Northwestern Shuts Out Purdue With Oozeball

After Northwestern went into Penn State, beat them at their own homecoming, and decapitated their coach, it would be understandable if they struggled against Purdue. It was a big week, the last game at The Lake, and Purdue Pete was lurking in a house of mirrors with dozens of Petes leering at every angle waiting to spring his trap. But it turns out it wasn’t anything to worry about because Purdue was terrible in this game, Northwestern completely suffocated them and came away with a demoralizing shutout.

It’s clear at this point that Northwestern’s game plan is to slowly drip onto the other team like a slow basement leak that causes foundation damage. They come at teams like one of those lumbering slasher movie villains who you think you can outrun simply by managing to walk at a brisk pace. They ooze. In the first half, Northwestern held the ball for more than 22 minutes in the first half and allowed 57 yards and scored every single one of their 19 points. It was excessive. They only needed to score one point to win this game.

A foundational text for Zach Lujan's offense

Nothing Northwestern is doing is complicated. They are going to send Caleb Komolafe to smash into linebackers. They are going to send Joe Himon and Dashun Reeder to also smash into linebackers. They are going to throw the ball almost exclusively to one guy who is pretty much always open. And they’re going to try to take away big plays on defense and let other teams methodically try to work down the field until they screw up and have to kick the ball or give it to a Wildcat defender; last Saturday we saw three Purdue turnovers, highlighted by 291 pound defensive tackle Brendan Flakes leaping up and snagging a pass. This is the same way Northwestern has been pretty decent since the spread lost its novelty and Northwestern looked exactly like it was being run by a bruising suburban linebacker whose solution to every problem was bruising suburban linebacking. They even ran a classic doomed special teams trick play that the Wildcats pull off about as successfully as a teenager trying a skateboard trick at a strip mall with a single stair.

Pat Fitzgerald was there, by the way. Northwestern honored its 1995 Rose Bowl team and it was a mystery whether he would show up, what with the university firing his ass and saying he was responsible for the awful stories that were coming out almost daily about the football team and him suing the university in a shockingly bitter end to the coaching tenure of the school’s most important sports figurehead and Doing Things The Right Way mascot. But money heals all wounds, apparently. Whatever bitterness existed between Northwestern and Pat Fitzgerald seems to have been put aside at least for one day after he and the school settled their lawsuit for what I assume is a lot of money and Northwestern having to issue an official “actually Pat Fitzgerald was shocked SHOCKED to see hazing going on in this football facility” statement. So there he was, looking older and more weathered than the last time he was in public, smiling and waving, the face of Northwestern football in everything that it has come to represent.

Fitzgerald in happier times, before he had ever heard of cell phones and the RPO

The game was the swan song for The Lake. In the end, despite nasty forecasts, it did not rain. The game was played in unseasonably warm and humid conditions in very seasonable October gloom. It staved off  the sudden descent of autumn by one day. They’ll pack away the extra bleachers and video boards and yowling sound effects and return the field to its primary purpose which is to unleash the power of Northwestern’s lacrosse team on hapless opponents. They'll host next year's lacrosse final four at The Lake, and hopefully the 'Cats will be there. The Chicago Stars (an inexplicable naming downgrade from the Red Stars that is the type of thing that happens when a Ricketts is in charge) will be playing there next summer. 

The Lake was a wonderful novelty, a beautiful setting, and a very silly college football stadium. On a clear day, it was easier to see the skyline of downtown Chicago from the north endzone seats than plays happening on the field if they happened to be one of the many massive poles in the way.  There was nothing like it in college football, which was fitting for Northwestern, which has never felt like its games are happening in the Big Ten. When you think of a major college fcootball game, you think of maximalism, of massive crowds and screaming fans, and pageantry. Northwestern has never been like that. There are just not enough fans. The point of Ryan Field is that it never made a Northwestern game feel like an event– tickets were affordable, it was easy to get there, and they occasionally would run out of things like hot dog buns and end up selling loose hot dogs in a paper cup. The whole feeling was that none of this was a big deal.

The new stadium will not have that cozy, neighborhood feeling. It will be fancy and expensive. It will not be rusting like a disused WWII freighter or (presumably) rely so heavily on decorate tarps. And yet, no matter how much money Pat Ryan spends, it will never feel like a Big Ten home game because there are just not enough Northwestern fans to outnumber opposing fans. Maybe instead of spending close to a billion dollars on a stadium, they should have just paid people to show up in purple like nineteenth century ward bosses rigging elections. They could hand them laminated cards with important Northwestern Guys to reference, with fans comparing notes and saying things like "who'd you get? I got Chi Chi Ariguzo." 

It's time to start using the revolutionary ideas of early 20th century Chicago aldermen "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna in Northwestern revenue sports 

Under my ambitious Bribing Fans plan, you could eventually turn on a Northwestern game on the radio and actually be able to tell whether it's a home game. It’s worth a shot– certainly it’s better than building a fancy stadium and making people rob a bank for the privilege of getting screamed at by Iowans.

ELECTRIC NEBRASKA

Here’s the set of circumstances behind last week’s Minnesota-Nebraska game on Friday night. Minnesota’s last three games involved squeaking by a lousy Rutgers team, getting run over by the Ohio State steamroller, and narrowly beating the same Purdue team that we saw last Saturday look like it was having the rules of football explained to them during extensive TV timeouts. Nebraska had beaten a Maryland team fading from its September mirage, beat Michigan State, and lost narrowly to Michigan, but managed to keep a toehold on the #25 AP ranking. So of course, Minnesota absolutely crushed the Huskers, holding them to 36 rushing yards, no touchdowns, and an anemic 3.9 yards per play. There’s a simple explanation for this: the Big Ten West is alive.

The Big Ten may have gotten rid of its roiling crab bucket division, but as long as these middling, corn-fed programs get to smash into each other a few times a year, it is impossible to predict the results. The last thing you want to do as a ranked team is go into Minneapolis on a Friday night to play a team that just had to throw down a smoke bomb to escape from Purdue. For a long time, Big Ten West teams would have to bus down to Evanston, play in front of an overwhelming crowd of their own fans on a cold, gray morning, and lose 13-10 after a flurry of overtime scoring. Every team had to lose a game to Iowa with one combined touchdown. Northwestern and Nebraska, for a solid decade or so, committed to playing the stupidest football game you have ever seen at each other. Nothing the Big Ten and its pots of money and ludicrous westward expansion has done has been able to stop the Big Ten West from Big Ten Westing when the schedule allows.

Once again, Northwestern has to play a team that is frustrated after losing a game in which they were favored with some coach drama. Matt Rhule, who looks like the thought experiment “what if Phillip Seymore Hoffman played a college football coach,” is a rumored top candidate for the Penn State job that opened up after the Nittany Lions made the mistake of scheduling Northwestern for homecoming. Rhule played at Penn State and coached at Temple. I have no idea if Rhule is interested in the Penn State job when he is ensconced at a Nebraska program where the expectations are currently to clean up Scott Frost’s vomit, but if he is, it was probably not a good idea to immediately go out and get wiped out by P.J. Fleck’s Acronym Squad*. I can't predict what Penn State's gas station barons and anti-woke hoagie magnates are thinking about their coach search, but I would have to imagine a loss to Northwestern would affect Rhule’s job prospects after that was what did in James Franklin; regardless of the effect on Rhule's future employment, I think we all can admit that it would be very funny.

Phillip Seymore Hoffman as Matt Rhule reenacting the shut the fuck up scene from Punch Drunk Love on the headset with his offensive coordinator 

*Technically it's the A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Squad, the first A stands for Acronym and P.J. Fleck is hard at work consulting his Acronymicon for the rest

Nebraska remains heavily favored in this game despite sporting identical records 5-2 records with Northwestern ahead in the conference standings. It does not seem like anyone takes the Wildcats and their Just Sit On Them offense particularly seriously even after vastly outperforming preseason expectations. Nebraska still has highly-ranked quarterback Dylan Raiola, whom I know mainly from his close emulation of Patrick Mahomes that, at least last season, involved styling and dressing himself like the Kansas City superstar. I appreciate that, and I encourage more quarterbacks to do this; I think every Purdue quarterback should be encouraged, if not required, to wear his hair exactly like Kyle Orton.

 Welcome to Purdue, please take this copy 1678 copy of Haire Styles, Beardes and Moustachios for the Vigorous Manne to your barber

Northwestern needs one more win to get to a bowl game. Nebraska needs to get the taste of Minnesota field turf out of their mouth. Once again, Northwestern is a “get right” game for a Big Ten opponent. We’ll see if Nebraska, Northwestern’s second Big Ten opponent that isn’t currently either spiraling into organizational chaos or Purdue can manage to figure out how to stop the ‘Cats from running at them for seven minutes at a time. They haven’t been able to get right against them yet.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti told Marco Polo that he would tell him about Big Ten cities and Marco Polo would tell him if they existed. "Here is an enormous, teeming city," Pettiti said. "Buildings pile up next to buildings. All manner of people that have ever existed bounce off each other on unimaginable business.  And yet, despite their differences, there is one thing that unites them: wanting to watch small, regional football teams from suburbs or even small towns nowhere near them on television. Every single week, they huddle together around television sets fervently hoping to see their team or other teams from cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away play, and in their excitement they are willing to buy the products they see on screen: extra large men's pants, various braces for sore limbs, farm implements. Every person in these gigantic cities where they are crammed next to each other in small apartments will order a backhoe or one  one of those string spinners used for weeds."

"Great Commissioner, I have not seen such a city," Marco Polo says.  I have seen a city where no one sleeps, where dreams become corporeal and mingle with the half-awake people. Where the distinction between dream and reality becomes blurred and so it has been for generations, no one quite able to determine whether they are in the city or in its familiar but convoluted double, where connections between the dreamers are ephemeral and yet somehow more lasting than in cities where people can differentiate between them. They float on gossamer streets that might not be there and nothing is where it is supposed to be. Those are the cities I have seen."

"You're always seeing cities like that," the Commissioner said.

Cities and Memory: Linka

Linka, the great city of the past.  Everyone in Linka knows that the city had once had been astonishingly prosperous, covered in riches, everyone happy and learned.  The love of the city's past is palpable.  They say that anyone born in Linka or who lives there long enough, no longer even sees the city as it exists, but in their mind's eye they travel the great thoroughfares and boulevards in their own parades celebrating the city's former glories.

Conversation in Linka only consists of the recitation of these former triumphs.  The residents' devotion to ancient scholars and poets and architects who built the great libraries and gardens and palaces is so clear that these great figures seem alive and well in Linka.  Their teachings and personalities have been passed down so thoroughly it is as though they can still speak. But they are not alive. Years of interpretation and scholarship and popular bastardization have created competing versions of the same figures. People in Linka sometimes argue over the merits of these great ancestors, arguments that lead to shoving matches and the inevitable interjection of passesby, who proclaim that the celebrated old figures would never shove, except for Balon The Shover who had perfected the art beyond the comprehension of any contemporary Linkan. "To shove like that is barbarity unworthy of Balon The Shover," is a refrain that is sadly more common than ever in contemporary Linka.

You would think that Linka is covered in monuments and statues and museums to honor the glories of the the city's storied past. But the city is barren. No one can agree when the golden age of the city was. Every person seems to have a different idea of when Linka was a guiding light to the world and when it has shrunk to its present decrepitude. Any meeting where someone proposes erecting a monument descends into denunciations and recriminations and the inevitable bout of shoving. Even after a particularly vigorous bout of shoving when someone suggested building a statue to honor Balon The Shover, a small but insistent faction denounced Balon and claimed that it was actually his successor Pleton The Pusher that had perfected the art, and that whatever shoving Balon The Shover was doing was low, brutish calisthenics. It took three days for the people of Linka to stop shoving each other. A similar episode happened after a suggestion to dedicate a street to Uliot The Chest Poker.

The city of Linka as it presently exists can never compare to the glories of the city in the past, and that makes the people who live there disgusted with their own city. They cannot build anything new because they fear it would compare unfavorably to what was there before, but they cannot admit that the desolate ruins of old, rotting buildings can ever be destroyed because of what they meant. The people of the city lead double lives, traipsing around the imagined city of past glory in their own heads while they grow ever more upset with the state of their own city as it exists, the one they traverse every day.  Linka is a city trapped within a million other cities that perhaps never existed, smothering the present. 

Cooler at The Lake

EVANSTON I have made fun of the Temporary Lakeside Stadium as a desperate gambit after Northwestern failed to find anywhere else in the Chicago area to play and were forced to hastily pile up some bleachers on a soccer field in an attempt to have home games and not wander the country like they were barnstorming against 1920s religious cults focused on beard growth. But all it takes is a perfect late summer night with the golden hour sunshine fading over campus and the Chicago skyline shimmering in the background to realize that it is truly something. I was wrong. The stadium (which I have nicknamed “The Lake”) is an incredible setting for college football. 

Views from The Lake

I remain sentimental about Ryan Field, which had stood for more than 100 years at the same spot and was a very easy and convenient place to watch football, but after drinking a beer sitting on a rock on the shore of Lake Michigan before a game, it is hard to understand why Northwestern insists on playing football in a residential neighborhood that is made up entirely of professional Noise Lawyers. Sure, the tiny lakeside stadium lacks the intense wall of noise atmosphere associated with college football, but it’s not like anyone had anyone described Ryan Field as “rocking” unless it was Northwestern going on a silent count at home because opposing fans were complaining about uncalled holding penalties in a game they were winning by 32 points. I can also imagine that a game in cold, windy, rainy weather could feel like being on the deck of a nineteenth century whaling ship.

And yet while The Lake might be a unique and picturesque place to watch a bunch of teenagers run into each other's torsos, the stadium is also kind of a silly place to watch a football game.  The endzone bleachers, which contain the largest blocks of seating, feature views blocked by a series of gigantic poles, perhaps in tribute to the Wildcats' secondary alternative home at Wrigley Field.  The endzone seats also have no speakers, making it virtually impossible to hear what is going on, the referee warbles incoherently like a Peanuts adult, and I can't remember if I heard them play the annoying Wildcat yowl on an endless loop which is a vital part of Northwestern football's psychological operations.  I assume the experience is better in the sideline seats, although the end zone seats are already far more expensive than any Northwestern ticket I've ever bought; I am pretty sure that most people sitting through an Eastern Illinois-Northwestern game in years past were actually sentenced to be there by a Cook County judge. 

 

As big of a sign that you are in the Chicagoland area than the skyline

Putting a bunch of rickety bleachers on a practice field sitting on a wad of garbage hauled into Lake Michigan in 1960s was a weird and desperate move, but it's impossible to deny that it workd.  The temporary lakeside stadium rules.  The natural beauty of the lakeshore does a lot of heavy lifting here and there's nothing else like it in major college sports.  Perhaps this is appropriate for a sport that seems to be fueled by short-term thinking and last-second gambits and silly accidents that turn into traditions-- there's no better example than some drunken college students stealing a pig or driving a tractor into each other and then making it a rivalry trophy passed down for generations-- so Northwestern can go from trying to not play football on the streets of Sheridan Road to creating a stadium fans will remember long after they put up the new stadium with its Luxury Cabanas and Imagine Dragons concerts and lake of asphalt parking lots.

EASTERN ILLINOIS DOES A JUMP SCARE

Northwestern's heralded switch at quarterback looked like the wrong one.  The first half was winding down to its final minutes, and it appeared that Eastern was about to go up 10-7.  Northwestern had just had a kick blocked and Eastern had managed to nudge the ball downfield to field goal range.The Wildcats had to that point late in the half a total of 16 passing yards, many of which had bounced off the ground as if they had just invented a new variant of Australian rules football.  But then Eastern missed the kick, Lausch found a rhythm, and the Cats got another touchdown.  Then they absolutely torched the Panthers in the second half.  Lausch went 11 for 11 for more than 200 yards in the second half alone and unleashed A.J. Henning who was flying around the field.  The defense remained almost impenetrable on the ground and reduced the Eastern playbook to short passes because their run game was stopped and Northwestern rushers were dragging their quarterback around the field.  It is one of the most beguiling performances we've seen against an FCS team where they didn't lose.

 

Northwestern shoots off celebratory fireworks after the game that make it look like Arnold has just blown up the bad guy on the roof and then said "you-ah going oudt widda bang"

The Eastern game represented a relatively comfortable introduction for a new quarterback, but the Wildcats will get thrown into the fire for their first West Coast road trip in the new Enormous Ten.  Washington, their first conference opponent, represents a rude welcome.  The Huskies are coming off an appearance in the national championship game.  They've lost a large number of key players including star quarterback Michael Penix to the NFL and their coach to Alabama.  They're also coming off a tough home loss to bitter rivals Washington State, a team they abandoned to a dead conference that is currently clinging to the Mountain West before bursting forth from its chest to devour it next season.  The 2024 Washington Huskies do not currently appear to be the terrifying national championship contenders they were last season, but that does not mean that they are still not good enough to throttle Northwestern as the oddsmakers predict.

I suspect there will be a prolonged feeling out process between the new West Coast Big Ten members and the existing members of the conference.  I have no idea what to make of Washington Football other than enjoying watching Penix huck balls up to Rome Odunze last year and hoping they'd beat Michigan.  Washington fans, all of whom I assume have already assumed that this is a win, have not really had the experience of having their superior football team dragged down the Wildcat Toilet as the 'Cats attempt win or lose to subject opposing fans to the shittiest football game they've ever experienced.  This is a very exciting year as the vestigial stink of the Big Ten West still hovers over all of its proud former members who have an opportunity to really make these new teams question their decision to fly into the middle of the country and get rudely punted at for hours at a time.

History favors the Huskies.  Northwestern has never beaten them, although all three of their previous games took place in the Wildcats' early 1980s nadir where they started every football game by digging a giant pit in the middle of the field and refusing to leave until time had expired.  Washington quarterback Will Rogers is one of the most prolific passers in football and will test what has so far looked like a formidable Wildcats defense.  The Northwestern passing game is even more of an enigma than usual.  The Wildcats have also not yet played in a stadium that has a larger attendance than a Monster Jam event at Allstate Arena.  

 

It is very difficult at this point in the season to be able to figure out if a team is any good.  Washington is as good of a test as any.  Even if the 'Cats can't get their first win in this series, I'll be watching to see how competitive they can be against a good conference opponent, how Lausch fares in his second game, and, most importantly, how badly the Wildcats can manage to annoy Washington fans in their Big Ten baptism.

HUSKY STADIUM, SEATTLE WASHINGTON

This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up.

Husky Stadium holds more than 70,000 screaming Washington football fans every week, but has its origins in a bitter dispute over football.  It was, according to my meticulous research, never meant for the sport at all.  Husky Stadium was built to support "Husky" Zeb Middyons's bear-fighting promotion.  Middyons, who claimed to be a mentalist who could control bears with his mind, barnstormed across the Pacific Northwest throughout the the early 1900s.  He set up a stable of bears calmed by salmon doused in vats of laudanum and, along with his accomplice Mars McMaster,* advertised the bear fighting as a demonstration of what he called "Brains-Combat."

*According to H.U.J. Holman's "Woods Men: The Pacific Northwest's Greatest Hucksters, Gamblers, and Shamanic Grafters 1880-1925, McMcaster was also known as "El Picador" and claimed to be from Spain, but was actually born Stan Oldlocz in Lodz.  He spent years using the name Bradley Morton that he stole from an army buddy who was killed in what official Army records described as a "moose taunting incident."  McMcaster was also known to use the names Brode Hohny, Horus Mangaarten, The Rev. Red Rogers, Stan Van Stan, and Hohnus Gravy, which he assumed while selling a canned gravy with "restorative properties for the man's Vigorous Area."

By 1918, Middyons, who had also profited from a wartime black market zinc operation, had enough money to being construction on what he named Husky Stadium, which he had sold as the "Paradise of Brains-Combat."  But, in the middle of construction, disaster struck.  Middyons was in a small town where he had a planned performance but the day before, a group of locals caught a wild grizzly that was rampaging through town and locked it in the courthouse.  The mayor and other town dignitaries begged Middyons to use his mental powers to convince the bear to leave.  For three hours, Middyons stood outside the courthouse touching his head and squinting (this is my interpretation. Other accounts, such as from Tred Millcox in Bear Court, suggest that he was also mumbling and possibly crying.  I have some serious concerns with Millcox's methodology and I want to just state on the record that his last article on bear attacks was held up in peer review because he kept insisting that the Port McNeil Maniac Grizzly had somehow fashioned what he kept referring as a "salmon nunchuk.")  When some angry residents began to question whether Middyons had the ability to manipulate bears with his own mind, Middyons told them that he the shape of the roof created a "mental curtain" that prevented him from achieving full control of the "ursine cortex."

That is when "Two Strap" Knagston, the leader of a strongman outfit coincidentally barnstorming through the same town who was known for his then-unorthodox two strap unitard, picked up Middyons and flung him into the courthouse.  No one knows what happens next, although his hideous screams echoed through the town within minutes.

Middyons's grisly bear death left his financial backers and the city of Seattle in a serious dilemma; they had no major attraction for their expensive new stadium.  Investors brought in all sorts of acts.  They first tried to recruit men from the lumberjack camps for a series of violent games including "trunk jousts," but the authorities shut them down after deciding that a "beard to beard" fighting event was "obscene on a level The Court has never thought possible."

Football fans demanded that they move the team into the new stadium, which abutted the university, but they made a powerful enemy.  Vice Provost E. Emmett Brudge had wormed his way into a powerful position at the right hand of the university president by mesmerizing him with elaborate conspiracies about plots forming against him among the faculty.  For example, the president's private papers contain an elaborate secret memo that Brudge had written suggesting that a geographer popular among the faculty been attempting to control the university president by putting psychedelic powders in his tea that Brudge described as "the dragon's tendrils."  Brudge, for reasons no one ever has confirmed, despised football, referring to it exclusively as "an Oaf's Holiday" or "the Devil's Pork Wrestling" and calling football players "Bovinous Beefs."

Brudge began planting letters and editorials in local papers, but everyone could tell they were by him because they had headlines like "Beware! Bovine Brawls in your Backyard" and "Ban this Farcical Pork Circus from our Beloved Bears-Wrestling Stadium AT ONCE."

Eventually football gained too much popularity for Brudge to hold it off.  The final straw came when Brudge's automobile, a model T that he painted himself a color called "accounting visor green" and called "Mrs. Plimstin" broke down in front of a field where Washington players were practicing.  They lifted the car with Brudge inside screaming "unhand me, you unseemly hippopotami" and carried him to the main administration building while a crowd of thousands gathered before dispersing into a massive riot.

Brudge had long suspected that his arch-rival Quill Quall had arranged the stunt in a series of "invidious machinations" to humiliate him.*  It worked.  Brudge lost the support of the university president and left Seattle.  He formed the anti-football organization "Manful Society Against Oafery" and toured the country convincing towns to ban football and instead engage youths in what he claimed were more wholesome sports such as "brain pushing" where youths stand forehead to forehead and recite useful facts at each other until exhaustion. Often he was chased from town on a railroad pushcart, scattering his pamphlets as a distraction and to deflect pitchfork blows. G.A. Rimsford's "Lumber Laughs: Touring Vaudeville in the Pacific Northwest 1918-1932" suggests that the popular Rolph and Dolph's Head Sport act was essentially a sarcastic performance of brain pushing, but I am sorry to say that his entire article is also based on Jean-Robert Mitaine's philosophy of "word construction" where it presents as instructions to fold a thin sheet of cardboard into various configurations in order to decipher the words in order as part of the School of Touch Scholarship and it is nearly impossible to determine the citation because my cardboard got too bent up.

*It is difficult to take Brudge's accusations seriously, but some university historians, most notably Katthy Cregg, have noted that Quall was an early automobile enthusiast who could have disabled Brudge's car easily.  Quall also benefited from the ascent of Washington football as he was often selected to tackle the opposing team's bursar before the game, which was a popular tradition at the time until a professor of medieval studies showed up in full armor and had to be subdued with a weighted net.

Within a few years, the stadium became the unquestioned home of Washington Huskies football.  Every few years, a small group of Brudge sympathizers emerges to denounce it a series of leaflets as a "Odorous Pig Sport" and prophesying that one day a mentalist will bring a horde of rampaging bears back to the stadium to reclaim it for its rightful purpose, but it has not happened yet.

Heartbreak At The Lake

One of my favorite Northwestern football relics is a poster from the 2005 season that says “Not Afraid to Work Overtime” and shows various Northwestern football players in a construction worksite wielding inexplicably inappropriate tools– the only job I can think of that would require multiple chainsaws and toilet plungers is probably Clue Murderer. The year before they won three out of four overtime games. In 2017, Northwestern set a college football record with three consecutive overtime wins. This is a program that has historically thrived in overtime and sought it out as part of a deranged obsession with subjecting America to additional Northwestern football. But the Wildcats’ occult overtime obsession failed them Saturday night as they collapsed against Duke sometime around midnight as the wind whipped the waves into a frenzy.

 

The business of big time sports has warped and distorted schedules to fill every crevice of the cable television and streaming schedule, and college football has changed from a metronomically regular Saturday product into one where it is impossible to tell when a game is taking place and what network it is on. In most years, a Northwestern and Duke game could be quietly tucked away into 11:00 AM Regional Coverage away from the prying eyes of national media, but now for some reason it was on a Friday night on West Coast hours and on national television, where too many people for my liking were exposed to the grimy punt-and-interception-based football that belongs in the shadows of a rust-covered Ryan Field.

   

Northwestern may have turned over its staff, but they are still playing some Pat Fitzgerald-ass football out there. The defense looks fierce and whatever they are doing different on offense is indistinguishable from previous years' slopfests. It seems like there is some ancestral memory baked into certain football teams. On Sunday, we watched the heralded New Bears Offense revert to the same Bears garbage we have seen from the Litany of Bullshit Quarterbacks and the team had to win in the same grotesque special teams and defense configurations that it was grinding out with Jonathan Quinn out there.

 

  

The Apex of Bears Football

The offense had been shaky all game but fully collapsed in the second overtime.  With Cam Porter cutting swathes through Duke's defense, new offensive coordinator Zach Lujan decided to read from the cursed Bajakian Booke of Doom-ed Trick Plays and sent in a quarterback run on third-and-one that that went backwards for nine yards and basically ended the game.

This made it six consecutive losses against Duke in this quasi-rivalry series.  I don't know how other Northwestern fans feel about Duke other than noting it is another small private school that was historically bad at football and also makes the NCAA basketball tournament, but losing six games to any school is annoying.  Northwestern has not had the luxury of many heartbreaking losses in recent years-- they were so lousy the past few years and started last year from such a horrible place that it was mildly surprising they were able to field a team let alone rattle off eight wins-- but the last truly gutwrenching loss I can think of was to Duke in 2022.  The 'Cats won't have a chance for revenge anytime soon since the Blue Devils vanish from the schedule for the foreseeable future, but I don't think anyone minds taking a break from this series and meeting them again when college football coalesces into a single superconference for the biggest teams and relegates the Dukes, Northwesterns, Stanfords, and Vanderbilts of the world into their own sad conference where squads of rowdy ultras attack each other in pregame brawls wielding copies of US News and World Report. 

 

The loss also strikes a major blow to Northwestern's bowl hopes.  Northwestern's conference schedule, shorn of the bowling bumper comforts of the Big Ten West, is brutal and the 'Cats need every win they can get if they want to be playing in a mid-December bowl game that passively plays out on sports bar televisions at four in the afternoon.  The fact that the game came down to a question of whether a few of a Duke player's shin molecules had grazed the turf after a fumble that would have let Northwestern seal the win is also unfortunate.  But this is what happens in the post-replay sports world where a fumble that looks completely obvious to the fans, players, and officials at the time and has the recovering team doing the excited Fumble Recovery Jump Point goes to an off-site computer lab where it is zoomed and enhanced until the question moves from was this a fumble to what technically constitutes a "ball."  This type of fine-grained analysis is slow, annoying, and robs big game-swinging plays of their immediate excitement as everyone knows we will be staring at replays for five minutes while the referees pause to take the necessary psychadelics for their epistemological inquiries, but as irritating and detrimental and widely loathed as replay is in every sport that uses it I think we can all agree that it is a necessary and useful when the outcome favors Northwestern.

EASTERN PROMISES

Northwestern faces off against Eastern Illinois at another night game on The Lake. I have decided to call the temporary lakeside stadium The Lake, as in "Northwestern suffers devastating loss to Duke at The Lake" or "The Wildcats must defend The Lake from Eastern Illinois."  I also considered "on The Lake" but that is not literally true even though the site of the stadium is technically on a mound of garbage used to expand the amount of land jutting into Lake Michigan because "actually we are on what would have been Lake Michigan in the early 1960s" would be cumbersome to explain every time I say it.

 

David Braun will try to kick start his offense by making a change at quarterback, replacing Mike Wright with Jack Lausch. Lausch made several appearances last season as a change-of-pace running quarterback. You might think it reeks of panic to desperately change quarterbacks after two low-scoring games, but I prefer to see it as an opportunity for the coaching staff to confuse and beguile the opposition. You will often see a two quarterback system where one is a passing specialist and one is a running specialist like Northwestern in the Kolter-Siemian season, but imagine a system where Northwestern deploys a running quarterback and another running quarterback and defensive coordinators are forced to decide which is the true running quarterback and which one is the passing running quarterback as they flip through laminated play sheets in an increasingly frenzied reverie before losing their minds in the third quarter and then spending the rest of the game attempting to write extensive novels that are based entirely on acronyms. I would send this suggestion to Braun’s coaching staff but I don’t know if they are still using the Northwestern football email address Hashtag I Don’t Care.

 

One thing I do know about the quarterback change is that announcers are going to be very excited to call the game because Lausch was a standout baseball player, and announcers love when they can say that a person playing one sport is actually playing a different sport, what is referred to in the business as Greg Paulus Syndrome.  You can imagine a producer's eyes going wide the first time Lausch slides.  Lausch, for his part, is getting in on the action by telling reporters  "The best practice for the fourth quarter of a football game is hitting with two outs in the seventh inning with guys on base."

 

The Wildcats are heavily favored against their FCS opponent.  Northwestern blew out Eastern in their two previous meetings in 2011 and 2015, and this should be a final tuneup before having to face the dragons of the Enormous Ten.  Northwestern's defense has looked stout against two good FBS teams; the hope is that the quarterback shift does not look like a complete disaster.  These types of games have very little upside-- anything other than a very convincing win will feel bad and a loss represent the functional end of the season with the only solace that it is kind of funny when that happens.

CONFERENCE RE-RE-REALIGNMENT

This week, the PAC 12's remaining two members announced that they are bringing back the conference by poaching four members of the Mountain West.  Oregon State and Washington State filled out their schedules with Mountain West games as part of a loose association.  Now they repay that loyalty by stealing four schools, forcing the Mountain West to scramble and letting other conferences know that the PAC 12 is going to start trying to find at least two more members.  This, to me, seems like a rude betrayal by the two schools who immediately backstabbed a friendly quasi-conference.  It reminds me of when the Big Ten and ACC formed The Alliance against the SEC and then the Big Ten immediately forgot about it, raided the PAC 12 for four more schools, and left the ACC as an also-ran power conference with Clemson and Florida State attempting to sue their way out of it except they both kind of stink now.

 

A lot of the story about realignment has been about TV money and geography and tradition and how no one knows what conference any team plays in anymore but I think one thing that requires further elaboration is how all of these people ostensibly in charge of a university are all backstabbing each other.  I would like to read a long feature about how these schools are arranging these moves.  In my imagination, they are happening in torchlit antechambers and the Big Ten is announcing that UCLA has joined by firing a flaming arrow through the offices of the PAC 12 and the provost of Oregon State awakens to see that someone has dropped a poisonous asp into his office and it is writhing and hissing all over his folders full of accounting documents as a warning.

New Arizona State president Armand Jean du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu meets with Big 12 officials

If anyone wants to make a very expensive serial drama about conference realignment that somehow takes place in 17th century Venice and involves British character actors screaming "YOU'LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH THIS" at the cackling President of USC and his scheming athletic director dressed in his signature colorful robes, I would definitely watch it if it wasn't on one of the twelve streaming networks I don't pay for.

Any time I see how quickly and heedlessly these moves happens, I of course get a little nervous because it seems like Northwestern's time in one of the two most important football conferences despite being literally Northwestern football and struggling to fill its 12,000 seat stadium is limited.  But for now, Northwestern somehow remains in the epicenter of college football, playing at The Lake and hopefully crushing the Eastern Illinois Panthers.