Get Rich or Play Towson

I'm not a betting man. (Medill folk: are sports journalists even allowed to? Seems like that would be sorta unethical, right?) My last foray into betting was a monthlong NBA centsports addiction that saw my worth rocket to $1.38, then collapse, ending with my betting my last 16 cents on the national soccer team of the extremely tiny nation of San Marino, hoping they could beat a six-goal spread against Poland. (They ended up losing 10-0. SAN MARINOOOO!!!!!!) 

But I was tempted to check out NU's line for the Towson game. How much, I wondered, are we expected to win by?

I looked everywhere, found nothing. No spreads, no odds. 

I jumped to three separate conclusions.

1) Vegas oddsmakers don't deem the game as likely to draw much betting, since NU and Towson don't have big fanbases, therefore, there are no lines.

2) The game will be a blowout. There's no money line big enough to be worth the casino's time, since NU will clearly win, and a spread that big would be pointless.

3) There probably aren't any spreads for any games featuring I-AA opponents.

Turns out, the correct answer was #3: there's no betting on games between FBS and FCS opponents, generally, although the guy from USA Today had a little bit of fun predicting that Florida should have a 63 point spread against Charleston Southern, and people went around reporting that he actually had said they'd win by 73. 

But still, all this should give us pause about our game against Towson. Playing I-AA opponents is a definite lose-lose situation. First off, it's a lose-lose because there's actually no way to win money off it if you're the betting type. But think about it: Towson shouldn't be able to compete with us. We were in the Top 25 last year, they probably weren't in the top 3/4 of I-AA teams. If we win, it's expected. We should win. If we lose, chaos ensues. If we win only by a little bit, people will start wondering if we're not legit. As Joshua astutely put in the comments section a few posts back, pretty much anything besides a blowout isn't good. And when you think about it, a blowout is kind of bad, because it means we're those guys who pay schools too much money to hammer them senseless. 

It's reasons like this I've started viewing our September 5th game less as something I need to be worried about and more as an organized practice and a chance to see how we run our offense and to gauge the skills of our players. Yes, score will be kept, unlike the spring game, and yes, if we do cool things, I'll gloat about it. I'll probably watch the highlight reel of the game multiple times. But when the game is so lopsided that Vegas is essentially pretending it doesn't exist, there's really no positives. 

Explain yourselves.

So, 42 of you sick people have voted in the poll over on the right. If you haven't yet, go.

But here's the point of this post: 26 of those people, like me, think Syracuse is the team to fear off the out of conference bunch. I can see why. They're a Big East team, they've got a top recruit, if you can call him that, starting under center, and we'll be on the road.

Four other people voted for that last choice, the "I'm not scared of anybody" choice.

But the other 12 of y'all? Two each for Towson and Eastern Michigan, and a whopping eight for Miami (OH). I'm confused. I could see the "we lost to them in 1995" thing affecting some of your thought processes re: Miami, and if that's true, say so, but, still, folks, I want explanations, because I'm not quite sure why those schools might seem frightening.

Folks, we have a comments section below. Use it. If I don't get a comment from anybody, I'll assume the 12 people who voted for those schools are operatives sent from MAC athletic departments to destroy us.

Others Receiving Votes

ERRRRRRRRRRRRRR?

Look, I know we ain't top 25, and we shouldn't be top 25, and we shouldn't be top 25 even if we go 6-1 or something against the Magnolia Bakery portion of our schedule. 

I wouldn't say we should be.

And I know last year's team that ended up 9-4 started the season not even being an other receiving votes, and that progress is progress.

But yo! Let's be real here!  We're probably better than Arizona and NC State. And we are definitely not 100 votes worse than Illinois.

And Central Michigan? Central Michigan? Really, Central Michigan?

Wow. 

Some Out-of-Conference Tidbits

Yesterday I touched on how bad our out-of-conference opponents this year are. I mentioned how none had winning records last year, and how all have new head coaches, who have never been college head coaches before. 

That doesn't even capture how bad they are. I didn't really realize how horrible the teams we play this year are, as a group, and I gathered some stats here, just so we can get this straight: all four games are must win. We have to win them. If we can't beat them, I'm not sure who we can beat. 

• It was noted that none of our opponents had winning records. But these teams didn't just go 5-7 - every team on our out-of-conference schedule finished last in their respective division. Towson's 1-7 record was last in the CAA Southern division, EMU's 2-6 was tied for last in the MAC West with Toledo, Syracuse's 1-7 record was good for last in the Big East, and Miami (OH) 1-7 was last in the MAC East. That's some shameful stuff right there.
• NU, with our no returning starting skill players, is a beacon of stability compared to these guys Each school, as noted, has a new head coach with no head coaching experience. To add to that, Towson and Syracuse each have new starting quarterbacks, one of whom, as you may have heard, is good at basketball. 
• NU won nine games last year. Our four out-of-conference opponents last year won 11, combined, an average of 2.75 per team. Sound horrible? It gets worse when you add context. Let's recap every victory one of those four schools had last year.

August 28: Eastern Michigan, 52, Indiana State, 0. Indiana State's team is apparently quarterbacked by a 52-year old Larry Bird.

September 6: Towson, 21, Morgan State, 16. 

September 13: Miami (OH) 38, Charleston Southern, 27. Unlike the College of Charleston or, um, Coastal Carolina, I have never heard of Charleston Southern, and, like Morgan State, I have no jokes about it.

September 20: Syracuse, 30, Northeastern, 21. You might remember Northeastern from that Tyrell Sutton highlight video I posted, a 27-0 victory two years back, and when people ask you "oh, Northwestern, that's in Boston, right?"

September 27: Towson, 31, Columbia, 24. Little known fact: back when PS2 was still popular, I tried to make Columbia national champions on NCAA Football. They had a perfect conference slate and road wins at USC, Texas, Ohio State, and Florida, but, if I remember correctly, they ended the season ranked, like, 23rd in the country. It was a waste of two days of my video game playing life.)

October 4: Eastern Michigan, 24, Bowling Green, 21. And with a squeaker on the road against Bowling Green, NU's 2009 out-of-conference opponents scored their first victory against a FBS opponent. Previously, they had been 0-12. 

October 11: Towson, 37, Rhode Island, 32. The Fighting Cuttino Mobleys provided Towson with their only conference victory of the season, and, sadly, their last victory of the season. 

October 18: Miami (OH) 27, Bowling Green, 20. Miami's second and final victory on the year came on the road against BGSU, and it's good to see NU's future opponents taking out vengeance on the Falcons for the 2003 Motor City Bowl. Surprisingly, Bowling Green wasn't too bad, finishing 6-6 on the season. I'd guess they'd like one of these two games back and a trip to a sub-par bowl. 

November 1: Syracuse, 28, Louisville, 21. Hey, respectable. Sure, Louisville was 1-7 in conference, but you take what you can get.

November 22: Syracuse, 24, Notre Dame, 23. The Orange beat some school in Indiana by scoring two fourth-quarter touchdowns, on the road. In 1963, this would have been on some sort of predecessor to ESPN Classic.

November 29: Eastern Michigan, 56, Central Michigan, 52: A directional school shootout to end the season ended up with EMU taking home their third W of the year. 

• So let's sort out the carnage: the teams we will play were 11-37 last year. Unfortunately, six of those wins were against Division I-AA, so against I-A opponents, they were 5-29. (The flipside of this reveals a 6-9 record against I-AA opponents, but all nine losses came from Towson.) Against Division I-A teams that aren't Bowling Green, they were 3-29. Against BCS opponents, they were 1-13, with the sole win Syracuse's victory over Louisville.
  
• The three teams we'll play at home, Towson, EMU, and Miami (OH), combined to go 2-17 on the road last season, with both victories coming against Bowling Green. To take that stat to its obvious conclusion, the three teams were a combined 0-17 at road games not in the Greater Bowling Green Metropolitan Area.
• Towson hasn't played a BCS school in so long I can't find it in ESPN's schedule database, and their loss against Navy last season was the only game against an FBS opponent I could find. Miami hasn't beaten a BCS opponent since beating Cincinnati in 2005, and EMU hasn't beaten one since beating UCF in 2003. 
• The last one of these schools to boast a winning record was Towson, who went 7-4 in 2006. 
• Northwestern is good at football, and these schools aren't.

So look: we all know we're Northwestern, the school with the terrible football history, and who really shouldn't be taking any game for granted. That being said, these are four games which we have every right to believe we should win. We'll even be favored by the oddsmakers, most likely. Now: if we lose one of these games, don't hit the panic button. I hate panic buttons, and, what's more, I hate sports fans who hit them. (I also hate jinxing things, so, I'm not saying WE'RE DEFINITELY GOING TO WIN.) We could still salvage the season and make a bowl.

But here's my point: we shouldn't have to. We're too good. We should win all four games, and anything other than that would be, well, surprising.

The OOC

Remember sunday, when I said I'd post every single day until football season? I meant it, but I probably should've put a caveat saying "except days when I inexplicably don't have internet access." Anyway, crisis resolved, there'll be two today and one every day from here on out. 

So I was on a Jetblue plane today, watching a mixture of a four month old Barca-Madrid game that I already knew the final outcome to and Animal Planet. (What happened to the Big Ten Network! I DEMAND TO WATCH INDIANA WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL DURING MY FLIGHTS) There was a horrible, horrible point during the flight where both these events managed to be on commercial, and I had to watch SportsCenter, where I saw that Greg Paulus will be Syracuse's starter this season. Which got me thinking about how winnable the Syracuse game is. Which got me realizing that of our four out-of-conference games this year, quite possibly our most difficult one could be against a team we handily beat last season with a new head coach, a quarterback who met his receivers three months ago for the first time and is more used to running away from dunkers than running an offense. 

Last year, NU won swept its out-of-conference schedule for the first time since 1962, and this year, we face four opponents who we should beat handily. None had winning records last season, and all four have brand new head coaches who have never been D-I head coaches before. For the first time in a long time, even dropping a single out-of-conference game will be a major disappointment for the Wildcats. 

This isn't necessarily the best way this year's schedule could've turned out. First of all, there's the fact that no matter how well we do this year, people will point to our 4-0 out-of-conference schedule and say that we didn't beat any real competition. Next, there's the fact that this year, we don't really need the cupcakes - we have a plus defensive unit with players with NFL talent and a lightning-rod quarterback who can make legit D-I teams look silly. Next year, our squad might be a drop-off from this year, and we'll have to play an SEC troublemaker in Vanderbilt and an improving Rice squad. Without a clear heir to Kafka's job and with guys like Wooton, McManis, Phillips, and Smith leaving Evanston, we might need four out-of-conference wins to be bowl eligible, and we might not be able to get them. 

This year, our bowl eligibility shouldn't be an issue. We should get four wins out of Towson at home, EMU at home, 'Cuse on the road, and Miami (OH) at home, leaving us to only need two (realistically three) to go someplace warm for the winter. And to be honest, if we don't get four wins out of those four games, we probably don't deserve the vacation.