Potemkin Stadium

  

At some point they must have played a football game. But at Northwestern’s opener against Miami on Saturday, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the hastily-constructed pop-up stadium built on a soccer field. I have been skeptical about what seemed to be a desperate and hare-brained scheme that had Northwestern scrambling to find somewhere to play the majority of its home games despite the fact that they had been planning to tear down Ryan Field for two years and had been locked in legal combat with a lawn sign army the entire time. And yet, by all accounts, they seemed to have pulled it off. They played a football game there and the bleachers did not collapse, the turf didn’t roll up, and no gangs of bloodthirsty pirates besieged the stadium with cannon fire, boarded the stadium, and menaced David Braun with a cutlass.

The temporary stadium looked spectacular on television. The game kicked off on a picture perfect late summer afternoon with the sun shining, the lake shimmering, and the sky clear enough to see the skyline of Chicago, the city that I would like to remind you that Northwestern is the official Big Ten Team of. It is wild that it sits so close to the lake. Cameras showed boats cruising on by carrying Northwestern and Miami flags. The stadium is close enough to the water that it is possible for a team to literally take a boat to the stadium. I am not sure about the logistics of transporting nearly one hundred of the largest people that we can produce on a fleet of ships, but I think that would be a spectacular entrance, one that would only be matched by running out of a blow-up tunnel that features an annoyed-looking partially deflated panther and some smoke machines.

PJ Fleck learning that he doesn't play Northwestern this season and can't literally row into the stadium

The stadium looked so good that I immediately started to see calls for Northwestern to abandon the ridiculous $800 million sarcophagus that Pat Ryan is building to carry his name and permanently stay on the lake in a cozy little stadium. This would be a disaster. 

 

The fact is that Northwestern is not meant to play in a fun lakeside stadium any more than a brand new palace on the ashes of the old Ryan Field. The school already had its own ideal stadium: a dilapidated shithole. Northwestern is not somewhere fans should be able to go watch football and marvel at the views. It should be a half-filled pit where no one would ever want to set foot. 

Northwestern will never play Big Ten home games– I don’t know how small of a stadium you would have to build to stop Chicagoland’s tens of thousands of Big Ten alumni from flooding every single structure Northwestern could play in but it is certainly less than the 12,000 of the lakeside stadium’s capacity– so the stadium should remain a fortress dedicated to the misery of opposing fans. I don’t want to see people rooting for Wisconsin sitting in sun-kissed bleachers watching a parade of sailboats blooming like flowers on a glittering lake. They should instead be pelted with sleet and spend the entire third quarter waiting in line for a hot dog only to be told they are out of buns and be handed a loose frank in a paper cup. Ideally, Northwestern should play in a stadium that is rigged to explode at the end of every conference game.

OK FINE HERE'S FOOTBALL

 

Last week’s post highlighted the stark changes in Northwestern’s football team, but one thing stayed the same: the Wildcats won yet another punt-driven 13-6 slog marked by dominating defense. The result is very good; Miami is coming off an eleven-win MAC championship season, the game was only as close as it was because of an ill-timed goalline fumble, and Northwestern’s untested secondary largely held up and kept the RedHawks out of the endzone. A team like Miami would have likely defeated many recent vintages of Northwestern Wildcats in the type of game where Pat Fitzgerald would have immediately been loaded onto a barge after the game and sent to Door County after being mistaken as a live mascot for a cherry orchard. At the same time, it would be nice to see a brand new offense headed by a dynamic quarterback who is electric running in the open field manage an offensive opener more exciting than The Mick McCall Gambit.

If Northwestern can't break 20 points Mike Bajakian will have to file another lawsuit against Northwestern, this time for plagiarism

This week, Northwestern will face off against Duke with an absurd eight pm kickoff on a Friday night. This game will be on national cable television for the benefit of the most degenerate college football fans possible and football maniacs who are too cheap to shell out for Peacock to watch the Packers and Eagles play in a venue even more ridiculous than the lakeside stadium. This game will undoubtedly be a blow for Chicago’s restaurants and nightclubs as late night revelers stay home to watch these two teams try to secure a vital win that will make it easier to qualify for the Spirit Halloween Novelty Dracula Fang Bowl.

Duke and Northwestern have been playing an awful lot lately, and Duke has been running away with the series. They’ve beaten the ‘Cats five consecutive times. Despite the fact that these two schools historically operate in the same sad dregs of the power conferences, I don’t think that playing them every year has congealed this series into a rivalry. But I also know that I am sick of watching Northwestern lose to Duke in football. I would like to see the Wildcats get a decisive win and then start a new tradition where they make the opposing mascot walk the plank into the unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan.

 

Northwestern lures the infamous Coach K Sheffsky into the stadium only to march him straight to the plank while he makes those hideous death mask faces that he used to make if the official dared to call a foul on his team

Between staff moves, the transfer portal, and the last of the Covid era players lingering for their ninth-year dissertation defenses, it is incredibly difficult to tell how good a team will be year by year.  Duke has a new staff headed by Florida journeyman Manny Diaz and a new transfer quarterback.  They beat an FCS team called "Elon" handily.  Northwestern is playing at home and will outnumber whatever Duke fans manage to float in.  It is at this point very difficult to figure out how confident I am in a Northwestern win and even whether we should Throw Out The Record Books for this quasi-rivalry that is now being played for The Basketball Legacy of Ryan Young.  Looking at the dragons that lurk on Northwestern's Big Ten schedule, they need this one badly.

CHICAGO BEARS FANS HAVE HOPE AND I'M TERRIFIED

Look, the Chicago Bears don't have quarterbacks.  My entire life they have sent out some new jabroni to throw for 167 yards while the Bears lineback the other team into submission.  For a long time, the Bears didn't seem to even care about the position; their approach to quarterbacks seemed to mirror a gang of street toughs menacing Jean Claude Van Damme in that each of them would do a couple of moves before falling down or getting thrown through a plate glass window.  The Bears now have the most hyped rookie quarterback since Trevor Lawrence, a full complement of competent wide receivers, and an offensive coordinator whose previous experience didn't watching Aaron Rodgers run around for 15 seconds and then heave a perfect pass across his body to a wide open guy and then saying "I told him to do that."  I genuinely don't know what to do.

Bears fans have been through the ringer with their last two great quarterback hopes.  Mitch Trubisky was such a pud that he was booed by fans on draft night and spent the entirety of his career here being reminded that he was drafted over Patrick Mahomes.  Justin Fields, handed a nonexistent offensive line and a cadre of wide receivers that were made up of kick returners and XFL players, produced some of the most incredible highlights I've ever seen from a Bears quarterback, but never found rhythm in the passing game.  I put a lot of hope into Fields, who was an absolute monster in college and a person who seemed to bear the inept management of his career that looked almost like sabotage with an admirable grace.  I still am very defensive about Fields and instinctively lash out at anyone who dares to call him a glorified running back.

The 2024 Bears hype has been fueled by their first appearance on Hard Knocks, the HBO and NFL Films documentary series that follows a team in training camp.  I have no idea if this is how Hard Knocks is or because Bears ownership mandated that they remove all of the swearing, but this TV show was unbearably boring.  The NFL Films crew does a great job filming game and practice action-- a sequence from the final episode that seamlessly stitched together a bunch of Caleb Williams practice throws was delightful-- but there is little the gravelly voiced NFL announcer can do to get you hyped up to watching a bunch of guys in athleisure talking in meetings.  It doesn't help that the Bears management and coaching staff have zero personality.  Matt Eberflus, one of the most baffling and oafish coaches I've seen whose blundering through the first half of last season made me astonished that he had not yet been fired, made a dramatic offseason change by growing a beard and getting a new haircut and apparently in NFL logic this makes him good now.

Eberflus had a dramatic beauty transformation from a "find me the girl" henchman to a "get me the launch codes" henchman

Caleb Williams has an enormous amount of pressure.  Bears fans are not just expecting the first good quarterback they've had in most fan's lifetimes, they are expecting a superstar and fast.  It is unlikely that a rookie, even one as talented and magical as Williams and with his supporting cast of star receivers, will be that good that quickly.  Williams, for his part, seems to welcome the hype.  Fields, cast in a similar role, seemed to bear the psychosis of generations of quarterback-scarred Bears fans belching giardeniera into sports radio call lines with a stoic determination.  Now he's trying to win the grimmest quarterback battle in the league against a chalk outline in the shape of Russell Wilson.  As Fields knows, Williams may never be as popular in the city as he is right now.  A lifetime of experience has hardened me against hope that the Bears will ever have a functioning passing attack. 

 

Chicago is already a rabid Bears town above all other professional sports, but the Bears optimism has reached a deranged pitch because the rest of the city's professional sports scene is dreadful.  The Cubs have been floundering all summer making their last desperate lunge for an unlikely wild card spot.  The Bulls have traded their two best veterans for underwhelming returns including a deeply flawed and unpopular young player and seen their two all-stars turn into untradeable albatrosses that have no interest from the league; they need to desperately lose as many games as they can so they don't lose their 2025 draft pick.  The Chicago Sky are still several players away from building anything around their two exciting rookies.  I have been told we have a hockey team here and it is also bad.

But it is impossible to frame how bad professional sports teams are in Chicago without talking about the White Sox.  The White Sox have already lost 109 games.  They seem to win a game once every two weeks.  They are inept in ways that defy belief-- in a recent game their entire outfield and left side of the infield collided in the shallow left field, allowing two runs to score on a routine popup hit by a guy who started the season playing for them as the DH because he was somehow worse at fielding than that.  The 2024 White Sox will finish the season the worst major league team in modern history.  They are run by a cadre of fools led by Jerry Reinsdorf and somehow immortal croaking corpse Tony La Russa, both of whom seem like they would rather have this team become a national laughingstock than find someone who has a functioning understanding of baseball in 2024.  I understand that Reinsdorf is very old and rich enough that he never has to interact with anyone who isn't going to flatter him, but I do not understand why a person would want to continue owning sports teams in a city where the possibility that you might have some weird emergency that requires you to leave your house without a retinue would instantly result in a mob of sports fans trying to capture you and parade you around the city in the type of restraints made famous by the late, great Hannibal Lecter.  To me, that sounds like a bummer.

This city needs a winner badly and they are counting on a rookie quarterback on the team that destroys quarterbacks for as a reflex.  It is natural to go into this Bears season in a defensive crouch, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But life is hard enough as it is.  If Caleb busts, he busts.  If the Bears stink, they stink.  Why not at least have hope, for both football teams that play on the lake.

What On Earth Is College Football

College football is not exactly built on the sturdiest frame at the best of times, but this season has unleashed the largest amount of organizational chaos in decades. The upheaval left dedicated fans of the sport with questions that are usually answered well in advance of the season such as what teams, exactly, are currently in the Big Ten and how is Northwestern going to play football without a stadium.

The conferences spent last summer engaged in a feeding frenzy as they cannibalized each other for lucrative teams, desperately lunged for unclaimed programs, or were completely ransacked. The continent-spanning Enormous Ten now sports eighteen teams, Texas and Oklahoma are in the SEC, and the PAC 12 is now a rump conference that currently consists of two teams loosely aligned with the Mountain West like Protestant Holy Roman Empire principalities clinging to Prussia at the outset of the Thirty Years War.

The PAC-12 meets with Mountain West members to arrange the 2024 schedule and plan logistics for the Battle of Lützen

It is not as if college football has never desperately rearranged itself for money before. Even by major American sports standards, the powerful people at schools, conferences, and TV networks that can loosely be defined as in charge of college football have always been shameless and grasping. But the 2024 Hungry Hungry Hippoing of college athletics teams seems particularly galling because of its swiftness, its totality, and its bloodlessness. College football operates as much out of grievance as greed, but it is hard to find an idiotic snit behind any of this. It is a massive realignment born in boardrooms that is entirely about television revenues.

The change in college football feels like most things do these days where an enormously rich and unaccountable corporate power has done something no one wants to the benefit of extraordinarily wealthy people who are not even going to go through the motions of selling it to you. There is something about seeing a massive change in college football that results in conference rivalry games between Rutgers and USC that reminds me of suddenly being told you need to buy a monthly subscription to a toaster.

Perhaps I am bitter because college football realignment has robbed me of something precious and dear to me, my beloved Big Ten West. The Big Ten generously put all of its glamor teams into the East division and left the West teams to fight amongst themselves like screeching cannibal rats. Yes, Iowa and Wisconsin were traditionally good, but they were good in the same predictable, lumbering way and steadfastly refused to roster a competent quarterback out of some sort of lunkheaded midwestern spite; every other team in the division was built in their image and so Big Ten West teams tended to violently lineback at each other and dare each other to throw the dreaded forward pass in the hopes that they could score the bare minimum number of points that would allow them to be absolutely annihilated by either Ohio State or Michigan before blissfully heading to the Outback bowl.

The Big Ten West will be memorialized with a large statue of Kirk Ferentz contemplating a punt in front of a Menard's

 

As a fan of a Northwestern team that has excelled for the past decade in producing neck roll linebackers who can rack up more than a hundred tackles per year and a passing game that resembled industrial action by wide receivers, this was an ideal setup. Every Big Ten West fan knew they could win the division. Now they are all fucked. There are no divisions anymore. The west teams are all at least competent and two come in at a playoff level. There’s no comfort in knowing that you could schedule Rutgers, Maryland, and one of the shitty recent-vintage Michigan State teams and punt your way to glory. The Wildcats have to play Michigan and Ohio State in back-to-back weeks.

NORTHWESTERN 2024 OUTLOOK: HOPEFULLY FEWER LAWSUITS
 

Northwestern had been one of college football’s most staid programs with a coach that many assumed would keep grinding out increasingly disgusting wins where the Wildcats somehow gain negative yards on offense yet occasionally qualify for the Operator's Precision Military Grade Nose Trimmers For Men Bowl until he died and had the entire football program was entombed with him in a giant pyramid. Instead, student reporters looking into a lawsuit brought to life the shocking details of an elaborate hazing program in the football team which led to Pat Fitzgerald’s ouster in what has to be the most surprising firing of a guy who won one football game the previous season.

A year later, the football team has undergone massive change. Fitzgerald is gone and is suing the school for more than $100 million for besmirching his good name, and presumably the good name of the Dreamworks motion picture character “Shrek” that played a disturbing and to me entirely inscrutable role in the hazing rituals. Nearly every coordinator has been replaced, most notably offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian, who is now also suing the university partly because he felt that then-Athletic Director Derrick Gragg had betrayed him by saying he did not like his “Cats Against The World" t-shirt. There are still dozens of ongoing lawsuits from former football players. Gragg himself has been promoted to a Director of Not Saying Anything Please position and has been replaced by a person named Mark Jackson who was hired after Northwestern officials thought it would be funny to give a little jump scare to social media users who immediately thought about the Mark Jackson who is known for spending an entire quarter of an NBA finals game complaining about how you’re not even allowed to order soup anymore and for his brief time coaching the Golden State Warriors where he spent a lot of time trying to psychologically intimidate backup center Festus Ezeli. This is a different Mark Jackson.

 

Imagining a situation where Northwestern hires ESPN's Mark Jackson and he derails every meeting by explaining how provosts are not as tough as they were in the 1990s

The team belongs to David Braun now. He brought in new offensive coordinator Zach Lujan from South Dakota State and is turning the defense over to legendary Wildcat linebacker Tim McGarigle, a person who I am trying to singlehandedly associate exclusively with the infamous Not Afraid To Work Overtime poster where he is shown wielding a chainsaw. It is harder to imagine a situation more difficult than the one Braun came into, and the fact that they won a single game, let alone eight, seems like a minor miracle. It will be interesting to see how Braun will manage now that he is no longer attempting to be a first-time head coach on a month’s notice while also coaching the defense and dealing with a program that was the most notorious one in college sports until a Michigan Football Doofus decided to conduct industrial espionages against Central Michigan University. And yet, Braun is also coaching a team that graduated several of its best veteran players and has left the comforting womb of the Big Ten West to face a schedule full of dragons. The team is also losing its powerful “Cats Against The World” motivational rallying cry which seemed to keep the team together as the rest of us tried to ignore what the Cats did to get The World so riled up.

More importantly, the Northwestern Wildcats do not have a stadium, which is one of the things that you would think might be important for a college football team. Ryan Field is a pile of rubble. Amazingly, while Northwestern was busy sending its army of lawyers against Evanston’s various placard-wielding anti-stadium organizations, they did not seem to take advantage of the extra time to think about things such as where they would play football if they won. The logical place is Soldier Field, where they are playing zero games. They are playing two at Wrigley but only in November because the Cubs have to pretend that they are trying to make the playoffs.

Northwestern will play most of its games at a hastily-constructed lakefront practice field that seats 15,000 people and was put together by pulling bleachers out like a gym class that has been turned into an assembly where a D.A.R.E. officer yells at children about the dangers of laudanum. They have been selling this as a “Field of Dreams” because Field of Desperation is not as punchy. It is extremely unlikely, but technically possible, for a football to somehow end up in Lake Michigan. This boondoggle will be Northwestern’s home for the next two seasons while they build profoundly unnecessary stadium. It is tiny and even with ticket prices soaring and concentrated on season-ticket holders, will still be easily overrun by visiting fans. They are advertising "sail gating" as one of the perks although by mid-October someone attempting to sail gate on Lake Michigan will most likely lose an appendage to frostbite. It is one of the most ridiculous things Northwestern has done for a team whose entire identity as a football team is ridiculous. I am currently weighing astronomical (for Northwestern) ticket prices because I need to see this thing for myself.

Northwestern fans are watching an unrecognizable team in an unrecognizable stadium in an unrecognizable conference. And yet, despite the upheaval, college football remains the same chaotic mess. There will still be bands and drunken students and dumb upsets. The method of choosing a champion will remain a travesty because the difference between the twelfth and thirteenth best teams will be even murkier and finer than the difference between the fourth and fifth. A heavily ranked team will hilariously falter against a lesser conference opponent. Message boards will whine about missed holding calls. And I hope that a west coast team will be initiated into the Big Ten in the only way that makes sense: being profoundly annoyed by the Northwetern Wildcats.

BUCK DUCKETT'S FINAL ADVENTURE

In 2022, I ended every blog post with a story about Buck Duckett, NCAA Pants Investigator navigating the uncharted world of NIL. Now, Buck Duckett returns a final time.  It's time to choose your final Buck Duckett adventure.

The sun beats down relentlessly on the field. It’s the last day of practice at camp. You’re exhausted and each one of your limbs feels like it has been replaced with one of the giant sports drink coolers you’re waiting to get to in order to fill up your bottle. Coach Mansz has been remorseless. You made the semis last year, and this is it: it’s your senior year and your last shot at a title, and for Coach, it is his chance to get the boosters and the press off his back after failing to win a championship in any of his first five seasons, something that his predecessor, the legendary A. Morton Lodez, had managed to do fourteen times in his glittering 36-year reign at the top of the sport of Full Contact College Squabbling.

You fill the bottle and start chugging, but as you start to try to catch up to the guys and limp back to the locker room for a plunge in the ice bath, Coach stops you.

“Hey, I know that Chairston was our guy,” he says. “But he’s gone now.” Chairston, who captained the team all three years you had been in the program, had graduated and signed a big contract with the pro leagues. But the wildlife preserve he had chosen to celebrate his hefty contract was the crooked one that had skimped on security measures and he was somehow simultaneously eaten by both a tiger and crocodile. “This is your year now, and I need you to lead this team. Not just on the field, you can do that just fine. I need you to keep these jackheads in line.” As he says that he glances up at your roommate and best friend, Randy Moods.

“OK, skip,” you say. “I won’t let you down.” You know exactly what he means about Moods.

—-----

You get back to your dorm room. Moods is sitting on his bed, idly tossing a ‘quab in the air and catching it. You don’t understand how he manages to have the energy for that since it hurts to move, breathe, and think after Coach made the entire team do 1,500 arm flap drills after Kiggley missed a simple drunkard’s riposte in front of the first mole, but Moods seems geared up.

“Dude,” Moods says. “I’ve got a line on something absolutely nuts.”

You furrow your brow. Moods is a good teammate and a great friend, but he is also the biggest idiot you know who is responsible for almost all the good stories you ever tell and most of the trouble you’ve ever gotten in.

“How can you have a line on anything other than a bed right now?” you ask.

“Dude,” he says. You look at him. “Bro,” he says sheepishly. For the past year, you’ve been making fun of him for saying “dude” all of the time, so he tries to switch it up with “bro” for your benefit. Early experiments in saying “bud” or “amigo” got him jeered by the entire team; an attempt briefly at using “guv’nah” after accidentally showing up to a Victorian novels class was a complete debacle.

“Bro, you’ve got to come with me tonight. It’s senior year, we need to look good. I’ve got this crazy hookup.”

“What are you talking about? I’m beat. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

I met this dude,” Moods says. “Real fancy guy. Actually wearing a top hat, bro. This guy is Reginald “Wump” Marnassasson IV. Loves what we do. Gives a lot of money to the program, in fact he pays a lot of Coach’s salary himself. We got to talking and he owns this whole pants factory. Not just regular pants. Crazy pants. The fanciest stuff, I mean I’m talking about rare pants, bro. And he wants to just give them to us tonight. Because we’re cool.”

You sigh. “First of all, I’m too tired to go chasing after some pants after Coach made us do the puker’s gambit fifteen times. Second, this whole thing sounds sketchy as heck. You know what can happen to us if we get caught with pants? Didn’t Coach talk to us about pants for like three hours?”

“That’s the beauty of it! We won’t get caught! We have a whole system. You see no one is giving us anything. The pants are buried in the woods. We just take this map,” Moods says as he grabs a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, “and we just dig. Who gave us the pants?” Moods makes a puzzled face. “Bro, I don’t know. You don’t know. We just have them.”

“And,” you say, “when we go wear these glittering trousers at all of the finest squabbler parties and someone asks us where we got them, you say…”

He thinks for a second. “We got them at the pants store, dude.”

You think about it. It’s actually not that bad of a plan. There’s no way that Moods came up with this himself, which makes you very suspicious.

“C’mon dude. You in?” He grabs two shovels from under his bed. They’re new. They still have stickers on them from the store. 

 

 Go With Moods

Let Him Go On His Own