WELCOME TO THE ENORMOUS TEN

There is usually a process to conference expansion that starts with rumors, innuendo, denials, and eventually leaked negotiations but instead, moving with a speed and coordination unheard of at universities unless it is to quash a graduate student union, the Big Ten suddenly includes UCLA and USC.  A conference so midwestern that its initial network programming was sponsored entirely by extra large men's pants and a can of vegetables to throw in liquid cheese now bestrides both coasts for some reason and is reborn as the Enormous Ten.

There was a time when a move like this would seem like a titanic upheaval but titanic upheaval is now the only register in which big money college sports operates.  The Big Ten's move to gobble up the two California schools echoes the SEC's devouring of Texas and Oklahoma last year, and part of what seems to be an inevitable move towards Superconferences that will continue to pick the bones of the Big 12 and Pac 12 in the interest of consolidating television money.  As we speak, unconfirmed twitter rumors show the SEC is poised over the ACC like a Habsburg squinting at a map of the Ottoman Empire. 

That's it, the Big Ten just got two teams bigger, believe me. Just got two teams bigger. We're gonna make the Big Ten so much bigger, they say already it's too big that we can't make the Big Ten bigger, but we're gonna make the Big Ten so big, so many teams in the Big Ten, you're not going to believe how big this ten is

Over the past several years, the people in charge of college sports, who have been selling the entire enterprise with the concept of tradition, of rituals and rivalries handed down from time immemorial filled with nineteenth-century pomp and stories of fans vomiting on each other for generations, have acted with the subtle grace of Humphrey Bogart in the last third of the Treasure of Sierra Madre.  They have completely abandoned every single one of their decades-old talking points as soon as they glimpsed their first few dimes of television money.  The leagues and universities have acted so greedily and hastily to fill their pockets that they instantly negated college sports' most important commodity which is access to unlimited unpaid labor and quickly (it is almost impossible to believe how quickly this has happened) professionalized the sports through NIL deals although the schools do not seem to be that concerned beyond the usual huffing and puffing about the corrupting influence of sponsorship money because they have managed to offload the expense of paying players to the various oil barons, car dealership emperors, and prominent local Yosemites Sam who have been playing the players surreptitiously since college sports were invented.

The move will have seismic impact on the people actually playing the sports. On the one hand, it is extraordinarily funny to imagine teams that play in gorgeous, mountainous sunsets forced to confront the grim reality of an 11AM November kickoff at Ryan Field in front of 8,000 people while the players are forced to fend of an onslaught of wind-blown hot dog wrappers.  The effect on their Precious Body Clocks, a previous hobgoblin of Pac 12 teams that had dared to venture into the Central Time Zone, can only be imagined.  On the other hand, I suspect that students having to fly across the entire country to play a volleyball game in Piscataway on a Tuesday night might find this all less amusing.

The college football bigwigs at least used to give us a song and dance and a whole story as the various league commissioners and NCAA officials, and athletic directors, in their suits hooking their thumbs through their suspenders would tell us of the extraordinary educational benefits wrought on the Student Athletes, and how it is a little tough on them when it comes to sometimes going to class or eating enough food, but you can't possibly understand what would happen if schools had to pay the players, after all have you seen the skyrocketing cost of pipettes and protractors these days, why you'd be putting the whole thing at terrible risk they would say while standing in front of the $3.8 billion Gertwig "Cud" Broodbatter IV Athletic Performance Center, but now their pitch for college athletics is give us your money, excuse me, give us your fucking money.

The thing that is most shocking about heretofore unthinkable addition of UCLA and USC to the Big Ten is how not shocking it was.  These precision raids by conferences on their rivals' big money programs have become a regular part of the landscape, no matter how strange, incongruous, or pointless they seem.  Rutgers and Maryland fans seem completely miserable in the conference that only wanted the money from regional cable audiences; Nebraska's entry into the Big Ten has been an unmitigated catastrophe for that football program although the fact that its annual game against Northwestern has become such a hideous and preposterous nightmare that it has been banned from taking place in the United States is incredibly funny.  The Big Ten's transition into the Enormous Ten and the accompanying moves no doubt on the way are less shocking for the moves themselves for naked disregard for anything this sport pretends to be.     

College sports seem to fit in a larger trend, and I hate to be too bleak or dark on a blog as stupid as this, but there really does seem to be a shared sense of being at the end of something, and big businesses and industries seem to have jettisoned any obligation to even try to bullshit us as they nakedly grab at everything in a desperate game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, even if it is just to hold everything for a few moments longer than everyone else.

NORTHWESTERN IN THE ENORMOUS TEN

The biggest question on everyone's mind as soon as they announced the Enormous Ten expansion is simple: how will this affect Northwestern?  Last year just before the season, I wrote about the SEC grabbing Texas and Oklahoma, the formation of Superconferences, and where Northwestern fits in it.  The fact of the matter is that while the college football world's recent desire to rip off its fig leaves about amateurism and tradition and strut around nude and open for business is not really something I care about and in fact has been good for getting at least some money to players, it seems likely to me that this bodes ill for Northwestern's time in a big time football conference.

Northwestern has nothing to rely on to keep it in the Big Ten other than residual tradition.  The school's revenue sports programs offer no revenue to the conference.  Northwestern has been unsuccessfully waging an information war on Chicago-area highways to try to convince an indifferent populace to root for the team since the existence of this blog, which I support because it makes people really angry for some reason; it offers mostly a cold bench once a year to Chicago-area alumni of other schools.  To the extent it has a national brand, it is either the team that sucked a lot in the 1970s and 80s or a factory that produces annoying television sports personalities.

The fact that the football team has been good, or at least good enough to win the Big Ten West twice in the last four years is, I believe, irrelevant.  What Northwestern football represents is a pain in the ass: a win that means nothing to fans of big teams that believe that they should always beat Northwestern no matter how good they are because of the program's legacy of futility and because Pat Fitzgerald has been spending the past decade analyzing football rules to figure out how he can possibly win games one to nothing or 4.3 to 4 or they could lose in the shittiest football game anyone has ever seen and that will immediately drop them 15 points in the rankings and get their dozen most deranged message board posters in a thread called "Uncalled Holding Penalties" put on a watch list.  The times when Northwestern finds itself in Indianapolis or even in a particularly prominent bowl game, opposing fans are either casuals who are confused by the existence of the team or they are someone who has watched Northwestern play this decade and know that they're about to watch four hours of armpit football.

As a Northwestern fan, the prospect of irritating other teams and having one of the program's most prominent fans be a tarp is the best part of college football, but it is hard for me to see how that fits in the sport's new paradigm.  Having a team like Northwestern around when college football was still pretending to be an amateur sport was useful for the Big Ten; I am not sure it makes sense in a professional league for a team that cannot fill its own tiny stadium, has no television audience, and has a name that is even more flagrantly mendacious in a conference that could literally include the northwest.  As long as college football clung to its notions of tradition, Northwestern could slop around with the big boys through organizational inertia.  Now that conferences are being torn up and consolidated and college sports has finally arrived at their fuck you pay me apotheosis, I struggle to see what Northwestern offers.

On the other hand, I am an idiot and don't know anything.  Maybe there's more money in amassing as many teams in a conference as possible.  Maybe college football is such a bulletproof television product that it is more lucrative for the Big Ten to keep broadcasting Northwestern games much like how ESPN pays an unfathomable amount of money to broadcast the Head On Apply Directly To Forehead Bowl to families having low, hissing fights at airport gates even if it takes an amount of precision research with maps rolled out on tables to find a bar that is actually showing a Northwestern game in the very city it is the Big Ten Team of.  Maybe the Northwestern psychology department has put a subliminal signal in every Big Ten broadcast so that every time a Big Ten executive tries to float the concept of kicking the school's ass out of the conference he or she instead makes the Wildcat First Down Noise and immediately pivots to a powerpoint presentation comparing advertising rates for competing gout treatments.  Maybe Northwestern and USC can develop a famous rivalry.   

The situation in college sports is collapsing and exploding day by day.  For the time being, Northwestern plays in the Enormous Ten, one that could be growing more enormous.  Fans are tracking conference realignment the only way they can, by citing anonymous message board sources and analyzing flight logs.  The past week imagining flop-sweated conference commissioners in frantic calls with panicking athletic directors while boosters do donuts in the parking lot in 1970s cadillacs whose horns bleat out the school fight song and while the coaches try to wrangle recruits with NIL promises from the Suspenders King of Mant County is delightful, a Hieronymus Bosch triptych of football decadence unfolding in all corners of the college football universe.  

At least we can be sure of one thing and that is Northwestern's return to the Rose Bowl is now guaranteed.

Mergers and Acquisitions

The consolidation of college football's most powerful teams into a superconference at this point seems inevitable. Once the college football powers that be had four playoff teams, the question became why they did not have more. Once the committee established that there is nothing a non-Power Five team could do to actually enter the playoff short of entering Bryant-Denny Stadium in the middle of an otherwise desultory Alabama win and challenging the Tide right then and there and then beating them handily, and once it became evident that the SEC was the only conference that mattered save for a smattering of other teams, then we would eventually reach a point where it seems like the sport is headed for a superconference that picks out the powerhouse teams and makes an entire season of the playoff while the remainders bludgeon each other in increasing obscurity and it is not clear to me if this is even bad.

If there is one thing I can appreciate about the College Football Playoff is that they
invest the proceedings to determine whether Ohio State goes to the playoff or the
Fiesta Bowl with the grim aesthetic seriousness of inventing Yugoslavia from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire

The fact of the matter is that the nebulous world of college football--the major conferences, the powerful schools, the television networks, and the NCAA sort of stumbling alongside them as a deputy emerging from a bathroom with a trail of toilet paper stuck to its shoe to ask players how they managed to afford those pants-- is going all in on a model that prizes the national championship picture over all else and represents a stunning misunderstanding of the sport. They understand that this championship focus is the surest way to bring in advertising dollars and cable carriage fees and sponsorships and even more money trickling to players for top schools in their NIL deals. It is the obvious thing to do by the rules that govern the operation of all sports and entertainment enterprises as vehicles for making money for grasping middlemen who don't have to get tackled by 365 pound nose tackles, but a myopic version of the sport that demonstrates a lack of understanding that the chase for the championship for most fans is a silly and irrelevant sideshow compared to watching their own teams slop around for twelve stupid games that mean nothing except everything to the people there.

What the college football establishment is doing is attempting to build a delicate floating island resort for top teams that can compete for championships over the awful, roiling ocean of football chaos. There are horrible things down there-- triple options, overtimes, toppled goalposts, Ryan Field filled with opposing fans on a gray November Saturday where teams combine for 17 total points and a sinkhole claims the special teams coach. But, for most fans, that cauldron of 11AM kickoffs in half-empty stadiums between godforsaken teams vying for a spot in the Pinstripe Bowl is the experience of the sport and will be until the United States finally makes college football illegal.

With Texas and Oklahoma set to join the SEC, there are few other teams left out of that conference that have any playoff resonance. There is Clemson, of course, and then Florida State and maybe Miami, there is a rusted Notre Dame still held aloft by enough load-bearing red-faced midwestern uncles, and maybe the desiccated husk of USC if they want to consider the west coast television markets. And then there is the big one, Ohio State, currently idling in a Big Ten with no actual challengers after rendering its rival Michigan into a pitiable program that mainly excels at sending strongly-worded letters. The Big Ten, ACC, and PAC 12 are attempting to fight off the SEC’s power grab by forming a hilariously gossamer alliance in a stunning exhibition of cunning and skullduggery in torchlit zoom sessions where they all banded together and vowed that they would hold a vague press conference.  Should the SEC or whatever name the superconference ends up going by attempt to gobble up their remaining glamor teams the way it has just done to the Big 12, they will come together in an attempt to salvage their piece of the pie by furiously trying to shovel each other into the superconference’s maw until they are all devoured, picked clean, and left as rotting piles of Marylands and Washington States.

******

Whatever shape that college football consolidation takes, it is obvious that there is probably no room for Northwestern. Northwestern managed to grimly hold on to its spot in the Big Ten long enough to get onto the cable television gravy train and become a genuinely annoying enough presence in the conference to repeatedly gatecrash the Championship Game, but even so it is very hard to imagine the Wildcats qualifying for the Playoff or contending for a national championship against the elite programs bursting with NFL players. The program offers little to the sport as an entertainment enterprise; outside of the smattering of Northwestern fans, supporters of the week’s opponent, and gamblers so degenerate that they are acquiring VHS copies of Wild & Crazy Kids to bet on, it is impossible to imagine anyone tuning into a Northwestern game so they can watch some fundamentally sound linebacking and Pat Fitzgerald get an experimental plastic surgery to he could have one of those lizard frills installed on his neck that he can flare up to intimidate a referee who has called a horsehit pass interference penalty.

 

Artist's rendition

 

Northwestern and the vast majority of other teams outside the top echelon of the sport operate in a nebulous shadow world of football that orbits around the playoff and championship picture. This is fine because the entire process of choosing the playoff teams and crowning a champion exists as the sports world’s most convoluted, ludicrous, and stupid procedure, one that revolves around a cabal of unaccountable bureaucrats twisting themselves into agonizing contortions to get the teams that will get the best television ratings into the playoff while sanctimoniously pretending they are not doing that and instead are carefully weighing criteria such as Game Control and Body Clocks and whether or not some alumni chartered enough airplanes with a banners over an opponents’ game while everyone from conspiracy-laden maniacs frothing on message boards to the most serious men who have ever lived grimacing in a suit on ESPN all yell about it. From an outside perspective, this makes an entertaining and funny way to crown a champion, but if it affected the team I care about, I would get driven insane to the point of writing slightly longer blog posts.

 

Since Northwestern emerged from hibernation in 1995, it has been a fairly consistent pain in the ass for the Big Ten, starting the twenty-first century with Randy Walkers’ track meet squads that forced teams to chase a pesky, undersized quarterback all over the field for four quarters and evolving into the program’s apotheosis under Pat Fitzgerald as a team of anthropomorphic neck rolls who turn every game into the aesthetic equivalent of Borat tackling his nude producer in a hotel ballroom for three and half hours.

 

Is there a role for Northwestern in the picture of big time college football? Will the Big Ten, enamored with tradition, desperately attempt to stay together even as the money that has driven it to rapaciously expand onto the Eastern seaboard is now poised to pull it apart? There is a future where the Big Ten rallies and tries to form a rival superconference to the SEC. There is also a future where Ohio State and maybe a few of the biggest names get picked off, leaving a rump Big Ten desperately clinging to its berth in the Music City Bowl.

Either way, I don’t think it makes a difference. Everything about Northwestern football that matters is because in the larger scheme of college football, it doesn't matter. If the Big Ten manages to plod on, Northwestern will continue to play its grim Sisyphus football and occasionally ruin a promising season. And if college football consolidation forms that superconference and the Big Ten becomes a gentrified MAC, the Wildcats will still be able to perpetrate sloppy, drooling messes against Illinois in the cold November rain for a trophy shaped like Abraham Lincoln’s hat, which is all any of can really desire from this wretched sport.

 

2021 NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL PREVIEW

 

Of course Northwestern thrived in the grotesque football season that should not have existed. They played college football with a shocking indifference to the raging pandemic, and the swashbuckling monstrousness of the entire enterprise really put a damper on the funniest Big Ten season in years. It started with Scott Frost offering to wander the Earth to find a team willing to play Nebraska in college football with the bravado of a first guy to take a swing at Steven Seagal in a pool hall with similar results and ended with the Big Ten calling an ad hoc Constitutional Convention to allow Ohio State into the championship game and in between a traditional conference power got stomped into a fine powder by Indiana every week and the result of all this fuss and secret maneuvering was forcing America to watch more Northwestern football.

The Wildcats face a tall order trying to repeat this year. Peyton Ramsey is gone. Paddy Fisher is gone. Greg Newsome and Rashawn Slater went in the first round of the NFL draft. As I write this paragraph, Isaiah Bowser is bludgeoning Boise State in a UCF uniform and his successor Cam Porter will miss the season with an injury. They also have some returning building blocks including veteran linebacker Chris Bergen and young stars Brandon Joseph at safety and Peter Skoronski at tackle. The most important returning player will be Hunter Johnson, one of the quarterbacks during a rough 2019 who will get another shot this time in Mike Bajakian’s offense and who I am excited to see because “Hunter Johnson” should also be the name of a character Arnold plays in a 1994 movie where he is a postal inspector tracking dangerous packages in an investigation that constantly requires him to fire antitank weapons in a city center and then say to a horrified bystander “he didn’t use enough stamps.”

Inspectah Huntah Chonson is heeuh to stop da mail froo-awdt

 

For some reason the Big Ten has decided to open the season with conference play so instead of getting to ease into the season with an alarmingly sluggish game against a local dental college, they have to play on a Friday night against Michigan State. A miserable Spartans team cost Northwestern their only loss of the regular season because Rocky Lombardi turned into a midwestern Michael Vick.  This will be a tough test for a team that traditionally eases into the season before powering up in October before they get FCS Indiana State, quasi rival and fellow member of the ACC/Big Ten/Pac 12 Unbreakable Blood Pact Duke, and Ohio before getting to play a Nebraska team that feels like it will have to cancel a game because Scott Frost has decided that he needs to drive the bus with purpose and a manful chin jut before confidently swerving off the highway and motoring directly to the Yukon.     

 

There is still a pandemic by the way and they probably should not be playing football but we’re at a point where people are either vaccinated and confused about whether they should be doing anything anymore or unvaccinated because they can’t get a shot or are hesitant because of nonsense conjured on social media or are one of those maniacs mainlining horse pharmaceuticals and no government entity will ever shut down anything ever again even if there is a variant that turns us into werewolves that cough a lot so I suppose the central question from a Northwestern football perspective is whether college football will remain reckless enough to feign a normal season or if things will get dysfunctional and stupid enough to allow Northwestern to once again win the Big Ten West. They might as well, while there’s still a Big Ten West to win.