For the past three years, the Northwestern-Michigan game has ended in a conflagration of unlikely football misfortune robbing the Wildcats of a victory over a depleted, languid Michigan team. That did not happen this year. Instead, Northwestern kicked off and then I'm pretty sure the field opened up and swallowed the Wildcats whole for the rest of the game. I know that people come to this website for detailed play-by-play football expertise, so I've diagnosed some of the key plays in this video below (you might not want to blare this one at work): The result was a 38-0 debacle that only became watchable once it mysteriously transformed into a festival of improbable Cubs bunts through the magic of television. Northwestern's football Wildcats were utterly dismantled and are no longer undefeated. Michigan put up another shutout and remains ascendant, insufferably. Losing to Michigan is annoying. The rebirth of Michigan and the barely-disguised giddiness of national football pundits at the reestablishment of a Football Brand is annoying. The incredible series of idiotic San Francisco 49ers skulduggery that exiled an excellent NFL coach and brought him to Michigan through a blood-red sky on a war chariot raining a pestilence of nose tackles upon the Big Ten is annoying. Jim Harbaugh is profoundly annoying. Every week, an assistant coach is tasked with assuring Harbaugh that he has not been thrown out of the domed settlement on the surface of Mars in Total Recall Despite the disheartening clobbering, the Wildcats are still 5-1, still close to clinching a bowl berth, and in contention in the Big Ten West. Their time in the national spotlight has passed; now Northwestern fans can retreat to the shadows comfortably away from college football bloviatrics and enjoy what still has the possibility to be an incredible season. A repeat of the 2013 season, where a hot Northwestern start devolved into a series of inconceivable late-game meltdowns where the Wildcats found themselves turning into the opposing team on Friday Night Lights every week will hopefully not happen. Listen up, we're gonna run the you scramble around for two minutes before heaving the ball up against their entire defense with no time remaining and I want you to throw that ball with metaphoric resonance about small-town football and triumphs and misery and what it means to be a man and I want you to do it while people scream in wide-eyed wonder in slow motion in the stands, what are you doing, don't you get in that huddle without this post rock CD But Northwestern will not contend for anything if they don't get past an undefeated Iowa team with its own designs on the West in a bloodthirsty Big Ten showdown. BIG TEN FOOTBALL: THE NATION'S SHOVIEST FOOTBALL Iowa-Northwestern games are technically football in that there are football teams and balls and crowds and everything. But the games are also demolition derbies, where dream seasons from teams far removed from Big Ten royalty smash into smoldering piles of ligaments and animus. Pat Fitzgerald broke his leg in the 1995 Iowa game, preventing him from playing in the Rose Bowl. A dreadful Iowa team crushed Northwestern's chance at Pasadena in 2000, relegating the 'Cats to a share of the championship and a berth in the Alamo Bowl. Both teams lost starting quarterbacks in consecutive years in 2009 and 2010. Iowa and Northwestern exist to ruin each other's seasons in complete anonymity because not a single soul outside Iowa City and Evanston is aware that these teams play each other every year on a regulation football field. Artists' rendition: Iowa 12, Northwestern 7 The Hawkeyes are flying high with an undefeated season and the Wildcats are still recovering from the drubbing they received in Ann Arbor. It would appear that Iowa should cruise to an easy win. The Hawkeyes, however, have been hammered by injuries. Star defensive lineman Drew Ott is lost for the season. The offensive line is so beat up that Kirk Ferentz may suit up; he has spent the week lifting triangular weights, looking for his leather helmet, and practicing hand-to-hand combat against Soviet agents in preparation. Iowa quarterback C.J. Beathard his also nurturing an injury, but he plans to counter by having the best football name since Army quarterback Trent Steelman managed to tactically subterfuge his way through Northwestern's defense some years back. Northwestern's miserable outing in Ann Arbor exposed some problems that the defense had covered up. They still have trouble moving the ball against good defenses. The defense had trouble stopping Michigan's power running game, and Iowa's Jordan Canzeri has absolutely sliced defenses apart. Last week against Illinois, the Hawkeyes simply stopped throwing the ball, giving it to Canzeri over and over again as he literally ran over the Illini to seal an Iowa victory. Add in that Ferentz, long considered an ambassador of Big Ten Fuddy-Duddery has embraced a Cornfield Gambler persona that has the stereotypically staid Hawkeyes going for it on fourth down, embracing the forward pass, and occasionally eschewing a field-goal-and-safety scoring philosophy, and it is not hard to see why they are undefeated and favored. This time it is the Wildcats who live and die with the defense, run the ball between the tackles, and try to punt other teams into submission in order to win football games while Ferentz mocks Fitz's conservatism from the groovy psychadelic bus where he now lives. The Wildcats will honor the twentieth anniversary of the Rose Bowl team on Homecoming this Saturday. They will be wearing throwback 1995 uniforms. This marks the seventh different uniform combination Northwestern has worn this season: white helmets, white jerseys, Aggressive Wildcat Bite Helmets, Dracula Uniforms, Chicago's Big Ten Municipal Corruption Boodle Bag helmets, Lake helmets, Colbert Eyebrow uniforms, and Fake Opposing Uniforms to Convince an Overwhelming Away Crowd At Ryan Field to Root For Northwestern Uniforms. Northwestern's marketing partnership with UnderArmour has been vital for building the Northwestern Brand, which is crucial for twenty-first century football programs who plan on using their Solid Brands to stop the option play. THE CUBS ARE VERY GOOD AND YOU ARE GOING TO READ ABOUT IT IN THIS BLOG There is a dumb comfort to fatalism. When the seemingly-insurmountable lead evaporates through a series of miserable Rube Goldberg events, well it could never end well. It's not necessarily a belief in curses or goats or any sort of supernatural malevolence. It is just the idea, lodged in the Neanderthal Cortex of a primordial human brain that if something happens a few times over the short course of a human lifetime, it is a truth from time immemorial. The Cubs would never win anything and, if they did, they could never beat the St. Louis Cardinals, as ever-present at the top of the National League Central division as a sun shining the Right Way. The Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series. They beat them and the St. Louis Cardinals are no longer able to play baseball. They can go out and play some stickball or get together on the diamond to practice calibrating their baseball caps to avoid tilting them at morally unacceptable Strop levels, but these games will not be sanctioned by Major League Baseball and there is nothing anyone can do from disseminating accounts of them all over the Midwest. The bizarre Costas diatribe against Strop after a disastrous outing is one of the funniest subplots of the season. "KNOW THIS, STROP," Costas said, puffing out his bulging eye sacs to make him appear larger and more menacing. "WHEN YOU ARRIVE IN WHATEVER DAMNED AFTERLIFE WILL ACCEPT YOUR SHODDY RELIEF PITCHING SOUL, I HOPE YOU FACE AN ETERNITY SERVING UP MEATBALLS THAT WILL SOAR ACROSS THE HEAVENS TO DESTROY YOUR MOST CHERISHED MEMORIES AND WHILE THAT IS HAPPENING YOU ARE MOCKED WITH GRAVITY-DEFYING BAT FLIPS WHICH HANG FOREVER TURNING AND ECHOING DEMONIC LAUGHTER AT YOU, HERE I SHOULD NOTE I AM PROBABLY ALSO OPPOSED TO BAT FLIPS BECAUSE THAT SEEMS LIKE A REALLY BOB COSTAS THING TO GET ANNOYED WITH, THIS IS BOB COSTAS SIGNING OFF WITH UNEARTHLY CACKLING." Costas then rode off on his High Horse, which is a normal, regular-sized horse. The Cubs sent Jason Hammel, a pitcher sponsored by the American Meatball Council for the past several months, against the Cardinals in a potential series-clinching game. Hammel immediately gave up a hit and home run to put them down 2-0 before fans even had an opportunity to aggressively point to their arms in an effort to remove Hammel from the game in world where it was possible to make citizens' pitching changes. The move to keep him in seemed even more ludicrous in the second, when Maddon sent Hammel to bat with men on base. Hammel responded with an RBI single, setting the stage for Javy Baez to homer home the go-ahead runs and for Cardinals pitcher John Lackey to argle-bargle his way back the mound in a delightful display of baseball fury. A Cardinals rally (started by a scrappy backup catcher who hit .200 this season, whose crucial RBI double against the Cubs was fore-ordained by the Big Bang) was answered by thundering Cubs dingers including a Kyle Schwarber blast that affected the rotation of the Earth.
If the Cubs can defeat the Cardinals, if they can make it to the National League Championship Series, then hell, why can't they make it to the World Series? If all it takes to break through the playoffs is a team full of young people who do not realize they are Cubs, a manager who manages the team with cuddly zoo animals, and a lumpy, chin-bearded home run machine, then I suppose it is worth unmooring ourselves from an entire baseball cosmology and actually believe. Or, do what I plan to do and miserably watch every playoff game, spending the most fun Cubs season of all time in a protective flinch waiting for the other shoe to drop. Playoff baseball makes Larry Kings of us all IMAGINE DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY SPORTS THIS WEEKEND Northwestern faces off at 11:00am in Chicago's Big Ten time slot against Iowa at Ryan Field. Perhaps a return to confines of Ryan Field alongside the '95 team can shake the team from whatever hit them last Saturday at Michigan. All that's at stake is a bowl berth, contention in the Big Ten West, and avoiding a Ranked Northwestern Death Spiral that has claimed so many other seasons. The vestigial quasi-rivalry with Iowa, Homecoming, and a stadium filled with hostile Iowa fans will certainly lend the game an intense atmosphere.
There is no fatalistic doom-and-gloomery that hovers over a Northwestern/Iowa game. Instead, it is a shared horror that both promising seasons can simultaneously implode by slobberknocking so hard that it causes some sort of rift in the slobber/knock continuum, throws the earth off its orbit, and opens the Big Ten West to be claimed by Purdue. After all, we are living in a world where the Chicago Cubs have beaten the indomitable St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series and the Laws of the Universe no longer apply.
Northwestern tarps off one or two ends of the northeast stands for games. This is to prevent the shameful appearance of naked bleachers on television, covering them with an aesthetically superior giant banner that says NO ONE IS SITTING HERE (CHICAGO'S BIG TEN TEAM). It was a raw, overcast, two-tarp afternoon in Evanston when Minnesota came to open Big Ten play. Northwestern's grounds crew could very well have tarped off the endzones when the Gophers had the football because they did not cross the plane. They did not kick a field goal. They did not get a safety or a point-after conversion or in fact score in any other way possible in a football game because the Wildcats shut them out, remained undefeated, climbed to #13 in the rankings, and actually I don't think I'm going to make it to the end of this sentence before I pass out. Northwestern's defense has shut down all comers so far. The defensive line goes ten deep. Dean Lowry is playing football like UnderArmour has designed a special grass-camouflage alternate jersey and he keeps popping up in the backfield to tackle running backs who think the field itself has come alive and seized them. After a referee inexplicably overruled an apparent interception, Tyler Lancaster poked the ball away from Gopherquarterback Mitch Leidner, and Anthony Walker ran it in for a touchdown. Clayton Thorson ran in two touchdowns, Justin Jackson rushed for 120 yards, and the Wildcats Big Tenned their way to a field goal with a nearly nine-minute-long drive to open the third quarter that has probably been prescribed to someone as a sedative. I wish I could be as excited about anything in my life as Northwestern's PA Announcer is when Justin Jackson is The Ball Carrier. Northwestern played once again in their gothic uniforms, which have become so popular that I expect the entire campus to become more gothic until the clock tower is replaced by a moon-blotting bat alcove that broadcasts nightly cackling from university president Mortuary Shapiro Northwestern has arrived. It is currently part of The Conversation. It is somewhat gratifying and bizarre to see Northwestern actually discussed in the context of major college football as a subject itself and not merely as part of a highlight montage of some Heisman candidate blithely stiff-arming a Wildcat into oblivion. Of course, absolutely no national college football pundit has anything at all useful or insightful to say about Northwestern football because they are a bunch of square-jawed suit men whose entire job is to clumsily restate the obvious with the unhinged zeal of a doomsday prophet. An ESPN analyst, dug from the rubble of a natural disaster, will immediately grab your lapels and explain that at the end of the day, I tell you what you move that ball up and down the field but what it's going to come down to is turnovers and scoring points off turnovers that's how you're gonna win this football game and also toughness Only one victory remains between Northwestern and bowl contention. Another win would set them up for an apocalyptic showdown against hated quasi-rival Iowa with Big Ten West Championship Implications. But first, they have to get past another unexpectedly resurgent team from the East that has spent the last three consecutive years funded by a grant by the United States Department of Northwestern Football Misery. SHIT, MICHIGAN IS GOOD AGAIN Well, it had to happen. Michigan fans, facing suffering unimaginable to less august fanbases when their team was not good for a couple of seasons, cried out into the night for a savior. They got Jim Harbaugh, a grating football monomaniac who seems poised to return the Wolverines to tedious prominence just as he did at San Diego, Stanford, and in the NFL with the 49ers. The Wolverines have jumped out to a 4-1 record and the AP top 25. Michigan fans are excited; the revival of Michigan football reminds me of the Simpsons episode when the Soviet Union unexpectedly returned. Michigan and Northwestern mirror each other this year. Both feature fearsome defenses and suspect offenses. And both feature animated coaches that irritate the hell out of other teams. Jim Harbaugh and Pat Fitzgerald are the yin and yang of obnoxious football coach gesticulation: Harbaugh reacts to every penalty like a thwarted space emperor while Fitzgerald celebrates like he is at a Great Awakening tent revival and has just been moved for the first time by the spirit of Butt Slap Jesus. Who maniacally cavorted it better Northwestern will be relying heavily on workhorse Justin Jackson, but will need a big game from Clayton Thorson. Thorson has only played one road game in his career at Duke's sedate Wallace Wade Stadium. Saturday, he'll have to deal with the Big House and the cacophony of 100,000 Michigan fans disapprovingly harrumphing. Michigan will turn to quarterback Jake Rudock, late of Iowa. Finding a graduate transfer quarterback from Iowa is like finding the last
grizzled, one-eyed captain in a sleepy bar in Marrakesh to try to run a shipment of dubiously-procured artifacts past an Ottoman blockade. It is worth mentioning here that Northwestern has never defeated Jake Rudock in football. Despite being undefeated and ranked higher in the polls than Michigan, Northwestern will enter this game as underdogs. This game projects as a really Big Ten game, where teams will spend most of the first half building elaborate trench systems. Both teams will be looking to make a statement and keep themselves in the Big Ten championship picture. More importantly, Northwestern is playing for the distinct honor of ruining the afternoon for a bunch of people in Michigan Stadium, as high a calling as exists in the Big Ten Conference. ALMOST BIG TEN CARNIVAL The opening week of Big Ten play was an exciting time of upsets, near upsets, field goals, and the state of Indiana nearly upending the entire conference in a single fell swoop. It could have been a Big Ten Carnival, an upsetting of the traditional order when the Great Powers of the conference were overturned in a drunken bacchanal. Bruegel's Fight Between Carnival and Lent is a Big Ten painting, showcasing sixteenth- century agricultural practices, beer-swilling, smoke meat enthusiasm and, on the Lent side, abstinence from the forward pass Ohio State 34, Indiana 27 Urban Meyer is trying very hard this season to prove the old football chestnut "if you have three Heisman-caliber quarterbacks, then you have none." The defending champs have looked listless on offense and a heroic Indiana team that lost its starting quarterback and running back nearly upset the number one team in the country. Unfortunately, the Hoosiers called a play called "The Entire History of Indiana Football," that ended the game on a bad snap, but we all know that an SEC partisan has already gotten the phrase "they almost lost to Indiana, paawwwlll" tattooed backwards on his face in case he suffers a Memento accident. Purdue 21, Michigan State 24 Michigan State survived a spirited comeback from Purdue at home. We are just minutes from inhabiting a bizarre world where Indiana and Purdue upset the first and second-ranked teams in the country, the college football world becoming contained entirely within their Old Oaken Bucket. Instead, the Hoosier state stuck to its moribund football destiny, forever forced to remain in the shadows of a powerhouse football state like Illinois. Nebraska 13, Illinois 14 Illinois is now 4-1 in the post-Beckman era. It is great to watch the Illini rallying around Bill Cubit, a man who once got into a heated sideline altercation with Beck Man while they were ostensibly coaching the same team. The Illini are looking far friskier than the dilapidated husk of a team you would assume to see when a coach is fired eight days before the beginning of the season. While the recovery of The Hat in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry remains paramount, I hope the Illini continue to bedevil Big Ten teams, if only because Tim Beckman is home watching these games while wearing a disconnected headset, drawing sideline interference penalties for dripping nacho cheese onto the sofa. Beckman has not yet, as far as I can tell, followed through with his wrongful termination suit against the University of Illinois. I imagine it is because he is thoroughly preparing to take the case to trial, fire his legal team, represent himself, and interrupt court proceedings every five minutes to yell INFILTRATION YOUR HONOR and then army crawl over to the defense to rifle through their papers Iowa 10, Wisconsin 6 I did not watch a minute of this game and assume that it involved two people screaming at each other at the 50-yard line until one of their heads exploded, after which the teams were assigned an arbitrary Big Ten score of 10-6 and the fans went home. BIG HOUSE, BIG GAME If there's one thing the last few years have told us, it is that Michigan-Northwestern games will defy the laws of physics and space-time in order to rip the beating heart out of a Wildcat football team. Last year, the infamous M00N game ended with what I had described as Trevor Siemian's one-man Charge of the Light Brigade against the entire Wolverine defense on an ill-conceived two-point conversion. Pat Fitzgerald had attempted to win in regulation because the previous two had ended in overtime after bizarre collapses allowed Michigan to tie. In 2012, it was on a tipped pass hauled down by a Michigan receiver with just enough time for a field goal. The next year, Michigan somehow rushed its field goal unit onto the field like Indiana Jones escaping a collapsing temple to get the kick off as the dying second melted from the scoreboard. Every football game is a unique series of independent events that should not be affected by the approximate amount of insanity that ended the last game, but it seems entirely possible that the outcome of this game depends less on football plays than on a series of rivalries played out on some football Mount Olympus for reasons we cannot possibly fathom. If this game plays out as predicted, it should be an unwatchable festival of the punting arts, with brown footballs raining from sky like autumn leaves. The Wildcats have a lot to prove; Michigan fans seem to have already looked past this game to their contest against Michigan State the next week because they've spent the last several games effortlessly dominating Northwestern by winning in the dumbest, flukiest way possible. But, in the spirit of Big Ten Carnival, maybe the Wildcats will once again upset the traditional Big Ten order and maybe even win the West. It is impossible to say because Northwestern has so delightfully surpassed expectations this season that it would be a shame to stop pundits from blandly pontificating about Northwestern because let me tell you when it comes to Northwestern football they're gonna need to go out there for sixty minutes and I tell you what this team they can play some defense in the Big Ten Conference but (he says, staring into the camera like he's about to tell the American people he has authorized the use of nuclear weapons against a meteor hurtling towards the Capitol building) you need to get into the endzone.
Oh it is coming. August is the first ripple in the water glass, next is the coaches goldblumically cackling their way through press conferences, then a goat is dismembered, a lawyer flees to a toilet, and college football season comes stomping out of its paddock, bellowing its blood-curdling roar. Across the country, college football teams are baking in the sun, running into blocking sleds, and getting screamed at by crew-cut wearing millionaires. The Northwestern Wildcats are in Kenosha, trying to figure out who will be the quarterback. Defending national champions Ohio State (good grief) are turning their training camp into a reality show called "Scarlet and Gray Days," which, stunningly, is not a turgid nineteenth century Southern Gothic epic. Last season, a bunch of morons had declared the Big Ten dead and buried, including the least-informed football blogger in the world. Bowl season, however, eased those doubts, with the conference scoring several close wins over highly-ranked teams. Statistically, a close win in a single game depends so heavily on chance that no thinking person can possibly assume it means anything; these games have naturally has fueled the discourse on college football since time immemorial. Ohio State returns as the consensus favorite amongst the football yellerati after downing Alabama and Oregon with a third-string quarterback. Michigan seems poised for a return to prominence under Jim Harbaugh. The Big Ten refuses to be anyone's punching bag until the first significant out-of-conference loss, in which case the Big Ten will return to its perception as a conference of ignorant fullbacks and linebackers squinting quizzically at the flickering shadow of a forward pass on a cave wall. BYCTOM BIG TEN PREVIEW Fortunately, the Wildcats will be avoiding the Buckeyes this season. Another East powerhouse, Michigan State, will mercifully remain off the schedule as well. Rutgers and Maryland as yet exist on the "here be dragons" portion of the Big Ten map. Instead, let us turn to an exhaustively-researched and comprehensive preview of the Big Ten West and East Division Interlopers as they appear on Northwestern's schedule while pretending they won't be effortlessly clobbered by the invincible Wildcat football team. Minnesota Golden Gophers Minnesota, led by crimson walrus Jerry Kill, appears to be a program on the rise. They took an 8-4 record to the Citrus Bowl. Minnesota had been a Big Ten cellar-dweller and reliable Wildcat victim; from 2007-2012, the 'Cats won five out of six. More importantly, Northwestern had some spectacular Metrodome mojo, with two of the most absurdendings to a football game I've seen within the arena's glorious roof-pouch. Minnesota had been a welcome sight on the schedule, a cobblestone on the yellow brick road to Pizza City. Now, they are a much improved team that has irritatingly beaten Northwestern the last two years-- once with an assistant coach at the helm filling in for an ailing Kill, the other time with a 100-yard fourth-quarter kick return. The 'Cats may regain the advantage this year by playing at Ryan Field in front of a river of maroon that has seeped down Interstate 94. As with most Big Ten opponents, Northwestern will be relying on the home field advantage of hoping that the visiting team tenses up and gets nervous in front of an overwhelming deluge of their friends, family, and supporters and the dozens of purple-clad handclaws occasionally voicing their disapproval. Michigan Wolverines The Michigan Wolverines suffered the apparently unbearable burden of being kind of bad for more than one season. The team devolved into a rudderless mess with a mediocre coach, regarded by Michigan fans as a catastrophe on par with a situation where the President of the United States has dissolved the court system and replaced all jurisprudence with trial by monster truck rally. Michigan fans would only accept one man for the job. And, because it is not feasible to have a team coached by an animatronic Bo Schembechler standing on the sidelines spitting out dot matrix printouts of what Bo Schembechler would do in any given situation, they decided to hire an unhinged football monomaniac. I can't wait to hate Jim Harbaugh. He comports himself like a nineteenth-century military officer just returned from some colonial posting no longer able to function in the West where he has to answer to a doddering hierarchy of muttonchopped generals. Even by the insane standards of football coaches, whose lives revolve around yelling and watching film and taking fanboats to the east end of nowhere to convince a 300-pound 16-year-old to allow himself to be yelled at by them for the next four years, Harbaugh is intense. He seems to strive to exist in a world of wide-eyed zeal, where humans only communicate in elaborate football play argots, where discourse is limited to talking about how determined you are, and where the punishments for variation in pants style are unspeakably draconian. He is also a very good football coach and that is intolerable. Harbaugh politely disagrees with a holding call Northwestern had their window. Michigan had never been so vulnerable. And, with this final shot at crushing the Wolverines in front of a group of demoralized Michigan fans for once coming into Ryan Field with the slightest tinge of doubt in their inevitable victory, the 'Cats could not pull it off. Instead, the teams engaged in an embarrassing display of quasi-football, immortalized now as the M00N game. Neither team could score, hold onto the ball, or attempt any sort of coordinated movement that did not result in a Buster Keaton calamity. Fitzgerald decided to go for two and Siemian fell onto his buttocks and now Northwestern may never beat the Wolverines again. But what if something goes horribly awry? What if, for some unfathomable reason, Harbaugh's tin-pot dictatory doesn't work in Ann Arbor? What if all of the shouting and baiting officials and making dumb turning into Ghostrider faces can't turn Michigan around and the program continues to list like once-stately liner careening into an iceberg? What if Harbaugh gets run out on a rail, with angry Michigan alumni braying about him being tainted by the NFL and the Michigan Men condemn him for not living up to their hilariously lofty Michigan coach should be on the list of possible emergency presidential successors in the face of numerous simultaneous calamities standards and bray on the internet about things being UNACCEPTABLE? That turn of events would somehow justify the existence of college football. Iowa The Werther's Originals of football teams takes to the field again under Kirk Ferentz. Ferentz's team has fallen from its mid-decade heights challenging for Big Ten titles and some Iowa fans have begun to lose their patience. He remains dedicated to the platonic, plodding ideal of Big Ten football, churning out endless highlight reels of guards running into people. There's nothing flashy, exciting, or particularly irksome about Iowa football except somewhere along the way they have become blood-rivals with Northwestern and should probably be crushed, with all Iowa merchandise loaded onto a boat armada and burned in the middle of Lake Michigan witnessed only by a single contemptuous man.
For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Iowa and Northwestern traded off foiling each others' hopes of contention and losing quarterbacks. The stakes, however, have vanished. Now, with the Hawkeyes stagnating at Insight Bowl levels and the Wildcats bereft of bowls entirely, the rivalry seems brief and fleeting. Ferentz reignites Northwestern/Iowa enmity by cruelly accusing him of inadequate fist pumping and taking it more than one play at a time out there
