When I was but an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario (before moving on to a superior school for graduate studies), my fellow engineering students would boast of the great pranks that engineering classes of yore had pulled, such as sawing a car in half, welding it around a flagpole, and rewiring it so that it could still start. But in the time I was there, the great pranks of yore were but legends, and we had been reduced to throwing paint filled balloons at buildings and calling pointless, needless, vandalism "pranks."
Such is also the case with College Football. In the halcyon days gone by, a prank against Big Football and Big Media would require complex planning resulting in stunning beauty: sabotaging a nationally televised card section stunt, for instance, or hacking into a PDP-8 computer in order to take over the game scoreboard. These days, such pranks consist of hacking a player's Twitter account or putting a sign that says "penis" behind Kirk Herbstreit on College Gameday. Though similar in spirit to the pranks of yesteryear, these efforts require little fortitude and little skill and will soon be forgotten by all except Google's cache.
But this devolution of pranking can be stopped, and the place where we make it stop is the inaugural Big Ten Championship Game. Much like Caltech objects to the Rose Bowl as a symbol of the perceived supremacy of athletics over academics, there is an institution in the Midwest that has the right to make the B1G Championship Game its prank playground. To put it in terms that geeks and nerds will understand:
Yes, the Big Ten's prodigal comrade, the triskadekic member of our conference and its Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the place where 65 years ago they cried "Enough!" and actually put academics ahead of athletics. The University of Chicago is the school with the brainpower, the deviousness, and the temerity necessary to restore pranks to their rightful place in big time college football. And what better place to do it than in Indianapolis, home to the headquarters of the moral turpitude that is the NCAA? And, seriously, Michigan State is playing. We need the possibility of non-Dean Winters related mayhem to have some reason to care.
As outsiders, we implore Chicagoans to take their rightful place as the kings and queens of Midwestern pranksterdom. However, we know that like all institutions, you may suffer from bureaucratic inertia that prevents you from forming new traditions. So, in order to help give birth to a new annual source of dread for Jim Delany, we humbly propose building upon your current traditions with the following.
