So...Northwestern lost that game
Every time Northwestern has had a bad loss in the Pat Fitzgerald era, it is convenient to ascribe the latest cruel twist of fate to hubris. In this telling, Northwestern is just like every normal football program—they built something, they flew too close to the sun, and they crashed and burned. Football is a carousel of Icarus wannabes, cycling through pride and humiliation due to the sport’s idiosyncrasies. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, most of the time.
This loss hurts, perhaps more than any Northwestern football loss that I can remember. It’s the kind of bitter, haunting loss that you can’t even make jokes about. There are some Northwestern losses that you can make jokes about, but this is not one of them. Between the ranking, the fact that Michigan State was playing terribly, Sparty’s Jake Paul knockoff quarterback, the double-digit spread, the legitimate playoff aspirations, and the simple reality that this is a very good football team that lost to an inferior football team, this is about as miserable as they come.
Although Northwestern lost to Michigan State and sent poor Beng into the Crestfallen Ironists Ward of Arkham Asylum, it would be a mistake to attribute this loss to hubris. Whatever the rankings and the scoresheets and the t-shirts say, Northwestern played about the same as it played in its previous five games, and perhaps about the same as it has played from 2013 to present. Just like against Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska, the other team had more yards. They fell behind early, but they fell behind early against Iowa and Nebraska. But why even limit it to this year? Northwestern has tried to win by doing the bare minimum offensively since 2012. It’s happened so often that it’s effectively their gameplan, even against the Illinois States, Nevadas, and Akrons of the world. Sometimes, that doesn’t work, so we’re left with this:
None of these outcomes stem from a place of classic college football hubris. For all the insane Cell Phone Conspiracies, it feels like Pat Fitzgerald and the team culture is mildly allergic to the kind of “no one can beat us” machismo of this godforsaken sport. Northwestern never actually blows out enough teams to ever do this without sounding stupid, so we usually get some iteration of “fighting Rece Davises” or “stats are for losers” that blue-blood programs would simply leave unsaid. That’s probably for the best, as any type of traditional trash talk would look embarrassing when their quarterback recklessly endangers his receivers’ lives on a regular basis (I hope Berkley Holloman makes a speedy recovery) en route to a 23-point underperformance of their Vegas line.
I’m not really here to diagnose the game—we all suffered enough—I’m just trying to hash out how Northwestern football is not the plucky underdog that rises and falls like any number of decent-to-bad Power 5 schools. Perhaps it could’ve been, but that ship has sailed for the foreseeable future. Overall, this has worked well for them (have you seen Vanderbilt or Texas Tech of late?), but this stability has its tradeoff. Due to a number of factors, including a lack of bag men, bad weather, a nonexistent historical brand, and staying as elitist as possible, Northwestern has had to forgo the Icarus route. They are now fully and utterly committed to siege warfare, both in program development and in their style of play. They can keep a terrible offensive coordinator for nearly a decade and have almost no administrative consequences. Because of the commodification of the sport, this is pretty much impossible at any other school in the modern era—no coach could ever afford to wait out opponents for 2-3 years and stay as relentlessly employable as Pat Fitzgerald.
This is not necessarily a criticism; Northwestern is about to make its second Big Ten Championship Game in three years (albeit in unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances) and will likely end the year ranked for the fourth time in six years. This comes for a program that was utterly broken by the tragic passing of Randy Walker and nearly catapulted itself into disaster again in 2011 before Pat Fitzgerald and Jim Phillips used a potential Michigan job to force a Godfather offer for new facilities. I will contend, however, that Northwestern’s fans desire to be Icarus like they were in 1995-96 or 2000-2001, rising from the bottom to touch the sky and think about a National Championship, cannot be fully realized under this system. Or, if it is realized, it will be after such a long and grueling siege that forces us to grit our teeth at scores like Michigan State 29, Northwestern 20 repeatedly. Even Mike Bajakian, may he reign forever, cannot save us from that. Today’s game is a bitter confirmation that the math of winning all of these games in such a close fashion is too much to bear. As Northwestern’s marketing so eloquently puts it in its Panopticon Prime ads, it is in our DNA.
After the Wisconsin game, Ben got to wax aimlessly about the joys of this approach, which was the football equivalent of marching around the Walls of Jericho blowing trumpets and seeing them actually fall down. Big, if true! But like those ancient, mythical Israelites, the story didn’t end there. In the Old Testament tradition, you still need to get through the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, and 2 Samuel to get to “the Real Thing” (if it even existed historically), and then you need to understand and contextualize another 2,700 years of history. This is not the Icarus Myth, there is no clear-cut ending, there is no valuable moral lesson, there isn’t even a discernible pattern, there is only pain, sacrifice, and occasional triumph.
I’ve had many, many Northwestern fans and members of the general public try to argue differently, that I’m wrong to have such a “negative” outlook on the realities with which we are presented with. I don’t disagree with my haters that much—my writing can be too self-indulgent and hysterical. Yet I cannot concede the main thesis: it do be like this sometimes. As a fan, I want the opposing view to be correct, but there is no rational analysis that leads to “we’ve turned the corner”. These six games are an extremely representative sample of everything I’ve watched in the last six years. There’s one blowout win over a bad opponent (Maryland), one semi-convincing win anchored by a strong defense (Purdue), two very close games that turned out to be wins (Nebraska, Iowa), one dramatic upset (Wisconsin), and one close game that turns out to be a loss. In the distribution, we are only missing the one complete blowout by a superior team, which is probably going to happen if they do indeed play Ohio State in the Big Ten title game (hopefully not though?!).
This formula of 3/7 close games, 1/7 semi-convincing win, 1/7 blowouts, and 1/7 upsets has been the same for over a decade (and is pretty much how most middling college football teams operate, mind you). Overall, in the last six years, Northwestern has been able to pick up many more close games and slightly more semi-convincing wins than the average, thanks to incredible efforts from the players and coaching staff. Even then, there are years like 2019 where Northwestern’s luck was awful. Recently, it has been quite good, and though they say you “make your own luck” (or bring your own juice) in football, you most certainly do not. There is nothing Northwestern could’ve done to stop that stupid Michigan State knuckleball field goal that cost them the game. Fumble recovery luck is, statistically, quite close to 50/50. If anything, Northwestern has won far, far more close games than it has lost in the last 10 years, so even a bitter loss like this one is regression to the mean. Every narrative has been simply a reaction to the order in which these events have taken place. It’s not like Northwestern has ever threatened to have a top 20 team by SP+.
While this is not for lack of trying, especially on the defensive end, the reality is that after 14 years, Pat Fitzgerald’s Northwestern teams live on close games and narrow escapes. Such a team making the Playoff, winning the Big Ten, or even making a damn New Years’ Six Bowl would be euphoric, without a doubt, and I want it to happen. However, that is simply not the only part of the plan. The plan is to turn Northwestern into a sustainable college football program over the course of a lifetime, not to blow all the cash on one run that ends with everyone getting ignominiously fired five years later. The lifespan of a college coach is but a walking shadow; Pat Fitzgerald is the poor player who insists that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will signify something. Either this will happen, or it will persist so long that everyone gets sick of it and Fitzgerald gets a Bill Snyder farewell (right down to “retiring”, having the stadium named after him, and then coming back for another decade…wouldn’t that just be peak Fitz?).
That being said, I have no doubt that there’s nothing more that Pat Fitzgerald, scion of 1995, wants than to repeat the feat as a coach. Hubris is the oxygen that allows football coaches to breathe. Yet when the emotions clear, Pat Fitzgerald’s best trait is that he can seemingly resist this hubris. How many other coaches would’ve declined to even interview when the Green Bay Packers, you know, one of the 4-5 legendary NFL franchises with a HOF QB and a ready-made playoff contender, came calling? The man simply will not let himself get Peter Principled, and that seems to be the ethos that seeps through this team.
In essence, I’ve spent six years writing, reading, and editing content about the exact same question in hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways. “How good is Northwestern?” I stated in an October 25 article written by freshly-minted Inside NU correspondent Tristan Jung. Though so much of the world has changed since then, and my reason for writing has gone from schoolboy aspiration to…hmmmmm…I have no idea…anyway, it is now something of a solemn duty. It is November 28, 2020, Northwestern has lost again, and I must write about it. And the cycle begins anew.
