EVANSTON-- Throughout the game, the scoreboard flashed ominous warnings about how anyone who entered the field of play would be captured and thrown into an oubilette, but when the clock hit zero, Northwestern fans were on Ryan Field celebrating a victory over three-win Purdue, a possible Quick Lane Bowl berth, and the imminent destruction of their own stadium. It was the greatest moment in a populated Ryan Field in five years.
The actual game itself was a festival of Big Ten West football. Northwestern missed an extra point. Purdue ran the ball at will until they got close to the endzone and then immediately turned the ball over; Purdue also kept going for it on fourth down and failing including one sequence that gave them multiple tries from within the one yardline. Neither team made a single kick in the first half.
Another disturbing turn of events is that it appears that Willie Wildcat has joined a militia
The overall disgust and misery that the Big Ten West has brought to college football in this, its last glorious season, has been one of the highlights of the year. In recent weeks, I have been trying to think of reasons why the division is the way it is and why every big ten west game seems like a four-hour presentation on why football should be illegal. It is not accurate to say that the Big Ten West uniformly plays an outmoded version of football that existed before the invention of the forward pass; the play is more like a collection of teams that have all been told that the forward pass was legal exactly four weeks ago. It seems like it should be possible that even a single team has discovered a dynamic and exciting way to play but there is only one program trying to change to a forward-thinking pass-wacky style and it is a Wisconsin team that is still mainly made up of rowdy Wisconsinites who all won state championships in shoving, and they are operating the air raid with a bunch of fullbacks who are having trouble learning the nuances of the system because they need to spend each week between games getting extracted from walls they have headbutted too hard.
The Big Ten West has never been good. The division's representative has lost every single championship game in its history although this is misleading-- it is more accurate to say that no West team has ever been better than Ohio State or Michigan, which are the only two teams to represent the east, although that is something that can be said about the East division as well. But the Big Ten West's outstanding oafishiness this year is remarkable. I think that part of it comes down to a down year for Wisconsin, which is usually the default West favorite. Part of it comes down to the West being dominated this year by Iowa, the most ridiculous team in college football. Iowa is a bizarre meme team with weird dynastic politics that have left the offense in the hands of an inept princeling like they are a Crusader Kings game where the heir to the throne has rolled perilously low skill in football coaching and has developed the trait "disturbing punt fetish." Every week, this team goes out with a dominant defense and the most diabolically wretched offense I have ever seen and I am speaking as someone who has grown up watching the Chicago Bears, and you see all of the japes and jokes online and think to yourself they can't possibly be this horrible to watch, they've got to at least be able to run the ball a little, and then you turn on the game and they are just falling down behind the line of scrimmage and the quarterback is spinning around and passing the ball like a discus thrower and two wide receivers have gotten their facemasks stuck together and are desperately trying to pry themselves away from each other while the ref throws the flag for "aesthetically disgusting" and still they are dominating the division by winning every game like 8-6 on a walkoff safety, and despite my natural enmity for the Iowa Hawkeyes I have to admit this is one of the greatest bits I have ever seen a football team pull off.
I also think that some of the reason for the Big Ten West's transcendent putridness comes from a process that is not identical but adjacent to the tech process known as "enshittification." There, once a tech platform has gotten users and vendors locked into its services, it no longer has any incentive to improve and exists to extract money form both users and suppliers. In the Big Ten West, none of these teams can ever compete with Michigan or Ohio State, so there is really no incentive to actually try to not play functional toilet football. They just have to be slightly better than the other Big Ten West teams and become comically more inept and disgusting for their fans and for Big Ten advertisers who are trying to sell extra-large men's pants to people who are lapsing into punt-induced comas.
Or maybe it's because the midwest just doesn't really produce anyone who can throw the ball good.
NORTHWESTERN IS GOING TO A BOWL GAME
There were many ways I could see this season going, but I didn't see it ending in December. It looked to me like the hazing scandal would destroy the program and lead Northwestern back into its 1980s nadir. Instead, the team started winning games, first miraculously and then methodically.
I have absolutely no idea if David Braun will be an effective coach going forward, but it's impressive that he managed to keep the team together, win football game, and not do anything obviously embarrassing during this bizarre and turbulent season. It also has helped him that college football media has turned its focus entirely on a very stupid and harmless scandal where an array of the Upper Midwest's goofiest motherfuckers have been running a Coen Brothers sign-stealing operation while Michigan's most litigious alumni have been preparing legal briefs on their message boards and Jim Harbaugh shows up every week in a wrestling singlet saying he is training to wrestle on the moon's gravity, which has overshadowed Northwestern's very real and awful hazing scandal. I suspect that once college football re-enters its summer doldrums and the lawsuits begin in earnest, the grotesque practices of Northwestern's football program will reappear in the news, but Braun got the luxury of operating in the shadow of national indifference to Wildcat Football.
Of course, the university has imposed another challenge on Braun for year 2: wander the earth. The Evanston City Council ruled this week that Northwestern can build its fancy new stadium and hold additional events and concerts there over the stringent objections of neighborhood groups. Demolition of Ryan Field will begin very soon. Northwestern football will not have a home for two full seasons. I have no idea where they will play, although I guess it will be some combination of Wrigley Field and Soldier Field. It is possible they will play somewhere funnier, like a local high school or the parking lot for the disused suburban Kmart where the National Guard gave me a Covid vaccine. The single season that Northwestern basketball played at the All State Arena while they renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena was a complete disaster-- it is kind of absurd that the small amount of momentum the program has gained to keep it away from the permanent bottom of the Big Ten might be easily destroyed by an obsession with putting Pat Ryan's name on another building that is already named after him.
I have written before about my bewilderment and sadness that Northwestern wants to build a fancy new stadium, but it hits harder now that Ryan Field is being advanced upon by bulldozers. Let's not mince words: Ryan Field is a shithole.
At the very least, Northwestern could have the barnacles scraped off the hull once in awhile
It is a ridiculous place to watch a Big Ten football game. It is small and simultaneously cramped and empty. It does not have lights. The grass turf is lousy. But it was also very accessible and easy. It doesn't feel like a Big Ten stadium, but it feels like some field they're playing football on in the middle of a neighborhood. It doesn't feel like some sort of Cathedral of Football but just a sort of run-down place where a game is going on, which really matched the vibe of Northwestern football for a long time. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a stadium for this program that will still never have more fans than an opponent in its own building no matter how many times they decrease the seating capacity is so ridiculous to me that I can barely fathom it. I am really disappointed that no one triumphantly tore out the tarp and threw it into Lake Michigan.
GIVE ME THE DAMN HAT
Northwestern's unreal season can be capped with one more improbable feat: to go into Memorial Stadium and reclaim the hat from the Illini. There was a stretch when Northwestern won The Hat six years in a row and came close to evening the all-time record between these teams. It took three more Illinois coaches to pry The Hat from Northwestern heads between Tim Beckman, unleashing an unholy cackle as he rode an unending tide of anti-Northwestern propaganda to victory in the greatest Hat Game of all time which was also a battle for bowl eligibility, and Brett Bielema stretching the trophy on his gigantic noggin unceasingly since 2021. But enough is enough. The Hat must come home.
Illinois has a lot to play for. Their eight-win season last year was followed up with a sour sequel, and the Illini must win this game in order to qualify for a bowl. Northwestern can qualify for a "better" bowl game whatever that means with an additional win and rise in the Big Ten West standings. There is also the matter of the Hat itself, which has never been worn by many of Northwestern's players. Here's Braun on his indoctrination in to the Hat Cult:
“It’s been a great learning opportunity for me to ask the staff, to ask our Leadership Council this morning, what this rivalry means to them. The consistent message is ‘Coach, we want the HAT back. It’s time to bring the HAT back.'"
Hopefully Braun has spent the week staring at pictures of the Hat and becoming hypnotized by its power and the prestige that it conveys in this rivalry and in the North American sports landscape.
BIELEM IT! THE BRETT BIELEMA MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEM
I did not expect to be shivering at Willard Airport and waiting for a someone to take me to the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center where I was supposed to meet Bret Bielema, the head of coach of the Illinois Fighting Illini to talk about his book. I was out of my element here in the midwest-- my life was on set or in writer's rooms punching up scripts and sampling a blend of exotic cocaines. For thirty-five years, I've been saving shitty writers and producers from themselves in Hollywood, and I was the best. They called me Doc Frankenstein for a long time because I'd drive up and dig up some parts of some other failed projects and then use some unholy magic to get the whole thing to work, at least they did until some jagoff executive producer didn't understand that Frankenstein referred to the scientist and not the monster and after he said "hey someone tighten the neck bolts on Frankenstein over there" I tried to run him over with the Batmobile (I was responsible for about 85% percent of Arnold Schwarzneegger's Mr. Freeze cold puns and I am specifically the person who came up with "stay cool bird boy" after which Arnold personally sent me a reproduction of his grotesquely red and swollen head from Total Recall from his own collection in gratitude).
Every day producers would line up outside my office and beg me to rescue their crummy shows and save their asses. I started from the absolute bottom of the industry. We were filming on a set on Eraser and production had halted because Arnold just shot an alligator in the face and no one had any idea what he says (the dummy who wrote the script didn't have anything, like Arnold was just going to shoot and alligator in the snout and then just stand there like a fuckin' idiot) and I, a lowly PA who was already nearly fired for telling James Caan to get his own fucking walnuts and was saved only because Caan said he "liked the balls on this kid" just stood up and said "now you're luggage" and everyone was really pissed but it worked (the writer cut out "now" because he felt he had to do something). Before long, I was Arnold's top emergency murder pun call. I was also the person responsible for saving the movie Lake Placid by telling Betty White to say "fuckin" and "shit" and also rescued the dying Texas football soap opera by writing the part where that moon-faced kid kills the guy with a shovel, you're welcome.
I made a crucial mistake, though. I wanted to finally make something on my own. For years, I had secretly been working on a treatment of the classic Chekhov story "The Nose" that I had never really read except for instead of a Russian bureaucrat, the titular Nose came from a tough-as-nails Chicago cop named Eddie Noczinsky who just beats the hell out of people for 90 minutes and whose tagline is "I smell crime." None of the big studios would finance it, not even after I selflessly saved their shitty movies for three decades, so I decided to sink all of my own money into it. We ran into problems immediately. No one could get the nose suit right, and none of the top costumers would work with me after I threatened them with one of Christopher Lambert's swords from Highlander III: Sorceror which he gave me after I told them to forget about the goddamn aliens and put the bad guy in a cave. Also, I had already given millions of dollars to the great Dennis Farina to voice the Nose before he passed. Unfortunately, I had burned a lot of bridges while desperately trying to raise money for the movie by threatening, attacking, or pissing in the offices of many of Hollywood's top executives, so I started to take whatever bullshit writing jobs they could cobble together. I don't think that anyone even knew who I was when I was sent over to meet Bielema.
The large, jolly man who picked me up from the airport was Bielema himself. "Hey man, how the hell are ya?" he asked me as I tried to climb into the truck. It was covered in cameras and camera equipment for a TV show he was pitching called "Live from Bret Bielema's Car" where he would interview people from the sports and entertainment world with a variety of ridiculous questions. "Quick, top Thanksgiving foods," he asked me while practicing staring into a camera while switching lanes. "I don't know. I haven't had Thanksgiving since 2002, when Dino De Laurentiis threw me out of his house for trying to slap Bill Paxton with a fist full of cranberry sauce while I was out of my mind on a designer drug called "The Gobbler." "Whoa, look at this fuckin' guy," Bielema said chuckling as we pulled into his office.
Bielema had a little shtick for everyone we met on the way in. He shadowboxed a security guard. He had a complicated handshake for one of the assistants. He did an elaborate gun finger point at a walk-on which involved him feigning being gut-shot and staggering around a lot before collapsing to his knees and vowing revenge. It was spellbinding.
When we got into his office, he told me that his publisher explained to him him that they liked to take some life lessons from football and put them into business situations. They'd sell books, but more importantly they were selling the lecture circuit, boardrooms and hotel banquet halls, a money printing machine. I asked him if he ever said anything cool after beating someone like "eat some turf" or "touch down to hell." "One time I called a guy a prick and the university had to send an official apology," he said. "Hell yeah," I said.
As we talked, I realized that writing this bullshit coach book was a waste of both of our time. Bret Bielema was a dynamo, a star. And he had a TV show. Sure it was just a goofy little web series he was trying to sell to Big Ten Network Omega that would also air a select gas stations and interstate rest stops, but I saw something bigger here. I saw a big, lovable tough guy who would have everyone in the palm of their hand. I saw Bielema transcending midwestern football and me getting out of the Hollywood gutter. I saw Eddie "Da Nose" Noscinsky.
"Forget about the fuckin' book," I said. "Everyone's got a motivational book. Dick Wolf's assistant has a book." He looked at me blankly. "P.J. Fleck's got a book," I said quickly remembering the name of a football coach I had seen on TV one time looking really weird. His brow furrowed. "Really?" "We can do better than that," I said. We need to go big. We need to go to TV. We need to get into Bret Bielema's car."
I thought I'd collect a few bucks to meet with Bielema, get his pitch and then go back home and buy some illegal lizard gland stimulants and just write the whole thing in a week, but I couldn't go back. I hauled out my original screenplay for The Nose. I would have to make some serious changes in order to accommodate most of the action taking place in an SUV instead of on city streets. We also would have to accommodate Bielema by filming mostly in Champaign-Urbana and make make The Nose an expert on football crimes where he spent a lot of his time hanging around football fields and film sessions. In this version, the Nose would smell out a guy stealing signs and then throw him from the top of the stadium into an active volcano. But I knew I could make it work. We just had to cobble together this first season secretly by stringing along the publisher and then we'd get our sets and our actors and our feature budget.
It took about a week to convince Bielema to come onboard. I spent every day in his office or hounding him on the practice field, showing him pages of the script and telling him how much easier it would be to get great football players to come to the university if he was an international acting superstar. He finally one day just said, "ah what the hell, I always wanted to be a detective. Let's do it." It felt amazing, like the first time I convinced a producer to spent an extra million on a helicopter because how fucking cool would it be to have a helicopter here.
I did have one major problem. There was no nose costume. I didn't have the money to fly anyone out or even hire someone locally. The whole thing didn't work without a giant nose walking around dispensing nostril justice and giving scumbags the Big Sneeze. In desperation, I decided to make the nose myself. I have no idea how to even go about doing something like that. I always just wrote something and it appeared. But now I was absolutely fucked. I walked into a Michael's and told them I needed to make a giant nose, but no one was that helpful. Eventually, I found an old mattress next to a dumpster. I figured I could get something vaguely nose-shaped out of that, get it on Bielema for a fitting and then make some adjustments. I worked for days not sleeping, measuring, cutting, duct taping, and spray painting until I felt I had a nose good enough for a test pilot. The nose was too big and unwieldy for me to carry so I found an old wheelbarrow and bedsheet to cover it and pushed it for miles to the Illinois football offices. The guard stopped me. "Cool it, buddy, I've got a nose here for Coach Bielema," I said. He told me to get lost. It took a lot of pleading, begging and even tears until they finally called Bielema and he came down. He pulled the sheet off and took a look at the nose, which after the end of my nose-obsessed reverie I now saw was just a dirty, mangled mattress with uneven nostril holes and a deviated septum. "Why don't you put that away and we can talk later," he said.
It took a few days, but Bielema finally told me to come by his office. I appreciated that about him. No bullshit, a straight shooter. "I'm not going to bullshit you," he said to me. Bielema finally talked to his agents about the Nose and they told him the whole project was insane and in fact really stupid. He told me they didn't want him working with me on the book either because I clearly was a "crackpot." I wasn't that upset. I had been thrown out of fancier offices than the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center. One time, Michael Ovitz had a dumpster flown in from an especially disgusting Chipotle parking lot for his goons to throw me in after I told him that First Kid should have been called First Shit. But this one stung. "Look, for the record, I really liked the part where the Nose drove my car into a guy so hard that he landed in a paint manufacturing plant and then I said to him 'let's paint the town red,'" Bielema told me.
I was waiting to get a plane back to Chicago and eventually Los Angeles when I got a message on my phone from a number I had never seen. It was from James Franklin, the coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions. The college football world is small and talks a lot. "First of all, does the Nose drive an ATV?" he asked. "Consider that my first note."
