#40 Northwestern

Evanston, IL

Ryan Field September 21, 2019 Michigan St 31 – Northwestern 10 (ESPN Recap)

A lot of people asked me how the game/experience was today at Ryan Field. I told all of them that it was a super cute stadium. Cute size, cute polite fans, no chants other than a few MSU “Go Green! Go White!” back and forths which was cute since they were the road team. It is really hard to believe that NU hosts the rest of the Big 10 teams in that stadium: Ohio St, Michigan, Penn St, Wisconsin, Nebraska, etc. It is tiny. Cute.

Despite having close friends in Chicago who I spent dinner with last night, I could not convince them to join for the lowest CFB total in 3 years (closed at 36.0). I took the U39.5 and suffered a bad beat with 2 mins left and both teams playing their backups, which led to Northwestern’s only TD of the game. #99 on Michigan State’s DL is a beast and looked like a man amongst boys.

I loved the game and the sweat despite the late loss. Great to kick it with Joe (+family) and meet Peter at the ambulance pregame.

I had not watched NW play yet this year, but I have watched a few dozen of their games over the past decade and Coach Fitz is still Coach Fitz. To the amusement of the fans around me, I was predicting play calls and out comes (yardage and all) correctly about 70% of the time. “Draw up the middle for 1 yard…Incomplete pass…either sack or completion for 3-4 yards and a punt.” Stuff like that. I don’t know whether it is coaching or personnel, but the NW offense is painful to watch, has no creativity, and appears to have no talent. Aside from Justin Jackson and Trevor Siemien, what I saw today is essentially what I have seen for the past decade out of the Cats.

I tried to high tail out of Evanston to get to game two of the double-header down in Champaign. More on that in the next post.