Wrigleyville Classic: Illini Rout Northwestern In Classic Style

Sounded like a real fun game

Wrigley is baseball hallowed ground — it should NEVER be torn down! The sight of the rooftops packed with fans made me miss the baseball season!

How was the weather? It looked pretty cold.

I’m riding on your coattails with this comment, Al, but even as a Northwestern fan, I thought the whole experience was amazing. When they first started to flirt with the idea of a game at Wrigley, I got season tickets because I knew I wanted to be part of the day. Do I wish NU could have been a little more competitive in the second half? Oh god yes. To everyone there, I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a football game with that kind of atmosphere with the stadium rocking like it was in that first half. Awesome experience. Tomorrow we’re doing the Touchdown at Wrigley, so that should be awesome too.

Looked great on my big screen, and I wish I still lived in Evanston so I could’ve gone…if only this happened 2 months ago! But it was great to see my Illini get a win we really needed

It’s was _ to _ … elbow to elbow during halftime. Bathroom lines were ridiculous. All more reasons why the ballpark needs renovations.

I’m one of the lucky few who gets to play ball on the field tomorrow morning at 8am… thanks to a good friend at NU!

No ticket, but want to check out the festivities

view from the right field gate

Just got home from the game and went to see Harry Potter with some friends afterwards,

It was an awesome experience despite the outcome and I have to do some household chores that my husband and I usually split this week (he’s an Illinois alum and it’s our annual bet)

Illinois is going to be good next year as will NU. If both teams were consistently good at the same time it could become a nice rivalry. It alredy is a rivaly but would be better if both were good.

Talked to a friend who is a fan of college football and baseball (but of Stanford and the Giants as she is a Stanford grad living in San Francisco) and watched it because being a fan of both sports but not of the teams she was still curious. She loved it

Guys if you like football I definitely recommend taking in a game at Ryan Field. It’s still relatively reasonable and a lot of fun and NU is consistently good.

Although I do love reminding my Dad that Notre Dame could have had Pat Fitzgerald both as a player and now coach but they didn’t give him a scholarship (thanks Lou Holtz! – ironically when Coach Randy Walker died suddenly a few years ago the question was whether Fitzgerald was ready to be a head coach and Holtz was a name mentioned as a possibility to take over for 2 years and guide Pat along but they decided to promote Pat).

HEard there were some Cubs players sightings but didn’t see any myself. Wouldn’t be surprised if Dempster and Zambrano were there. Did see a few of the Bears including Corey Wooten (sp) who played at Northwestern.

That’s a pretty thin stretch to turn a postgame thread into trying to drum up support for public money. All I’ll say in response is that politicians of all ilks are going to have to address unpleasant issues and make heartbreaking choices to get budgets back in order in the near term. (Also – I hope this thread is modded a bit more closely before people start breaking out their blackboards and conspiracy theories again.)

Onto the game itself, it played out a little weird on TV, not too bad as they mostly kept the ball repositioning off camera – out of sight, out of mind? Again, it’s a shame team management got an undeserved bad rap out of the deal, I wouldn’t mind seeing another game, odd ground rule or not. A fun afternoon, even for someone without a particular rooting interest.

everyone who gave 15 points to NU beating UI in the 2010-11 Offseason IT’S HAPPENING Contest can SUCK IT!! I couldn’t believe all the UI haters out there. GO ILLINI.

as a sports fan in general however, whomever first got the plans in the big televen office and approved this field plan should be sacked. that was an embarassment to northwestern and the cubs.

if northwestern wanted to play a game in the city of chicago, comiskey or soldier field would have been better. i know that some fields are shoehorned into some baseball fields (like yankee stadium aparantly, i haven’t seen any pictures yet) but this was ridiculous.

First, I’m going to add to the disagreement with the kwitcherbitchin statement. I’ve been a Wisconsin Badger football season ticket holder for five or six years now and while I’d take a Cubs World Series over a Badger National Championship in a heartbeat, I have become much more and more of a college football fan over the past few years. One of the things that stands out between baseball and college football is the importance of a single game. In baseball, you lose a game, but you come back tomorrow and get back on it. Rarely is one game of tantamount significance. College football, however, is the opposite. Unless you’re one of a handful of teams, one loss ends any possibility of a chance of a national championship, and in most conferences, the difference between 1st place and 2nd place is one game. Heck, look at the Big Ten this year. Its very possible that three teams will finish with one loss.

I have been trying to think of a baseball equivalent for what has happened over the past day or so and have struggled to come up with one… maybe it was some of the complaints that arose when the Cubs traveled to Japan to play the Mets about a decade ago. I have no idea how big of a college football fan you are, and its not to say that ones level of fandom lends credibility to their comments. I guess, in the end, though, when you really look at a sport like college football, where every single win and loss has strong implications, you better be damn sure that the sanctity of the game is preserved. Again, if the Cubs and some other team moved a series to some historic British cricket grounds and had to impose some odd ground rules, I think you’d probably bristle if some Brit told you to kwitcherbitchin. To me, the spectacle was of greater importance than the game itself.

One other thing I wanted to mention. Its been discussed that everyone signed off on this and so on. I don’t think that the timing of Friday’s events were at all random. The fact of the matter is that its in college football’s rulebooks that there must be at least six feet between the sidelines/back of the end zone and any walls or obstructions. I think that this all was inspected at a point where it was too late for a change of venue to be made. If the NCAA and Big Ten had come in a few months ago and realized the problem the game would have been pushed back to Evanston. By the time the powers that be really got involved, though, it was too late for a change of venue.

“For those of you who cried, “travesty”, “joke” or “disaster” yesterday when the rule changes were announced, I say: kwitcherbitchin."

And for those that constantly feel the need to defend Wrigley and the Cubs Organization, I say: Stop being a Stooge.

I appreciate your sentimentality as it pertains to Wrigley and historic landmarks, I understand it. It’s hard to let go of things, but what we need to understand is that things in this life are impermanent, anything made by human hands is impermanent. If the Cubs were to overhaul Wrigley properly, they would more than likely have to spend at a minimum 1 full season away from home. If the rehab process were to be pieced together, it more than likely wouldn’t eliminate the entirety of the problems that exist.

I work for a company that did some of the structural inspections of Wrigley post concrete fall inspections and bleacher structural inspections. The problems were real and they still exist today.

Al, it’s not an “American” thing to do away with historical structures, most of the structures that have been preserved in Europe for example, are stone structures. Just remember anything made by man is as impermanent as we are.

but I can’t find

kwitcherbitchin

anywhere. Eths, can you translate for us?

I guess it was on some station you have to pay extra for. That was nuts. How can you hype an event like this and not make it universally accessible?

She said all she could find were games of absolutely no interest to her. Actually, no other college game would have been of any interest to her. How many other potential viewers did they turn away, not just from one game, but the spectacle of college football?

Part of what makes football a great sport is the wind factor, if the wind comes from one direction, it is interesting, especially in an outdoor stadium, to see how the wind affects the teams.

It is not bitching, it is for those of us who would have preferred to see football as it was meant to be played.

Oh, and one more thing. Lou Holtz needs to shut up in a hurry. How he can continue to say Ohio State is the best team in the Big Ten because they beat the Hawkeyes in Iowa … that is utter horsecrap.

For those of you who cried, “travesty”, “joke” or “disaster” yesterday when the rule changes were announced, I say: kwitcherbitchin. Playing every offensive series facing the west end zone had absolutely no impact on the flow of the game.

Neither would making a new rule that players no longer have to run the bases on a home run but I doubt you’d be in favor of that