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- The Northwestern Wildcats football team, representing Northwestern University, is a NCAA Division I team and member of the Big Ten Conference, with evidence of organization in 1876. The mascot is the Wildcat, a term coined by a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1924, after reporting on a football game where the players appeared as "a wall of purple wildcats. " Northwestern achieved an all-time high rank of #1 during the 1936 and 1962 seasons, which has thus far not been duplicated. Northwestern has won one bowl game, the Rose Bowl, in 1949. The team achieved notoriety with a 34-game losing streak from 1979-1982, the longest in Division I-A college football. Upon setting the new record in 1981 (thanks to a 61-14 home loss to Michigan State), students rushed the field to "celebrate," and chanted "we're the worst!" A win over Northern Illinois University finally broke the losing streak, and the students again celebrated, rushing the field, tearing down the goalposts, and throwing them into nearby Lake Michigan. Recent years have been far kinder to the Wildcats; they were conference champions in 1995 and co-champions in 1996 and 2000. Northwestern's woes are in part due to the talent level, which typically is not like that found at larger, public institutions. It is the lone private school in the Big Ten, and at 8,200 undergraduates it is by far the smallest (by comparison, the second smallest school, Iowa, has almost 21,000 undergraduates). However, Northwestern consistently is among the leaders in graduation rate; it is consistently in the 90th percentile and graduated 100% of its players in 1998 and 2002. Despite the stricter academic standards, Northwestern has produced notable athletes, such as former first-round draft picks Luis Castillo and Napoleon Harris (who was valedictorian of his high school class). Northwestern holds the all-time records for Division I-A losses, points allowed, and negative point differential (amount opponents have outscored them by). They are also on the losing end of the greatest comeback in Division I-A history, blowing a 38-3 lead in the third quarter of a 41-38 loss to Michigan State on October 21, 2006. The team spends its preseason at Camp Kenosha in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Wildcats have also been nicknamed the "Cardiac 'Cats" after several seasons with highly contested games, with victories in the final seconds or in overtime. The team first earned the nickname during the 1996 season, and would go on to apply during the 2004 season, when four of the Wildcats' games went into overtime.
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- The Northwestern Wildcats football team, representing Northwestern University, is a NCAA Division I team and member of the Big Ten Conference, with evidence of organization in 1876. The mascot is the Wildcat, a term coined by a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1924, after reporting on a football game where the players appeared as "a wall of purple wildcats. " Northwestern achieved an all-time high rank of #1 during the 1936 and 1962 seasons, which has thus far not been duplicated.
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