Next week begins B1G 2025, our week-by-week preview of every team in the Big Ten ahead of the 2025 college football season. For the next three months, we’ll run you through the rosters, the coaching changes, the traditions that make Big Ten football great.
Hail to Alma Mater
I am dreading it.
Not, reader, because we don’t have a fun twist on it—we do: Rivalry Week, Every Week, where June 9-13 will feature dueling previews of Northwestern and Illinois.
Not, reader, because I no longer care about my Northwestern Wildcats—I do, even if Pat Fitzgerald’s self-inflicted demise, the relative anonymity and irrelevance of the post-Fitz ‘Cats, and the shambles that was the Ryan Field rebuild saga have damped my enthusiasm.
We will sing thy praise forever
Not even, reader, because our corporate overlords have strip-mined sports blogging for venture capital and in turn have themselves been strip-mined by venture capital several times over—I’m relatively confident they forget we exist until they receive another directive from on high that we should Pivot to Video or Circle Back to Podcasts or Kill the Podcasters and Talk ‘Crootin.
It’s been 15 years of The Rivalry, Esq., turned Off Tackle Empire—and now, dear reader, we stand once again at the precipice. Reformers within the empire appear to be experimenting with a new—and frankly, to this tired overlord, welcome—pivot to something called a “Republic”. Perhaps you can tell us your thoughts, when you have time.
All thy sons and daughters pledge thee victory and honor
In the meantime, we press on, haltingly and with barely a fraction of the enthusiasm these tired fingers once had for Big Ten football, Midwestern cuisine, and OK we lied, of course, we still have enthusiasm for Midwestern cuisine.
Nebraska.
Maryland and Rutgers.
Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington.
It doesn’t stop.
Alma mater, praise be thine
Now, having joined forces with the SEC to ram through a College Football Playoff “reform” that eliminates the auto-bye for the four highest-ranked conference champions, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti—whose name, if I’m honest, likely has that number of t’s but possibly in a wildly different formation—is trying to push the Playoff into a 16-team model in which the Big Ten is always guaranteed four tickets to the dance. The conference championship weekend, in this model, could morph into some unholy Sweeps Week abomination in which the sixth-ranked team in the conference plays the third-ranked team, and the fifth-ranked the fourth, for the final two auto-bids to the 16-team playoff.
Presumably this would, at some point, result in 8-4 (6-3) Iowa making the College Football Playoff. Undoubtedly, it’s already leading to headlines where the SEC is being presented as the rational actor who needs to tell an out-of-control Big Ten “enough is enough.”
Reader, I’m tired.
Not because I have two kids now, mind you—I was a graduate student living 70+ miles from my then-girlfriend when I took over this place—and not because about 30% of my students just flagrantly used AI on their final exam—you think I wouldn’t notice that your conclusions all talked about Fievel: An American Tale, you pricks? Look at the tiny, white, size-1 font that you dutifully copy-pasted into ChatGPT. Look at yourself. Was it fucking worth it?
Where was I?
Ah yes, whether Northwestern has surrounded Preston Stone with enough playmakers for the ‘Cats to make it, wheezing and gasping like me climbing the stairs, to 6-6 (3-6) and a trip to then Gaylord Hotels Glen Mason Memorial Music City Bowl.
May thy name forever shine
The Primal Scream and Painting the Rock.
Sink the Biz and 25-foot beer bongs on Breese Terrace.
Jingling keys—no, not exactly like everyone else does, ours means something—and spelling four-letter words, then applauding yourselves for it.
A fight song that talks about drinking rum, or is played at twice the speed it’s intended as the crowd loses the beat clapping along, or references now wonderfully-anachronistic rivals that your team will now play, if you’re lucky, two times every five years.
Those beautiful, stupid, wonderful traditions got me into college sports as a kid. I got to become part of them as a young adult—and ruin your stupid fucking ANF card stunt, Iowa fans, fuck each and every last one of you and the now-defunct train you rode in on—and they prompted me to start—and keep—writing for Off Tackle Republic sorry, Off Tackle Empire.
Hail to Purple, Hail to White
Now, those traditions are 45-second pre-recorded spots before we bring you back to Sign Cam, sponsored by Home Depot, itself a one-minute interlude before returning to the all-important ten-minute Red-Faced Baboon Conspiracy Theorist Yelling Segment, Brought to You By DraftKings. Our loyalty and our tradition has always, always, always been subject to crass commercialization, and perhaps this is no different—perhaps I am just at an age where I now shake my cane at the clouds and curse the youths for Caring Less than I did.
But, I suppose, it’s time to circle up and sing our song again—to block out the noise, put your arms around the two people standing next to you, whether strangers or friends, as long as they’re wearing the right colors, and gaze into the mid-distance, remembering to enunciate the “H” in “Hail”, lest Dr. Thompson kill you with but a look.
I’m not sure if this song, this time, is the Alma Mater we sing in pregame, or at the end of each halftime, or the one we sing when we’ve circled up on the field at the end of the game, win or lose, and we prepare for someone atop the stadium to turn out the lights as we trudge off, convinced that next time—that time everything goes according to plan.
Hail to thee, Northwestern
Welcome to B1G 2025.
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