BRING YOUR CHAMPIONS, THEY'RE OUR MEAT

We've had nearly nine months to forget about last season, a season of promise and preseason rankings, a season of winning amongst allegations of fake injury skullduggery, a season of making fun of P.J. Fleck's absurd rowboat sloganeering, and a season that ended in ignominy amongst hail mary passes, last-second field goals, overtimes, failed fourth-down conversions, and, well, at least we have The Hat. We spent the offeseason watching Northwestern become the focal point of the NCAA's ridiculous Custer-like defense of student-athlete amateurism. It is time to put that aside, drink beer, contort our hands into claw gestures, and bray for touchdowns as our Wildcats smash into other football teams for our amusement. Northwestern makes its debut in the Big Ten West in search of a bowl berth, the final blow against the Tim Beckman Hate Machine, and oh my goodness, we play Notre Dame again this year, let's create a dumb rivalry trophy and then use it to dismantle that stadium brick by brick.

Northwestern and Notre Dame last played 19 years and this Pat Fitzgerald
mustache ago

The Wildcats will this season to their comfortable position of low expectations, they return key defenders, and, most importantly, they will never play in the LEGENDS DIVISION again or at least until the next Big Ten expansion that will create the LIONHEART, LOCH NESS, or LINKEDIN.COM divisions.

START PANICKING

Yet, before the season started, the Wildcats have already hit some setbacks. Star running back Venric Mark, one of the most exciting players in Northwestern history, has departed the team under mysterious circumstances. Mark missed most of last season with an injury (a "lower body" injury in NU's festively vague injury-reporting protocol that lists injuries as upper or lower-body; the medical staff would be baffled figuring out how to report Buzzsaw's untimely end at the hands of the fugitive Ben Richards). Reports surfaced that he had been suspended from the team for the first two games for a violation of team policies. Last week, the school announced unexpectedly that he was transferring. There's nothing more to say about any of that other than reiterating how much I enjoyed watching Venric Mark zoom around Ryan Field as defensive players futilely tried to tackle him using a variety of defective products from the Acme catalog.

Tim Beckman presents a solid tactical plan to stop the
Colter/Mark option play

That same day, we learned that speedy wideout Christian Jones is lost for the season with a knee injury. These developments will strain an offense already adjusting to a presumably more pass-happy offense under the sole direction of Trevor Siemian. Northwestern fans have seen plenty of him the past few years as a co-starter who saw significant playing time. Now, the senior will get his shot as the full-time signal caller without two dynamic playmakers and with the pressure of knowing that, at any minute, some pun-happy newspaper editor is going to figure out that his last name is a homophone for simian and let loose with a barrage of substandard ape-related wordplay until he or she is subdued by the proper literary authorities.

Northwestern has had an uncharacteristically interesting offseason. Normally, Wildcat fans can look forward to ramping up to opening day by reading Pat Fitzgerald's candid admissions that they will indeed be playing (American) football this season and are training with branch of the military that will teach them how to lift logs in tandem and safely detonate landmines for football purposes. This year, though, the union case made Northwestern football into national news, thus taking away a key tactical advantage against Big Ten coaches who often forget the 'Cats are in the conference and now need to figure out how to get a bus to Evanston in less than 72 hours.

Whatever the hell this thing is doesn't need to worry about finding out how to ride
to Evanston for the forseeable future

Then again, maybe Northwestern's dismal season and loss of key offensive players has rendered the offseason attention moot. The Grantland Big Ten preview by the excellent Holly Anderson, for example, offered few bits of insight for Wildcat fans such as the existence of the team or its intention to play football games this fall in both home and away venues.

As we've learned from years when the 'Cats have boasted preseason ranks and then crashed or have been picked to finish in the basement and then won Big Ten Championships, there's no point in prognosticating. The defense, returning Ibraheim Campbell, Nick VanHoose, and Chi Chi Ariguzo along with some exciting newcomers, could potentially carry the team to a better record than we expect. The Big Ten West does not terrify anyone. But the 'Cats will have to face a vengeance-obsessed Sonny Dykes, try to maintain their perfect record against Northern Illinois, and travel to South Bend in November during a brutal stretch of conference games in order to make it back to their rightful place in Pizza City. I would not have it any other way.

INTRIGUE SEASON

For those of us who are idle and silly enough to waste our time following sports, we have been greatly rewarded by the creation of year-long soap operas around our favorite leagues. The NBA is the best at this, featuring a summer of stunning revelations, open letters written in comic sans and normal fonts, exile and deliverance from Minnesota, and breathless updates on golf cart men.

The NBA trade and free agent market is rendered even more exciting by a collective-bargaining agreement that is essentially impossible to follow unless you are a person who owns a green accounting visor and one of those jewel-magnifying monocles for strictly recreational purposes. Player movement is governed by a salary cap riven with exceptions such as the midlevel exception, the room exception, the bird rights exception, the table ladder and chair exception for players able to successfully pin either Karl Malone or Diamond Dallas Page in a professional wrestling match, an exception for players willing to get a tattoo of former commissioner David Stern in an area visibly exposed by a modern basketball jersey, an exception for teams with non-extinct animal mascots, and an exception for general managers able to last an entire night in the NBA's spooky mansion.

The NFL has gone a step further and made contracts, as far as I can tell, completely and utterly meaningless, like they've been placed on the front page of the official organ of the fictional evil Wisconsin communist regime.

This interview with a Temporary Mosinee Communist sheds light on the festive fictional communist coup. While the Mosinee experiment is a notorious Red Scare episode, few historians are aware of Moscow's repsonse, where citizens in a small rural Soviet town pretended to launch an American takeover and spent the day accusing each other of being communists.

START THE CLOCK

The wind is shifting, Wildcat fans. Old men can feel it in their bones. Pat Fitzgerald's fists pump infinitesimally harder in practice. Soon, the leaves will fall from the trees. Dozens of people will pour into Ryan Field. The Chicago Cubs will stop embarrassing themselves in public. Football is mere days away, and I couldn't be more excited. There's no hype this season. No preseason ranking. No expectations. No verbs in these sentence fragments. It will soon be football season, it will soon be Big Ten football, and it will soon be time to share in college football's greatest prize: a berth in a bowl game named for a soon-to-be-defunct product or service. Wildcat football is coming to save us all.

College football has returned! The Wildcats will take the field this weekend in a rematch against Cal played at time when events actually start that don’t take place at Studio 54. Once again, a small number of people roughly comparable to the crowd at a rally for the Divine Right Party will gather at Ryan Field to exorcise last season’s demons and witness the destruction of college football as we know it.

Many aspects of the game are unrecognizable. Realignment has led to the end of old conferences, the rise of new ones has confused casual fans (the reshuffle involving the Late Big East, Conference USA, and something called the “American Athletic Conference” in particular has the feel of a television show crafting an alternate reality to avoid trademark infractions. The American Conference is home to schools like State University, Texas and Wasamotta U.

The American Conference's Milford School student section unnerves the opposition
with an eerie silence

This means that Rutgers and Maryland will play in the Big Ten, creating rivalries that will, in the tradition of college football, become ageless bedrocks for fans until teams inevitably move to another conference in two years because a cable network is throwing around ducats like a Dickensian Marquis.

College football is changing as a result of the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit and the Northwestern unionization case. The impossibility of clinging to amateurism for players in a multi-billion dollar sports entertainment industry is eroding in the court of law and in public opinion. The results of the O’Bannon lawsuit, however, have shown that the status of college athletes in revenue sports will remain in an ambiguous morass of slow-moving lawsuits about how much lunch meat to give players and selling pants.

We can’t be sure what college football will look like in the future, except that all future entertainment will turn out to be death sports propping up an authoritarian government envisioned by people in the 1980s. Litigation, however, will mean that college athletes will eventually be able to be compensated and able to capitalize on their likeness until we can get robots to tackle each other for our amusement and also take over universities and churn out papers with titles like “The Flesh Prince? Discourses of power and bodies: Foucault’s rhetorical ‘pendulum’ ‘swings’ from Bel-aire to TGIF,” in Sensors: A Journal of Robot Humanities, v. 46514836 (May, 2167) pp. 15164-15194.

Dean Vernon is unable to deal with Robot Faculty

THE PLAYOFFS, NORTHWESTERN, AND CHAMPIONSHIP INDIFFERENCE

The most important change to the college football is the addition of a playoff. The four-team system will replace the hated Bowl Championship Series system, which was designed to combine polls in order to select the best two teams in the country and to enrage the South. The new system will use a panel of judges to arbitrarily select four teams in a playoff and infuriate the South and potentially the Rust Belt. We’ve made progress.

For NU fans and, indeed, fans of most of the 120 FBS football teams, the precise method of choosing a national champion, be it a Mythical National Champion, a BCS Champion, or a Piggly Wiggly National Champion, is largely irrelevant. Schools outside of the newly-christened “Power Five” conferences (excluding Notre Dame, which bums athletic conferences like a drunk ex-smoker) will toil for mid-tier bowl berths. MAC teams exist mainly to provide weeknight games ending in 75-68 scores and to potentially humiliate Michigan. And the majority of Power Five teams are only around to upset major teams, charge the field, and play each other to death in Pizza City Bowls across the country.

Most college football fans have no real stake in the annual debate over rankings, Heisman winners, and championship berths that fuel the Twenty-First Century Sports Jabbering Industry.

BYCTOM is a card-carrying member of the Twenty-First
Century Sports Jabbering Industry, although fewer
people read this blog than a hastily-xeroxed fan zine
about zither player trading cards

As a Northwestern fan, I don't care about the playoff or the National Championship or whatever powerhouse team manages to win. I don't care about the Big Ten being terrible because there is maybe one team that can win the championship and it no longer has a quarterback and because Michigan is the Sick Man of College Football. One year, perhaps even this year, the 'Cats may catch fire, catch all the breaks, and reverse 2013 the conference on their way to having a claim on a playoff berth. One day, perhaps, Illinois will come out of nowhere and win every game except the Hat Game and be denied a playoff spot and Tim Beckman will be caught doing whippets on the sideline. Until then, though, I'm not going to worry about the ridiculous Kafka-esque process that this dumb sport uses to determine a champion. I measure victory in bowls and Hats.

The Selection Committee convenes to determine a College Football Champion

DYKES'S REVENGE

College football analysts have analyzed rosters, attended practices, looked at the state of the Big Ten West, and their verdict on Northwestern's season is a resounding Fuck If I Know. Last year's games ended on a series of impossible calamities which could not possibly be duplicated. This year's team lost its two best playmakers and plays a tougher nonconference schedule. Also, the team became the face of college football's labor activism, with the NCAA and the university denouncing it as the ruination of the sport.

NCAA-provided informational literature to student-
athletes about unionization

And the 'Cats have to perform against their sworn enemies, the California Golden Bears. Last year in Berkeley, Northwestern played a close game against first-year head coach Sonny Dykes. The game ended in recriminations and promises of vengeance. Dykes accused Fitzgerald of instructing players to fake injuries in order to slow the fast-paced Bear offense. The Bears' attack was indeed vicious. Wener Herzog has instructed Northwestern defensive coaches to burn their tapes. Cal suffered an even more disastrous season than NU. They finished 1-11, beating only Portland State.

The acrimony is supposedly behind both coaches, but Dykes spent the rest of the season fuming. He has spent weekends rolling around pretending to clutch his hamstrings outside of numerous academic conferences on Northwestern's campus, he has been calling Fitzgerald and pretending to sell motivational haircut equipment then screaming OH MY INTERNAL ORGANS and hanging up, he has been putting hooks on Northwestern players' cars. Football fans hope the game is as exciting as the last one without being marred by controversy. Actually, fuck it, I want Northwestern to win and I don't care if they do so by bringing in a mechanized Tyrannosaurus on the sidelines and they pretend to get mauled by it every three minutes because we're going to a bowl game this year even if it means using underhanded tactics like stealing playbooks, impersonating coaches, and fomenting revolution in rival programs by sending Kain Colter to their practices in a sealed train.

RUNNING FOOTMEN, FLYING BUTCHERS

As college football erupts in stadiums across the country and our homes, it carries a long legacy of mass interest in sports. And with sports came gambling. In the 17th century, for example, English people took a great interest in foot racing. The most celebrated runner of the 1690s was known as the Preston, the Flying Butcher of Leeds, who earned his nickname by literally being a butcher. This demonstrates a true dedication to nicknames that is unmatched in the twenty-first century except by Kobe Bryant who calls himself the Black Mamba and hisses at people on the court like he is Thulsa Doom. According to Edward Seldon Sears, Preston became too well-known to race and had to disfigure himself in order to get opponents.

Similarly, aristocrats wagered heavily on races between footmen. These "running footmen" had to keep up with horse-drawn carriages, carrying light snacks on poles. I assume that the presence of gambling aristocrats made these races crooked. I imagine that there were all sorts of ways to gain an advantage such as destroying a competitor's confidence by wearing fancier footman uniforms, poisoning their staff-borne hard-boiled eggs, and falling down to fake injuries in order to slow the opposing offense.

While aristocrats could compete for the services from
the hardiest footmen, the shoe buckle companies also
fought for their endorsement, as seen for this ad for the
popular 1698 Stride Man buckle with an elaborate air
pumping system for increased racing and unruly
dinner guest thrashing performance

By the nineteenth century, long-distance walking events gained traction with the gambling community alongside horse racing, attracting enormous crowds. Here, according to Wikipedia, is an account of Robert Barclay Allardice's celebrated 1000-hour/1,000 mile walk in 1809:

One hundred to one, and indeed any odds whatever, were offered on Wednesday; but so strong was the confidence in his success, that no bets could be obtained. The multitude of people who resorted to the scene of action, in the course of the concluding days, was unprecedented. Not a bed could be procured on Tuesday night at Newmarket, Cambridge, or any of the towns and villages in the vicinity, and every horse and every species of vehicle was engaged...Capt Barclay had a large sum depending upon his undertaking. The aggregate of the bets is supposed to amount to £100,000.

The image of people frantically shaking money and screaming at Barclay to walk, to walk, to WALK DAMN YOUR BLOOD while he calmly but determinedly ambles through the countryside is irresistible and unrecognizable to modern sports fans unable to process such a feat without the nineteenth-century equivalent of Skip Bayless shrieking about his gentlemanliness.

The nineteenth-century version of ESPN's Embrace Debate format.
This is actually a depiction of a duel between a journalist named
Paul Déroulède and Georges Clemenceau from 1892 over a political
dispute, which means that only eight years before the twentieth
century these two prominent public men literally shot guns at each
other. Neither was harmed, and Clemenceau went on to become the
French Prime Minister in 1917, represent France at the Paris Peace
Conference, and grow a spectacular mustache

Pedestrianism is the antecedent of race walking and other endurance sports, such as race walking, ultra marathons, and watching Northwestern attempt to hold a lead in the fourth quarter.

FOOTBALL IS HERE

It is college football season! Head to Ryan Field, turn on your television, fashion your hands into elaborate defense-encouraging claw gestures, and hold onto your butts. There's no way the 'Cats can lose on eight consecutive hail mary fumble overtimes again. There's no reason the Wildcats can't beat Cal without allegations of chicanery. There's no reasonthey can't keep the The Hat from The Beck Man. There's no reason why they can't sack, pillage, and salt the fields of South Bend on the way back to where the program belongs-- in a low-prestige bowl game sponsored by an absurd company that I can't possibly want to win any more. I'll grab my pole and my elaborate footman livery and race you all to the stadium.

At one point in the second quarter, Northwestern had shown signs of life as Cameron Dickerson scampered into the endzone. A despondent Ryan Field woke up. The band struck up a chorus of Go U, the Cal lead narrowed to a manageable ten, and the listless Wildcats seemed poised for a comeback. Cal got the ball back, and on the first play from scrimmage, Jared Goff found Trevor Davis with a few miles on the last defender, leaving every single player behind him as irrelevant as the fictional Batman football teams swallowed by a chasm. Ryan Field deflated. The pockets of Cal fans erupted. Northwestern fans turned into sentient tarp. This is Wildcat Football.

There are some teams for whom a nine-win season is an unmitigated disaster that demands the sacrifice of a head coach and a bevy of deranged alumni staring unblinkingly at creepy flight-tracking websites. There are programs in the throes of misery that get scraped off the field every week. And then there is Northwestern, a team that wins upsets, perseveres with moral victories, and suffers horrifying losses, usually all within the fourth quarter of a single game.

north·west·ern
adjective \-ˈwes-tərn\
in, toward, or from the northwest
of or relating to the northwest

verb
to lose a football game in a spectacular manner in the fourth quarter or overtime by hail mary, quick field goal, interception, treachery by the inopportune defection of the offensive line, fundamental rule change to the game of football that applies only to Northwestern at that moment in time such as the abolition of the forward pass, or playing profoundly badly.

A WRISTBAND RAPSCALLIONSHIP

Northwestern did manage a comeback in the second half, tightening the defense, moving the ball, and using a super cool double pass play. The 'Cats had several opportunities to tie the game before some ill-timed drops and a backbreaking interception ended the game.

We're unsure what this game augurs for the Wildcats' season. In the first half, they looked unprepared and unmatched by the remnants of a 1-11 team before rallying in the second. Part of it involved preparation. InsideNu discovered that Northwestern defenders had incorrect play-calling wristbands, which Pat Fitzgerald dismissed as a "typo." This goes deeper than simple uniform confusion. What Fitzgerald does not want you to know is that the wristbands were switched with elaborate early modern battle maps that left the NU defense less than prepared to stop the Cal offense but in excellent position to siege Constantinople if it was the fifteenth century.

Wildcat defenders are confused when they are unable to locate their siege towers
and sapping equipment

While we can be heartened that Northwestern played far better in the second half, the loss has significant implications for the team's bowl hopes. Assuming they can pull together and defeat Northern and Western Illinois (scheduled by an apparently self-referential athletic department), Northwestern will need to wring four wins out of conference play and Notre Dame in order to qualify for the postseason. Better prognosticators than me will have to figure out where those are coming from (aside from a surefire Hat Defense), but it is going to be a rough and exciting Road to Pizza City this year.

Crunching the numbers on Northwestern's Bowl Position

The first week of the season, especially when the game is not against Chicago Dental College or the Institute of Football Losing Science, is unpredictable. Maybe Sonny Dykes has righted the ship and Cal will be far better than last year. Maybe Northwestern's lapse was a product of Mark's departure and Christian Jones's injury. Maybe Tim Beckman's Legion of Evil Abraham Lincoln Impersonators successfully switched the wristbands before melting away, unseen, into a landscape of license plates and pennies. Regardless of the reason, the 'Cats will have to improve to win in the Big Ten, to make it to a bowl game, and to finally drive us all to the brink of insanity at the end of each game.

NORTHERN ILLINOIS MUST FALL

The demoralized 'Cats will return on Saturday against Northern Illinois to rescue their season. This is fitting. Northwestern defeated the Huskies in 1982 to end their ignominious record-breaking streak of defeats. They have, in fact, never lost to Northern, and at 6-0-1, they have dominated them more thoroughly than any other opponent that is not a high school, YMCA, dental college, or other group of Spanish-American War-era football enthusiasts.

Northwestern owns a 0-0-1 record against Kentucky's
Transylvania University, which was founded in 1780.
Transylvania University's law faculty at one time included
future Secretary of State Henry Clay, shown in the standard early
photographic pose where subjects were asked to look like they
wanted to murder every man, woman, and child who has ever
lived and will live in future times. There are no other jokes to
be made about Transylvania University

Northern is coming off of a 55-3 thrashing of Presbyterian College. They lost their All-American Heisman candidate quarterback Jordan Lynch who graduated and was last seen wandering from NFL city to NFL city offering to football. Nevertheless, the Huskies are more than a one-player team, and have been the scourge of the MAC West for the last four years. They were certainly the best college football team in Illinois last season. The stakes for Northwestern are serious. A loss would effectively end their hopes at bowl contention (barring a miracle Big Ten run), obliterate their unbeaten record against Northern, and lead to the Huskies putting up a series of garish billboards along the expressway declaring themselves Chicago's MAC Team, and then entering a float denigrating Northwestern into the annual Sycamore Pumpkin Festival. This is Northwestern's Waterloo.

BASEBALL INTERMISSION

The Chicago Cubs are alive. Not in the sense of having any hope of making the playoffs or achieving any concrete thing in baseball. But they have recently swept the AL East-leading Orioles (using a variety of former Orioles in the pitching staff) and the erstwhile NL Central-leading Brewers and have done so with an arsenal of exciting young prospects that would in theory lead the Cubs to glory in a universe where the Chicago Cubs were not the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs have gone from the basement to the sub-basement. They can realistically overtake the free-falling, injury-cursed Reds to finish in a position above last for the first time in a few years, and I could not be more excited.

The most impressive addition has been Jorge Soler, a Cuban free agent who has hit everything since coming up last week. The more intriguing prospect, though, is Javier Baez. Baez already has 7 dingers in his first 30 games. He also has struck out 51 times in 129 plate appearances and his hitting .179 with a .217 on-base percentage. This is because Javier Baez swings hard. He wants to hit a baseball so hard it will simultaneously hit all of the baseballs made from the same hide. If it was possible, he would take a running start into his swing from the dugout. His swing starts from the origin of the universe and, on the rare instances when he makes clean contact, he hits the ball it into the next era of geological time.

The Pacific Coast League demanded that pitchers throw balls to Baez with the Pioneer plaque

In addition to Baez and Soler, the Cubs have had excellent seasons from Anthony Rizzo and even Starlin Castro, whom I've spent the past several seasons maligning. Reinforcements including Addison Reed, Kris Bryant, and the sublimely-named Albert Almora are cooling their heels in the minors. It is a tremendous time to be a Cubs fan because it is way more fun to imagine Hypothetical Future Good Cubs than to deal with the inevitable September collapses, October collapses, and even possible November apocalypses that are the best-case scenario for this forlorn, hopeless team.

LET'S GO OUT TO THE HIPPODROME

College football is here again. It is an unalloyed spectacle of the absurd, of crowds braying for barely-controlled violence that is vaguely connected to educational institutions, of goofy mascots and bands dressed like Edwardian bus drivers playing 1970s jazz rock, of people falling upon hunks of meat in parking lots and college students letting the streets run sort of yellowish with vomit, all of which is covered by sports networks with the gravity of an international arms summit. It's a mutant cousin of the NFL, which oversees a similar menagerie with the gravity of the end of the world.

AIKMAN: Joe, I've just learned that the Pacific Northwest has just vanished under
a mushroom cloud.
Aikman: Joe, San Franciso and Vancouver have gone, and no one has heard
anything from a major city outside North America.
AIKMAN: Joe all we can do is try to defense ourselves and our loved ones
AIKMAN: Joe
AIKMAN: Joe
BUCK: There's no excuse for that in the National Football League

Yet, watching young people collide for our amusement while stuffing ourselves with nachos is just as ridiculous as any form of mass entertainment spectacle we've come up with in the last century. London's Hippodrome in the Edwardian period, for example, hosted elaborate variety shows, some of which required hundreds of gallons of water for aquatic extravaganzas. These included divers, polar bears, and ramps for elephants to slide down and fall gracefully into the water while spectators looked on. As football stadium experiences become more elaborate to hold the crowd's attention during an ever-expanding roster of television commercials, perhaps we too can turn them into elaborate variety shows with breaks for synchronized swimming, animal ventriloquism, and people getting embarrassingly removed from the premises with robotically controlled vaudeville hooks.

A reproduction of the hippodrome, attended crowds in their top-hatted finery,
no doubt shouted things like "I say, sir, that is tip-top elephant sliding."

IT IS NOT YET TIME TO GIVE UP

One game into the season, and Northwestern remains a team shrouded in mystery. It is still possible that the best is yet to come for the Wildcats as they shake off the rust. Pat Fitzgerald's perfect streak of openers is shattered, but we can continue the streak of invincibility against Northern Illinois University. And, in case you don't get official e-mails from Northwestern football and doubt the team's ability to mean-mug their way through adversity, let this prove you wrong:

I've stared at it for hours, and there is nothing that can be included in this image
that is funnier than the phrase "Official E-mail of Chicago's Big Ten Team."

If there's one thing we can be sure of one game into the season, it's that Northwestern will continue to play the most exciting games in college football until there's no one left sink to their knees in full Heston in the fourth quarter. Northwestern may yet Reverse Northwestern itself to glory, its football team basking in an unending parade of fortuitous bounces, incomprehensible opponent gaffes, and a 35-lateral trick play that makes up for the entirety of last season.

The Northwestern "Wildcat" Football team has won a game. Tremble, Big Ten! After two disappointing losses, the 'Cats have taken on a team from the mighty Missouri Valley Conference and triumphed, showing yet another FCS team what it's like to play at the mighty Fortress Ryan Field unless they are that New Hampshire team coached by Chip Kelly. Pat Fitzgerald will stop at nothing to wring every advantage against a team psychologically bolstered by a phalanx of cheerleaders with inspirational placards reading "NECKS."

The Leathernecks ought to bust out their original "Rocky" mascot,
shown here with an alternate mascot entitled "Dog Who Sees All
the Secrets of Time and Space and then is Instantly Mummified"

Not taking any chances on a WIU field goal at the end of a tense first half, Fitz deployed all three timeouts in succession. The 'Cats blocked the kick attempt, which somehow justified it and set Fitz on a course of madness.

"ICE DA KICKAH: FREEZE, FREEZE, WINTER COLD, WINTER ICE
COOL COOL FREEZE FREEZE," Fitz said to the official before
whirring away to halftime on his icemobile.

Northwestern may not have dominated the game, but still came up with a vital win before beginning Big Ten play this weekend against Penn State. While it has been a grim opening to the season, there still may be hope for the Wildcats because the Big Ten is a frigid wasteland of broken dreams, as I wrote about last week in a guest post for Lake the Posts. But Saturday's game is a tall order against an undefeated Penn State team in the jubilant throes of a modern college football team's greatest triumph: an end to NCAA sanctions.

WE WANT FRANKLIN SHUT UP OLD MAN

Northwestern faces off against new Penn State head coach James Franklin. Franklin used to coach at Vanderbilt and led the Commodores to a minor resurgence. This success did not extend to games aginst Northwestern, as the Wildcats beat them in a close-run away game. The next year, Vanderbilt canceled the series, citing the shake-up of SEC schedules thanks to the addition of Missouri and Texas A&M. This sounds perfectly reasonable, and a sound explanation so let's just

WAIT A MINUTE I'M TALKING TO YOU NOW PENN STATE HEAD FOOTBALL COACH JAMES FRANKLIN AND YOU LISTEN GOOD. NOTICE I'M USING THE WRESTLATIVE TENSE, WHICH MEANS THAT I CAN ONLY ADDRESS A PERSON BY THEIR FULL NAME AND GIMMICK FOR EXAMPLE I CAN SAY I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY TO YOU HULK HOGAN AND ALL YOU HULKAMANIACS OUT THERE FROM COAST TO COAST: WILL YOU PLEASE PASS THE GREEN BEANS? SORRY, PARDON MY REACH THERE, GORILLA MONSOON. PENN STATE HEAD FOOTBALL COACH JAMES THE COMMODORE FRANKLIN, YOU CAN'T DUCK US ANYMORE. YOU CAN'T RUN. YOU CAN'T HIDE. THERE'S NO SEC SCHEDULING LOOPHOLES NOW TO SAVE YOU FROM A RAMPAGING, UNSTOPPABLE WILDCAT FORCE EXCEPT FOR YOUR APPARENTLY VERY GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM, HEISMAN-CANDIDATE QUARTERBACK, AND 100,000 FRENZIED FANS OOOH YEAH.

Pioneer of the Wrestlative Tense The Macho
Man Randy Savage shown here in press
materials for the 1988 American Academy of
Rhetoric and Piledrivers conference. Savage's
speech "I've Got Something To Tell You: Modes of
Address, Semiotics, and the Ring, a Structuralist
Reading," is still widely cited in academic papers
and before sending a vice-provost through a
flimsy card table

Northwestern has not beaten Penn State since 2004. Actually, Northwestern has not technically played Penn State since 2004 according the NCAA, who has vacated all five of Penn State's wins since then, so all of those losses occurred in a shadowy alternate universe; perhaps in one Northwestern held their 21-0 lead against Penn State in 2010, perhaps in of them the NCAA negligently allowed players to use both endzones in the Wrigley, perhaps in one of them America has become a brutal future dictatorship run by Ron Zook with the standard greeting being an enthusiastic butt bump and a Gainesville-based resistance movement.

Penn State is 4-0, but has not exactly looked dominant. They beat Akron and UMass, but struggled against Central Florida and Big Ten newcomer Rutgers. The Nittany Lions can be excused for that last game as it is clearly a deadly rivalry game. I can only dream that one day fans of a rival team can hate Northwestern enough to express their disdain via hastily-stenciled sheet. Nevertheless, Penn State are heavy favorites against a Northwestern team that has struggled at times to move the ball. Pat Fitzgerald has assured reporters that the Wildcats will play better because he is doing things like enthusiastically yelling at practices, and a solid effort in Happy Valley will be an encouraging sign for how they can play against other crappy Big Ten teams.

UP IN THE AIR

I've recently been reading Atlantic Fever by Joe Jackson about the 1927 race to be the first to fly the Atlantic. The race, set off by New York hotelier Raymond Orteig's $25,000 prize, led to a confluence of explorers, daredevil aviators, magnates, engineers, and all of the types of people you would imagine would be willing to strap themselves into a flying lawnmower and travel several thousands of miles over the vast, unforgiving expanse of ocean in the name of science, patriotism, and lucrative endorsement opportunities.

The race was won by Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis, but Jackson and Bill Bryson, who uses thespring air chase and Lindbergh's nation-wide adulation tour to frame One Summer: America 1927, discuss Lindbergh's colorful rivals. These aviators included René Fonck, the French World War I ace whose attempt in in 1926 ended in a crash. Fonck and his crew overloaded their plane with mahogany chairs, a hide-a-bed, and a fancy table for a victory feast; essentially, they were attempting to transverse the Atlantic in a flying nineteenth-century gentleman's club, missing only an ancient, decrepit man in dozing in the corner with a newspaper clinging perilously to muttonchops and life. Though Fonck survived, three of his crew members perished. Another French team led by WWI ace Charles Nungesser and François Coli attempted the first crossing in 1927 from Paris. Their plane, L'Ousseau Blanc (the White Bird) disappeared over Canada. Frontrunners Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster, Americans fueled by a patriotic desire to beat the French across the ocean, died during a test run of their American Legion. The ill-fated flights cast a somber pall over the race. In all, eighteen people died in 1927 attempting the feat.

Nungesser (l) was ravaged by injuries sustained in the
First World War, and Coli flew with an eye patch. The
two are shown here looking like the platonic ideal of
people who should be flying primitive airplanes

By the time Lindbergh set off, there were three other teams close to beating him. One, led by polar explorer Richard Byrd, crashed before takeoff and was delayed by his financial backer, the spectacularly named Rodman Wanamaker. Wanamaker was greatly moved by the deaths of Nungesser and Coli, and was hesitant to send Byrd and his crew out until he could explore every safeguard possible. The Columbia team became embroiled in a heated contract dispute the day before the flight that led to a legal injunction against the plane's takeoff. Charles Levine, who owned the grounded Columbia and had no flight training before 1927, took off with pilot Clarence Chamberlin and flew to Germany two weeks after Lindbergh landed. Byrd's team eventually made the journey into horrible weather, and was unable to land in a heavy fog surrounding Paris; eventually they crash-landed in the ocean. As Jackson notes, some kind of altercation happened on Byrd's America during the flight, but the events remain shrouded in mystery. According to one account, co-pilot Bert Acosta attempted to hijack the plane and turn it around before Byrd stopped him by hitting him with a flashlight. Another tale involved engineer George Noville and Acosta getting drunk together during the flight's most hopeless moments-- in this version, Byrd knocked them both out with a wrench. A third unconfirmed version had Colonel Mustard pummeling all three of them with a lead pipe.

Other aviation pioneers broke barriers adjacent to the Orteig Prize. One of the most fascinating was Francesco de Pinedo, the "Lord of Distances." De Pinedo flew a seaplane thousands of miles around the world, making numerous stops. He crossed the Atlantic from Buenos Aires on a quest to fly across four continents. De Pinedo faced numerous challenges, but perhaps none were as harrowing as the capricious patronage of Mussolini, who supported him but demanded results. All of his movements were politically charged; an appearance in New York City sparked a riot between anti-fascists and Mussolini supporters. His plane was destroyed in an accident in Arizona, which carried accusations of sabotage from Rome. De Pinedo failed to complete his tour, running out of gas and needing a tow to the Azores. After he returned, Mussolini sent him to a diplomatic post in Buenos Aires. Ruth Elder attempted to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic in October of that year, becoming herself a media sensation. She and co-pilot George Haldeman safely crash landed more than 2500 miles from New York. Frances Grayson, an ardent feminist, attempted the crossing in late December, but her plane vanished before reaching Nova Scotia.

Francesco de Pinedo, Ruth Elder, and Frances Grayson

Both Jackson and Bryson are fascinated not only by the sheer derring-do of the flyers, but also the media frenzy that surrounded them. The Oreteig race blew all of the participants up to daily front-page news, and test flights and appearances brought out thousands of spectators. Lindbergh, who projected a blank slate of monomaniacal determination to fly solo, made him a blank canvas for the media to shape into whatever narrated they wanted. While the flight made Lindbergh rich and unimaginably famous, he found himself haunted by his inability find quiet and outside of the skies. Eventually, Lindbergh transformed his intense desire to be left alone into a geopolitical philosophy, becoming an outspoken voice against American participation in the Second World War. Byrd took solace in the Antarctic, at one point living for months in a frozen hut alone in the tundra.

PENN STATE CLASH

Saturday, Northwestern hopes to set its own season on a course. Perhaps they will manage to upend the favorites. They may take flight against the Nittany Lions, they may crash and burn, or they may get involved in some sort of mysterious altercation involving wrenches and flashlights before being rescued by a friendly lighthouse-keeper. The Big Ten (except for Indiana) (exclamation point) is a laughingstock, but Northwestern will fight to remain in the middle of this particular pile of garbage. It will take courage, heart, and hopefully as many timeouts as humanly possible to ice a kicker and bring about a winter of discontent what killed da dinasawas, de ice age freeze freeze freeze ice pun, I'm sorry it has been 17 years since that movie came out and this is still funny to me.

These were the facts heading into Saturday's contest in Happy Valley: Northwestern would be playing at Penn State's homecoming (Northwestern is a perennial Homecoming Opponent, forever treated by the Big Ten as the first or second guy Van Damme fights in a Van Damme is kicking everyone's ass montage in one of those infinite Van Damme movies where Van Damme is in an underground fighting tournament for money, for love, for United States foreign policy objectives). Northwestern had played poorly in its first three games. Penn State was undefeated, and now allowed to appear in post-season games. And the Big Ten is a festering cauldron of nonsense football.

What I don't think anyone expected was for Northwestern to flatten Penn State for a decisive 29-6 win on the road. This was Penn State's worst loss at home since getting clobbered by the legendary 2001 Miami Hurricanes team. The Wildcats' defense held Penn State's highly-touted quarterback Christian Hackenberg to 22 completions on 45 attempts for 216 yards. The Lions managed only 50 yards on the ground. By the end of the game, discombobulated Penn State offensive linemen were out of answers and attempted to slam into each other while yelling "WHY ARE YOU BLOCKING YOURSELF." This did not help.

An alternative explanation involves deep-seated subterfuge and hypnosis in what's known as the
Manchurian Blocker theory

Trevor Siemian looked crisper, repeatedly finding a wide-open Dan Vitale moving through the middle of the field, a desolate area abandoned by Penn State defenders. Justin Jackson and Warren Long led the rushing attack, although it was Siemian who cashed in three rushing touchdowns from the one yard-line and should now be referred to as "Touchdown Sneakian." On defense, the story was freshman Anthony Walker who started his first game at linebacker and appeared everywhere on the field at once. He essentially ended the game by scoring on an interception in a tribute to his injured comrade Colin Ellis. Northwestern's defense looked like it could keep the 'Cats in games while the offense rounds into shape.

CANCEL THIS

Myths and legends are much more of a daily part of our lives than we like to imagine. We swim in a sea of apocryphal common knowledge. Our understanding of the world around us is shaped by half-remembered lectures shrouded by daydreams, discredited theories, misinformed relatives, television, and That Great Deceiver Wikipedia. The things we don't just think we know but we know we know are riven with cracks and papered over by over-simplifications, false anecdotes, even outright lies.

I'm sure there are nuanced reasons why the Vanderbilt Athletic Department canceled its series with Northwestern. I'm sure the addition of two new conference teams wreaked havoc with their scheduling. But it's way better to imagine a furious James Franklin angrily clearing his desk of Commodore memorabilia with one sweep of his forearm and shouting CANCEL THEM into a red hotline phone that handles football scheduling emergencies. I've been regularly taunting Vanderbilt for abandoning the series as The Assassination of the Northwestern-Vanderbilt Rivalry by the Coward James Franklin because I strongly believe that any time you get a chance to make fun of someone for ducking Northwestern and you have a high-powered and influential blog like this one you take it.

I've recently learned that certain corners of the
internet refer to Franklin as "CJF," which stands
for Coach James Franklin. I really like how "Coach"
is an honorific title like Lord Palmerston or
Captain Cook or Chairman Kaga

In any event, Northwestern traveled to Happy Valley and unexpectedly ruined their Homecoming festivities, which is close to the platonic ideal of a Northwestern road victory. The win also jolted the Big Ten, which has been usurped by chaos and uncertainty as these flailing programs start to play each other. The conference in the midst of a Carnival season, where boring agents of stability and order have fallen apart and no one knows if any of these teams is actually decent. Only Nebraska remains unbeaten. Ohio State lost a Heisman-caliber quarterback. Michigan is so bad that its students are staging literal demonstrations against the athletic director.

Legend has it that a campus screening of a football-related opera ignited a fervor
amongst Michigan students who took to the quad demanding independence from
their athletic director Dave Brandon. Brandon, the former CEO of Domino's Pizza,
remained defiant, and as of press time was constructing a balcony that could be
used to taunt protesting students while preparing to advance on the crowd with his
personal elite noid guard

Northwestern might be ok enough to win games in the Big Ten West. Four more wins might be possible. Everything is up for grabs.

BADGER-BAITED

What is certain is that Wisconsin is among the best teams in the Big Ten. The Badgers' sole loss was to Les Miles's LSU team from the Invincible SEC West filled with teams that can only be defeated by other SEC West teams much like how Highlanders can only chop off each others' heads.

Nick Saban celebrates a 2013 win over Texas A&M on the roof of
A&M's Department of 1980s Production Values

This year's Wisconsin team wins games by doing the same Wisconsin shit they have been doing since time immemorial. They have a stable of a stable of excellent running backs led by Heisman hopeful Melvin Gordon running behind giants. With Joel Stave out, Wisconsin has gone Full Wisconsin and started converted safety Tanner McEvoy at quarterback. There are few certainties in this world, and it is a comfort to know that Wisconsin is still Wisconsinning at people nearly 20 years after the reign of terror perpetuated by Ron Dayne.

Northwestern put up a stellar defensive effort against Penn State, but Wisconsin will be a far tougher challenge. The Penn State offensive line had been a concern all year while the Wisconsin line is an anthropomorphic ozone layer. If two Wisconsin linemen accidentally block each other, the result would be a seismic calamity orders of magnitude beyond a catastrophic Jump Around mishap. Gordon himself will give the Wildcat defenders fits if he gets any space. Certainly, Wisconsin is one of the most difficult matchups left on Northwestern's schedule. Even at home, Ryan Field will be at least half full of Wisconsin fans braying at Siemian.

At least Wisconsin will not be bringing this abominable Terror Badger to horrify
petrified spectators and unsuspecting Evanston residents on the second floor of
their homes

As excited as we were by last week's romp at Penn State, the Badgers will be heavy favorites. The Badgers have designs on a Big Ten Championship. As we all know, though, the true Big Ten Champion this season is Chaos.

LET US BECOME UNREASONABLY CONFIDENT

Which Northwestern team is the real Northwestern team? Is it the team that looked lost during the first half against Cal and in disarray against Northern Illinois? Is it the team that failed to pulverize Western Illinois to a satisfactory pulp? Or it the team that shut down Penn State's offense and sent thousands of disappointed Nittany Lion fans home to their Unhappy Mountains in the fourth quarter and frustrated the James Franklin, the Apocryphal Dodger? There is no doubt that the Wildcats can match up in the post-Big Ten Big Ten. There is no doubt that the Badgers have a very good team that views Northwestern as a stepping stone to the conference championship game. And there is no doubt that, if the game is close, we'll only be able to see if this is a new Northwestern team by how completely and utterly insane things will get in the fourth quarter starting at a baseline Northwestern Football Fourth Quarter Chaos Scale that starts at major natural disaster, reaches a middle of expected Godzilla attack, crescendos into unexpected Godzilla attack, and tops out at 2013 Northwestern vs. Nebraska.

As the clock approached midnight on December 31, 1999, there were three types of people: those celebrating the end of the twentieth century, those huffily refusing to celebrate for another year making a brave stand for joy-killing pedantry, and those who sat huddled with rifles waiting for our dial-up modems to rise up and tie us to railroad tracks. All three of those types are now joining us in the twenty-first century, when we can illegally stream football from other continents, when we wait for our cable modems to murder us all, where Wisconsin has failed to win a football game at Ryan Field.

Chaos Week, certified by thousands of hash-tag notaries, was here! A college football Carnival where top-ranked teams lost, unranked teams ruled the day, and goalposts were pillaged. A day where, somehow, Northwestern sits atop the Big Ten West, with dreams of a crappy bowl game now dancing through our minds.

Current Big Ten West standings

After sputtering through two losses, Northwestern is now in the driver's seat in their division. They will face off against Minnesota for first place this Saturday. And, this week, they revealed they will be playing a homecoming night game against Nebraska while dressed like the Castle of Otranto.

Here's a Wikipedia Sentence that describes the plot of Horace Walpole's gothic novel:
"Shortly before the wedding, however, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic
helmet that falls on him from above." In case you were wondering what makes
this a Wikipedia Sentence rather than a regular sentence, it is the specific detail
that the helmet falls on him from above instead of crushing him from below or
from the sides, from the other other gigantic helmets you didn't even know were there

It's been an exciting week for Wildcat football.

NO ESCAPE FROM RYAN FIELD

Ryan Field is a picturesque place to watch a football game. It has grass and towers and a tarp. It is located near Chicago's Big Ten public transportation. It is probably the worst home field advantage in the country. Opposing fans invariably swarm the stadium, debase the stands with their reds and yellows and maizes and oranges, and occasionally force the offense to use a silent snap count. Yet, for whatever reason, Wisconsin has lost its last four games against Northwestern in Evanston. A rational person would note that the Wildcats notched three close victories (including the spectacular 51-48 Tyrell Sutton breakout game in 2005 where both teams refused to play defense) while getting blown out repeatedly in Madison. But if you were a rational person, you would certainly not be wasting your time reading this blog, so it's clear that Wisconsin players are intimidated by fist claws, by the yow yow wildcat sound they play over the PA system, by the Foster-Walker complex.

Everyone expected the Badgers to run all over the Wildcat defense. Wisconsin coaches climb beanstalks to recruit their offensive linemen, and Melvin Gordon is a human locomotive. He rushed for a career-high 259 yards and seemed poised to explode for a 50-yard gain every time he touched the ball. Yet, it was the Northwestern defense that carried the day by seizing four interceptions, including three by freshman safety Godwin Igwebuike in his first start. It was the second consecutive breakout game from a freshman defender after Anthony Walker's debut against Penn State. Badger fans, however, remain baffled at their coaching staff's decision to call passing plays late in the game while Gordon remained their most dangerous offensive threat.

Wisconsin coaches instruct their evil ninjas to circle Black Belt Jones and attack
him one at a time. It's called playing the percentages

Northwestern's offense seems to improve every week. Freshman running back Justin Jackson, had an impressive game in his own right with 162 yards. Tony Jones and Dan Vitale have given Siemian steady options to move the chains; Kyle Prater is finally healthy and Pratering people.

But something more important happened last Saturday. Northwestern entered the fourth quarter with a lead. Northwestern entered the fourth quarter with the lead against a ranked opponent. Northwestern entered the fourth quarter with the lead and instead of fumbling nine consecutive times or throwing fifteen interceptions or committing personal fouls with overly-extravagant timeout gestures or the heavens opening up and a ray of light shining down upon Joel Stave who then turns into a many-armed Russell Wilson/Jim Sorgi/Scott Tolzien avatar of Wisconsin quarterbacking which makes him really good at handing off and also occasionally completing passes and then throwing five consecutive hail marys to Melvin Gordon, nothing happened. The Badgers approached the endzone. Igwebuike picked off the pass. The Wildcats held on.

Godwin Igwebuike's Law: As a Wisconsin game grows longer, the
probability of a ridiculous Wisconsin interception on a pass play
when Melvin Gordon is literally in the backfield approaches 1

LOOKING DOWN AT THE BIG TEN FROM A LOFTY PERCH

Minnesota and Northwestern sit atop the Big Ten West. The Gophers are 4-1 this season, with their only loss to TCU. Their signature win this season was at Michigan, where they waxed a Wolverine team in complete and utter disarray and reclaimed their jug trophy. Minnesota plays rivalry games for a jug, a pig, and an axe as they try to complete the Triple Crown of Hillbilly Accoutrements. There's no trophy at stake this week other than control of the division as the Big Ten and college football continues to eat itself in an upset ouroboros.

Conference play has come, and Big Ten teams can safely retreat to their thunderdomes to clobber each other in peace, insulated from the braying mockery of the national media. There is still upheaval. Michigan has fallen apart. Dave Brandon and Brady Hoke have been confined to the Touliers Palace.

Hoke and Brandon attempt to flee to Windsor, Ontario, but are captured when
Brandon's face is recognized from a Domino's coupon

At the bottom of the conference, Illinois fell to lowly Purdue at home. The loss casts a pall over the Beckman Era. Illinois supporters have grown restless with their coach, who has managed a single conference victory. A rogue Wikipedia editor has added a section to his page entitled "Public Outcry." There are vultures circling the Castle Beckman. He may not last the season. All of us can only hope that he turns it around and wins a few because nothing in college football has brought me greater joy Tim Beckman's War on Northwestern.

GOOD GRAVY, NORTHWESTERN IS A DECENT TEAM BY BIG TEN STANDARDS

What are we to make of this Wildcat team? They went from encouraging to despair to looking like a bowl team. They only need three more wins, and Big Ten victories apparently come more easily than to Pac-12 and MAC opponents. They have decisive home and road victories over Big Ten title hopefuls.

Minnesota is in the same position, hoping to take the pole position in the topsy-turvy West. They don't feature any superstars like Penn State's Hackenberg or Wisconsin's Gordon, but they also don't have a glaring achilles heel like Penn State's self-blocking linemen or Wisconsin's nineteenth-century passing attack. We're in a dangerous place as Northwestern fans, with our expectations raised just enough to be dashed. But this team's steadfast refusal to Northwestern itself in Big Ten play has gone from puzzling to exciting. Regardless of what happens in Minneapolis, Nebraska will have to come into the Invincible Fortress Evanston where they face the impossible pressure of not embarrassing themselves in front of the stands full of Husker fans.

Fist pump.

Sometimes, you win football games. Sometimes, you lose football games. And sometimes, you eradicate a bowl drought nearly old enough to qualify for social security by jubilantly tearing a stuffed monkey asunder in a locker room and then bringing its severed head to a press conference because Northwestern finally won a damn bowl game.

Not too many coaches deliver a sincere address about the hard work and tenacity of their football
players with the remains of a monkey toy sitting on the table like the head of Alfredo Garcia

With the victory, Northwestern's seniors became the school's winningest class, the Wildcats claimed their third season with 10 victories, and Coach Fitz won his fiftieth game, more than any other head coach. Emotions flew high after the win. Fitz broke down; even his rote "our young men" speeches went from banal, rote coach-speak to inspiring rote coach-speak as you can hear the weight of Northwestern's abysmal football history lifted off of his shoulders.

THE HISTORY OF NORTHWESTERN BOWL LOSSES

The burden of history continued to weigh on Northwestern football fans with each passing year. For much of the drought, bowls were relatively few and far between, and Northwestern lost most of their games anyway. The 1949 Rose Bowl seemed impossibly distant. The last time Northwestern won a bowl game, Harry Truman demanded satisfaction from Hirohito in a musket duel and the United States was a breakaway dukedom in the Holy Roman Empire.

Harrold of Truman, Archduke of Missouri, Pomerania, and
Lower Silesia, undermined a strategic marriage of his
arch-rival Dewey into a powerful Canadian Habsburgh family
by revealing Dewey's ungainly way with the tea service. He
then posed for a portrait with an announcement prematurely
announcing Dewey's ruined nuptials filled with those f-looking
s letters and then Northwestern won a bowl game

For a long time, Northwestern fans had been content merely to make it to the postseason, but the bowl losses had begun to pile up into an astounding collection of happenings. From the perspective of today, it almost seemed like those bowl losses happened to make yesterday's win even sweeter; that is the only way I can describe what happened in the Sun Bowl, the Outback Bowl, and the Second Alamo Bowl without the use of hostile occult forces because the Lakefill was built on some sort of ancient Mer-Man burial ground with a very specific grudge against mid-tier bowl victories.

HEY THERE WAS AN ACTUAL GAME THAT HAPPENED

The game certainly played to the complete opposite of my expectations. Northwestern's defense locked down Mississippi State's passing attack and the offense relied on timely passes to march down the field as they struggled with the Bulldog run defense. The 'Cats certainly benefited from a tough day for Mississippi State quarterback Tyler Russell, who coughed up four interceptions, including an opening pick-six into the waiting arms of Quentin Williams. He was not helped by the excellent play of the Wildcat secondary, who kept MSU's ace receiver Chad Bumphis in check with only 18 yards. On offense, Trevor Siemian came off the bench to deliver an unexpected rushing touchdown and the play of the game on an elusive third-down completion to keep a drive alive. The Bulldogs limited Colter and Mark, but Colter sealed the game with a 31-yard scramble to set up a Tyris Jones touchdown. Freshman superback Dan Vitale continued his late-season surge by leading all receivers with 82 yards. Mississippi State also helped out with several costly penalties, including a penalty for attempting to use 1.5 defenses, and another sideline interference penalty that was nowhere near as funny as the Beckman flag-clobber.

The game, though, remained in doubt. The Bulldogs battled back from an early deficit and, at times, looked like they might take over the game on the ground. When they got within a touchdown in the fourth quarter, Northwestern fans instinctively began to strap into their safety seats, put on their mittens, and have their man-servants prepare their purple-plated heart paddle machines. To their credit, Mississippi State refused to give up even after a barrage of turnovers. Fortunately, Northwestern rallied, added an insurance touchdown, and refused to budge in the final minutes, and I am just now nearly able to chew solid food.

To be honest, I did not know much about Mississippi State before the game. Northwestern fans were introduced to the Starkville tradition of constantly ringing cowbells for several consecutive hours. Far be it for me to disparage the tradition as a person who has encouraged the defense by yelling and making fist-claws. I'm also thankful that Bulldog fans don't traditionally file their collective nails on third downs, make mewling late-night alley cat noises, or endlessly holler out Snow's "Informer" off the top of their heads for the duration of the game, which would result in a muddled staccato mishmash except on the words "informer" and "licky boom boom down."

Please don't give Purdue any ideas

As someone who could not make it to Jacksonville and watched the game on television, I can only add that the only thing that would have made this historic day for Northwestern more enjoyable would be more delightful banter between the race car guy and the inflatable knight.

THE GATOR BOWL IN CONTEXT

Northwestern's win was a lone bright spot in a disappointing day for the Big Ten. Michigan and Nebraska lost close games to SEC foes, while Stanford prevailed over Wisconsin in the giant man running into each otherest game of the day. Purdue disappeared in the wilderness. The crappy Big Ten showing was certainly affected by Penn State and Ohio State's bowl bans, which led to unfavorable match-ups against unsporting athletic conferences that refused to suspend two of their top-ranked schools from bowl play out of gentlemanly honor.

Bowl season is reserved for ridiculous inter-conference opprobrium that affects rooting interests. Though Northwestern took care of business against an SEC opponent, New Year's Day brought grim tidings to the Big Ten as a whole. Michigan State was the only other Big Ten team to win a bowl game what can only be described as satisfying reverse choke that helped undo some of the heartbreak from the past season. The rest of the conference has caused a whole lot of internet consternation about the Big Ten's inferiority to other conferences, particularly by swaggering SEC partisans.

The conference argument is specious and ridiculous, born out of the inherent politicking inherent in college football's arbitrary ranking system. While the Big Ten certainly had a down year, its top teams did not seem overwhelmingly over-matched in their games. More importantly, it is impossible to calculate the strength of the ever-growing Big Ten; teams playing Big Ten opponents cannot be entirely sure that they will not somehow end the game in the Big Ten in a new division called the Lions or the Land Barons or Los Locos Kick Your Balls into Outer Space.

Scientific simulation of Conference Realignment

Nonsensical conference arguments also mean that we're supposed to support our fellow Big Ten teams in bowls, even though I have spent the last several months whipping myself into a fury of pointless sports hatred directed against their programs. No conference argument was going to deny me the hollow satisfaction of Michigan getting Roy Roundtreed or Nebraska coming up short. How am I supposed to cope with bowl season without feasting on their fans' mild disappointment?

IN CASE YOU FORGOT, NORTHWESTERN WON THE GATOR BOWL

I honestly have no idea what else to say about this happy moment in Northwestern bowl game history. I'm thrilled for Coach Fitz and the players, who turned around a season many of us thought would be a disappointment into one of the most gratifying in the history of the program. Watching Northwestern's years of impossibly heartbreaking bowl losses are a reminder that a single game is not an indictment of a team's character, but the result of the unpredictable bouncing of an oblong ball and (in my theory), the curse of a vengeful group of supernatural mermen. Even so, it is much more fun when the team wins and then parades around a stuffed monkey carcass. Happy new year, Wildcat fans. Let's all hope the basketball team does well enough to make us suffer through another Selection Sunday.

This is Master of Horror Svengoolany bringing you to the depths of terror every Saturday with the most frightening programming imaginable: Big Ten Football. Tremble at fumbles. Cringe at special screams. Try to sleep a full night after gazing into the grotesque dancing of man-sized gophers, badgers, wildcats, discarded rugs wearing a scarf, an anthropomorphic hammer-wielding chin made flesh.

Last week's feature left your mind boggled with fear as you gazed upon "Terrors from the Fourth Quarter 5: Another Quarter." You watched as Northwestern fans walked into a creaky basement, stopping only to put their car keys in their most inaccessible pockets, separated individually, and turned off their flashlights. But the rustling they heard was not a cat this time, it was Jalen Myrick leaping from the shadows, returning a kick 100 yards, and plunging a rusty farm implement into Northwestern's temporary control of the Big Ten West Division while cackling maniacally.

This week, we bring you night terrors. A speed demon. A town besieged by a scarlet horde taking over the stadium to their unspeakable ends. An unfathomable head-bouncing avatar of corn's sinister possibilities. And Ryan Field shrouded in darkness.

In the dead of night, when all is still and unnervingly quiet, in the distance you might be able to
catch the faintest whisp of an unnatural mechanized yow yow sound echoing through the wind

GRAVE ROBBING

Northwestern fans can be both heartened and disheartened by the loss to Minnesota just like how nineteenth-century resurrectionists were heartened when they pried a heart from a freshly-buried corpse and then disheartened it when they sold it to a disreputable anatomist.

Hablot Knight Brown's Ressurectionists (l.) depicts body-snatchers at work in the late eighteenth
century. The corpse dissection industry caught the public imagination in Britain in 1828, when
William Burke and William Hare were implicated in a string of murders in order to obtain salable
corpses. They sold them to Robert Knox, an anatomy lecturer who was never prosecuted, but
was publicly derided for purchasing the bodies and because according to this picture of him, he
looks really mad-scientisty

Justin Jackson looks harder to bring down every week. The defense held against the bruising David Cobb. And, despite his murderous name, Gopher Head Coach Jerry Kill did not kill anyone during the game at all. Minnesota now controls the West. This is much more satisfying than saying that a team controls the Legends because it sounds like teams are medieval warlords rather than rogue anthropologists. Despite the deflating loss, Northwestern still played well, and the occasional backbreaking kick return touchdown with little time remaining in the fourth quarter seems just a normal part of the Northwestern football experience.

GOTHIC HORRORS

Last year, Nebraska turned Northwestern into a House of Horrors when an impish spirit took possession of Ron Kellogg III and delivered a stomach turning hail mary as a contribution to the Block Museusm exhibit on shitty football losses. The Wildcats' bowl hopes looked dead after two gutting losses to open the season; they have been galvanized back into life with two big wins over Penn State and Wisconsin and now they lurch about, terrorizing Big Ten West opponents who have no idea what to make of them.

Northwestern football scientists reanimated dead tissue into a
creature learning what it means to be human although it knew
innately to protest against an unjust defensive holding penalty

Some people say sequels have diminishing returns, but you will be glued to your seat with the third straight edition of "Terrifying Running Back Is Lurking in the Backfield." This week, Northwestern defenders will be looking in their rear-view mirror at what is that movement, oh that must just be from a truck that passed by, but there it is again and then oh my god it's Ameer Abdullah and his hook hand. Abdullah surely will be the focal point of whatever fiendish concoctions are cooked up by Bo Pelini and his coaching staff.

Pelini tries to sell skeptical Nebraska fans on the Black Cloak defense

Northwestern will hope to play another close, low-scoring game inspired by their suddenly fearsome defense. The offense may be hampered by a banged-up Siemian as InsideNU's Zapruder film analysis of his ankle tape reveals. The game should be a raucous Homecoming affair, with alumni coming from far and wide to take up nearly 50% of available stadium space.

But who knows what horrors may lurk again in the fourth quarter? If a football game is a spooky mansion (this is a common metaphor in high-level football analysis), then the first through third quarters are wandering around the house only occasionally startled by a creak or by a painting of a duke with shifty eyes and then the clock chimes fourth and the stairways turn into ramps and the shifty-eyed duke is made flesh into a vengeful ghost duke and Ron Kellogg III and in fact all of the Ron Kelloggs are bending the time-space continuum and scoring on hail mary passes in three decades simultaneously. If that happened, it would be bad.

PRIMAL FEAR AND NIGHT GAMES

It has been a rollercoaster season. If Northwestern football kills you on Saturday, make sure that you are guarded against Victorian grave robbers and anatomists, or better yet take preventative measures and remove your heart right now and transplant it into a rampaging monster that learns about human emotions by watching the Wildcats.

The moon will rise above Ryan Field. And it will bring with it the return of long-deceased late-night hauntings from Carlos Hyde, Denard Robinson, and Matt McGloin, that flame-headed hobgoblin of Northwestern football. But do not be afraid. But don't be afraid of the stadium's haunted past. The ghosts of past defeats don't really exist like Frankenstein monsters and werewolves and Big Ten spots in the College Football Playoff.

At halftime, Northwestern held a 17-14 edge. The defense had managed to keep all-everything running back Ameer Abdullah largely in check. Justin Jackson was slithering around defenders and smashing into people. Those gothic uniforms were pretty sharp. Northwestern was holding its own as part of a transformation into Bizarro Northwestern, relying on the defense and a power running game instead of desperately trying to outscore people. Then the second half happened and Ryan Field turned into Peter Lorre's spooky sanitarium.

Northwestern failed to score or move the ball particularly effectively. The defense eventually succumbed and Abdullah shook free. And this all happened under the watchful eye of thousands of Husker fans staining the stands red, letting their "go big red" chants echo through Evanston like they did 14 years ago on the San Antonio Riverwalk and who are I am sure all wonderful people who happen to like a different football team than I do but irritatingly and predictably took over an alleged home game and one of them threw nacho cheese on me.

Literally a Northwestern home game

Being outnumbered at home is part of the Chicago's Big Ten Football Experience and has been since time immemorial, so it's no surprise area Nebraska fans and roaming Husker vagabonds took over the stadium. But we can do better, and Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat is a Web Log devoted to ideas, innovation, synergy, thinking outside the box, achieving buy-in, shooting you an e-mail about that. Last week, I proposed some concrete ideas on twitter that I will lazily regurgitate here for filling the stands with purple:

1. Hire a nineteenth-century ward boss to fill the stands with Civil War veterans
2. Invent the machine from Multiplicty, fill the standswith thousands of Keatons (assuming the multiplicity machine only clones keatons)
3. Tupac holograms
4. Construct a fake Dyche stadium on campus, tell visiting fans to go there, conduct game in peace and quiet
5. Hire a snooty maitre'd, only admit people in purple attire, but allow guests to borrow a gigantic purple sport coat for the evening

Mr. Purdue Pete, I am going to have to ask you to remove your hard hat
One time, I had to attend a function at a London club that originated in the nineteenth
century that was all plush red carpets and muttonchop portraits and ossified
stodginess. I didn't have a jacket and was prevented from entering the establishment
by a tail-wearing doorman who looked like he had seen action at Sebastopol, but he
was gracious enough to lend me the house sportcoat which was designed for an
enormous plutocrat grown fat on the plunder of empire. I then spent the rest of the
evening absorbing elbows like a Karl Malone opponent as other guests were able to sense
that the guy in David Byrne's Stop Making Sense jacket was not important enough to
remain unjostled in a race to talk to an actual important person.

In addition, I suggest the athletic department strongly look into covering opposing fans with tarps, making Ryan Field into a speakeasy with a password like "Steve Schnur," or demolishing the stadium and replacing it with a field that has only one bleacher where I am the only spectator and can freely support the team and heckle Kirk Ferentz.

Northwestern was certainly an underdog in this game and demonstrated that its defense is not a fluke. There are five more games and three more wins to a bowl. Only Notre Dame is a powerhouse and anything is possible in the Big Ten, the conference for dreamers and mystics. But first the Wildcats need to make it through hell.

IOWA WEEK Y'ALL

Iowa is 5-2. Somehow. The Hawkeyes have not looked like world-beaters, although by Big Ten standards they are they are at the very least world insulters. To be honest, I can't tell you much about Iowa football this season. We have a finite number of minutes in our lives and no one outside of the Hawkeye state lies on his deathbed regretting that he did not watch more Iowa football. You might be disappointed that you came to a college football blog with virtually no pertinent information about football, but you probably should have closed the browser window when you read that sportcoat anecdote.

The Hawkeyes once again feature human battering ram Mark "Heisman" Weisman who will be long celebrated in Iowa City for his ability to play multiple years in the backfield with all of his ligaments. Jake Rudock seems entrenched at quarterback, despite Kirk Ferentz teasing a Colter/Siemian style quarterback rotation earlier in the month. One can imagine the staid Ferentz thinking about making that change with the same disdainful look he had on his face when he learned that the Big Ten legalized the forward pass in 2003.

The 2005 All-Big Ten football team featured many athletes who served against
the Kaiser

At this point, it seems that the Wildcats can hang with any team in the division. Both teams see this as a winnable game. And given that Iowa-Northwestern has been a surprisingly fervent rivalry in the last few years, I'm going to say throw out the record books. Throw them out and invent a hideous CatHawk trophy to hoard in victory and rule over ancient Egyptians if we ever meet them in some sort of Stargate scenario.

BYCTOM NBA PREVIEW

I am really excited for the return of professional basketball. In that spirit, please peruse the ultimate and essential guide to every possible important scenario in professional basketball in question and answer format.

How long will the new-look Cavs take to lead the Eastern Conference?

There are two ways to look at this. One is to balance the advanced statistics and likely strategies that the Cavaliers will employ since regaining the services of the greatest basketball player on earth and his superstar teammates. This is for chumps who sit around watching basketball and printing out reams of paper on dot matrix printers while wearing orange basketball statistics visors. The best way to determine anything involving the Cavaliers is to practice golfcartmancy, a method of reading the future by analyzing the patterns and attitudes of the people who patrol the James estate in golf carts, as popularized by the time reporters set up a tent city and besieged his Cleveland-area mansion until we as a species could determine where he would play basketball next season. In the wake of the media circus, James has taken more measures to protect basketball secrets by hiring additional golf cart men, decoy golf cart men who are actually people dressed like golf carts, and submersible golf carts used to patrol his property’s water and check for scuba-diving reporters should he decide to opt out of his contract at the end of this season. After meticulously observing the movements and patterns of his golf cart men, it appears that the CLEVELAND CAVALIERS will make the EASTERN CONFERENCE PLAYOFFS.

Which Laker will die under mysterious circumstances during the season?

At some point, the Los Angeles Lakers are going to take a player out of the Staples Center in a body bag. Maybe it’ll be Carlos Boozer, whose screams were never heard because he is pretty much always yelling and everyone who heard him yelling HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY ARRRRGHGHGHGHGHGH thought he was playing basketball. Maybe it will be rookie Julius Randle, who vanishes after taking more than 10 shots. Maybe it will be some other guy on the Lakers whose untimely death is notable because there was no prior evidence that played basketball professionally. Maybe it will be Nick Young, whose Kobe-related obituary is already on file with the LA Times. During the investigation, Byron Scott will refuse to use fingerprints, DNA, or any other modern techniques, arguing that if it was good enough for Allan Pinkerton, it's good enough for the Los Angeles Lakers. The murders would never be solved because they were all Speckled Banded by a mamba.

Will Derrick Rose regain his form and lead the Bulls to the Finals?

Derrick Rose will undergo an experimental Monkey's Paw procedure where he will wish for super strong knees. His knees will indeed make him unstoppable but they will keep growing stronger and larger until he finds himself gradually turning into an anthropomorphic knee. Derrick Rose's knee will lead the Bulls to the second round of the playoffs.

This is my most plausible prediction

Will the Phoenix Suns maintain their surprising rise?

The Phoenix Suns will be unstoppable this season because they added Zoran Dragic. He and Goran will walk around off the court in matching shirtless vests as Double Dragic. Mark Cuban will add Abobo from overseas to no avail.

What power plays does Jason Kidd have up his sleeve this season?

Kidd engineered a move to Milwaukee after attempting to seize control of player personnel from Billy King in Brooklyn. Kidd had a tumultuous first year as head coach just a year after the end of his playing career. He grew a comic book villain beard, oversaw a disappointing first half, orchestrated the first intentional beverage-related timeout, led the Nets to the second round of the playoffs, then feuded with his general manager, attempted to invade Silesia, invented the #trader hashtag, poisoned the Brooklyn Knight's jousting horse, and absconded to Milwaukee in the dead of night after vanishing from a Nets boardroom with a puff of smoke. Once there, he made noises about letting the seven-foot Giannis Antetokounmpo run the point. Jason Kidd may be capable of anything. This season, he plans to coach with a goblet of wine in hand for emergency timeout situations, keep a bugout bag in his office, and deploy decoy Bango the Bucks spread throughout the arena to gather intelligence.

One has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because
they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot;
therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one
does not stand in fear of revenge

Where is Drew Gooden playing?

Drew Gooden must play for every NBA team, and BYCTOM is a clearing house for Gooden movement. Sadly, the Washington Wizards have retained his services for another season, but we can only hope he makes it to at least one other team by the end of the season.

The NBA is only 33.3% Goodened. We can do better.

PIZZA CITY CALLS

Northwestern has two remaining home games, and both are winnable. The 'Cats face a struggling Michigan team hellbent on defying road fields with stakes and climax with the possible ultimate showdown with Beck Man. The possibly soon-to-be-erstwhile Illini coach may have helped salvage his job with a stunning win over West leader Minneosta. The Illinois victory has thrown the West into further chaos. Enjoy the last week of October because every football move must be evaluated not only in terms of bowl implications, but Hat consequences.

Well, shit.

If you, like me, measure the relative success of Northwestern seasons by a berth in a much-ridiculed and ignored bowl game, then the season is likely over. If you enjoy college football as a living museum art piece dedicated to exploring every possible way to lose, then you may have this Northwestern football season framed and hanging on your wall in violation of everything you think you know about the physical laws of the universe.

Two weeks ago, the Wildcats were coming off two unexpected Big Ten wins and a competitive half against Nebraska. They also had a close loss against Big Ten West powerhouse Minnesota that they could have won except it had been a couple of weeks so fans needed to be subjected to a Northwestern Ending. It seemed like Wildcat football would center on defense and Justin Jackson barreling into people. And then Northwestern went into Iowa City. I've prepared an elaborate video filled with high-level football strategy talk to summarize every element of the Iowa game.
a
Gott dame it

After the Iowa stomping, Northwestern still clung to hopes of a bowl game with three games against a reeling Michigan team, Purdue, and the Tim Beckman's Hat Apocalypse as well as a tough road matchup with Notre Dame. The 'Cats entered last week with everything left to play for: a crappy bowl game, a perfect Hat record against Illinois in the Greatest Rivalry in the History of College Football, and the remote possibility of knocking Notre Dame out of the playoff hunt and ruining their season. Even though Northwestern had an up-and-down season, those three goals are pretty much the zenith of the Northwestern football experience.

LOOK ON OUR FOOTBALL, NON BIG-TEN PEOPLE, AND DESPAIR

Years from now, when millions of Americans that eagerly follow collegiate water polo or ultimate frisbee or competitive eating, someone will reflect on what happened to kill college football. They'll point to the usual suspects: concerns about the long-term health consequences of the sport, the unsustainable avarice of the NCAA and its member universities, a rash of football-related tree poisonings, but most likely they'll point to November 8th, 2014 when Northwestern and Michigan reached the apotheosis of Big Ten-related football ineptitude. Both teams threw out their play books and replaced them with animated gifs of stuntmen in fire suits flailing around. For most of the game, both teams treated the endzone like Moses treated the Promised Land.

The Apotheosis of Big Ten football (click for full size)

So when Northwestern improbably marched down the field and somehow managed to crack through the invisible forcefield surrounding the Ryan Field endzones, it is not surprising that Pat Fitzgerald decided that the moment was ripe for a Pat Fitzgerald Gutsy Moment. It's not like going into overtime had worked that well against Michigan last year. Unfortunately, the coaches decided to send Trevor Siemian on an ill-advised one-man Charge of the Light Brigade into the entire Michigan defense and then Siemian fell down.

Two more yards, two more yards,
Two more yards onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the one quarterback.
“Forward, the Siemian!
Charge for the deuce!” Fitz said.
Into the valley of Death
He sort of fell on his butt.

Miserable Michigan faced aghast Northwestern in the So It's Come To This Bowl. Northwestern still hasn't come down from the highs of winning a Gator Bowl and getting enough hype to host ESPN College Gameday. Since then, the 'Cats have turned into a well-funded art installation dedicated to losing football games in increasingly bizarre and unfathomable situations-- the Siemian slip is not even the most ridiculous way that Northwestern has lost to Michigan in the past two seasons.

Michigan, meanwhile, is having less of a bad season than an existential crisis. Michigan is not just Big Ten bad, where a team beats up on other lumbering Big Ten teams enough to get ritually sacrificed in lopsided bowl game, it is regular football team bad. And that is spectacular.

College football's spectacle depends on inequality: on titanic clashes between powerhouse teams and on the field-rushing jubilation from when one one of those mortal teams manages to beat them. And while previous success tends to replenish teams into perpetual juggernauts, the landscape underneath them shifts tectonically; teams start losing recruits, teams hire bad coaches, teams join the Big Ten. The descent of a traditional powerhouse program into another mediocre team scrapping their way into the galleryfurniture.com bowl like the rest of us is one of the most enjoyable aspects of college football.

Brady Hoke, along with recently-departed Athletic Director Dave Brandon has drawn the ire
of the Michigan faithful. Currently, a google's image search for Hoke has an entire category
of pictures under the heading "Fred Flintstone."

Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of Michigan Men, it's unlikely the program will remain in its dormant state forever. I'd be surprised if Michigan didn't return to the Big Ten title picture sooner rather than later, although it remains to be seen if a good Big Ten team will have any relevance to the national championship picture as the conference plods itself into Rotel oblivion. In the meantime, Michigan fans can enjoy baselessly speculating about NFL head coaches, install the standard creepy flight-tracking software, and start reinforcing the railroad pump cart they'll use to run Brady Hoke out of town as he claps forlornly.

THE DAMNED DOME

Nineteen years ago, an unheralded Northwestern team marched into Notre Dame stadium and walked out with a football program. There's no doubt that the 1995 victory was the most significant in Northwestern's modern history. Northwestern and Notre Dame have not played football since. During the interval, Northwestern won three Big Ten Championships and one bowl game. Notre Dame plummeted into football mediocrity before storming back into a BCS championship game under Brian Kelly. Modems stopped screeching at people. A president was impeached but not convicted. Humanity landed a probe on a comet. The Big Ten expanded to 14 teams. Notre Dame kind of joined the ACC much like how the Irish Free State was kind of in the Commonwealth during the Éamon de Valera era.

Éamon de Valera's feuds with the British government over
land annuity payments and references to the King in the
Oath of Office led to a devastating mutual boycott. This
Punch cartoon lampoons his attempts to move the Irish
Free State closer to a republic while remaining in the
Commonwealth. In reality, both de Valera and British
government officials spent the 1930s complaining about each
other undermining the Commonwealth while de Valera refused
to leave and the British government refused to kick the Irish Free
State out. In the end, both parties maintained an uneasy
membership by using the well-worn "no one knows what the
hell the Commonwealth is or does" defense

In 1995, Northwestern came into South Bend in a Trojan Horse containing a Big Ten champion. No one expected anything from the 'Cats. According to Teddy Greenstein's oral history of the game (unfortunately locked behind the Tribune's paywall), Gary Barnett does not think Irish coach Lou Holz watched any film of NU quarterback Steve Schnur. Barnett also suggests that Holz did not even know who he was. This year, Northwestern's team resembles a trojan horse with no one inside, except maybe Pat Fitzgerald who has been living in it for nearly twenty years pumping his fists.

It's a shame that Arizona State already robbed the Wildcats of the most important motivation for a win: to knock Notre Dame out of the playoff picture, destroy its season, and festively square dance across the season's ashes. Congratulations to the Sun Devils for living the dream. Instead, Northwestern will be scrapping for its bowl life as a Notre Dame win will knock them out of the postseason for a second consecutive year.

If they are to have any shot at an upset, Northwestern needs to find a way to score points. The Wildcats score fewer points per game than almost any other team in the country. Last week, Fitzgerald and Mick McCall experimented with a two-quarterback system by using Matt Alviti to run the option. I'm all for that, believing strongly in the old Northwestern chestnut "if you have one quarterback, then you have not enough quarterbacks" and a return to the is the running quarterback going to pass oh wait you think he's going to pass but really he's going to run just kidding here's a third quarterback who's playing wide receiver and now the offensive coordinator is wearing a cape plays from the Kain Colter era. That strategy was not particularly effective (Alviti rushed 3 times for -2 yards), so we'll see if the coaching staff can think of any other wrinkles to move the ball other than giving it to Justin Jackson or strong rhetoric to convince the Irish that they have achieved first downs.

HAT COUTURE

Should Northwestern falter, they'll be down to one season goal, but it's the most important one of all: The Hat. With two seasons filled with avant-garde losses and likely two seasons spent in a bowlless wilderness, only reasonable goal for Northwestern fans is hat-based monomania. I hope Northwestern can keep its nineteen-year unbeaten streak going against Notre Dame and somehow claw its way to the Detroit Lions Pizza City Bowl. But Northwestern cannot under any circumstances lose possession of The Hat. It is the only thing keeping us going through this season.

It's Hat Season. The Beck Man is coming. He's coming to your town. He's coming for a Hat.

Also, the basketball team has a guy on it named "Vic Law," which is an incredible basketball name.

Turn up the Coolio, put up your Jud Buechler posters, and hang with Mr. Cooper. Northwestern has gone back into South Bend and improbably beaten the Notre Dame Fighting Irish nineteen years after their last trip to Notre Dame Stadium convinced America that Northwestern football existed. And they did so with a game only marginally more ridiculous than Northwestern's losses in the past two seasons, a game that unfolded like a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine designed to ruin Notre Dame football. Look, I know anyone who has gone far enough down the Northwestern football rabbit hole to actually be reading this blog has probably watched the game and read all the articles and produced a 1920s silent film reel about it, but I can't think of anything more pleasurable than reviewing the stupefying chain of events that led to Northwestern victory.

Excerpt from silent film The Hiphooraysman.
The gif comes from @NUHighlights's spectacular collection of Fitzgifs, including one where
Fitz temporarily vanishes from the Coaches' Review graphic box because he is reacting like a muppet

1. A botched hold on an extra points allows Nick VanHoose to return the ball some 98 yards for a two-point conversion. You are not allowed to do this in the National Football League because only the kicking team can score National Football Points on a point-after attempt as mandated by the NFL's Committee of Guys With Folded Arms Slowly Shaking Their Heads.

2. A football bounces off an iconic Notre Dame Golden Helmet into the waiting arms of Anthony Walker for a rare Domeception.

3. The 2014 Northwestern Wildcats score multiple touchdowns in the same game.

3.Up 40-29, Notre Dame Head Coach Brian Kelly decides to go for two, even though a PAT would force the Wildcats to score two touchdowns instead of a touchdown, two-point conversion, and field goal because it's called playing the percentages and it's what smart managers do to win ballgames.

"More points! More points!" screams Kelly, demanding the Irish go for two in the
manner of a reprobate Roman Emperor

4. Northwestern scores a touchdown and converts for its 37th point.

5.With 96 seconds remaining in the game and Northwestern out of timeouts the Fighting Irish have the ball. Virtually any football action here such as running, passing, falling down, performing an elaborately choreographed Busby Berkeley dance number, snapping the ball and yelling I DECLARE A FOOTBALL, would have virtually ended the game. Instead, the running back fumbled the ball right back to Trevor Siemian and the Wildcat offense.

6. Northwestern drives down the damn field.

7. Kicker Jack Mitchell (MITCHELL!), who did not hit a field goal longer than 29 yards all season, straight up stone colds a 41-yarder to send it to OT. Then, after a Notre Dame miss in overtime, he blasts a 45-yarder to just end Notre Dame.

After enduring a two-year supply of fourth-quarter meltdowns, Fourth and Shorts, Ron Kelloggings, kicker-slidings, overtime debacles, Husky tauntings, two point conversion slips, and the entire case history of Universe v. Northwestern Football, it culminated in a game where everything short of the Red Sea parted for the Wildcats. And they did it to Notre Dame in South Bend on the Notre Dame Television Station in front of thousands of Notre Dame fans and in front of you and me and America.

THIS IS NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL

Northwestern football has been kind of bumming fans out lately. No one expects the Wildcats to be a football juggernaut-- in fact Northwestern football had been defined by its decades-long stretch as a reverse-juggernaut that was better than any other team in this nation at getting trampled upon. But the improbable way the Wildcats have lost football games has given fans the same kind of dour combination of disbelief and resignation that John McClane has in the first 25 minutes of any Die Hard movie when he learns he's at the center of another plot concocted by an as-yet undiscovered Gruber Brother.

The advent of the playoff system (and its inevitable future expansion) and the Embrace Debate culture that permeates college football's nonsensical championship raises questions about the relevance of the rest of the teams. What do you root for when your team is irrelevant to the playoff picture? Why does the Big Ten bother to play football?

"Because it's there." George Mallory and this guy

Wildcat football is not likely to figure in the playoff most years. They are not likely to contend for conference championships, although it's far from impossible in the Big Ten West: Division of Dreams. But Northwestern, like 100 other teams in the FBS can have successful seasons. There's the eternal quest for six wins and a golden ticket to one of dozens of Pizza City Bowls. There's the Hat, the symbol of victory in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry. And there is the possibility to just absolutely brutalize some other team's hopes and dreams.

This is the essence of Northwestern football. If you cannot be a football powerhouse forever stressing about strength of schedule, transitive properties, shadowy playoff committees, and all of the other nonsense that goes into disguising the essentially arbitrary process that determines the national championship, you might as well be a team that infuriates other teams by beating them.

Northwestern will beat a ranked team. That team's fans will respond with apoplectic calls to fire their coach, their athletic director, their mascot, their band director, their chair in zoology. They will write angry things on the internet about how the situation is unacceptable, despite the fact that the word unacceptable should only be by used be people like international observers monitoring elections in that fictional country ruled by Dr. Doom. They will fail to acknowledge the existence of Northwestern except as a force to expose their team's flaws, like the Wildcats are an unexplained blight or pestilence. No one ever gives credit to the sun for being really clutch at melting Icarus's wings.

College football has organized and commodified a process of demolishing expectations and crushing hope. We know that all too well-- both seasons since 2000 that Northwestern entered with a preseason rankings ended as four- and five-win debacles. I don't know how fans of powerhouse teams do that every year. It does not seem fun to consider nine-win seasons and bowl victories as catastrophes or get genuinely upset when the team does not win by enough points. It's great when Northwestern can rack up victories and contend for Big Ten Championships. I sincerely believe the 'Cats will make it back to Pasadena at some point even as I've made peace with the fact that I will die without seeing the Cubs play in a World Series and all of their young talent is an elaborate cosmic taunt. But, in those leaner years, Northwestern will remain an agent of chaos, spreading football discord and trampling upon the hopes of other fans, and chaos wins in college football more than anything.

HAVING SAID THAT, LET'S HAVE UNREASONABLE BOWL EXPECTATIONS

The Notre Dame victory did more than satisfyingly infuriate Notre Dame people. It also kept bowl hopes alive for Northwestern. Should the Wildcats win out against Purdue and Illinois, they are going to Detroit or Dallas or the back room of a chicken slaughtering facility. Neither team opponent is a world-beater, and Northwestern may well be favored in both.

The Wildcats are coming off their best offensive performance of the season. The 40 points they scored in regulation is the exact number of points they scored in their last three games. Trevor Siemian threw for 284 yards, but could have had more if receivers could have come down with some few well-thrown bombs that bounced off their hands. He also ran for 32 yards and a touchdown, although he probably could have moonwalked into the endzone. Justin Jackson has already rushed for 910 yards despite not beginning the season as a starter. Jackson's not overwhelmingly big or blindingly fast-- instead, he has an innate sense that allows him to find cracks in the line and an apparent disdain for opposing tacklers that are forced to leave messages for him about tackling because he is too busy running the ball.

A late tackle attempt

The biggest story of the Notre Dame game was Jack Mitchell. HEY DID YOU KNOW JACK MITCHELL IS A BASEBALL PLAYER? IT IS TRUE, HE LITERALLY PLAYS TWO SPORTS. THAT'S MORE THAN ONE SPORT, DOUG. I don't know what it is about multi-sport athletes that makes announcers lose their fucking minds with dumb, unfunny references to batting averages and walk-offs and wRC+, but we all lived through the Greg Paulus Imbroglio and as happy as I am for Mitchell and the rest of the 'Cats, I would not wish that on any fan base, even Notre Dame.

I don't know anything about Purdue football. They have three wins this season and the worst record in the Big Ten (powerhouse Northwestern boasts four wins). Darrell Hazell, who took over from Danny Hope last year, inherited a program that had fallen far from its heights as a reliable generator of NFL quarterbacks including Drew Brees, The Pride of Buffalo Kyle Orton, and Curtis Painter. The Boilermakers' quarterback is a person named Austin Appleby. It's been a grim year in West Lafeyette and probably all other Lafeyettes.

Hazell may be forced to take extreme action to rally his
Boilermakers

Purdue is the worst team in the Big Ten this season. But there's no point in assuming anything with this Northwestern team. Purdue will see the 'Cats as a potential win, the Wildcats are coming off an emotional victory over yet another ranked opponent, and I bet Austin Appleby is really scrappy. Perhaps the Notre Dame victory has managed to reverse the demonic curse that has befallen Northwestern since the Ohio State game last year. Perhaps Northwestern players will build on the win. Perhaps nothing has changed at all and this game will end with Purdue temporarily winning a court injunction to suspend the out of bounds rules on the final play and will lateral the ball around the stadium and parking lots and on hastily constructed Mad Max dune buggies that will allow them to lose the Northwestern defense somewhere around the Tippecanoe battle site and then wind their way back down to score a secret touchdown in the dead of night.

But the even larger implications surround the Apocalyptic Northwestern-Illinois Showdown looming in Evanston on November 29. I'm turning my back on the Greatest Rivalry in the History of American Quasi-Amateur Sports this weekend to root full bore for the Beck Men to beat Penn State. Both NU and Illinois have four wins. If Northwestern manages to win against Purdue and the Illini beat Penn State, the teams will be playing for more than a Hat. The last, shittiest, Big Ten bowl berth will be at stake.

The Battle for the Sixth Win would be the greatest Illinois-Northwestern game of all time. The two teams have only played once with bowl status on the line as far as I can tell: in 2008, the Wildcats knocked Ron Zook's Illini out of bowl eligibility. This could be potentially the first knockdown bowl berth death bowl ever played, and the fact that it would be for a forgotten place in some far-flung nonsense bowl makes it the greatest possible game between these two hallowed squads. Plus, the winner gets the damn Hat and the undisputed crown as the second-best football team in the state of Illinois.

WILDCAT FOOTBALL

Notre Dame football looms over Chicago like the ominous shadow of a rubber monster suit over a scale model of Tokyo. It is inescapable. Despite sitting nearly 100 miles away and in another state, Chicago's a Notre Dame town only because of some weird quirks like the Fighting Irish dominating college football for the vast majority of its existence. Meanwhile, only a few miles up the road, Northwestern toils in front of braying Nebraska fans, tarps, and no one, even in winning seasons. The last win was the beginning of a great Northwestern team announcing its presence; this was a greater upset as the sputtering 'Cats regained their mojo.

Two wins for bowl, one win for Hat, and zero wins left for chaos to reign.

Last Saturday, the 'Cats opened the season at Ryan Field by hosting out-of-conference nemesis Syracuse. The 'Cats hoped to improve on their first game with the comforts of home: a reasonable time slot instead of playing at some ridiculous midnight moon time, stands full of Wildcat partisans, and an inspiring tarp that stood in for empty seats that opposing teams could look towards and imagine thousands of angry fist claws shouting at them on third down, theoretically.

Early speculation remains that the tarp will be deployed at a future Big Ten game--
imagine the opposing team feeling comfortable down by the north endzone and
prepared to go about its business when the tarp is suddenly lifted to reveal a secret
cache of Northwestern fans in a common football tactic known as the "Trojan Tarp"
(Photo from nusports.com)

Northwestern and Syracuse have played enough over the past few years to create something of a rivalry. Some Syracuse fans have complained about the officiating in the last game that allowed Northwestern's dramatic comeback; I will never forgive Greg Paulus for his excellent play in a win against Northwestern, and I'm disappointed that Fitz never returned the favor by putting in Juice Thompson or Luka Mirkovic in for a play to show them what it's like and also to accrue a never-used NCAA infraction for attempting to play graduated basketball players in a football game because of spite.

WHAT THE HELL KIND OF WIN WAS THAT? I WANT MY MONEY BACK

I think as Northwestern fans, we can all be greatly disappointed by the kind of football played by Northwestern the past weekend. Kain Colter returned to combine with Trevor Siemian into an unstoppable bomb-throwing, scrambling, optioning, quarterbacking monster that I will be referring to as The Colterian.

As the old football adage says: if you have two quarterbacks you
have no quarterbacks unless they are melded into a two-headed
multi-limbed mutant capable of optioning to itself and coming
up with the world's most elaborate celebratory handshake

The high-powered offense and an opportunistic defense that snagged another four interceptions allowed the 'Cats to leap out to a 34-7 lead at the half. I don't know about you, but I watch Northwestern for the adrenaline after last year's Four Quarters of Terror campaign, not to watch them slice up a defense, to watch Dan Vitale and Treyvon Green become stars, and to see the spread offense wreak havoc with an arsenal of receivers who are all named Jones. There weren't even accusations of Wacky Races skulduggery to have opinions about and no coaches calling the team a disgrace to the concept of college football which is doubly insulting because the NCAA exists and sets a pretty high standard of being an insult to college football.

I hope the Northwestern football establishment realizes the disappointment of fans who expect to spend the duration of games strapped into their recliners as the Wildcat defense is expected to perform a Reverse Teen Wolf and return to a feeble teenage Michael J. Fox status that allows the other team to start inexplicably executing hail mary passes and Roundtree Catches. What kind of lunatic who is invested in a college football team wants to see them playing extraordinarily well against an ACC team because of an incredibly entertaining offense that dominates even with Venric Mark out? I don't ask much from Northwestern football other than a vision of oblivion in the last five minutes of the fourth quarter where I enter an otherworldly plane, an out-of-body experience that is happening because I'm worried that the football team I like might lose.

BRONCO BUSTING

This week, Northwestern will play Western Michigan. This was not supposed to happen. It came about because of the Assassination of the Northwestern-Vandebilt Rivalry by the Coward James Franklin. As you may recall, and given that you are reading like the eighth-most trafficked Northwestern football blog on the internet I'm guessing that you do, Vanderbilt canceled its 2013 and 2014 series against the Wildcats with a variety of low-tech notification methods including a telegraph, a passenger pigeon, a Soviet-era analogue hotline, and a disastrous attempt to send a gorilla-gram with an actual gorilla that just ended in a tragic Nashville-area gorilla rampage presumably because Northwestern kept beating them and James Franklin and the Vanderbilt Athletic Department are yellower-bellied than the Yella Fella Yellawood pitchman who is apparently a powerful football booster at Auburn University.

No, thank you, I prefer not to be Coltered, says a
terrified James Franklin. I should probably add here
that I have no idea if Vandy dropped the series because
they wanted an easier schedule, but I took a vow long
ago that if I could vaguely accuse an opposing athletic
program of ducking Northwestern I would react the
same way that Clubber Lang would because I train
alone, I blog alone, and I tweet "shut up old man" at
any geriatric Vanderbilt supporters I can identify
in cyberspace

Western Michigan is a program in transition. They are led by 32-year-old first-year head coach P.J. Fleck, who has the square-jawed enthusiasm of a Fitz but has decided that he is obsessed with overwrought boat-paddling metaphors.

Fleck traces the influence of his motivational techniques to Hagar the Horrible

The Broncos have had a rough season so far. Last week, they were upset by FCS Nicholls State in the Fortress Waldo Stadium (which is perhaps the platonic ideal for a MAC stadium name, with the possible exception of Kelly-Shorts-- much like the Great Fillmore/Arthur Muttonchop Debate, I believe that is best left to the taste of the reader). Northwestern is expected to prevail here against an inexperienced team whose best days are ahead of it.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume the 'Cats are taking this lightly. Pat Fitzgerald is more committed to living one game at a time than Vin Diesel is to living one quarter-mile at a time and expressing himself through tank top. Fitz doesn't care about what happens beyond that; if a government agency were to deploy to his house and tell him that in two weeks, a group of malevolent aliens will invade the Earth and the only way to stop them is by commandeering a spacecraft that can be piloted by high-intensity fist pumps and that Fitz was the only one who could stop the imminent destruction of the planet, I'm fairly sure he would send them away because he wants to take another look at that Western Michigan bunch formation.

HAT UPDATE

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the Illini had a fairly convincing victory against a Cincinnati team that had previously laid waste to Purdue University. This week, they take on a ranked Washington team in Soldier Field. According to ESPN's Big Ten Blog, "Illinois athletic director Mike Thomas said back in 2011 that he hoped the university would become the 'king of Chicago,'" in the escalating War to Determine Chicago's Big Ten Team. Jim Phillips then escalated the situation by dressing in regal purple robes in front of a map of the Demesne Kingdom of of Chicagoland with sketches of dragons in Missouri and giants near Peoria. The desperate attempt of Northwestern and Illinois to capture the Chicago market has been one of the most dramatic turf wars in the Big Ten as they vie against each other and the approximately 99% of Chicagoans who root for the Bears and whatever college they went to.

Meanwhile, Tim Beckman and new offensive coordinator Bill Cubit are planning on extricating themselves from the Big Ten cellar this season. A win against Washington would not only be a major step in righting the program and establishing the Beck Man Era in Champaign, it would also be a warning shot fired across the bow of Northwestern, a notice that the Beck Men are coming for The Hat. As we speak, Beckman is doing pull-ups in a dimly-lit corner of the Illini football complex and had #HAT tattooed across both of his sets of knuckles.

A CLOOTS BY ANY OTHER NAME

"However, when the revolution broke out, he changed his name to Anacharsis Cloots and set himself up as a spokesman for the human race."

That is a pretty good sentence, and it is by Hugh Gough in an essay about the French Revolution's effect on Europe (in his edited volume Ireland and the French Revolution). He is referring, of course, to the Baron de Cloots, a Dutch-Prussian nobleman who got caught up in the revolutionary fervor of 1789 as a way to promote his ideas about a broader revolutionary world state. Cloots was a close relative of Cornelius De Pauw, a French philosopher who pushed the idea that the New World degenerated all men and beasts who arrive there. Americans took umbrage to this. Even ideological enemies Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could agree that they did not live in an ecological backwater that stunted growth and had cruddy, inferior wildlife. Jefferson and Madison exchanged notes on weasel measurements in order to counter claims of degeneracy; Jefferson attempted to counter the claims of the Comte de Buffon, the leading degeneracy advocate, with a process that could best be described as "take a look at this moose-- who is degenerate now, Buffon?"

Buffon scoffs at the paltry size of American
weasels

Cloots got too wrapped up in the Revolution for his own good. As the Terror folded back on itself, Cloots was unable to see the Revolution carried into universal human principle. On the other hand, he left a legacy of inspiring historians to craft spectacular sentences, such as this one by William Doyle in the Oxford History of the French Revolution:

"To substantiate the charge of a foreign plot, a clutch of colorful aliens perished with them too, including Clootz, who bade farewell to his beloved human race in front of the biggest crowd ever to surround the guillotine."

WEEK 3 IS HERE, EVERYONE

Western Michigan may not be the most daunting opponent on the schedule, but the Broncos have nothing to lose in Evanston. Fitzgerald will attempt to guide his team to another rejection of Northwestern football as we know it by winning without trying to kill his fans and without accusations of intrigue. And then he will take the title of Anacharsis Fitz, Spokesman For All Humanity when he declares "Something something, Our Young Men, Winning, Go 'Cats."

Fistpump.

It is here.

Which team will qualify for a virtually non-existent bowl game in Detroit or somewhere spiritually aligned with the concept of a Detroit bowl game ? Which team can persevere in the face of intense media scrutiny? Which team has what it takes to be the second-best team in the state? Which team has a better back-up quarterback? Who's cuisine will reign supreme? Who wants The Hat, the universally-recognized symbol of the greatest rivalry in the history of college football?

Hat

It's Hat Saturday. Haturday. Win or go home. The most important game between Northwestern and Illinois in the history of the rivalry and it's to punch a golden ticket to a Siberian bowl wasteland or be forever cast into the dustbin of forgotten teams that don't play in bowls even though the difference between playing in a crappy bowl game or not playing in one is for all intents and purposes meaningless. This game is no less than the climax of the Tim Beckman era, and a win or die showdown for watered-down, grade-inflation bowl eligibility; it is the platonic ideal of a Land of Lincoln game. This game could be a glorious continuation of Tim Beckman-related Hat Invincibility or it could go down as one of the most ignominious defeats in Northwestern history which includes losses via multiple onside kick returns, allowing the greatest comeback in the history of college football, losing to an FCS opponent at home, losing 34 consecutive games as students through the goal posts in Lake Michigan in mock triumph, and failing to defeat Brady Hoke.

DO BECK MEN DREAM OF ELECTRIC HATS

Tim Beckman is one of the best things to happen to Northwestern football. Illinois and Northwestern shared Big Ten Cellar-Dweller Solidarity, occasionally rising to the top of the conference and serving as a welcome breath of fresh air against the ceaseless and boring domination by the Ohio States and Michigans. Illinois's football past is only slightly less bleak than Northwestern's. I can't sum up the Illinois football experience better than the lede from this article: "Illinois senior football players were asked to name their favorite memory during their time in the program for the team's website. For most of the 18, the best memory was the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl."

The rivalry game, first for the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk and then vastly superior Hat, was a good way to end the season and usually seen as winnable. Then Tim Beckman came to down, guns blazing, staring down piano players.

Beckman made no secret of what he wanted: state pride and its currency: Hats. His introductory press conference was rife with references to destroying purple objects, referring to Northwestern as "that school up north," putting up that anti-Northwestern sign in the locker room, and probably getting angry at Kansas State and sending hate mail to the purple teletubby for what the producers of the that show would see as novel and unexpected reasons. If you for whatever reason have read more than one entry of this blog, you've noticed that I think the War on Northwestern is an unending wellspring of hilarity.

Try to think of something funnier than this

But, in some ways, Tim Beckman has won. Beckman, and the conversion of the trophy into a coveted Hat, has made the Illinois game a must-win. It's more than just a win against an in-state rival (Beckman, who makes pronouncements with the understated, soft-spoken cadence of a desperate Depression-era carnival barker, declared this the "state championship," apparently oblivious to the existence of Northern Illinois). The cosmic laws of the universe simply cannot allow a person who uses all of the ridiculous flopsweat-addled manufactured rivalry tricks on what is historically the worst program in the history of college football to prevail in that game. Instead, Beckman functions best as a frustrated foil; Beck Man the Saturday morning cartoon villain whose plots are forever frustrated by his own incompetence.

If Tim Beckman had turned the Illini into a football juggernaut, his goofy Northwestern-baiting would be embraced as part of his motivational tactics. But his Illini have not exactly set the world on fire. Beckman has won a total of four Big Ten games since taking over in 2012. His tenure has been marked by weird incidents on and off the field, including a public censure by the NCAA for chewing tobacco on the sideline, acquiring sideline interference penalties including the one linked above where he's simultaneously flagged and run over by a referee, and criticism for attempting to poach Penn State players seconds after sanctions came down. I don't blame him for any of those things; there's no room for dignity in coaching college football and Beckman should be able to use whatever sideline substances he wants whether it's chaw or the chemicals that are constantly pumped into Ed Orgeron on gameday to prevent him from removing his shirt. But it would also be fair to say that his position at Illinois is under siege, and he may well be coaching for his job on Saturday.

GET ON UP FOR THE HAT GAME YOU CHUMPS

What else can we say? It's the Hat Game. Northwestern is carrying a modest two-game win streak including a decisive 38-14 victory over a train accident Purdue team that was never really in doubt. But the Wildcats suffered a massive blow on offense when Trevor Siemian injured his knee. That means that the already-struggling Northwestern offense will turn to big-armed backup Zack Oliver. Oliver looked good to close out the game. It would not be surprising to see the 'Cats use their other quarterback in Alviti Packages because they sound like the Macguffin at the center of a heist movie.

Slide the briefcase across the floor. Stay there. I need to make a call. If I don't call
by precisely 2:30, we'll destroy the Alviti Packages. You're not getting anything
until my boss confirms he has the Colter Options

The Illini may also use their backup at quarterback. Beckman replaced a rusty Wes Lunt with Riley O'Toole in their win against Penn State. Northwestern fans may remember O'Toole from his cameo in the 2012 game, when he relieved Nathan Scheelaase in a Northwestern romp. Lunt may also play. Maybe the teams will switch quarterbacks at halftime just to mix things up.

The game will match one of the country's least productive offenses (playing with up to two quarterbacks, neither of which has ever started a game) against one of the worst defenses. Northwestern plays defense better than anything the Illini do and are at home, albeit badly outnumbered by Illinois fans. The 'Cats have beaten Wisconsin and Notre Dame while the Illini have felled mighty Minnesota.

Don't write off the Illini. This game is for The Hat. It is for a bowl. It is for Tim Beckman's job, for continued irritation at the whole Chicago's Big Ten team thing, for a tiny crack of dawn in the darkness that has shrouded the Illinois football program since the Fall of the Zook Empire, and I expect the Illini to come out like maniacs to let that Hat radiate happiness around Champaign in the dismal winter months to come in The Greatest Rivalry in All of College Football.

COME OUT THIS SATURDAY. It is the Hat Game. It is going to be pleasant outside. Are you prepared to sit idly by and ignore what will certainly be the hattest hat game of the century with a trip to Detroit at stake when you and your loved ones can be part of a braying purple throng ready to sweep Beck Man and the Illini down I-57, hatless and bowl-less, in the last opportunity to do so at Ryan Field this season, and with the only socially acceptable venue for yelling at college students who are running into each other for our amusement? Don't let the Illini enact a Glorious Revolution and turn Ryan Field into a House of Orange.

Beckman's hatred for Northwestern is so intense, I
can see him taking over another team and
attempting to maneuver them into the Big Ten and
use their resources to try to crush the Wildcats, like
William III attempted to do against the Sun King,
Louis XIV

HATURDAYS OF THUNDER

This is the greatest Hat Game in history. A bowl is on the line in a win or go home thunderdome. We might not have Tim Beckman to kick around anymore. No one wants to see Beckman ever hold a Hat in triumph; the thought is sickening, appalling, disgusting. At the same time, I want to see more on the line in this game. Beckman's ridiculous, tone-deaf, absurd rivalry campaign has made this game relevant again and not even entirely ironically. I hope he sticks around for many more Hats to come and for this game to be not about Detroit or whatever shitty bowl game the bowl gods conjure up but one day about Indianapolis or Pasadena.

Even in a sport where wins and losses can swing the tenor of an entire season, this has been one of the most bizarre Northwestern seasons I can remember. It featured at least three or four moments when all seemed lost. It featured a heinous blowout at the hands of the hated Hawkeyes and a football game against Michigan so terrible that it was not played so much as perpetrated. It continued the inexplicable and frustrating Northwesternings from last season, but also contained one of my favorite Northwestern games ever played when every single break Northwestern missed over the past two years came to their way in the service of ruining Notre Dame's day. And it culminated in a knock-down drag-out fight to the death for a Hat, a crappy bowl game, and all that is worth rooting for in college football.

A week after routing Syracuse, the Western Michigan Broncos rowed into Ryan Field and gave the 'Cats a first-quarter scare. The offense stagnated and the defense yielded large chunks of yards to a quarterback operating under the pseudonym "Tyler Van Tubbergen." Fitz pumped his fists to little avail. Automatic kick machine Jeff Budzien missed a 42-yarder. The Broncos went up 3-0. The 'Cats finally scored a touchdown after about 17 grueling minutes. On the next play, Van Tubbergen found a wide-open receiver streaking down the field for a 75-yard touchdown. Charlton Heston sunk to his knees in front of the Statue of Liberty. Mighty Casey took his second strike, looking. Edvard Munch was hired to paint literally every Northwestern fan at the game. Things looked grim.

Northwestern fans react to a 10-7 Western Michigan lead

The scare, however, was temporary, and the 'Cats rallied behind Treyvon Green to run up a 24-10 lead at the half. Green rushed for 158 yards while Kolter added 106 on the ground. Ibraheim Campbell intercepted another pass, making that 5 straight games dating back to last season. Campbell has grabbed picks off of tip drills, on overthrown passes, by jumping routes, and through the long con known as the "The Viscount's Rake" which involves hiring a confidant to serve as an opposing team's offensive coordinator who designs plays specifically to go in Campbell's direction and then, in the dead of night, uses counterfeit university documents to rename opposing sports facilities after a fake donor so they have to play their basketball games at the "Ernest P. Worrell Family Arena." In the summer, Campbell will intern with a consortium of suave international jewel thieves.

In the end, the 'Cats were too much for P.J. Fleck's squad. The game was never in doubt in the second half, and it's possible that the 'Cats just came out flat in a bad first half that will henceforth be known as the "Van Tubbergen Mutiny." Fitz prefers not to dwell. Ever since that horrible football laboratory explosion, he spends his time after games in torn clothes, wandering around Sheridan Road, unable to remember anything about the game except for the fact that he has an undefeated Maine squad coming to Evanston on Saturday.

MAINE EVENT

Maine is Northwestern's only FCS opponent. The Black Bears are 3-0, including a win against an FBS opponent. Granted, that team, UMass, is in its second year in the FBS and had come off an opener where massive Wisconsin linemen sat on them for 60 minutes.

UMass plays at Vanderbilt this week, and I plan to go to the game wearing purple
boxing trunks and scream I WANT VANDERBILT! DO YOU HEAR ME OLD MAN?
I DON'T CARE IF THESE CLUBBER LANG REFERENCES ARE GETTING STALE
AND REDUNDANT

Regardless of their record, Northwestern should beat Maine handily. But games against the FCS this season are hardly gimmees. In Week 1, four FCS schools scored upsets, including season-derailing victories by North Dakota State over Kansas State and Eastern Washington over a ranked Oregon State team. FBS schools pay these teams for record-padding-- after a loss, angry FBS coaches should be forced to remain on the 50-yard line to present their opponents with over-sized novelty checks made out to "I'll See You In Hell."

Northwestern, of course, is no stranger to the FCS home upset. That is because Northwestern received a grant in 1975 to explore every possible avenue of football-based humiliation. Circumstances certainly did not favor the 'Cats that year. The New Hampshire game was the emotional home opener in Fitz's first year as the team attempted to handle the loss of Randy Walker. New Hampshire also had a ludicrous speed offense coached by none other than Chip Kelly; I assume that most of Kelly's offensive concepts are based on neutralizing Tim McGarigle.

(I should add here that I know McGarigle had graduated before the 2006 season, but I assume Kelly was preparing for him anyway because of a little-known NCAA by-law that said if McGarigle was living on a houseboat reliving the tragic memories of the Sun Bowl, it would be legal for him to suit up for one last season, but only if he initially refused to play and then told the NU coaching staff that this time he was playing by his rules and also because this time it is personal. There is also an NCAA by-law that says we haven't had a dumb McGarigle joke here for awhile and I'm going to work it in this way even though it makes much more sense to reference his stint as an opposing linebackers' coach for Western Michigan because we don't do things by the book here at BYCTOM. Go ahead and take away my badge, Chief, but I'm working this one my way.)

MAINE

Maine in the nineteenth century was of course the United States's primary front in a war against rapacious British land-grabs from Canada. In the 1830s, an area claimed by the U.S. as the northern part of Maine was the subject of a border dispute arising from vague provisions of the Treaty of Ghent. That treaty attempted to restore the borders to those agreed upon in 1783. One can only speculate that the Treaty of Ghent did not resolve this issue because delegates became too distracted by the Ghent nightlife, which is how the phrase "like a diplomat at Ghent" became a winking euphemism in nineteenth-century foreign policy circles.

Meanwhile, tensions increased as lumberjacks from New Brunswick began lumber-jacking in the disputed territory. American and Canadian lumberjacks organized themselves into armed militias. The Governor of Maine denounced the Canadians as "unruly wood thieves." Maine land agents were captured. Sabers were rattled. A skirmish was interrupted by an unexpected bear attack, as one would expect during nineteenth-century conflicts.

Finally, British and American diplomats formed a compromise treaty. According to Wikipedia at least, this compromise involved both sides allegedly hiding maps and accusations that the British forged a map made by Benjamin Franklin to convince Americans to accept the treaty. I have no idea if that is true, but I'd prefer to assume that all nineteenth-century diplomacy hinged on things that Nicolas Cage would do in one of those movies where the Declaration of Independence is actually a code for a Secret Declaration of Independence that replaced a list of accusations against King George with a number of rhyming clues about a Crown Jewel hidden in one of Alexander Hamilton's wigs that is being held in Teddy Roosevelt's right nostril at Mount Rushmore and there are evil treasure hunters trying to get to it first in order to compromise America's Freedom.

Wait a minute, it says here that the American territories were won by the Duke of
Portland in a crooked horse race and his descendants can use any inhabitant for
cudgeling practice

The U.S. and Canada remain in dispute over the Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine. The territory is referred to as a "grey zone" with both sides attempting to flood the island with lighthouse keepers. It is also the setting for a movie I'm producing called "The Gray Zone: Bear Puncher," where Liam Neeson exploits the murky international boundaries to guide illegal bear hunting expeditions but of course something goes wrong and Nesson is forced to punch dozens of increasingly-larger bears and, if we get the budget, a gigantic lobster with a granite chin.

JUST MAINE, NOTHING ELSE GOING ON HERE

Northwestern looks like a legitimate challenger for the LEGENDS crown as Nebraska's defense was dismantled by a good UCLA team at home and Michigan was nearly done in by a plucky Akron team supported by the powerful Michigan Suffering Lobby. Michigan State is undefeated but is planning to play every single eligible man on their roster at quarterback for a snap this season.

You'll notice this post has not looked past the Maine game. But the fact is that if Northwestern defeats the Black Bears (in a civilized, un-Neeson-like manner, we presume), they will be 4-0 heading into a bye week before a looming showdown with Ohio State. And, if Ohio State beats Florida A&M and a tough Wisconsin team that has spent the past week sending threatening telegrams to officials, we could see a showdown between the two unbeaten teams in what we can calmly describe as a GODDAMN FOOTBALL APOCALYPSE 2013 AT RYAN FIELD. And the Four Horsemen of the Football Apocalypse shall appear: Sack, Fumble, Hamstring Injury, and NCAA Sanctions for Allegedly Selling Your Own Pants. Lee Corso could potentially put on a Wildcat Hat. The game will be a sold-out free-for-all with Northwestern fans going all out to claim up to 25% of their own stadium. Pat Fitzgerald could end the game needing experimental fist replacement surgery.

It's all very exciting, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We all know Fitz has nothing but Maine on his mind. He has contacted the State Department for Grey Zone maps to better understand the Maine mindset. Next week, he will focus on the bye week by scrutinizing tapes of patio furniture and lawn maintenance equipment. Let's hope for a quiet week unmarred by bear attacks of the literal and football variety.

It is April and the Chicago Cubs will begin playing baseball in order to cause misery and despair to legions of beer-swilling mustachioed mustard monsters. For several years, the Cubs have been irrelevant: the team has been stripped of competent baseball players in exchange for prospects and allowed to sink to appropriately Cub-like depths in a shameless tanking exercise. Ticket prices, of course, remained among the highest in baseball even as team president Theo Epstein all but announced OUR STRATEGY IS INTENTIONAL INEPT FLOUNDERING GIVE US YOUR MONEY.

It's equally exciting as a Cubs fan and infuriating as a fan of baseball teams trying to win baseball games and a person who has foolishly given money to a Ricketts that this plan appears to be working. The Return of the Cubs to Contention is a major baseball story this spring. The team is a trendy pick to contend for a wildcard spot; enough maniacs have descended upon Las Vegas to give them absurdly low odds to win the World Series.

That is insane enough to be the plot of one of those
bachelor parties gone bad movies but instead of
inadvertently murdering a croupier or getting in
too deep with an organized crime syndicate or falling
victim to a crooked casino with complicated gambling
games that are just made up on the spot but all called
"baccarat" in order to fool unsophisticated rubes the
protagonists decide to put actual hard-won dollars,
AMERICAN dollars for the love of god, on the Cubs to
win the championship of Major League Baseball

The optimism has come with the development of young players. Anthony Rizzo had a breakout year by learning to hit left-handed pitching. Starlin Castro returned to the All-Star game after a year as one of baseball's worst everyday players. Jorge Soler came up to give major league pitching the battering he once threatened to unleash upon an entire dugout's worth of baseball players. And Javier Baez, glorious Baez, joined Cubs in August. Baez, a mercurial baseball maestro whose potential to alter the Earth's tide with his tater-mashing is held in check only by his complete inability to successfully hit a ball with his bat. Consider this: Baez came to the plate 229 times last season. Of those, he put the ball in play 36 times. Nine of those 36 hits left the yard; that's a dinger percentage of 25% and if that isn't a real stat it should be. He also struck out 95 times, more than 40% of his total plate appearances. This sample size is so small that baseball stats people would regard it like Vigo the Carpathian regards ghostbusters, but still.

A thorough analysis of advanced batting statistics (click to enlarge)

And, after a couple of weeks superprospect Kris Bryant will appear as soon as he has passed a bizarre and arbitrary deadline that will allow the Cubs to keep him on a rookie payscale for an additional season, which the Cubs have justified by saying he needs to work on his fielding with the subtlety of a CBS sitcom character ordering a footlong hotdog in mixed company. The Cubs have a number of heralded prospect bats waiting in the wings, but Bryant has eclipsed them all by demolishing minor league pitching last year and going on a spring training rampage that left a trail of baseball carcasses in his wake.

The Cubs were not content to sit around with their exciting young team. They made additional not fucking around moves. First they signed America's Favorite Cool Grandpa Joe Maddon to manage the team. Maddon unexpectedly became available when Tampa GM Andrew Friedman bolted for the sunny skies and infinite money piles of Los Angeles. The Cubs fired first-year manager Rick Renteria and signed Maddon in a round of baseball skulduggery that has the Rays filing tampering charges and (presumably) Renteria plotting vengeance in smoky tents filled with medieval topographical maps. The Ricketts brought to the Cubs a healthy dose of intrigue: Theo Epstein's Second Clandestine Voyage from Boston, the Wooing of Joe Maddon, the Betrayal of Renteria, and the War of the Spanish Succession.

This time, bereft of gorilla suits, Theo Epstein fled
Boston in the disguise of Lenin disguised as a
Guy Who Isn't Lenin

Then the Cubs signed Jon Lester, the first big-time free agent pitcher of the Epstein era (let's forget Edwin Jackson exists). Lester was brought in as the ace who can one day anchor a champion pitching staff. Not to be fatalistic, but given the success rate of big time ace pitcher free agent signings and the involvement of the Chicago Cubs, there has never been a larger Sword of Damocles hovering over a baseball pitcher; there is an Aircraft Carrier of Damocles regularly sending squadrons of Damocles bomber jets at Lester's shoulder and cruciate ligaments.

For several seasons Cubs games were not only meaningless in the existential sense of all sporting events being a trifling distraction from societal problems and I don't even an own a TV, but meaningless even within baseball's limited universe. You could slate the Cubs into last place in April and find them comfortably resting there undisturbed in September. The only mild pleasure from Cubs games came from the potential of watching Cubs ineptly run into each other. Now, even if they don't make the playoffs, the Cubs are at last interesting and it is not just because they will be playing their games in a dilapidated hellhole.

WRIGLEY RENOVATIONS

The Cubs' renovations of Wrigley Field are behind schedule. This makes sense because the Cubs are philosophically behind schedule. The outfield bleachers will spend this season as pits, barren baseball wastelands filled with dirt, more than a century of stale beer, and, by the end of the season, I assume roaming bands of abandoned prospects attempting to build a civilization out of sunflower seeds and fungo bats.

Theo Epstein, wearing a crown fashioned out of forbidden Old Style cans and Jed Hoyer, wearing pinstriped epaulettes, will begin to use the pits as part of hardline contract negotiations. Edwin Jackson will be the first to be DFP'd-- designated for pits, forced to rely on his wits, charm, and ineffective fastball to negotiate his way through the numerous pit civilizations. He will team with a man once known as Brian LaHair but now goes by his pit name Gargantuous The Hair who knows the ways of the pit but may have his own agenda. But the greatest horror in the Pit does not come from the warring factions of pit dwellers or the pit pits or the festering bites of vienna hotdogs mutated into sentience by decades of proximity to urinal trough organisms. No, it is the Toweled One, a mysterious man who stalks silently at night. He wears ragged pants, a tattered jersey with only the letters "ior" visible and a cap pulled low over his face. Severed elbow ligaments dangle from his belt. Only one man has escaped and he has been driven mad; he screams about Tommy John surgery and teeth before becoming transfixed with fear and the only words he'll mutter are "in Dusty we trusty."

The Cubs' new Special Adviser to the General Manager on Pits,
Thunderdomes, and Mutant Outlands

The Cubs are also installing a videoboard this year.

SEASON OUTLOOK

The Cubs will be improved this year. This is because they have decided to use actual major league baseball players. In addition to the ballyhooed prospects, the Cubs brought in on-base specialist Dexter Fowler, and Miguel Montero, a solid defensive catcher and maker of intense yell-faces. Montero is also adept at pitch-framing, an art of openly deceiving umpires that is an acceptable part of baseball unlike attempting to steal signs, which is punishable by having a baseball thrown at your face because baseball is a violent murder sport invented in the nineteenth century by train robbery gangs.

Early baseball action: a strikeout

Yet, while it's exciting to have a baseball team that aims for more than a top draft pick, it's probably a bit premature to assume they will make the playoffs. For one, they play in the same division as the dangerous Pirates and the grimly inevitable St. Louis Cardinals. Other awful teams, like the Padres and the Marlins will also contend for the Wild Card. Fortunately, I can't imagine either of those teams ever causing misery to Cubs fans.

Secondly, the Cubs' prospects, as good has they have been, are still prospects. Soler probably won't continue his blistering pace. Baez may never learn to hit major league pitching. Kris Bryant has played exactly as many big league games as you or me, assuming that Carlos Zambrano did not just google himself for 1,000 pages. Pitchers Jake Arrieta and Justin Hammel may not replicate last season's breakouts. Joe Maddon's honeymoon will end under the thunderous echo of 10,000 guys with mustaches and a Chicago sports press manned by lumbering men writing the words "wins=winning games=winners yes?" in their notebooks next to sketches of sausage products.

And yes, the Cubs are still the Cubs. Stewards of a century-plus World Series drought, compilers of losing seasons, standard-bearers of sporting ineptitude. Perhaps, the Cubs will win one year, but it is equally possible they continue to lose until baseball transforms into another sport entirely after Wrigley Field is taken over by the pit people and baseball quickly transforms into an inevitable future death sport involving bullpen cars and pitching machines. The Cubs have gouged fans and reached for taxpayers' wallets. They have sent forth armies of stonegloved fielders, strikeout mongers, belly itchers, and Junior Lake against professional baseballers, they have intentionally made a mockery of team whose name and everything it stands for is already a mockery and in 2015 they have attacked us with the absolute worst thing with which to afflict a Cubs fan: hope. You maniacs.

Playoffs are exciting, championships are thrilling, but sports leagues across America and the globe know that nothing is more gripping than investigations bearing reports spanning hundreds of pages, hearings, and stone-faced press conference denials. As professional sports have evolved from corrupt rackets started for the benefit of gamblers to corrupt rackets worth billions of dollars, it's time to give fans what they want and start a Sports Investigation Hot Stove League that captures all of the excitement of dour lawyers, slumping, jowl-heavy officials, and the refusals to comment that we all crave.

THE UNITED STATES VS. FIFA

This week, the United States and Switzerland staged daring sheet raids on FIFA officials accused of various acts of bribery, corruption, and basically being FIFA officials. FIFA graft has been as much a part of international soccer as falling down and rolling around on the ground as if the pitch was covered in a complex series of invisible bear traps. According to the New York Times, "Soccer officials treated FIFA business decisions as chits to be traded for personal wealth, United States officials said. Whether through convoluted financial deals or old-fashioned briefcases full of cash, people were expected to pay for access to FIFA’s river of money and publicity."

The main reason why the United States has finally acted was because the justice department successfully strong-armed a criminally corrupt soccer official into cooperating. The informant is named Chuck Blazer because of the well-known rule that if you're a shady soccer bureaucrat ready to make a government deal and you also have a separate apartment for your cats then you have to have a Steven Seagal name.

The most surprising aspect of the FIFA arrests is that an international body is actually making an attempt to hold some corrupt officials accountable. This is the same body that awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a site so ludicrous that bribery is the only rational explanation other than gambling that by 2022, soccer will have transformed into an apocalyptic death-cult where players who can survive the searing heat will be allowed to live within the walls of the city and work on post-apocalyptic society constitutions that are ham-fisted metaphors for current crises. The Qatar World Cup has already had an appalling human cost in the thousands of migrant workers trapped in exploitative and deadly conditions to build stadiums, infrastructure, and hotels. FIFA has examined these troubling reports of thousands of worker abuses and deaths and decided that the best course of action is to move the 2022 World Cup to the winter.

As I am writing this, the world waits on tenterhooks to see if FIFA President Sepp Blatter will resign or get voted out. Blatter has stated that he will not, and he usually has a steadfast coterie of cronies that he can count on to re-elect him in perpetuity even though him and his supporters within FIFA are literally the only people on the planet who want to see any more of his oily visage popping up on television to say something impressively awful.

Blatter defaults to making "I don't know how these with artifacts from the
recently-looted pyramid came to be carefully arranged in the living room
of this luxury hotel suite" gestures

Blatter operates with the charm of a low-level political donor with dubious diplomatic license plates; he is the prototype of the international bureaucratic lizard person, and he infuses a sport with unmatched global appeal with the spirit of crooked bean counting.

UPDATE: Sepp Blatter has won re-election as FIFA president. He is the Sphinx, he is a pyramid, he is eternal and unmovable; he is a bad vaudeville act with a cane-cutting chainsaw.

DAYS OF DEFLATION

There is nothing funnier in American sports than when the National Football League and its overwhelmed Vice Principal Roger Goodell vow to get to the bottom of something. The NFL, a non-profit pickup truck marketing agency, wants Americans to know that it stands for America and it won't allow its players to besmirch the reputation of a sport where millionaires run into each other as fast as possible. And when players, coaches, and equipment managers threaten the very game itself, there will be hell to pay.

The Great Patriot Ball Deflation Media Event is quite possibly the greatest NFL scandal of our lifetimes. Its stakes were violations of pedantic NFL rules which, as of this publishing, have not yet been added as amendments to the United States constitution. It involves the type of moronic Patriots wacky races-style skulduggery that trapped a standoffish coach and perennial homecoming king quarterback in a series of hilariously humiliating press conferences. It involves Goodell squandering any ounce of goodwill he could have gained from this by throwing around suspensions with the reckless abandon of Barney Fife with a submachine gun.

In the NFL justice system, the players are represented by two separate
yet equally important groups: Roger Goodell, who hands down
punishment; and Roger Goodell, who arbitrates appeals to Roger
Goodell's decisions. These are their stories.

But the by far the best part about the Deflation Event is the Wells report, the results of an investigation running more than 200 pages with transcripts of text messages, scientific charts, and the results of hundreds of man-hours of digging into the question of ball pressure. Today, we examine one of these heroes.

THE ADVENTURES OF BROCK JAW: NFL INVESTIGATOR

Brock Jaw woke up in his car. He used takeout cartons for a pillow and a racing form for his blanket even though he had an officially licensed Kansas City Chiefs branded snuggy in his trunk. It was time to go to work. It was always time to go to work.

For five weeks he tailed the Patriots' assistant equipment manager. He knew his apartment, his car, his friends, his bar. He woke when he awoke, slept when he slept, and lived in his shadow. Brock Jaw didn't have to go home anymore, not since the divorce. He figured his wife would take him back after he cracked the incorrectly-branded headphone case, but he was wrong. She didn't understand. She wasn't out here, defending everyone from garish cleats.

Goodell told him not to engage with the equipment manager. The Commissioner said he'd take his badge. But Roger Goodell didn't sleep in his car for the past five weeks and wake up smelling like gas station coffee. Roger Goodell didn't spend hours at a corkboard tracing football needle receipts. Roger Goodell didn't have to watch that smug son-of-a-bitch walk around like there was no Brock Jaw around every corner, held back only by the bylaws of the National Football League and probably municipal laws, but Brock Jaw wasn't sure.

"BROCK JAW, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE," Jaw said as his car fishtailed around a corner into twelve fruit stands. "Did you deflate the balls?" he said, shaking the equipment man. "Did you tamper with them? Did Brady know? "DID BRADY KNOW?" he screamed, wiping produce from his eyes.

"You're with a professional sports league, I don't have to talk to you," the equipment man said.

Brock Jaw launched a pomegranate inches from the equipment manager's face. From his car, the NFL radio dispatch squawked out an emergency signal. "This isn't over," he seethed. But for now it was. Brock Jaw stepped on his accelerator and turned on his siren blaring The Equalizer. It was a code 451: illegal pants. "Jesus Christ," he said.

BECKMANIA

Our old pal Illinois head football coach and frustrated bear swatting at out-of-reach picnic supplies Tim Beckman has found himself in hot water again. Beck Man has been in fine off-season form since unthinkably wresting The Hat from its rightful place in Evanston and has been clearly driven mad with Hat Power since. In February, he demanded that reporters cover Illinois football positively. "The challenge is still, how important is the University of Illinois to you? It's very important to us. We can be successful if we're all in it together.""I AM THE HAT-HOLDER," he added, throwing on a cape. "I AM YOUR NEWSPAPER. HERE'S A HEADLINE FOR TOMORROW'S EDITION: BECK MAN HAT MAN."

Beckman then announced the creation of a Beckman-edited Illinois
propaganda newspaper called Iltruthni filled with articles such as
"Illinois Football's Tractor Procurement Numbers See Dramatic
Increase" and "Hatless Pig-Dog Pat Fitzgerald Cowers Like Child"

More seriously, former Illinois football player Simon Cvijanovic accused Beckman of mistreating and abusing players. Other former players from Illinois and Toledo have corroborated his allegations while still others came to Beckman's defense. Cvijanovic claims that Beckman and his coaching staffs dismissed injuries and forced players into dangerous and stressful situations. Beckman denies the allegations, and the university has begun an investigation.

One of Cvijanovic's allegations, however, seems completely in line with what we've come to expect from Beck Man, as the Tribune reports:

Cvijanovic said Beckman created a dangerous culture around injuries, forcing hurt players to wear purple signifying the color of rival Northwestern.
"This shows how he views injured players. Like you're weak," said Cvijanovic, who will graduate from Illinois.

There is no doubt that stoking the flames of an intrastate football rivalry between two bad teams that no one cares about is the first priority of all Beck Man practices. Here are some other likely Illini practice scenarios:

Recruits are blindfolded and forced to take the hat from a papier-mache Pat Fitzgerald without ringing any of the bells placed on his person
Illini football players enrolled in seminar class called "We Have Always Been At War With Northwestern"
All tackling dummies now say "Chicago's Big Ten Team"
It is the last day of training camp. It's a hazy dusk and Beckman pulls aside the newcomers and says to them your last task is to get to the dining hall. They take their first tentative steps when they see them charging down a hill. It's a dozen makeshift Willie Wildcats built by Beckman at the anti-Northwestern crafting studio he built in a shed, but his costume-making techniques are still crude, so the Willies have crooked smiles and mismatched eyes, and they are coming straight at the players out of the forest and they are on fire.

INVESTIGATE!

Several open questions remain: Will Sepp Blatter ever be successfully removed from his post at the top of FIFA and sent off to some soccer St. Helena? Will Roger Goodell get his man? And will Embattled Coach Tim Beckman (his title as specified by the latest AP Style Guide) be able to prove that his brand of deranged coaching psychosis is within university-sanctioned bounds of deranged coaching psychoses? And if he is fired, will he still keep up a one-man anti-Northwestern hatred campaign by standing at Ryan Field wearing a t-shirt with his anti-Northwestern logo on it but no one notices because it is a Big Ten game and only 35 people are cheering for the home team? Only one man knows, and he is Brock Jaw, and he can't tell you because he's got a hot tip about improperly branded sports drinks.

The sports calendar has climaxed this week, with the NBA and NHL crowning new champions, American Hero Abby Wambach cowing foreigners with the Forehead of Freedom, and the Chicago Cubs contending for a playoff berth or as I call it, pre-disappointment. The smoke from hockey fireworks still lingers over Chicago. In Evanston, a confused and desolate community cries into the infinite night for its Hat.

TURNOVER

There are five major professional sports teams in Chicago and, at any given time, at least three are bound to be in turmoil. The Chicago Bears are rebuilding after firing Marc Trestman. Trestman, sought as an offensive guru after the Bears spent too many years relying on Devin Hester and the defense to score points, failed to qualify for the playoffs and was also the least football coachy-looking person who has ever coached football. This shouldn't count for anything, but in the weird, quasi-authoritarian NFL, where coaches demand the same respect as a Kipling-esque military officer who has forged his own kingdom and death-cult on the fringes of some nineteenth-century empire, Trestman looked like a man perpetually realizing he was on the wrong train.

Trestman was instructed to pose as if he just invented hands. If you didn't want this dude to
inexplicably become a juggernaut head coach in the face of the square-jaw, man-bellow
NFL, then I don't understand you

The Bears replaced Trestman with John Fox, who looks like a first-page google image search result for "professional football coach" and have started a process of dismantling the vestiges of the Lovie Smith era. They will remain tethered to quarterback Jay Cutler, who is rapidly becoming as popular in Chicago as the guy with the nineteenth-century murder house.

Across town, the Bulls have made move eerily similar to the Trestman hire two years ago. They fired defensive mastermind Tom Thibodeau to bring in unconventional offensive guru Fred Hoiberg from Iowa State. The Bulls and Thibodeau reached an impasse; Thibodeau, a basketball monomaniac who spent most games in a purple-faced reverie demanding that Jimmy Butler play more minutes, clashed with a front office that historically spends most of its time scheming against and occasionally punching its head coaches.

Thibodeau's departure was, in some ways, necessary. It is no coincidence that his teams tended to wear down at the end of the season, and his offenses had grown stagnant. At the same time, who doesn't want to root for a crazed basketball lunatic? Thibodeau legendarily has no apparent interests other than basketball. He spends his days screaming at basketball players, his evening screaming at televised basketball players, and he counts basketball players who don't box out in order to fall asleep, screaming. He wears a black and white tracksuit every day. He probably sleeps in a giant, hollowed out basketball chamber like Darth Vader's little Vader-dome. He reluctantly squeezes into a suit on gamedays, which makes him look like an angry detective who is escorted out of an interrogation room with Carlos Boozer because he can't stand to look at his defense.

BOOZER: And I'll tell you what Coach, when I didn't hustle back on defense, I liked it.
THIBS: (Restrained by five other detectives)

Hoiberg may be a fine coach. It's not fair to dismiss him only because he is yet another Iowa State guy replacing a successful Bulls coach who feuded with the mercurial front-office cabal. It's not fair to have a lingering distrust of him because he played for the terrible post-Jordan Bulls teams and may also have tricked us all by using the name "Rusty LaRue." But what about this clean-cut guy who looks like he could be on a 1940s-era war bonds poster could possibly be more fun than a coach who lives like a basketball monk who took a vow of yelling?

THE ST. LOUIS CARDINALS CYBERCRIME OF THE CENTURY

I remember when kids looked up to baseball executives. They'd go to the ballpark, take in its immensity, the sights, the sounds, Billy Crystal's descriptions of a fictional baseball player called "Mickey Mantle," and the larger-than-life, home run-crushing titans and immediately ask their parents who negotiated the salaries and entered into arbitration with their heroes.

And now, in St. Louis, instead of telling them about finance majors and computer programmers who handled the implications of the luxury tax the right way, parents must look away ashamed. Because they will have to look their sons and daughters in their innocent eyes and tell them the truth. That the St. Louis Cardinals weren't a collection of scouts and data analysts and math whizzes, but a vast and ruthless organization of cybercriminals who built their Red Empire on stolen data, mendacity, betrayal, and probably a grisly string of heretorfore undiscovered cybermurders.

St. Louis cyberhacker supercriminals in action

The Cardinals' hacking story is one of the greatest dumb baseball chicanery stories in recent memory. Charlie Pierce argued that use of computers to steal data has robbed baseball thievery of an earthy, pre-digital romance:

Time was, if you wanted to steal some scouting reports, you had to drag your sorry ass to Salinas or Visalia somewhere, and get the busted-knuckle old scout sockless in some local dive so you could steal his spittle-soaked notebook out of his shirt pocket. It was maybe 98 degrees in Visalia and the ceiling fan in the joint didn’t work and, if you had an open wound on your hand, and something from the cover of the notebook somehow got into your bloodstream, you could lose three fingers to an infection the old scout had picked up under questionably legal circumstances in Boise the year before. A baseball thief had to work for a living back then.

But it is precisely the computerized nature of this scandal that makes it so goddamn hilarious. While cybercrime as a crime is scary and serious, the word "cybercrime" is ludicrous-- to me, it seems like a criminal should have been able to perpetrate a cybercrime only between the years 1995 and 2002. Cybercrime sounds like the name of a direct-to-video Dolph Lundgren vehicle where a brilliant hacker has to stop an evil computerman from launching nuclear missilesby typing furiously into a computer before the script devolves into 25 minutes of kickboxing.

Jack Quarry was a CIA computer expert who left the agency when he
accidentally typed too hard, blowing up his partner. But when an evil
computer mastermind begins overriding American security systems,
stealing Abraham Lincoln artifacts, and hacking into stadium Jumbotrons
and regaling terrified sports fans by brandishing computers armed with
malicious nuclear weapons software, Quarry is reluctantly called into action.
Cybercrime: how do you stop an enemy who can be anyone with a computer
anywhere until the last 25 minutes when he is inexplicably within kicking
range?

And, of course, the allegations are sweeter because they affect the St. Louis Cardinals, a team with a small but irritatingly vocal subsection of fans who act as High Baseball Moralists who have nonetheless rallied around baseball's second-roidiest slugger and a front office dedicated to cutting edge crookedness. Then again, it is always dangerous to enjoy a scandal engulfing a rival team because it is only a matter of time before the dogged baseball Joe Fridays of the world end up on your team's door. And the Cardinals remain unreachably entrenched into first place in the National League Central, prepared to close ranks and barrel into the World Series fueled by the adversity of having some nerdy front-office guy load up some floppies with batting averages. Baseball is America's game.

KHRUSHCHEV ARRIVES

Nikita Khrushchev famously told the West that the Soviets would bury them. He boasted of ICBMs and submarines destroying American cities. He taunted Eisenhower with models of successful Soviet satellites while American versions detonated before leaving the atmosphere. And he angrily demanded to go to Disneyland.

Peter Carlson's K Blows Top: A Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, follows the madcap adventures of Khrushchev's whirlwind tour of the United States in 1959. Carlson, a journalist who writes that he became obsessed with Khrushchev's visit during down time while working as a copy editor at People magazine, has assembled a history of the visit . The through press clippings and interviews with key players including Khrushchev's son Sergei. Carlson is interested in the absurdity of Khrushchev's visit playing off against American anti-Communist hysteria and in the ludicrous media attention, which he views as a seminal modern media event.

Carlson remains fascinated by Khrushchev, whom he describes as a consummate politician with a tendency towards purple-faced apoplexy. The book naturally opens with the famous "kitchen debates" between Khrushchev and his rival Richard Nixon. The two sparred during Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union, as the American government reluctantly remembered that they were essentially dropping a crate armed with a sweaty, suit-wearing biological weapon against dealing gracefully with communism into Moscow.

Eisenhower: This is a delicate diplomatic mission, one that needs someone
who can go into the Soviet Union and stand up for the United States without
turning it into a jowly, anti-communist bark-off.
Dulles: But Nixon's already on the plane
Nixon: Jesus Christ

The State Department intended to leverage an invitation to the United States into Soviet concessions to ease off on his demands that the Western powers leave Berlin. Khrushcehv knew that Berlin was a sensitive subject, later writing that "Berlin is the testicles of the West," Khrushchev wrote, "whenever I give them a yank, they holler." But, characteristically, Khrushchev ignored the diplomatic demands and decided to accept the invitation. He gathered in entourage and boarded the TU-144, the world's tallest airplane, and set course for Washington.

As Carlson relates, the visit inspired varied reactions, from small towns urging him to visit (Moscow Idaho, for example, trumpeted the town as the "largest dry pea shipping center in the United States"-- I feel like the good people of Moscow probably could have found another angle) to opportunities for Congressional grandstanding. The opposition to Khrushchev's visit was not all knee-jerk anti-communism. Khrushchev, as he frequently reminded Eisenhower and other officials, was capable of unleashing nuclear destruction upon American cities. He had brutally repressed the Hungarian Revolution just three years earlier. And, while Carlson clearly relishes the absurdities of Khrushchev's trek across America (for example, a struggle with a national dentist's organization for a New York hotel ballroom becomes a farcically patriotic battle), he does not completely gloss over the horrifying stakes of the Cold War.

According to Carloson, the American media crush completely destroyed
a supermarket that Khruschchev visited as photographers leapt onto
checkout counters and stood in deli meat cases to get important shots such
as this one of him staring at a can of pickles while surrounded by hundreds
of grim-faced suit-wearers

K Blows Top, though maintains a light tone, focusing on the unthinkably bizarre result of having America's greatest enemy arrive at the doorstep, and having that enemy be Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev charmed his hosts, but also pugnaciously defended any perceived slight to the national dignity of the USSR. This included bludgeoning banquet crowds with stacks of dubious Soviet statistics, slyly alluding to missiles, and publicly bristling over a refusal to take him to Disneyland because American authorities told him they could not guarantee his security.

"What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place?" ... Khrushchev was starting to look more angry than amused. His fist punched the air above his red face.

The New York Post's Harry Salisbury described the Premier's temper while simultaneously throwing in a pithy review of Dostoevsky's works:

This trip is like one of those tea parties in Dostoevsky when everyone meets in apparent comity and then, after three of four minutes, Nikolai Nikolaevich for no discernible reason overturns the boiling samovar on the head of Alexander Alexandrovich...It is a Russian party elevated only by the possibility that the guest of honor may blow his stack. It is both awesome and deplorable how suddenly Nikita Khrushchev can blow his stack.

Khruschev's visit, though bumpy, did actually appear to foster some goodwill. He invited Eisenhower to visit him in the Soviet Union. It appeared that the trip had made some intangible progress to bring some greater amount of understanding between the American people and the Soviet Premier. Seven months later, an American U2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace. Khrushchev was furious. He scuttled a Four Power conference in Paris and returned to New York to harangue the United Nations. Khrushchev's trip had little value as a turning point for US-Soviet relations, but, as Carlson points out, it has immense value as a bizarre press spectacle.

THROUGH SUMMER

The City of Chicago had a much less bizarre media blitz for the Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks. The Hawks won their third championship in six years as sports writers quibbled about whether they qualify as a dynasty and, if they did, whether or not it was an elite dynasty or a sub-elite oligarchy, or whatever the hell other kinds of mumbo jumbo that sports radio people come up with to stop themselves from staring into the void for four hours a day. The Hawks have improbably rallied from one of the worst-run sports teams in the country to the class of the city. It remains to be seen whether the Bulls can overcome their space-emperor ownership, the Bears can overcome their incompetent, mustachioed, third-generation football-meddlers, or whether the Cubs can one day transcend being the Chicago Cubs.

The Hawks used Soldier Field as the site for their championship rally amongst thousands of fans. But Soldier Field will soon bear witness to a far greater glory. Beck Man is coming. Soldier Field will not only be the site of championship celebrations and Chicago Bears perversions of football, but the site of the Great Hat Reckoning.

The National Basketball Association has just capped off its five hour list-reading extravaganza in Brooklyn. The NBA draft has everything a person wants on television: garish suits, extended shots of people talking on cell phones, xenophobic booing of gangly European dunk magnets, and basketball players forced to deceive the American public with disingenuous hats.

LaMarcus Aldridge and the NBA draw helpless basketball fans into a web
of lies

In a vacuum, it is hard to understand the appeal of a clumsy, ponderous spectacle where the most exciting thing that happens is some giant dressed like an anthropomorphic blueberry awkwardly shaking hands with a hairless future-man while an off-stage panel publicly describes his shortcomings. I can't imagine sitting through it live until second-round picks are distributed based on one-on-one pickup games between Darryl Morey and Sam Hinckie. But the NBA draft and even its overwrought three-day NFL cousin are great because they celebrate hope, intrigue, and developing intractable opinions without any firm basis of knowledge. Teams and, to a lesser extent, creepy self-proclaimed draft experts, spend hundreds of hours evaluating players, but their picks are in the hands of fate; the only certainties in the history of the NBA draft are the inevitable deaths of everyone involved and the fact that Jan Vesely was not an NBA player.

The Bulls selected Arkansas power forward Bobby Portis with the 22nd pick in last night's draft, even though they have a crowded frontcourt. I have not seen one minute of Bobby Portis playing basketball. I am not a basketball scout. But I am thrilled with the pick because Portis seems to excel at two important skills the Bulls require: making crazy faces and yelling.

Opponents cower in fear from the dreaded "Portis Head"

Portis will be mentored by experienced bigs Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, and Pau Gasol in bellowing and scowling. Nikola Mirotic, in his rookie year offers something no one else on the Bulls has: a great, big, bushy beard. Many pundits expected the Bulls to get a backup for Derrick Rose, but they thought Portis was the best player left on the board and Nate Robinson is still available.

A VERITABLE AND AUTHENTIC SATAN OF MODERN EUROPE

"Whatever subject he started he always got back to his favourite theme, and he represented Prince Bismarck, however he might be for the moment disguised, as a veritable and authentic Satan of modern Europe."

That is how you start a goddamn book review. W.T. Stead, the notable British journalist and editor known for, among other things, using his newspapers to suggest sending Charles Gordon into Sudan and then excoriating the government for its failure to rescue him and dying on the Titanic, took a flamethrower to recently-deceased Otto Von Bismarck in an 1898 article in his Review of Reviews. The quote above is attributed to a conversation he had with Robert Morier, the British Ambassador to Russia (Stead traveled to Russia during the height of British Russophobia and published The Truth About Russia in 1888). It is fair to say that Stead shared this opinion. In a review of German press agent Julius Moritz Busch's memoir Bismarck: Some Secret Pages of His History, Stead opened both barrels on Bismarck and his Boswell, Busch.

Moritz Busch, Otto von Bismarck, and a pyschic portrait for the floating ghost head of W.T.
Stead, oh yeah I should probably mention that Stead was an ardent spiritualist who wrote
extensively about his communication with ghosts and telepathy and automatic writing

There are certainly countless responsible histories you can read of Bismarck that analyze Busch's memoir as a historical source and give you proper context with which to read Stead. But this is not a place for responsible, contextual history, this is a place for taking a look at nineteenth-century invective and luxuriate in the bile and sort of weird insults and curses laid upon one of Europe's most reviled Victorian statesmen. Here are some headings and subheadings from the article describing Bismarck or Busch:

THE ARCH-REPTILE
HIS WORMS ON THE PRESS
AN UNCONSCIOUS JUDAS
A PRINCE OF LIARS
BAITING A TRAP WITH A WOMAN
THE DIPLOMATIC SATAN REVEALED

Stead attacks Bismarck and Busch for manipulating the press. He quotes his own description of the use of a "Reptile Fund" (money set aside for espionage, manipulation, and other underhanded secret deeds) to influence the foreign press from his own The Truth About Russia because extensively quoting yourself in a scathing review is a power move:

In the journalism of Europe it is the lot of some correspondents abroad to fulfil with automatic and unfailing regularity the useful and, from Bismarck's point of view, the necessary functions of the earthworm. There are, for example, some supreme types of this species on the Times, whose despatches, telegraphed daily to the leading newspaper in the world, are little more than ill-digested reproductions of the inventions and calumnies of the Reptile press-- their "news" is merely the secretion of the reptile passed through the alimentary canal of the worm. But it helps to form the compost upon which public opinion is based, and thus from the great central bureau of Berlin are fed all the newspapers of the world.

Stead describes Busch as little more than a tool of Bismarck, rendering him as a sort of attack-butler.

It would be difficult to outdo in caddish insolence the way in which Dr. Busch suffered himself to write of journalists whom he regarded as outside the official circle. Jeames de la Pluche(1) himself was less of a flunkey than Dr. Mortiz Busch. One of his articles in the volume is simply superb as a revelation of the way in which a great man's valet can give himself airs. Even Lord Salisbury's footman in Arlington Street(2) might take a lesson from Dr. Mortiz Busch. The good German Boswell is really the most unmitigated snob on record. It is very amusing, and yet in its way not a little pathetic. For even Dr. Moritz Busch is a human being.

(1) Jeames de la Pluche is a former footman/railroad speculator character whose rise and fall is chronicled in The Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche, a series of letters in Punch by Thackeray writing as M.A. Titmarsh, Esq.
(2) I don't know anything about Salisbury's footman in Arlington Street, but I am going to assume he the apex of High Victorian butler snobbery who wore a suite made from tails collected from lesser footmen.

As way of proof, Stead offers up an example of how Busch addressed Bismarck:

Pray excuse me for comparing you to an animal, but you remind me of the picture of a noble stag, which, time after time, shakes off the snarling pack, and then, proud and unhurt, regains the shelter of his forest, crowned by his branching antlers.

"It is much to be wished that Prince Bismarck did belong to an entirely different species, if only for the credit of our common humanity," Stead wrote.

The whole of the article is peppered with attacks on Bismarckian subterfuge and Bismarck's impressions of Queen Victoria and other notable British figures. Stead's review is not a bad way to spend some time reveling in pointed Victorian insults, a model for all book reviews as the following passage should convince you:

NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONGRESS MURDER

We'll end with a final mention of a bizarre spectacle from early American politics when statesmen settled their disputes by shooting each other in the face with pistols. In 1831, Missouri Congressman Spencer Pettis and U.S. Army Major Thomas Biddle met in a deadly duel that ended both of their lives. The dispute arose after Pettis, a supporter of Andrew Jackson, attacked Biddle's brother Nicholas, the president of Jackson's hated Second Bank of the United States.

A contemporary pro-Jackson cartoon shows him attacking a monster-bank. Nicholas
Biddle is wearing the top hat

According to an article from an 1877 edition of the Hartford Weekly Times by a correspondent who claims to have been a close aid to Nicholas Biddle and signed his article "BOWIE-KNIFE," Biddle's character was "assaulted with bitter vituperation." Thomas Biddle, who lived in St. Louis, and Pettis began to attack each other in the press with insults such as calling each other a "dish of skimmed milk."

The conflict became violent when Thomas Biddle attacked Pettis in a hotel room. As BOWIE-KNIFE puts it, Biddle grabbed a cow-hide and "inflicted a very severe chastisement upon Pettis." Pettis recovered before all involved decided it was sensible and manly to shoot each other.

The venue for the duel was settled as an dandy outcrop between Missouri and Illinois called "Bloody Island," which should be the title for some horrible pirate fantasy novel. The island got its name from the numerous duels fought on its soil, as explained by the Missouri State Archive's helpful page on Missouri dueling. According to that page, the Biddle-Pettis duel was the third major political duel fought on its sand. The existence of a dueling island could not have been unique to Missouri, and I assume other states had their dueling arenas such as:

RHODE ISLAND: Lockjaw Caverns
GEORGIA: Skeleton Corner
TEXAS: Hellfire Gulch
MISSISSIPPI: Scurvy Coves
KENTUCKY: Headbutt Quarry
FLORIDA: The State of Florida

Biddle and Pettis chose to duel at five feet, an absurdly short distance (Biddle was near-sighted and we were years away from the advent of prescription dueling goggles), and both fired and killed each other. Bloody island continued to host duels well into the 1850s before people came to their senses, realized that politicians probably shouldn't murder each other, and decided to settle disputes with honor and skill in the Atlasphere.

The Cubs have made it to late July and they have managed to go through nearly 60% of a baseball season without dissolving into a Cubbish morass of ineptitude. They have hit baseballs in the right direction. They have thrown baseballs at a regulation strike zone. Most of the outfielders have managed to show up with regulation baseball gloves and not oversized novelty gloves and propeller beanies. It's a new world.

The Cubs remain in contention for one of the dozens of available wildcard playoff spots this season because of the sudden influx of young, talented Cubs. Anthony Rizzo has matured into one of the best hitters in the National League. Jake Arrieta is pitching like a legitimate ace. Kris Bryant was an instant all-star, Addison Russell has become an excellent fielder, and Starlin Castro is being the best Starlin Castro he can, which means he is swatting ineffectively at baseballs with a pool noodle. And every time one of these guys starts to falter or slump they bring up another bat. This week, it was Kyle Schwarber, a neckless stump-person who treats baseballs like they are a nameless bar hooligan in a Steven Seagal movie.

Cincinnati detectives at a crime scene where two baseballs were brutally schwarbered

Schwarber had a brief cameo as a DH-- he nominally plays catcher the way Russell Crowe is nominally the front man for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts-- but came up this week after a thumb injury to Miguel Montero. And, in a series with the Reds in which the teams played baseball nearly ceaselessly for 24 hours, Schwarber exploded. On Tuesday, he blasted a ninth-inning home run to tie the game, knocked the go-ahead dinger in the 13th, and then exploded into a supernova firing bats across the cosmos.

For the first time in years, the Cubs are fun. That is not to say they are a juggernaut. They play in the same division as the red-hot Pirates, and the St. Louis Cardinals continue to grimly march towards the division crown, replacing injured pitchers like a gritty Midwestern hydra regenerating heads so it can devour Ancient Greeks the right way.

"Seeing that Heracles was winning the struggle, Hera sent a large crab to
distract him. He crushed it under his mighty foot."
I would read a book of myths as told by a Wikipedia Editor

Even though the Cubs are headed towards almost certain Cubs disaster, summer is infinitely better with a relevant baseball team that has not yet crushed us.

BEARS FOOTBALL IS BLEAK AND HOPELESS

The Chicago Bears, on the other hand, appear to be moving towards the season with the graceful dignity of Peter Lorre from the first five minutes of Casablanca. They have installed a new GM, a new coach, a new offense, and will run a heretical 3-4 base defense. Fortunately, the hands at the wheel are steady, with the McCaskey family committed to running a professional football team in their image, which is currently confused, vacuous mustache staring.

George McCaskey's hero is Ludwig von Reuter who also has a mustache and runs things into
the ground

The greatest lightning rod for Bears criticism remains quarterback Jay Cutler. Cutler is entering his sixth year with the Bears, during which he has become as popular in Chicago as a crooked politician dumb enough to get caught. Cutler arrived with a reputation as a big-armed malcontent who was just good enough to disappoint you. This was welcome in Chicago's barren quarterback wasteland where fans cheered Rex Grossman for his mastery of the fling-it-up-to-Bernard-Berrian play, where Kyle Orton became a folk hero for managing to look competent nearly as often as he looked like he had grown a beard so he could walk into one of those dingy Chicago bars identifiable only by a faded Old Style sign and order one for him and one for his beard, and where fans cheered Rex Grossman again as he replaced Kyle Orton and this had been going on with a series of interchangeable Grossmen and Ortons since time immemorial.

Cutler had a few seasons of promise and excuses. The Bears fielded a five-man OSHA complaint as an offensive line and a squardon of interchangeable undersized punt returners at receiver. When the Bears turned their receivers into a fleet of hulking dreadnoughts and approached competence on offense, the defense turned into a performance art piece about launching oneself gracefully at the air behind a running back. Nevertheless, Cutler has failed to transcend the team's shortcomings and torpedoed the offense with infuriating interceptions. Every quarterback throws baffling interceptions from time to time; Cutler throws picks so ill-conceived that they appear almost spiteful. Bears fans have given up on him. The team gave up on him last season when they benched a healthy Cutler for Jimmy Clausen, a quarterback who had failed to look like a functioning NFL player for even a single snap in his short, miserable career and also he has a baby head.

Cutler has also committed the unforgivable sin of making a large amount of money. He signed a seven-year $126 million contract, although it is important to remember that NFL contracts deliberately obscure, misleading, and fictitious. It is not uncommon to see NFL contracts include rich parcels of land in Frisland or Poyasian bonds. Cutler's contract binds the Bears for a shorter period of time and money than indicated, but it's not negligible. It is too onerous to release Cutler and has rendered him untradeable, and new general manager Ryan Pace seems to regard his quarterback like an elderly person will regard a tribal bicep tattoo in the year 2070.

The Jay Cutler/Ryan Pace relationship reminds me of a version
of What About Bob, but instead of being charming and ingratiating,
Bob sits sullenly in the corner, texting pictures of his boat shoes

Jay Cutler also has an unpleasant reputation. In this ESPN article ranking the NFL quarterbacks (behind their insider paywall), Cutler is invoked like a chain-wielding wraith portending quarterback doom before finally revealing himself at #20 as a bunch of nameless NFL people call him a jerk. His air of hostile indifference is well-documented. It does not bother me if my team's quarterback is a churl because I don't imagine I'll ever have to interact with him, but I can understand how a guy theoretically paid a bit less than the GDP of Nauru who looks at any given moment like he might walk out of the stadium before a gleeful opposing cornerback has the chance to finish sauntering into the endzone with one of his errant passes might antagonize fans. At the very least, Cutler's mediocrity and toxic reputation means we don't have to see him attempt to act in terrible commercials. His only onscreen role seems to have been as himself in a fantasy football sitcom, which is a shameful miscasting; Jay Cutler was born to play the dismissive sheriff who doesn't believe in chupacabras until it's too late or someone credited as "guy who won't move yacht."

The Bears will, barring an unexpected miracle, be a dreadful team to follow. They are in the midst of a complete rebuild. They face a brutal schedule. Doug Buffone has passed away, leaving an entire metropolitan area of braying, nasal mustard enthusiasts bereft of anywhere to complain about Jay Cutler for hours at a time. The entire enterprise will be a joyless slog. And yet, one year one hopelessly miserable team rises out of nowhere to get obliterated by the Patriots or the Packers in the playoffs and it might as well be the Chicago Bears, sucking all around them into their black hole of mediocrity and dysfunction. It is not likely, but we just sent a probe towards Pluto, discovered a vaguely Earth-like planet 1,400 light years away, and the Chicago Cubs might sneak into the playoffs.

We are nearing August, when football training camp begins in earnest and the Wildcats begin the 2015 season, or as I call it, HATRIBUTION '15. This week, Big Ten coaches will meet with the media to address hard-hitting questions about whether or not they are excited for football to start. Big Ten officials will field questions about expansion, because in the rapacious Enormous Ten, the goal is to capture as many television markets as possible in the United States and abroad. Expect Jim Delany to strut around asking reporters if they had ever seen such a big ten in their lives and who has a bigger ten than him.

Pat Fitzgerald is scheduled to speak Friday. Those who can't wait can read Skip Myslesnski's interview that addresses the uncertainty on the roster, not only a quarterback but up and down the depth chart. Fitzgerald doesn't give up much and Myslenski is reigned in instead of the florid, lyrical Myslenski that injects training camp stories with much-needed elements of the introduction to Conan the Barbarian movies. Though I am writing this before Fitz has spoken, BYCTOM moles have obtained a transcript of his remarks, and he is expected to delight the crowd with references to Our Young Men.

Pat Fitzgerald expects fireworks after last year's revolutionary speech
when he scandalized the football media by vowing to take things one
game at a time, drawing heckles from disbelieving football personnel used
to taking things two or three games at a time. Jerry Kill denounced
Fitzgerald as a sick, sad man and Kyle Flood leaped through a plate glass
window

Yesterday, Illini football coach and man who doesn't need your advice about opening that pickle jar just give him a second ok Tim Beckman spoke to reporters. Let's check in on Beck Man.

Usually, this is a time for Beck Man to stand astride a podium, cape fluttering in the fan he has brought, while he denounces Northwestern and issues boasts and taunts from the anti-Wildcat underground, but this year Beckman immediately found himself dealing with reports about player abuse allegations. The Chicago Tribune recently spoke to 50 Illini current and former Illini players about the allegations. It is clear that Beckman will continue to face questions that he'd rather not answer when he should be preparing for a Soldier Field hat defense.

Big Ten media days are a pointless, ridiculous exercise in nonsense. None of the coaches will say anything particularly noteworthy about his program and none of them want to be there when they could be screaming at teenagers to run into inanimate objects in the sweltering Midwestern sun. On the other hand, media day means that we draw ever closer to football season and the attendant miseries.

BRITISH SOCCER MOVIE REVIEW

What happens when a group of race car conman billionaires takes over a sports team, attempts to rocket them to glory, turns into a global cabal of Steinbrenners, and hires someone to film it? The end result is The Four Year Plan, directed by Mat Hodgson about the rise of Queens Park Rangers to the Premier League.

The film covers the 2007 purchase of Queens Park Rangers by a consortium of billionaires including F1 racing honchos Bernie Ecclestone, Flavio Briatore, and Alejandro Agag and Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, rescuing the club from bankruptcy. The investors were interested in QPR because of its history (founded in 1882), location in West London, and presumably a whimsical name that brings to mind an ambitious episode of Walker Texas Ranger where he traverses the Atlantic to jump kick English cattle rustlers. Their goal: to raise QPR from the second-tier Championship to the lucrative Premier League.

FLAVIO: We need to work on our set piece
ECCLESTONE: We should set a piece of this stadium on fire and collect
the insurance money
BOTH: ho ho ho ho ho ho ho

The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers. Scandal has dogged Briatore wherever he has gone; he spent several years dodging prison from numerous fraud convictions in Saint Thomas and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, spent portions of the 1980s as an Italian Elmore Leonard character:

In 1986, in Milan, Briatore was sentenced to 3 years for fraud and conspiracy for his role in a team of confidence tricksters who, over a number of years, set up rigged gambling games using fake playing cards. The judges described these as elaborate confidence tricks, in which victims were invited to dinner and then "ensnared" in rigged games that involved a cast of fictional characters and realised enormous profits for their perpetrators.

Hodgson's cameras follow Briatore as he stalks about the club. He denounces managers as idiots. He disparages players in the stands with Director of Football Gianni Paladni. He orders substitutions from the owner's box. He walks around in hilarious European rich person puffy jackets presumably invented to prevent a disgruntled peasant from stabbing him with the jagged edge of a stale baguette in a Parisian uprising. Briatore, who goes through no less than five managers in his first two years with the club, comports himself like a ludicrous and incompetent dictator.

Gianni Paladini enjoys a soccer game. Paladini comes across in the movie as Briatore's lackey, but
had actually been a powerful agent who had purchased a stake in QPR in 2003. In fact, in 2006, he
was involved in a bizarre incident where he claimed that a minority owner had hired a gang of "hard men"
to intimidate him into selling his stake during a match. You should read that whole article as it is
completely fucking insane and something that Hodgson doesn't mention at all in the movie.
Flavio Briatore is the angry man gesturing behind him.
In an related note, that is pretty much how I watch all sporting events

The best part of the movie by far is when QPR fans revolt. They chant "FUCK FLAVIO." They angrily sing "we want our Rangers back" to the tune of La Donna e Mobile while scuffling with police, their blood-curling aria echoing through the streets of Shepherd's Bush. Briatore tells a group of fans that he will sell the team and leave it to rot while obsequious hangers-on beg him to stay. He demands names. What Flavio Briatore would possibly do with the names of people who boo him is unclear; I like to imagine he will use his billions to set up a fake sweepstakes luring them to his private island where they will be hunted for sport, not by Briatore, but by a group of Robert Muldoon-like characters he has flown in while he hovers over the island in a helicopter denouncing them as shitty, incompetent hunters using the speaker system from Apocalypse Now.

The other major figure who emerges is Amit Bhatia, an investment banker and Mittal's son-in-law. Bhatia comes across as a slick but enthusiastic bean counter who acts as the more reasonable counterweight to Briatore. He becomes the central face of ownership after Briatore steps down, tainted by an F1 match-fixing scandal. Shortly after, QPR poaches manager Neil Warnock and rockets to the top of the table. Yet, even the team's greatest triumph remains mired in scandal. The Football Association launches an investigation into an illegal transfer. The FA threatened fines and a points deduction that would strip QPR of its championship and automatic promotion to the Premier League. It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the film that the most touching moment of catharsis is not the team's locker room celebration after clinching the championship, but Paladini jubilantly sprinting through the stadium screaming "NO POINTS DEDUCTIONS!"

The film is an odd window into a deliriously dysfunctional sports organization. Again, Hodgson remains upfront that the funding for the movie came primarily from the ownership, which he depicts as operating with operatic absurdity (it never acknowledges the various scandals and corruption allegations floating around Briatore and Ecclestone and their role in Britatore's exit). Though the movie has the rhythms of an underdog sports movie, we rarely see the players and have little sense of what is going on on the field. We keep track of the team's progress by seeing them progress up and down the table and through montages of the owners celebrating or angrily calling for the manager's head. Managers get more screen time, but come across like teenagers in the first 20 minutes of a slasher film, given veneers of personality before they are inevitably axed. Hodgson is more concerned with showing how Bhatia saves money by purchasing less ostentatious food and floral arrangements than why QPR has gone from mid-table embarrassment to champions. But that perspective is more compelling than the traditional narrative, not only because it is a part of sports not often captured, but also because Flavio Briatore comes across as irresistibly loathsome.

Manager Neil Warnock celebrates the 2011 championship. Ecclsteone quickly sold his share
to an ownership group headed by Malaysian airline magnate Tony Fernandes. Fernandes
fired Warnock into his first season in the Premier League, but QPR continued to scuffle
and was relegated back to the Championship after only one season

The Four Year Plan resonates because it illustrates the helplessness of sports fans when it comes to ownership. The movie depicts a team saved and backed by the unexpected largesse of deep-pocketed owners, but kept in chaos by volatile, impetuous, and incompetent management. Capricious owners have been around since the concept of owning sports teams was invented, but the almost unimaginable expenses and profits associated with modern professional sports and the globalization of leagues has amplified effects. Fans of teams with meddling, boorish, incompetent owners have no recourse other than futile chants and angry arias. The exception remains the Green Bay Packers, and I hate them so much that I hope their team is purchased by a Habsburg who moves the team to Jacksonville and changes the name to the Muskie Haters.

DON'T DESPAIR IT IS NEARLY FOOTBALL

If there is one thing more arbitrary and absurd than professional sports ownership, it is the NCAA. We are only about a month away from the season opener against Stanford, quarterback-related anguish, silent home snap counts, and hat vengeance.

Good Gravy, Northwestern Football is Almost Here

Bear Attacks

Let's All Freak Out About Football

TREMBLE, BIG TEN

Tremble Big Ten, Unironically

Invincible Fortress Evanston

It Has Been Zero Years since Northwestern Last Won a Bowl Game

YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SAFE FROM THE FOURTH QUARTER

The Huskening now with BYCTOM NBA Preview

The Season's Not Over Until You Pry a Hat From My Cold, Dead, Head

Notre-Dame: This is Northwestern Football

The Least Northwestern of Games

HATURDAY HATPOCALYPSE HAT GAME BOWL GAME HAT

Remember the Maine

Cubs Baseball Returns to Make You Miserable

BYCTOM Investigates!

This Post Was Hacked

Televised List-Reading

Words, Words About Sports

Media Day