One. Day.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.

I saved the best for last. Ten minutes of solid dramatic music set to every highlight from the 2008 season, except none of the highlights from games we lost. For ten straight minutes. Yes. 

T-minus 24, folks. T-minus 24. And think about this. Watch that video.

Did you watch it? Ten less minutes to football season now than there were when you started.

College football last night was actually pretty boring, but hey. I always find myself in the first few weeks of the season rooting for every team with slightly more votes in the AP poll than NU to lose, and that wish came true with NC State and their multitude of ten votes coming up short, although I was disappointed with ranked Utah and Boise State beating lesser opponents. (I also pull for every team in another BCS conference to lose to non-BCS opponents, but unfortunately, Iowa State wasn't really troubled by North Dakota State. 

On the Big Ten front, Indiana... sort of represented, taking down Eastern Kentucky, 19-13, so my 19-13 pick was close, I guess. However, I set a bad precedent picking a score for that game. I will, however, be picking the Big Ten games in a quick post later today, and, guess what, I got two more posts coming up too!

I've been posting up a storm recently, and it's not stopping any time soon. So check back later.

Two Days/I'm an Idiot

A different youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.

Props to whoever recorded this. There's nothing like a college football student section (except maybe a college basketball student section), and while the season starts in two days, the quarter system means I've got another three weeks until I get to stand on metal bleachers and go hoarse, and that's sort of depressing.

For those of you wondering about the "I'm an idiot" portion of the title, well, you'll notice that yesterday I had a post saying "four days" and today I have a post saying "three days." 

Well, last saturday, I had a post saying "Seven Days" because I looked and saw it was a week from football season. However, it took until today for me to actually look at a calendar and realize, "hey, that countdown means there's still a day left on saturday", which is stupid. I'm not counting down to sunday.

Anyway, yes, I'm an idiot. In my defense, I'm a journalism student, and therefore, haven't taken a math class since high school, haven't gotten above a C+ in a math class since tenth grade, and haven't gotten a B in math... ever. (I'm proud to be one of the few Northwestern students who says they got bad grades and means it. I assume this means I'm amongst the top five journalists of all time, but I'll leave that for you to decide.)

In other news, college football starts tonight! In even better news, Big Ten football starts tonight! Indiana plays Eastern Kentucky, and if this game took place two years ago, and was basketball, and you changed the word "Eastern" to "Western", I'd totally watch it, and it would be on the news as a matchup of potential tourney teams. Sadly, none of those things are the case.

Eastern Kentucky is sort of an FCS powerhouse - 31 consecutive winning seasons - and Indiana is sort of a FBS, well, whatever the opposite of powerhouse is (slaughterhouse? crackhouse?), so expect it to be closer than your average I-A vs. I-AA matchup. 

I'm going Indiana, 24, EKU, 17. Watch a bit and switch over toe the Oregon-Boise State matchup. You gotta pull for the Hoosiers, because you never, ever want your future opponents to drop a game (or nine) to FCS squads.

It also should be noted that Indiana added a little over 3,000 seats to Memorial Stadium in the offseason, pushing the difference in size between our stadiums from about 2100 to about 5500. I'm not sure what the purpose of this was, but suffice it to say, with a hot start to the year and good student support at Ryan Field, who knows, maybe Indiana will challenge for the 2009 edition of the prestigious Big Ten's Most Empty Seats award, which NU has won handily pretty year ever. Sadly, short of back-to-back NU Rose Bowls or a snap decision by Purdue to move all their home games to el Estadio Azteca,  I think NU will probably be the frontrunner for this trophy for a long time.

Three Days.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.

Boy, it's sure going to be exciting to see all those guys... in action... this year for the Wildcats... oh crap.

PS: I will be revealing the results of the poll to the right directly before gametime, so I suggest you vote now. It's getting heated, as one person has manned up and voted for Towson, so, vote. It's your civic duty.

Four Days.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.

This countdown post sort of breaks the template of the others, but, whatever. It's got a long preface and whatnot. Just read it. 

You see, I'm a hip-hop nerd. You probably figured this out from my first post, and all the other ones, too. Anyway, I've noticed a trend: behind every successful sports team is a team-specific hip-hop song.

As a New Yorker, this was evident to me from a young age. The Knicks had a song called "Go New York Go New York Go", and they made a new edition of it every time they made the playoffs. It's pretty much the best song of all time. On Youtube, I can find the '94 version (they made the finals), the '99 version (they made the finals again) and the '04 version (the last year they made the playoffs, also the last time the team made the song. (It also should be noted that Q-Tip freestyled about the team when the Knicks made the finals.)

Also, when the Yankees had a dynasty in the late 90's, every year, local radio stations like Z100, which I unabashedly listened to when I was 8, hired random people to make songs about the team every year. I distinctly remember one rapper who had to do it completely copping out and just saying "Hideki Irabu" at the end of a verse, because nothing rhymes with it very well. I can't find any on the internet, besides this song which is less rap than two fake Italian guys talking to each other, but you get the gist.

Chicago fans also should be familiar with this concept, courtesy of the '85 Bears.But this is something that's universally true. I mean, the Lakers even had their own mixtape this past year. 

And nowhere is this truer than in Northwestern sports. To my knowledge, there are three rap songs about Northwestern football. I present to you: the complete, unabridged glossary of Northwestern football-related rap music.

1) The song from the beginning of the "Purple to Pasadena" video on Youtube.

Year made: 1995.

Wildcats Record that year: 10-2. 

They had to make some promotional video about the Wildcats making it to the Rose Bowl, and the producers of the VHS were like, "hey, what do the kids listen to nowadays?" and they ended up with this terrible song. I imagine the questionnaire they used to hire the rapper guy contained questions such as "Have you heard of music before?" and "On a scale of 1-10, how bad are you at pronouncing the word 'Wildcats?'" Anyway, the guy comes on, raps two verses and proves to me that he's vaguely familiar with the concept of words that rhyme with one another, has heard of Northwestern (he kind of rhymes it with "best") and that he's also vaguely familiar with football. Anyway, it's like a how-to of how not to rap. He ends two bars with "running back", and he says awkward things like "the Wildcats uniforms roar when they hit the field," which doesn't make any sense, and he says our offense "has more power than an Amtrak derail", which is bad, because you try not to compare your offense to a horrific tragedy, or something which is terribly misguided, both of which are ways you can describe Amtrak trains derailing. Also, there's the aforementioned fact that he pronounces the word "Wildcats" "waaaaolcats", which wouldn't be annoying, but he does it 14 times, and therefore, I feel it bears repeating that it's really annoying.

2) Mo Greene's "Go U NU" and "Go U NU Alamo Bowl Remix".

Year produced: 2008.

Wildcats record that year: 9-4.

I'm not quite sure who Mo Greene is. I know he's a rapper who went to Northwestern, and that he showed up at the Purdue game last year, was sort of just chilling outside the students entrance while everybody was entering the stadium while music is playing, and that later, he walked through the stands, and stood near me and my friends for a few seconds, and we couldn't decide what to say to him, finally someone was like "hey, Mo, what's up" and he said "Making music, you know how it is" and then answered his cell phone and walked away.

What I do know is that he made two great songs last year about Northwestern football. The songs are catchy, and good game day/stadium listening music. Greene is clever and has lyrical talent, and it shows.

Mo's namechecking skills are off the charts. He manages to mention pretty much everybody involved with NU football, and he manages to make each namedrop relevant, and stays inventive with how he incorporates the names into his flow. In the Alamo Bowl remix (hear it here) he manages to reference Jeff Yarbrough (who didn't record any catches last year) Ramon Diaz (a backup offensive lineman who never played at NU) Stefan Demos (our punter), Finnish football star David Oredugba, our entire offensive line (yeah, seriously) and, as far as I can tell, every single starter at every single position.  And none of them seem forced. (Actually, the "go far with O-mar Conteh" sounds forced, but other than that, it's pretty good.) It's actually really impressive. It's like "Fame" by GZA except it's a little bit more of a cut-and-paste job, since he had so much less material to work with. 

My only complaints about the song are the weird "CHAAAAA!" fake laughing things he does all the time that actually scare me. 

Anyway, Greene pretty much sets the bar for team-related hype songs.

You'll notice that of the three rap songs, they were written in two years, and in those years, the Wildcats combined for 19 wins, whereas in the rest of Northwestern history, in years the Wildcats don't have rap songs, the team averages well below 9.5 wins a season. Therefore, I hypothesize that the Wildcats need a rap song written about their season to be successful.

However, the season starts in four days, and we don't have a song yet. I nominate Mo Greene to write one, but, if he doesn't step up, I might just have to. And I think it's in the best interests of everybody around us that that doesn't happen, because although I'm undeniably nice with it, there's a reason I'm a rap nerd and not a rapper, because I'm better at writing about rap, than I am at rapping it, and as you can see, I'm pretty bad at writing about it. But if I have to step into the studio to save NU's season, I might have to take that chance. I'm not afraid, but you should be.

Trifecta of Doom: Towson, the Big Ten Network, and Northwestern being Northwestern.

Title ominous enough for you?

Anyway, I know it's messed up to complain about Northwestern's television situation: I'd think I lost the right to do so after watching the NU-UC Riverside game on an airplane. (I also once watched an inning of NU softball on a plane.) But today, I gotta gripe.

Basically, a perfect storm of Northwestern being Northwestern events are conspiring to make it really, really difficult for me to watch Saturday's game vs. Towson.

The first, and simplest reason, is that college football starts September 5th, and Northwestern, unlike most schools in the country, is on the quarter system, meaning we start about 3-4 weeks after every other school in the country, and well into the swing of the football season. The problem here is that I live about 800 miles away in New York City, meaning I won't be going to this game or the EMU game. This is just one of those sort of annoying things about NU football: we get 2-3 games every year with essentially no student section, which means our attendence isa bout 3-4000 lower than it should be. 

But how to watch the game in New York? If you're not living in the states that contain Big Ten schools, it's already sort of hard to get the Big Ten Network - you have to pay to get that station, plus a bunch of other channels you don't particularly care about - and the cost of this and the fact that it will come in handy for maybe two games a year make this an unappealing option. 

However, even if I did have the network, a quick glance at the TV schedule for next Saturday on Time Warner Cable shows that with a ridiculous 7 Big Ten games beginning at noon ET, NU gets the short end of the stick: Ohio State and Minnesota will be getting the ESPN and ESPN2 slots, while MSU, Purdue, Iowa, and Penn State get the Big Ten Network and three overflow channels, while the Towson vs. Northwestern game doesn't air live, instead getting shown at 6 PM the next day. If this information is incorrect, somebody tell me, but my cable box and the Time Warner website appear to verify this. I wouldn't be surprised: last year, NU vs. Duke was the only football game containing a Big Ten team that didn't get televised. I presume watching the game is easier in Big Ten country, but that's the problem with going to a school 800 miles from home.

It certainly doesn't help that a) we're Northwestern, the school with the smallest fanbase and the least regionally centered one, thus making airing the game anywhere unappealing and b) the fact that we're playing Towson, a team that struggles against FCS opponents, thus making the game completely unwatchable for anyone who isn't an NU fan. 

Also, the fact that NU's fanbase is so diluted makes it difficult to make a large gathering of NU fans anywhere. Therefore, while the Buckeyes and every other college in the world has a well-established NYC bar, I've only heard rumors that there's a place like that in New York, and I've never actually met anybody who's been there. (If any of you can give word on whether that place is, in fact, an actual place, please, I'm desperate over here.)

Personally, I plan on gathering the NYC NU crew together at a sports bar where I watched the SIU game last year, but any suggestions about places to watch the game in New York are appreciated. 

Long story short, the fact that we're Northwestern and we're playing Towson makes it sort of difficult to find Saturday's game for a large percentage of our already small fanbase. And that's not good for anybody. 

There won't be any game thread - first off, if you live within two hours of the school or so, you should be at the game. Second off, I see no way I can bring a computer to wherever I watch the game, and third, blogger isn't to conducive to game threads. 

However, hypothetically, if, let's say, I don't know, my blog gets picked up by a large sports blog network that currently has a blog for every Big Ten team besides Northwestern about 2-3 weeks from now (COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH), I'll post a game thread for every game, and I'll need you guys to help make them actually interesting. So, hypothetically, be prepared. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Five Days.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.


Not NU-related, but, as someone who followed the NBA in the 90's that song instinctively causes some combination of goosebumps, spine chills, and loss of bowel control.

Expect at least two more posts today. What can I say, I'm bored, excited for football season, and wishing everybody else hadn't left for college already.

Six Days.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped. 

My favorite part of this video - and there's a lot of good parts - is how Jordan Mabin and I had the exact same reaction, which is a sort of jumpy fist-pump thing. The difference is that I was still lying in bed, not having left my room all morning, and Mabin laid a hardcore block on a wide receiver less than four seconds later. 

The ESPN call findable in other youtube clips is louder, but you can't beat the atonal yelling of "WE OWN THIS BUILDING, DAVE". It doesn't get any better than that. 

7 Days.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.

If you'll excuse me, I have a brick wall to go and run through now.