Fall’s Tarts, Week 8: Wisconsin Edition

We just finished... WEEK 8, somehow? Holy crap you guys, this season is flying by. I’m sorry I deprived you of your Tarty goodness last week, but sometimes it is just too much to do the day job plus creating riveting free content. I know, Lazy Millennial.

Anyway, we’ve got some good tarts this week, and some of them are even not related to Wisconsin.

In Which Northwestern Commits the Unpardonable Sin

Look, if you want to be a Big Ten team, there’s one thing you must do: genuflect at the altar of punting. If you can’t punt well, then what the hell are you even doing here? This is a punting conference. It’s literally the only thing we can say in Rutgers’ defense—they’re decent at punting, which is a good thing, since it’s like 80% of their on-field performance.

Anyway, Northwestern had a bad outing against OSU, which was to be expected, as OSU is very good, and Northwestern seems to not be. So if there’s one part of the game Northwestern needed to have on lockdown against OSU, it’s punting. They, uh, did not:

Predictably, this led to an OSU touchdown two plays later. OSU won big, but their fans are still mad about it, because it was on Friday night, and thus not an optimal viewing experience. If you see a Buckeye today, please gift them a tissue.

In Which Northwestern Defends Poorly (And Hilariously)

Look, I’m sorry Wildcats—you guys had a bad night on Friday. While this still doesn’t rise to the level of hilariously inept defense displayed by my own Huskers last year when two defenders blocked EACH OTHER, this is still pretty damnable:

Since this particular tweeter is of OSU extraction, he gives all credit for this snafu to the blocking prowess of Jameson Williams. Williams doesn’t do a bad job here, but to neutral eyes, this feels more like ineptitude on the part of Northwestern rather than anything else. Anyway, this is one of the dumbest ways to let OSU get open in the end zone.

In Which Fresno State Auditions for Squeakyfouls Season With a Cool Dribble Move

I’m a historian, not a physicist, so I can’t explain how, exactly, this happens:

What I do know though is that this is absolutely mesmerizing to watch.

In Which OU Auditions for Ponies Gone Wild

This is absolutely my favorite tart of the week. Let me set your mind at ease: all riders and horses were thankfully uninjured in this event (which very much could have not been the case), so you can definitely laugh at this—which is good, because it’s really funny.

For those who are unaware (and I envy you your innocence), when Oklahoma scores, they drive a little covered wagon onto the field in a salute to their land thief heritage while world’s most annoying fight ditty is played. This time, it, uh, did not go well:

That thing rolled over more spectacularly than a Republican Senator! The drama didn’t end with the cart tipping though—Oklahoma’s spirit crew (the “Ruf Neks,” if you needed more evidence that Oklahoma is a terrible state) was faced with the immediate problem of how to move a wagon off the field sans ponies. Happily, they quickly organized and persevered (this is a great angle, by the way):

Personally, I think they should leave those poor horses out of it and carry the Schooner thusly from this point onward.

Oh Oklahoma. Never change.

In Which Iowa Kicker Keith Duncan Makes His Middle School Sunday School Teachers Proud

Keith Duncan is pretty much the entirety of Iowa’s offense in 2019. As the Ferentzii struggle to come up with a game plan that scores more than three points at any one time, Duncan is the only difference between Iowa’s offense and Rutgers’ offense. So it’s little wonder he’s getting love from his teammates. However, he seems a bit ambivalent about all of this:

LOOK AT IT. It’s an absolute beaut of middle school awkwardness:

I could probably turn this into a rant about toxic standards of masculinity in sports and how they poison moments like this one by making players afraid of just hugging like normal people, but I’ll spare you. Instead, I’ll just encourage Keith to check out this classic movie that is somehow older than he is:

In Which Barstool Is More Wrong than Usual

As you know, we here at OTE are no strangers to boldly proclaiming wrong things, to declaring your team Absolute TRASCH, to having no idea whatsoever what we’re talking about. That said, we still must salute this absolute gem of a poorly aged tweet, which took on highly comedic dimensions as the clock struck 0:00 in Champaign on Saturday:

Hahahahahahaha! Anyway, James McCourt would like a word, Barstool Wisco:

Though really, he said all he needed to on the field.

In Which Rutgers Continues to Exist as a Football Team, Academically Speaking

I don’t really like knocking on Rutgers anymore, because damn. Just practicing and suiting up all week in order to go get publicly humiliated has to be tough on those players, and at this point, I don’t really feel like laughing at them anymore. There might be some sort of life lesson here, about persevering through difficult circumstances, but that doesn’t make this any more palatable to watch.

However, in order to maintain my credibility (lol), I have to call a tart when I see it. And at this point, Rutgers continuing to field a football team is a Tart.

I can’t think of a worse way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of #thebirthplace. Here’s hoping they make a hire that gets them back to at least a normal level of bad, instead of absolute decrepitude and an underdog to Liberty. (Note: If you lose to Liberty, Rutgers, you will be Tart of the Week every week, for the rest of this season, and for all of eternity.)

In Which an Announcer Fails to Play it Cool

This isn’t truly tarty in the bad sense, but perhaps in the Victorian sense, where a tart is someone who behaves in a licentious manner. When Ole Miss busted a 69-yard run, the announcer just couldn’t help himself...

NICE.

In Which Lane Kiffin Displays His Wise Judgment

Now, obviously we live in a world in which irresponsible, imbecilic, and immature tweeting is practiced by some of the most powerful people, with zero repercussions. It was perhaps such a figure that Lane Kiffin took for his role model as he took to Twitter to vent his frustration about the officiating in his game:

Because he is not the President of the United States, Kiffin was of course fined $5,000 for violating Conference USA’s sportsmanship standards and what Kiffin called “freedom of tweet.” To his credit (I guess), he kept a sense of humor about it, at least on Twitter:

Defiant to the end, Kiffin made the following bizarre statement about the incident:

“I already made the decision I’m not going to get into officiating,” Kiffin said, per the ESPN report. “I don’t know if we lose money in this conference -- we probably do -- and I don’t have a lot anymore. I’m not going to lose any. I’m about to say what I want to say, but I’m not going to. The assistant AD is back there shaking his head like, ‘Hey, don’t say what you want to say.’ I’m not gonna say anything.”

Alright, Kiffikins. Say what you want for Jim Harbaugh, at least his officiating harangues haven’t gotten this bizarre (yet).

In Which Rev. Shaw Moore is Angered

In a clash between Georgia Southern and Coastal Carolina, both teams decided to spice things up a bit during the TV timeout before the 4th quarter by having what a local TV station termed a “hype dance-off” featuring a lot of bouncing up and down and seemingly harmless fun:

Of course, if there’s anything Rev. Shaw Moore the NCAA hates, it’s student-athletes having a bit of harmless fun. Consequently, the officials were left with no choice but to penalize EVERY SINGLE PLAYER FROM BOTH TEAMS with an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Several players were ejected because their dance moves were just too sick the group penalty made their second in the game.

It turned out to be an exciting game even without the dancing players—it took three overtimes for Georgia Southern to prevail.

In Which Wisconsin Loses to Illinois

We’ve covered this at length elsewhere , but it bears repeating. Wisconsin—ranked #6 in the country, winner of four games this season by absolute shut-outs, hands-down favorite to destroy the West en route to Indy—managed to lose to Illinois. Yes, that Illinois, a conference-wide punching bag saved from total ignominy because Rutgers is a thing.

To be fair, Wisconsin probably had no real shot at the playoff anyway, and as Beez says, they were expected to have a loss somewhere in the West at some point anyway. But uh... yeah, it wasn’t supposed to be to Illinois. The magnitude of this upset is enormous—I think the BTN graphic said it was something like the second-largest difference between rankings in the last 40 years of the Big Ten.

There has been much ink spilled about why Wisconsin lost this, and I’m sure those are all very good explanations—but at the end of the day, it seems that the Badgers simply didn’t think they’d have to really play Illinois to get the (motion) W. Illinois, to their credit, in spite of enormous odds and a solid record of always losing and never having nice things, came to play and didn’t quit. And as a result, they notched one of the largest upsets in college football history.