16 Days - 30 B1G Years - 1995

Definitely a team you could easily get behind.

It’s the start of football history. Year one.

Yeah, the guy is a jerk, but he managed the greatest program turnaround in college football history. Nobody saw the Wildcats going 15-1 in conference play over two years, but somehow it happened.

Your introductory paragraph is spot on. I was a senior in college, and the whole thing had a “too strange for fiction” feel to it. It is the most remarkable sports story of my lifetime. The only think that could have surpassed it would have been if Gordon Hayward’s buzzer-beater against Duke in 2010 hadn’t rimmed out. If people think “Indiana football” is a punchline now, it really doesn’t compare to how Northwestern was regarded in the 25 years before 1995.

Here I was, the freshmen year of college, thinking I had watched college football for years while growing up only to learn that it was all a figment of my imagination. And to think, the number of people involved in the conspiracy. Hell, you had CBS and ABC staging mock games every weekend to con us into thinking college football was being played; bowl organizations across the country staged “games” where they would play “participants” millions of dollars just to keep the charade up. Hell, even reputable national magazines like Sports Illustrated would report each week on the “results” of the prior week’s “games”. What an elaborate ruse, perpetrated by so many, all to convince us what we thought we saw wasn’t really what we saw.

It would irritate me to no end.