Music City Bowl Review: Pre-Overtime

“I think the kids wanted to go for it. They wanted to try and win it and I don’t fault the effort at all…They deserved the opportunity to have it in their hands,” is what Kentucky's Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart said about coach Mark Stoops's decision to go for two at the end of the game.  But I prefer to think that Stoops knew that he did not want to go to overtime against Northwestern, a team that does nothing but allow teams to go into overtime, to watch the scoreboard hit zero and to win games in a vortex where linear time no longer has meaning, where the game could stretch into infinity and there's no clock to manage, and that Stoops had stayed up all night reading a monograph entitled Schroedinger's 'Cats: Quantum Mechanics and Northwestern's Inexplicable Nine-Win Season and the implications were terrifying enough for him to do anything he could to end things in regulation.  Also it was cold and the game had already entered its nineteenth hour.
 
Opposing coaches go to overtime against Northwestern 

The Franco-American Music City Bowl ended on an exciting last play, but will be best remembered as an all-encompassing descent into madness.  There were bizarre coaching calls on all sides-- Stoops's decision to go for two, Fitzgerald's disastrous trick plays dreamed up after a pregame meal of hot chicken spiced with psilocybin mushrooms, and the takeover of the game by a Maniac Referee who entered the field dressed in a cape and headdress made of writhing snakes.

The program said that the referee crew came from the Pac-12 Conference, but my guess is that a group of wilderness raiders drove up on the referee's vehicle, seized it in a daring heist using balancing poles and grappling hooks and numerous bellowing guys with Aron Baynes haircuts and leather armor, and impersonated the crew with the goal of sowing chaos. 
 
The Pac-12 Conference sends its officials to a Bowl Game

That would explain the reason why the first half took more than two hours to complete because they sent every call to a grotesque carnival parody replay crew, why they ejected Paddy Fisher for targeting a receiver with his arms, and why, when Kentucky running back Benny Snell lightly brushed against a grasping official, they had him thrown into a pit beneath Titan Stadium.

This is why Benny Snell was ejected. pic.twitter.com/QVFczR8anz

— Tom Fornelli (@TomFornelli) December 29, 2017

The Nortorious Benny Snell begins his reign of terror against innocent referees

Northwestern's win prevented the bowl from becoming a complete debacle after they carted Clayton Thorson off the field.  The Wildcats then turned to veteran backup Matt Alviti, a senior who never started a game and whose major contribution to the anticipated game plan involved growing a spectacular mustache.  Alviti didn't make mistakes and moved the chains with a quarterback rushing attack Kentucky would have never seen coming unless they dusted off their Kain Colter tape.  Alviti's heroics were bittersweet for Northwestern fans who had been rooting for him for years and were hoping he'd have a chance to get into a game and apparently made those wishes known to the nearest monkey's paw.

Northwestern won the same way they managed to win all year-- a stout defense against the run (though it helped that Snell got ejected, Northwestern's rush defense battled without Nate Hall and without egregious ejection victim Paddy Fisher whom I hope spent the second half commiserating with Snell in that fancy ice cream place on Broadway), a timely interception from turnover hero Kyle Queiro, and of course Justin Jackson.  Jackson finished his Northwestern career with 157 yards on the ground, two touchdowns, a second consecutive bowl MVP trophy, and a mind-melting bevy of records including virtually every record at Northwestern, third all-time in Big Ten rushing yards, and an ascent to the top ten in rush yards in major college football history.  Even Jackson's records and accolades don't fully explain how good his career has been at Northwestern; the Wildcats' offense for four years has hinged on Jackson or the threat of Jackson causing teams to use the entirety of their scholarship players to try to stop him and allow Northwestern's quarterbacks to throw the ball to open receivers, many of whom are also Justin Jackson. 
 
Justin Jackson the Trophy Carrier

The Music City Bowl managed to be the apotheosis of Northwestern's bizarre season.  They got stuck in a perilously close game, battled through heart-rending late comebacks, persevered through a truly bizarre array of fourth-down decisions and ludicrous trick plays that Wile E. Coyote would scoff at as unnecessarily complicated, and managed to hang on to a win.  The egghead football statistics guys say that close games decided by a touchdown or less not to mention overtime are toss-ups completely dependent on luck; Northwestern won every single one of them and did so in a fashion that seems to defy science and mathematics and gets into metaphysical realms that turn into religion.  The 2017 Wildcats were an excellent football team and one that also seemed buoyed by a series of football miracles. 
 
Game-saving Two Point Conversion Preventer Marcus McShepard 
defends the pass with an Unholy Incantation

By the time that Stephen Johnson's pass floated through the fingertips of a heretofore unstoppable Tavin Richardson, it was no longer possible to root for Northwestern as a football team but necessary to do so with robes, orbs, candles, foam hats in the shape of wildcat heads, and other miscellaneous religious implements as they watched another pass fall incomplete to the ground and Pat Fitzgerald bellow from the sidelines in an otherworldly tongue and the band launch into its ancient hymn "U Northwestern Rah" into the ashen faces of the fans of the Apostate Wildcat fleeing into the freezing Nashville air and back into the arms of their true religion because did you see the score of the Louisville game.

Undefeated All-Time Against Maryland

After back-to-back neck wringings at the hands of the Big Ten's top teams, Northwestern finally had a chance to test its mettle against a Big Ten team that will be scrapping around with them for a berth in the Yelling Fist Generic Flesh Colored Hulk Hands Bowl and they bulldozed through them with the assurance of a team that will get to six wins if they have to infiltrate Big Ten headquarters and rearrange the Big Ten's computerized punch cards.
 
A Big Ten technician adds the statistical
 data from last year's Northwestern-Michigan State 
game into the official database

Maryland seemed to have the Wildcats' number at first.  Star receiver D.J. Moore jetted through the Wildcats' defense, already depleted from injury and suspension for trying to tackle receivers through the inside of their chests.  But then the 'Cats came alive.  Maryland, down to a third-string quarterback named Bort Bortenschlagen could not move the ball, and Northwestern wore down their struggling defense by battering them with Justin Jackson.  What looked like another nail-biting game turned into a solid victory in the yet another chapter in this storied Big Ten football rivalry.

Jackson owned the day.  He broke the all-time school record for rushing, carried Northwestern to the win, and delivered impassioned French monologues about how the French word for touchdown is "touchdown."  Northwestern has had its share of great running backs in recent years, but Jackson may go down as the best.  Jackson is not a big back nor is he blindingly fast.  His specialty is poking and prodding through holes and shimmying away from contact.  Some of his most impressive runs have been in games where the offensive line has struggled against conference behemoths and he has had to dodge three or four tacklers just to get back to the line of scrimmage.  When he gets into the open field, he is shifty enough to bamboozle would-be tacklers into lunging at air.  Yet, Jackson's greatest attribute is probably his resilience.  There have been many games when the entire offensive game plan seems to have been to keep giving Jackson the ball against teams that have moved their entire defense into trenches surrounding the line of scrimmage and hope that it's enough to win the game.  It didn't always work-- that kind of thing can't work unless you're a Wisconsin team that has specifically engineered linemen from the largest and most virulent strains of locker room fungus available on the black market, but it takes a back like Jackson to make it a conceivable strategy.
 
That Pitt safety was absorbed into the grass of Yankee Stadium

OH C'MON IOWA AGAIN?

One of the sad effects of the Big Ten's adoption of conferences has been to see the same teams every year.  In some ways it is a boon, especially since Northwestern plays in the blighted West, which reliably serves up the requisite three jabroni teams that keep Northwestern in low-tier bowl swag.  Conferences, though, have created six annual games, instead of the protected annual games that featured a mix of hated rivalries with trophies named for weaponry and farm implements and matchups generated more or less at random.  The conferences mean that Northwestern has to weather an irritating biennial Invasion of the Nebraska People and getting sat upon by Wisconsin every season.  It also means that the Wildcats are constantly playing Iowa.

I don't know what to make of Northwestern-Iowa matchups anymore.  Northwestern and Iowa should never be playing every year when they're both fighting for mid-tier bowl games.  They should appear like wraiths on the schedule in one of the years when one of the teams is good, waiting as a dangerous three-win team nonetheless hellbent on ruining their opponent's season.  Iowa or Northwestern should forget about each other's existence except when they're on an impossible Rose Bowl hunt and then fall into a trap door into filled with turnovers and overtimes and, to read on the internet the next day, a shameful bounty of uncalled holding penalties. 

Iowa lost CJ Beathard and talismanic cornerback Desmond King.  They still have their star linebacker, the comic book-named Josey Jewell.  And they still have Kirk Ferentz, their Forever Coach.  Ferentz has solidified his power by naming his eldest son Brian to the role of offensive coordinator.  He will supplement his coaching staff with other Ferentz from throughout the Spanish and Low Countries branches of the Ferentz family until college football is, like Europe in the early twentieth century, essentially a deteriorating mass of branches of the Ferentz weakened by generations of inbreeding until they all declare war on each other.
 
Guards come to escort Rolph Ferentz IV from the Sun Belt branch of 
the Ferentz Family to accept ULM's invitation to participate in the 2345 Belk Bowl

Is there a point to trying to predict an Iowa-Northwestern game?  Iowa sure looks like the better team. Northwestern is coming off its best performance of the year against an injury-ravaged Maryland team.  Iowa's only losses have been a near-upset of the same Penn State team that pulverized the Wildcats at Ryan Field and a narrow loss to a resurgent Michigan State.  The Hawkeyes will be looking for revenge after having their homecoming spoiled by Northwestern last year, but this game remains a big one for the Wildcats-- a loss keeps them scratching for three more wins against a putrid conference that might not be putrid enough.  A win might do what last year's game against Iowa did and wake them up from a disastrous non-conference performance that ended in the most famous Pin Stripe Bowl victory.  Either way, the unfortunately annual Iowa-Northwestern undoes the hoary maxim about familiarity breeding contempt.  Contempt grows best from rare meetings that end with recriminations and devastating quarterback injuries.

BYCTOM NBA PREVIEW

NBA analysis has changed from its original barebones boxscore to a cornucopia of fancy statistics, impressions gleaned from the numerous terminator cameras feeding biometric data to teams and to the per synergy sports bloggers, and, most importantly, running updates about the various feuds, social media kerfuffles, and free agency betrayals that pepper the NBA year-round and make it by far the most compelling sports league in this country.

There are, perhaps, basketball purists who sit around longing to root for crew-cutted ciphers who run pick-and-rolls and hoist jumpshots, for basketball broadcasts without allusions to a twitter war between opponents, or try to follow teams without learning which players’ embarrassing sexual peccadilloes have been instantaneously broadcast to a worldwide instagram audience.  For the rest of us, the NBA has become a glorious dunk-adjacent soap opera.

Every sports league has its outsized personalities, but the NBA sells them better than any league.  The NFL is dominated by its owners; every year, the major storylines involve some sort of rules conflict and the NFL meting out its own bizarre brand of football justice.  MLB's players remain in a weirdo Twilight Zone episode where overexuberance at doing things most normal people would find near-impossible is met by a hail of baseballs.  When I think of the culture of American baseball (if anything, the World Baseball Classic demonstrated that literally every other country seems to have way more fun playing baseball than the USA's square-jawed hall monitors), I think of John Lackey, a man who has taken his cues on manful stoicism from 80s action movies and speaks in a weird tough-guy argot that seems to be taken from a disastrous Stephen Seagal-penned Western.  

Imagine Seagal sitting atop a lifeless plastic horse in front of green 
screen wildly whipping the bridle around as he pretends to be chased
 by a ruthless gang of Bulgarian cattle rustlers

The NBA is rife with drama because players have been forming and reforming superteams and appearing to take things extremely personally.  Trust no NBA preview that doesn't feature a list of feuds boiled down like the incomprehensible What's Happening on Your Favorite Soaps columns that used to be in newspapers:

LeBron is feuding with former teammate Kyrie Iriving because Irving's inexplicable decision to wade unbidden into the waters of flat-Earth theories pre-empted LeBron's attempt to troll the media by earnestly speaking about the Mole People.  Chris Paul and Doc Rivers have been trading barbs in the media until they will finally reconcile years from now when they both simultaneously wheel and turn to belittle the same referee.  Tom Thibodeau is attempting to recreate his Bulls teams in Minnesota and is currently building his own Kirk Hinrich out of compression sleeves.  The Lakers drafted a player with a maniacal basketball stage dad who has already provoked a feud with LeBron.  LeBron, who is very busy, is also feuding with Comic Sans mortgage-goblin Dan Gilbert who is going around firing people like a mad emperor.  Carmelo Anthony finally accepted a trade after the Knicks' attempts to alienate him enough to waive his no-trade clause became increasingly indistinguishable from George Costanza's attempts to get fired from Play Now. 
 
Jackson torturing Anthony with his famous Zen koans such as "how 
shitty is Carmelo Anthony? Still here?"  Jackson left the Knicks to 
have several expensive surgeries that will transform him into a human triangle
 
SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES FOR LUKA

At least the Three Alphas had an obvious tragic downfall.  The Bulls surrounded Jimmy Butler with combustible personalities with a poor fit on the court and the entire season was spent waiting for it to combust.  The collapse happened quickly-- Butler was shipped to Minnesota in a trade that immediately made living phrenology exhibit Gar Forman the laughingstock of the NBA, then the Bulls paid both Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo substantial sums of money to prevent them from playing for the Bulls again.
 
I don't think there will ever be a funnier self-inflicted sports
 nickname than the  Three Alphas

Last year's Bulls had infinitely more compelling drama of washed-up stars, a grotesque parody superteam scratching and clawing for the eight seed over the other shambling corpse teams in the Eastern Conference.  This year, they will be bad.  Barely anyone on this team is an NBA player; their best player is somehow still a guy recovering from knee surgery.  All of the Bulls' hopes lay in the spindly arms of Lauri Markkanen, a sweet-shooting Finnish beanpole who will spend the season being wrapped around the stanchion by bruising NBA forwards. The Bulls will likely be the worse team in the league, clobbered night in and night out, trying desperately to turn over a top-three draft pick to a front office so beleaguered that they have literally inspired a protest movement.

And yet!  This team, a team that featured players so anonymous that they were not issued their own jerseys on media day, that has been assembled to be the largest mass of humanity ever collectively dunked upon, is not content to get beaten by opponents.  They are instead beating upon each other.  Niko Mirotic, last seen being pulled from a rut five feet behind the three-point line, had his jaw broken in practice by Bobby Portis.  There is nothing funny about an altercation that lands someone in the hospital.  There is something vaguely amusing about thinking about Fred Hoiberg trying to stop this fight by repeatedly and ineffectively blowing a whistle.

The Bulls will be almost unwatchable this season, as abysmal as their post-Jordan unraveling that featured awful players like Dragan Tarlac, Marcus Fizer, and Fred Hoiberg.  The NBA's draft structure that rewards awful teams with the chance to draft superstars will change after this season to make it slightly harder for teams to guarantee high picks just for sucking.  This change has created a terrifying race to the bottom among the NBA's shittiest teams and has destroyed the entire point of basketball; bad teams are so desperate to be bad, especially this season, that any win that the Bulls get by running into a team ravaged by the flu or coming off a back-to-back or so distracted by Cam Payne repeatedly falling down that they actually start throwing the ball directly to him, will be potentially catastrophic.  It's no revelation that savvy fans should root against their own rebuilding teams-- this is, after all, what has sparked the rules changes.  But in a bleak year where even the Bulls know they have no chance one night, it deprives Bulls fans the ability to enjoy their greatest achievement of making another team's fans really really angry.

WELCOME HOME, HAT

 at!  The Hat has returned to its rightful place in Evanston after the Northwestern Wildcats managed to pry it from the heads of the Illini.  Last year, a miserable debacle, the Hat game to end all Hat games with an appropriately miserable bowl berth on the line, the Illini won.  Northwestern turned the ball over four consecutive times and Northwestern's Hat-Nemesis Tim Beck Man stood in Ryan Field cackling as his three-year reign of madness in Champaign finally culminated in him hoisting the Land of Lincoln trophy to a horrified purple throng.  "Look upon this Hat," he bellowed defiantly.  "This justifies my ludicrous three year anti-Northwestern campaign.  This is normal! This is normal!"

In the year since, things have changed.  Tim Beckman became Shit Canman.  Bill Cubit, toiling as interim, took over the Illinois program in perpetuity, the Cubit name guaranteed to ring across Illini football for two entire years.  Northwestern rode a spectacular defense, a running game led by Justin Jackson-TheBallCarrier, and the sane and rational decisions of referees to a 10-2 record, a national ranking, and a bowl game.

Clayton Thorson came out firing in the first half as the 'Cats scored three touchdowns.  It appeared as though the Wildcats had spent the entire season refusing to throw before unveiling the Trojan Pass in the crucial Hat Game.  In the second half, though, Pat Fitzgerald and Mick McCall turned to their innovative Run 'n Punt offense, relying on Jackson The Ball Carrier to Carry The Ball while the defense took over.  All-Big Ten linebacker Anthony Walker terrorized the Illini backfield and the Wildcat secondary kept the passing game in check.  They were helped out by Illinois receivers who dropped an almost unfathomable number of balls-- Illinois quarterback Wes Lunt had a much better day than the box score indicates.  No sequence better sums up the snake-bitten Illini than their effective drive to a fourth-and-one near the Northwestern goal line.  The Illini lined up to go for it, then false-started.  Down ten, Cubit decided to kick a chip-shot field goal which then shanked wide right.  This series of plays will be displayed in the Van Pelt Museum of Football Cruelty.

HAT IS GREAT. ALL HAIL HAT

Illinois fans seem disappointed with the Bill Cubit contract.  Cubit was certainly not one of the marquee names changing jobs during this Flight Aware season.  On the other hand, Cubit presents a few advantages to the University of Illinois:

1. Players seem to like him and he has weathered the storm of general administrative tumult.
2. Probably believes in hamstring injuries.

Illinois's interim athletic director seems less than excited about the hire.  Here is what Paul Kowalczyk has to say about Cubit:

"Obviously, it's not ideal but for now, I don't think it'll put a dagger in the heart of the program."

 
I am not an athletic director.  But I am fairly sure that is not a ringing endorsement.  And I am also sure that you should use the phrase "dagger in the heart" unless your profession involves antechambers.

It is disappointing to see Illinois fans disillusioned about their football program, even if the schools are sworn enemies forever destined to clash as foretold by Beckman's Clock.  There would be nothing more satisfying than seeing a Hat Game have actual consequences in the Big Ten West.  There would be nothing more exciting than seeing ESPN College Game Day come to a Northwestern/Illinois game not because it is an embarrassing one-endzone baseball stadium sideshow novelty act, but because the winner would be going to Indianapolis.

Both Northwestern and Illinois have had great seasons this decade, just never at the same time.  The Northwestern/Illinois rivalry is in that way like a seesaw, although most of the time it is more like a rotting plank of wood moldering in a dirt patch four feet from a rusted seesaw mechanism.  Yes the teams compete for recruits, for media coverage, and in a grimly farcical branding war futilely focused on the Chicago market that climaxed in Saturday's game at a well-nigh empty Solider Field.

But, in the larger Big Ten, both are traditionally moribund programs overshadowed by the conference's Football Brands that expect to effortlessly plod through them on their way to yet another Rose Bowl.  Despite the in-state rivalry, Northwestern and Illinois remain bound together in Big Ten also-ran solidarity.
 
HATCHAT SIDEBAR

Northwestern's stirring victory over the Illini not only gave them bragging rights in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry, but it also gave them America's Greatest Rivalry Trophy, the Land of Lincoln Hat.  But there is one thing about the Hat trophy that has bothered me and that is this: the Hat is permanently attached to the base and it cannot be worn.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at our locker room celebration after we reclaimed the Land of Lincoln Trophy. #B1GCats https://t.co/cSaz4SPUeK

— #B1GCats Football (@NUFBFamily) December 1, 2015

Look this Wildcat sadly attempt to mime wearing the Hat.  He cannot.  There is a base in its way.  This is madness.  The Hat should be removed from its base and worn triumphantly upon the victorious heads of the hat-winners, not reduced to a grotesque locker-room burlesque.

Abraham Lincoln did not travel through Illinois carrying his hat on a trophy base.  That would be ludicrous.  The Lincoln-Douglas debates would have never helped publicize Lincoln enough to take Democratic nomination in 1860 because no one would consider voting for a hat-carrying maniac. 

LINCOLN: That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of 
                     Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these 
                     two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.
DOUGLAS: Why do you carry around your hat on a base instead of wearing it on your head?
LINCOLN: At this time of strife and division, you wish to discuss my hat?
DOUGLAS: Your hat practices are discomfiting and peculiar.
ANGRY BYSTANDER:  Answer the question, Lincoln!
ANGRIER BYSTANDER: Go back to Kentucky, you hat-carrying scarecrow!

I urge you to write school administrators and your representatives about this travesty and to engage in pointless hashtag activism about this by tweeting #WEARABLEHAT at all involved parties.  I plan to publish a 3,000 page screed about this in a new screed format I have invented called the monomaniagraph. Together, we can unite and probably amuse ourselves for nearly 45 minutes.

BOWL POSITION: DANGER ZONE

By Monday, Northwestern will know its bowl fate.  The Playoff Committee awaits the results of Lucrative Conference Championship games.  The bowls begin their dance of selecting teams by trying to land the biggest Brand Teams allowed by their slotting.  The combination of bowl selection and playoff rankings have made this a week for the brandishing of advanced statistics, complex transitive property arguments, and the traditional claims that teams ain't played no one.  It's Recrimination Week.  Northwestern, for once, is in the middle of this because they are jockeying for a more prestigious bowl game and higher rankings.  This is exciting because it implies a small amount of relevance for Northwestern's football program and also because it is fun to complain about things on the internet and make snide remarks about body clocks.

Of course, bowl positioning does not really matter.  The entire hierarchy of bowl games after the playoffs is a meaningless system where older bowl games that have names that appended by ridiculous sponsors rank higher than games that are named completely by their ridiculous sponsors; thus, the Gator Bowl (now known as the TaxSlayer.com Bowl) is more prestigious than the GoDaddy Bowl, the Quick Lane Bowl or the arrestingly bellicose Armed Forces Bowl.
 
The Beef O'Brady's Bowl, played at the decrepit Tropicana Field, was such a perfect shitty 
bowl game name that it burned out like a glorious comet.  Then, it metamorphosed into the 
BitCoin Bowl, which was somehow even more ridiculous before settling into the 
disappointingly stolid St. Petersburg bowl.  I have pledged $45.00 in naming rights for the 
bowl to be called the Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com St. Petersburg Bowl. 
If you are a representative of the St. Petersburg Bowl, please contact me and let me know 
when to fly down a present the trophy.

The hierarchy of bowl games is, I suppose, a way to differentiate the bowl games that have multiplied across the nation.  This year, there are more so many bowl games that there are not enough teams that have reached the magical 6-6 threshold of Bowl Eligibility to play.  Therefore, 5-7 teams will receive invitations, in order of Brand Status.  This means that Illinois, despite dashing itself upon the rocks of Northwestern's defense for four quarters last Saturday can still go to a bowl (and I hope they are selected).  Nebraska, America's most prominent 5-7 team, will almost certainly receive one.  At this point, matchups and rankings and hierarchy are all that separate the bowls until the NCAA decides to thrust all of the non-playoff teams into a giant fishbowl and select bowl matchups by lot.

This is not a time to become stressed about Northwestern's ranking or bowl positioning.  The Wildcats have won ten games and they are ranked and I am still sort of dreading a flood of hail marys that will somehow take them all away.

NORTHWESTERN SEASON IN REVIEW

Northwestern has finished off a season of the impossible.  In the past two years, the Wildcats won ten games combined, and lost in mind-bogglingly improbable ways.  In two games, Northwestern fell victim to passes bouncing off a defenders hands at the last possible second.  In one game, they lost to a field goal team that successfully assembled itself like they were in aBuster Keaton movie.  They lost in overtime and they lost in the final seconds of regulation attempting to prevent overtime when the quarterback fell on his buttocks.  They literally lost to Tim Beckman. 

This season, the Wildcats went an astonishing 8-0 in games decided by a ten points or fewer and every one of those weird breaks fell their way.  This season, Northwestern managed to stop the tying conversion.  This season, the winning field goal went through the uprights.  This season, the referees took an apparent game-winning touchdown off the board because the whimsical hands of fate have decided that Northwestern should have that win fair and square by redefining what the terms fair and square mean.  This year, the Wildcats got the Hat.

Northwestern won with ugly football.  They unleashed a defense rivaled only by the 1995 team and seemed content to score only as many points were necessary, as if by winning by more than the bare minimum would trigger a loss through an innovative Price is Right scoring system.
 
Coming this spring to Big Ten Network, contestants bid on Rotel, extra-large men's pants, 
and luxury vacations to Indianapolis

Fitzgerald and McCall were content this year to let Justin Jackson ball carrier at people until they got within scoring range.  If not, they were happy to punt and let the defense back onto the field.  Every once in awhile, Thorson would find a receiver or, more excitingly, find a lane to gallop down the field with gangly strides through a baffled defense.  This offensive approach was effective, but also kept Northwestern's games within terrifying range of Northwestern events at all times.  Wildcat football is not often going to roll into a Big Ten stadium and demolish the opposition, and good seasons thrive on plays designed for wild swings of fortune.  The head football coach doubles as the endowed Dr. Ray Arnold Chair in Butt-Holding. 

It is possible to look at the Wildcats' numerous escapes this season and see their record as dependent on luck.  Advanced statistics appear to think the Wildcats have wildly overachieved.  But college football is itself an anarchic scrum relying on young people, the bounce of an oblong ball, BODY CLOCKS, weather conditions, referees deciding on increasingly arbitrary and obscure definitions of a catch, and a host of a zillion other things that wreak havoc on a twelve-game sample.  No teams, not even the championship-caliber, coach-firing, juggernaut nightmare teams win all their games without weird bounces and luck.  Northwestern not only played lockdown defense and had an effective running game, it also enjoyed the favor of the football chaos deities for once.  They won ten games, went 6-1 at home (and 1-0 at Chicago's Big Ten Neutral Stadium), and will finish the season ranked and in a prominent bowl game.  And our reward is to get to watch them one more time without the pressure of a bowl drought that originated in the Truman administration.  Most importantly, we have The Hat.