Northwestern came into the season with a tough schedule, an undefined situation at quarterback, back-to-back bowl-free seasons and the loss of the Hat to a team coached by a human bobblehead. Another tough season seemed on the horizon. Instead, Northwestern has won all of its games, they are 3-0, they beat Stanford and Duke, they have allowed a grand total of one (1) touchdown, they are ranked #17 in the country in the AP Poll, and they are going to win five simultaneous national football championships this year. The Duke-Northwestern game was played on the surface of the sun and broadcast locally on a channel showing nothing but Judge Mathis and ninja knife infomercials. Both teams feature ferocious defenses and both teams had first-year quarterbacks. What followed was practically obscene. Both offenses struggled in the unforgiving heat. Balls sailed past open receivers. Running backs fell fruitlessly into the arms of defensive tackles. And punt after punt rained down upon Wallace Wade Stadium as possessions went through a football samsara, a cycle of death and rebirth off the exhausted legs of Hunter Niswander and Will Monday. Do not adjust your monitor. You are looking at eleven consecutive punts. This is taken directly from ESPN's game log. The only adjustment I made was to zoom out the web browser because mine could not fit all of the punts on a single screen The game was brutal and ugly. And who cares? Northwestern won. Solomon Vault took the second-half kickoff some 97 yards and Warren Long snuck past a Duke defense that had loaded up on the line of scrimmage for a third-and-one. The defense remained unmovable. Dean Lowry terrorized Duke by tipping an interception to himself and coming inches from swatting another to the turf for a fumble and touchdown (referees ruled that the ball traveled forward enough to constitute a forward pass). Anthony Walker was credited with 19 tackles, securing another Big Ten player of the week award. Northwestern has the top-ranked scoring defense in the entire FBS. The Wildcats' endzone might as well be the moon; sure it is possible to go there, and it's been done in the past, but opposing teams are wondering if they have the manpower and the short-sleeved white button-down shirts to engineer a way there and how are they going to convince the government to give them the resources to try in this economy. Stanford scientists attempt to engineer a drive, but are unable to navigate past the VanHoose Belt Yes, there are causes for alarm. The offense, despite a superhuman 35-carry day from Justin Jackson on a muggy afternoon, bogged down. The passing game remains a work in progress. But cautious, measured optimism has no place in college football, a sport that lunges from ecstasy to horror in seconds, where victories are temporary and fleeting, where the only sensible way to handle the success of this team is to mold a car into the shape of the angry wildcat head from the helmets that says TRANSITIVE PROPERTY PAC 12 CHAMPIONS and shoots flames at passing motorists, most of whom have never heard of Northwestern's football team. UNDER THE LIGHTS But before Northwestern can move on to dismantle the Big Ten West, the 'Cats will be going UNDER THE LIGHTS to face the Ball State Cardinals. This is not just a football game; this is prime time slobber-knockin', clock-cleanin', ball jarrin', big puntin' Midwestern football under the stars and on Big Ten Network regional action. Ball State's logo is a cardinal's head plummeting from the sky, presumably from a distressed headless cardinal injured in an unimaginably violent conflagration only seconds beforehand The Big Ten Network has brought this team to prime time because of the storied rivalry between Northwestern and Ball State. It all stems from the 1920s, when Ball State's football team consisted of Pericles N. Ball, a distant relative of the school-founding Ball family, who would travel to Northwestern football games and taunt the players for being feeble arm-noodles with the weak mustaches of a child. Ball ordered pennants of a Wildcat logo with a giant no circle around it, but no printers would agree to print them because they were too absurd. Each year, the Ball State football banquet would begin, end, and consist entirely of Ball reading an unhinged rant claiming that Ball State would start its program at the junior college level, eventually move up to the top division, and, 34 years later, finally walk into Evanston with a team mighty enough to grind the Wildcats into dust in a game momentous enough that word would spread over the telegraph to the far flung corners of Yugoslavia. Northwestern and Ball State have never played, but only a fool would pencil in an easy victory. The Wildcats will be favored, but anything can happen UNDER THE LIGHTS. The Cardinals are 2-1 and have a very good coach. They know the Wildcats will want to run the ball, and the 'Cats have yet to show they can pass effectively. It is hypothetically possible that the lights in the stadium will go out and the plaintive cries of a Husky will echo through the Evanston night and Northern Illinois will come out of the tunnel as a MAC Commissioner John Steinbrecher swaggers onto the fifty yard line while Pat Fitzgerald stands in gape-mouthed stupefaction and Dave Eanet yells NO NO NO THERE ARE RULES AGAINST THIS. Three kestrels flying over the Castle Steinbrecher heralded the inevitable ascension of young John to his destiny as the Commissioner of the Mid-America Conference, as noted in the ancient football text "Ain't Prophesied No One Yet" Ball State will be playing for a grand upset, a chance to demonstrate yet again that MAC teams can hang with a Big Ten opponent. Northwestern has even more at stake: a chance to go undefeated into Big Ten play, solidify bowl positioning, and maintain a top-25 ranking and status as a Big Ten West contender. Northwestern football rides high again, and the possibilities are unfolding in front of fans like an Early Modern prince with vague ties to the Spanish Crown seeing a portrait of the inbred, sickly Habsburg on the throne. We have seen this before. Two years ago, a ranked Northwestern finished its nonconference season 4-0 and ranked. A bowl seemed certain and a spot in the Big Ten championship game seemed possible. A tough loss to Ohio State showed that Northwestern could keep up with a top contender. Then, the wheels came off. The Wildcats lost every single game in the most confounding way possible like they had been cursed by a vengeful football deity for committing some sort of forgotten football blasphemy such as taking it more than one game at a time or scoring on the Forbidden End Zone or not jumping up and down and pointing emphatically enough after a fumble even if the ball rolled out of bounds 15 feet away from the closest Wildcat defender. There are no certainties in college football. AS I MENTIONED, UNDER THE LIGHTS Northwestern football is under the lights. It will be dark out and later than normal. There are several hours available to travel to your local library and peruse the section labeled by the Dewey Decimal System as incoherent football yelling (this section includes All Right It's Time to Trade Cutler to Zounds, Trade Cutler Already: The A to Z Anthology of Doug and OB Callers). Ball State players will have to contend with the mayhem of Prime Time Ryan Field, with its shrieking fan maniacs and terrifying glow-in-the-dark tarps. Kickoff is scheduled for 24 hours before a blood moon eclipse event, and the game should have been scheduled for then, a Big Ten-MAC showdown under Chicago's Big Ten Blood Moon with a tiny but fervent group of people braying about portends of the end of the world and a slightly smaller but no less fervent group proclaiming the glories of Wildcat football.
Northwestern is ranked. According to the Associated Press and the cabal of harried graduate football video coordinators who fill out the Coaches' Poll, Northwestern is one of the top 25 teams in these United States. And now they have a looming showdown with a good Duke team in Durham that will be broadcast on the Internet to Northwestern fans, Duke fans, and people involved in football betting pools so degenerate that they spend halftime betting on nineteenth-century horse races by looking up the result in microfilmed copies of Gentleman's Magazine. Among the Gentleman's Magazine's famous writers was Samuel Johnson (l, pugnaciously squinting), who craftily evaded a ban on parliamentary reporting by inventing the country of "Magna Lilliputia" and helpfully explaining that parliament's debates, which bore eerie similarity to the actual Parliament. It is hard to know how Johnson could have found anything extraordinary to write about eighteenth-century Parliament, such as when MPs would attempt to murder each other. In the early 1760s, radical reformer John Wilkes (r, depicted by Hogarth) dueled Samuel Martin after Martin referred to Wilkes as a "stabber in the dark, a cowardly and malignant scoundrel." The two met at Hyde Park, where Martin shot Wilkes in the stomach. According to Edward Walford's Hyde Park from 1878, some gadflys suspected Martin of practicing for months and attempting to lure Wilkes to the duel through his use of brazen eighteenth-century epithets. Wilkes survived long enough to get tried in absentia for co-writing a pornographic poem that was read in the House of Lords by his arch-nemesis, the Earl of Sandwich. The Wildcats crushed an overmatched Eastern Illinois with another dominant display from the defense. The defensive line and linebackers stymied the Panthers all afternoon. Matthew Harris picked off two passes although one was on a faltering trick play where a panicking wide receiver attempted to huck the ball up to Mount Olympus and the other when the Panther quarterback improvised a shovel pass as if someone in the crowd had suggested the ball had suddenly become a rabid bat. This game did not tell us much about Northwestern other than reinforcing the fact that the Wildcats can comfortably defeat a team that is structurally set up to be worse than Northwestern at football. Eastern Illinois showed up, collected its check, and was subject to Chicago's Big Ten Football Stadium roaring comfortably at a one-tarp level (Northwestern has not yet deployed the Full Tarp; with the one home game happening UNDER THE LIGHTS before Big Ten play fills Ryan Field with jeering Iowans for the rest of the season, we may not yet see it). The game certainly reinforced the Wildcats' defensive bonafides. Opponents have yet to score a touchdown against them. There are a number of rational reasons to proceed with cautious optimism, but for the love of everything holy the Northwestern Wildcats are ranked and I'm not going to let my native sports pessimism to take over here and heartily invite the Big Ten Conference to be effortlessly CRUSHED BENEATH ANTHONY WALKER'S CLEATS I'LL SEE YOU CHUMPS IN INDIANAPOLIS. TITANIC SHOWDOWN BETWEEN FOOTBALL POWERHOUSES On Saturday, the sudden proclamation that Northwestern might be good will be put to the test by a very good Duke team. Duke has made short work of its two first opponents, Tulane and North Carolina Central. Before the season, pundits had questioned whether the Blue Devils could withstand numerous key graduations, especially on defense. They have not yet shown any ill effects and now the 'Cats are going into their steamy swamp stadium in a battle of undefeated football titans. Duke and Northwestern have met fairly often since the late '90s. Both teams are small, private schools in big conferences that have spent most their footballing history flailing ineffectively at opponents like balloon men in a car dealership parking lot. Northwestern has gotten the better of Duke, taking six of the last seven. In fact, the Duke/Northwestern quasi-rivalry is evidence of Duke's stunning turnaround; the last Duke victory in 2007 ended a 22-game losing streak, and Duke played in the ACC Championship game just six years later. Despite these similarities, Duke fans have endured the relative tragedy of their football program because Duke basketball is an unstoppable death-juggernaut. While Northwestern sports are generally ignored or pitied, Duke's basketball team is almost universally reviled. Northwestern takes the court to indifference; Duke basketball plays against a planet of seven billion fist-shaking Beck Men. Northwestern has actively sought to emulate Duke's basketball success through a complex conspiracy involving numerous shadowy organizations, clandestine meetings, and hiring a guy who was literally Coach K's assistant coach. The mysterious disappearance of Duke Assistant Coach Chris Collins and his sudden reappearance at the head of Northwestern basketball is explained by the Chris Collins Conspiracy Corkboard that explains everything clearly and is not at all inscrutable-- in fact the Chris Collins Conspiracy Corkboard won Honorable Mention, Most Scrutable at the Screedies Conspiracy Awards or at least would have if it weren't for the intervention of shady forces beyond your wildest imagination If the Wildcats wilt in the Carolina heat, they can still rally against Ball State (LET ME REMIND YOU: UNDER THE LIGHTS) and turn a strong non-conference record into a bowl campaign. If they beat the Blue Devils, then it's TOOT TOOT THIS TRAIN ONLY STOPS IN PASADENA time and the Northwestern hype will switch into overdrive, kept off the front pages of the sports sections of Chicago's Big Ten Newspapers only by a particularly noteworthy Notre Dame practice. THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE IS NATIONAL AND FOOTBALL The NFL has kicked off again with the controversy, lawyer-laden press conferences, and general up-in-armsmanship that has come to define America's game. The actual games are almost incidental to ancillary NFL nonsense. Some of it is a designed spectacle; the NFL has blown up the draft into a three day list-reading extravaganza that closed down parts of Downtown Chicago for upwards of a week. Other times, it is the general bumbling created by the NFL's desire to serve as an independent branch of the United States justice system featuring a court lorded over by a a man who acts at all times like the guy from Bananas who goes mad the second he takes power and starts issuing underwear statutes. The NFL's pompous nincompoopery came to a head during the Great Ball Deflation Media Event of 2015, which climaxed with Roger Goodell upholding Roger Goodell's decision to suspend Tom Brady over a shrill chorus of Wahlbergian moaning before an actual judge intervened. At least the ball deflation scandal involved something as silly as Patriots skulduggery; earlier attempts to adjudicate on domestic violence through football justice were bungled so egregiously that I am surprised that Goodell has not yet mistakenly suspended himself before quickly changing suits and exonerating himself at a press conference featuring military hardware. Even without scandal and legal wrangling the NFL has become exhausting. Professional football includes the grandiose bumbling the NFL specializes in, but comes packaged with what can only be described as the dumbest shit imaginable. The NFL's broadcasts aren't uniquely joyless; every televised sporting event bombards us with the same corporate simulacra of the concept of fun. NFL games, however, are presented with a ponderous self-importance where announcers imbue inane platitudes about football players making football plays at the quarterback position in the national football league with the gravity of a U.N. conference on arms control. Ads airing on sports events are universally intolerable, but only NFL games stop seemingly every three minutes to breathlessly shill rifled beer bottles, various pickup truck brands in increasingly hardy settings that will seemingly climax at the Super Bowl with a consumer-grade Gravedigger dragging Dennis Leary through the apocalypse, and an endless wave of Babas Booey screaming about fantasy football. The fact that rational people tune into this week after week and that Americans are willing to cede precious hours of their lives to be screamed at by Trent Dilfer shows just how entertaining football games are. NFL players are really good at smashing into each other. And as long as players continue to fly through the air catching passes, drag five tacklers across the first down marker, and dramatically steam from their heads on winter days, we will continue to watch, no matter how badly the experience becomes laden with promos for TV shows about abrasive detectives who get results and this week the internet has become a person and it is murdering people. This season airing concurrently on Fox, CBS, and NBC, Dan Bakkedahl stars as Karl Fugue: Asshole Detective. This week, Fugue is suspended for dropping leaflets outside police headquarters entitled Your Police Are Morons illustrated with a cartoon of the chief clumsily struggling to put on a dunce cap but he can't because he is so uselessly stupid. But then, Fugue solves the case because despite his gruff obnoxiousness, he possesses incredible powers of observation that no one on the force can match even with their newfangled computers. He is reinstated, tells the chief that he is an idiot, then goes to drink self-destructively, possibly with his reluctant partner, a by-the-book detective who can't stand Fugue but respects him and also while her career is going well, her personal life is in shambles. On the next Karl Fugue: Asshole Detective, someone fires a gun and drives a car recklessly DUEL IN DURHAM It is way too early in the season to consider any game make-or-break. Last season, a roller-coaster where Northwestern struggled against non-conference opponents, scored two massive upsets against Wisconsin and Notre Dame, and then lost a bowl play-in game to Illinois, reinforced the unpredictability of Big Ten football. The Duke game, however, should reveal a lot about the Wildcats: whether the Stanford game was a fluke, whether the defense can remain dominant, and whether Thorson can continue to play like a quarterback with far more experience than he has. The game should be a defensive duel, complete with some pre-game social media chatter in which Ifeadi Odenigbo's expectations of a shutout have been received as if he referred to the Duke team as malignant cowards in Parliament. Everyone expects a close game, everyone that is except for Karl Fugue: Asshole Detective who is also a sports-betting sharp whose encyclopedic knowledge of college football betting patterns allows him to foil a series of shrimp restaurant robberies before that goddamn idiot chief has a chance to mess things up with his computers in Episode 8: Pick Six Murders.
There are numerous ways to begin a season: elation, disappointment, caution, and amid accusations of football malfeasance. This year, an unheralded Wildcat team looked awfully good against a sluggish and flummoxed Stanford, securing a jubilant upset and making the Big Ten look slightly less blighted. A first-game victory tells us little, and it is important to be sober and dispassionate in our analysis but that is for fact-bloggers and football experts so let's build an elaborate cardboard edifice, wait inside, and then burst forth from it screaming about how Northwestern demands the Big Ten West, especially if you are living in a country where no one knows what the Big Ten or Northwestern or football is. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT WILDCAT FOOTBALL This first win has changed the complexion of the season. The schedule had looked like twelve games of grim butt-holding. Now, a convincing walloping of an FCS team and a respectable showing against Duke and Ball State (UNDER THE LIGHTS) can set the Wildcats up for a bowl run. Some teams spend the season with a predetermined arc. ESPN announcers constantly mentioned that Wisconsin, once scraped off the bottom of Alabama's boots, should expect to romp virtually unopposed through the West against a bunch of cardboard football programs such as Northwestern. Ohio State's schedule remains under vigilant scrutiny should they fail to adequately humiliate each and every opponent they face. Every Northwestern game, however, will remain an adventure game to game, quarter to quarter, and Pat Fitzgerald fist pump to Pat Fitzgerald fist pump, whether it results in a thrilling Wildcat comeback on a hook-and-lateral or an attack on Ryan Field by heretofore undetected Tremors monsters. It is too early to celebrate. But the fundamental tenet of sports fandom is irrationality, so for just one week let's allow for the possibility that Northwestern is much better than the prognosticators thought. In fact, let us throw out most of our assumptions about the universe as we know and spend the rest of the week as a cult of moon-haters celebrating every new moon as a victory and shaking our fists when it slowly grows throughout the month invoking our credo "I'll get you next time, Moon." NORTHWESTERN'S UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUT VICTORY The Northwestern Wildcats scored 16 points and Stanford scored six and now Northwestern has one win and Stanford has zero. This is a fact. It is a matter of public record. It is on television, on newspapers, on the internet, and possibly in Gregg Easterbrook's Game Over notebook. The reasons for this result are up for debate. Stanford did not play particularly well. Quarterback Kevin Hogan struggled. The running game, after the first drive, sputtered. Wide receivers and cornerbacks dropped passes, including at least one sure interception in the endzone and one wide-open route where a receiver broke free of the defense with absolutely nothing to stop him from running into the endzone other than a temporary hallucination that the ball had turned into a vengeful porcupine. Stanford fans have also complained about the early start time after traveling from the West Coast. This problem, though, is part of the Ryan Field home field advantage, where opponents must learn to adapt to Chicago's Big Ten Time Zone. (click to read) Railroad companies introduced the first standardized time zones in 1883. On November 18, the Day of Two Noons, railroad stations across the United States simultaneously synchronized their clocks. This is routine now, but the synchronization provided some dislocation by reinventing time itself and because The Day of Two Noons sounds like the beginning of a Young Adult post-apocalyptic trilogy where time itself is controlled by a mysterious Council that can only be undone by a plucky tween and a mysterious old man who knows the Terrible Secret of the Before Times. This New York Times Article illustrates the concept with the help of a couple of broadly-drawn Irish stereotypes which I imagine newspapers brought out as their nineteenth-century explainers: “Begorra,” remarked to his companion a vermilion topped Hibernian who was watching the south face of the clock, “the thing has stopped; phwats the matther wid it, anyhow? I don’t see no time changin', do you Mike?”
Northwestern's defense, especially the defensive line, played well against a team whose M.O. is shoving people and falling down. But the game belonged to the two 18s: Clayton Thorson and Anthony Walker. Thorson's first game included a few nice passes and a few adventures through the hands of Cardinal defenders. He won the game on the ground by flying untouched through the Stanford defense for a 42-yard touchdown. Walker, on the other hand, was everywhere, tackling Stanford players at the line of scrimmage, in space, and in their classes after posing as a precocious guest lecturer before ripping off an elbow-patched sport coat and punching at their three-ring binders. SPONSORED CONTENT: HOW TO HAVE A RAD FOOTBALL COOK-OUT
It's football Saturday. You got your grill? You got your friends? You got your jersey and your facepaint and your foam finger with a generic football message? You got your Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants? Well, friend, it's cookin' time. World-Renowned Chef Vaughn Sharkle knows what tailgating is all about as he drives the Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants RV through the heart of college football grilling. "I've seen everything," Sharkle says moving his wrap-around sunglasses to the back of his head. "Shrimp, brisket, pork. The only thing college football fans are more passionate about their team is their barbecue." And everywhere he goes, Sharkle draws a crowd with the smell of fresh, sizzling meat. "You know a lot of people think of industry when they think of Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants. Hard work. Smelting aprons. The work that forged America. But Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants are also a part of making America fun, like at this tailgate," said Sharkle completely spontaneously while casually flicking a beach ball with white hot anviling tongs in the direction of some giggling, clean-cut youths. "I got involved with Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants because we're all about the same thing: Make it More Awesome," Sharkle said, putting on a Make it More Awesome t-shirt. "I'm going to keep putting meats in more meats and blow people's minds, just like Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants has been doing in the anvil and anvil lubricant industry for 135 years." "Dude," he added. Vaughn Sharkle's quest for the perfect tailgate hasn't ended yet. You can follow him on Facebook and tweet to #AmalgamatedAnvil&AnvilLubricantGameDayHASHTAG and you could get Vaughn Sharkle and the Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricant Ultimate Game Day Tailgate Team to make your tailgate more awesome with Amalgamted Anvil and Anvil Lubricants. EASTERN PROMISES Eastern Illinois looms next for the Wildcats. The Panthers play in the FCS, and Northwestern fans are expecting a convincing victory after beating a ranked team. But you can't sleep on the Panthers. For one, expect them to take Northwestern by surprise by being primarily south and slightly west of Evanston. For another, they will be gunning for an enormous upset of their own. Last season, the 'Cats had a tough time scoring against Western Illinois in a miserable game involving a three-timeout kicker freeze and cheerleaders bearing placards reading (and this is a direct quote) "NECKS." Eastern Illinois threatens the Wildcats with a disembodied H.R. Giger panther head Northwestern has only played Eastern Illinois once before in 2011. Last year, the Panthers lost to all of the FBS teams they played as well as FCS Championship runner-up Illinois State, but they did pound the holy bejesus out of the teams they did beat. Eastern is a surprising supplier of NFL quarterbacks. Jimmy Garoppolo was poised to start for the Patriots this season while Roger Goodell had Tom Brady imprisoned in the Château d'If. Tony Romo worked his way from an undrafted free agent to stardom, riches, and getting assailed by angry Texas talk radio callers for nearly a decade no matter what he does. Northwestern has not had a regular starter in the NFL since Otto Graham, with the exception of that time Brett Basanez played for the Panthers or whenever Mike Kafka surfaces in preseason games to a chorus of the same Kafka jokes everyone made when he was at Northwestern some seven years ago and will haunt him for his entire professional career until the debut of a quarterback named Bobby Sartre or Jimbo Nietzsche. ALSO RECEIVING VOTES It has only been one week and it is foolish to draw too many conclusions. Every single football article you will read this week probably includes that disclaimer. But the entire point of college football is these madcaps swings in confidence and despair, anointing strong teams and contenders and consigning losers to the dust bin of Pizza City bowls. Official AP Style Guide for College Football Writing Northwestern beat a ranked Stanford team and siphoned off their AP poll votes like a Highlander who has just successfully beheaded someone. The 'Cats are Also Receiving Votes. The day has two noons.
Football has returned! On Saturday, the twenty-first ranked Stanford Cardinal drive their crowd-sourced content-centered Silicon Valley Tesla bus into Evanston while the Wildcats will try to disrupt their Pac 12 North title bid. A long, bleak, hatless offseason finally ends. Northwestern football is back to terrify the Big Ten West, to seize the Land of Lincoln Trophy from the cold, fired hands of the Beck Man, and make it back to a damn bowl game because I am pretty sure there are no more possible ways for Northwestern to lose every single game in a bizarre last-minute conflagration of football misery. Since last week's exhaustive preview, Pat Fitzgerald has named a starting quarterback. Redshirt freshman Clayton Thorson has emerged to grab the starting job, probably because you can't bench the offspring of a Norse deity. The coaching staff hopes that Thorson will remind Wildcat fans of the traditional scrambly Northwestern quarterback that has led the team during successful years without betraying his lack of experience. He'll have some help with the return of speedy wideout Christian Jones, who missed all of last year, and Pierre Youngblood-Arry, the Cockney Prince of Agincourt. Northwestern's offense plans to baffle the opposition with a secret play called "The Invisible Didgeridoo" Northwestern's out of conference schedule this year includes a miniature tour of equally insufferable Power 5 private schools. Stanford can be seen as a funhouse mirror Northwestern, albeit far more successful on the field, with much nicer weather and an ignominious loss involving a kick return team running over a marching band instead of an ignominious win involving the drowning of a goal post. The Cardinal went 8-5 last year, including a loss to Notre Dame, a team that crumbled easily before the might of the Wildcats and the cumulative effect of every single lucky break that Northwestern had been denied in nearly two full seasons of football action. Maybe opening against a top-25 powerhouse with a freshman quarterback is not the ideal way to start a season. But top-quality opposition will invite the full pageantry of non-conference football to Ryan Field: ESPN broadcast, Stanford's hallucinogenic tree mascot, and Chicago's Big Ten Tarp. Northwestern's greatest seasons in recent memory have come out of nowhere. It is time for them to once again ruin opponents' seasons, crush dreams, and travel to a bowl game even if we have to invent one from whole cloth using shell companies and a long con involving inventing a dot com company. FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BECK MAN We don't have Tim Beckman to kick around anymore. Last week, Illinois abruptly fired him amid allegations of player abuse. Beckman's dismissal could hardly be seen as unexpected after years of futility, controversy, and general flailing Beckmania-- at one point his Wikipedia page contained a section entitled "Public Outcry"-- but his sudden termination eight days before the start of the season certainly caught the college football world unaware. He spent his last year of coaching like Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea; we all knew he'd get eaten by a shark, but the end was still sudden and jarring. There's nothing at all amusing about the reasons why Beckman was ultimately canned. A University of Illinois-commissioned report claimed that Beckman pressured injured players to keep playing and threatened players with the loss of their scholarships. These charges are not that surprising in the world of college football, where some tobacco-stained mustache columnist is probably still rhapsodizing about the time an old-school hat-wearing Woody Hayes type yelled "you're not injured. I'll show you injured" before running a walk-on through with a Civil War cavalry saber. A cynic could also note that the report gave the university adequate legal ammunition to fire him with cause and save nearly $4 million owed to him on his contract and his buyout. Beckman denies the allegations and vows to fight for the money owed on his contract. It seems likely that Beckman's tenure involved shady injury practices and provided the university with a way to renounce his salary. Illinois administrators, already riven with scandals in the athletic department and embattled leadership at the top, found an opportunity to free themselves from financial commitments to a losing coach who continually acted like Tim Beckman in public. The allegations against Beckman don't seem outside the realm of possibility because they had already been echoed by some former players and because Beckman has coached like he bought a Weekly Reader book from 1967 called Trench Bludgeoner's Guide to College Football and Commie Spotting and dedicated himself to Cold War-era football: thus insisting on having players play through pain, demanding favorable coverage from print media, and nurturing the second-most ridiculous rivalry in college football. THE HAT RIVALRY IN THE POST-BECKMAN ERA If there is one thing that Tim Beckman accomplished at Illinois it was successfully creating a Northwestern-Illinois rivalry. It is still not a true rivalry the way most intrastate rivalries work; instead, the Beck Man has somehow reinvented the entire concept of a college football rivalry as a quixotic crusade waged by a single man. His immediate declaration of war against Northwestern was nothing short of ludicrous. His ham-fisted attempts to stoke that rivalry devolved into farce. It is possible to read the entire Beckman treatment of Northwestern as a brilliant deconstruction of rivalry itself, recasting the Iron Bowl, or the The Game, or the dozens of other actual football rivalries as absurd, rendering all football fans as dimbulb Beckman simulacra. But, let's give the Beck Man his due here: it sort of worked. No one hates Northwestern football. Northwestern football is briefly remembered and occasionally pitied. I have spent the past few weeks skimming thousands upon thousands of words of college football and Big Ten previews and almost none of them deign to mention the existence of Northwestern football except as evidence of a Big Ten contender's easy schedule. So when Sheriff Beckman swaggered into town with his school up north euphemisms and purple clothing bans, it was fun. Beck Man stood in front of the press, the world, and his god decrying Northwestern football with a straight face and it was impossible not to respond with hat-taunts as he floundered about. In theory, the rivalry was against the University of Illinois. In reality, it was a rivalry with Beck Man himself, who inexplicably continued his one-man anti-Northwestern jeremiads while simultaneously comporting himself like a man in an infomercial unaware that an overstuffed kitchen cabinet is about to unleash an unholy rain of tupperware upon his person. This actually happened. This actually happened. This actually happened. This actually happened. What on earth are we going to do without Tim Beckman? Bill Cubit seems unlikely to burst into a press conference with a fresh barrage of Northwestern hate-mongering-- it is possible he removed the anti-Northwestern symbol from the Illini locker room only to discover it was covering up a secret cache of VHS recordings of an unsold television pilot called "Tim Beckman's Hat Police." I don't know anything about Cubit other than his name is an obscure, ancient unit of measure that is good for maybe one half-hearted stiff-arm joke per season. Our only hope is that Cubit somehow becomes mesmerized by the Hat, loses all grip on reality, and turns into a Klaus Kinsky character over the course of the season, his clothes in tatters, his hair frayed, his press conferences devolving into incoherent hat-shrieks, only no one notices because that is still slightly more reasonable than Tim Beckman. Illinois fans, we're in this together. Beckman may have have stared blankly into the middle distance for the last time as the Illini coach, but we have a conference, a trophy, and two bleak programs eclipsed in our own state by a MAC team and FCS team, respectively. We only have each other. Beckman, banished to the Phantom Zone, vows to defeat That School From The Adjacent Dimension Well Actually There's No Way To Define Its Relation To Us In Time and Space Give us our damn hat back.
In scant weeks, the college football will again get underway and soon, perhaps as soon as the first forlorn kickoff returner is scraped off the field, it will be time to have The Conversation. The Conversation dominates college football's bloviosphere for the entire season. Its cosmology is heliocentric; everything revolves around the playoff and, ultimately, the National Championship. For a team must be in The Conversation before it can be in the playoff, and each week, each minute of college football season, unavoidable college football pundits and bloggers and unhinged Finebaum shouters who, without Finebaum, would be forced to call people to yell at them about Alabama one at a time starting with A Aaronson and ending with T Zbikowski to cast teams out of The Conversation like the Almighty banishing Moses from the Promised Land. It is a process so weightily asinine that it requires a Bill Simmons-esque Capitalized Phrase. The crew of Bloviosphere II begins its two-year project to live in a self-contained ecosystem generating all of its energy from nightly screaming matches about the SEC. N.B. College football is so dependent on subjectivity, arguments, and nonsense that it is the most Bill Simmonsy sport possible-- we should be living in a world where Bill Simmons develops a feud with Phyllis From Mulga College football is the only major American sport where The Conversation has tangible effect on determining a champion. There are 128 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision and the sheer impossibility of determining the four top teams results in a hodgepodge of computer formulae, polls filled out by hat-wearing journalists and graduate assistants, Lou Holtz's saliva, residual Civil War animus, and people paying to fly airplane banners over stadiums. Then, a mysterious Committee of Thirteen picks them with no accountability. College football has found the most convoluted, compelling and profoundly stupid way to pick its champion short of Nostradamus texts. Approximately 90% of the media discussion about college football is about The Conversation and more than 90 of the 128 FBS teams will not be in The Conversation for a single second. Northwestern is one of them. Also-ran teams in top "Power Five" conferences exist only when a Conversation team rampages through their stadiums with their entourage of bloodthirsty alumni. Those outside the Power Five, the Mid-Majors without the influence and the money and the ludicrous propaganda television networks might as well exist in Siberia or a the very least Moscow, Idaho. Big Ten Network programming subtly works in a sponsor while airing its The Big Ten Invents Football: Rutgers documentary Northwestern, along with the vast majority of college football teams, exists in a shadowy netherworld apart from the dominant college football narrative. These teams toil in relative obscurity as tackling dummies for contenders or by beating up on each other on games televised by contractual obligation that only warrant a passing mention if they end with the requisite number of overtimes, laterals, or 300 pound men precariously running with the football, gleefully living out their Pop Warner touchdown fantasies before they gained several hundred more pounds and coaches convinced them to smash into other giants, triumphantly gallumphing along the sidelines desperately looking for someone to stiff-arm. In an ideal world, these teams are agents of chaos, ruining a contenders' season and exulting in their opponents' shock, sorrow, and internet coach-firing. Notre Dame, for example, deserves the indignity of losing to Northwestern so completely that, if Northwestern did not exist, we would have to invent it and its temporarily unstoppable baseball kicker. Teams outside of the championship face spread offenses, blitz packages, and genuine existential quandaries. There are 128 teams. There are no draft picks rewarding miserable seasons; the only prize is its merciful end. For these teams, the season is a Sisyphean struggle where quarterbacks metaphorically hand off enormous unmovable rocks. This is the best football. Fans of teams in The Conversation suffer through football season as a precarious drudge through a dozen potential calamities. Anything short of a championship is agony, a nine-win season is a failure, and anything short of that requires the immediate installation of creepy flight-tracking software to analyze coach movements. In a sport featuring a weird, oblong ball, every unpredictable bounce portends doom and misery, and every discussion of the team welcomes a thousand armchair Napoleons spouting inane theories about a winning mentality. Turn on the television and college football is about ESPN College Gameday, poll positions, committees, and trophies. But for most fanbases, The Conversation is irrelevant white noise. It is about grasping a frozen beer at 10:00 in the morning before entering an empty, windswept stadium, exulting in invites to the forgettable dregs of bowl season, buckets, Hats, and the faintest hope of ruining the season for some juggernaut team. Their asses will remain uncrowned. It does not matter. NORTHWESTERN ON THE FIELD Northwestern has had a rough couple of seasons. The 2012 campaign ended a bowl drought that originated in the Truman administration in a bowl that people actually have heard of. The Wildcats began 2013 with high expectations, eventually summoning College Gameday to campus in a football apocalypse against Ohio State. Since then, it is misery and strife. Northwestern has experienced a beguiling series of impossible, last-second losses culminating in the catastrophic Hat Game Bowl Game defeat at the hands of Beck Man in their own goddamn stadium. There have been no bowl games since the 2013 Gator Bowl. The Hat resides in Champaign, under guard from Beck Man's elite Order of the Mustacheless. The Order is trained from birth to defend the Hat with hand-to-hand combat, stump speeches, Abraham Lincoln Trivia facts, period-accurate timepieces, and bo staffs. Before 2009, they were known as the Order of the Flying Tomahawk with a whole other set of birth rituals, each of which was probably offensive and problematic, so if you think about it the whole turnaround into a Lincoln-based artifact-guarding death cult in such a short amount of time is pretty impressive The main question is at quarterback. Candidates include big-armed senior Zack Oliver, dual-threat sophomore Matt Alviti, and John Grisham protagonist Clayton Thorson. Less than two weeks before the season opener against Stanford, the quarterback situation remains unsettled. Northwestern does not necessarily need a single incumbent starter. During the Kain Colter/Trevor Siemian heyday, the 'Cats altered quarterbacks successfully; Northwestern should push that further by having at least three quarterbacks on the field at all time, occasionally playing quarterback, occasionally playing other skill positions, and other times simply standing in the backfield attempting to confuse the defense with unpredictable arm motions while Justin Jackson runs around them. If there is one thing to look forward to on offense, it is the return of Justin Jackson. Jackson seized the starting job as a true freshman after the unexpected departure of star running back Venric Mark. He ran for 1,184 yards despite coming on as the featured back in the third game. As Siemian battled injuries, Jackson carried the offense, including going for 162 in an upset against Wisconsin and 149 against Notre Dame. Jackson's game depends on an expert reading of holes and coverages as he slinks and slithers through the line, ending up where linebackers aren't looking for him. A frustrated linebacker punches the mirror where he thinks Justin Jackson is, but he is not there; no, he is 20 yards away, scampering past a hapless safety or maybe he is cutting back, warding off the nose tackle with his claw hand The Wildcats will lean heavily on their defense this season. They lost some stalwarts last year including ball-hawking safety Ibraheim Campbell and all-encompassing tackle monster Chi Chi Ariguzo. They return a senior-heavy defensive line and Nick VanHoose at corner. Safety Godwin Igwebuike and linebacker Anthony Walker made excellent debuts last season. Igwebuike picked off three passes in the Wisconsin game alone, although picking off Wisconsin passes is equivalent to 1.65 normal passes since the Badgers only break out the forward pass as a droll party trick. Walker memorably returned a pick for a touchdown in his first start and made another vital pick against Notre Dame off a pass that had comically bonked off a Notre Dame player's helmet. The road to an unheralded Pizza City bowl game will be difficult. The 'Cats open the season against a strong Stanford team vying for a Pac 12 North title. They also face a resurgent Duke team in Durham. The Big Ten West division does not inspire reverent rhapsodies or rapid mouth-foaming soliloquies on sports talk radio, but it still offers little respite; the 'Cats will likely need to eke out three or even four Big Ten victories to qualify for a bowl game. After Fitzgerald guided Northwestern to five straight bowl appearances, fans had become accustomed to them, treating these excursions to Texas (always Texas) like a dubious birthright. Now, expectations have relaxed. A big upset would be great. Bowl eligibility spectacular. But none of this matters when some Midwestern Roscoe P. Coltrane has absconded with The Hat and it is finally time to do something about it. NORTHWESTERN OFF THE FIELD While the Wildcats attract little attention during football season, they've found themselves at the center of the unionization debate. This week, the National Labor Relations Board surprisingly overturned the regional board decision that labeled football players employees and allowed them to vote on forming a union. The NLRB examined the evidence, looked at the trailblazing work by Kain Colter and the CAPA and the growing unease about the way billion dollar sporting leagues are incoherently bolted onto universities and boldly declared: "THE HELL IF I KNOW." The NLRB overturned the earlier ruling argued that the designation of athletes as employees at a private institution would cause conflicts when expanded to public universities. According to this article, Michigan and Ohio have passed laws specifying that scholarship athletes are not employees in response to Northwestern's initial unionization attempts. The unionization case has exposed the dark underbelly of college football at Northwestern. The nonsensical marriage of universities and big-time football is endemic and ever-present in the nature of college football the way the air we breathe is rife with microscopic fungus spores and our gas station soda cups are inescapably inundated with images of captain something-or-other who will defend humanity by throwing people into buildings with no apparent effect in an endless series of movies. Even Northwestern, which has recently invested in a series of various-sized tarps to cover up empty stands (ranging from FCS Illinois Team to Purdue and It's Snowing) is inundated with Big Ten Network money and plasters fans with ads from companies who paid actual American dollars to be the Official Such-and-Such of Northwestern Football because they were swindled by some dashing Harold Hill figure. Players, university officials, and easily-riled internet commenters can debate about the extent to which they feel athletic scholarships adequately compensate athletes for their time or the extent to which unionization is the right path for athletes. But it is also difficult to square the opulent spectacle of college football with the actual demands from Colter's College Athletes Players Association for things like expanded medical care, protection of scholarships, and payment for use of images so they can make some money from when I use a thinly-veiled Kain Colter video game facsimile to get an endless supply of first downs against Virtual Ohio State. It is not clear what behooves the NCAA or its member conferences to increase benefits for players when players have essentially no leverage to play anywhere else until Vince McMahon brings back a new version of the XFL where players are forced to comply with a fringe cowboy hat dress code and play is constantly interrupted by washed-up former players dramatically entering the field while everyone involved unconvincingly feigns stupefaction. The Macho Man Timmy Hat Rage leaves college to join the reformed XFL, enjoying a stellar run as a guy who keeps forgetting his gimmick FOOTBALL RETURNS Northwestern is irrelevant in the national media's coverage of college football. But off the field, Northwestern has become the most important team in the country when it comes to showcasing the meaninglessness of the NCAA's "student-athlete" designation. Ultimately, the battle for college athletes to gain what they decide is their fair share of the monstrous profits generated by college sports will continue to dominate the off-field narrative. But the bizarre nature of college football, almost impossible to explain in the abstract, will once again make sense as soon as the meats sizzle in parking lots, the marching bands blare their Chicago covers, and the students begin ramming into each other for our amusement. Northwestern kicks off against Stanford in two Saturdays and all becomes lost in a haze of tarps and hands contorted into crude wildcat claws. I want college sports to reach a more equitable place even if that means massive changes that render them unrecognizable. But I also want to watch Northwestern players score ludicrous touchdowns, completely destroy some Big Ten team's season, and defeat the Illini in some way that causes the winning touchdown to somehow trigger a vast Rube Goldberg apparatus that hits Tim Beckman in the face with a pie. I have no idea if these two desires can coexist or if this is a delusion created by the pageantry of the music, the stadiums, and the people dressed like angry anthropomorphic animals imploring the team to touchdowns.
Oh it is coming. August is the first ripple in the water glass, next is the coaches goldblumically cackling their way through press conferences, then a goat is dismembered, a lawyer flees to a toilet, and college football season comes stomping out of its paddock, bellowing its blood-curdling roar. Across the country, college football teams are baking in the sun, running into blocking sleds, and getting screamed at by crew-cut wearing millionaires. The Northwestern Wildcats are in Kenosha, trying to figure out who will be the quarterback. Defending national champions Ohio State (good grief) are turning their training camp into a reality show called "Scarlet and Gray Days," which, stunningly, is not a turgid nineteenth century Southern Gothic epic. Last season, a bunch of morons had declared the Big Ten dead and buried, including the least-informed football blogger in the world. Bowl season, however, eased those doubts, with the conference scoring several close wins over highly-ranked teams. Statistically, a close win in a single game depends so heavily on chance that no thinking person can possibly assume it means anything; these games have naturally has fueled the discourse on college football since time immemorial. Ohio State returns as the consensus favorite amongst the football yellerati after downing Alabama and Oregon with a third-string quarterback. Michigan seems poised for a return to prominence under Jim Harbaugh. The Big Ten refuses to be anyone's punching bag until the first significant out-of-conference loss, in which case the Big Ten will return to its perception as a conference of ignorant fullbacks and linebackers squinting quizzically at the flickering shadow of a forward pass on a cave wall. BYCTOM BIG TEN PREVIEW Fortunately, the Wildcats will be avoiding the Buckeyes this season. Another East powerhouse, Michigan State, will mercifully remain off the schedule as well. Rutgers and Maryland as yet exist on the "here be dragons" portion of the Big Ten map. Instead, let us turn to an exhaustively-researched and comprehensive preview of the Big Ten West and East Division Interlopers as they appear on Northwestern's schedule while pretending they won't be effortlessly clobbered by the invincible Wildcat football team. Minnesota Golden Gophers Minnesota, led by crimson walrus Jerry Kill, appears to be a program on the rise. They took an 8-4 record to the Citrus Bowl. Minnesota had been a Big Ten cellar-dweller and reliable Wildcat victim; from 2007-2012, the 'Cats won five out of six. More importantly, Northwestern had some spectacular Metrodome mojo, with two of the most absurdendings to a football game I've seen within the arena's glorious roof-pouch. Minnesota had been a welcome sight on the schedule, a cobblestone on the yellow brick road to Pizza City. Now, they are a much improved team that has irritatingly beaten Northwestern the last two years-- once with an assistant coach at the helm filling in for an ailing Kill, the other time with a 100-yard fourth-quarter kick return. The 'Cats may regain the advantage this year by playing at Ryan Field in front of a river of maroon that has seeped down Interstate 94. As with most Big Ten opponents, Northwestern will be relying on the home field advantage of hoping that the visiting team tenses up and gets nervous in front of an overwhelming deluge of their friends, family, and supporters and the dozens of purple-clad handclaws occasionally voicing their disapproval. Michigan Wolverines The Michigan Wolverines suffered the apparently unbearable burden of being kind of bad for more than one season. The team devolved into a rudderless mess with a mediocre coach, regarded by Michigan fans as a catastrophe on par with a situation where the President of the United States has dissolved the court system and replaced all jurisprudence with trial by monster truck rally. Michigan fans would only accept one man for the job. And, because it is not feasible to have a team coached by an animatronic Bo Schembechler standing on the sidelines spitting out dot matrix printouts of what Bo Schembechler would do in any given situation, they decided to hire an unhinged football monomaniac. I can't wait to hate Jim Harbaugh. He comports himself like a nineteenth-century military officer just returned from some colonial posting no longer able to function in the West where he has to answer to a doddering hierarchy of muttonchopped generals. Even by the insane standards of football coaches, whose lives revolve around yelling and watching film and taking fanboats to the east end of nowhere to convince a 300-pound 16-year-old to allow himself to be yelled at by them for the next four years, Harbaugh is intense. He seems to strive to exist in a world of wide-eyed zeal, where humans only communicate in elaborate football play argots, where discourse is limited to talking about how determined you are, and where the punishments for variation in pants style are unspeakably draconian. He is also a very good football coach and that is intolerable. Harbaugh politely disagrees with a holding call Northwestern had their window. Michigan had never been so vulnerable. And, with this final shot at crushing the Wolverines in front of a group of demoralized Michigan fans for once coming into Ryan Field with the slightest tinge of doubt in their inevitable victory, the 'Cats could not pull it off. Instead, the teams engaged in an embarrassing display of quasi-football, immortalized now as the M00N game. Neither team could score, hold onto the ball, or attempt any sort of coordinated movement that did not result in a Buster Keaton calamity. Fitzgerald decided to go for two and Siemian fell onto his buttocks and now Northwestern may never beat the Wolverines again. But what if something goes horribly awry? What if, for some unfathomable reason, Harbaugh's tin-pot dictatory doesn't work in Ann Arbor? What if all of the shouting and baiting officials and making dumb turning into Ghostrider faces can't turn Michigan around and the program continues to list like once-stately liner careening into an iceberg? What if Harbaugh gets run out on a rail, with angry Michigan alumni braying about him being tainted by the NFL and the Michigan Men condemn him for not living up to their hilariously lofty Michigan coach should be on the list of possible emergency presidential successors in the face of numerous simultaneous calamities standards and bray on the internet about things being UNACCEPTABLE? That turn of events would somehow justify the existence of college football. Iowa The Werther's Originals of football teams takes to the field again under Kirk Ferentz. Ferentz's team has fallen from its mid-decade heights challenging for Big Ten titles and some Iowa fans have begun to lose their patience. He remains dedicated to the platonic, plodding ideal of Big Ten football, churning out endless highlight reels of guards running into people. There's nothing flashy, exciting, or particularly irksome about Iowa football except somewhere along the way they have become blood-rivals with Northwestern and should probably be crushed, with all Iowa merchandise loaded onto a boat armada and burned in the middle of Lake Michigan witnessed only by a single contemptuous man.
For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Iowa and Northwestern traded off foiling each others' hopes of contention and losing quarterbacks. The stakes, however, have vanished. Now, with the Hawkeyes stagnating at Insight Bowl levels and the Wildcats bereft of bowls entirely, the rivalry seems brief and fleeting. Ferentz reignites Northwestern/Iowa enmity by cruelly accusing him of inadequate fist pumping and taking it more than one play at a time out there
Whatever lingering antipathy has declined at the same time as the Rise of Beck Man. There is nothing the University of Iowa can possibly do that can match his ludicrous Northwestern bashing. Iowa fans no longer care about this quasi-rivalry since Northwestern has ceased to be a thorn in their side. That is why it is imperative that the Hawkeyes get hot and win all of their games before rolling into Ryan Field and losing on a preposterous series of laterals so Northwestern fans have another fanbase that might hate them before Beckman volunteers for interplanetary travel to start a pointless rivalry with theoretical Martian bacteria. Nebraska When Nebraska entered the Big Ten, Northwestern fans immediately demanded to know: who is the true NU? Here's a quick rundown of the case: Northwestern fans claim NU since the school is literally "Northwestern University." Nebraska fans counter by having had no idea that Northwestern had a football team with uniforms and everything. Since then, there has been a tense but civil NU détente between the fans because the controversy is inane even by college football standards, a sport where people get incensed by a victorious team scoring too many points. Last year, the Huskers defeated Northwestern and turned our Homecoming into a pitiless sea of red. Now, the 'Cats have to face thousands of Nebraska fans in Lincoln without the benefit of Dracula jerseys. The Huskers have a new coach this season, Mike Riley from Oregon State. Jug-eared cave person Bo Pelini has returned home to Youngstown State because he has figured out that there are entire generations of Youngstonians who have not been screamed at within two inches of their face. The best way to beat Nebraska is to reclaim the crowd advantage so if you're some wealthy teeth-clenching monocle enthusiast planning to name a building on Northwestern's campus, why not endow a Chair of Showing Them What It's Like instead, buy every goddamn ticket in their stadium, and flood it with Northwestern fans or, in a pinch, Kansas State fans with holdover anti-Nebraska animus? Penn State THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, FRANKLIN, WHEN YOU DUCK NORTHWESTERN IN THE PAST Purdue Ten years ago, Purdue was riding high in the Big Ten, with a conveyor belt of quarterback champions. Kyle Orton played there, and I can think of no greater aspiration for a football fan than rooting for Kyle Orton. Now, the post-Tillman Boilermakers are a living museum of football indignity. The high-flying offenses are probably a thing of the past because who the hell knows what kind of offense Purdue runs. The coaching staff probably puts in a tape and then says the hell with it and watches a bunch of Magnum PI reruns before passing out in their Strategy Caboose. Everything about Purdue football is misery. Even Northwestern, at its depths of ineptitude, managed to lose operatically, setting records and throwing things into lakes. It would take a herculean effort to throw anything larger than a shoulder pad into the Wabash River. The Wabash river is further east on this map, but look at what's going on near the stadium. Beck Man would never stand for that. He would have that street name changed immediately to That Road Up North, Chief Boulevard, or Fill In Field Here Before Submitting Form Purdue muddles through, eclipsed even by its slightly-less-moribund state rival Indiana, bucketless and heartbroken. Northwestern-Purdue will kick off at 8:30 AM, reluctantly televised with commentary recycled from an old copy of NCAA '05. Wisconsin There was uncharacteristic intrigue in Madison this off-season as head coach Gary Andersen decamped to Oregon State. He filled the vacancy left by Mike Riley, who left for Nebraska. The Badgers failed to close the circular coaching loop by hiring Bo Pelini. Instead, they brought in long-time assistant coach Paul Chryst from Pitt. Once again, Barry Alvarez descended from the his lofty perch in the athletic department to lead the Badgers to an Outback Bowl victory. This is the closest thing to a statue coming to life to coach a football team until the technology is perfected by Penn State scientists. Wisconsin football is not about gracefully lofting passes over a defense. It is about running around them, over them, and preferably through them by using Wisconsin's hulking offensive linemen and the parts of defenders that are still stuck to them from the week before. Last year, the Badgers had one of the most comically lopsided offenses in college football, with Melvin Gordon wreaking havoc behind a typical wall of beef while the passing game approximated the replacement of a football with a regulation anvil. Then, Wisconsin came into Evanston and decided to air it out. And pass they did. Badger fans stood there, stunned, as their quarterbacks heaved up 29 miserable passes into the field, off of helmets, and into the waiting hands of Godwin Igwebuike. Time and time again, Melvin Gordon ran the ball close to the endzone and then watched helplessly as an inexplicable series of passes flew anywhere but. Andersen and his coaches became textbook victims of what I call Vizzini's Law: never try to do the unexpected when the unexpected is unexpected because it is self-evidently dumb. "The wide receivers will be wide open," Wisconsin offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig cackled while calling for another Joel Stave rollout BYCTOM PREVIEW NUGGET: Wisconsin will probably run the ball a lot this year. Illinois
Beck Man finally did it. After years of clumsy rival-mongering and quizzically squinting at something in the middle distance, Ham Fistman managed to beat the 'Cats at home in a loser doesn't get to go to a crappy bowl game match. And, given an entire off-season to luxuriate in his possession of the Hat, perhaps Beckman will grow from his glories. Perhaps he'll make the Hat an assistant coach (Coach Hat says you're only giving me 105 percent out there), change his name to Beck Hatman, or walk around Champaign in a home-made hat-cape-- these are all things that most of us would do if we won as prestigious a trophy as the Lincoln Hat. The Wildcats won't get a chance to wrest the Hat from Beckman in Champaign. Instead, the contest moves to Soldier Field, Chicago's Big Ten Neutral Site, in order to seize the attention of Chicagoans interested in a Northwestern/Illinois game only if the halftime show consists of 25 guys simultaneously screaming about Jay Cutler. Tim Beckman is the greatest thing to happen to this football blog. He has single-handedly taken a rivalry that was at best ironic and elevated it into something approaching an actual rivalry. He then backed up his talk steering his team into an abysmal record while bumbling around the sidelines and getting bowled over by the occasional referee. He comported himself at all times like he was flummoxed by an unfamiliar frozen yogurt ordering procedure. And, in a satisfying narrative twist, he somehow beat Northwestern, not only winning the Hat, but winning a golden ticket to lose a Conference USA team in a bowl game, which is the platonic ideal of stakes for an Illinois-Northwestern football game. Beckman may not last past this season if the Illini are crappy again, but he has already accomplished everything there is to accomplish in the game of football. It is football season. It is Hat Season.
