I ran across this article from the 1995 cinderella season...it's a good read

Northwestern fans: enjoy it now
BY DAVE KINDRED
THE SPORTING NEWS
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Northwestern, the Halley's comet of college football, will make its twice-every-century trip to the Rose Bowl this winter.

My, my. The wondrous Wildcats have streaked high over the smokestacks of football factories littering the landscape from Pennsylvania to Iowa.

The temptation is to say that Northwestern's ascension shows that college football is all that it's cracked up to be: actual students attending an actual university with the idea of actually getting an actual diploma that has actual meaning.

In celebration of such a thing, we should retrieve our purple sweaters from Goodwill and wear them proudly.

We should announce ourselves as the Wildcats' subway alumni. We should make up lies about sneaking Ann-Margret out of her dorm. We should say we knew Charlton Heston before he went biblical. We should even get a map and learn where Evanston is.

Because this is the best story in college athletics today, we should enjoy Northwestern's thrill ride as long as it lasts. For, alas, the end is coming. We can see it.

We can see the inevitable result of magical work. We know what will happen. This will happen.

It's the week after the Rose Bowl, maybe even the next morning. Northwestern's coach, Gary Barnett, calls a press conference at which he does an Ara Parseghian.

That is, having worked a miracle, he leaves for an actual football job at an actual football school. A year later, mighty Northwestern is again Northwestern the mediocre.

We subway alumni then repair to our usual dark places to wait another 50 years or so to see our Wildcats light up the sky.

This will happen because college football at the major-bowl level is about three things. It's about winning. It's about winning big. And it's about winning big all the time.

The Northwestern stories are the beautiful exceptions that allow us to lie to ourselves. They allow us to imagine that college football is about kids having fun all over America.

For Northwestern, a private university that long ago made peace with its identity as a big-time football failure, the occasional success is all that's necessary.

But for nine or 10 of Northwestern's conference playmates, perennial success is not only necessary but expected and needed. It's needed to sell 80,000 tickets every other Saturday. It's needed because college football is peripherally about college and directly about money.

At the top levels, college football is professional football with millionaire coaches, multimillion-dollar budgets, national television performances and the world's largest stadiums.

All that's amateur about it are the players, who work for free in an exploitation so shameful that universities hide the truth even from themselves.

BTTT