Two days to the bowl, so here's a lot of people who are better writers than me:

• The most important thing for me to point out today is that after a respite of several months, defensive tackle Marshall Thomas has re-emerged as my favorite player on the Northwestern football team in the past two days. I first noticed Marshall overemphatically enjoying Gucci Mane, during preseason camp, then I saw him play some relatively mediocre defensive tackle, then I became aware of him when he fell on two loose fumbles, against Iowa, including the one where Ricky Stanzi briefly forgot about holding the ball while having his lower leg wrecked by Corey Wootton. However, in the past two days, he's re-emerged into my consciousness in dramatic fashion: yesterday, I found a picture of him with a sloth, today, I discovered the bowl blog he's been keeping for NUsports.com, brilliantly titled "I Am Marshall." Normally, student-athlete blogs on the official website are pretty boring, a lot of "today we had practice. It was hard, just like all my midterms. Go Cats!" But Marshall's is actually pretty interesting. Lots of nicknames, and actual jokes, some of which are sort of off-color, and managed to slip through the editorial cracks. I particularly enjoy the fact that superback Mark Woodsum is nicknamed "Young Dro", who, unlike Gucci Mane, who I actually only sort of like despite having named a blog after his lyrics, is actually my favorite rapper.
• Lots of newspaper pub for the bowl game, and it's interesting how, just like in my part of the blog world, most of the articles in Chitown papers are about Auburn, while the Auburn-Opelika News is busy uncovering things even I didn't know about Northwestern. (Corey Wootton's mom played basketball for Auburn? Where your human interest stories at, Northwestern press?) 
• Auburn folks also be readin bout Zeke Markshausen and Mike Kafka. 
• This is exactly the type of thing you like to read about your opponents two days before you play them. As noted yesterday, they have the same issue at H-Back. Health is a big factor in any football game, and we're lucky that while Northwestern is the healthiest they've been all year, the break, if anything, has hurt Auburn's depth as they lost multiple players to academic ineligibility and DUI's without getting equivalent players healing.
• In more "I'm saving this for posterity so nobody can claim it never happened" news, this:
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• You know, just checking which top-25 teams are playing today, same old, just wanted to see which of the best teams in the country are playing, no biggie. The teams with the parentheses and the numbers are the ranked ones.
• Not to mention this article headline. 

That's all I got for today. It would be nice to see a few people who haven't had chances to watch NU basketball when the games were on bigtennetwork.com in the game thread tonight. I'm not allowed to comment, but, some people say it's the biggest Northwestern game in years, so, stop by.