Nebraska and Northwestern are in a Codependent Emotional Death Spiral

Someone has decided that every year Northwestern and Nebraska have to slog at each other for four hours before one group of fans has its insides explode. I don’t know what sort of strange alchemy allows this-- perhaps there is some sort of football cosmology that says there can only be one NU team and so the two are fated to destroy each other emotionally for all time, perhaps there is some sort of chortling football demon involved, or perhaps it is because both teams are both Sort of OKish, but I don’t think that anyone realized when the Corn Huskers joined the Big Ten that they would spend the next decade more or less locked into a devastating Spider-Man pointing meme with Northwestern, and I admit that if I didn’t just watch a walk-on backup safety kick a game-winning field goal in the dying seconds and run a bulldozer over the Wildcats’ season, I would admit that this particular turn of events for Nebraska is incredibly funny.

Northwestern had won the last two contests both, as the team prefers, in overtime. Nebraska won this one with a backbreaking interception, an inexplicably gorgeous throw from a backup quarterback, and said field goal. Nebraska loves to win this game with a backup quarterback. Their most ridiculous win in this mutant rivalry to date remains a hail mary engineered by Ron Kellogg III, such an improbable and heart-breaking finish that I will remember the name Ron Kellogg III to my dying day and I admit I did not even watch that game because I was gambling on jai-alai.

The feeling when Ron Kellogg III hits a hail mary and you miss the Trifecta

The Wildcats started the game with a new quarterback but continued to struggle on offense. It is a hoary cliche for internet football idiots like me to sarcastically joke about the team establishing the run when they are having the same success doing so that Wile E. Coyote has traditionally had in entering a tunnel painted onto the side of a mountain. It is clear that the coaching staff has them devotedly running the ball only because it is not currently legal in football to burrow into the defensive line, wait several weeks, and then burst out of them in a disgusting shower of flesh and football jersey material for a two-yard gain.

The Nebraska loss has dropped Northwestern to 1-4 in a game they could have won. Northwestern’s defense appears vicious enough to strike fear in the hearts of the Big Ten West’s meatiest and least ham-handed quarterbacks.  It is impossible to say that Northwestern will not right the ship and find their way to a gnarled moth-eaten bowl game as is their birthright in the Fitzgerald era but it seems like the mythical sixth win and berth in the Col. R. Humpted Bilious Official U.S. Army Surplus Iron Claw For Meat Preparation Bowl continues to fade away like a mirage in the distance.

Meat Claws are a real product. It is unknown whether the United States 

government keeps a list of Known Meat Claw Injuries

And now big, bad Ohio State, the Crimson Scourge, comes steaming into Ryan Field on an insane and unnecessary Friday night game with its fans poised to take over the stadium for a game none of them have any interest in watching.  The Buckeyes are favorites.  The gambling point spread is obscene.  The game has been removed from the FS1 channel and banished to Big Ten Network to ensure it is viewed only by those steeled for hardcore Big Ten Content.  

I have suggested that this year's Northwestern team at 1-4 is in a good position for an upset.  Nobody is watching Northwestern football this season unless they have been arrested for effectively passing and put into a Clockwork Orange device, and so no one understands that the Wildcats' defense is excellent.  The hope has been that the entire enterprise of Northwestern football under Pat Fitzgerald has become so nonsensical and random that the Buckeyes will enter some sort of chaos state where what happens becomes an operatic farce and they are dragged to overtime and eventually madness.  I have submitted this to many gambling preview websites but they have all turned it down. 

THE RETURN OF RODNEY

If there is one thing that the baseball playoffs have given fans this season it is the startling revelation that Fernando Rodney is here and still pitching.  Rodney, the crooked-hat closer for the Tigers and eventually pretty much every team in Major League Baseball is still popping up in middle relief in his seventeenth year in the majors at the age of 42.  In his first appearance, he gave up a walkoff single to the Twins' Christian Guzman scoring Corey Koskie with Bobby Kielty and A.J. Pierzynski on base, and now he is in the World Series pitching for a team that at the time did not exist. 

An impossibly young Rodney before the Cap Tilt, 
before the Arrow, before the All Star appearances and 
Inexplicable Receipt of Downballot MVP Votes when 
he was striking out various Jose Valentins and Brians Broussard

There is a meditative element to players like Rodney who have been around forever, had prominent moments, and then more or less vanished to anonymous middle relief roles for years at a time, resurfacing from every once in a while startle fans who had no idea he was still in the league.  There's a component of this that I believe runs parallel to the idea of aging especially in the distorted Logan's Run world of professional sports. There is also a weird way that sports figures like Rodney hover around the game like bizarre specters-- at the point where even if you hadn't heard from him in a few years and you expect that he has retired to a life of appearances on extremely local sports radio or eerily stilted commercials for car and truck dealerships, he reappears on a mound in a burst of startled and delighted confusion. But the reason why Rodney is more compelling than all of the other journeyman middle relievers with a shockingly extended run or brief resurrection from the Long Island Ducks or whatever is because he is still shooting the arrow on people.

Fernando Rodney has a signature move, and that is relatively unique for baseball.  Major League baseball polices the expression and movement of players with the severe gruffness of the meanest Soviet ballet instructors, and Rodney has continued to mime shooting the arrow on people for years because he does not seem to care if a purple-necked manager named "Duff" or "Spud" screams at a reporter about him Respecting the Game and also Hat Angle Disgruntlement.  The best thing about Rodney is that he has continued to shoot the arrow even as his role has changed-- he began using this gesture to celebrate saves (this somehow started in 2012 with the Rays in his tenth year in the big leagues), but now shoots the arrow more or less in any situation where he has pitched without allowing 15 runs.  In the 2015 NLDS pitching for the Cubs, he came on in the seventh, recorded two outs and put a man on first, and when Joe Maddon came to take him out he strode to the foul line and shot an arrow to the crowd to the general amazement and understated disgust of the commentators, a job sort of done-ish.  It is one of my favorite things that has ever happened in a Cubs playoff game.

The next year, Rodney saved two games for an absolutely putrid Padres team against the Cubs in both ends of a double header.  I do not know if he had ever arrowed a team twice in the same day before, but I was not even mad.

One of the precarious things about having a signature celebration is that at any point, an opposing player can take it and perform it themselves.  Sometimes when this happens the player gets mad.  Here's an article from 2019 about former Charger Shawne Merriman still fuming about the time the New England Patriots sarcastically performed his "Lights Out" dance in 2006.  Merriman would also pen a long article about how the "inverted sack-celebration discourse used by the Patriots had been recontextualized as a mocking burlesque" in The Wagged Finger: A Journal of Sports Celebrations.  This has also happens to Fernando Rodney.  Here from 2014 is a video that someone in Major League Baseball has uploaded with the incredible title "Albert Pujols and Mike Trout get PAYBACK for Fernando Rodney's early bow and arrow celebration."

Fernando Rodney is still doing this.  He is not exactly a high-leverage reliever for the Nationals, not even in their benighted, shambling bullpen.  But he is there.  When it was time to get some mop-up innings in an NLCS Game 3 where the Nationals had thrown the Cardinals into an enormous toilet, Rodney was there. It was 8-1 in the eighth.  He got three outs.  The invisible arrow arced into the October air.

A PREVIEW OF NORTHWESTERN'S UPCOMING NIGHT GAME AGAINST THE FOURTH-RANKED OHIO STATE BUCKEYES

No, thanks.

Good Gravy

We should have seen this coming.  All of the preseason hype, all of the accolades, all the sweet dreams of the Kolter-Mark option (which sounds like an exotic financial implement that could short-circuit the United States economy), all of the rankings.  It has all come crashing down like a proverbial House of Cards, by which I mean Pat Fitzgerald is now inexplicably talking with an absurd southern accent and delivering fourth-wall breaking asides about Purdue to a camera that isn't there.
 
Kevin Spacey sounds so much like a Shelby Foote impersonator that I expect him 
to threaten to bring hellfire on someone's district then turn to the camera and 
start talking about Beauregard

Last week, Northwestern faced a Nebraska team without its wobbly slingshot passing all-everything QB Taylor Martinez and looked like they could finally pull off a Big Ten win.  Instead, with no time remaining, a ninth-string quarterback impossibly named "Ron Kellogg III" lofted a ball in the endzone at a Northwestern defender who improbably tipped into the waiting hands of a Nebraska receiver in a play known as Inconceivably Heartbreaking Defeat Right.  At least that is what I am told.  I did not see the play because I was busy gambling on jai alai, but at this point Northwestern football no longer has the ability to shock me.


Chi Chi Ariguzo's endzone collapse is a pretty decent summation of the season to date
 
Northwestern is 0-5 in the Big Ten and is desperately scrambling to make a bowl, any bowl.  The 'Cats will play anyone, any time in December.  They will play the fourth-place Sun Belt finisher in an abandoned tile warehouse?  They will play the remaining UFL all-stars in a rendering plant.  They will undergo some sort of Captain N process to play against the 1991 Los Angeles Raiders in a Tecmo Super Bowl.  They could really use a win.

THE VICTORS

Northwestern hopes to avenge it's entire season by taking out a mediocre Michigan team on Saturday.  Michigan, also touted as potential LEGENDS DIVISION contenders, is not having a great season by any stretch of the imagination.  The Wolverines sit at 2-3 in the Big Ten and have yet to record a positive rushing total in the past two games.  Fans, though, can be comforted that they have at least qualified for a bowl game that Michigan fans can haughtily look down their collective noses at.  

Michigan's offensive woes have made this a winnable game for the ailing 'Cats.  And even though a theoretical Northwestern victory has lost a lot of luster against the unranked Wolverines, it would still be vastly satisfying.  One of the great pleasures of college football fandom is rooting not only against a current team but entire programs, fanbases, and civilizations.  All Big Ten fans have been traumatized by Michigan and Ohio State for so long that you could put a winged helmet on Rocky Balboa and I'd be singing the Soviet National Anthem.

Of course, this would mean that Northwestern would have to pull out a victory at all.  Last week, I speculated on twitter about some potentially devastating Northwestern loss scenarios for this season including deadly meteor strikes, vacating the 1995 Big Ten championship, and having a mass of Chicago-area Northwestern fans cause a large enough ruckus to force a forfeit.  I've brainstormed a few more since then:

-Colter breaks away for game-winning touchdown but is tackled by the Visitor Section Tarp, which has escaped its moorings and is out for vengeance.
-All of Northwestern football turns out to be an elaborate long con from a family of grifters who wait for the 'Cats to be in winning field goal range before announcing that the game is over, disassembling the stadium, and selling it to be ground up and shipped as gravel as part of an art installation project.
-Northwestern wins a game in dramatic fashion, but does so to the advantage of Biff Tannen, who has traveled back in time, wagered heavily on the 'Cats, and immediately forces us all to live in a post-apocalyptic Biff Town.
-A Soviet sleeper agent alters Northwestern's super-patriotic flag uniforms to hypercolor fabrics that reveal pictures of Lenin when exposed to sweat and moisture.  The game is forefeited when a riot breaks out led by the surviving relatives of Apollo Creed and professional wrestlers from the 1980s.

Northwestern's uniforms have created a Patriotic Singularity 

LET US WIN A BIG TEN GAME

The Wildcats are certainly hungry for a victory.  They will be without Venric Mark the rest of the season and have a fairly banged up with emerging threat Stephen Buckley also injured.  It has been a rough season for the 'Cats, but a victory here would still keep them in bowl contention and give some much-needed stakes to the Hat Game.  Buck up, Northwestern fans.  The 'Cats have been alternately maddening, depressing, and shocking, but never boring, and they can use your fist claws this afternoon.