Pat Fitzgerald Wants To Cut A Chicken's Head Off

No, seriously, he does:

"I was thinking about going 'Major League' and cutting the head off a chicken like [Pedro] Cerrano did," Fitzgerald said.

Pat Fitzgerald needs no reasons for this. He just wants to do it. His quarterback is named Kafka and he wants to invite the spirit of Jobu into his locker room and that's just that. Whateva. Fitzgerald does what he wants. He's high-brow, low-brow, middle-brow. He's got all your brows covered. He's Pat Fitzgerald. Kafka doesn't care as long as the items Fitzgerald wants to chop off are pitiful hoo-man things and not antennae or thoraxes.

The thinking here: if Fitzgerald ever has to play Notre Dame (Insight Bowl, baby!), he can cut a chicken's head off, stick the headless chicken at quarterback, and then watch it go on a game-winning drive a la Tate Forcier. I'm not sure if this theory is a shot at Notre Dame, Tate Forcier, or Northwestern. It's been a weird season.

But seriously, folks, Fitzgerald wants to cut off a chicken's head so his team will stop losing the first quarter of football games:

"The bottom line is we're doing everything we can to win," Fitzgerald said. "Early in the year, we started fast and we didn't finish. Now, a couple games, we didn't go out and score 25 points in the first quarter, and so what's wrong there? We try to be more consistent, we try to be more focused, we try to execute to the best of our ability.

"If you have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, you're going to be spread so thin."

Northwestern has been outscored in the first quarter 52-42 this season. Take away its first two games against Towson and Eastern Michigan, and the deficit swells to 52-16.

That's bad. Worse: leading Northwestern 28-3, like Indiana did, and losing despite three second-half interceptions of Kafka. I wonder what Bill Lynch would like to decapitate. Various members of Indiana's secondary would rather not know.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.