Miniature Homecoming

On the first drive of the game, University of Louisiana at Monroe effortlessly ran through the Northwestern defense until a flea flicker left a Warhawk receiver streaking alone towards the endzone. ULM 7 Northwestern 0. The announcer who screams OH NO DISASTER was in my brain yelling “oh no disaster.” Northwestern was about to get torn apart in its most homecoming-ass homecoming game in recent memory in a Sun Belt paycheck game before having to throw itself into the gears of the Big Ten schedule. And then Northwestern rattled off 42 points and won the game easily.

The score is a little deceptive. ULM drove the ball effectively, but missed a field goal badly and got stopped on 4th down deep in Northwestern territory when they had an opportunity to make it an actual game in the first half. But it’s hard to find fault with a Wildcat team that was firing on all cylinders, dominating the lines of scrimmage, and, much like a civilization unlocking a new tech tree in a complicated strategy video game, discovered the new invention Receivers Other Than Griffin Wilde. Stone did not even complete a pass to Wilde until the third quarter, though his top target still piled up 64 yards and a touchdown. 

 

All of those people in the stands are rooting for Northwestern 

The fundamental issue for Northwestern or what I would refer to as the Northwestern Question if I was a muttonchopped nineteenth-century guy, is that it has far fewer fans than almost any FBS program and certainly any “Power Four” program in the country. Northwestern literally has tens of thousands of fans in Chicago and across the country; this is still closer to zero fans than any other team in the Big Ten. As anyone who has ever attended a Northwestern game and attempted to cheer for the home team in a Big Ten game can attest, the stadium is almost always overrun with visiting fans. This was true in Ryan Field (R.I.P. in its gnarly rusted glory), it is true in the tiny lakeside stadium, and it will be true in Patrick Ryan’s billion-dollar Xanadu where you will still have the experience of being tut-tutted by a Michigan fan who is upset that they are only up by eighteen except now you have to pay like two hundred dollars for the experience.

Pondering the Northwestern Question 

It is only during the non-conference schedule where smaller, far-flung teams are trucked into Evanston that you can experience a pure Northwestern home game. At the old Ryan Field, that meant the stadium was about a third full of parents, onlookers lured by cheap tickets, and high school marching bands all lolling in the blazing early September sun. Northwestern’s quirky quarter system meant that most students were not even on campus for the first several games. But in the diminished college football microdose ecosystem on The Lake, those same scattered fans are a dominant force, the vast majority of the capacity crowd. In some perverse way, this homecoming game against a Sun Belt team from northern Louisiana that has never played Northwestern in football before may have been the most overwhelmingly pro-Northwestern homecoming crowd they’ve ever had by percentage, and perhaps ever will have assuming that they revert to playing homecoming games against Big Ten opponents; in that case they are homecoming games because they are being played closest to their opponents’ homes in the greater Chicagoland area.

There is one game left at The Lake. The stadium is still a minor college football wonder. It feels like pretty much every game there has been in picture-perfect weather designed to look gorgeous on television; the game on Saturday was played on an uncharacteristic and frankly alarmingly warm day for October in Chicago. The end zone seats still have a vast and impenetrable network of poles in the way but this year they have oriented the speakers so you can actually understand the announcer when he bellows that it is time to move the chains instead of hearing him as a warbling Peanuts adult and then you have to turn to the person next to you and say “he said it’s time to move the chains.” I even heard the psychologically satisfying Wildcat Growl noise, which I only learned over the weekend is taken from the intro to a Janet Jackson song and not from an effects library entitled Royalty Free Sports Yowls.

The ‘Cats are now 3-2 with no more FCS teams, Sun Belt squads, or reeling Big Ten teams with recently-fired coaches to feast on before heading into the abattoir of the Big Ten. But a funny thing happened to that UCLA win, and it involves their next opponent.

PENN STATE REALLY BEEFED IT

Last week, while Northwestern’s backups were mopping up the remaining ULM players, a remarkable thing was happening in the Rose Bowl. UCLA, thought to be the worst team in the Big Ten coming off a string of embarrassing losses and a surprisingly feisty loss to Northwestern last week, was leading Penn State in the Rose Bowl. The Bruins jumped up to a major lead, led by their superstar quarterback Nico Iamaleava who finally looked like the guy who justified all of the transfer drama and by interim playcaller Jerry Neuheiser, a former UCLA quarterback and son of former UCLA coach Rick Neuheiser and California Hair Guy whose whimsical blonde coiff is as we speak being digitally scanned by a company that specializes in selling comical 1970s-style toupees for the insecure bald guys who refuse to get the Brian Urlacher Hair Treatment. Penn State rallied back and it came down to a fourth down near the UCLA goal line with the game on the line. Penn State farted around and blew it and produced one of the worst losses in the history of the sport. They showed this on the jumbotron at The Lake and I hope Penn State fans are aware that their team suffered the indignity of being guffawed at by a large group of Northwestern fans.

Penn State fans have been in a state of absolute meltdown for the past week. The Lions, returning the core of a playoff team and fortified with expensive transfers, were lauded before the season and started play as the number two team in the country. They looked kind of mediocre against a very weak schedule building up to a major showdown with Oregon at home at night in a famed Penn State Whiteout game that they lost in overtime. The Oregon loss was another blemish against James Franklin in his dismal record against highly-ranked teams, and the letdown from that game plus what Franklin later described as exhaustion from travel in the first known case of an eastern time zone team claiming a Reverse Body Clocks situation climaxed in the historic collapse against a winless UCLA team. 

"They did Reverse Body Clocks," a despondent Franklin says at his press conference. "It was simply too late for our boys." 

So there you have it: a UCLA team that Northwestern dominated in the first half and sort of crapped around with and unnecessarily made the game come down to the closing seconds in the second was gashing through an expensive Penn State defense. The entire thing was extremely funny except for the fact that Northwestern now has to travel to Penn State (as the homecoming opponent, naturally) letting us enjoy a funny transitive victory for a week. 

Do you have any idea what is going to happen in this game? It could be that Penn State is so broken mentally and riven with conflict and hostility radiating from a maniacal crowd that Northwestern could take them out. The Nittany Lions could also be so mad that they take out all of the frustration out on the ‘Cats and annihilate them. After five games, I don’t really have a good handle on how good Northwestern is. They looked abysmal against Tulane, overmatched against Oregon, and took care of business against Western, ULM, and UCLA. Northwestern has looked better and better each week, but all we have learned is that they had a terrible game to open the season and don’t look good against one of the three best teams in the sport.

 

The Playoff Committee punished Penn State for its brutal loss. But they've waited a week, and now they're going to get revenge... on the Northwestern Wildcats

For many years, we watched Northwestern teams that were on paper much worse than their Big Ten peers manage to go into their stadiums and slop them around so badly that the ‘Cats manage to hold onto a win by their fingernails. It is not impossible for this to happen now, although the presumed gap between a Penn State team with its playoff pedigree and Northwestern is theoretically much greater than the usual scenario of Northwestern surprising a Nebraska team that is getting too big for its britches or a Minnesota team with a backup quarterback. Despite the turmoil and horrible vibes in Happy Valley, the ‘Cats are enormous underdogs.

My guess is that Northwestern will go into a Penn State stadium echoing with chants about firing the coach and the Nittany Lions will win comfortably while its fans grouse the entire time in a very annoying way and then get mad that they didn’t win by enough because everyone who roots for a college football team with expectations is functionally a toddler. The Penn State fans you see catastrophizing on the internet about this game have not watched a single second of Northwestern football since the last time they played Penn State and are just using the Wildcats as a vessel for their angst. But I would invite any of them who claim they actually want Northwestern to win because they are that mad at James Franklin and who have a ridiculous Philadelphia/Delaware County accent to immediately send me a recording of themself saying the words “let’s go Caleb Komolafe.”

Or maybe Penn State is in such disarray that James Franklin does some of his world famous James Franklin-Style Clock Management and they lose and then he instantly flees to a waiting blimp to whisk him off to Stillwater and immediately install him in Mike Gundy’s disused Antler Palace.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

At first Marco Polo and the great Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti could not communicate in the same language. Polo was mystified by what Petitti and his court meant when they kept demanding to see a “deck.” But Petitti soon came to understand Polo’s description of his conference’s far-flung cities that he would never see because there are so many of them through a series of gestures: Polo stomping around like an ungainly giant meant that there were fullbacks there, grabbing his head and pretending to angrily undo a chin strap meant that the city featured an inept Big Ten West-style quarterback, squinting into the middle distance meant an overmatched coach on the hot seat. Eventually, Polo mastered the Commissioner’s language and the Rosemont dialect spoken in his court, but after several conversations, he and Petitti soon decided that the gestures told him much more.

Cities and The Future I: Happylis

The city of Happylis is the great unfinished city of the conference. Every person you talk to in Happylis is excited to tell you about the great treasures that the city will have eventually. Every place you stand is the site of a future monument or edifice. And every person has a different idea what it will be. For example, you can stand in an alley and talk to one Happylisian and he will tell you that you are the foundations of what will be a great museum. Run into another person (the Happylisians are very busy) and she will tell you that you are standing where there will be a brilliant spire with decorations that will bathe the city below in different type of light depending on the position of the sun, turning the entire cityscape in its shadows into a psychdelic art project. It is a city that is becoming.

But while the optimism for the future radiates through every person in Happylis, all of them are despondent about the present. Here, any existing museum is a dump, any existing spire is a ruin, and any existing structure is only a placeholder meant to be demolished and paved way for something larger, bolder, and better. Everywhere there are signs on walls depicting what is going to eventually be there and contrasting signs with differing visions. 

On one building, largely considered the finest and most intricate in Happylis, the entire edifice has been covered in placards going up ten or eleven stories where residents have been feuding for decades about whether it is going to be a luxury hotel or an elaborate arena for laser tag; this argument for several stories until, as you reach the upper floors, the placards give way to personal insults about the person who had made the placard immediately below it. For two stories, the placards go back and forth in threats where the placard-writers threaten to fight each other, sending each other hypothetical combat moves. 

“Pig fucker!” one placard reads. “All you do is write on placards. When I see you in the arboretum (which will eventually be replaced with a helipad) I will do drum fills on your skull with my nunchucks.” “Swine-rutter! I have sketched a picture of my elbow on this placard to exact 1:1 scale so you can prepare for it to meet your solar plexus!” No one, as far as I can tell, has ever fought, and both placard-writers seem content that they had made their point.

The one thing everyone in Happylis can agree on is that the current leadership in the city cannot fulfill their future vision. Everyone spends all day with plans to depose the leader, to throw him in an oubilette. Every poster with his picture, warmly smiling on the site of hypothetical construction, immediately becomes a site for outdoor bowel relief for even the fanciest citizens. Those in their regalia, tails flapping in the wind, elegant evening gowns enmeshed in elaborate scarves that are cut to seem like they come directly from the neck, stop immediately and erect elaborate screens that they carry for this purpose to they can befoul pictures of city leadership. “He will not build the sky library,” one of them tells me as he laps up water to assault an etching of the city leader at a bus station. “That maniac wants to build a sky library” another one on tells me as he charges toward the same image.

For the traveler who is cursed to see Happylis as it is, the city is bustling and idyllic. But after spending any length of time there, the traveler begins to see the city becoming. The entire city becomes subsumed to becoming, the present becomes poisoned. The charming neighborhood becomes a slum, the parks a blemish. The streets curdle and disintegrate. Happylis drowns in its prosperous misery.

You Had Better Have a Coach If You Want to Beat Northwestern At The Lake

The titanic Showdown On The Lake between two Big Ten bottomfeeders scraping for a rare conference win turned out to be a tense, exciting game that came down to the final seconds where Northwestern triumphed as the Kings of the Rot Pile, and I was miserable and fuming.

UCLA came out looking every bit as lousy as advertised. The ‘Cats ran the ball on them at will with Caleb Komolafe steamrolling through their defensive line like it was made out of papier mache and Joseph Himon flying around the outside. They let Griffin Wilde run free in the secondary. Northwestern, a generous donor of the ball early this season, did not turn it over. The UCLA offense, led by heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava, moved the ball a little but continually stalled out. At halftime, the ‘Cats were up 17-3 and on their way to what looked like an easy romp against a profoundly crappy team and one of the most convincing wins against a Big Ten opponent in years.

But in the second half, the game took a turn against the ‘Cats. UCLA got another field goal. Northwestern went on a long, punishing, run-heavy drive that took up a large chunk of the third quarter and into the fourth that got them all the way down to a first and goal at the three, but the ‘Cats couldn’t punch it in, and the field goal was blocked. Somehow, Iamaleava took an offense that was doing little other than getting hit in the solar plexus by Robert Fitzgerald and led a quick drive down the field. All the Bruins needed was a field goal to send the game into overtime. The game went from a casual Wildcat romp to the ‘Cats desperately holding onto the lead with the tips of their fingernails.

Calmly watching the second half of the UCLA game 

The ‘Cats could not get the drive they needed to finally put away UCLA and the Bruins got the ball with 86 seconds left to get into field goal range. I was watching this at like 11:00 at night and had spent the entire afternoon in a hermetically sealed internet bubble to avoid knowing what happened and I was quietly losing my mind and pacing around, anxiously fast forwarding from snap to snap. But there was nothing to worry about. UCLA mounted no real threat to score and the clock ran out on them with the Wildcats triumphing and remaining in a strong position to not be the worst team in the Big Ten this season. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be their biggest win.

When you root for Northwestern, you can’t really get mad at a win. You can watch them flail around against a crummy team or win because of a very stupid mental error by another team or because of what a scientific analysis of other teams’ message boards after losing to Northwestern has determined to be an extremely unfair amount of uncalled holding penalties, very nasty holding penalties, it’s a disgrace with the holding penalties and we’re looking into it very strongly. So I am not going to go on the internet and complain that Northwestern did not win a Big Ten game enough in a period of time where they are averaging like one big ten win a year. We got ‘em. The Bruins came into The Lake with their interim coaches and their fucked up Body Clocks, they didn’t come back, and you can go ahead and chisel that W on the Wildcats’ schedule.

 

Welcoming the west coast teams to Chicago's Big Ten Time Zone, uh file not found for the Oregon game

Maybe it will mean something. Maybe Northwestern can somehow manage to get another couple of wins from more combobulated Big Ten teams and get in prime position in case ESPN runs out of bowl teams. Maybe it will just mean that they won a Big Ten game on The Lake before they fold it up and put the stadium into storage like a crooked circus.

A HOME-STYLE HOMECOMING

As far as I can tell, schools try to schedule their homecoming games against a team they think they can beat, which is why Northwestern plays what seems like at least three road homecoming games every season. Last year, because Northwestern was desperately trying to assemble the lakeside stadium out of scrap metal and lincoln logs, they scheduled one of the funniest homecoming games possible: a late November Wrigley Field game against future national champion Ohio State in a venue that was at least 90% Ohio State fans. I wrote about this last year, but watching all of the stadium attractions programmed to Northwestern Mode in front of probably the most overwhelmingly away-team heavy crowd I have ever seen at an ostensible Northwestern home game was surreal. These people, I thought incredulously, don’t even know who Corey Wootton is.

You think that's Steve Schnur 

This year, Northwestern has taken the opposite tactic. They’re playing on campus at The Lake against a Sun Belt team from Northern Louisiana. I don’t know about the traveling predilections of ULM football fans, but it seems likely that Northwestern’s homecoming will actually feel like a home game, as much as it can feel like a home game in a stadium so small that the crowd noise on the television broadcast sounds like a golf tournament, and not even one of the rowdy golf tournaments like the Waste Management Open where Scottsdale hospitals spend the day full of cases like “fell into pool of own vomit, cactus” and “the warning from the Cialis commercial.”

I would never lie to the readers of this blog unless for some reason I thought it was funny, so I will admit that I know nothing about ULM football. I am not sure I have ever watched a ULM football game, not even the 2012 AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl. Northwestern has never played the Warhawks; even if a ULM team from the earliest days of its program in the 1930s wanted to get on a steamer and head up the Mississippi looking for midwestern football teams to tussle with, they would have to go through far too many squads and take far too many violent 1930s style tackles from Normal Schools and dental colleges especially tough air force reserve programs before they even got to the Quad Cities.

ULM comes into the game 3-1, with wins against FCS Saint Francis, a UTEP team team winless against the FBS, and conference foe Arkansas State. Their only loss was to Alabama, who wiped them out 73-0 in what was probably an expression of the complete derangement of everyone around that program who have reacted the program merely being “pretty good” by a descent into total madness. Northwestern is heavily favored, but the ‘Cats are also a big target. Any team that comes to Northwestern for a paycheck game sees the Wildcats as a rare opportunity to pin a Power Four pelt on their wall.

It’s hard to measure these things, but ULM is possibly a tougher matchup than UCLA. Sure, they don’t have a million-dollar five star transfer quarterback, but their run defense does not appear to graciously usher tailbacks to the first down marker with linemen spreading garlands of flowers before they ineffectually fall down. It’s clear that this year’s Northwestern team wants to just run the ball at ball people as much as possible with their large offensive line, sit on the clock, and happily punt. For six quarters against Western Illinois and in the first half against UCLA, Northwestern looked dominant doing that. If they have to start trying to move the ball beyond just letting Komolafe run over guys and Himon run around them, things may get precarious.

If Northwestern manages a win, they will be 3-2 heading into a gauntlet of a schedule that includes three ranked teams and a Friday night game in Los Angeles against a dangerous USC team. Northwestern does have some games against fellow Big Ten West Slop Alumni, but I have absolutely no idea how competitive the ‘Cats can be against the likes of Nebraska, Minnesota and Even Purdue this year. Whoever took a reeling, Fickell-addled Wisconsin team off the Northwestern schedule this year must be found and held accountable. I don’t have high expectations for this season, but any shred of hope would die with a loss on Saturday. But I do believe that this year’s homecoming has to be better, if only because I assume ULM doesn’t have some weird self-proclaimed mascot guy running around the stadium in body paint.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES I

Tony Petitti does not necessarily believe Marco Polo when he describes the various cities of the Big Ten. In the life of any Conference Commissioner, there is a pride in conquering vast swathes of new territory and a melancholy and relief of knowing he should give up any thought of knowing or understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes in the evening, with the smells of unlimited Brazilian meats waft into his Rosemont headquarters and the traffic from the Jane Addams intensifies into a steady roar of passing cars rather than the grind of stalled traffic, and the din from the Chicago Dogs baseball stadium has died down. Only through the tales from the Venetian explorer could Commissioner Petitti grasp the subtle patterns.

Cities and transportation infrastructure 1: Angelina

Angelina is a great city of roads. The roads form a great circuit around the city and the residents travel through them all day every day to unknowable ends. The city is divided into those who can still remember the purpose for which they set off on the road and those who have forgotten and only travel upon the roads for lack of understanding of what else to do. 

Travelers are constantly broadcasting their complicated routes to other travelers and describing the parts of the city they have heard about– the beaches, the gardens, the tar pits, the elevated street taco place that’s still authentic– they are all constantly explaining these plans and meticulously broadcasting them to other travelers who are making and explaining their own plans. The travelers all take to the airwaves to talk about their routes and then appear on other travelers’ broadcasts to have the same conversation.

Somewhere nestled in the mountains through ribbons of road there is a large, flat, bowl. The sun sparkles on it before setting into a picturesque scene, like a softboiled egg nestled in a purple broth. And yet, the bowl is empty. Travelers discuss games that take place there, they relay explanations of complex plays and detailed descriptions of violent tackles, but no one can verify them since they are not there. They have played an infinite number of games, each one altered by a traveler who has not seen it but has heard of it, the games warp in the retelling and become another game. In some accounts these games turn into perverse spectacle and others turn into farcical comedy, impossible comebacks, the endless, recursive return of onside kicks into touchdowns.

No one has seen the games because no one is there. The travelers of Angelina are circling the stadium in loops simultaneously arriving and departing until it is impossible to determine which is which. It all blurs into the same road.

Cities and waterfowl 1: Eugenia

The citizens of Eugenia complain of neck pain because they are always looking up. Their necks stick that way. Older residents are no longer able to see their own shoes and need to have them placed on by children with more pliant, flexible necks. Toddlers crawl and call out obstacles on the ground to older relatives, an imperfect system since they do not have a keen eye to discern obstacles, but they have been deputized for this important job by being lowest to the ground.

The residents of Eugenia must keep their heads up at all times because the city has a duck. Every day, the man-sized duck flies across the city on a nest of zip lines. The tallest buildings have been repurposed into zip line towers, and this duck zooms around, low to the ground, its webbed feet constantly clattering into unaware heads as distracted citizens are knocked into creeks and merchant stalls filled with fresh fish. Before the Eugenians adopted their signature pose, the duck was knocking scores of people to the ground every day as it zips around toward a purpose that no one has discovered.

Every day, the Eugenia go about their business to the din of the zipline and enter their low-ceilinged buildings where they read and write on their own ceilings and hang their belongings so they do not trip on them. Doctors say it takes five years for outsiders to be able to look up vigilantly enough to avoid the duck and unaware visitors expect to get kicked or belly bumped by a ziplining duck at least three times each day, depending on the duck’s activities.

The people of Eugenia like their duck and are horrified at any suggestion that the duck should be harmed or stopped from maniacally ziplining into the populace. You should get out of its way, they say to anyone who protests. This is simply what the duck does in this city. You should not carry large bundles of eggs or panes of glass. 

The duck is whimsical. Every small joy of looking forward or bending over to smell flowers or even to avoid stepping into a pothole or pile of animal waste is subsumed to the enjoyable spectacle of a duck flying around, hopping from line to line, expertly lining up in front of a baker carrying an enormous layer cake unaware of the duck’s whereabouts. 

No one needs to bicker or spread gossip. The only acceptable topic of conversation in Eugenia is what the duck is up to or speculation about where the duck might be going next or even talking to each other as if they were the duck him or herself even though the duck’s own thoughts are entirely inscrutable. People come to Eugenia with hopes and dreams and fears but they happily subsume them to hopes and dreams and fears about the duck in an annihilating relief.

The duck also has a motorcycle.

The Winning A Big Ten Game In 2025 Bowl

From the final score, it looked close enough. I saw that Northwestern lost to mighty Oregon by only 20 points at The Lake while I was out of town and away from a television, and I was actually pretty excited because what looked going into the game like an inevitable, apocalyptic asskicking that occurs when the Big Ten schedulemakers lob national title contenders at the ‘Cats like Donkeys Kong hucking deadly barrels may have actually featured a portion of the game that was competitive.  But as a service to the readers of this blog, I went out of my way to do some extraordinary research on this and actually watched a large portion of this football game and it turns out that Northwestern just sort of squatted on the ball and scored some garbage time touchdowns when already down 34-0 against whatever Eugene-area toughs could be put into Oregon jerseys for the fourth quarter. And my analysis is: that's a bummer.

Northwestern freshman Dashun Reeder zooms for 79 yards in a thrilling moment for anyone degenerate enough to bet on Northwestern football

Still, there were some positives to take from this game.  Without Cam Porter, the ‘Cats were still able to string together a respectable running game with a steady diet Caleb Komolafe and Joseph Himon.  In fact, there were portions of the first drive, perhaps while the Ducks were still under thrall of the treacherous Central Time Zone and its attendant black magicks affecting West Coast Teams, when the Northwestern offensive line was actually sort of shoving around Oregon.  But that was about it.  The Northwestern offense went dormant, the defense couldn’t keep Oregon and its Heisman candidate quarterback Dante Moore bottled up, and the result was pretty much what everyone had expected.  

But the Oregon game doesn’t matter because Northwestern has much more important things on its plate: the UCLA Bruins are coming to the Lake on Saturday and so far they have looked extremely crappy.  In their last game, they got blown out by New Mexico and fired their coach, classic early 2000s Fantasy Football Guy DaShaun Foster.  This is a big game; for both programs it represents potentially the only Big Ten win on their schedule.

The firing of DeShaun Foster is a blow to the Early 2000s Fantasy Football Guys Community and I'm sure there was a somber group text among Priest Homes and Az-Zahir Hakim, and Michael Turner

The Big Ten seemed to sense the importance of this game.  Both UCLA and Northwestern had byes last week, and they have both been revving up like friction motor cars to smash into each other.  The Big Ten or TV people or whoever sets the schedule even gave UCLA a Body Clock-friendly 2:30 kickoff.  It’s a classic contest of Disarray versus Ennui.

At first when I saw what happened to UCLA and was only aware of the score of the Oregon game, I was extremely confident.  A coachless team would come into the Lake, and Northwestern, by virtue of being a coherent football program, would beat them decisively and claim the crown as the sixteenth or seventeenth best Big Ten team as we had been promised.  Having viewed the carnage of the Oregon game now, and knowing that the Bruins have had an extra week to jell under interim coach Tim Skipper, I’m more worried.

Firing a coach after three games usually mires a team in misery as everyone involved begins making plans, especially in the time of the transfer portal where UCLA’s players can find lifelines to a better program. On the other hand, as we saw with Northwestern two years ago albeit under very different and more sordid circumstances, an interim coach can galvanize a team.  While UCLA has been awful, Northwestern has not been competitive against either FBS team on its schedule.  The stakes could not be higher: a loss on Saturday would make it very difficult to believe the ‘Cats will have a shot against another Big Ten team, even Purdue. 

You know you are writing about Northwestern football when you have to start sentences with the ominous phrase "Even Purdue" 

In its brief sojourn from Ryan Field, the Wildcats have yet to win a conference game at The Lake.  They have also not yet won a game at Wrigley Field since they started playing there in 2010 and in the subsequent games when they were allowed to have more than one end zone.  Northwestern perhaps needs the dingy, miserablist atmosphere of rusted bleachers and loose hot dogs served in a pop cup because they ran out of buns in order to intimidate and demoralize Big Ten opponents.  Or you could say they just keep facing good teams at home and at Wrigley during a couple of relatively down years, but I’m going to forget about that and assume they need the constant yawping of the Wildcat Noise in order to function at the highest level, qualifying for the Gronk Goin The World's First Rob Gronkowski-Based Crypto Currency Bowl.

The stakes could not be higher for either team, and this is clearly a “must win” for both programs if they want to avoid complete collapse.  A bowl game already seems unreachable for both teams but it is impossible to imagine either team doing anything remotely good this season without a win on Saturday.  This game is a desperate fight for merely a lousy season instead of a complete disaster.  College football doesn’t get any better than this.

UCLA'S JOE BRUIN PRESENTS: THE REMAINS OF THE SEASON 

It appears that my trip to the Mid West is more likely to happen.  I spoke to Interim Coach Skipper and he told me I did not need to remain with the team while they performed their calisthenics and tackling rituals and that I should take a golf cart that says “Bruins Football” and is used to cart around players with broken femurs and drive up to the Evanston area.

The football facility has been more empty than it was in the days of Coach Foster.  In those days, it was full of visiting dignitaries: Bill Walton, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, even Stephen Davis.  The best of the Professional Sports landscape convened here, and I was very busy fist-pumping at them and carrying various flags, and occasionally doing complicated hand-slapping rituals with their children. Coach Skipper has favored a more austere environment, wanting the players to focus on the fundamentals and not as he said “taking selfies doing butt bumps with the mascot.”  These are not the ideal conditions for mascotry, but I also believe that the professional is able to work within whatever restrictions the Coach sets.

I have, with other professionals, discussed the essential traits of a good mascot. I believe that the essence of good mascotting comes from the principle of buffoonery. The mascot must be a silly, jovial oaf whose antics entertain the crowd without ever becoming a sad or macabre spectacle. One’s thoughts naturally turn to stories of the infamous inflatable velociraptor who attempted to rollerskate down stars, slipped, and went flying as its mouth flopped open in a disgusting, leering spectacle, its tail deflating in silence as it was swarmed by medical personnel. The crowd was not guffawing but terrified that the fool had broken his limbs. My colleague, the duck from Oregon with whom I had passed many hours discussing the finer points of our profession, also pointed to the time the Denver Nuggets mountain lion passed out while being lowered from the arena ceiling before landing on the floor in a lifeless heap in a demonstration that looked like a warning sent from a rival mascot crime family.

The professional mascot should charm and delight, unlike, for example, the dreadful Stanford “tree.” I had endured its disgraceful antics for several years every time it visited, many times suspiciously wavering and tottering in an amateurish stomach-turning parody of the types of wholesome capering about one should expect from a trained mascot.

It is difficult to describe what I mean by professionalism in buffoonery, but I often heard this anecdote from my father, also named Joe Bruin. He told me that he heard of a mascot who had gone over to a section filled with rowdy children who had spent hours at a tailgate ingesting the type of candy where one licks a sugary stick and then swirls it around in pure sugar, and he had een warned that these children had already been chided for roughhousing. Nevertheless, the mascot walked over there, greeted the children and the largest and most aggressive went in for what appeared to be a hug before kicking the mascot in the most sensitive of regions. He wandered off into the tunnel to shake off the pain before returning to the section and another child then repeated the motion. Once again he returned to the tunnel before going out again, knowing the fate that awaited his most delicate parts, and once again another child delivered. A cheerleader organizing t-shirts to be thrown to the crowd said you cannot keep going out there, please find another section, but the intrepid mascot, without flinching, took another five kicks and one punch without showing pain, discomfort, or disgust, and managed to high five and take photos with more than a dozen children in the section. The mascot completed the game before retreating to his quarters with a package of frozen peas, a job honorably and professionally done.

Many mascots become briefly fashionable as the ideal of the profession.  For a time, I suppose it was Gritty, a hockey mascot with maniacal eyes and a morbid, terrifying grin.  I suppose those in the profession valued a mascot who appears to be performing his duties with the unhinged enthusiasm of an escaped maniac, but I suspect it will not be long until the pendulum swings in the other direction and the professional standard defaults to those of us who have perfected the more subtle mascotry arts instead of flashy, fashionable antics such as breakdancing or leaping from a trampoline and dunking flaming basketballs before getting immediately sprayed by a team with fire extinguishers.

I motored up the scenic environs of Interstate 90 from the airport, bludgeoned by the ubiquity of Brian Urlacher hair replacement billboards.  Urlacher is himself one of the most famous Lobos from New Mexico, a program that contributed to an incident that led to the ouster of Coach Foster.  I do not care for the slanderous insinuations about Coach Foster.  In my experience, Coach Foster was a good, honorable coach who acted from the most noble instincts of his way of life. I do not believe that it was a defect of character that led to the team deploying their linebackers ineffectively against the relentless New Mexico rushing attack, nor do I think it was his intention to put heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava in a position where his statistics are well below where they had been at the University of Tennessee even though he had deployed a large section of the program’s resources to bring him over to our facility.  
It is not the job of the mascot to question the Coach on the direction of the program but only to stir up the fans in support, to do pushups after scoring touchdowns, and to never hang one’s head or be caught by cameras in the “surrender cobra” position after an ill-advised turnover or defensive breakdown. These things are simply not done by the professional mascot.

As I motored up the twisting byways of Evanston, I could not help but think of how things had been in the heady early days of Coach Foster’s leadership.  In those days, we had a larger staff of mascots, particularly with my colleague Josephine Bruin. From time to time, she would try to show me videos of other mascots such as the time Tommy Lasorda tried to assault the Philadelphia Phanatic after it made a series of provocative belly shakes in his direction and the old Coach was offended enough to try to steal the Phanatic’s personal ATV and to knock down the mascot and beat him with the Phanatic’s own crude effigy of himself, a video that I admit I had watched alone in my parlor during off-hours several times and found very amusing despite the Phanatic's actions that went beyond what I feel is appropriate mascot behavior.

Of course, I had explained that I was far too busy attending to my duties: checking “Let’s Go Bruins” cards to make sure that no one had slipped in a card with obscenities, combing the costume fur, cleaning and oiling every part of the hot dog gun to make sure that it fired consistently and regularly but would not cause an injury to a spectator's face. I suggested if she has time to watch Phanatic videos, she surely had time to take comical photos with Jonathan Ogden where he looks enormous compared to even the largest mascot heads, as I had been alerted that he had just arrived on campus.

I arrived at the Lake and saw another mascot just sitting there, saying perhaps to no one in particular how much he enjoyed the smell of dying fish in the air on a crisp autumn day.  He turned to me and noticed that I too was a mascot.  He asked where I had come from and I told him I was the Bruin after working for the interim Coach. I am not sure why I did not mention working for Coach Foster. 

The Wildcat told me he was slightly embarrassed discussing important matters of mascotry with me, a mascot who worked in the Rose Bowl while he was at home in a stadium that fits fewer people than our basketball arena.  But we both, I suppose, were working at difficult times.  “I have heard that previous mascots here were locked in a cage until Northwestern scored, which rarely happened, back in the ‘80s,” the Wildcat said.  I resolved that no matter what happened that afternoon I would learn some of the more restrained antics that Coach Skipper preferred, perhaps a Jose Canseco-style forearm bump.

Duck Off

Northwestern looked so lousy in the opening game of the season against Tulane that it seemed that the ‘Cats could struggle against FCS jobber Western Illinois in the home opener on The Lake. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that they could even lose, although you would like to think that even the lowest tier of Big Ten team could easily handle Western Illinois in front of a home crowd of several dozen Northwestern fans and the occasional windsurfer jauntily passing by the stadium. And they did. Northwestern bulldozed their less north and further western neighbors to a 42-7 drubbing and while I am skeptical that this tells us anything other than the difference in the type of athlete that even Northwestern can recruit over their FCS counterparts, I am also making the extremely brave and controversial assertion that it still fun to see them get a buttkicking win before getting fed into the Big Ten woodchipper.

Quarterback Preston Stone recovered from his tough first outing with a much better game with no turnovers and three touchdowns as he and receiver Griffin Wilde (pronounced more like Wildebeest than Wild) torched the Western secondary. Stone needed a little luck to avoid some turnovers– his first pass clipped through a defender’s hands like he was a character in a CD ROM football game before settling into Wilde’s mitts, and he also had a fumble bounce directly back into his hands with the practiced precision of an Australian football player– but he looked closer to the player that we saw in highlight reels from his first three years at SMU.

The highlight of the game for me was in the fourth quarter with the ‘Cats already up 35-0 when backup quarterback Ryan Boe ran the ball and stiff-armed a defender into orbit around Pluto en route to a glorious 58-yard touchdown run in garbage time. In a year that certainly looks like tough sledding for the Wildcats, I will take any play that results in a defensive player all but holding up a Wile E. Coyote sign before getting stiff-armed into oblivion.

Boe makes someone yell "B'oh!"

Unfortunately, the game had one disastrous outcome for Northwestern. Cam Porter, the steady sixth-year captain, injured his knee and will miss the rest of the season. Porter already recovered from a devastating knee injury once and has been a reliable presence in the backfield and on the sidelines since he first entered the program in 2020. With all of his accrued seasons, it is possible that Porter is the most Northwestern player, having played an unfathomable amount of Northwestern football. He’s also been a player that every teammate and coach has raved about, and it is crushing that the injury will likely end his tenure-track career in Evanston unless he is able to successfully apply for a medical redshirt and return for a seventh year by convincing the NCAA that it would be “a great bit.” 

I'm glad Northwestern got to wipe out an opponent in the home opener because the schedule makers have decided to make Northwestern go from blowing out an FCS team to having to face a rabid brontosaurus. Number four Oregon shows up as a profoundly unwanted guest this week.

DUCK SEASON 

Oregon comes to The Lake on Saturday after vaporizing both teams on its schedule. Last week they clobbered Oklahoma State and its coach, the physical manifestation of the Wilson volleyball from Castaway, 69-3. No one expects this to be a competitive game even after the Wildcats diced up the Western Illinois Leathernecks. Like every game Northwestern has to play against one of the terrifying title contenders in the conference, the goal here is not necessarily to win but to annoy and disgust the opponent with a display of what can best be described as Northwestern-style football. The 'Cats, for example, held national champion Ohio State to a 7-0 deficit for a decent part of the first half last season and though the game very quickly turned in the way that you would expect it to go, we at least got to luxuriate in 40,000 sour-faced Ohio State fans glowering and looking to comfort from the guy who puts on silver body paint as they furiously turned to their phones to see if it was legal for Northwestern to repeatedly throw complete passes for nearly an entire half hour.  David Braun, the Maestro of Embarrassing Field Goals, is likely itching to send out his kicking unit down 30 points in the fourth quarter.

The thing to me that is most interesting about this game is what the atmosphere will be like. This is the first time one of the new west coast teams will travel to Evanston and I believe that Oregon is one of the only Big Ten teams where there are fewer alumni and fans of a team living in the Chicago area than people affiliated with Northwestern. Because of the novelty of the setting, because Oregon is really good, and because I suspect some season ticket holders are more eager to turn a tidy profit than watch the team picked up and carried back and forth across the field for four hours, I suspect Oregon fans will still have an overwhelming presence at the game, but there will probably be more of them that had to get on an airplane to get here instead of a Metra train.

This is also Fox’s Big Noon Game that will be nationally televised for some reason and involve Fox and its studio crew of noxious, yelping morons posting up at the lakeside stadium.  Gus Johnson is on the call and I presume that he has covered himself in Memento-style tattoos that say “Northwestern is not Wisconsin” after his embarrassing gaffe in the 2018 Big Ten Championship Game that I constantly bring up because it is one of the rare times Northwestern football was nationally prominent for something other than Allegations, Lawsuits, or Uniform Disrespect.  As I am writing this, Urban Meyer is loose and unaccounted for in the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area, and it is possible he has deactivated his tracking device and Fox Sports personnel have been urgently dispatched to the area's most depressing suburban steak houses. 

I still can't get over the scandal that Urban Meyer allegedly kicked the Jaguars' kicker like he is doling out an evil ironic punishment like a direct-to-video horror movie villain.

Oregon apparently has an enormous floating duck that it occasionally deploys, and there have been calls for it to appear on the lake during this game. I think it is a reasonable response that Northwestern fans immediately form into a Waterworld-style jetski gang to take that thing down as a warning to other teams with inflatables and also to P.J. Fleck.

 

September 2025, Oregon is now master of the Big Ten. Only the Northwestern Armada fleet stands before them- Lakes are now battlefields.

College football is goofy and unpredictable, but defeating this Oregon team seems like a nearly impossible task-- a win against Oregon would be the largest upset in the modern history of the program or at least second to the Wildcats' win over Any Football Team in 1982. The Ducks will be competing for the national championship while Northwestern looks like their goal will be winning a Big Ten game. 

Oregon has not been in the Big Ten long enough to annoy me. In fact, Oregon has never beaten Northwestern as the 'Cats hold a 1-0 record over them from a 14-10 road victory in 1974.  While I am sure that I will eventually grow disgusted with the Ducks after being exposed to them long enough, I would rather have them win over any other traditional Big Ten power whose harrumphing, gloating fans have infected Ryan Field since I have been going to games.

If somehow Northwestern by some minor miracle manages to win this game, I will write and release a single called “Body Clocks” on the most appropriate label.

THE CHICAGO BULLS DROP THE GIDDEY BOMB

Tuesday was a rough day for Chicago sports fans who had waited all offseason to watch their supposed offensive genius head coach and highly-touted second year quarterback only to instantly be reminded that they root for the Chicago Bears and will have to endure what looks like another season of grim Bears-style football.  That was the day that, with the sports radio lines clogged with men choking on the wettest beefs legally available while furiously calling for Tyson Bagent, the Chicago Bulls announced to an already deflated and miserable fanbase that they will have to put up with Josh Giddey for four years.

Giddey, a 22 year-old Australian who is already entering his 4th year in the NBA, had been in a standoff with the Bulls all summer.  The Bulls traded for him by sending beloved superstar role player Alex Caruso, a brilliant defensive menace, to the Okalahoma City Thunder straight up without even getting a token draft pick.  Caruso instantly became a key part of the Thunder's championship team while the Bulls were once again 86'd from the play-in tournament the Miami Heat as is their custom, this time by a profoundly crappy and injured Heat team that had not beaten the Bulls all season.  

Giddey reportedly demanded starting point guard money but as a restricted free agent in a league where no one had cap space and also have access to numbers that say that he is not particularly good that apparently elude the Bulls' analytics department that I think is just one guy playing spider solitaire who occasionally sends the front office one of those fake spread sheets generated by the Boss Button on the NCAA tournament streaming website, so he had little leverage. The result was the exact deal that everyone expected the Bulls to give him for months but arrived at only after his team and the Bulls exchanged vaguely hostile emails for three months.

Giddey is a weird player.  He is very big for a point guard at 6'8" and he is an excellent rebounder and passer who routinely flirts with triple doubles and puts up combinations of stats that allow the Bulls broadcast to put up graphics that say things like "the only people who have ever scored 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 16 assists twice in a calendar month under the age of 22 are Earvin 'Magic' Johnson and  Josh Giddey" even if he put up those numbers in a depressing loss to the Charlotte Hornets. He largely steers a fun, uptempo style of play installed by Billy Donovan after the Bulls ran out of NBA-caliber defensive players last season and is responsible for one of the greatest Stacey King calls since Andres Nocioni dunked on a backup center and he started screaming "GET OUT OF THE WAY FAMILY GUY" because of the center's oblong-shaped head reminded him of the baby character.

On the other hand, Giddey despite his size is an abominable defender, a lackluster shooter, and an oafish dribbler who is constantly giving the ball to the opponents. He is also not particularly athletic for an NBA player; he moves like he is a recently-enchanted broom from the movie Fantasia.  His game is pretty much the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art NBA star in 2025, and it's possible that what he can't do is much worse for a team than his box score stuffing contributions.  You can read from actual Basketball Knowers about Giddey rather than taking my word for it; I couldn't even watch Giddey's disastrous first half of the season because the Bulls played on a channel that I needed to buy an antenna to watch and now shows nothing but low-rent MMA events that look like montages in one of the several dozen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies where he enters an underground fighting tournament.

The Bulls had a star for years with obvious shortcomings in his game that fans and the general NBA world fixated on in Zach LaVine, but LaVine was better at the much more important skill of scoring than Giddey is at anything, and the Bulls were barely able to give him away because of his crummy defense and mediocre playmaking.  I don't expect that the Bulls will do much better with Giddey as the focal point.

There are a couple of troublesome aspects of the Giddey contract in the broader strategic sense.  One of them comes from the annoying metagame involving the Bulls salary cap.  Giddey, whose four-year $100 million deal is fairly modest for a starting point guard, is still making a few million dollars more per year than the Bulls could have perhaps gotten away with if they had really pressured him.  I don't want to care about how much money players make nor root for front offices to squeeze them, but in a salary cap league where individual payments are apparently so important that there are very popular and influential podcasts where guys just list off how much money everyone makes for hours every day like a bizarre numbers station, it is true that any dollar Giddey makes theoretically takes away the Bulls' flexibility to bring in better players to put around him-- this is of course assuming that bringing in good players was the goal of the Bulls instead of Arturas Karnisovas doing a weird avant-garde art project with a basketball roster to prove a point that eludes me.

I am also very sorry to bring up Giddey's effect on the the profoundly depressing metagame of tanking.  Giddey and the style the Bulls play with him is probably good enough for them to win enough regular season games to take them out of the running for what analysts say is a draft laden with potential stars near the top.  That doesn't mean they will have no shot at drafting a Rowdy Boozer Son-- assuming the Bulls have another season hovering around the desolate environs of the Eastern Conference play-in tournament race, they could still jump up in the draft order.  The Bulls were apparently a coin flip with the Mavericks away from landing prized Duke freshman Cooper Flagg; the state of the Chicago Bulls is such that they are even getting their asses kicked by coin flips.  I personally hate tanking and find the idea of wasting everyone's time trying to intentionally lose a disgusting pursuit, but it pains me to admit that it is also the most viable way to land a superstar unless you are the fucking Los Angeles Lakers.

The fact that Giddey is merely a flawed basketball player who won't make the Bulls better than mediocre is not something that really bothers me since that is basically every basketball player the Bulls roster. Even as the Bulls have been a largely crummy and enervating to watch the last few years, the players on the team seemed to be good guys who liked each other and had fun playing uninspiring basketball. Giddey, who came to the Bulls under a cloud of gross allegations, is not someone I particularly want to root for, and it's a bummer to have my favorite team chained to him for four years.  Fortunately, the Bulls are going to vanish from my TV unless I pay an exorbitant amount of money to watch Jerry Reinsdorf's horrible sports teams, so perhaps the Josh Giddey Bulls will no longer be my problem.

Worst Dressed

There is not much to say about Northwestern’s opening game against Tulane other than they got their butts kicked very badly and it stunk. The Green Wave won 23-3 and it could have been worse than that. Maybe only General Edward Parkenham can claim to have had more unpleasant days in New Orleans.

The Northwestern offense, which even in good years merely exists to distastefully score points because it is not technically legal to win a college football game by a contest of sprinting into an opposing running back the most, did not impress in the debut of new transfer quarterback Preston Stone. Stone threw four interceptions and lost a ball after getting sacked– the Wildcats were only able to successfully run one of their first three plays without turning the ball over which sounds grim but if you look at the totality of the game the Wildcats managed to run a play without giving up the ball about 92% of the time.

The ‘Cats did manage one decent drive down inside the five yardline, but they elected to kick a field goal. Strategically I suppose there is nothing wrong with getting some points to narrow the score to 7-3 in the first quarter; on the other hand, based on how Northwestern’s offense has performed for the last decade, I would like to see them throw caution to the wind instead of assuming that they will just drive down the field again when most Wildcat possessions resemble a Labor of Hercules. David Braun is the Maestro of Cowardly Field Goal Attempts, and next time they get to a fourth down inside the five the crowd should clap politely as Braun enters the field of play in a tailed tuxedo, takes out a baton, and then cues the field goal unit with the wild élan of the great Leonard Bernstein to rapturous ovations.

Critics say Braun's interpretation of "Sending In the Punt Team" is "too American." 

The game would have been miserable to watch, but fortunately due to the Big Ten’s media deal that scatters games across networks and streaming services with the reckless abandon of an eighteenth century French Marquess tossing coins from his carriage while focusing entirely on how he plans to destroy his rival by making several subtle yet cutting remarks about inability to align his wig correctly, I was unable to get this game on TV. It was just me, WGN Radio's “Mr. Cat” Dave Eanet, and various household tasks punctuated by a regular drumbeat of interceptions.

Tulane is an excellent team with ambitions to claim a playoff spot out of the American Conference and Northwestern is at best the second-worst team in the Big Ten. But the game dealt a dispiriting blow to anyone hoping to see the Wildcats pushing for a bowl berth or even being able to stay on the field against lesser Big Ten opponents. The only heartening thing left to believe is that Northwestern came out similarly flat against Rutgers in the 2023 opener that was scheduled as part of a “You’ll Even Watch This Slop” Opening Weekend. The ‘Cats were towed around the field in that game too, and their performance along with the looming stench of scandal made it seem like the football program would simply be packed up in a truck and left in a warehouse and if anyone showed up to the stadium to watch a game there’d just be a guy there shouting back to some people in the back “Football? Hey anyone remember at football team here? Oh? Those guys? Oh, yeah. He said they left.” Instead, they managed to win seven games, crush the Badgers in Madison, and win a bowl game. 

The game could have been a normal low-key Northwestern butt-stomping, but all of the attention after the game had nothing to do with anything that happened on the field but with the jerseys the teams were wearing. After his Green Wave had finished mopping up the Wildcats, Tulane coach Jon Sumrall said that Northwestern had denied their request to wear white jerseys, which were the jerseys Tulane had worn in their first game after Hurricane Katrina had displaced them from their home stadium 20 years earlier. Northwestern claims they only received the request on August 17th and did not have time to change their uniforms without saying whether or not they were willing to. “When you show disrespect to the city of New Orleans, that’s what’s going to happen to you,” Sumrall said of the sartorial dustup. 

It seems reasonable to ask why Northwestern would not simply do what they could to accommodate this request and why it would even be a question but the I believe that the answer runs into extremely stupid Football Logic about the questionable strategic benefit of wearing white in hot, humid weather. Northwestern likely wanted to aid its plodding, snow-conditioned players any way they can to cope with the Louisiana heat; I have been told it is illegal for linebackers on the field to fan themselves like it is an early twentieth century courtroom drama. Perhaps Northwestern’s coaches felt like Sumrall was himself cynically chasing this advantage with his request; more likely, they underestimated or did not care about the importance of Tulane’s white uniforms as a symbol of New Orleans’s resilience in the aftermath of the hurricane.

What seemed to happen by my own reading of events as some guy who has no inside information or insight into how the team operates is that whoever made the uniform decisions really valued the infinitesimal perceived cooling power of white uniforms over the risk of looking like giant assholes. While I understand why Sumrall was upset about the uniforms, I do think it was unfair of him to not mention that the Wildcats made up for it by charitably handing the ball to Tulane players repeatedly.

Northwestern has upgraded its uniform debacles to Insensitive from Depicting What Appears To Be The Aftermath of a Massacre Perpetrated by a Public Domain Captain America 

After dealing with dozens of lawsuits from players and firing a coach and then getting sued by him and also the offensive coordinator (I am unaware of the results of the Mike Bajakian lawsuit, but if it ends anything like the Fitzgerald suit, the university will be forced to put out a press release with then-athletic director Derrick Gragg officially apologizing for disparaging his "Cats Against The World" t-shirt), it seems like the Northwestern football program is only in the news when doing something dumb or embarrassing. As a fan, I would very much like to support a team that has normal college football scandals and am willing to throw myself at the mercy of the NCAA by illegally buying a football player a burrito. That's the kind of thing Northwestern should be about instead of seeing headlines like "Wildcats Coach: No Disrespect Meant To Tulane."

The Wildcats get a chance to get back on track with their home opener at The Lake against Western Illinois. The Leathernecks are an FCS squad and the hope is that Northwestern will easily defeat them, Stone can gain some confidence, and the team will not get into a feud with them over the jersey selection. I would have thought these teams would have played a bunch of times dating back to the early years of the twentieth century, but they've only played once, a 24-7 Northwestern victory that happened in 2014. That's not the sepia toned history I was hoping for-- in fact I was at that game and have just now remembered that it was the game where Pat Fitzgerald called three successive timeouts at the end of the first half to successfully ice the Western kicker, which I remember that because I know that I badly photoshopped a picture of Fitzgerald's face onto Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Mr. Freeze. I wrote all of that without even looking at the post even though a few weeks ago I went for a bike ride for several hours and left all of my keys just hanging out in the lock on the front door.

These FCS games are never that fun. Even if they win fairly comfortably, there's usually a nagging feeling that they should be winning by more. Only a win so convincing that the Western Illinois coach takes the team and leaves at halftime only leaving a note that this isn't fun anymore is satisfying. There is also the risk that they could actually lose. Northwestern has two losses to FCS teams on its XBOX Achievement page and crazy stuff happens in football-- the 2016 team that went 5-4 in the Big Ten and beat Pittsburgh in a bowl game lost to Illinois State on a last-second field goal after being held to seven points. There is nothing worse than a team losing to a designated jobber opponent after paying them millions just to show up unless this happens to another Big Ten team in which case it is extremely funny.

AT LEAST WE ALL GOT TO SEE BILL BELICHICK EAT SHIT

College football is a huge business and commands tens of millions of eyeballs, but for ESPN and college football media that is not enough and there is nothing more exciting for them than when a famous NFL Guy deigns to return to the college ranks. For many years, that person was Deion Sanders, the brash, larger than life NFL superstar who loves the spotlight and used an entire college football program as a vehicle to launch his sons' NFL careers. Though Deion has somewhat unexpectedly stuck around at Colorado even after his son Shedeur went pro through a process that turned ESPN's draft guru Mel Kiper, Jr. into the Joker on national television, ESPN has been laser focused on a new coach, Patriots mastermind Bill Belichick.

Belichick has the opposite media profile from Sanders. He spent his decades in New England glowering on the sidelines, disdainfully giving curt, contemptuous answers to the press, and acted like he would prefer to call games from a cave where he could be alone with his special teams film from 1971. He has no charisma. And yet, because the Patriots won championships with a joyless factory-like efficiency throughout this 2000s, he has become extremely famous. Belichick could have retreated back to Nantucket to enjoy his riches away from the spotlight but unfortunately his legendary quarterback left, his post-Brady Patriots teams plummeted in the standings, he got essentially fired by the team owner who he was also feuding with, and he could not get another NFL job because the 2020s version of Bill Belichick who has locked himself in a football bubble and will only hire the sycophants and flunkies whose football knowledge is sealed in amber around the year 2008 or his own very upsetting sons is not really up for coaching anymore, and this clearly has made him go insane and desperately try to chase the high of being thought of as a mastermind and genius again. Belichick, out of ideas, went back to school.

Belichick arrived to enormous fanfare at the University of North Carolina over the summer but with an uncharacteristic media circus. That is because Belichick also has new developments in his personal life as he is dating a much younger lady who is also taking a prominent position promoting his personal brand. That relationship came to prominence while Belichik was simultaneously installing himself at the head of UNC Football and promoting one of those bullshit "Winning Winners Who Win The Winning Ways in Football... And In Business" books that old coaches publish and then talk about in depressing mandatory corporate conferences where they are paid more money for a 90 minute talk comparing business-to-business sales to scoring touchdowns than you and I will make for a decade.  His appearances with Jordon Hudson that involved her yelling at a reporter doing a fluff piece for CBS News, a multipart investigation by Pablo Torre about Hudson and her role at UNC that raised questions of whether she was technically banned from the facilities and also for some reason revealed the location of the rental house where Belichick was caught shambling shirtlessly from by a doorbell camera, made this a major sports story over the summer. 

Torre tried to emphasize the less tawdry parts of the story, emphasizing that Belichick is now an employee of the state of North Carolina, but I think most people can admit that Belichick was in the news because of the prurient tabloid interest in the gruffest, most joyless man in the NFL swanning around with a lady young enough to be his granddaughter who is trying to launch a media branding career centering on a miserable sweatshirt-ogre who is only willing to talk publicly about obscure punting rules. I've personally made fun of this whole thing obliquely and directly in a post that contains the two grossest sentences I've ever shared publicly and therefore haven't really posted about much because I am afraid people will yell at me.

But the other dimension of the story that came to a head Monday night was that Belichick, after all of the stories and the attention, would have to coach a football game. Belichick, the great NFL Mastermind was coming to show college teams how the football is played along with his most unemployable henchmen and an unknown number of his grim, post-apocalyptic sons, and when ESPN put UNC on national television on Monday night of a holiday weekend the Tarheels got absolutely smoked by TCU. It was not only very funny but also one of the best online sports events we've had in awhile as the entire internet together to celebrate watching some nasty geriatric dickhead completely annihilated in one of the few endeavors we have left where nasty geriatric dickheads can't simply lie and say "actually we won the game and in fact won it very strongly."  

LOOKING WESTWARD 

The 'Cats will need to get their act together against Western Illinois because #6 Oregon comes to The Lake the next week, and things do not get much easier after that.  While Northwestern has already started off the season on the worst possible footing, the only shred of hope is that there is a whole season still ahead of them with opportunities to improve, to possibly shock an opponent, and to also hastily apologize to someone else.  

Winning the Argument

One of the defining features of the early 2000s that went hand in hand with the increasing spread of the internet was a clear dichotomy between old-fashioned "dumb" and new-fangled, stats-inflected "smart" sports opinions.  This manifested itself most clearly in baseball, where an emerging vanguard of stats-focused fans and analysts got a stronger foothold into the mainstream with game-changing revelations like “it is bad to make outs for no reason.” It helped that the opponents were a true rogue’s gallery of oafs and dunderheads: baseball lifers marinated in a cocoon of tobacco juice, mummified local announcers telling decades-old Mickey Mantle anecdotes, and newspaper columnists (there were still locally well-known newspaper columnists) who were photographed grimacing over typewriters and churning out sentence-paragraphs about how there’s only one stat that matters and it’s Heart. 

Their argument was based on That's How It's Always Been Done, This Smacks of Math That Belongs in a Mother's Basement, and That's Not How The Mick Would Have Done It even though I have conclusively proven in this blog over the years that the existence of a ballplayer named "Mickey Mantle" was invented by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal as a CIA psy-op on Baby Boomers in 1988. Despite the fact that these people controlled 90% of the narrative in the game and had most of the airtime, they were, to anyone remotely capable of listening to reason, buffoons.

Eventually the rational argument won out. Stats guys replaced grizzled former players in front offices. Managers are now jacked 45 year-olds in hoodies, replacing the pot-bellied, hooch-nosed older breed who all regardless of their actual age appeared to be 77 years old after a lifetime of exposure to the sun, liquor, and the fact that 43% of all plate appearances before 1993 involved a guy getting a baseball thrown at his face because he may have smiled at some point. Baseball broadcasts now feature statistics that come from sophisticated cameras measuring every movement that happens on a diamond. All of the Hat Guy sports columnists took buyouts or retired and have been replaced by a bot dispensing gambling advice.  

But what did the baseball fan gain from this? Front offices are obsessed with efficiency meaning they have a justification to avoid signing pricey free agents. The three true outcomes-style of optimized baseball is more boring than the objectively stupider method of having little slap hitters out there running around. Every team is run by a hair gel guy wearing one of those investment vests instead of a crusty baseball creature who makes dumb trades in order to feel alive. Starting pitching is disappearing from the game as dozens of identical guys who throw 98 with nasty movement are beltfed from the bullpen and are constantly bouncing between the majors and minors and subsequently batters just get up there and strike out. It’s enough to make you want to turn on the moneyball movie and hope John Connor has traveled back in time to take out Jonah Hill before he can start replacing production in the aggregate.

Another classic early 2000s "smart guy" sports opinion was to demand a college football playoff.  The concept of a college football championship had been, for most of its history, a process where the most boorish second-generation ski-doo salesmen in each state yell at each other and hire airplane billboards in order to essentially demand their team win a national championship.  Every once in awhile, teams just go back in history and decide they won a championship like they are forging documents to claim a minor principality in the Holy Roman Empire.  The entire sport was based on hollerin’.  To a rational person, this was incredibly stupid. Why not just have the best teams play each other?

Finally, college football acted and arranged for the two best teams to meet in a national championship game. Unfortunately there was rarely a consensus about who the two best teams were, and more often than not the answer was more hollerin’ and also bellyaching by the team or teams left out as expressed by rude airplane banners.  It seemed to make sense to simply do what every other level of football does and simply have a playoff. So they unleashed a playoff that is constantly growing and threatening to swallow the entire sport.

An institution as corrupt and rickety as college football could not elegantly implement a playoff.  They decided to ignore all of the rankings that had traditionally been used and consecrate a conclave of recently retired coaches and athletic directors and the occasional war criminal to disappear themselves into bland executive hotel conference rooms and emerge with their own rankings based on mysterious and whimsical criteria.  Every week the square tie knot ESPN guys have to go on TV and guess at what the Committee was thinking by portentously intoning that "By its new rankings, the Committee has shown that it really values ranked road wins" like they are trying to divine the whims of ancient gods by the arrangements of fish bones on a beach.  

And once ESPN and the conferences got a whiff of playoff money, the question would not be if the playoff expanded but to how many teams.  Last year, the playoffs expanded to twelve teams, including higher seeds getting to play home playoff games.  The atmosphere for those games was incredible, but the conferences are too committed to the big bowl games to move the next rounds off of neutral bowl sites.  But that is not enough. The Big Ten has now proposed a playoff that consists of 28 teams.

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti announces plan for 28 team playoff

The problem is not with the playoff itself, but with the way the playoff has devoured the rest of the college football landscape.  The bigger the playoff gets, the more its shadow covers the rest of the college football landscape.  Unfortunately for ESPN, which along with the Big Ten and SEC is driving the push towards a more NFL-style setup in college football, there are not 32 teams in FBS football but 136.  It is impossible for ESPN and the other TV networks to both focus increasingly on the playoff picture that affects a handful of teams while simultaneously trying to build up their inventory of other games, which they market as narratively meaningless.

The playoff is not the entire problem.  The constant realignments, the merciless pillaging of rival conferences, and even the desperately-needed implementation of player payment under a grungy and haphazard system governed by collectives of alumni determined by who has the stupidest goatees instead of making these players employees with unions and employee protections-- these are all vandalisms against the sport that the conferences and TV networks are trying to paper over with the spectacle of the playoff, the promise that we will eventually have a champion where 40 years from now a university president standing next to the smirking heir to the only plot of fresh water not yet claimed by an LLM data center can decide that they actually won the 2031 title. Unfortunately, while the so-called "smart" sports argument was to beg for a rational answer to the question of awarding a title in college football, it turns out that maybe having people yell at each other on the radio was the best way to do it.

Before the playoff, the best way to ensure your team was in the playoff was by creating BCS acronym themed signs and also hiring airplanes to fly them over your rivals' games; another way would be to hire a fleet of Napoleonic war ships to denounce your team's rival with a series of saucy semaphore codes.

The playoff is a fun and entertaining mechanism for crowning a college football champion.  It also has nothing to do with how college football is experienced on about 100 of the 136 campuses where it is played.  The networks and conferences now has to figure out what to do with all of the excess football that has nothing to do with the playoff that is left around like overstock inventory. Perhaps these games never mattered before either in the grand scheme of the mythical national title chase. But they had weight because the sport seemed at least to acknowledge that the title chase was only part of the picture; college football was a self-justifying enterprise because there were drunk college students willing to yell about it and regional rivalries and dumb trophies that meant as much as turning the World's First Monster Truck Lawnmower Boca Raton Bowl into a playoff game between the 34th and 36th seeded teams.  As the sport gets rationalized into a more and more efficient way of distributing money to the biggest programs in the two big conferences, that seems to be getting lost.

Early 2000s sports arguers got the college football playoff, advanced stats in baseball, optimized shot distribution in the NBA, and even (and I remember this being sort of part of all of this conversation as well) legalized gambling.  But when the optimized and rational idea gets combined with the obsession with chasing efficiency in money, we get obsession with salary cap arcana, bland homogenization of tactics, and idiotic gambling being forced into everything.  I'm sure that people arguing for better baseball strategies or normal ways of crowning a football champion at the time were not aware that their cries for rationalization would get swept up with the ruthless and efficient financialization of everything in sports.  The one silver lining is that I strongly believe that college football is too stupid to ever be fully contained.

NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL 

Whatever they do with the playoff, it is not my problem because I root for Northwestern, a team that will almost certainly not qualify for the playoff no matter how many teams they let in.  Every change in college football bodes terribly for the Wildcats, who feel to me like they are sort of floating in the Big Ten and just waiting for the axe to come down and send them into DIII the second the conference can justify it by adding a lawsuit in university form like Florida State or Miami.  But here we are in 2025, the Big Ten is one of the two pinnacle quasi-major league conferences in college football, and some of these august teams are going to have to waste their time on the 'Cats and their makeshift stadium that holds 25 people or play in a baseball stadium that regularly devolves into a muddy pit.

Last week, the university finally settled its lawsuit against former coach Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired in the wake of a widespread hazing scandal where several former players described ugly incidents, many of which inexplicably mentioned the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek. Fitzgerald sued the university, claiming he was shocked, shocked! to see hazing going on in the Northwestern football program and demanded $130 million for costing him his career coaching at the only school in the country where a guy who goes 1-11 is not even on the hot seat.  

The last game Pat Fitzgerald won involved him somehow squeezing a crystaline football helmet over his head so he could look like a warlord in a movie where the prop budget involved stealing a bowl from the director's mom. 

Fitzgerald seems to have prevailed in his lawsuit.  We have no idea how much money the school ultimately paid to Fitzgerald, but they were forced to put out a humiliating press release claiming that Fitzgerald knew nothing about the hazing, possibly because during the time he was the coach, he was one of those Guillermo Del Toro guys whose eyeballs are on his hands and he was always holding something.  The ruling presumably clears the way for Fitz to get one of those bullshit "analyst" jobs for disgraced coaches and eventually reenter the coaching ranks for any program in the market for a guy who failed to win a single played game in the United States in his last active season and who will denounce NIL and player movement as some sort of new offshoot of communism.

THE 2025 WILDCATS

There have been two recent vintages of Northwestern teams: those where there is a capable veteran transfer quarterback who can at least manage to keep the offense on the field long enough so the defense doesn't keel over from exhaustion in the third quarter that is good enough to get to a bowl game and teams where there is functionally no quarterback and they win one 0-1 Big Ten games.  In David Braun's first year, they had Ben Bryant and a vicious defense, and that was enough to win eight games. Last year, they played offense like they were on the game show Slippery Stairs.  

This year, the 'Cats will have heralded transfer quarterback Preston Stone, who was last seen grimly watching his replacement at SMU self-destruct in a playoff game against Penn State while Stone was functionally en route to Evanston.  There are some questions about who will catch the ball-- Northwestern's receiving corps is most politely described as "untested"-- and some key losses and transfers on defense, most notably with stalwart captain Xavier Mueller's graduation. 

And even is Stone is as good as advertised and the defense is as much of a pain in the ass as it has been in the past, it might not be enough.  Northwestern's veteran-quarterback-and-defense program was optimized for the Big Ten West, where teams would simply bash their heads into the locker room walls for 60 minutes and the winner was the last guy to stagger onto the 50 yard line and vomit.  The Enormous Ten has taken away these comfortable environs and traded them for an absolutely brutal schedule.  Stone will not be hanging out on the sidelines against Penn State this time.  They also have to face Oregon at home and Michigan at Wrigley in what has been described as the most annoying football game ever played.  I would rather lick the L tracks at Addison than sit with 40,000 power-shushing Michigan fans and I am a person who willingly pays money to go to Cubs games and sit next to a group of 48 year old guys wearing backwards hats and loudly having "tell my lawyer she doesn't get the audi."phone calls.

It is possible that Northwestern is both a much better team this year and also has an equally bad or worse record simply because the schedule is marked "thar be dragons."  Even Illinois is good now; the only Big Ten team that anyone has any expectations to beat is Purdue which will either be very bad or can be expected to have the entire roster at one point in the game ensnare itself in a giant net on the sidelines.  Either way, I'm not sure how this bodes for David Braun, who unlike his predecessor cannot rely on a legacy of being one of the greatest players in the history of the program to shield him from criticism.  Braun's success seemed like a minor miracle under the gross circumstances surrounding the team in 2023, but no one is particularly tied to him and they're opening a shiny new stadium next year.  It doesn't help that I have watched a lot of Northwestern football and I could not tell you anything about Braun's personality other than "football coach." Maybe also "regularly photographed with mouth open."  In the end, what may save him if he has another rough season is the classic Northwestern conundrum of who else would even be willing to coach here.

The 'Cats will have to open the season on the road against Tulane, a very good team in out of the American Conference.  The Green Wave face some uncertainty at quarterback, where they are choosing between latecomer Jake Retzlaff from BYU and former Northwestern quarterback Brandon Sullivan who has been hovering around the Wildcats like a specter.  Sullivan, who served as the backup for Bryant, ended up in Iowa last year and came off the bench to lead the Hawkeyes to a dispiriting romp against the 'Cats.  It would be at the very least awkward, in my opinion, to see him getting the better of his former team again and hope he does not have three more years of covid-related eligibility so he can barnstorm around the country every year playing for at least one Northwestern opponent that he gets to by traveling via one of those pump railroad carts with a bindle sporting a Tim Beckman-inspired anti-Northwestern symbol.

The Tulane game is a good measuring stick for Northwestern.  Tulane is favored to win by about as large of a margin as you'll see from a team outside the Power Four against a Big Ten opponent this time of year. A surprising Northwestern win would instill some hope that they could seriously scrap for a bowl this year. A crummy loss does not mean the season is instantly over, but Northwestern desperately needs every win that that it can manage before facing the Big Ten manglers.

Northwestern's first year in the brutal, unforgiving Enormous Ten was discouraging.  And yet, there has been no reason why the Wildcats should have been able to field a competitive program for more or less the entire modern history of the school, and for about 20 years in the new century, they were able to be reliably annoying if not occasionally outright good.  The fact that Northwestern will constantly have to face off against playoff powerhouses in whatever stadium they happen to be playing in that year is a blow to their hopes of making crappy bowl games should they still exist, but on the other hand, each of those games offers a rare but tantalizing opportunity to do something incredibly funny.  

Unfortunately, the playoff means that, should the Wildcats manage to do the impossible and actually knock off a ranked team in front of an overwhelming number of opposing fans at what is supposed to be a Northwestern home game, it does not have the destructive power that a loss to crummy or mediocre Wildcat team could have in the past. Before the playoff, a loss to Northwestern usually meant an absolute annihilation of that big time opponent's dreams of winning anything.  The playoff has meant that teams like Northwestern can't single-handedly derail a opponent's national championship season by punting them into hell but what the playoff can't take away is a bunch of those fans going on the internet demanding that they fire their coach and whining about uncalled holding penalties, which to me is the greatest prize of them all.  Let's hope we get one of those this year.