Call it whatever you want. Pigskin Classic. You won’t even be half right. Swinehide Special. Porkrind Memorial. They gave a trophy for it and Northwestern took it. Happy to have it.
It was nowhere near classic and whatever animal epidermis they make footballs out of, Oklahoma has an obvious allergy.
“This is just one step,” said Northwestern coach Gary Barnett. “I’m not ready to say we’re ready to defend our Big Ten title.”
A paltry ambition these days for Northwestern, the Big Ten. If that’s all that meant anything, it would not matter who won whatever that was Saturday at Soldier Field. College football in August?
Why not the Iditarod or the nordic combined? Those have trophies, too.
“It was a risk to take this game,” Barnett said. “But when you win it, it makes it seem worthwhile.”
What risk? The only risk was to national title consideration, since this has absolutely no effect on the Big Ten. Northwestern lost to Wake Forest to start last season and ended up with the title, relying on what seems an infallible strategy: Lose no more than one Big Ten game and wait for Michigan to beat Ohio State.
Going into this thing, nevertheless and despite verifiable title redundancy, Northwestern was as unranked as laundry lint.
“We are not worried about rankings,” said Tim Hughes, one of the quarterbacks. “We will earn our place and move up slowly.”
“Every year is a telltale year for Northwestern football,” said Chris Hamdorf, the other quarterback. “We don’t want anyone to give us anything. We want to earn it.”
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Both managed not to move his lips while the other was speaking.
What came out of the day was not just a win and a ranking but a genuine quarterback controversy.
Oops. Didn’t mean to use the word controversy. This is under strict instructions of Barnett, who, for a guy who refused to acknowledge anything negative on the day, did appear unnecessarily gloomy.
“What I don’t want from anyone, from us, is any mention of a quarterback controversy, because there is none,” Barnett said. “We are going to need both of them.”
Sure. Whatever he says. I will not bother to repeat the only statistic I kept in the whole dull day, that Northwestern scored 18 points with Hamdorf at quarterback only six with Hughes.
Either would have been enough to beat Oklahoma, a team so bent on avoiding the end zone, as well as the football, that little judgment can be made on whether the Wildcats are 24-0 good, or OU is 0-24 bad.
Oklahoma is as haplessly desperate these days as Roberto Duran, a big name come to a shabby state. The Sooners were all nostalgia and very little else. They played the stooge for the day. You know, like Northwestern used to do, except without the half-dozen national championships and the trio of Heisman winners.
Oklahoma is the outfit about whom their college president once said he hoped to build a school the football team could be proud of.
There is a bit of work to be done on both sides now.
But that is Oklahoma’s problem and welcome to it, much larger concerns than who is starting at quarterback.
“Tim is a real good quarterback and so am I,” said Hamdorf.
Both of Hamdorf’s points remain to be seen, but logic would suggest that since both are fifth-year seniors and finally fighting for one job, their immediate predecessor was not Steve Schnur at all but Otto Graham.
Hamdorf had the best of it this day. He seems to throw a tighter ball and quicker. Hughes won the job in practice, so he has to be better than he looked.
But I bow to Barnett’s wishes. What we have here is not a quarterback controversy but a quarterback sequence, 1 and 1A, all equal, all necessary.
“Tim is the starter,” Barnett said. “I reserve the right to change my plans.”
Better to have a problem over who helped you win than over who made you lose.
Nice trophy they gave out, by the way, even if it is like getting the first number in the lottery. You do need it, but it is what comes next that matters.