Northwestern Football Versus the World (and, More Alarmingly, Ohio State)
The 6-1 Wildcats are a footnote—and a 20.5-point underdog—in a hastily revised Big Ten finale. They’re accustomed to the disrespect.
By
Jason Gay
Dec. 14, 2020 8:53 am ET
Northwestern isn’t given much of a chance. Well, maybe they’re given a
chance, but it’s a courtesy chance, the kind the cashier gives with a Powerball ticket—an “anything can happen” chance, because we’re supposed to be a polite society, and that’s the sort of optimism the civilized among us project. The Wildcats have been invited to participate in a football contest this upcoming Saturday, and in the football contest, they
could score more points than the Ohio State Buckeyes. Theoretically, it
could occur. Crazy happens! It does. Sometimes.
But really, no, absolutely not. No. Don’t be absurd. Right?
When 6-1 Northwestern plays 5-0 Ohio State on Dec. 19 in Indianapolis for the Big Ten Championship, there is little expectation that the No. 14 Wildcats will give the No. 4 Buckeyes a game. Ohio State has been installed as a hearty 20.5-point favorite, and the history is bleak; Ohio State has won 32 of the past 33 meetings, including a 52-3 romp in Evanston last year.
“They probably shouldn’t even have shut the buses off,” deadpans Northwestern’s head coach, Pat Fitzgerald.
Last year was last year, but the wide assumption is that sometime late in Saturday’s first half, maybe earlier, we’ll look at another Wildcats-Buckeyes score and wonder why they bothered putting the whole thing on.
Ohio State is playing for
more, after all. When the Big Ten kingpins reassembled last week to tweak their pandemic rules, and allow the Buckeyes into the title game despite having only played five games—the minimum for this pandemic season was supposedly six—it was done not only with the belief that No. 4 Ohio State shouldn’t be punished for missing games its opponents couldn’t play because of Covid-19 outbreaks, but also with the unsaid assumption that this 2020 Buckeyes team is very, very good, as in national championship good.
To the kingpins, to deny the Buckeyes the right to steamroll through another Big Ten championship and vault into a playoff with illuminati like Alabama, or Clemson, or whomever else, would be an affront to the conference, the sport, and probably life itself, and so the six-game minimum was dissolved. It was a bummer for Indiana, which has had itself a thrilling season, played beyond the minimum number, and hung with OSU in a 42-35 loss, but even Indiana kinda/sorta understood the deal. It’s
Ohio State, for crying out loud. Everybody’s making 2020 up as they go along, anyway. What was one more tweak?
It’s a presumptuous conversation which might make you, if you’re a Northwestern Wildcat, or a friend to one, feel a little disrespected, a little forgotten, a little prematurely written off—a plus one, on a party invitation for somebody much more important. And yet this is a custom. Disrespect is a familiar vibe at Northwestern; they bottle the public’s jibes and backhanded compliments and drink it up as fuel. Earlier in the season, when ESPN commentator Joey Galloway
described Northwestern as a “bunch of Rece Davises”—a reference to the wonky, 55-year-old host “College Game Day”—Fitzgerald pithily rebranded the roster as the “Fighting Rece Davises.”
“How about the Fighting Rece Davises?” Fitzgerald quipped after the Cats knocked around my beloved and then-undefeated Wisconsin Badgers in November.
They’re not bad.
At all. Northwestern is a handful on defense, giving up less than 15 points a game, and its offense, led by Indiana transfer quarterback Peyton Ramsey, is an upgrade after a dismal 3-9 season in 2019. The rap on the Cats, besides the usual snide dismissiveness, is that they play on the weaker side of the Big Ten, that the Big Ten is a hot mess this year, anyway, and they haven’t knocked off a known heavyweight—Northwestern’s biggest win is probably its one-point victory on Halloween over now 6-2 Iowa.
No matter. As the cliché goes, you can only play who you play. Haters will hate, skeptics will skeptic. Fitzgerald, a Wildcats defensive standout during the Gary Barnett 90’s heyday, doesn’t seem rattled.
“When the ball goes up in the air, all that stuff doesn’t matter,” says the coach. “It’s great for blogs and it’s got to be unbelievable for
Twitter. What great stuff, right?” He veers into an amusing digression: “This generation probably doesn’t even go on Twitter anymore, right? You guys are now on Instagram or something?
Facebook is for your grandparents, right? Twitter is for dads and moms now.”
Fitzgerald knows his team is up against it. He is quick to laud Ohio State’s success and acknowledge Northwestern’s recent defeats, which include a 45-24 defeat in another Big Ten title game in 2018. But that was then. This squad is different, he says. Let the predictions of gloom come. Let the players use it any way they like.
“Whatever gets our guys going, I don’t care,” Fitzgerald says. He offers a memory: “Coach Barnett used to make up all these t-shirts. I thought they were pretty cheesy. I cut the sleeves off to show off the pipe cleaners. You know what I mean?”
I think I know what he means. Coach Fitzgerald had fantastic arm muscles back in the day.
Northwestern also offers this: Fitzgerald says the team has, so far, remained Covid-free, an impressive accomplishment in a season in which
college football outbreaks have been routine, and the schedule has resembled a shopping cart with a broken wheel. The coach credited the success to the reduced number of students on Northwestern’s campus, strict internal protocols of masks and social distancing, and a resolute buy-in from his team.
“I’m just so proud of our players.” Fitzgerald says. “To me, that normal college experience—you give [that] up as an athlete already, and then to have the Covid pandemic on top of that, our guys have just been so disciplined, sacrificed so much. [I’m] just really thankful for how they looked after each other.”
In 2020, you don’t know for sure until they kick it off, but they intend to play this championship, Saturday at noon, at Lucas Oil Stadium, where the NFL Colts live. Ramsey, the Cats QB, will try to borrow some of the magic from the famous Peyton who built the barn, and Fitzgerald isn’t afraid to think about what it would be like if Northwestern actually pulled it off.
“It would be a hell of a ride home on I-65,” the coach says.
Sure would. Sometimes a chance is all it takes.
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