Not much today, but let's see what we got. 

• LTP called it once again: Northwestern's 12th opponent next year will be Central Michigan. I'm not thrilled, because this is a high-risk, low -reward opponent seems like we should beat but might not. As for LTP, I'm going to need you to stop scooping everybody. I blame my readers for not being as in-the-know as LTP's readers. Shame on y'all. 
• Chris Ballard from Sports Illustrated wrote possibly the best article yet about NU's basketball situation. Also, he had the cojones to quote a Daily men's basketball beat writer, which is always a good idea.
• I'm not the only person who wanted to analyze the heater: HTP and the Daily each posted analyses before I did. I hadn't seen the HTP one, and I knew about the Daily one, but had already written too much of my piece to stop writing it. So, sorry for being a ripoff, but I didn't know I was ripping off. Ignorance is bliss. 
• Spread Far the Fame sticks with coach Fitz through the good times and the bad times. 
• Two things need to change around campus: first off, the rock is still painted like this, with the Outback Bowl thing. Uhhh, change that. Somebody. Second, I wrote this article last week, but the clock tower is still purple. 

That's all for now, people. 

Charles Cherney - AP

Whoever keeps taking ridiculously great photos at NU basketball games has to stop, or I'll keep using them.

View full size photo »

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:
•  
• 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. 

Not to bump down Loretta's Q/A with Illini people, but, a bowl in three days is a bowl in three days. 

• But before we get to that, more coverage of NU's top 25-ness. USA Today ran two pieces, one on NU, one on our chances of going tourney, meaning hotel-stayers the nation over are aware of NU, while ESPN joined the ranks of people who loved Loretta's moderately unrelated article. Meanwhile, as predicted, not much pub in the Chi-town area media: the Sun-Times managed to squeak in this, while the Trib used the AP Wire story while focusing on the basketball team's bowl-bound counterparts. Clearly the paper just simply doesn't have the space or resources to cover things like an Illinois vs. Northwestern basketball, but if they did, they'd surely focus on the more successful of the two teams rather than running a story on Bruce Weber's rotation. (in all seriously, my tone may be whiny at times, but it's good to be the talk of the town.)
• Of course, I was write that something crazy had to happen in last night's Bears game. Some people are trying to spin it as being a good omen for NU sports because Nick Roach recovered a fumble in overtime to give the Bears the ball, but, these people ignore that the receiver of the game winning pass was ex-Auburn Tiger Devin Aromashodu. So it's a moot point. 
• Todd McShay says the best pro talent in the Outback Bowl wears purple. It's interesting to hear the pro hype for "Michael Kafka" beginning to develop - the Trib ran a story on this as well. Hopefully, he doesn't Chase Daniel his way out of a decent chance at becoming a rare NU quarterback in the league - with his really shocking development in the accuracy department this season and speed, it's actually not surprising to see him considered a potential NFL-er next year. 
• An old football adage says, to win a football game, a little girl has to pick your team in a self-posted internet video based on your uniform color. (I think it was Vince Lombardi who said that.) Well, folks, Northwestern is in luck:
• 
  
• I can't argue with the logic, although it feels necessary to point out that if anything, the boy resembles a tiger. In other news, I'm sooooo glad I didn't have an older sister growing up, because that kid is going to begin regretting that video around the time he hits eight years old. 
• In Journalism 202, you learn how to take photos very briefly. However, I've never been able to be a good photographer for some reason, I just don't have it in me, but I've always wanted to have that ability to be able to capture a beautiful image, one that tells a story by itself, one that doesn't need explanation, one that captures your eye and your imagination. For example, here is a photo of Northwestern defensive tackle Marshall Thomas with a sloth.   
• I probably should have ended on that world-altering photo, but, I feel sharing extraordinarily minor bowl news: I wrote about how I feared Auburn's h-backs (in addition to other things), but, no worries: blocking h-back Eric Smith is out for the bowl due to academics, and his backups John Douglas and Jason King have matching DUI's, meaning only Mario Fannin will be playing, with no real backups. These guys figured into the pass offense quite a bit actually, and their absence should hurt Ben Tate's ability to run the ball as well. For once, recruiting a team of players who go to class and don't enjoy D'ing under the I pays off for Northwestern.

I got another post for later, so, stay tuned, punks. 

Funny, because Sippin on Purple is celebrating it's first ever week as one of the internet's top 25 Northwestern sports blogs. 

• So, I'm not allowed to write about basketball on here, but after a 40 year bowl drought, well, I feel like it's okay to at least chronicle some of what's going down in the NU internets. LTP has something,NUsports.com has something, SBNation has something (although, yo, way to link to the article Loretta wrote that didn't really have anything to do with the ranking as if it was written after the fact, SBnation editor guy), Spread Far the Fame has something, Fire Bill Carmody has something (and is presumably contemplating changing a blog name to "iwouldhavesupportedfiringbillcarmodyawhileagobutnowamfullybehindhim.blogspot.com"), Welsh-Ryan Ramblings put up a brief something, and as noted, the AP wrote something. 
• I don't have a twitter, but if I did I'd probably be starting to get pissed off with all the "Northwestsern is in the top 25! Variation on a joke about this being the apocalypse!" tweets that were funny the first time but not funny the 403rd. 
• NU fans, thank these people. Especially Dave Jones and Bob Sutton. Those dudes are troopers. 
• Normally my home page is set to my gmail account, but that's taking a one-week hiatus. I decided I need to see this every time I open my browser.
  
• However, if you must check a college basketball scoreboard, don't use ESPN's. Something that's frustrated me while trying to check out Northwestern's chances of being in the rankings the next week night after night is that ESPN's scoreboards and bottom line use the ESPN/USA Today rankings, made by a panel of one coach from the majority of DI conferences. NU is #30 in these rankings, and it made it really difficult to track the wins and losses of the #19-25 schools in the AP (not to mention the teams between #26 and #30, which were just as pivotal to NU's ranking), because the AP and ESPN polls generally differ a decent amount towards the bottom. So, if you're looking to see a college basketball scoreboard where Northwestern is featured with a nice little superscript ²⁵ next to it, go to the Yahoo or CBS Sports scoreboards, which feature the AP rankings. 
• Of course, whenever Northwestern does something good and potentially has an opportunity to be newsworthy, you can count on the Chicago sports world managing to find a way to ignore it anyway. Tomorrow's sports pages will certainly be filled with Vinny Del Negro's imminent firing and whatever horrific thing happens to the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football, and if the Wildcats win on Wednesday or the football team wins in the Outback Bowl, I predict something else crazy happens, like Notre Dame pulling a reverse Urban Meyer by firing Brian Kelly days after hiring him, or Lou Piniella hockeyfighting Ozzie Guillen at center ice in the during the second intermission of a Blackhawks game, ensuring Northwestern's hypothetical top 25 teams receive nothing more than a 250-word brief on page B13. 
• As for me, at first, I was a little bit disappointed to see this now: I have a lot of football related posts planned for this week, and my gut reaction was like, "man, can't this wait a few days until the bowl is over and there's nothing left to post on my site?" Then I remembered all those times I'd reloaded a college basketball scoreboard checking results of the 17th-35th ranked teams in the nation, thinking it would somehow effect NU's as-of-then nonexistent ranking, watching a Memphis-Umass game last week because Memphis was hypothetically 28th ranked or something, and realized, well, Northwestern is here, and I remembered why I named my site "Sippin' on Purple" (besides the part about it being a Gucci Mane lyric). 
• I realize now that the timing is, if anything, serendipitous: With us in a bowl and ranked in basketball, potentially ranked in both with an win in the Outback, you can expect the "hey, both teams are successful" angle to be featured in any NU games/highlights of those games on Sportscenter in this next week. And at this point in Northwestern sports history, all we can ask is that people take a look at our athletics programs and realize that the training wheels are off. 

Because I hate giving all the people coming over from EDSBS something interesting to read, here's a boring links post. 

• You know who else thought breaking down the Outback Bowl unit by unit was a good idea? Track em Tigers. 
• As you might have noticed, it's December of 2009, which means errbody's waxing poetic about the past decade. Paul Banks from The Sports Bank ran down the top ten players of the decade in football and an all-decade basketball team, while jhodges has the all-decade offensive and defensive units. If we win the Outback bowl, I think Mike Kafka automatically earns his spot as all-decade 2010's, despite only having played one day of that decade.
• Somehow, I haven't been aware of an NU basketball blog called Carmody Court. To sum up my intial reaction, I'm impressed. Any blog that updates for every Northwestern basketball game would automatically earn my respect, but CC does that and more, analyzing every game in depth and providing random trivia about the cupcake opponents that we play every week, which is EXACTLY what I'd do if I could. 
• A lot of you are probably wondering how intense Pat Fitzgerald is right now, since the intense-o-meter hasn't been updated since the Wisconsin game. Well, the answer is: very intense. Every year, coach Fitz says the goal is to win a bowl game, so he's really fired up, registering a season-high 9.4 out of 10 on the intensity tracker. Now, a 9.4 for a regular person is pretty intense, but for Fitz, it's overwhelmingly terrifying. Symptoms of being 9.4 out of 10 on the Fitz intense-o-meter include the temporary ability to spit actual lava.
• I talked a little bit about how being in the Big Ten is a financial boon. Well, consider that according to this, Northwestern is 59th in the nation in revenue drawn from our football program. I don't feel like looking up how bad our attendance is, but it's worse than 59th. (update: this link appears to be dead. trust me on this?)
• Some Auburn fan rigged up their house to do this. But they forgot the menorah!

Doin' it to it. 

• First off, you clearly don't need me around these parts: I want to highlight some things going on in the fanpost section in the right, because the last few days have seen three good posts over there and I feel like I'm hogging the spotlight.
• Chadnudj posted his plans for the conference expansion, and, quite frankly, made a better case for his viewpoint than I've seen anybody else do for their respective viewpoints elsewhere, so, props on that. There were two basketball posts reinforcing the fact that it's a good time to be an NU fan: Loretta posted his weekly Big Ten basketball power rankings, so go disagree with those, and G1000 described the week in NU basketball, without discussing NU, which is something I do in my head pretty much every day but am too lazy to post it. My only point is that regardless of what happens in NU's next few games, win or lose, rain or shine, deal or no deal, their RPI will drop like a stone due to the rankings of their opponents. That's not really basketball analysis, just a true inevitable statement, so, if my overlords are reading this, make a note of that. 
• Bama Hawkeye made this a fanshot down there in the bottom right, but I feel like bringing it up here: over at Rivalry Esq., the crew did something I kind of wanted to do here: ask an Alabama fan why I should hate Auburn. Well, now doing it here would be redundant, so go read what they said. Some good insult fodder. 
• I feel obligated to discuss what's been the #1 issue around the Big Ten blog vortex, which is, the Big Televen becoming the Big Tenwelve. Personally, I'm close to 95% indifferent: I'll probably focus on this in the offseason when there aren't exciting football and basketball games to think about. And even so, I'm extraordinarily ambivalent. I don't see the point in expanding, except, obviously, getting that paper, but at the same time, I don't see any drawbacks. (Except from the silly naming issue we'd have. As a journalism student, I disapprove of our soon to be really inaccurate name.) I really like the plan Chad set out in his post, as Mizzou seems like a better fit than a lot of other schools, and they seem like they want it judging from stuff I've read. I mean, it's not Penn State, but who is? (Oh, and to anybody who thinks that Rutgers and Syracuse would make New York a Big Ten market, you're blatantly wrong. As I type this, staring down the Chrysler Building, I can assure you that no New Yorker I know that isn't a current student of Syracuse University cares about the athletics teams of either of those schools, and even if they did - which, it should be noted, they don't - it's not like the Daily News would start covering Minnesota-Ohio State basketball games.)
• But it really does seem as if the wheels are in motion for this to happen, but chill out. It would take about three years for us to figure out what school we'd add, and then probably about three years before they actually joined the conference. So calm, people. 

That's all for now. My incessant Auburn posting is taking a rest today so y'all can focus on tonight's ESPNU showdown with the University of North Florida, which, judging from the University of South Florida's location in Tampa, is probably situated on a beautiful oceanfront campus on Key West. So stop by for that gamethread later, until then, stay in school, and don't do drugs unless they're prescribed by a licensed medical physician.

I'm tryina learn about American Government and Art History over here, ya heard? Oh, and read my post two posts ago about ex-NU folks gone pro. Not to mention the fanposts Loretta and Chad posted over on the right. 

• For the only time this year, the mystical curtain behind the Coaches Poll is lifted, and in an Wizard of Oz twist, the guy voting up Northwestern week after week wasn't a host of coaches each mutually appreciating NU's success, but Charlie Weatherbie head coach for Louisiana-Monroe. Weatherbie had the Cats 16th, providing nine of NU's 24 points, good for 30th. Of course, Weatherbie had a lot of time this past week to fill out his ballot, because he got fired from his job November 30th after completing his seventh consecutive non-winning season at the helm of the Warhawks, but that certainly didn't effect the vigor with which he filled out his poll mere days later. (He also left LSU off the ballot. Dedicated to ULM to the end, that Weatherbie.) Robb Akey from Idaho had us 19th, while no Big Ten coaches had us in the 25 except Bill Lynch, who had us 24th. Basically, the poll reeks of rampant homerism (Brian Kelly put Cincinnati No. 1, Jim Harbaugh has Stanford five spots higher than anybody else at No. 12, North Carolina owes its two points to their own head coach, Butch Davis, and Missouri can thank Gary Pinkel for four of their five.) So, basically, never trust the coaches poll, until next year when we're ranked there and I can go like GO U NU YEAH and you'll forget I ever wrote this post.
• I know this video has been posted on every other NU sports blog, but it's funny, and tremendously executed. 
• I personally am excited to enjoy Outback Steakhouse's unique blend of American food with an Australian guy voicing over their commercials. (Does anybody actually know what type of food they eat in Australia? Is it really just the same food as in America, but you have to go to a suburban strip mall to get it?) My Outback experiences thus far in my life are essentially limited to the one Outback Steakhouse along the I-84 almost exactly in the middle of the drive between New York and Boston, which for me is essentially the only landmark in the middle of Connecticut for me to distinguish how much longer I have to go. And I have to say, I've never had any issues with the food there, although it is really annoying having to figure out which random town in Australia corresponds to the regular American food you're trying to get. However, I do have one complaint, which is that Outback's jingle is possibly the worst in the history of mankind:
•  
• "Life will still be there tomorrow?" The only less committed statement they could've given was "Go Outback Tonight... There's like an 80That's the best you can give me? To be honest, before I saw this ad, I had no fears that my life would not still be there tomorrow. When I'm deciding which chain restaurant I want to go to, one of my issues is not "how likely is it that I die within eight hours of eating their food?" But they kind of snuck that into the back of my head. 
• Also, this:
  
• First off, not funny. Second off, Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords is clearly from New Zealand, not Australia. Which is different.
• UPDATE: of course, a day after I do a major post about every NU player remotely near the NFL, the Saints sign Prince Kwateng to their practice squad. So good to see him getting paid. 

Another day, another dollar. Another week, another monday links post.

• As always, highlights!   
• Two pats on my own back this week: first off, because apparently my blog name is catchy enough that SBNation's editorial staff can refer to it in posts about NU pulling the upset and expect people to get the reference. Secondly, for apparently being close enough to Teddy Greenstein when my friends and I were shirtlessly wandering around Ryan Field that he heard us singing the Outback Steakhouse jingle, and it making enough of an impression on him that he put it in his lead. You see, journalism professors, I got published in the Trib! Except it wasn't for an article I wrote, I wasn't attributed for it and I was wearing chest paint while I got quoted, and it could have been someone else, but I think it was me because nobody else would be dumb enough to sing the Outback jingle after a football game because a) we're clearly not going to the Outback Bowl and b) even if we were, why would you sing a commercial jingle from three years ago?
• Point being, I'm stupid. But to quote a commercial jingle, life will still be there tomorrow.
• Spread Far the Fame gives the pros and cons of this whole field-rushing thing. If you're con, well, you're a buzzkill and I hate you. 
• Hail to Purple's bowl thingy has, as always, an efficient and easy to follow rundown of who/where/why we'll be playing in a bowl. And as always, I'ma go head an link to it. 
• And if you think there won't be excessive coverage of bowlage here.... well, you done gone mad. 
• As noted, I love hip-hop and basketball, so it's not altogether unsurprising that Sunday night at 3 in the morning, I found myself distracting myself from writing a paper by watching this music video, Shaq's "No Hook" featuring two rappers from the greatest hip-hop assemblage of all time, the Wu-Tang Clan. (In my defense, I was youtubing the song "No Hook" by Jay-Z, which is quite awesomely covered on Legend of Zelda themed mixtape "The Ocarina of Rhyme". The version of "Still Tipping" on there is actually better than the original version of Still Tipping, which is just a smattering of how fantastic the idea of a Zelda music inspired mixtape is.) Point being, at 3 in the morning, I spent a good 15 minutes rewinding a very specific part of the video because I thought that Method Man might be wearing a Northwestern sweatshirt. As someone who wears a Northwestern sweatshirt a lot, I had a lot of reasoning to think it might be: it looks purple-ish, it's got roughly 11 letters on it, it's arced, like all Northwestern hoodies, there's some N's, O's, and T's clearly visible on the hoodie, and I figured this video was from like '96 or '97, when NU might have had football relevance. I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure it out, thanks to the enormously crappy video quality. As far as I can tell, it's not an NU hoodie, but rather, a Georgetown hoodie, and all the scenes with Meth in them are, for some reason, flipped horizontally, so it looks like the first letter is an N. If anyone has a better hypothesis, please tell me, but it should be noted that it took me 15 minutes to come up with that. To quote the RZA, "A decimal. Let's have a festival!!!" First person to decipher that line wins ownership of my blog, unfortunately, I'm pretty sure only the RZA could possibly tell you what it means, and he probably forgot he was ever on a song with freakin' Shaquille O'Neal 28 minutes after recording it.
• The Coach Fitz Intense-o-Meter is down, obviously, to a 3.4, denoted by the ability to fashion glass vases with the heat provided from his bare hands. You're probably thinking, "well, 3.4 is awfully high considering we don't play a football game this week", but, although the intense-o-meter is capable of detecting intensity levels down to a 0.1, Fitz has never recorded an intensity reading below a 2.1, and that came while he was napping on a Sunday afternoon in April when he was in the third grade, and even then, his intensity singed the pillow he was sleeping on because he was so intense.
• Via the links section of Spread Far the Fame, I saw this site NUIntel, which I somehow have never seen before. It's like NBN, but with absurdly more frequent and detailed sports coverage. I especially enjoy the IM football power rankings and its devastating, but alarmingly accurate assessment of my fraternity's offensive playcalling scheme. (for the record, I'd like to say that I was a key figure, but I forgot to give our coach my netID before the deadline, and missed the season after game 1. However, I eagerly await any online assessment of my basketball game. My game has been described as "a cross of Slava Medvedenko and Kurt Thomas", you can laugh all you want, but I urge you to kiss the rings.)
• Demos and Kafka earned Big Ten player of the week honors. As always, I give the Big Ten conference my disdain for naming Kafka "co-Big Ten offensive player of the week", because "Big Ten offensive player of the week" wasn't specific enough. PICK A SIDE DAMNIT.