O'Donnell: Lovable elitists - can Northwestern and its football program have it all?

NORTHWESTERN ATHLETICS WANTS to be loved.

And Northwestern University wants to be elite.

Didn't Bob Seger address that disconnect in "Beautiful Loser" when he sang:

"Read it on the wall

"And realize

"You just can't have it all."

The Wildcats captured a most improbable Big Ten-West football championship last season.

It caught the general public's imagination in much the same way that a win in last winter's Republican mayoral primary in Chicago seeded soaring civic dreams.

If only there had been a Republican mayoral primary in Chicago.

Pat Fitzgerald should be one of the most treasured individuals in Chicago sports.

They don't make very many people as decent as NU's "Fitz."

As his sister Jacki once told a bearded insouciant: "He's got my father's work ethic. And my mother's sense of empathy."

It shows.

He has been a godsend to any understated senses of perspective, sustained success and organic goodness still extant on The Enchanted Lakefront.

His one blind spot is excessive loyalty. But if that were man's biggest flaw, the world would be a more Kumbaya place.

And then there is NU athletic director Jim Phillips.

He's gotten a lot done in his 11 years on the lake.

And one way or another, he'll make sure that the people who matter know about it.

He would blanch at being called "an excessive self promoter."

But if the billboard fits …

From his desk, information that serves to distance the common Chicago sports fan is allowed to periodically flow.

Gauche data, things like the $270 million spent on a new lakeside football/athletics "developmental" complex.

Another $120 million directed to the renovation of Welsh-Ryan Arena.

Endless tropes about student-athlete grade points, graduation rates, on-field successes, "philanthropic initiatives."

All with significant pockets of abject poverty and want scant miles away in Evanston and East Rogers Park.

But it's his thing, "his bag" as Austin Powers might say.

Phillips is bright enough to know he lacks Fitzgerald's core genuineness.

He's also shrewdly theatrical enough to try and fake it.

Still, the two will once again work parallel lanes this autumn in pursuit of a common goal:

To take the Northwestern athletics brand even higher.

Fitzgerald will measure his season by wins, losses and the frequently incremental development of young men into even finer young men by Enchanted Lakefront standards.

Phillips will work more empirically, or, as Henry Bienen, the past NU president who hired him said: "Put fannies in the seats."

Last fall, Phillips and staff sold out three of six home games and played to an announced capacity of 91 percent.

A Thanksgiving weekend game with hopeless Illinois, after the West crown was decided, was a killer.

This season, 90 percent would be amazing, especially with a September date vs. UNLV and a dud dropper in November against UMass looming as momentum busters.

Ten years ago, those kind of expectations around Northwestern football would have been as laughable as the son of an Illinois Bell lifer emerging as the most impacting individual in the history of the school's grid program.

But now, this is "Chicago's Big Ten Team" after all.

Kind of.

Apparently not realizing that they just can't have it all.

PHIL GEORGEFF'S CLASSIC LINE about horse-race betting not being "a game for little boys in short pants" extended to the NFL preseason with two techno-trancing decisions this weekend.

Over/under in the Ravens-Eagles game was 38½. Baltimore led 26-15 when the game was called with 11:43 remaining because of lightning.

But over backers were blanked because a standing universal house rule stipulates that an NFL game must go a minimum 55 minutes before wagers are cashable.

Ouch-ee-carumba.

And at Winnipeg's fabled IG Field, the Raiders beat Green Bay 22-21 on an 80-yard field shortened because of concerns over unpatchable Canadian football goal-post holes in the end zones.

Oakland (plus 1½) was a winner on the app accounts.

And the over of 38½ - which should have prompted an Oklahoma-style land rush when word of the mini-pitch leaked out - also cashed.

STREET-BEATIN': Encouraging to hear media reports that Mitch Trubisky will be "making plays with his legs" this season. It's so hard to quarterback while doing handstands. … Adam Amin - who'll miss Thursday's Bears-Titans preseason finale while calling UCLA-Cincinnati for ESPN - picked up major points with NBA classicists with his effusive praise and recall of the late, great Jim Durham. (Twenty-eight years after Durham's bizarre departure, the Bulls broadcast scheme has never fully recovered.) … Not at all unreasonable that Richard Dent checked in at No. 14 on the list of all-time Greatest Bears. Although, "The Sack Man" had a Lon Chaney-like ability to confuse most and look like Otis Wilson while waiting on Michael Jordan in Bulls locker rooms of yore. (Their wives were extremely tight.) … Lucky Charms Level 2 spit-take while reading a downtown headline macro-blabbing about a midweek Tweet volley between Yu Darvish and David Kaplan over Darvish's pitch selection. Would The Egg Man be so bold if he hadn't signed a contract extension at Cross-starred NBCSCH rather than bolt for the Cubs new Marquee Sports Net? … His many Chicago friends are pulling for a return to full health and vigor for Brian Wheeler, who is out after 21 years as voice of the Portland Trail Blazers. Wheeler, 57, first touched local circuitry as the undergrad p-by-b-er for the Gene Sullivan-Alfredrick Hughes Sweet Sixteeners on Loyola's WLUW-FM (88.7). ... Report that Mike North's football bookie is already pricing a luxury spaceport. … The weekly Town Tribune of New Fairfield, Conn., has hit on a crafty way to cover and contain local adult softball games: Umpires write the game stories. (MLB should try it; doesn't Cowboy Joe West already have a business center under his shirt?) … And some Iowans - outraged by the desecration of legacied farmland for that suspicious White Sox-Yankees "Field of Schemes" game next summer - are turning to naming-rights possibilities for comic relief. Top of the first: "Shoeless Diamond Jo Casino Stadium" and "The Pete Rose Iowa Sportsbook Field."

• Jim O'Donnell's Sports & Media column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.