Pizza and Predatory Purring Purple People: Pot Luck #3

It was inevitable, but we made it 2 days before everyone ran out of gas talking about Northwestern. Honestly, I think it’s rather impressive. But sooner or later, you just can’t bring yourself to care anymore and here we are. Will we have more energy tomorrow? I sure hope so.

Food: We’ve probably beaten every Chicago food stereotype to death. We complain about anything and everything, but we rarely just admire things that are perfectly mediocre and OK. So let’s take a moment to appreciate Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Like the Northwestern defense, it’s usually perfectly cromulent. So let us enjoy this much and dive on in to it, shall we?

1. What are you putting on your deep dish pizza? And yes, you do need to carb load with all of that crust.
2. What’s something that’s perfectly fine in your region that people treat as inferior or bad?

BRT: Pepperoni and cheese. Not everything needs to be overthought. I’ll confess though, I’m a thin-crust fan when left to my own devices.

As for my region, some people demean the Runza as being difficult to digest, but I think that’s an overblown concern from those with delicate constitutions. That’s not the Runza’s fault!

misdreavus79:

1. I was in Chicago that one time and tried the deep dish pizza. It was fine. I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to eat one, but if it’s there, it’s food…

As per what I’d put in it, all the meats and all the vegetables!

1. The seafood?

Kind of…: Sausage. End of story.

As for my region. Well, I’ve lived out east long enough that I guess that’s my region now. I repped the roast pork in the comments to an earlier thread. But, yeah, slow roasted pork shoulder, broccoli rabe (a.k.a. rapini), and sharp provolone. I’ll take that over a cheesesteak anyday, but I know I’m in the minority.

Green Akers: If we’re eating lasagna instead of pizza, that’s cool, and an opportunity to get ground beef, pepperoni, and ham into the same conveying medium.

WSR: Look, just throw everything you’ve got except pineapple on it. I did pizzas for Mother’s Day on her Little Green Egg, and we had hamburger, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, bacon crumbles, green and black olives, sauerkraut, and 4 types of cheese. The only complaint was that it was too much for the crust. But if we were have done a Chicago-style crust, there probably wouldn’t have been a problem at all.

I’m not sure if there’s any questionable Minnesota food that deserves to be defended. because lutefisk is trash and church hotdish is... very hit or miss. What are people’s thoughts on fish frys? Because they can be pretty awful if you end up in the wrong VFW. But if you go to the right one and they actually know what they’re doing with the walleye, you’re in for a great night of deep fried fish, deep fried french fries, crappy slaw, and deep fried domestic light beer.

Football: One thing we’re not used to at Northwestern is players transferring out. Stockholm syndrome is real and is a fan of purple, I guess. Anyway, one of the few playmakers on the defense last year was Sophomore All-American Safety Brandon Joseph, and for some reason you can’t find him on the 2022 Northwestern roster. Peculiar, no?

But if you look on the Notre Dame roster…well, there’s a Brandon Joseph. Same class and everything. More peculiar.

Losing your best player sucks. Losing him to Notre Dame has to be particularly crappy. So tell me:

1. Can Northwestern’s defense rediscover it’s mojo without Joseph?
2. Who’s a player that left your program that particularly stung.

BRT: Did it have mojo? “Rediscover” is kind of a generous term here. As for my own program, once they leave, they’re dead to me. Can’t even remember their names. This is also due to sheer volume, shut up.

HWAHSQB: I hope not. It appears that perhaps Hankwitz was the key to the Nern D. My guess is that when 3-8 Illinois rolls into Evanston, they’ll figure out their D for at least one game. I’m going old school on a player leaving that stung, although he never actually played for Illinois. Chris Redman was a five star QB recruit who chose Illinois back when the Illinois D was among the stingiest in the nation. Lou Tepper, mixing incompetency with assholery, decided to fire OC Greg Landry for unknown reasons and waited until the day after Redman signed his LOI to do it. The Redman family and football community writ large were outraged and pressured Tepper to release Redman to release him from his commitment, which he eventually did. Redman went on to set the NCAA record for completions at Louisville and Illinois began its swan dive into the depths of ineptitude from pretty much that moment forward.

misdreavus79:

1. Sure can! They might need to replace him as a team instead of trying to find an individual player to emulate his production, but they certainly can.
2. 2008: Pat Devlin was unhappy with how things turned out after the Ohio State game, and after Daryll Clark came back for 2009, he was off to Delaware! 2010, and maybe 2011, probably goes quite differently had Devlin still been around.
3. 2020: Will Levis got a shot at starting, was no better than Sean Clifford, then got benched again. He was unhappy with how things turned out after he got his chance, and off to Kentucky he went! 2021 would have definitely gone differently had Levis still been around.

Kind of…: Anything is possible, but the answer is no. Keeping your shitty coordinator and losing your best player is NOT the path to improvement, so why expect NW to suddenly be better? [At least the Wildcats didn’t have this happen to their hoops squad, too, right?]

UW has been pretty fortunate in this respect. Aron Cruickshank leaving for Rutgers was a bummer because he was pure excitement returning kicks and probably would’ve helped the receiving corps the last two years. But that was a homesickness thing and I have nothing but love for him. I guess Jack Coan? I mean, given Mertz’s hype, there’s no way Coan was starting again after he got hurt early in 2020, so you can’t really re-run last year with Coan at QB. Still, given his level of play, it’s certainly possible UW beats PSU in the opener (call me crazy, but I don’t think Coan commits multiple turnovers inside the 10) and splits with ND/Michigan. Do they finish the regular season 11-1? Possibly. Do they beat Michigan in the B1G championship game? Maybe (Probably not). It’s okay, though, because this is DEFINITELY the year Mertz makes a leap. For real this time. No doubt. *starts sobbing*

Green Akers: I don’t have a great answer for this, because a lot of former MSU players who transfer elsewhere don’t end up accomplishing a whole lot. Some go on to be decent starters, but the best result in recent memory is probably WR Trishton Jackson, who left after a couple of decent underclassman seasons and then had a 1,000-yard season at Syracuse. Rocky Lombardi went and won a conference championship at Northern Illinois, but I wouldn’t take him over Payton Thorne. I do remember, at the time, worrying it was a big problem that not long after Tucker took over, Class of 2019 Crown Jewels Julian Barnett and Devontae Dobbs both bailed, but both of them are now backing up younger players at Memphis, so what exactly are we missing out on?

WSR: This is a tricky question, because Northwestern is in a great place to turn around their defensive fortunes quickly. And by “a great place,” I mean a division with Iowa, wisconsin, Nebraska, and Illinois. Sure my team loves to try to take the air out of the ball and run every play clock down to 0.0001 before snapping, but I’m not here to slander Peej’s approach when there are others that deserve it more. Anyway...it is possible because there are plenty of QBs that want to play into Northwestern’s approach of getting dumb turnovers and scraping out a 9-6 win. But will it actually happen? No. No it won’t.

I’m torn here. There are a couple different types of guys that transfer out. There are guys that are going to cash in on NIL, some of whom need that money to help their family out. And to those guys I say “good luck Mar’Keise Irving and go Ducks” and stuff like that. Then there are guys that transfer out because they just don’t pan out at the P5 level. To those guys, I say “Good luck at Illinois State, Zack Annextad.”

And then there are the guys that transfer out because a bitter former coach from your school who’s now at another P5 school keeps whispering in the ears of a kid and their dad about how they won’t get anywhere near the reps they deserve while at Minnesota and that they should transfer to get the PT they deserve. And to those kids, I say “Sorry that KSU RB coach Brian Anderson got caught tampering and I hope you have a wonderful time at Kansas you moron.”