Hypotheticals are irrelevant. Reality will not change, no matter how many well-reasoned what-if scenarios sports fans will devise. And yet, even with Northwestern’s players celebrating and 89,000 people emptying Memorial Stadium in record time, everyone involved wondered what might have been, at least once.
College football, like all sports, is a nonsensical game of layered probabilities. No. 6 Ohio State lost 55-24 to Iowa, a team that could not score more than 10 points against Northwestern. Was this likely? No, but that doesn’t matter. Stats are for losers.
After the Penn State game, I wrote that Northwestern was “Chicago’s Big Ten Existential Crisis.