Big Ten West Football Horoscopes: Year of the Gopher

Stats? Analytics? F+? Should we really base our football expectations on some nerds wasting time between Star Trek reruns? Math is fake. If you want real analysis, look to the stars, as your fore-bearers did (page D6 of your local newspaper. And this post. Read this too).

Nebraska

Your collective psyche is beginning to crack under the weight of unrealistic expectations.  You seem to believe that your team should consistently compete for national championships.  Until you all become a little more realistic with your expectations, two things will be true: periodontists in Nebraska will continue to rake in cash money as they repair and replace teeth ground to their roots, and keyboard sales will continue to thrive as you wear them out with your annoying habit of hijacking every comment thread on SBN to discuss how disappointed you were with Bo and how Mike Riley is your savior (or vice versa).  In three years the cycle will have come full circle once again with Riley assuming the role of the goat and some new coach unable to live up to your outlandish expectations.

Iowa

Futility is your future as long as the Grim Reaper is your head coach.  Have fun paying him bazillions of dollars for the foreseeable future as he repeatedly administers the kiss of death to your program.  Just think, if you fired him today, you wouldn't even be able to afford to hire a decent coach until your grandkids are old enough to choose to attend (spoiler alert here; it's a horoscope) Iowa State and major in a liberal art that will ensure their unending financial dependence on you.

Wisconsin

All good things must come to an end, and your good things began ending last December.  If Karma is real (and for the purposes of this post, sure, why not?) you have twenty years of dramatically underachieving ahead of you.  At least your basketball program won't backslide Basketball is also screwed in the long term, and hockey is already burning.  Pretty soon there won't be enough students in your stadium to make your ridiculous jumping noteworthy.  On the plus side, the world will be a better, less annoying place.

Northwestern

You're sure that you're a ten-win team this year (just like last year, and the year before), but unfortunately it won't take too long for that dream to deteriorate into a statistical impossibility.  You might be one of the best Directional Illinois schools, but you'll continue to be hilariously misplaced on the map.  Fear not, your suffering will end when the sun explodes and consumes the earth.

Illinois

The world is becoming more and more hostile and abusive to the hostile and abusive, and that's bad news for you on many levels.  Karma will even the score this year, and your string of ridiculous good luck (which earned you six wins against teams stricken with disease on game day) will not continue this year.   This is actually good for you as the Timmay years will come to a close.  It's also good news for any football coach willing to relocate to Champaign/Urbana in 2016.  Bad news: that will be a short list.

Purdue

You were good at precisely one aspect of the game last year, and that was having really fast running backs.  Welp, now that's over and your coach is talking about toughness like it's a replacement for speed.  It's not.  Your offense is screwed.  There's no way to make a two-win season look pretty, even in fancy horoscope words.  When the end days come, you'll survive longer than the nerds at Northwestern because you'll have the practical skills to build a spaceship rather than just possessing a theoretical understanding of Bernoulli's Principle, which makes atmospheric flight possible, but won't do them any good in the vacuum of space.  Your suffering will eventually end thanks to the first two laws of thermodynamics, amiright, nerds?

Minnesota

Dear Gopher fans: don't be Northwestern fans.  This autumn promises to be the most fun in living memory.  Your team will be competitive against the best teams on the schedule (except maybe TCU and Ohio State), facilities groundbreaking is almost here, and Coach Kill is starting to improve his recruiting game, setting up a bright future for the Gophers for years to come.  None of that should lead you to expect a ten win season this year.  Don't be crazy.  If you turn into a Northwestern fan, you're gonna have a bad time.

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