How Freekbass woke up the echoes

During last Friday's MAC Championship game, I happened to catch the PSA that Northern Illinois's Department of University Relations ran during the game. By the hammer of Grabthar, it was horrible! Good university ads do not use a font that's a seemingly random mixture of small and capital letters. Good university ads do not use a bizarre strobe effect when showing their title cards. Good university ads typically spotlight more photogenic professors or, better still, don't spotlight any professors at all.

NIU won the game 40-37 in double overtime and crashed the BCS, overcoming the losing psychology of weasel ex-head coach Dave Doeren, whose bizarre decision to sit on two timeouts at the end of regulation would have been blamed for their defeat.

Dating back to Every Day Should be Saturday's classic "YOUR SCHOOL'S PROMOTIONAL AD IS TEH SUX0RZ" series, every university-produced ad that has been met with howls of derisive laughter from both the university's rivals and disinterested observers has been followed by an upswing in the school's football fortunes. Sitting up on their clouds, the football gods must smile upon schools that don't waste their money on media relations. This is also why the football gods love gritty NFL players from small colleges with cheap ads instead of the glory-boy types from the big-spending schools.

Beat Ohio by making your own Ohio logo!

The official serif font of Ohio is Minion. This can only be intended as a subtle reminder that: 1) Ohio is evil, and 2) Ohio shouldn't be put in charge of things. Among things Ohio shouldn't have been put in charge of is designing their own logo. They clearly visited the same people responsible for Lucent's "brown ring of quality" and Gap's Helvetica disaster. The result was the brilliant idea of a scarlet square with the phrase "The Ohio State University" written in white inside it, as though that's Ohio's official name.

This logo is so simple that it's easy to parody. If you've purchased - ha, ha, downloaded - Photoshop, Minion is included. If you don't like to do illegal things, Minion is included with Adobe Reader, but you have to use a trick to install it for general use. Simply open up your favorite image editor (I used Inkscape), make a scarlet square (RGB hex = #990000) and insert your favorite phrase.

First we start with Terrelle Pryor's name for the university:

I refused to equally capitalize all the letters in "The." It should be in small caps, just like on their official seal.

There's a possibility that someone, maybe T. Pryor himself, might mistake you for a fan with the above design. No worries, next we'll go with MGoBlog's favorite formulation:

Seal Block Special Edition: Little brother from another mother

The name "University of Cristal" was also briefly considered.

If ESPN and TSN (aka ESPN Canada) were to somehow convince Canadian universities to care about varsity sports even a tenth as much as American universities do, the next round of Big Ten expansion would have two obvious candidates for admission: The University of Toronto, the centre of Canada's largest TV market, and my undergraduate alma mater, The University of Western Ontario, the home of Canada's proudest university football tradition. Both schools would have to make enormous facilities upgrades for this to happen, and Toronto would have to stop being terrible at football, but academically both would be excellent fits for the CIC. Having two Canadian schools in the Big Ten hockey conference would help replace the Canadian Hockey League with a slightly less corrupt player development model, which would also be nice.

UWO has recently announced a major new marketing push asking for people to call it "Western." To Canadians, this is hilarious as no other province has a western directional school. We all call it Western already. The American equivalent to this would be the University of California at Los Angeles spending tons of money on marketing to convince people to call it UCLA.

This marketing push includes a quote from the university president which may go down as one of the stupidest most WTF things ever said by a university president ever:

Harvard isn’t just Harvard. It’s Harvard University. But you don’t have to say university. How long will it take Western to get there, I don’t know. Our goal is to become such a recognized brand that just Western means us.

I've been trying to make a snarky comment in response to that and I can't. I'm so confused that the best I could think to do was put in a snarky post tag.

Old logo: We have a tower!
New logo: Stag and lion slap-fight! Winner gets maple syrup!

I didn't enjoy my undergraduate years. People bragged a lot about how great they were, but backed up their boasts with alcohol consumption instead of academic performance. I really don't like getting the alumni magazine because it's a lot of fluff about how great the school is and far too little about the interesting stuff people are actually doing. It's like the school has an inferiority complex. Recently it hit me: UWO is Michigan State. It's Toronto's little brother.

The Curse of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

This is the ad that the University of Wisconsin has been running during its football games.

On October 7, this ad became incorrect when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Wisconsin alumna and President of Liberia, was awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize.

On October 7, Wisconsin was ranked #4 in the country with a 5-0 record. Since that date, they have gone 1-2 and given up a touchdown play of at least 40 yards in each of those three games, even to Indiana. They have fallen from national championship hopeful to third place in the Big Ten Southeast Division.

If I were a university running an ad boasting about how many Nobel Prize winners were associated with the school, not only would I hastily update the ad if an alumna received a Nobel Prize, I would make a big show of hastily updating the ad.

I believe that Wisconsin is doomed to disappointing results until they fix their ad. Sirleaf's other FBS alma mater, the University of Colorado, is 0-4 since she was awarded the prize. I do not think any curse is involved there. I think they are just bad at football.

UPDATE (11/5/11, 7:40 PM): Wisconsin defeats Purdue handily, but gives up a 30-yard TD pass. Perhaps the curse's power is diminishing slightly? Also, Colorado loses again.