VICTORY RIGHT AFTER THIS GAME GOES TO OVERTIME

We live in overtime now. The strictures of regulation football no longer exist to constrain the Northwestern Wildcats; they start now at the 25 yardline, the clock no longer moves, there is no longer field position or quarters or movement of the sun across the horizon. Here in this dimension beyond time and space and logic and reason the Northwestern Wildcats are unstoppable, indomitable, also receiving votes.

Northwestern has won three consecutive overtime games, a feat that has literally never been done by any other team. This record reminds me of the people who decide that they're going to break the record for skijumping off a mountain into a basejump and then landing on a jetski and that is also on fire in that sure they are doing something unprecedented but it's only because no one else in their right mind would even think to do it.

I just watched the movie McConkey, which details Shane McConkey's
career from extreme skiing to BASE jumping and then combining
them with wingsuit flying after designing a mechanism to release his
skis midair and you learn that like 90% of extreme skiing stunts exist
because of Roger Moore

The Wildcats are 6-3 and ranked #25 in the Playoff Poll even though no rational person has explained to me why the Playoff Committee, which solely exists to pick the top four teams in the country after entire college football season including the Lucrative Conference Championship Games have finished, has a full set of rankings going down to #25 weeks beforehand other than to thrust us further into a chaotic world where we now have three sets of more or less meaningless top-25 ranking systems between warring factions of Playoff Bureaucrats, reporters, and graduate assistant coaches who are all as we speak publishing their own newspapers and pamphlets attacking each other.

Literature sent to discerning college football bloggers by
various rankings including the Playoff Committee's
"Have You Gone Mad?" and the Coach's "A Diffent
Against the Affociated Preff"

Northwestern is bowl eligible. Their previous overtime victories came against teams that spent last Saturday opening a black hole in the Big Ten, creating a swirling vortex that may well suck the entire conference out of the playoff picture and has already destroyed the entire Big Ten East. Michigan State, which fell to Northwestern in an insane three-overtime denouement that ended only when their quarterback panicked after fumbling, grabbed the ball, and Rex Grossmanned it into the ripped and bloody hands of Nate Hall, outlasted Penn State in a seven-hour rain epic where the Spartan Stadium field might as well have turned into quicksand for the Nittany Lions and devoured the entire team. Iowa annihilated Ohio State from the surface of the Earth. No one knows how it happened. The Buckeyes went into Kinnick Stadium and got rampaged upon by a team that had spent the entire season treating the scoring of a twentieth point like Moses searching for the Promised Land. They dropped 55 on them. They did a fake punt, a religious desecration in the House of Ferentz. The result was so baffling that football archaeologists have begun excavating Kinnick stadium in search of proof.

Both of those teams would have prime playoff positioning now, with Michigan State able to seize control of the East with a win against the Buckeyes and Iowa heading into a showdown with Wisconsin except they made the mistake of traveling to Ryan Field to get overtimed and now I want nothing more for them to win out, for them to miss any chance at playoff glory under the triumphant cackle of Northwestern's Generic Wildcat Growl #15 sound effect.

NEBRASKA LOST IN OVERTIME TOO

When Thorson's hail mary got batted down, I relaxed knowing that the game had shifted from hostile Memorial Stadium to the Realm of Overtime, a fissure in time-space where the laws of football no longer exist and Northwestern becomes a dominating football force.
The game featured much of what Northwestern has brought to bear against the Big Ten-- tough run defense, an offense that moves in fits and starts like an old pull-to-start lawnmower, Justin Jackson. This week, the Wildcats got a tremendous performance from Kyle Queiro, who picked off Tanner Lee twice and nearly ended the game on a third that just slipped out of his grasp. Pat Fitzgerald added to his increasing museum of avant-garde clock management by basically running out the clock for no apparent reason at the end of the first half when the team had a decent shot to at least give Charlie Kuhbander a better shot.

Once again Northwestern played well enough to win; a team that does nothing but go to overtime has, in fact, discovered how to be literally the exact amount of better required to beat another team.

when you win three straight games in overtime

Nebraska fans have reached their breaking point. They demand that Mike Riley be fired, removed, and arrested, and 90% of Nebraska football sportswriting is just Scott Frost fanfiction where all Hypothetical Scott Frost dialogue has been hastily repurposed from the 1997 film Batman and Robin.

"I AM HEUH TO RETOOURN NEBRICEKA TO DA COLD
STANDAHDT," says the lede from the Lincoln Journal-Star
in a column entitled "The Ice Man Hiredeth: Eighteen
hypothetical columns about hiring Scott Frost"

It is impossible to tell how good Northwestern is. Part of that is the chaotic nature of college football, where all rankings and formulas are ridiculous because the entire season is 12 games of unpredictable chaos dictated by an oblong ball and dependent on the emotions and consistency of teenagers and grown adults who have decided on a career path that depends a lot on yelling and also blowing whistles at people. The Wildcats, left for dead after a listless victory over a putrid Nevada team and a complete dismantling at the hands of what turned out to be a fairly crappy Duke team, now have six wins and will be favored in their three remaining games. It is not impossible that they could somehow win nine games or for them to lose all three or to play Purdue to so many overtimes that they manage to cross over into Sunday when they are still going for two-point conversions and Ryan Field is converted into an Overtime death cult where fans cut the North stands tarp into robes and demand more overtime periods to slake their overtime lust.

TRAINING DAY

Purdue is here. Purdue under Jeff Brohm, which has transformed itself from the hapless punching bag of the Big Ten with its sinkhole-riddled field and despondent fanbase of train spotters watching a postmodern art installation of football despair to an actual, frisky, scary team that let's not get ahead of ourselves here they still lost to Rutgers.
Purdue and Northwestern is the essence of an 11:00AM Big Ten game, one to be played and forgotten as soon as humanly possible, and the lunatics in charge of college football television have moved it for some reason to a night game. Night football, prime time, national broadcast on ESPN2 no doubt under the strictures of some arcane Big Ten/ESPN contract that prevents them from moving it to ESPN: Handball where all channel descriptions are written in English phonetically but in Cyrillic. Under the lights, where Northwestern and Purdue will inspire millions of college football fans in the Chicago area to stand around anxiously as bar staffs fumble around complicated satellite television systems to get the Notre Dame game while Purdue Pete peers ominously from the preview box.

Purdue actually has to apply for a waiver to allow Purdue
Pete to be used at night. Here is what Purdue Pete originally
looked like before it was destroyed, buried, resurrected,
buried again and burned, resurrected again while taking a
human host who transforms into Purdue Pete when in
proximity to certain brands of train engine, and finally
defeated in combat by Ross and Ade, who trapped it in
a concrete slab from which it has only escaped four times

Purdue comes in with a much-improved defense and a coach who likes to do things like call reverse flea flickers while scanning a playbook taken from NFL Blitz. The Boilermakers, though, will be without one of their quarterbacks after David "That Name Again Is Mister" Blough suffered a gruesome ankle injury against the Illini. Elijah Sindelar will take over as starter, although Brohm had been rotating both this season in order to sow chaos and terror among opponents. Northwestern will hopefully be able to figure out how to beat Brohm's squad instead of the usual method of intimidating Purdue by wearing helmets, repeatedly confusing Purdue's linemen by convincing them of radical changes to the rules of football moments before the snap, and doing nothing and watching the entire Purdue football team walk one by one in to an open manhole.

Northwestern sits as a consensus top-30 or so team in all the rankings and will probably be ranked should they keep on winning through the soft part of their schedule. But there are no guarantees with this team, which has risen to stonewall some bizarrely good teams and struggled against decidedly mediocre ones, with the status of those teams constantly fluctuating through this insane Big Ten season. The Wildcats have been riding a razor's edge for the past three weeks where a single play could have beaten them in all three previous games, and Purdue hasn't rolled over for anyone. They're on their way up. But all I can say to them is that if the Boilermakers want to win this game in Ryan Field under the towers and the weird, emaciated blow-up Wildcat tunnel and night sky they need to do one thing: for their own good, they had better not let the game go into overtime.

Week 13: The Sound Decisions of Learned Referees

Winter arrived last weekend in Madison.  The northern winds swept ice and snow across the Midwest and buffeted the stadium with freezing air and football misery.  It is as if Jim Delany, sitting comfortably in his LeaderLegend Big Ten Command Center flipped the switch from "football" to "Big Ten football" all the way up to "Ludicrously Big Ten football" and a torrent of sleet and cold and inability to pass the football like it was 1944 and we needed to send all our forward passes to the front and the Big Ten chaos referees all flooded into the stadium while the Big Ten Network beamed the debacle to dozens of American homes.  And, in the end, the Wildcats came away with a 13-7 victory, their ninth of season, and a chance to make it a 10-win Hat season. 

Both defenses played heroically.  Wisconsin's held even as the offense refused to hold onto the ball.  The Badgers turned the ball over five times; Wildcats continued to bedevil quarterback Joel Stave, who threw two picks and fumbled.  Tanner McEvoy, who threw an interception as a quarterback last year and now has become a receiver, fumbled as well.  Yet, time after time, the Badger defense held in their own end of the field as the Wildcats stalled out and missed field goals.  After an early pick led to a Northwestern touchdown, the coaches decided to run the Besieged Citadel offense.  Justin Jackson's 139 rushing yards accounted for about two-thirds of their entire output.
 
The Wildcats' play calling was so conservative that they only ran packages called "The 
Bourbon Restoration"

But the entire game was overshadowed by referee decisions. 

CALL ONE: THE RETURNER'S PREVARICATION


With the third quarter winding down, Northwestern had satisfactorily run into the Wisconsin enough times to get in punting position.  Badger receiver Alex Erickson caught the punt, shrugged off two Northwestern tackles, and weaved his way into the endzone to put Wisconsin up as Camp Randall erupted.  OR DID HE?  As the punt bounced its way towards him, Erickson signaled for his teammates to clear out.  As the referees later explained, Erickson's attempt to move the ball was an act of deception, of grave duplicity where he would signal a fair catch-- when the fair catch becomes not fair at all.  There is some precedent here.  Two weeks before, a Penn State returner had clearly made a fair catch signal then advanced the ball in an act of fair-catch signal derring-do that the officials ignored.  An apoplectic Fitzgerald charged onto the field,  his head so red that he resembled a human matchstick.  This time, the ball was handed back to an incredulous offense with six points removed.  The Badgers could do nothing and punted.

As a Northwestern fan, I applaud the officials for their enforcement of clear, well-known rules against that rogue Alex Erickson.  If Erickson wanted to make sure he got credit for his touchdown, he should have gone to the Memorial Library, requested a book from off-site storage entitled "Approved Football Gestures," and studied up on it instead of deceiving the Wildcats and preventing them from ineffectively attempting to tackle him.  I will quote here from the NCAA rule book:

VERDICT: THEY GOT IT RIGHT

CALL TWO: THE POSTMODERN CATCH


With less than a minute remaining, the maligned Stave drove Wisconsin down the field.  Tight End Troy Fumagalli appeared to score the winning touchdown.  Instead, his knee was ruled down at the one subatomic molecule line.  On the next play, Stave appeared to have hit Jazz Peavy for the winning touchdown.  Peavy caught the ball, ran several steps, and then bobbled the ball as he fell out of the endzone.  After a lengthy review, the referees determined that every Wisconsin football player has an incredible name.  Then they lit up a few Gauloises cigarettes, consulted their Derrida, determined that it is impossible to determine what a "catch" is anyway, and ripped away the winning score.  On the next play, Stave was sacked and knocked out of the game.  Backup quarterback Bart Houston entered the field through swinging saloon doors and tossed an incompletion aimed at McEvoy. 

While Peavy appeared to snag the ball and possess it for several steps, the rules are clear.  Peavy may have caught the ball, stopped, filled in the proper catch paperwork (the Transfer of Football from Quarterback to Receiver is available as a PDF on the NCAA website), but failed to get it properly notarized before falling out of bounds.  This unfortunate oversight on the part of the Wisconsin coaching staff cost them dearly, but is clearly stated in the rules.

VERDICT: NORTHWESTERN WINS YOW YOW YOW YOW YOW YOW

The sloppy pace of the game and the numerous sound and rational refeeeing decisions left a small but rowdy group of Badger fans with no recourse but to pelt their own cheerleaders, officials, and Northwestern players with snowballs.  It was a difficult loss on senior day, particularly for Stave, who thought he had rallied his team to victory twice.  Northwestern had numerous opportunities to extend the lead to the point where the referees would have no part in it, but the Wisconsin defense and the Wildcats' ultra-conservative play calling kept it close.  Northwestern fans in the stands had no idea how they won.  Pat Fitzgerald was delightedly perplexed.  And the Wildcats canceled their bus service back to Evanston so they could ride back in rum-running getaway cars.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

The Hat Game is upon us!  This blog has already covered hat-lore in Thirty Days: Hat November, An Oral History of the Northwestern-Illinois Game at length.  Last year, the Hat Game reached its apotheosis as it became a bowl eligibility game.  With the Beck Man at the height of his powers and Northwestern desperate to salvage a miserable season, it is hard to imagine a more perfect Hat Game scenario than as the Golden Ticket to what turned out to be the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl against a superior Conference USA team.

This year, the teams have gone in opposite directions.  Northwestern has powered its way to a 9-2 record.  The Illini are reeling.  They fired Beck Man eight days before the season and released a 1,200-page report that depicts him as Will Ferrell's impression of George W. Bush.  After making fun of Beckman's absurd anti-Northwestern crusade for the past three years, many of his actual, real life behaviors turned out to be something like 15 percent less insane than this nonsense blog that claimed that he had an anti-Northwestern command center and crafting shed where he built shoddy replica Willies to set on fire and assault first-year players during Illini training camp.
 
There's no evidence that this is Beckman's car, but the man has crossed into the Beck Man 
Valley, where no piece of ludicrous anti-Northwestern activity can be ruled out unless 
specifically mentioned by a 1,200-page report.

The University of Illinois is also in turmoil.  The university sports an Interim Chancellor, an Interim Athletic Director, and an Interim Football Coach; the game will be played at Soldier Field, making this an Illini Interim Home Game.  Bill Cubit is playing for more than just a Hat.  He hopes a win and a bowl game will keep him in Champaign-Urbana for a long time.  It is hard to root against the Illini this season as the team has fought through the disorder, and Cubit's Northwestern-related pronouncements remain within the bounds of normal football person behavior.

What happens to the Illinois-Northwestern rivalry now?  I've noted earlier that the intensity of the Hat Game developed as a rivalry not between the two schools but between Northwestern and Tim Beckman himself.  Without the Beck Man and his avant-garde dada interpretation of football rivalry, can the Greatest Rivalry in College Football persevere?  The Illini, like Northwestern, are a historically moribund team often left for dead by the Big Ten Football Brands, all of whom are insufferable.  Nevertheless, it is important to soldier on and remember that, no matter how well the Illini have coped through a tumultuous season, they have The Hat.  That is no way to live.
 
After last year's debacle, Northwestern has hired its Assistant Dean of 
Procuring Rivalry Trophies By Any Means Necessary

So, it is with a heavy heart and with all respect to our friends at That School South of What Beckman Called The School Up North, I say: 

Give us that hat, Cube Man.
Give us that hat back.
Want that Hat.
Hat Hat Hat

Hat.