Good morning! Welcome to the second issue of the Inside NUsletter. Thank you for taking the time to read it. We hope you enjoy it. If you know someone who you think will like it, share it with them by clicking the button below.
Today, we’ll once again highlight some articles we published over the last week or so, other interesting college sports news as well as some random things we found on the internet and wanted to share.
If you’ve come to expect anything from Inside NU, it’s that we don’t like to take ourselves too seriously. If it’s your first time reading, the Inside NUsletter should come off as informal but informative.
What we’ve been up to
First, and most important, editor-in-chief Lia Assimakopoulos released a feature covering a group of Black Northwestern football players in the early 1980s who sought to combat the unequal treatment they encountered on a daily basis within Northwestern’s football team.
She interviewed former Wildcat football players Dana Hemphill, Mike Cammon, Joseph Webb, Chris Hinton and Tim Hill, who all played a major role in establishing Black Athletes Uniting for the Light (BAUL). BAUL led the charge for equal treatment from the coaching and medical staff under head coach Rick Venturi. With conversations of race and equality at the forefront of our society, this story of a courageous group of Northwestern student-athletes deserves to be told.
A brief quote from the story:
“At first, we were all experiencing these nuances separately, which is why these conversations happening in our dorm rooms started validating one another. That validation turned out to be consensus that the Black athletes were in fact experiencing things differently than our white colleagues.” - Joseph Webb
In other news, the NBA season officially resumed last night in Orlando. With it, our in-house basketball and film room guru Dan Olinger was back for seconds with an intriguing piece on Vic Law’s playing hopes in the NBA Restart Bubble and beyond. If you missed last week’s NUsletter, Law is currently in the bubble and listed on the active roster for the Orlando Magic. TL;DR: Law has been struggling as of late, but if he embraces his role as a true three-and-D player, he could be the first NU player to reach the NBA in a long time.
Wildcat Banter, our new podcast hosted by Lucio Vainesman and Jackson Boolbol, caught up with rising junior guard Ryan Greer. The Georgia native went in depth on testing protocols, practicing during a pandemic, and Senior Day jersey designs. Pound The Talk this week covered Illinois running back Ra’Von Bonner’s announcement to sit out the 2020 season as well as testing updates from several Big Ten schools.
If you might recall from last week’s NUsletter, the five editors took part in a Northwestern Football all-time draft, choosing one quarterback, one defense, two pass catchers, and two running backs. Alas, Dan Olinger, already coming off a victory in the (under)dog poll from back in June, once again prevailed, garnering thirty-four percent of the vote for a team featuring fan-favorite Otto Graham, Tyrell Sutton, Austin Carr and the 1995 ‘Cats defense.
Accordingly, Dan created this video to celebrate:
Mac Stone finished second with 26 percent, while Lia Assimakopoulos’s undoubtedly shady tactic of drafting Kain Colter as a running back saw her place third with 18 percent. Astoundingly, despite predictions from his fellow editors that he’d be “dunked upon” in the comments for his strange affinity to golden god Clayton Thorson, Colin Kruse managed to finish a solid fourth in the pack, while a listless Eli Karp, despite a solid combination of Dan Persa, D’Wayne Bates (!), and the 2017 Wildcat defense, earned a mere nine percent of the vote and finished last.
Things that happened this week
With the pandemic continuing to unfold, the prospect of college football in the fall hangs in the balance. The ACC announced a tenuous plan to play an eleven-game season with one non-conference opponent while welcoming Notre Dame to the league. It took a pandemic, but the Fighting Irish will finally play conference football.
The SEC also finally formally acknowledged the season would not be business as usual, as it identified September 26 as a start date for a 10-game conference-only season, throwing a wrench in the plan of one non-conference game for ACC teams, several of whom have in-state rivalry games with SEC teams (South Carolina vs Clemson, Georgia vs Georgia Tech, Florida State vs Florida).
According to Teddy Greenstein of the Chicago Tribune, early hints suggest that the Big Ten could begin its season on the originally scheduled date of September 5, three weeks ahead of both the PAC-12 and SEC’s start time, with nine or ten conference conference games, emphasizing flexibility with more by weeks and the ability to schedule geographically closer cross-over games. The B1G will likely release a schedule in the next few days, potentially as early as today (which we here at Inside NU would love!).
The conference-only scheduling is expected to front-load division games, which means we could see rivalry games like HAT and The Game in September and October. Moreover, the Big Ten’s decision to play football in the fall is not reliant on any other major conference.
Nonetheless, the situation remains ever fluid, as suggested by this tweet from Sports Illustrated's Pat Forde last night. An on-time camp would start August 7, a week from today. So, unsurprisingly, we are waiting and seeing.
https://theathletic.com/1962456/2020/07/30/acc-schedule-model-notre-dame-presidents-chancellors-leadership/
The recent MLB hiccup with the Miami Marlins sustaining an outbreak and forcing the cancellation of games as well as shifting of the schedule roughly parallels some of the issues facing college football programs. Numerous positive tests at Rutgers and Michigan State forced shutdowns of workouts and quarantines of the programs. In an article written by Yahoo’s Pete Thamel, Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin summarized the essential procedures which each and every program and university needs to master ahead of the season:
“Testing and getting our arms around the tracing protocols are the two things that have to be figured out if we’re going to play this fall.”
According to the article, the key is a new advances in testing, namely rapid, daily tests people could self-administer at home. These tests coming to market would transform the way we live before a vaccine is widely available. So far, Tulane’s frequent testing and protocols has led to just three positive cases within the football program since arrival, perhaps a positive sign amid all this uncertainty over whether or not football can be played.
On the pitch, a few former Wildcats played in big games this week. Tyler Miller of Minnesota United sent his squad to the MLS is Back Quarterfinals with a penalty save (start at 4:50) in the Loons’ Round of 16 victory over the Columbus Crew. In the NWSL Challenge Cup Final, Kayla Sharples conceded a penalty in the fourth minute, which put her and fellow Wildcat alumna Hannah Davidson’s Chicago Red Stars behind the Houston Dash as they lost 2-0.
In other, somewhat astonishing news for our readers out west, a recent article in The Salt Lake Tribune detailed an alleged exchange of money between the Pac-12 and the Los Angeles Times. The report alleges that the Pac-12 entered an agreement with the newspaper in 2018 in which the conference would pay $100,000 for increased positive coverage.
That’s not all, however. The Pac-12 was allegedly involved in a deal with The Players’ Tribune as well in an effort to increase press coverage, but it didn’t go as planned. According to the report, “at least two first-person pieces written by Pac-12 athletes for The Players’ Tribune were not written by the athletes themselves.” Instead, they were written by a St. Louis-based PR firm. It’s been a rough few years for the Conference of Champions as it tries to keep up with the rest of the Power Five.
Spencer Hall, Richard Johnson, Alex Kirshner, Jason Kirk and Tyson Whiting, formerly of Every Day Should Be Saturday and Banner Society at SB Nation, have been co-writing an ebook titled The Sinful Seven: Sci-Fi Western Legends of the NCAA. If any of you are familiar with this group’s style of writing, then you should already know it’s bound to be filled with tons of sarcastic, hilarious and CFB-specific humor.
So why did this make it into the InsideNUsletter? Well, on July 21, Hall dropped the first chapter of the The Sinful Seven in the USA Today Sports page, titled “The Sheriff.”
This sheriff is a lazy, arrogant and downright despicable man who quickly gets portrayed as someone who thinks he is better than everyone else, but in reality is not, and ultimately causes harm do to his incompetence.
You’ll never guess where said sheriff got his education.
“As you undoubtedly know already, it is very prestigious,” screams NU in bright, beaming purple and white, and having their most dislikable character go out of his way to brag about such an alma matter is clearly a jab at the oft-mentioned academic reputation of the school.
Things don’t get any better from here for our fellow alumnus, as he follows up that brag with an unprompted monologue on the moral ethicality of the system, which starts as a reference to the debate over the lack of compensation for college athletes in the NCAA, but then morphs into more boasting.
Of course, all this NU-specific ribbing is all in good nature and should be taken thusly, rather than be seen as any actual attack worthy of a counterstrike from the Northwestern faithful. Though, rage might at least be understandable from how the sheriff is described in one of the closing paragraphs of the chapter by the story’s protagonist.
It’s admittedly dark, but great writing nonetheless. The full book goes live tomorrow at noon ET.
Good Tweets
No, there wasn’t a juicy Senate hearing pertaining to college sports this week, but the internet still did its thing. Stewart Mandel, editor-in-chief of The Athletic’s college football coverage (and Medill alum) brought up a couple very good points relating to yesterday’s scheduling developments across the ACC, SEC and Big Ten.
Re the first tweet, I think Northwestern fans would be just fine if they didn’t have to dread Akron or Illinois State or Western Michigan invading Ryan Field in September. Undoubtedly, the Power Five effectively separating itself from the rest of the FBS would be significant, but that doesn’t mean we’re there justtttt yet.
This one is less of a “good tweet” and more of an “oh look, we have a poll that always overrates Nebraska, let’s see what it says this year.”
It seems Nebraska received a more reasonable ranking of fourth in the West division, but the voters had very mixed opinions on the real NU.
“The voting panel had the toughest time coming to a consensus on Northwestern. The Wildcats received one first-place vote, two third-place votes and eight last-place votes in the West. Northwestern, which won the West in 2018, added former Indiana quarterback Peyton Ramsey as a grad transfer in the offseason.”
So yes, one person chose the Wildcats to make the Big Ten Championship, while eight thought they’d be a cellar dweller for the second straight season. Their composite ranking is 6th in the West. But most importantly, the Illini ranked seventh.
“Illinois, a bowl team last season, was the only team in the West not to receive higher than a fourth-place vote. However, that was a step up after receiving every last place vote in each of the last two preseason polls.”
HAT.
In college football universe news, notorious Alabama superfan Harvey Updike passed away yesterday. He infamously called into Paul Finebaum’s radio show to say he had poisoned Auburn’s iconic Toomer’s Oaks trees. He eventually plead guilty to a felony charge of criminal damage of an agricultural facility and spent more than 70 days in jail, while also being ordered to pay $800,000 in court-ordered penalties and restitution.
In the SEC, it just means more.
Finally, noted Southern California resident and holier-than-thou social media cleanser Colin Kruse reserved his parking spot for the Rose Bowl. He fully expects to be there, along with the entire editorial staff, on January 1, 2021. Hashtag Go ‘Cats.
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We’ll be back in a week, when maybe football camp will be starting? See you then.
Written by Colin Kruse with help from Eli Karp and Mac Stone