Ten days til a bunch of dudes dress up in purple and orange and try to throw each other to the ground! Let's hit the links.
Prepare sacrifices at the altar of your choice: Iowa running back Barkley Hill tore his ACL, which BHGP gave an appropriate reaction. As Northwestern prepares to enter its season virtually injury-free - so far as we've been told - we should take a moment to be grateful that we have not incurred the wrath of the Angry Iowa Running Back Hating God, that is, if its even possible for him to submit things that aren't Iowa running backs to his wrath. A Hawkeye fan board updated its listing of all of the victims AIRBHG has claimed, and at this point, you just have to feel bad for Iowa fans. (Just a little.) Has anybody actually gotten around to figuring out which god it is that is so angry at Iowa running backs? My vote is for Ba'al.
Suck it, Grevers: You know all those jokes that Northwestern's student-athletes are total nerds - rocket scientists! Ha! Rocket science is difficult, and therefore, only really nerdy smart nerds can do it! Well, balls, you guys: NUsports.com had the story of Andrew Long, a Northwestern swimmer who literally helped build the freaking Mars rover.
"The co-op program is not very compatible with being on a varsity swim team, so I decided to retire from swimming after my third season to get more in-depth engineering training," Long said.
Great. Now nobody is going to stop making fun of us.
Come on, you purples! #COYP: Cody will probably write on the team's chances this year, but Northwestern is No. 1 in the Big Ten preseason men's soccer poll. Come on, you purples! #coyp (Alternate EPL things to chant at the NU soccer team are welcomed.)
I can think of at least one more color: I went over to The Only Colors to discuss NU football and Steel Reserve malt liquor. Incidentally, they'll be over here later!
Troll chow: A bunch of silly silly talk is going down in the comments about how NU doesn't have any all-B1G players on the preseason teams. Well, ESPN is doing a list too, and NU doesn't have any players in their top 25! It also doesn't matter or mean anything. Also, former NU swimmer Andrew Long will be assisting with the construction of a rover providing transportation to a planet where Taylor Martinez is a better QB than Kain Colter.
And now, your tweet of the day: For the second day, our very own C.E. Bell makes it to the sips:
No. 9 overall, but No. 1 in cheapshots to opponents' balls. RT
— Chad (@RevDJEsq) August 21, 2012@espn_bigten Big Ten rankings: No. 9, Jonathan Brown es.pn/O2umNs
A close second was the first tweet by Ivan Peljusic - who I did not even know I was following - in over a year, which was an Instagram picture of a pug wearing sunglasses.