Let it never be said that a Northwestern player can't have an effect on the Super Bowl. 

Zach Strief's false start not only put the Saints back five yards in a goal-to-go situation, it also cost them a chance at a touchdown, allowing the Colts to enter the half with a lead when it very easily could have been tied. Go U!

But seriously, five straight years of NU grads earning rings is spectacular, even if Strief cost his team seven points. 

Anybody remember this feature from the old site? What's that? I didn't have any readers on my old site? Oh. Well, it existed. 

At Northwestern, we don't win many championships, and the ones we do are televised on the WCLN, the Women's Collegiate Lacrosse Network, a channel I just made up because the championships we do win are never televised because they're in women's lacrosse. Therefore, we have to turn to the most watched event in American television: the Super Bowl. For those of you who only follow college football, this will be tough to understand, but the NFL has a complex system where the best teams in the league compete in a single-elimination format, of which the final two teams remaining play for a championship. Contrary to common sense, computers and sportswriters have no say in which teams are allowed to compete, as they use an arcane system of wins and losses to determine which teams are allowed in the playoff. The championship is called "The Super Bowl", and it will be played on Sunday between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. 

I'll tell you have to watch it as an NU fan, after the jump. (It's been a long time since I've said "after the jump." Feels good.)

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This is great news for all my readers who are obsessed with the decision-making process of athletic boys that are still a few months shy of being able to buy porno mags, cigarettes, or vote in elections, although if they're Jewish, they've been bar mitzvahed for a few years now. Never mind the fact a) most of the kids decided where they'd go to college months ago b) you've never seen any of them, unless you take creepiness to a whole new level, and c) Signing Day is a primarily pointless event  which people act really excited about even though generally nothing really happens. To quote Otto from Spread Far the Fame, "You’re cheering a high school kicker. What has your life come to?"

For the rest of us, it's an awkward celebration of people who most likely won't contribute to Northwestern football while I'm an undergraduate student. (That sound you hear is me weeping blood.) 

Today is a day for the using of fax machines, the putting on of school logo emblazoned baseball caps nobody ever wears unless it's signing day or they play for the school's baseball team, and of new beginnings. 

Here's to the 17+ kids who wrote down their name on a piece of paper today and will deeply regret it in a year when they have to wake up at 9:45 to walk through six inches of snow to go to class at Kresge and their teacher doesn't know or care that they play football only to have some academic adviser be pissed at them for getting a B-minus while their high school friends who went to EVERY OTHER SCHOOL IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA naps, plays video games, and introduces himself to girls with "hey, my name's (blank), I'm on the football team" and they actually care about it.

But at the end of the day, they'll probably be pretty damn pleased that they're at a school where we consistently win football games and when every last damn one of those 17+ kids graduates, just like every damn class of ours does, 4-5 years from now, they'll realize it was probably a damn good call. 

Congrats, boys. Welcome to Northwestern. 

Comment along if you must. 

And by the way, can we just once have a kid who needs to make a last-minute decision between us and another school and put on a Northwestern hat at a press conference? Can we at least convince someone who knows he's coming to Northwestern to pretend like he isn't for a few days so that we get to see somebody put on a hat? As much as I just deaded signing day, that would be kind of cool. I'd get pumped. 

I'll be real: it's basketball season. When I'm not watching whatever NBA game is on at any random time using NBA League Pass Broadband, earning small increments of money on centsports using my freakish ability to understand NBA betting lines, writing about Northwestern basketball for an undisclosed publication, playing pickup at Blomquist or Spac, or vainly attempting to lead my fraternity's B team to white league IM basketball glory, I'm generally thinking about basketball in some other way. I'm like this pretty much 12 months a year, but it's especially heightened now in this brief period of time when other people around me are also paying attention to basketball.

Point being, football is on the back burner. 

I'm supposed to be on top of my football nonsense for this site, but quite frankly, it's not like that. I saw Mike Kafka did nice in the shrine game and everything. Watched the highlight reel and everything. Sweet.  I'll talk about that a little bit before the NFL draft probably, but for now, I was indifferent.

Point being, I haven't been paying attention much to recruiting. This is for multiple reasons: first off, I think much recruiting hoopla is undeserved, secondly, I'm overwhelmingly creeped out by the cottage industry of older guys texting high school juniors about what they enjoy about various colleges. (One of the bonuses of not being a highly-sought after athlete is that there were no articles being printed online like "SHERMAN CONSIDERING APPLYING EARLY" that people had to pay to read. That's creepy.) But thirdly, and most key, is that LTP covers this stuff well. Every few days, there's some post about the latest guy to commit to NU, and his latest interview with Louie Vaccher from Rivals was pretty gangbusters. 

But the downside to all of this is that for some reason, I was under the impression that NU was reeling in a pretty good recruiting class. Not sure why. I think it's some combination of the fact that LTP has a way of getting me to be in a happy place about NU sports and the fact that we're living in the Era of Good Northwestern Sports, but I was clearly convinced that Northwestern was doing some good stuff with recruiting. Not like a top 10 class, but somewhere in the middle of the pack. Something respectable.

Well, y'all, ignorance is bliss. 

I took a peek at Rivals.com's team rankings the other day. I knew we wouldn't be on page 1. I'm not delusional. I figured, hey, we've had a pretty decent recruiting class, maybe we're sneaking in on the bottom of that second page? Nah! Top of the third? Bottom of the third?  My answer was waiting for me at the top of the fourth friggin page: we're No. 76. Seventy-six. Sesenta y seis, for my readers who don't speak any english. (It's impressive you've gotten this far.) 76 puts us behind all but five BCS programs (UConn, Washington State, Rutgers, and, luckily, Wisconsin and Indiana). It puts us behind San Diego State, where dual-threat QB D'Angelo Barksdale recently committed. (He's a pretty good player, but he's got an unfortunate reputation for choking when it all comes down to it.) It puts us behind NU is one of six BCS teams who hasn't brought in a four- or five- star recruit, according to Rivals. 17 recruits, 16 of them with 3 stars, is pretty good for us, historically, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much.

It should be noted that since I checked that last night at like 2:30 in the morning, we've been bumped up to No. 75, passing Temple. (Get some, Temple! Suck it, you owl bastards! Go eat some field mice or something!)

We're supposedly coming up, capitalizing on our recent success. We've won 17 football games in the past two seasons, yo! But we're decidedly not. I expected us to have a middle of the pack haul, and, well, we don't. 

I know what y'all are going to say, so, I'll just say it for you.

"But, hey, remember how Tyrell Sutton/Pat Fitzgerald/every other player in Northwestern history was underrecruited?We always find diamonds in the rough!"

"Those rankings are meaningless! It's just one person's opinions."

"But this year, we recruited based on need, not just trying to grab the most talented player."

"Hey, 16 3-star recruits isn't bad for us."

"NU sports is about making the best out of the players we had, outsmarting opponents, and winning with less talent."

Now, y'all, don't get me wrong. These are all arguments of varying reasonability, and all things I feel like I've said at one point in time. (Except the "Rivals is intentionally underranking NU." That's just silly, and if you don't believe me, I bet SMU, Tulsa, and UCF have less swing than NU, and they're ranked way higher than us. Conspiracies are for important things like presidential assassinations, not ranking the skill levels of mid-level defensive ends.)

Now, y'all, don't get me wrong. These are all arguments of varying reasonability, and all things I feel like I've said at one point in time. (Except the "Rivals is intentionally underranking NU." That's just silly, and if you don't believe me, I bet SMU, Tulsa, and UCF have less swing than NU, and they're ranked way higher than us. Conspiracies are for important things like presidential assassinations, not ranking the skill levels of mid-level defensive ends.)

It's just that I don't feel like recruiting undervalued prospects is a sustainable model of success. Yes, we've been very lucky to find a few diamonds in the rough. And we've competed with said rough-diamonds, and are doing pretty damn well for ourselves. And yes, NU has been blessed in the past decade and a half with great coaching staffs: via unique schemes teams aren't used to playing against and really phenomenal player development, they've taken teams that were way less highly-touted recruits than the teams we generally playing against and turned them into winners. Hats off to Coach Fitz. 

And, yes, to some extent, all this is silly. Some teams like Michigan and Notre Dame can't take a dump without hitting a 5-star recruit that will eventually sign to the school, and all they have to show for it in recent years are old-timey stadiums and depression, while we haven't ever had a single 5-star guy and we're doing mighty fine, in my opinion. A coaching staff and a team can do a lot regardless of how "talented" they are.

But if you need a reminder how important the opinions of a few creepy guys with clipboards at high school games is, peep our basketball program. You might have heard of it. Bill Carmody spent the better part of a decade with guys more suited for Princeton than the Big XI, and came away with little to show for it. In the past few years, his coaching staff has put an increased emphasis on recruiting, and they've come away with some great guys - guys other schools of competitive calibers were also looking at - and well, let's just say Evanston hasn't looked this bubbly since the introduction of flavored Andre. (Although I can say nothing wrong about regular Andre, don't get me wrong.) Carmody's always had a good system, and if you talk to anybody mildly related to NU or Big Ten basketball, they'll tell you that now that he has above-average players to slot into that system, the Wildcats are sorta scary. 

Fitz also has a good system, and I'm overwhelmingly confident in him. But if NU sports wants to be upwardly mobile, there can't be any laurel-resting, especially in terms of recruiting. A team with bottom-five talent can't do the things an NU sports fan dreams of, and according to a bunch of people whose job it is to rank recruiting classes, we have a team with bottom-five talent. Now, don't get me wrong. I'd love to see this group of guys we just recruited do great things.

But signing day is Wednesday, and I'm not saying "don't be optimistic." What I'm trying to say is,f our recruiting hauls don't soon start resembling those of the teams we want to outplay, the Era of Good Northwestern Sports can take a few more years before developing into the Era of Great Northwestern Sports we'd like to move into. 

(of course, Adam Rittenberg shows us that all this doesn't really matter by comparing the all-Big Ten teams, offense and defense, to what they were ranked coming into college. So, this is all pointless. Carry on with the interesting discussion in the comments, though.)

This late! This site is all about savoring things, so this kinda got to simmer. 

All things considered, Northwestern-Auburn was probably the greatest sporting event I've ever seen in person. I've seen games with fantastic finishes before. I saw the Knicks come back from 20, send a game to OT, then double OT, adn then David Lee tipped in a game winner with .1 seconds left. I saw  Hideki Matsui and Kenny Lofton hit back-to-back homers when the Yankees were down two with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. But they all lacked the import and weird, crazy, disturbing nature of the Outback Bowl. I've never seen two teams try so hard to win that they kept accidentally actually making it significantly easier for the other team to win. I've never heard 35,000 quiet southerners, and I've never heard an entire crowd of purple successfully coordinate a "Go U NU" chant. (For all the greatness of that cheer, it's too difficult to coordinate over large sections at games for some reason.) There's a bunch of bulletpoints encapsulating that game/weekend after the jump.

(oh, and it's an epic post. read it.)

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I said that someday I'd start talking about the Outback Bowl, well, guess what, today's that day.

So, you have 4th and goal at the 5, down three. Whatever play you call will result in a win, loss, or double overtime. 

As you might know, Pat Fitzgerald opted to run a trick play called "Heater", and it was stopped for a gain of three, two yards short of the end zone, and Northwestern lost 38-35. Most of America probably thought something like "ballsy/stupid call! Awesome finish!" and turned away. You probably made up your mind with some combination of disgust or awe within eight seconds of seeing the play in Raymond James Stadium. 

I mulled it over for like four days, and what you have after the jump, complete with pictures, is what I came up with.

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I have no words. Let's give this a few days before talking. Comment away here if you got venting to do.

Do I really need to write anything? Really? 

Northwestern hasn't played since mid-November. We haven't won a bowl since 1949. I don't feel like I've slept since about the year before. 

But if you're an NU fan, and you're not  pulling a 3.0 on the Pat Fitzgerald intense-o-meter (translates to a 14.3 on the regular human intense-o-meter) you shouldn't be here. It's New Years' and it's 10 AM Central. Go back to sleep, enjoy your long weekend or something. Eat a sandwich. I don't know.

But if you are an NU fan, well, there's two places for you to be: 

a) Raymond James Stadium. I hear we sold out our bowl allotment, so here's to swimming in a sea of purple

b) this game thread. In an ideal world, this game thread would get no comments, but I understand not all of y'all can make it, and wish that I'd been reading a game thread during last year's Alamo Bowl instead of wallowing in my own despair. 

So comment along. I'll be checking in via my iPhone, and hopefully, we have a pretty good crowd, so, stop by and say something.

P.S. Let's do this. 

Go Cats, yo.