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Following last week’s two-game series announcement with Notre Dame, Northwestern University A.D. Jim Phillips announced today a four-game college football series with Stanford. The Wildcats and Cardinal will play their first game in 2019. Yes, that’s how long in advance these things are planned.
Northwestern and Stanford have played six times previously, with the last meeting in 1994, a 41-41 tie with the then-No. 24-ranked Cardinal in Evanston.
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If you’ve made it to the top of the food chain at either Notre Dame or Stanford, you’re probably very good at life! But on the football field, one school is a 2010 big shooter; the other one…not so much.
On one side of the ball, it’s strength versus strength.The Cardinal bring the nation’s best pass defense (yielding just 90 yards a game) to face the 8th best passing attack in the nation.
On the other side, the Irish come in ranked 99th in run defense, 102nd in total defense and 105th in turnover margin. And they’ll try to improve those numbers against a team that hung 68 points on Wake Forest last week, despite playing their starters for just two quarters. Of course, they routed an ACC team, and that conference is to good football what Miley Cyrus is to sophisticated musical composition.
People still keep watching both, even though no one understands why.
The Irish defense stopping somebody is like a Borat skit without anti-Semitic material, you just don’t see it. And now they welcome in Stanford QB Andrew Luck, the likely 2011 #1 overall NFL Draft pick. Yep, sounds like a “Staturday” to me.
By Paul M. Banks
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