BRING YOUR CHAMPIONS, THEY'RE OUR MEAT

Oh it is coming. August is the first ripple in the water glass, next is the coaches goldblumically cackling their way through press conferences, then a goat is dismembered, a lawyer flees to a toilet, and college football season comes stomping out of its paddock, bellowing its blood-curdling roar.

Across the country, college football teams are baking in the sun, running into blocking sleds, and getting screamed at by crew-cut wearing millionaires. The Northwestern Wildcats are in Kenosha, trying to figure out who will be the quarterback. Defending national champions Ohio State (good grief) are turning their training camp into a reality show called "Scarlet and Gray Days," which, stunningly, is not a turgid nineteenth century Southern Gothic epic.

Last season, a bunch of morons had declared the Big Ten dead and buried, including the least-informed football blogger in the world. Bowl season, however, eased those doubts, with the conference scoring several close wins over highly-ranked teams. Statistically, a close win in a single game depends so heavily on chance that no thinking person can possibly assume it means anything; these games have naturally has fueled the discourse on college football since time immemorial. Ohio State returns as the consensus favorite amongst the football yellerati after downing Alabama and Oregon with a third-string quarterback. Michigan seems poised for a return to prominence under Jim Harbaugh. The Big Ten refuses to be anyone's punching bag until the first significant out-of-conference loss, in which case the Big Ten will return to its perception as a conference of ignorant fullbacks and linebackers squinting quizzically at the flickering shadow of a forward pass on a cave wall.

BYCTOM BIG TEN PREVIEW

Fortunately, the Wildcats will be avoiding the Buckeyes this season. Another East powerhouse, Michigan State, will mercifully remain off the schedule as well. Rutgers and Maryland as yet exist on the "here be dragons" portion of the Big Ten map. Instead, let us turn to an exhaustively-researched and comprehensive preview of the Big Ten West and East Division Interlopers as they appear on Northwestern's schedule while pretending they won't be effortlessly clobbered by the invincible Wildcat football team.

Minnesota Golden Gophers
Minnesota, led by crimson walrus Jerry Kill, appears to be a program on the rise. They took an 8-4 record to the Citrus Bowl. Minnesota had been a Big Ten cellar-dweller and reliable Wildcat victim; from 2007-2012, the 'Cats won five out of six. More importantly, Northwestern had some spectacular Metrodome mojo, with two of the most absurd endings to a football game I've seen within the arena's glorious roof-pouch. Minnesota had been a welcome sight on the schedule, a cobblestone on the yellow brick road to Pizza City. Now, they are a much improved team that has irritatingly beaten Northwestern the last two years-- once with an assistant coach at the helm filling in for an ailing Kill, the other time with a 100-yard fourth-quarter kick return. The 'Cats may regain the advantage this year by playing at Ryan Field in front of a river of maroon that has seeped down Interstate 94. As with most Big Ten opponents, Northwestern will be relying on the home field advantage of hoping that the visiting team tenses up and gets nervous in front of an overwhelming deluge of their friends, family, and supporters and the dozens of purple-clad handclaws occasionally voicing their disapproval.

Michigan Wolverines
The Michigan Wolverines suffered the apparently unbearable burden of being kind of bad for more than one season. The team devolved into a rudderless mess with a mediocre coach, regarded by Michigan fans as a catastrophe on par with a situation where the President of the United States has dissolved the court system and replaced all jurisprudence with trial by monster truck rally. Michigan fans would only accept one man for the job. And, because it is not feasible to have a team coached by an animatronic Bo Schembechler standing on the sidelines spitting out dot matrix printouts of what Bo Schembechler would do in any given situation, they decided to hire an unhinged football monomaniac.

I can't wait to hate Jim Harbaugh. He comports himself like a nineteenth-century military officer just returned from some colonial posting no longer able to function in the West where he has to answer to a doddering hierarchy of muttonchopped generals. Even by the insane standards of football coaches, whose lives revolve around yelling and watching film and taking fanboats to the east end of nowhere to convince a 300-pound 16-year-old to allow himself to be yelled at by them for the next four years, Harbaugh is intense. He seems to strive to exist in a world of wide-eyed zeal, where humans only communicate in elaborate football play argots, where discourse is limited to talking about how determined you are, and where the punishments for variation in pants style are unspeakably draconian. He is also a very good football coach and that is intolerable.

Harbaugh politely disagrees with a holding call

Northwestern had their window. Michigan had never been so vulnerable. And, with this final shot at crushing the Wolverines in front of a group of demoralized Michigan fans for once coming into Ryan Field with the slightest tinge of doubt in their inevitable victory, the 'Cats could not pull it off. Instead, the teams engaged in an embarrassing display of quasi-football, immortalized now as the M00N game. Neither team could score, hold onto the ball, or attempt any sort of coordinated movement that did not result in a Buster Keaton calamity. Fitzgerald decided to go for two and Siemian fell onto his buttocks and now Northwestern may never beat the Wolverines again.

But what if something goes horribly awry? What if, for some unfathomable reason, Harbaugh's tin-pot dictatory doesn't work in Ann Arbor? What if all of the shouting and baiting officials and making dumb turning into Ghostrider faces can't turn Michigan around and the program continues to list like once-stately liner careening into an iceberg? What if Harbaugh gets run out on a rail, with angry Michigan alumni braying about him being tainted by the NFL and the Michigan Men condemn him for not living up to their hilariously lofty Michigan coach should be on the list of possible emergency presidential successors in the face of numerous simultaneous calamities standards and bray on the internet about things being UNACCEPTABLE?

That turn of events would somehow justify the existence of college football.

Iowa
The Werther's Originals of football teams takes to the field again under Kirk Ferentz. Ferentz's team has fallen from its mid-decade heights challenging for Big Ten titles and some Iowa fans have begun to lose their patience. He remains dedicated to the platonic, plodding ideal of Big Ten football, churning out endless highlight reels of guards running into people. There's nothing flashy, exciting, or particularly irksome about Iowa football except somewhere along the way they have become blood-rivals with Northwestern and should probably be crushed, with all Iowa merchandise loaded onto a boat armada and burned in the middle of Lake Michigan witnessed only by a single contemptuous man.

For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Iowa and Northwestern traded off foiling each others' hopes of contention and losing quarterbacks. The stakes, however, have vanished. Now, with the Hawkeyes stagnating at Insight Bowl levels and the Wildcats bereft of bowls entirely, the rivalry seems brief and fleeting.

Ferentz reignites Northwestern/Iowa enmity by cruelly accusing him of inadequate fist pumping
and taking it more than one play at a time out there

Whatever lingering antipathy has declined at the same time as the Rise of Beck Man. There is nothing the University of Iowa can possibly do that can match his ludicrous Northwestern bashing. Iowa fans no longer care about this quasi-rivalry since Northwestern has ceased to be a thorn in their side. That is why it is imperative that the Hawkeyes get hot and win all of their games before rolling into Ryan Field and losing on a preposterous series of laterals so Northwestern fans have another fanbase that might hate them before Beckman volunteers for interplanetary travel to start a pointless rivalry with theoretical Martian bacteria.

Nebraska
When Nebraska entered the Big Ten, Northwestern fans immediately demanded to know: who is the true NU? Here's a quick rundown of the case: Northwestern fans claim NU since the school is literally "Northwestern University." Nebraska fans counter by having had no idea that Northwestern had a football team with uniforms and everything. Since then, there has been a tense but civil NU détente between the fans because the controversy is inane even by college football standards, a sport where people get incensed by a victorious team scoring too many points.

Last year, the Huskers defeated Northwestern and turned our Homecoming into a pitiless sea of red. Now, the 'Cats have to face thousands of Nebraska fans in Lincoln without the benefit of Dracula jerseys. The Huskers have a new coach this season, Mike Reilly from Oregon State. Jug-eared cave person Bo Pelini has returned home to Youngstown State because he has figured out that there are entire generations of Youngstonians who have not been screamed at within two inches of their face. The best way to beat Nebraska is to reclaim the crowd advantage so if you're some wealthy teeth-clenching monocle enthusiast planning to name a building on Northwestern's campus, why not endow a Chair of Showing Them What It's Like instead, buy every goddamn ticket in their stadium, and flood it with Northwestern fans or, in a pinch, Kansas State fans with holdover anti-Nebraska animus?

Penn State

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, FRANKLIN, WHEN YOU DUCK NORTHWESTERN IN THE PAST

Purdue
Ten years ago, Purdue was riding high in the Big Ten, with a conveyor belt of quarterback champions. Kyle Orton played there, and I can think of no greater aspiration for a football fan than rooting for Kyle Orton. Now, the post-Tillman Boilermakers are a living museum of football indignity. The high-flying offenses are probably a thing of the past because who the hell knows what kind of offense Purdue runs. The coaching staff probably puts in a tape and then says the hell with it and watches a bunch of Magnum PI reruns before passing out in their Strategy Caboose. Everything about Purdue football is misery. Even Northwestern, at its depths of ineptitude, managed to lose operatically, setting records and throwing things into lakes. It would take a herculean effort to throw anything larger than a shoulder pad into the Wabash River.

The Wabash river is further east on this map, but look at what's going on near the stadium.
Beck Man would never stand for that. He would have that street name changed immediately
to That Road Up North, Chief Boulevard, or Fill In Field Here Before Submitting Form

Purdue muddles through, eclipsed even by its slightly-less-moribund state rival Indiana, bucketless and heartbroken. Northwestern-Purdue will kick off at 8:30 AM, reluctantly televised with commentary recycled from an old copy of NCAA '05.

Wisconsin

There was uncharacteristic intrigue in Madison this off-season as head coach Gary Andersen decamped to Oregon State. He filled the vacancy left by Mike Reilly, who left for Nebraska. The Badgers failed to close the circular coaching loop by hiring Bo Pelini. Instead, they brought in long-time assistant coach Paul Chryst from Pitt. Once again, Barry Alvarez descended from the his lofty perch in the athletic department to lead the Badgers to an Outback Bowl victory. This is the closest thing to a statue coming to life to coach a football team until the technology is perfected by Penn State scientists.

Wisconsin football is not about gracefully lofting passes over a defense. It is about running around them, over them, and preferably through them by using Wisconsin's hulking offensive linemen and the parts of defenders that are still stuck to them from the week before. Last year, the Badgers had one of the most comically lopsided offenses in college football, with Melvin Gordon wreaking havoc behind a typical wall of beef while the passing game approximated the replacement of a football with a regulation anvil. Then, Wisconsin came into Evanston and decided to air it out.

And pass they did. Badger fans stood there, stunned, as their quarterbacks heaved up 29 miserable passes into the field, off of helmets, and into the waiting hands of Gordon Igwebuike. Time and time again, Melvin Gordon ran the ball close to the endzone and then watched helplessly as an inexplicable series of passes flew anywhere but. Andersen and his coaches became textbook victims of what I call Vizzini's Law: never try to do the unexpected when the unexpected is unexpected because it is self-evidently dumb.

"The wide receivers will be wide open," Wisconsin offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig
cackled while calling for another Joel Stave rollout

BYCTOM PREVIEW NUGGET: Wisconsin will probably run the ball a lot this year.

Illinois

Beck Man finally did it. After years of clumsy rival-mongering and quizzically squinting at something in the middle distance, Ham Fistman managed to beat the 'Cats at home in a loser doesn't get to go to a crappy bowl game match. And, given an entire off-season to luxuriate in his possession of the Hat, perhaps Beckman will grow from his glories. Perhaps he'll make the Hat an assistant coach (Coach Hat says you're only giving me 105 percent out there), change his name to Beck Hatman, or walk around Champaign in a home-made hat-cape-- these are all things that most of us would do if we won as prestigious a trophy as the Lincoln Hat. The Wildcats won't get a chance to wrest the Hat from Beckman in Champaign. Instead, the contest moves to Soldier Field, Chicago's Big Ten Neutral Site, in order to seize the attention of Chicagoans interested in a Northwestern/Illinois game only if the halftime show consists of 25 guys simultaneously screaming about Jay Cutler.

Tim Beckman is the greatest thing to happen to this football blog. He has single-handedly taken a rivalry that was at best ironic and elevated it into something approaching an actual rivalry. He then backed up his talk steering his team into an abysmal record while bumbling around the sidelines and getting bowled over by the occasional referee. He comported himself at all times like he was flummoxed by an unfamiliar frozen yogurt ordering procedure. And, in a satisfying narrative twist, he somehow beat Northwestern, not only winning the Hat, but winning a golden ticket to lose a Conference USA team in a bowl game, which is the platonic ideal of stakes for an Illinois-Northwestern football game. Beckman may not last past this season if the Illini are crappy again, but he has already accomplished everything there is to accomplish in the game of football.

It is football season. It is Hat Season.

How is this possible?

Michigan players dashed into action. They vaulted over benches and spun around sideline personnel. The holder came sliding in like a Beastie Boy navigating a car hood in the Sabotage video. And the kick went up with less than one second preventing a Northwestern Big Ten victory, the longest second that has occurred since human beings invented the idea of measuring time.

Fuck.

Northwestern has had bad seasons. The entire Northwestern experience is wrapped in those bad experiences. Even if you were not alive when the Wildcats lost 267 consecutive games by 800 points apiece, were (possibly apocryphally) defeated by Interstate 94, and began each game by hastily reviewing the rules of football that players had put off learning because of the accelerated pace of midterm exams due to the quarter system, the history of crappy Northwestern football is imbued into your brain as a Northwestern fan. You may not have chanted "we are the worst" or participated in an aquatic grow-a-goalpost experiment, but your collective fan memory has. Northwestern's historical crappiness is the foundation of the Northwestern football narrative. The 'Cats were bad. They were the worst. Dennis Green. Then they were surprisingly good and lost the Rose Bowl. And now they are fine.

But there's a difference between the outright historical futility of Northwestern football and whatever the hell is going on. You could secure a grant, hire a dozen football chaos theoreticians of both bearded and non-bearded variety, put them into a lab with a simulated Ryan Field and moveable Northwestern figurines, and a Pat Fitzgerald action figure with Kung-Fu Fist Pump Action, and 50,000 simulated Nebraska fans, and I'm not quite sure they could invent the ways that Northwestern has lost so far.

Northwestern might win by a field goal or a butterfly flaps its wings on Deering
Meadow and, ah, the other team runs 45 consecutive laterals with no time
remaining and are stopped on the one-yard line, but get the chance to sneak it in
because the referees have discovered a loophole left over from the nineteenth
century that penalizes Fitzgerald for not having a festive boater hat and insulting
the game with his bare-headed impudence and then the game ends and Ryan Field
spontaneously bursts into flames MUST GO FASTER

Northwestern came into this season with so much promise and hype. Then, the season has been derailed by offensive woes and the disappearance of Venric Mark into the Springfield Mystery Spot. There is no joy. There is no hope. Football is despair, misery, and, to be honest, kind of darkly funny at this point because it should not be possible to keep losing games like this unless they are making weekly appearances in inspirational sports movies as the opponents in the last game of the season.

POTENTIAL ANTI-NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL CONSPIRACIES

Northwestern lost to Michigan in an absurdly heart-breaking manner on Saturday. It is clear at this point that it is not just bad luck and poor late-game coaching and execution that is dooming the 'Cats. Instead, it must be all part of some sort of nefarious anti-Northwestern plot concocted by dark forces beyond our comprehension. A brief survey of potential plotters:

The Soviet Union
Northwestern deployed its America Uniforms in order to America its opponent last Saturday. The mainstream media wants you to believe that the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991. But its clear that the Soviet government has remained operating in secret since then, plotting Soviet revenge and churning out Soviet documents in a shadowy reverse samizdat process. It's also clear that the Northwestern uniforms from last week were a provocation that could no longer be ignored. Let's be clear: for legal reasons, I am not alleging that the Michigan special teams unit is made up of Soviet sleeper agents who are identified by discreet Ivan Drago tattoos, that they met in secret before the game to sing the Soviet national anthem, and then they unfurled a giant poster of the guy who used to wrestle professionally in Soviet underpants. I'm just asking questions.

The Bohemian Grove
Long thought by conspiracy theorists to be a gathering by various global elites for secret meetings to consolidate their power and perform bizarre rituals, the Bohemian Grove has recently been revealed to be site where global elites gather to destroy Northwestern football. Insider sources tell BYCTOM that the Grove visitors enjoy acting out failed Northwestern offensive remade into light operettas, having hundreds of pizzas delivered to the Fitzgerald residence before big games, and somehow manipulate global economic systems and politics to a pinpoint degree to affect football recruiting, weather conditions, officiating, and the rules of football that will somehow end in a Northwestern loss because of a minor fluctuation in the stock price of a Swiss hedge fund.

Former Head Basketball Coach Bill Carmody
Carmody attempted to take the 'Cats to the dance for more than a decade. Earlier this year, he saw the football team's ignominious bowl record shattered in a glorious Gator Bowl victory. A few months later, he was fired. Shortly after, Carmody disappeared. Some say he has moved on from Northwestern as a sought-after guru of the Princeton Offense. Others say he has moved into the tunnel system underneath the university, wearing a mask for some reason, and is determined to never let the football team steal his glory again. Carmody and his shadowy operatives drawn from the former Yugoslavia have furtively followed the football team, they've divulged the meaning of those weird offense signal signs to opposing defensive coordinators, greased Northwestern footballs, and replaced one of the referees for the Ohio State game with a man named "Milos Fourthdownavic."

Calves' Head Club
A secret society devoted to mocking the death of Charles I through various food items: a cod's head to symbolize the beheaded king, a pike representing tyranny, boars' heads because Charles preyed on his subjects, and calves' heads representing Charles and his supporters. Maybe it's my twenty-first century manners poking through, but that dinner is really heavy on heads. The Calves' Head Club was broken up by an angry mob in 1734. Now, they meet to make fun of Northwestern's terrible season. They eat tiny frankfurters cut into four by one inch pieces to commemorate the Ohio State game, a bowl of corn flakes to celebrate the hail mary by Ron Kellogg III, and then they rub themselves in pig entrails to represent the Michigan game.

Tim Beck Man, Head Coach, University of Illinois Football
Sometimes, you make an elaborate cork board to trace the various ways that various shadowy organizations have it in for the Wildcats. And sometimes you think about who benefits the most and all becomes clear. Tim Beckman is sabotaging Northwestern football because he wants the Hat. Last year, the 'Cats humiliated his Illini and left him miserable and hatless in the cold. This year, he has pulled no punches. I am confident that Beckman has assembled a coterie of the nation's most deranged Lincoln impersonators to help him pull a series of daring wrecking operations to destroy Northwestern's morale before the Hat Game by convincing them that the Hat should be closer to Springfield. Beckman has stopped at nothing. He has disguised himself as Northwestern equipment managers and long-snappers, infiltrated the Wildcat video room, and replaced Big Ten chain gangs with clean-shaven Lincoln impersonators whose lack of beard allows them to roam amongst us undetected. Sure, this has not helped the Illini this season. They are equally winless in the Big Ten and Beckman nearly attacked his own offensive coordinator last week. But Tim Beckman doesn't think in terms of wins and losses or titles. He thinks in terms of hats and no hats, he has no sense of right and wrong, and he is determined to win the hat at all costs.

MICHIGAN STATE IS THIS WEEKEND

The grim season marches on as Northwestern is forced by some arcane, awful rule to play another football game on Saturday. Sure, it might be wearying to think of insane Rube Goldberg scenarios where Northwestern can let another one slip away. Instead, though, this is a significant opportunity. Michigan State are in the driver's seat of the LEGENDS Division, and no one on the planet think Northwestern can come out on top here. But this is just the opportunity for an improbable and absurd win. I fully expect Northwestern to hang in there all game and then, on the last possession, throw one victory right pass followed by 15 Reverse Victory Right backward passes and then weave their way to the endzone for America.

Keep the faith, 'Cats fans. Sometimes you win games, sometimes you lose games, and sometimes you lose games despite the fact that it should be impossible to lose them because of things like the physical laws of the universe. No matter what, the Wildcats continue to suit up and smash into other teams. The odds are against Northwestern. Clearly, unknown shadowy forces are against Northwestern. The Michigan State Spartans are definitely against Northwestern. As fans, though, we can do nothing less than support their effort, cheer on the seniors, and possibly die from emotional trauma.

HAT-- Hat!

Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat. Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat? Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat; hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat! Hat-- hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat.

Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat. Hat hat hat hat hat.

Hat hat hat hat?

Hat.

Hat.

Hat hat hat

Hat hat hat hat hat.

THE LAND OF LINCOLN TROPHY

It is Hat Week. Hide your valuables. Send your loved ones away.

Northwestern's season has come down to this. The Wildcats have not won a football game since September 21st. They will not be bowling. They have suffered a litany of football indignities too gruesome to describe on the way to a stunningly awful season. There is no hope. There is no redemption. There is only Hat.

Last week, Michigan State did something only few other teams have been able to do on a miserable, cold, windy day in Evanston (and lest you think it was not windy, I defy you to rewatch the game and count how many seconds it would take ESPN's ace announcing crew to refrain from talking about the wind. That's why Northwestern is Chicago's Big Ten team-- because the announcers will not stop talking about wind conditions). They decisively beat the Wildcats without having to resort to some bizarre, last-minute, physics-defying, deity-intervening play. The 'Cats moved the ball well on the Spartan defense in the first half, but the loss of Kain Colter to injury and some big offensive plays from Michigan State tipped the game in their favor, Northwestern lost, and now hat.

There is one indignity so wretched and one low that Northwestern has avoided so far: to lose The Hat to a woeful Illinois team coached by Beck Man. And that reduced this season to a single game.

I don't care that the 'Cats are not going to Indianapolis, and I don't care that they're not ranked, and I don't care that they have lost every game in an increasingly horrifying fashion that has convinced me that we are living in Homeric times and Pat Fitzgerald has accidentally started a petty feud with a lesser ancient Greek demigod who has decided to punish his fist-pumping hubris with a series of outlandish defeats. This season has been a waking nightmare, but these seasons happen and Northwestern will return to bowl contention. But I care deeply about the Hat and all hat-related ideas, and I refuse to see the Land of Lincoln trophy spirited away by that purple-hating, no Northwestern sign-having, "that school up north" referring, visor-wearing, sub-Zookian geek show from Champaign-Urbana.

THE HATFIELDS AND THE NO HATFIELDS

General Beckman was confident coming off his first conference victory at West Lafeyette. By the end, soldiers had written that he was at the end of his rope. He had in the past been reprimanded for sideline interference and the unauthorized use of mouth tobacco, so it was no surprise that he had attacked a subordinate with a spittoon. There's no evidence for this, but a rumor had started that said he had long, bleary-eyed late night conversations with a hat that he whittled.

Historians now believe Beckman's campaign was derailed by
his unceasing obsession with hat-vengeance

Letter from the front of Tim Beckman's War on Northwestern

November 25

Dear Mother,

It is cold. The lads were heartened by our victory in West Lafayette. We were far from home and the enemy had a train and a drum. Gen. Beck-Man had us return home and dig trenches around the hat. We are tired, we are strained, we have a losing record. One weary soldier has mentioned something about basketball season, and when Gen. Beck-Man heard about this, he said I'll show you a basketball and tried to dunk on an entrenched artillery piece. He has reprimanded us ordering the officers to violently rip hats off of our heads. They do this half-heartedly. I long to come home, but I suppose we may not until Gen. Beck-Man finally gets his hat or is fired out of a cannon.

M.F.B.

Beckman's men were exhausted. He had marched them day and night from Indiana, but refused to proceed in a Northern or Western direction because they didn't do that in his company. He had an officer plot out a route that included an Atlantic crossing and the Cape of Good Hope. Instead, the officers ceremonially renamed the directions "Chief" and "Dee Brown." Their compasses were artfully redesigned (chuckles softly to no one).

November 29

Dear Mother,

We are under constant watch. Some of us have begun to refer to Gen. Beck-Man as "Lord Stovepipe." He has taken our razors and made us wear long beards to look "more civil warry." Only one man has tried to desert, but he was found by J Leman and ceaselessly pelted with monocles. We have been building a giant Pat Fitzgerald out of straw and our unit must attack it each day and take the hat from its head. It is shoddily built, and has fallen on many good men. We dare not question or protest. We can only shout "Chicago's Big Ten Team," affix our bayonets, and hope that we avoid its flailing fists.

M.F.B.

HAT, NOW

This is the last game of the season. The Wildcats can salvage some hope against an equally downcast Illinois team or face a cold, hatless winter. Let us endure one more game, let us rally for The Hat, let us flood Memorial Stadium with our Lincoln regalia, let us spend the rest of our lives taunting our Illini friends and loved ones by wearing nothing but stovepipes in their vicinity, let us hope we have Tim Beckman to kick around for as many seasons as it takes to drive him into hat-madness.

Hat?

Hat.

Well, they got the hat.

Northwestern's football season was plagued by misfortune and we spent a horrifying winter without the relief of a soothing, crappy bowl game. But (and you know this because it happened apparently several months ago), the Wildcats somehow managed to outfox Beck Man, our Great Nemesis and retain possession of the most dapper football-related trophy in all of nineteenth-century fashion. Equally importantly, I am pretty sure I ended up on some sort of list after sending a barrage of demented hat-tweets directly to whoever runs Tim Beckman's twitter feed:

@coachbeckman IT WILL TAKE YOU FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS TO BRING FORTH A HAT FROM EVANSTON
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 29, 2013

@coachbeckman Instead of referring to NU as "that school up north" please refer to it as Hat Town, USA
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 29, 2013

@coachbeckman hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat ha
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) December 1, 2013

Though I received no official response to these sophisticated and elegant tweets to the Illini Athletic Department, I would like to think that Beckman spent the evening prank calling everyone in Illinois named George McLellan and then ordering an absurd amount of hats off an internet haberdashery to hoard in his home's hat annex.

Rumors swirled in the treacherous college football offseason that Beckman might get fired. Instead, the Illini will bring him and his absurd anti-Northwestern crusade back for another year because, according to highly-placed Illini sources, "someone playing up a football rivalry with Northwestern is the only thing we could think of that is funnier than Ron Zook." I have no idea what Beckman has planned for next year. For a small fee, however, I am officially making myself available to the University of Illinois to be their first Butkus Chair, Department of Northwestern Antagonism. Together, we will rent orange blimps to constantly hover over Evanston, dropping anti-Fitzgerald propaganda; we will deploy larger and more aggressive tarps at Memorial Stadium; we will petition to ban Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and The Color Purple from all University of Illinois-affiliated libraries; we will put up billboards that say "Illinois's Big Ten Team and In Case You Noticed, That Includes the Entire Chicagoland Metropolitan Area, Checkmate Motherfuckers."

Anti-Northwestern Propaganda Leaflet

Hat or no hat, Northwestern football is past a disappointing season, and fans can look towards next year. Venric Mark will return, along with several key players on defense. Kain Colter, however, will be moving on, but not before attempting to organize a union of football players. Colter and his supporters argue that football players are employees that should be allowed to collectively bargain with universities and challenge restrictions on transfers and loss of scholarships due to injury. The Northwestern administration argues that the players remain in the nebulous "student athlete" category who play in exchange for a free education unrelated to the millions generated by television deals, merchandise sales, and other piles of money generated by college athletics. After months of sophisticated legal analysis, the only way to resolve this is a strike by the nation's football players forcing university administrators to don helmets instead of canceling thousands of lucrative home games. College football analysts will hastily reorganize their preseason rankings based on whether you can run the wishbone effectively in full academic regalia, which dean gets to be quarterback, and which university has the meanest, most bone-crunching vice provost.

NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL: EQUALLY BENIGHTED

What say you, Chris Collins? Last year, Northwestern fired long-time basketball head coach Bill Carmody. Carmody led the 'Cats to several NIT berths, but could never quite make it to the promised tournament. I prefer to think that the methodical Princeton offense secretly irritated the brass, with high-ranking Northwestern administrators throwing things at their television every time they saw a backdoor layup developing or an opposing player working his way through the 1-3-1 zone to brutally dunk on a hapless defender.

Chris Collins was brought in to try to mold the Wildcats into a tournament team. He brings youthful enthusiasm, a commitment to recruiting the Chicago area, and an association with the universally-loved Duke basketball program.

Chris Collins and Mike Krzyzewski are temporarily overwhelmed
by visiting fans' awe and respect for Duke basketball, America's
team

The transition to Chris Collins basketball has been bumpy. The 'Cats are dead last in the Big Ten. They will likely not play in a post-season tournament unless they somehow manage to win the Big Ten Tournament or every single other Big Ten team loses its eligibility because all of their players were replaced with doppelganger ringers that play professional basketball in the off-season in the secret European country that is ruled by Victor von Doom.

Despite these setbacks, there have been some positive things to take away from the season. We got a full season of Drew Crawford, who was injured most of last year. JerShon Cobb also returned to the team before succumbing to a broken foot. There was a brief period of time when Northwestern turned into a defensive juggernaut and somehow beat Wisconsin at the Kohl Center for the first time and a fairly bad Indiana team on the road, and Big Ten teams occasionally had to cope with becoming Tre Demps victims. Then they lost seven in a row, including one game where they scored 32 total points over 40 minutes of basketball.

Collins leads 'Cat Basketball into next season with some of his recruits joining the fold. Big man Alex Olah showed some flashes this season, and Sanjay Lumpkin returns to play some defense and provide a really fun name to yell at people getting dunked upon. No one expects Northwestern to crash the Dance any time soon, but that's part of being a Northwestern fan; anyone who is not prepared to die without seeing Northwestern lose the first match of an NCAA tournament, cheering the Cubs in the World Series, or proclaiming to a mortal enemy that you and me are not so different is setting him or herself up of a lifetime of cruel disappointments.

THE TOWN

The early Victorian scandalous press was a nest of innuendo, bawdy suggestion, extortion, and feuds. In other words, it was the best possible use of presses ever devised by human beings. Donald J. Gray's "Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism: Renton Nicholson's The Town (1837-1842)" is available in the Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff-edited collection of scholarly articles The Victorian Press: Samplings and Soundings, and it's a pretty good way to spend a half-hour. Gray's study of The Town, a relatively cheap periodical that traded on scandal and innuendo,offers a number of trenchant insights into the early Victorian press, the transmission of ideas about social class amongst its working and lower-middle class readers, and how Victorian scandal challenges and reinforces scholarly understanding of Victorian mores in the 1830s and 40s. Instead, however, BYCTOM will pillage this wonderful article for bawdy anecdotes and strip them of context and analysis for cheap laughs because this is a dumb internet blog about a football team.

Gray discusses The Town, as well as other scandalous periodicals including The Age, John Bull, and The Satirist. John Bull initially targeted Queen Caroline, an enemy of her estranged husband, George IV. George, a bloated, pickled, raffish king was repeatedly thwarted by his father's recoveries from mental illness and stubborn refusal to die. He hated Caroline and attempted to divorce her using legislation based on allegations of infidelity (though George himself had been secretly and illegally married to a Catholic woman, Maria Fitzherbert). The bill did not pass and the marriage remained a fraught battlefield. As Gray relates, John Bull fanned the flames of her alleged affair, describing her as "mixed up with a disgraceful and criminal affection for a menial servant." After the Queen's death in 1821, John Bull transitioned into a milder, less scandal-driven publication to my personal dismay.

George IV had the unfortunate luck to live at the same time as British cartoonist
George Cruikshank, who delighted in drawing the despised, spherical monarch.
Here, Cruikshank demonstrates how George successfully fended off radical
petitioners by becoming more buttocks than man

The Age, The Satirist, and The Town were all reliable factories of spectacular Victorian vitriol. The Age, for example, dismissed the renowned essayist William Hazlitt as "Bill Pimple,""an old weather-beaten, pimple-snouted, gin-smelling man, like a Pimlico tailor, with ink-dyed hands, a corrugated forehead, and a spirituous nose." Yet, this gossip was not only directed at literary lions or axe-grinding aristocrats. The columns were filled with gossip about less luminous figures. Those who wished to avoid a public humiliation about unthinkable indiscretions such as young women asking a man to dance could scrub the record for a modest fee. Gray describes this kind of blackmail as an important revenue stream for these publications.

Gray's article, however, focuses mainly on The Town and its founder, Renton Nicholson. Nicholson, a self-styled baron (invariably the best kind of baron), was a colorful figure who gained fame in the 1840s for holding mock trials satirizing infamous divorce cases. Warrick Wroth, the author of a 1907 book called Cremorne and the Later London Gardens, described Nicholson as "a man who knew a thing or two" who had acquired a "remarkable knowledge of the 'flash life' of London in all its grades."

"After a minor experience of gambling-houses and doubtful premises of various
kinds, he became (in 1841) proprietor of the Garrick’s Head in Bow Street, and here,
in a room holding about 300 people, and fitted up like a law-court, he presided—as
Lord Chief Baron Nicholson—over the judge and jury trials that were so attractive to
the Londoner of the forties and fifties. The causes that came before this tribunal
were chiefly matrimonial—the crim. con. cases of the time—and were such that
their obscenity and heartlessness (mitigated, it is true, by flashes of wit) often made
the most hardened sinner shudder." Quotation and illustration from Warrick Wroth,
Cremorne and the Later London Gardens

The Town was a monument to the seedy underbelly of the Victorian press. It allowed Nicholson to attack his enemies. In the late 1830s, he feuded with Barnard Gregory, the editor of The Age, whom he described as "a common extortioner, gaming-house keeper, and brothel spongee." It contained bawdiness. As Gray relates, "Often the Town was simply coarse in its unrelenting play on words like 'work,''thing,''getting up the linen,''working under the butler,' and [Prince] Albert's German sausage again (and again)." More importantly, the Town, which avoided the official stamp duties and sold for a fraction of the cost of its rival publications, served as an instruction manual for its working and lower-middle-class readers with raffish aspirations. Gray describes Nicholson's Town as "something of an enormous guide through a loose and well-populated network of places to drink, eat, smoke, sing, gamble, flirt with pretty women, and meet women of the town..."

Alas, this golden age of scandalous journalism eventually was ground under the heel of Victorian moralism. By the 1850s, the Town and its ilk became unfashionable, with proprietors open to libel suits and obscenity laws. This had to be greatly disappointing to right-thinking people who needed clumsy double-entendres, fist-shaking vitriol, insinuations of social gaffes that are baffling in the twenty-first century, and descriptions of badger-baiting accidents or pheasant hunting chicanery. According to Gray, imitators did spring up with incredible names like Sam Sly-- or, The Town; Paul Pry; Fast Life; Cheap John; and Peeping Tom. I'm not entirely sure that Fast Life, Cheap John, and Peeping Tom are not currently the names of a Morning Zoo radio crew on Z108.5 GUYS, AM I RIGHT?

Perhaps, though, there is nothing more useful I can do than to leave you with the opening paragraph of Renton Nicholson's autobiography, which is how I should start all BYCTOM posts:

Exquisite reader, I have a right to believe you perfection. Let me shake hands with you at starting, for we are bound to travel together in sunlight and in shade, in lively day and dismal night-time; through narrow, devious passages and the mansions of wealth; with Lazarus and with Dives; o'er flowery meads and banks of wild roses; through cities, towns, and hamlets, where humanity dwells 'mid innocence and corruption, where base metal contrasts with unalloyed gold.

SPRING FORWARD

Exquisite reader, I have the right to believe you have wasted time and are now considerably misinformed about scandalous publications and Northwestern men's revenue sports. Let us make fist-claws with you starting, for we are bound to travel in sunlight and in shade, in lively wins and dismal losses, through Wildcat alleys and Welsh-Ryan arenas; with Fitzes and with Collinses; o'er Victory Rights and wild option pitches, through Pizza cities, pizza towns, and pizza hamlets, where humanity sits 'mid legends and leaders, where base helmets contrast with unalloyed hat.

Spring training is winding to a close. The baseball season started last weekend as the Dodgers and Diamondbacks opened play to a crowd of dozens of puzzled Australians who were not told that baseball is about throwing things at people's heads and delivering Shakespearean vengeance soliloquies about swimming pools.

But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What swims he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Gibson the King, McGwire and Mattingly,
Puig and Kershaw, Montero and Trammel-
Be in their flowing pools freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;

The rest of baseballdom continues in its lolling Spring Training doldrums as prospects in high digit uniforms anonymously plug away against pitchers that have not yet destroyed their arm ligaments. This includes the 2014 Chicago Cubs, where anonymous players and futility will continue over the course of 162 meaningless games, most of them losses, by design.

The 2014 Cubs are a postapocalyptic shanty town of a baseball team. There are few players that we can expect to see contribute to the Hypothetical Future Cubs that wins more than 80 games, and any that show any semblance of value will be shipped out and sold for scraps: younger players referred to as "lottery tickets" by baseball bloggers, players to be named later, and the fan favorite Cash Considerations. Only Anthony Rizzo, Welington Castillo, and (for some reason) Starlin Castro will be on the oil tanker when the Cubs ditch the rest of the team and are pursued by the motorcycle-riding, mohawked chap enthusiasts that make up the rest of NL Central in this overwrought Mad Max: The Road Warrior analogy.

I'm one Road Warrior shy of having each dude be a representative of an NL Central opponent, but
we can all agree that the jovial fat guy with the jaunty cap is a murderous Bernie Brewer

The Cubs will continue to lose, and fans are all aware that this is part of the master plan devised by the Cubs Brains Trust. We're all waiting for Albert Almora, Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Jorge Soler to be ready for the majors, and, in the meantime, the Cubs are going to play terrible baseball to allow them to draft the next Kris Bryants and Albert Almoras. Nothing the Cubs do this season matters. Ownership has magnanimously deigned to increase ticket prices, which according to some estimates are the third highest in baseball. And you can't even drown your sorrows in Old Style anymore, which will no longer be sold in the ballpark for absurd prices. This makes no sense because paying north of seven dollars for an Old Style is the exact beer equivalent of paying actual American currency to watch whatever it is Starlin Castro does when he flails futilely at baseballs or throws them at cracker jack vendors he has temporarily confused with Anthony Rizzo because they are both wearing hats.

The Cubs are selling hope and that is all well and good. Major League baseball rewards managers approaching their teams the way the Russian army approached the advancing forces of Napoleon. Free agents are harder to come by, draft slot money is enforced draconically, and the lawless dollar showers in the international market have been limited to the benefit of parsimonious owners. But it's a false hope. There is no guarantee that Bryant, Almora, Soler, and Baez will anchor the Hypothetical Future Winning Cubs-- the analytics movement has been clamping down on nonsense hokum like curses and clutch hitting and "Mickey Mantle" (a fictional baseball player invented in 1987 by Billy Crystal and Bob Costas), but I have no doubt that we can count on Four Separate Misfortunes to prevent any of them from being useful players as the Cubs will remain mired in purgatory for the rest of our short, miserable lives.

Felix Pie found himself in the Wrigleyville Mystery Spot, also known as Baltimore

It is tough to root for the Cubs this season. College sports, for all the hypocrisy, exploitation, money-grubbing, and general sanctimonious bullshit they nourish, at least do not have a framework that rewards losing. At the depths of Northwestern's futility, when it seemed unlikely for them to win a Big Ten game unless they convinced a team to forfeit by constructing a counterfeit Dyche Stadium dozens of miles away surrounded by a Potemkin Evanston, at least they'd give it their all. The Cubs are intentionally terrible, and their awfulness will likely not lead to a World Series. Yet, me and thousands of other dupes will continue to watch because baseball is as good of a waste of time as mankind has invented, and the Cubs have really sharp uniforms. Here are some reasons why we can manage to suck it up and deal with Cubs baseball this year:

-Someone named "Rick Renteria" has been named the new manager, and I'm sure he will do all sorts of exciting managery things like point to his left arm and scowl. The one hit I got for a google search for "rick renteria ejected" leads to an mlb.com article about how he got tossed as Padres first base coach for "engaging in a discussion" with an umpire. This is pretty uninspired, and I'd prefer that any manager is at the very least a 7-Piniella Scale lunatic who is willing to use his bulbous belly as an umpire-seeking missile (in case you were wondering, Dale Sveum was a 4-Piniella manager for having neck veins that flared up like a Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus. Mike Quade's Piniella reading is unavailable-- umpires could not figure out how angry he was because he has no eyebrows).

-Carlos Villanueva is still on the team and last year he had a spectacular curl mustache. Maybe this year, he'll grow some nineteenth century presidential muttonchops.

-Jeff Samardzija still looks like a musketeer, and will probably blame his poor outings on the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu. My prediction is that the Cubs will trade him before the deadline and then he ends up pitching a crucial playoff game against the Hypothetical Future Cubs, only this time he has gotten a sensible haircut and shave just when it would have had finally made sense for him to be sporting Early Modern Vengeance Facial Hair specifically to confound me.

-There are 162 games in a baseball season and regular players will earn north of 500 plate appearances. At some point, it is probable that Starlin Castro will earn a walk or Darwin Barney will hit a baseball with his bat. No guarantees, though, fans.

-Len Casper will attempt to pretend that a shitty Cubs player is turning things around, while in his heart, he knows the sample size is small, the statistic is misleading, and a Ricketts is holding a binder full of spreadsheets hostage at Cubs headquarters.

-Why the watch the goddamn Cubs any year?

-Fuck it dude, let's go bowling.

Cubs fans, we're stuck rooting for this team until the Terror Squirrel takes us to hell

In scant weeks, the college football will again get underway and soon, perhaps as soon as the first forlorn kickoff returner is scraped off the field, it will be time to have The Conversation.

The Conversation dominates college football's bloviosphere for the entire season. Its cosmology is heliocentric; everything revolves around the playoff and, ultimately, the National Championship. For a team must be in The Conversation before it can be in the playoff, and each week, each minute of college football season, unavoidable college football pundits and bloggers and unhinged Finebaum shouters who, without Finebaum, would be forced to call people to yell at them about Alabama one at a time starting with A Aaronson and ending with T Zbikowski to cast teams out of The Conversation like the Almighty banishing Moses from the Promised Land. It is a process so weightily asinine that it requires a Bill Simmons-esque Capitalized Phrase.

The crew of Bloviosphere II begins its two-year project to live in a self-contained ecosystem
generating all of its energy from nightly screaming matches about the SEC.
N.B. College football is so dependent on subjectivity, arguments, and nonsense that it is the
most Bill Simmonsy sport possible-- we should be living in a world where Bill Simmons
develops a feud with Phyllis From Mulga

College football is the only major American sport where The Conversation has tangible effect on determining a champion. There are 128 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision and the sheer impossibility of determining the four top teams results in a hodgepodge of computer formulae, polls filled out by hat-wearing journalists and graduate assistants, Lou Holtz's saliva, residual Civil War animus, and people paying to fly airplane banners over stadiums. Then, a mysterious Committee of Thirteen picks them with no accountability. College football has found the most convoluted, compelling and profoundly stupid way to pick its champion short of Nostradamus texts.

Approximately 90% of the media discussion about college football is about The Conversation and more than 90 of the 128 FBS teams will not be in The Conversation for a single second. Northwestern is one of them.

Also-ran teams in top "Power Five" conferences exist only when a Conversation team rampages through their stadiums with their entourage of bloodthirsty alumni. Those outside the Power Five, the Mid-Majors without the influence and the money and the ludicrous propaganda television networks might as well exist in Siberia or a the very least Moscow, Idaho.

Big Ten Network programming subtly works in a sponsor while airing its The Big Ten Invents
Football: Rutgers documentary

Northwestern, along with the vast majority of college football teams, exists in a shadowy netherworld apart from the dominant college football narrative. These teams toil in relative obscurity as tackling dummies for contenders or by beating up on each other on games televised by contractual obligation that only warrant a passing mention if they end with the requisite number of overtimes, laterals, or 300 pound men precariously running with the football, gleefully living out their Pop Warner touchdown fantasies before they gained several hundred more pounds and coaches convinced them to smash into other giants, triumphantly gallumphing along the sidelines desperately looking for someone to stiff-arm. In an ideal world, these teams are agents of chaos, ruining a contenders' season and exulting in their opponents' shock, sorrow, and internet coach-firing. Notre Dame, for example, deserves the indignity of losing to Northwestern so completely that, if Northwestern did not exist, we would have to invent it and its temporarily unstoppable baseball kicker.

Teams outside of the championship face spread offenses, blitz packages, and genuine existential quandaries. There are 128 teams. There are no draft picks rewarding miserable seasons; the only prize is its merciful end. For these teams, the season is a Sisyphean struggle where quarterbacks metaphorically hand off enormous unmovable rocks. This is the best football.

Fans of teams in The Conversation suffer through football season as a precarious drudge through a dozen potential calamities. Anything short of a championship is agony, a nine-win season is a failure, and anything short of that requires the immediate installation of creepy flight-tracking software to analyze coach movements. In a sport featuring a weird, oblong ball, every unpredictable bounce portends doom and misery, and every discussion of the team welcomes a thousand armchair Napoleons spouting inane theories about a winning mentality.

Turn on the television and college football is about ESPN College Gameday, poll positions, committees, and trophies. But for most fanbases, The Conversation is irrelevant white noise. It is about grasping a frozen beer at 10:00 in the morning before entering an empty, windswept stadium, exulting in invites to the forgettable dregs of bowl season, buckets, Hats, and the faintest hope of ruining the season for some juggernaut team. Their asses will remain uncrowned. It does not matter.

NORTHWESTERN ON THE FIELD

Northwestern has had a rough couple of seasons. The 2012 campaign ended a bowl drought that originated in the Truman administration in a bowl that people actually have heard of. The Wildcats began 2013 with high expectations, eventually summoning College Gameday to campus in a football apocalypse against Ohio State. Since then, it is misery and strife. Northwestern has experienced a beguiling series of impossible, last-second losses culminating in the catastrophic Hat Game Bowl Game defeat at the hands of Beck Man in their own goddamn stadium. There have been no bowl games since the 2013 Gator Bowl. The Hat resides in Champaign, under guard from Beck Man's elite Order of the Mustacheless.

The Order is trained from birth to defend the Hat with hand-to-hand combat, stump
speeches, Abraham Lincoln Trivia facts, period-accurate timepieces, and bo staffs.
Before 2009, they were known as the Order of the Flying Tomahawk with a whole other set of
birth rituals, each of which was probably offensive and problematic, so if you think about it
the whole turnaround into a Lincoln-based artifact-guarding death cult in such a short amount
of time is pretty impressive

The main question is at quarterback. Candidates include big-armed senior Zack Oliver, dual-threat sophomore Matt Alviti, and John Grisham protagonist Clayton Thorson. Less than two weeks before the season opener against Stanford, the quarterback situation remains unsettled. Northwestern does not necessarily need a single incumbent starter. During the Kain Colter/Trevor Siemian heyday, the 'Cats altered quarterbacks successfully; Northwestern should push that further by having at least three quarterbacks on the field at all time, occasionally playing quarterback, occasionally playing other skill positions, and other times simply standing in the backfield attempting to confuse the defense with unpredictable arm motions while Justin Jackson runs around them.

If there is one thing to look forward to on offense, it is the return of Justin Jackson. Jackson seized the starting job as a true freshman after the unexpected departure of star running back Venric Mark. He ran for 1,184 yards despite coming on as the featured back in the third game. As Siemian battled injuries, Jackson carried the offense, including going for 162 in an upset against Wisconsin and 149 against Notre Dame. Jackson's game depends on an expert reading of holes and coverages as he slinks and slithers through the line, ending up where linebackers aren't looking for him.

A frustrated linebacker punches the mirror where he thinks Justin Jackson is, but he is not
there; no, he is 20 yards away, scampering past a hapless safety or maybe he is cutting back,
warding off the nose tackle with his claw hand

The Wildcats will lean heavily on their defense this season. They lost some stalwarts last year including ball-hawking safety Ibraheim Campbell and all-encompassing tackle monster Chi Chi Ariguzo. They return a senior-heavy defensive line and Nick VanHoose at corner. Safety Godwin Igwebuike and linebacker Anthony Walker made excellent debuts last season. Igwebuike picked off three passes in the Wisconsin game alone, although picking off Wisconsin passes is equivalent to 1.65 normal passes since the Badgers only break out the forward pass as a droll party trick. Walker memorably returned a pick for a touchdown in his first start and made another vital pick against Notre Dame off a pass that had comically bonked off a Notre Dame player's helmet.

The road to an unheralded Pizza City bowl game will be difficult. The 'Cats open the season against a strong Stanford team vying for a Pac 12 North title. They also face a resurgent Duke team in Durham. The Big Ten West division does not inspire reverent rhapsodies or rapid mouth-foaming soliloquies on sports talk radio, but it still offers little respite; the 'Cats will likely need to eke out three or even four Big Ten victories to qualify for a bowl game. After Fitzgerald guided Northwestern to five straight bowl appearances, fans had become accustomed to them, treating these excursions to Texas (always Texas) like a dubious birthright. Now, expectations have relaxed. A big upset would be great. Bowl eligibility spectacular. But none of this matters when some Midwestern Roscoe P. Coltrane has absconded with The Hat and it is finally time to do something about it.

NORTHWESTERN OFF THE FIELD

While the Wildcats attract little attention during football season, they've found themselves at the center of the unionization debate. This week, the National Labor Relations Board surprisingly overturned the regional board decision that labeled football players employees and allowed them to vote on forming a union. The NLRB examined the evidence, looked at the trailblazing work by Kain Colter and the CAPA and the growing unease about the way billion dollar sporting leagues are incoherently bolted onto universities and boldly declared: "THE HELL IF I KNOW."

The NLRB overturned the earlier ruling argued that the designation of athletes as employees at a private institution would cause conflicts when expanded to public universities. According to this article, Michigan and Ohio have passed laws specifying that scholarship athletes are not employees in response to Northwestern's initial unionization attempts.

The unionization case has exposed the dark underbelly of college football at Northwestern. The nonsensical marriage of universities and big-time football is endemic and ever-present in the nature of college football the way the air we breathe is rife with microscopic fungus spores and our gas station soda cups are inescapably inundated with images of captain something-or-other who will defend humanity by throwing people into buildings with no apparent effect in an endless series of movies. Even Northwestern, which has recently invested in a series of various-sized tarps to cover up empty stands (ranging from FCS Illinois Team to Purdue and It's Snowing) is inundated with Big Ten Network money and plasters fans with ads from companies who paid actual American dollars to be the Official Such-and-Such of Northwestern Football because they were swindled by some dashing Harold Hill figure.

Players, university officials, and easily-riled internet commenters can debate about the extent to which they feel athletic scholarships adequately compensate athletes for their time or the extent to which unionization is the right path for athletes. But it is also difficult to square the opulent spectacle of college football with the actual demands from Colter's College Athletes Players Association for things like expanded medical care, protection of scholarships, and payment for use of images so they can make some money from when I use a thinly-veiled Kain Colter video game facsimile to get an endless supply of first downs against Virtual Ohio State. It is not clear what behooves the NCAA or its member conferences to increase benefits for players when players have essentially no leverage to play anywhere else until Vince McMahon brings back a new version of the XFL where players are forced to comply with a fringe cowboy hat dress code and play is constantly interrupted by washed-up former players dramatically entering the field while everyone involved unconvincingly feigns stupefaction.

The Macho Man Timmy Hat Rage leaves college to
join the reformed XFL, enjoying a stellar run as a guy
who keeps forgetting his gimmick

FOOTBALL RETURNS

Northwestern is irrelevant in the national media's coverage of college football. But off the field, Northwestern has become the most important team in the country when it comes to showcasing the meaninglessness of the NCAA's "student-athlete" designation. Ultimately, the battle for college athletes to gain what they decide is their fair share of the monstrous profits generated by college sports will continue to dominate the off-field narrative.

But the bizarre nature of college football, almost impossible to explain in the abstract, will once again make sense as soon as the meats sizzle in parking lots, the marching bands blare their Chicago covers, and the students begin ramming into each other for our amusement. Northwestern kicks off against Stanford in two Saturdays and all becomes lost in a haze of tarps and hands contorted into crude wildcat claws. I want college sports to reach a more equitable place even if that means massive changes that render them unrecognizable. But I also want to watch Northwestern players score ludicrous touchdowns, completely destroy some Big Ten team's season, and defeat the Illini in some way that causes the winning touchdown to somehow trigger a vast Rube Goldberg apparatus that hits Tim Beckman in the face with a pie. I have no idea if these two desires can coexist or if this is a delusion created by the pageantry of the music, the stadiums, and the people dressed like angry anthropomorphic animals imploring the team to touchdowns.

Football has returned! On Saturday, the twenty-first ranked Stanford Cardinal drive their crowd-sourced content-centered Silicon Valley Tesla bus into Evanston while the Wildcats will try to disrupt their Pac 12 North title bid. A long, bleak, hatless offseason finally ends. Northwestern football is back to terrify the Big Ten West, to seize the Land of Lincoln Trophy from the cold, fired hands of the Beck Man, and make it back to a damn bowl game because I am pretty sure there are no more possible ways for Northwestern to lose every single game in a bizarre last-minute conflagration of football misery.

Since last week's exhaustive preview, Pat Fitzgerald has named a starting quarterback. Redshirt freshman Clayton Thorson has emerged to grab the starting job, probably because you can't bench the offspring of a Norse deity. The coaching staff hopes that Thorson will remind Wildcat fans of the traditional scrambly Northwestern quarterback that has led the team during successful years without betraying his lack of experience. He'll have some help with the return of speedy wideout Christian Jones, who missed all of last year, and Pierre Youngblood-Arry, the Cockney Prince of Agincourt.

Northwestern's offense plans to baffle the opposition with a secret play
called "The Invisible Didgeridoo"

Northwestern's out of conference schedule this year includes a miniature tour of equally insufferable Power 5 private schools. Stanford can be seen as a funhouse mirror Northwestern, albeit far more successful on the field, with much nicer weather and an ignominious loss involving a kick return team running over a marching band instead of an ignominious win involving the drowning of a goal post. The Cardinal went 8-5 last year, including a loss to Notre Dame, a team that crumbled easily before the might of the Wildcats and the cumulative effect of every single lucky break that Northwestern had been denied in nearly two full seasons of football action.

Maybe opening against a top-25 powerhouse with a freshman quarterback is not the ideal way to start a season. But top-quality opposition will invite the full pageantry of non-conference football to Ryan Field: ESPN broadcast, Stanford's hallucinogenic tree mascot, and Chicago's Big Ten Tarp. Northwestern's greatest seasons in recent memory have come out of nowhere. It is time for them to once again ruin opponents' seasons, crush dreams, and travel to a bowl game even if we have to invent one from whole cloth using shell companies and a long con involving inventing a dot com company.

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BECK MAN

We don't have Tim Beckman to kick around anymore. Last week, Illinois abruptly fired him amid allegations of player abuse. Beckman's dismissal could hardly be seen as unexpected after years of futility, controversy, and general flailing Beckmania-- at one point his Wikipedia page contained a section entitled "Public Outcry"-- but his sudden termination eight days before the start of the season certainly caught the college football world unaware. He spent his last year of coaching like Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea; we all knew he'd get eaten by a shark, but the end was still sudden and jarring.

There's nothing at all amusing about the reasons why Beckman was ultimately canned. A University of Illinois-commissioned report claimed that Beckman pressured injured players to keep playing and threatened players with the loss of their scholarships. These charges are not that surprising in the world of college football, where some tobacco-stained mustache columnist is probably still rhapsodizing about the time an old-school hat-wearing Woody Hayes type yelled "you're not injured. I'll show you injured" before running a walk-on through with a Civil War cavalry saber. A cynic could also note that the report gave the university adequate legal ammunition to fire him with cause and save nearly $4 million owed to him on his contract and his buyout. Beckman denies the allegations and vows to fight for the money owed on his contract.

It seems likely that Beckman's tenure involved shady injury practices and provided the university with a way to renounce his salary. Illinois administrators, already riven with scandals in the athletic department and embattled leadership at the top, found an opportunity to free themselves from financial commitments to a losing coach who continually acted like Tim Beckman in public. The allegations against Beckman don't seem outside the realm of possibility because they had already been echoed by some former players and because Beckman has coached like he bought a Weekly Reader book from 1967 called Trench Bludgeoner's Guide to College Football and Commie Spotting and dedicated himself to Cold War-era football: thus insisting on having players play through pain, demanding favorable coverage from print media, and nurturing the second-most ridiculous rivalry in college football.

THE HAT RIVALRY IN THE POST-BECKMAN ERA

If there is one thing that Tim Beckman accomplished at Illinois it was successfully creating a Northwestern-Illinois rivalry. It is still not a true rivalry the way most intrastate rivalries work; instead, the Beck Man has somehow reinvented the entire concept of a college football rivalry as a quixotic crusade waged by a single man. His immediate declaration of war against Northwestern was nothing short of ludicrous. His ham-fisted attempts to stoke that rivalry devolved into farce. It is possible to read the entire Beckman treatment of Northwestern as a brilliant deconstruction of rivalry itself, recasting the Iron Bowl, or the The Game, or the dozens of other actual football rivalries as absurd, rendering all football fans as dimbulb Beckman simulacra.

But, let's give the Beck Man his due here: it sort of worked. No one hates Northwestern football. Northwestern football is briefly remembered and occasionally pitied. I have spent the past few weeks skimming thousands upon thousands of words of college football and Big Ten previews and almost none of them deign to mention the existence of Northwestern football except as evidence of a Big Ten contender's easy schedule. So when Sheriff Beckman swaggered into town with his school up north euphemisms and purple clothing bans, it was fun. Beck Man stood in front of the press, the world, and his god decrying Northwestern football with a straight face and it was impossible not to respond with hat-taunts as he floundered about. In theory, the rivalry was against the University of Illinois. In reality, it was a rivalry with Beck Man himself, who inexplicably continued his one-man anti-Northwestern jeremiads while simultaneously comporting himself like a man in an infomercial unaware that an overstuffed kitchen cabinet is about to unleash an unholy rain of tupperware upon his person.

This actually happened.
This actually happened.
This actually happened.
This actually happened.

What on earth are we going to do without Tim Beckman? Bill Cubit seems unlikely to burst into a press conference with a fresh barrage of Northwestern hate-mongering-- it is possible he removed the anti-Northwestern symbol from the Illini locker room only to discover it was covering up a secret cache of VHS recordings of an unsold television pilot called "Tim Beckman's Hat Police." I don't know anything about Cubit other than his name is an obscure, ancient unit of measure that is good for maybe one half-hearted stiff-arm joke per season. Our only hope is that Cubit somehow becomes mesmerized by the Hat, loses all grip on reality, and turns into a Klaus Kinsky character over the course of the season, his clothes in tatters, his hair frayed, his press conferences devolving into incoherent hat-shrieks, only no one notices because that is still slightly more reasonable than Tim Beckman.

Illinois fans, we're in this together. Beckman may have have stared blankly into the middle distance for the last time as the Illini coach, but we have a conference, a trophy, and two bleak programs eclipsed in our own state by a MAC team and FCS team, respectively. We only have each other.

Beckman, banished to the Phantom Zone, vows to defeat That School
From The Adjacent Dimension Well Actually There's No Way To Define
Its Relation To Us In Time and Space

Give us our damn hat back.

There are numerous ways to begin a season: elation, disappointment, caution, and amid accusations of football malfeasance. This year, an unheralded Wildcat team looked awfully good against a sluggish and flummoxed Stanford, securing a jubilant upset and making the Big Ten look slightly less blighted. A first-game victory tells us little, and it is important to be sober and dispassionate in our analysis but that is for fact-bloggers and football experts so let's build an elaborate cardboard edifice, wait inside, and then burst forth from it screaming about how Northwestern demands the Big Ten West, especially if you are living in a country where no one knows what the Big Ten or Northwestern or football is.

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT WILDCAT FOOTBALL

This first win has changed the complexion of the season. The schedule had looked like twelve games of grim butt-holding. Now, a convincing walloping of an FCS team and a respectable showing against Duke and Ball State (UNDER THE LIGHTS) can set the Wildcats up for a bowl run. Some teams spend the season with a predetermined arc. ESPN announcers constantly mentioned that Wisconsin, once scraped off the bottom of Alabama's boots, should expect to romp virtually unopposed through the West against a bunch of cardboard football programs such as Northwestern. Ohio State's schedule remains under vigilant scrutiny should they fail to adequately humiliate each and every opponent they face. Every Northwestern game, however, will remain an adventure game to game, quarter to quarter, and Pat Fitzgerald fist pump to Pat Fitzgerald fist pump, whether it results in a thrilling Wildcat comeback on a hook-and-lateral or an attack on Ryan Field by heretofore undetected Tremors monsters.

It is too early to celebrate. But the fundamental tenet of sports fandom is irrationality, so for just one week let's allow for the possibility that Northwestern is much better than the prognosticators thought. In fact, let us throw out most of our assumptions about the universe as we know and spend the rest of the week as a cult of moon-haters celebrating every new moon as a victory and shaking our fists when it slowly grows throughout the month invoking our credo "I'll get you next time, Moon."

NORTHWESTERN'S UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUT VICTORY

The Northwestern Wildcats scored 16 points and Stanford scored six and now Northwestern has one win and Stanford has zero. This is a fact. It is a matter of public record. It is on television, on newspapers, on the internet, and possibly in Gregg Easterbrook's Game Over notebook. The reasons for this result are up for debate.

Stanford did not play particularly well. Quarterback Kevin Hogan struggled. The running game, after the first drive, sputtered. Wide receivers and cornerbacks dropped passes, including at least one sure interception in the endzone and one wide-open route where a receiver broke free of the defense with absolutely nothing to stop him from running into the endzone other than a temporary hallucination that the ball had turned into a vengeful porcupine. Stanford fans have also complained about the early start time after traveling from the West Coast. This problem, though, is part of the Ryan Field home field advantage, where opponents must learn to adapt to Chicago's Big Ten Time Zone.

(click to read)
Railroad companies introduced the first standardized time
zones in 1883. On November 18, the Day of Two Noons,
railroad stations across the United States simultaneously
synchronized their clocks. This is routine now, but the
synchronization provided some dislocation by reinventing
time itself and because The Day of Two Noons sounds like
the beginning of a Young Adult post-apocalyptic trilogy
where time itself is controlled by a mysterious Council that
can only be undone by a plucky tween and a mysterious old
man who knows the Terrible Secret of the Before Times.
This New York Times Article illustrates the concept with the
help of a couple of broadly-drawn Irish stereotypes which I
imagine newspapers brought out as their nineteenth-century
explainers:
“Begorra,” remarked to his companion a vermilion topped
Hibernian who was watching the south face of the clock, “the
thing has stopped; phwats the matther wid it, anyhow? I don’t
see no time changin', do you Mike?”

Northwestern's defense, especially the defensive line, played well against a team whose M.O. is shoving people and falling down. But the game belonged to the two 18s: Clayton Thorson and Anthony Walker. Thorson's first game included a few nice passes and a few adventures through the hands of Cardinal defenders. He won the game on the ground by flying untouched through the Stanford defense for a 42-yard touchdown. Walker, on the other hand, was everywhere, tackling Stanford players at the line of scrimmage, in space, and in their classes after posing as a precocious guest lecturer before ripping off an elbow-patched sport coat and punching at their three-ring binders.

SPONSORED CONTENT: HOW TO HAVE A RAD FOOTBALL COOK-OUT

It's football Saturday. You got your grill? You got your friends? You got your jersey and your facepaint and your foam finger with a generic football message? You got your Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants? Well, friend, it's cookin' time.

World-Renowned Chef Vaughn Sharkle knows what tailgating is all about as he drives the Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants RV through the heart of college football grilling.
"I've seen everything," Sharkle says moving his wrap-around sunglasses to the back of his head. "Shrimp, brisket, pork. The only thing college football fans are more passionate about their team is their barbecue."

And everywhere he goes, Sharkle draws a crowd with the smell of fresh, sizzling meat.
"You know a lot of people think of industry when they think of Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants. Hard work. Smelting aprons. The work that forged America. But Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants are also a part of making America fun, like at this tailgate," said Sharkle completely spontaneously while casually flicking a beach ball with white hot anviling tongs in the direction of some giggling, clean-cut youths.

"I got involved with Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants because we're all about the same thing: Make it More Awesome," Sharkle said, putting on a Make it More Awesome t-shirt. "I'm going to keep putting meats in more meats and blow people's minds, just like Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants has been doing in the anvil and anvil lubricant industry for 135 years."

"Dude," he added.

Vaughn Sharkle's quest for the perfect tailgate hasn't ended yet. You can follow him on Facebook and tweet to #AmalgamatedAnvil&AnvilLubricantGameDayHASHTAG and you could get Vaughn Sharkle and the Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricant Ultimate Game Day Tailgate Team to make your tailgate more awesome with Amalgamted Anvil and Anvil Lubricants.

EASTERN PROMISES

Eastern Illinois looms next for the Wildcats. The Panthers play in the FCS, and Northwestern fans are expecting a convincing victory after beating a ranked team. But you can't sleep on the Panthers. For one, expect them to take Northwestern by surprise by being primarily south and slightly west of Evanston. For another, they will be gunning for an enormous upset of their own. Last season, the 'Cats had a tough time scoring against Western Illinois in a miserable game involving a three-timeout kicker freeze and cheerleaders bearing placards reading (and this is a direct quote) "NECKS."

Eastern Illinois threatens the Wildcats with a disembodied H.R. Giger panther head

Northwestern has only played Eastern Illinois once before in 2011. Last year, the Panthers lost to all of the FBS teams they played as well as FCS Championship runner-up Illinois State, but they did pound the holy bejesus out of the teams they did beat. Eastern is a surprising supplier of NFL quarterbacks. Jimmy Garoppolo was poised to start for the Patriots this season while Roger Goodell had Tom Brady imprisoned in the Château d'If. Tony Romo worked his way from an undrafted free agent to stardom, riches, and getting assailed by angry Texas talk radio callers for nearly a decade no matter what he does. Northwestern has not had a regular starter in the NFL since Otto Graham, with the exception of that time Brett Basanez played for the Panthers or whenever Mike Kafka surfaces in preseason games to a chorus of the same Kafka jokes everyone made when he was at Northwestern some seven years ago and will haunt him for his entire professional career until the debut of a quarterback named Bobby Sartre or Jimbo Nietzsche.

ALSO RECEIVING VOTES

It has only been one week and it is foolish to draw too many conclusions. Every single football article you will read this week probably includes that disclaimer. But the entire point of college football is these madcaps swings in confidence and despair, anointing strong teams and contenders and consigning losers to the dust bin of Pizza City bowls.

Official AP Style Guide for College Football Writing

Northwestern beat a ranked Stanford team and siphoned off their AP poll votes like a Highlander who has just successfully beheaded someone. The 'Cats are Also Receiving Votes. The day has two noons.

Northwestern is ranked. According to the Associated Press and the cabal of harried graduate football video coordinators who fill out the Coaches' Poll, Northwestern is one of the top 25 teams in these United States. And now they have a looming showdown with a good Duke team in Durham that will be broadcast on the Internet to Northwestern fans, Duke fans, and people involved in football betting pools so degenerate that they spend halftime betting on nineteenth-century horse races by looking up the result in microfilmed copies of Gentleman's Magazine.

Among the Gentleman's Magazine's famous writers was Samuel Johnson (l, pugnaciously
squinting), who craftily evaded a ban on parliamentary reporting by inventing the country
of "Magna Lilliputia" and helpfully explaining that parliament's debates, which bore eerie
similarity to the actual Parliament. It is hard to know how Johnson could have found anything
extraordinary to write about eighteenth-century Parliament, such as when MPs would attempt
to murder each other. In the early 1760s, radical reformer John Wilkes (r, depicted by Hogarth)
dueled Samuel Martin after Martin referred to Wilkes as a "stabber in the dark, a cowardly and
malignant scoundrel." The two met at Hyde Park, where Martin shot Wilkes in the stomach.
According to Edward Walford's Hyde Park from 1878, some gadflys suspected Martin of practicing
for months and attempting to lure Wilkes to the duel through his use of brazen eighteenth-century
epithets. Wilkes survived long enough to get tried in absentia for co-writing a pornographic
poem that was read in the House of Lords by his arch-nemesis, the Earl of Sandwich.

The Wildcats crushed an overmatched Eastern Illinois with another dominant display from the defense. The defensive line and linebackers stymied the Panthers all afternoon. Matthew Harris picked off two passes although one was on a faltering trick play where a panicking wide receiver attempted to huck the ball up to Mount Olympus and the other when the Panther quarterback improvised a shovel pass as if someone in the crowd had suggested the ball had suddenly become a rabid bat.

This game did not tell us much about Northwestern other than reinforcing the fact that the Wildcats can comfortably defeat a team that is structurally set up to be worse than Northwestern at football. Eastern Illinois showed up, collected its check, and was subject to Chicago's Big Ten Football Stadium roaring comfortably at a one-tarp level (Northwestern has not yet deployed the Full Tarp; with the one home game happening UNDER THE LIGHTS before Big Ten play fills Ryan Field with jeering Iowans for the rest of the season, we may not yet see it). The game certainly reinforced the Wildcats' defensive bonafides. Opponents have yet to score a touchdown against them. There are a number of rational reasons to proceed with cautious optimism, but for the love of everything holy the Northwestern Wildcats are ranked and I'm not going to let my native sports pessimism to take over here and heartily invite the Big Ten Conference to be effortlessly CRUSHED BENEATH ANTHONY WALKER'S CLEATS I'LL SEE YOU CHUMPS IN INDIANAPOLIS.

TITANIC SHOWDOWN BETWEEN FOOTBALL POWERHOUSES

On Saturday, the sudden proclamation that Northwestern might be good will be put to the test by a very good Duke team. Duke has made short work of its two first opponents, Tulane and North Carolina Central. Before the season, pundits had questioned whether the Blue Devils could withstand numerous key graduations, especially on defense. They have not yet shown any ill effects and now the 'Cats are going into their steamy swamp stadium in a battle of undefeated football titans.

Duke and Northwestern have met fairly often since the late '90s. Both teams are small, private schools in big conferences that have spent most their footballing history flailing ineffectively at opponents like balloon men in a car dealership parking lot. Northwestern has gotten the better of Duke, taking six of the last seven. In fact, the Duke/Northwestern quasi-rivalry is evidence of Duke's stunning turnaround; the last Duke victory in 2007 ended a 22-game losing streak, and Duke played in the ACC Championship game just six years later.

Despite these similarities, Duke fans have endured the relative tragedy of their football program because Duke basketball is an unstoppable death-juggernaut. While Northwestern sports are generally ignored or pitied, Duke's basketball team is almost universally reviled. Northwestern takes the court to indifference; Duke basketball plays against a planet of seven billion fist-shaking Beck Men. Northwestern has actively sought to emulate Duke's basketball success through a complex conspiracy involving numerous shadowy organizations, clandestine meetings, and hiring a guy who was literally Coach K's assistant coach.

The mysterious disappearance of Duke Assistant Coach Chris Collins and his sudden
reappearance at the head of Northwestern basketball is explained by the Chris Collins
Conspiracy Corkboard that explains everything clearly and is not at all inscrutable-- in fact
the Chris Collins Conspiracy Corkboard won Honorable Mention, Most Scrutable at the Screedies
Conspiracy Awards or at least would have if it weren't for the intervention of shady forces
beyond your wildest imagination

If the Wildcats wilt in the Carolina heat, they can still rally against Ball State (LET ME REMIND YOU: UNDER THE LIGHTS) and turn a strong non-conference record into a bowl campaign. If they beat the Blue Devils, then it's TOOT TOOT THIS TRAIN ONLY STOPS IN PASADENA time and the Northwestern hype will switch into overdrive, kept off the front pages of the sports sections of Chicago's Big Ten Newspapers only by a particularly noteworthy Notre Dame practice.

THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE IS NATIONAL AND FOOTBALL

The NFL has kicked off again with the controversy, lawyer-laden press conferences, and general up-in-armsmanship that has come to define America's game. The actual games are almost incidental to ancillary NFL nonsense. Some of it is a designed spectacle; the NFL has blown up the draft into a three day list-reading extravaganza that closed down parts of Downtown Chicago for upwards of a week. Other times, it is the general bumbling created by the NFL's desire to serve as an independent branch of the United States justice system featuring a court lorded over by a a man who acts at all times like the guy from Bananas who goes mad the second he takes power and starts issuing underwear statutes.

The NFL's pompous nincompoopery came to a head during the Great Ball Deflation Media Event of 2015, which climaxed with Roger Goodell upholding Roger Goodell's decision to suspend Tom Brady over a shrill chorus of Wahlbergian moaning before an actual judge intervened. At least the ball deflation scandal involved something as silly as Patriots skulduggery; earlier attempts to adjudicate on domestic violence through football justice were bungled so egregiously that I am surprised that Goodell has not yet mistakenly suspended himself before quickly changing suits and exonerating himself at a press conference featuring military hardware.

Even without scandal and legal wrangling the NFL has become exhausting. Professional includes the grandiose bumbling the NFL specializes in, but comes packaged with what can only be described as the dumbest shit imaginable. The NFL's broadcasts aren't uniquely joyless; every televised sporting event bombards us with the same corporate simulacra of the concept of fun. NFL games, however, are presented with a ponderous self-importance where announcers imbue inane platitudes about football players making football plays at the quarterback position in the national football league with the gravity of a U.N. conference on arms control. Ads airing on sports events are universally intolerable, but only NFL games stop seemingly every three minutes to breathlessly shill rifled beer bottles, various pickup truck brands in increasingly hardy settings that will seemingly climax at the Super Bowl with a consumer-grade Gravedigger dragging Dennis Leary through the apocalypse, and an endless wave of Babas Booey screaming about fantasy football.

The fact that rational people tune into this week after week and that Americans are willing to cede precious hours of their lives to be screamed at by Trent Dilfer shows just how entertaining football games are. NFL players are really good at smashing into each other. And as long as players continue to fly through the air catching passes, drag five tacklers across the first down marker, and dramatically steam from their heads on winter days, we will continue to watch, no matter how badly the experience becomes laden with promos for TV shows about abrasive detectives who get results and this week the internet has become a person as it is murdering people.

This season airing concurrently on Fox, CBS, and NBC, Dan Bakkedahl
stars as Karl Fugue: Asshole Detective. This week, Fugue is suspended for
dropping leaflets outside police headquarters entitled Your Police Are
Morons illustrated with a cartoon of the chief clumsily struggling to put on
a dunce cap but he can't because he is so uselessly stupid. But then, Fugue
solves the case because despite his gruff obnoxiousness, he possesses
incredible powers of observation that no one on the force can match even with
their newfangled computers. He is reinstated, tells the chief that he is an idiot,
then goes to drink self-destructively, possibly with his reluctant partner, a
by-the-book detective who can't stand Fugue but respects him and also while
her career is going well, her personal life is in shambles. On the next
Karl Fugue: Asshole Detective, someone fires a gun and drives a car recklessly

DUEL IN DURHAM

It is way too early in the season to consider any game make-or-break. Last season, a roller-coaster where Northwestern struggled against non-conference opponents, scored two massive upsets against Wisconsin and Notre Dame, and then lost a bowl play-in game to Illinois, reinforced the unpredictability of Big Ten football. The Duke game, however, should reveal a lot about the Wildcats: whether the Stanford game was a fluke, whether the defense can remain dominant, and whether Thorson can continue to play like a quarterback with far more experience than he has. The game should be a defensive duel, complete with some pre-game social media chatter in which Ifeadi Odenigbo's expectations of a shutout have been received as if he called the Duke team as malignant cowards. Everyone expects a close game, everyone that is except for Karl Fugue: Asshole Detective who is also a sports-betting sharp whose encyclopedic knowledge of college football betting patterns allows him to foil a series of shrimp restaurant robberies before that goddamn idiot chief has a chance to mess things up with his computers in Episode 8: Pick Six Murders.

Northwestern came into the season with a tough schedule, an undefined situation at quarterback, back-to-back bowl-free seasons and the loss of the Hat to a team coached by a human bobblehead. Another tough season seemed on the horizon. Instead, Northwestern has won all of its games, they are 3-0, they beat Stanford and Duke, they have allowed a grand total of one (1) touchdown, they are ranked #17 in the country in the AP Poll, and they are going to win five simultaneous national football championships this year.

The Duke-Northwestern game was played on the surface of the sun and broadcast locally on a channel showing nothing but Judge Mathis and ninja knife infomercials. Both teams feature ferocious defenses and both teams had first-year quarterbacks. What followed was practically obscene.

Both offenses struggled in the unforgiving heat. Balls sailed past open defenders. Running backs fell fruitlessly into the arms of defensive tackles. And punt after punt rained down upon Wallace Wade Stadium as possessions went through a football samsara, a cycle of death and rebirth off the exhausted legs of Hunter Niswander and Will Monday.

Do not adjust your monitor. You are looking at eleven
consecutive punts. This is taken directly from ESPN's
game log. The only adjustment I made was to zoom
out the web browser because mine could not fit all of the
punts on a single screen

The game was brutal and ugly. And who cares? Northwestern won. Solomon Vault took the second-half kickoff some 97 yards and Warren Long snuck past a Duke defense that had loaded up on the line of scrimmage for a third-and-one. The defense remained unmovable. Dean Lowry terrorized Duke by tipping an interception to himself and coming inches from swatting another to the turf for a fumble and touchdown (referees ruled that the ball traveled forward enough to constitute a forward pass). Anthony Walker was credited with 19 tackles, securing another Big Ten player of the week award. Northwestern has the top-ranked scoring defense in the entire FBS. The Wildcats' endzone might as well be the moon; sure it is possible to go there, and it's been done in the past, but opposing teams are wondering if they have the manpower and the short-sleeved white button-down shirts to engineer a way there and how are they going to convince the government to give them the resources to try in this economy.

Stanford scientists attempt to engineer a drive, but are unable to navigate past the
VanHoose Belt

Yes, there are causes for alarm. The offense, despite a superhuman 35-carry day from Justin Jackson on a muggy afternoon, bogged down. The passing game remains a work in progress. But cautious, measured optimism has no place in college football, a sport that lunges from ecstasy to horror in seconds, where victories are temporary and fleeting, where the only sensible way to handle the success of this team is to mold a car into the shape of the angry wildcat head from the helmets that says TRANSITIVE PROPERTY PAC 12 CHAMPIONS and shoots flames at passing motorists, most of whom have never heard of Northwestern's football team.

UNDER THE LIGHTS

But before Northwestern can move on to dismantle the Big Ten West, the 'Cats will be going UNDER THE LIGHTS to face the Ball State Cardinals. This is not just a football game; this is prime time slobber-knockin', clock-cleanin', ball jarrin', big puntin' Midwestern football under the stars and on Big Ten Network regional action.

Ball State's logo is a cardinal's head plummeting from the sky, presumably
from a distressed headless cardinal injured in an unimaginably violent
conflagration only seconds beforehand

The Big Ten Network has brought this team to prime time because of the storied rivalry between Northwestern and Ball State. It all stems from the 1920s, when Ball State's football team consisted of Pericles N. Ball, a distant relative of the school-founding Ball family, who would travel to Northwestern football games and taunt the players for being feeble arm-noodles with the weak mustaches of a child. Ball ordered pennants of a Wildcat logo with a giant no circle around it, but no printers would agree to print them because they were too absurd. Each year, the Ball State football banquet would begin, end, and consist entirely of Ball reading an unhinged rant claiming that Ball State would start its program at the junior college level, eventually move up to the top division, and, 34 years later, finally walk into Evanston with a team mighty enough to grind the Wildcats into dust in a game momentous enough that word would spread over the telegraph to the far flung corners of Yugoslavia.

Northwestern and Ball State have never played, but only a fool would pencil in an easy victory. The Wildcats will be favored, but anything can happen UNDER THE LIGHTS. The Cardinals are 2-1 and have a very good coach. They know the Wildcats will want to run the ball, and the 'Cats have yet to show they can pass effectively. It is hypothetically possible that the lights in the stadium will go out and the plaintive cries of a Husky will echo through the Evanston night and Northern Illinois will come out of the tunnel as a MAC Commissioner John Steinbrecher swaggers onto the fifty yard line while Pat Fitzgerald stands in gape-mouthed stupefaction and Dave Eanet yells NO NO NO THERE ARE RULES AGAINST THIS.

Three kestrels flying over the Castle Steinbrecher heralded the inevitable ascension of young
John to his destiny as the Commissioner of the Mid-America Conference, as noted in the
ancient football text "Ain't Prophesied No One Yet"

Ball State will be playing for a grand upset, a chance to demonstrate yet again that MAC teams can hang with a Big Ten opponent. Northwestern has even more at stake: a chance to go undefeated into Big Ten play, solidify bowl positioning, and maintain a top-25 ranking and status as a Big Ten West contender. Northwestern football rides high again, and the possibilities are unfolding in front of fans like an Early Modern prince with vague ties to the Spanish Crown seeing a portrait of the inbred, sickly Habsburg on the throne. We have seen this before.

Two years ago, a ranked Northwestern finished its nonconference season 4-0 and ranked. A bowl seemed certain and a spot in the Big Ten championship game seemed possible. A tough loss to Ohio State showed that Northwestern could keep up with a top contender. Then, the wheels came off. The Wildcats lost every single game in the most confounding way possible like they had been cursed by a vengeful football deity for committing some sort of forgotten football blasphemy such as taking it more than one game at a time or scoring on the Forbidden End Zone or not jumping up and down and pointing emphatically enough after a fumble even if the ball rolled out of bounds 15 feet away from the closest Wildcat defender. There are no certainties in college football.

AS I MENTIONED, UNDER THE LIGHTS

Northwestern football is under the lights. It will be dark out and later than normal. There are several hours available to travel to your local library and peruse the section labeled by the Dewey Decimal System as incoherent football yelling (this section includes All Right It's Time to Trade Cutler to Zounds, Trade Cutler Already: The A to Z Anthology of Doug and OB Callers). Ball State players will have to contend with the mayhem of Prime Time Ryan Field, with its shrieking fan maniacs and terrifying glow-in-the-dark tarps. Kickoff is scheduled for 24 hours before a blood moon eclipse event, and the game should have been scheduled for then, a Big Ten-MAC showdown under Chicago's Big Ten Blood Moon with a tiny but fervent group of people braying about portends of the end of the world and a slightly smaller but no less fervent group proclaiming the glories of Wildcat football.

The sun dipped behind the press box, the lights shone on the field, and, with the eyes of the nation upon Northwestern in Big Ten Network Regional Action and with a fearsome two-tarp crowd, the Wildcats narrowly defeated Ball State to a deafening chorus. Northwestern is 4-0 and the Associated Press has declared them #16 in the country as they prepare for the perfunctory Big Ten play as a warm-up to an all-but-inevitable national championship.

Northwestern opened the game with a touching tribute to Classic Northwestern Football. The offense stagnated and turned the ball over, and the defense looked solid but more vulnerable than the top-ranked tackle wall that consumed its first three opponents. Ball State's freshman quarterback Riley Neal extended drives. More importantly, he continually hucked the ball in the direction of Jordan Williams, an eight-foot colossus with net hands who continually out-leaped Wildcat defenders for ridiculous catches.

Jordan Williams, artist's rendition

In the third quarter, though, the offense switched on. Clayton Thorson looked like a different quarterback, spreading the ball around, and letting Dan Vitale terrorize Ball State defenders and confuse Ball State coaches who presumably spent a week scouring arcane tomes of football lore to figure out what a superback was before deciding it was a myth and then found out only too late that it is a slightly different word to use for a tight-endish player. This is a successful tactic, and the Wildcats should come up with unnecessarily weird-sounding names for all of their positions, such as renaming guards to Man-Walls and the quarterback to the Unholy Shaman of the Ninth Eye.

IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE UNHOLY SHAMAN OF THE NINTH EYE
POSITION YOU NEED TO MAKE QUICK DECISIONS AND GET THE
BALL OUT TO YOUR PODMEN AND YOUR KRAKUS GROUP IF YOU
WANT TO WIN GAMES IN (SEARCHES DESPERATELY FOR FALLEN
CUE CARD HOLDER WHILE HE PAUSES LIKE A DEER IN HEADLIGHTS
BEFORE AN INTERN RACES TO HOLD UP THE CARD) THE NATIONAL
FOOTBALL LEAGUE

Ball State came back to pull within five, but the game never seemed in doubt. The 'Cats did suffer some injuries. Standout tackle Geoff Mogus left on a stretcher. Safeties Godwin Igwebuike and Kyle Queiro also left the game. Pat Fitzgerald has remained characteristically tight-lipped about his injured players, although at press time BYCTOM has been able to secure a confirmation from him that some of his players may be made of molecules.

It was a harrowing win, but let us remember that we are talking about Northwestern football. Let the football gluttons sit around in their tuxedos grousing about not winning by enough points and intriguing about playoff committees. Northwestern has started undefeated for the third time in nearly two decades and has yet to lose a game through a spectacular series of football misfortunes.

Over the course of following Northwestern, I thought I had experienced
every single heartbreaking way to lose a football game. In the past two weeks,
the Texas Longhorns saw a spirited comeback end when their kicker was
temporarily possessed by the Spirit of John Carney and then the next week
were done in by a hideously mishandled routine punt. If the Longorns, the
Habsburgs of college football, have experienced decades of football gluttony,
this is their period of football gout

BIG TEN RECKONING

Northwestern has beaten two good teams already, but the real season begins on Saturday with Big Ten play. The Big Ten West is hardly considered a crucible; instead, it is more often portrayed as a sad relic of Midwest, where the football factory has closed and rusted and now only manufactures fullbacks on back order since 1996 and rusted knock-off spread offenses that falter when weak shouldered quarterbacks, originally designed to dive heedlessly into an interwar leather-helmet ruck, now heave the ball in the direction of nowhere.

The Northwestern-Minnesota game features two excellent defenses with suspect passing games. Conventional wisdom says that we should be in for another exciting game of field possession, dive plays, and punting. Hunter Niswander already attempted 10 punts in the Duke game. Any more double-digit punt games and he should be allowed to ride out onto Ryan Field on a custom-built punt-based motorcycle, his punting cape billowing behind him majestically while the marching band blares his majestic punt anthem.

Northwestern/Minnesota probably will not reach the heights of the 1939 Texas Tech/
Centenary College game, which featured 77 combined punts, including 36 by Tech punter
Charlie Calhoun. The amount of punting is mind-boggling in a game that happened after the
Spanish-American War. Were the teams handing off to a punter in the backfield who surveyed
the defense and immediately punted? Was there a rule that any person involved in the game,
including spectators and faculty members, were invited to stop play at any time to punt? Was
Shreveport, Louisiana temporarily engulfed by a disruption in the space-time continuum
that trapped a community in a maelstrom of endless punting and they could have been in
there for years and have no way of knowing? It is also important to note that the Centenary
College's team was known as the "College Gents" which is the puntingest football team name
possible.

The game also featured 14 fumbles

I don't anticipate a nonsensical paelolithic Big Ten puntfest because I have walked this Earth and I know that Minnesota/Northwestern games are a cauldron of insanity. These games have ended with hail marys, walk-off interception returns, 100-yard kickoff returns, and more improbable reversals of fortune than the last five minutes of a movie where a villain thinks he has successfully killed Arnold Schwarzenegger. I expect this game will end with the discovery of a heretofore-unknown NCAA rule that football games do not end until a team has successfully telegraphed the NCAA Head Office in the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago even though it no longer exists, prompting donors to attempt to build the hotel first. The game will be completed in several dozen years after the lawsuits are finalized.

THE CUBS ARE GOING TO WHAT IS TECHNICALLY THE PLAYOFFS

I am a Cubs pessimist. I am a Cubs miserablist. I am a Cubs doom-sayer wandering around Wrigleyville in a sandwich board prophesying millennia of non-championship baseball, tormenting fans with occasional heart-breaking misery until they embrace the sweet release of death or become Yankees fans.

Now, the Cubs face a do-or-die Wildcard quasi-playoff invented by the champagne and goggle industry to have the honor of facing slaughter by the mirthless St. Louis juggernaut that trains by stomping on hearts. They will, barring a miraculous showing against the Pirates from a Reds team that ended its season two weeks ago and is now fielding their social media interns, travel to a raucous PNC Park to face an excellent Pirates team. The consensus is that the Cubs have the upper hand; they will send out Jake Arrieta, who has ascended to some Olympian plane of pitching transcendence that has made him nearly impossible to hit for months at the cost of only his facial expressions (Arrieta is scheduled to start Friday night; there is still time for him to suffer the entire litany of Springfield softball ringer tragedies before the playoff game on October 7). This is precisely the point where the impending Cub calamity is so glaringly obvious that Euripedes has already dismissed it as "on the nose" in a snarky blog post.

On the other hand, who cares?

This Cubs season has been far too much of a joy to ruin with worry of an impending collapse. The Cubs have spent the past several years in an intentional death-spiral, slowly siphoning the fun out of the team like a python constricting the life out of a drunk, swamp-curious Floridian. The unfortunate reality of American sports teams, which favor bottoming out with no consequences, especially when you play in a tourist attraction guaranteed to draw during the summer despite sending an army of Darwin Barneys and Junior Lakes to helplessly flail at baseballs, nearly demands it.

The turnaround was not supposed to happen this fast. Kris Bryant, the probable Rookie of the Year, has been a star since he was brought up from Iowa awaiting the end of Theo Epstein's corn prison service time imbroglio. Addison Russell has been a revelation with the glove at short. Javier Baez and Jorge Soler have missed time with injuries, but both have returned towards the end of the season to clobber things. And Kyle Schwarber is a moon-faced stump person who has constantly entertained fans by finding new and more exciting ways to fall down and also smash baseballs into uncharted galaxies.

The team has been led by wacky old Joe Maddon who marries unconventional baseball tactics with whimsical entertainments for six-year-old birthday parties including dress-up days, zoo animals, and a magician. Anthony Rizzo could be making a case for an MVP-type season if Bryce Harper did not exist.

Harper (r) fights off Jonathan Papelbon's literal attempt to strangle him
according to baseball's unwritten rules of monster-violence. "Noose"
Papelbon plans to start a radio show with his twin brothers Garrotte and
Throttle called Choke Talk where everyday Americans call in with problems
and, after uproarious banter, one of them asks "have you tried choking
someone?" and then the brothers gently rib each other about the times
they've strangled and head-butted ineffectively

The most curious part of the season has been Starlin Castro's transformation from the worst everyday player in baseball to a genuine force with the bat, hitting .403/.429./.708 in September. Castro was pulled as the everyday shortstop in August and his resurgence has been difficult to explain. But these wild fluctuations make up the Starlin Castro experience. Castro doesn't walk and, until recently, had shown sporadic power. His entire worth is based on fluctuations in batted-ball placement. He is a no true outcomes player. Starlin Castro performs as a baseball casino, letting the capricious whims of fate guide his game whether hitting slap singles or flipping a coin as a ball barrels towards him in the infield to decide if he makes an impressive play or attempts to fling it to the cutoff man in a sixteen-inch softball game happening at the lakefront park.

As much fun as the Cubs have been this season, the ultimate goal of a World Series seems unlikely this year, even if they get past the Pirates. Jake Arrieta is only one man and he cannot not pitch every day. Jon Lester has had a fine season of his own, but remains hampered by a bizarre inability to throw to first base, his feeble batting, and his use of David Ross as a personal catcher. Ross, a grizzled gray-beard who looks like a warrant officer on British frigate torn between his loyalty to a captain going insane on the high seas and the men fomenting mutiny to return the ship to combat, is one of my favorite players, but he swings the bat like a crusty Napoleonic naval officer who has never heard of baseball.

Sailing Master David Ross ponders a plot to lock the skipper in the brig
after the captain has disregarded RN orders in order to pursue the Captain's
sworn enemy Louis-Antoine-Cyprien Infernet across the seas

The rotation after Lester and Arrieta remains suspect. Jason Hammel, who pitched a strong first half, has imploded. Before the All-Star break, he sported a 2.86 ERA. After, his ERA ballooned to 5.10, he has pitched only 67 innings, and opponents have mashed a robust .856 OPS against him. That is an entire team of Kris Bryants. Kyle Hendricks has been better, but his 95 ERA+ (just slightly below an MLB-average 100) inspires little fear. The Cubs have cobbled games out of an armada of former starters in the bullpen, including Travis Wood and mid-season pickups Clayton Richard and Trevor Cahill. In order for the Cubs to win, they will need Lester and Arrieta to be essentially perfect for every start.

And should the Cubs reverse every single defining feature of their team for the past ten decades and defeat the Pirates, they will be forced to play the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals have had an incredible season. They lost numerous key players to injury for all or part of the season including superstar pitcher Adam Wainwright, but have steamrolled to baseball's top record. Talismanic catcher Yadier Molina is out with a thumb injury sustained when Anthony Rizzo slid into him. Starter Carlos Martinez will not pitch in the postseason. This will not stop them. The Cardinals are essentially a Terminator factory of anonymous boring dudes sent to mirthlessly destroy baseballs. Their season has been a commendable testament to resilience and organizational depth. To fans of other Central teams leveled by the Cardinals juggernaut over the past decade, it is also a depressing paean to their inevitability. Facing the Cardinals in the playoffs is like receiving a tax audit, an impending bureaucratic nightmare that cannot avoided or triumphed against.

Unsurprisingly, Wainwright has returned months ahead of schedule to join the
Cardinals' playoff bullpen. I suspect that the Cardinals have cloned all of their
players and have only been waiting for the first opportunity to unleash this version
of Waino Mk. II in order to defray suspicion instead of replacing him immediately
and while this may seem impossible, far-fetched, and taken from the opening
segment of the crappy latter-day Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Sixth Day,
may I remind you that the Cardinals' cheating scandal from earlier this season involved
computers, case closed

Meaningful baseball has returned to the North Side for the first time in seven years. It does not matter that the Cubs will be playing in a truncated, bastardized play-in game seemingly designed by a malevolent baseball deity for Cubbish heartbreak. The season has been too enjoyable to be undone by a single disappointing loss. The Cubs, with their young bats, piles of free agent money, and bats still lurking in the minors seem poised to remain relevant for years to come; it is only then, with sky-high expectations, can Cub fans be properly and traditionally broken.

GOPHER INVASION

The Gophers started the season with high expectations of Big Ten West contention. They opened with an encouraging loss against championship contender TCU, but have struggled against Colorado State, Kent State, and Ohio, defeating each by only a field goal. Minnesota's fearsome defense has also suffered attrition, more than Northwestern's. A win against a ranked Northwestern team would instantaneously restore Minnesota's status as a team to be reckoned with in the division while giving Northwestern fans flashbacks to the squandered 2013 season. A Northwestern win, though, will set the Wildcats up for a showdown with angry football muppet Jim Harbaugh's frisky Michigan team at the Big House for bowl eligibility.

It is October, Northwestern is undefeated, and the Chicago Cubs are riding high into the postseason. Perhaps the most dangerous thing is not the tough Minnesota defense or presumed Pirates playoff starter Gerritt Cole. The most dangerous thing is the possibility of a comet striking the Earth.

Northwestern tarps off one or two ends of the northeast stands for games. This is to prevent the shameful appearance of naked bleachers on television, covering them with an aesthetically superior giant banner that says NO ONE IS SITTING HERE (CHICAGO'S BIG TEN TEAM). It was a raw, overcast, two-tarp afternoon in Evanston when Minnesota came to open Big Ten play. Northwestern's grounds crew could very well have tarped off the endzones when the Gophers had the football because they did not cross the plane. They did not kick a field goal. They did not get a safety or a point-after conversion or in fact score in any other way possible in a football game because the Wildcats shut them out, remained undefeated, climbed to #13 in the rankings, and actually I don't think I'm going to make it to the end of this sentence before I pass out.

Northwestern's defense has shut down all comers so far. The defensive line goes ten deep. Dean Lowry is playing football like UnderArmour has designed a special grass-camouflage alternate jersey and he keeps popping up in the backfield to tackle running backs who think the field itself has come alive and seized them. After a referee inexplicably overruled an apparent interception, Tyler Lancaster poked the ball away from Gopher quarterback Mitch Leidner, and Anthony Walker ran it in for a touchdown. Clayton Thorson ran in two touchdowns, Justin Jackson rushed for 120 yards, and the Wildcats Big Tenned their way to a field goal with a nearly nine-minute-long drive to open the third quarter that has probably been prescribed to someone as a sedative.

I wish I could be as excited about anything in my life as Northwestern's PA
Announcer is when Justin Jackson is The Ball Carrier. Northwestern played
once again in their gothic uniforms, which have become so popular that I
expect the entire campus to become more gothic until the clock tower is
replaced by a moon-blotting bat alcove that broadcasts nightly cackling from
university president Mortuary Shapiro

Northwestern has arrived. It is currently part of The Conversation. It is somewhat gratifying and bizarre to see Northwestern actually discussed in the context of major college football as a subject itself and not merely as part of a highlight montage of some Heisman candidate blithely stiff-arming a Wildcat into oblivion. Of course, absolutely no national college football pundit has anything at all useful or insightful to say about Northwestern football because they are a bunch of square-jawed suit men whose entire job is to clumsily restate the obvious with the unhinged zeal of a doomsday prophet.

An ESPN analyst, dug from the rubble of a natural disaster, will immediately grab your lapels
and explain that at the end of the day, I tell you what you move that ball up and down the
field but what it's going to come down to is turnovers and scoring points off turnovers that's
how you're gonna win this football game and also toughness

Only one victory remains between Northwestern and bowl contention. Another win would set them up for an apocalyptic showdown against hated quasi-rival Iowa with Big Ten West Championship Implications. But first, they have to get past another unexpectedly resurgent team from the East that has spent the last three consecutive years funded by a grant by the United States Department of Northwestern Football Misery.

SHIT, MICHIGAN IS GOOD AGAIN

Well, it had to happen. Michigan fans, facing suffering unimaginable to less august fanbases when their team was not good for a couple of seasons, cried out into the night for a savior. They got Jim Harbaugh, a grating football monomaniac who seems poised to return the Wolverines to tedious prominence just as he did at San Diego, Stanford, and in the NFL with the 49ers. The Wolverines have jumped out to a 4-1 record and the AP top 25. Michigan fans are excited; the revival of Michigan football reminds me of the Simpsons episode when the Soviet Union unexpectedly returned.

Michigan and Northwestern mirror each other this year. Both feature fearsome defenses and suspect offenses. And both feature animated coaches that irritate the hell out of other teams. Jim Harbaugh and Pat Fitzgerald are the yin and yang of obnoxious football coach gesticulation: Harbaugh reacts to every penalty like a thwarted space emperor while Fitzgerald celebrates like he is at a Great Awakening tent revival and has just been moved for the first time by the spirit of Butt Slap Jesus.

Who maniacally cavorted it better

Northwestern will be relying heavily on workhouse Justin Jackson, but will need a big game from Clayton Thorson. Thorson has only played one road game in his career at Duke's sedate Wallace Wade Stadium. Saturday, he'll have to deal with the Big House and the cacophony of 100,000 Michigan fans disapprovingly harrumphing. Michigan will turn to quarterback Jake Rudock, late of Iowa. Finding a graduate transfer quarterback from Iowa is like finding the last grizzled, one-eyed captain in a sleepy bar in Marrakesh to try to run a shipment of dubiously-procured artifacts past an Ottoman blockade. It is worth mentioning here that Northwestern has never defeated Jake Rudock in football.

Despite being undefeated and ranked higher in the polls than Michigan, Northwestern will enter this game as underdogs. This game projects as a really Big Ten game, where teams will spend most of the first half building elaborate trench systems. Both teams will be looking to make a statement and keep themselves in the Big Ten championship picture. More importantly, Northwestern is playing for the distinct honor of ruining the afternoon for a bunch of people in Michigan Stadium, as high a calling as exists in the Big Ten Conference.

ALMOST BIG TEN CARNIVAL

The opening week of Big Ten play was an exciting time of upsets, near upsets, field goals, and the state of Indiana nearly upending the entire conference in a single fell swoop. It could have been a Big Ten Carnival, an upsetting of the traditional order when the Great Powers of the conference were overturned in a drunken bacchanal.

Bruegel's Fight Between Carnival and Lent is a Big Ten painting, showcasing sixteenth-
century agricultural practices, beer-swilling, smoke meat enthusiasm and, on the Lent side,
abstinence from the forward pass

Ohio State 34, Indiana 27
Urban Meyer is trying very hard this season to prove the old football chestnut "if you have three Heisman-caliber quarterbacks, then you have none." The defending champs have looked listless on offense and a heroic Indiana team that lost its starting quarterback and running back nearly upset the number one team in the country. Unfortunately, the Hoosiers called a play called "The Entire History of Indiana Football," that ended the game on a bad snap, but we all know that an SEC partisan has already gotten the phrase "they almost lost to Indiana, paawwwlll" tattooed backwards on his face in case he suffers a Memento accident.

Purdue 21, Michigan State 24
Michigan State survived a spirited comeback from Purdue at home. We are just minutes from inhabiting a bizarre world where Indiana and Purdue upset the first and second-ranked teams in the country, the college football world becoming contained entirely within their Old Oaken Bucket. Instead, the Hoosier state stuck to its moribund football destiny, forever forced to remain in the shadows of a powerhouse football state like Illinois.

Nebraska 13, Illinois 14
Illinois is now 4-1 in the post-Beckman era. It is great to watch the Illini rallying around Bill Cubit, a man who once got into a heated sideline altercation with Beck Man while they were ostensibly coaching the same team. The Illini are looking far friskier than the dilapidated husk of a team you would assume to see when a coach is fired eight days before the beginning of the season. While the recovery of The Hat in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry remains paramount, I hope the Illini continue to bedevil Big Ten teams, if only because Tim Beckman is home watching these games while wearing a disconnected headset, drawing sideline interference penalties for dripping nacho cheese onto the sofa.

Beckman has not yet, as far as I can tell, followed through with his wrongful
termination suit against the University of Illinois. I imagine it is because
he is thoroughly preparing to take the case to trial, fire his legal team,
represent himself, and interrupt court proceedings every five minutes to
yell INFILTRATION YOUR HONOR and then army crawl over to the defense
to rifle through their papers

Iowa 10, Wisconsin 6
I did not watch a minute of this game and assume that it involved two people screaming at each other at the 50-yard line until one of their heads exploded, after which the teams were assigned an arbitrary Big Ten score of 10-6 and the fans went home.

BIG HOUSE, BIG GAME

If there's one thing the last few years have told us, it is that Michigan-Northwestern games will defy the laws of physics and space-time in order to rip the beating heart out of a Wildcat football team. Last year, the infamous M00N game ended with what I had described as Trevor Siemian's one-man Charge of the Light Brigade against the entire Wolverine defense on an ill-conceived two-point conversion. Pat Fitzgerald had attempted to win in regulation because the previous two had ended in overtime after bizarre collapses allowed Michigan to tie. In 2012, it was on a tipped pass hauled down by a Michigan receiver with just enough time for a field goal. The next year, Michigan somehow rushed its field goal unit onto the field like Indiana Jones escaping a collapsing temple to get the kick off as the dying second melted from the scoreboard. Every football game is a unique series of independent events that should not be affected by the approximate amount of insanity that ended the last game, but it seems entirely possible that the outcome of this game depends less on football plays than on a series of rivalries played out on some football Mount Olympus for reasons we cannot possibly fathom.

If this game plays out as predicted, it should be an unwatchable festival of the punting arts, with brown footballs raining from sky like autumn leaves. The Wildcats have a lot to prove; Michigan fans seem to have already looked past this game to their contest against Michigan State the next week because they've spent the last several games effortlessly dominating Northwestern by winning in the dumbest, flukiest way possible.

But, in the spirit of Big Ten Carnival, maybe the Wildcats will once again upset the traditional Big Ten order and maybe even win the West. It is impossible to say because Northwestern has so delightfully surpassed expectations this season that it would be a shame to stop pundits from blandly pontificating about Northwestern because let me tell you when it comes to Northwestern football they're gonna need to go out there for sixty minutes and I tell you what this team they can play some defense in the Big Ten Conference but (he says, staring into the camera like he's about to tell the American people he has authorized the use of nuclear weapons against a meteor hurtling towards the Capitol building) you need to get into the endzone.

For the past three years, the Northwestern-Michigan game has ended in a conflagration of unlikely football misfortune robbing the Wildcats of a victory over a depleted, languid Michigan team. That did not happen this year. Instead, Northwestern kicked off and then I'm pretty sure the field opened up and swallowed the Wildcats whole for the rest of the game. I know that people come to this website for detailed play-by-play football expertise, so I've diagnosed some of the key plays in this video below (you might not want to blare this one at work):

The result was a 38-0 debacle that only became watchable once it mysteriously transformed into a festival of improbable Cubs bunts through the magic of television. Northwestern's football Wildcats were utterly dismantled and are no longer undefeated. Michigan put up another shutout and remains ascendant, insufferably.

Losing to Michigan is annoying. The rebirth of Michigan and the barely-disguised giddiness of national football pundits at the reestablishment of a Football Brand is annoying. The incredible series of idiotic San Francisco 49ers skulduggery that exiled an excellent NFL coach and brought him to Michigan through a blood-red sky on a war chariot raining a pestilence of nose tackles upon the Big Ten is annoying. Jim Harbaugh is profoundly annoying.

Every week, an assistant coach is tasked with assuring Harbaugh that he
has not been thrown out of the domed settlement on the surface of Mars
in Total Recall

Despite the disheartening clobbering, the Wildcats are still 5-1, still close to clinching a bowl berth, and in contention in the Big Ten West. Their time in the national spotlight has passed; now Northwestern fans can retreat to the shadows comfortably away from college football bloviatrics and enjoy what still has the possibility to be an incredible season. A repeat of the 2013 season, where a hot Northwestern start devolved into a series of inconceivable late-game meltdowns where the Wildcats found themselves turning into the opposing team on Friday Night Lights every week will hopefully not happen.

Listen up, we're gonna run the you scramble around for two minutes
before heaving the ball up against their entire defense with no time
remaining and I want you to throw that ball with metaphoric resonance
about small-town football and triumphs and misery and what it means
to be a man and I want you to do it while people scream in wide-eyed
wonder in slow motion in the stands, what are you doing, don't you get
in that huddle without this post rock CD

But Northwestern will not contend for anything if they don't get past an undefeated Iowa team with its own designs on the West in a bloodthirsty Big Ten showdown.

BIG TEN FOOTBALL: THE NATION'S SHOVIEST FOOTBALL

Iowa-Northwestern games are technically football in that there are football teams and balls and crowds and everything. But the games are also demolition derbies, where dream seasons from teams far removed from Big Ten royalty smash into smoldering piles of ligaments and animus. Pat Fitzgerald broke his leg in the 1995 Iowa game, preventing him from playing in the Rose Bowl. A dreadful Iowa team crushed Northwestern's chance at Pasadena in 2000, relegating the 'Cats to a share of the championship and a berth in the Alamo Bowl. Both teams lost starting quarterbacks in consecutive years in 2009 and 2010. Iowa and Northwestern exist to ruin each other's seasons in complete anonymity because not a single soul outside Iowa City and Evanston is aware that these teams play each other every year on a regulation football field.

Artists' rendition: Iowa 12, Northwestern 7

The Hawkeyes are flying high with an undefeated season and the Wildcats are still recovering from the drubbing they received in Ann Arbor. It would appear that Iowa should cruise to an easy win. The Hawkeyes, however, have been hammered by injuries. Star defensive lineman Drew Ott is lost for the season. The offensive line is so beat up that Kirk Ferentz may suit up; he has spent the week lifting triangular weights, looking for his leather helmet, and practicing hand-to-hand combat against Soviet agents in preparation. Iowa quarterback C.J. Beathard his also nurturing an injury, but he plans to counter by having the best football name since Army quarterback Trent Steelman managed to tactically subterfuge his way through Northwestern's defense some years back.

Northwestern's miserable outing in Ann Arbor exposed some problems that the defense had covered up. They still have trouble moving the ball against good defenses. The defense had trouble stopping Michigan's power running game, and Iowa's Jordan Canzeri has absolutely sliced defenses apart. Last week against Illinois, the Hawkeyes simply stopped throwing the ball, giving it to Canzeri over and over again as he literally ran over the Illini to seal an Iowa victory. Add in that Ferentz, long considered an ambassador of Big Ten Fuddy-Duddery has embraced a Cornfield Gambler persona that has the stereotypically staid Hawkeyes going for it on fourth down, embracing the forward pass, and occasionally eschewing a field-goal-and-safety scoring philosophy, and it is not hard to see why they are undefeated and favored. This time it is the Wildcats who live and die with the defense, run the ball between the tackles, and try to punt other teams into submission in order to win football games while Ferentz mocks Fitz's conservatism from the groovy psychadelic bus where he now lives.

The Wildcats will honor the twentieth anniversary of the Rose Bowl team on Homecoming this Saturday. They will be wearing throwback 1995 uniforms. This marks the seventh different uniform combination Northwestern has worn this season: white helmets, white jerseys, Aggressive Wildcat Bite Helmets, Dracula Uniforms, Chicago's Big Ten Municipal Corruption Boodle Bag helmets, Lake helmets, Colbert Eyebrow uniforms, and Fake Opposing Uniforms to Convince an Overwhelming Away Crowd At Ryan Field to Root For Northwestern Uniforms. Northwestern's marketing partnership with UnderArmour has been vital for building the Northwestern Brand, which is crucial for twenty-first century football programs who plan on using their Solid Brands to stop the option play.

THE CUBS ARE VERY GOOD AND YOU ARE GOING TO READ ABOUT IT IN THIS BLOG

There is a dumb comfort to fatalism. When the seemingly-insurmountable lead evaporates through a series of miserable Rube Goldberg events, well it could never end well. It's not necessarily a belief in curses or goats or any sort of supernatural malevolence. It is just the idea, lodged in the Neanderthal Cortex of a primordial human brain that if something happens a few times over the short course of a human lifetime, it is a truth from time immemorial. The Cubs would never win anything and, if they did, they could never beat the St. Louis Cardinals, as ever-present at the top of the National League Central division as a sun shining the Right Way.

The Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series. They beat them and the St. Louis Cardinals are no longer able to play baseball. They can go out and play some stickball or get together on the diamond to practice calibrating their baseball caps to avoid tilting them at morally unacceptable Strop levels, but these games will not be sanctioned by Major League Baseball and there is nothing anyone can do from disseminating accounts of them all over the Midwest.

The bizarre Costas diatribe against Strop after a disastrous outing is one
of the funniest subplots of the season. "KNOW THIS, STROP," Costas
said, puffing out his bulging eye sacs to make him appear larger and more
menacing. "WHEN YOU ARRIVE IN WHATEVER DAMNED AFTERLIFE
WILL ACCEPT YOUR SHODDY RELIEF PITCHING SOUL, I HOPE YOU
FACE AN ETERNITY SERVING UP MEATBALLS THAT WILL SOAR
ACROSS THE HEAVENS TO DESTROY YOUR MOST CHERISHED
MEMORIES AND WHILE THAT IS HAPPENING YOU ARE MOCKED
WITH GRAVITY-DEFYING BAT FLIPS WHICH HANG FOREVER
TURNING AND ECHOING DEMONIC LAUGHTER AT YOU, HERE I
SHOULD NOTE I AM PROBABLY ALSO OPPOSED TO BAT FLIPS BECAUSE
THAT SEEMS LIKE A REALLY BOB COSTAS THING TO GET ANNOYED
WITH, THIS IS BOB COSTAS SIGNING OFF WITH UNEARTHLY CACKLING."
Costas then rode off on his High Horse, which is a normal, regular-sized horse.

The Cubs sent Jason Hammel, a pitcher sponsored by the American Meatball Council for the past several months, against the Cardinals in a potential series-clinching game. Hammel immediately gave up a hit and home run to put them down 2-0 before fans even had an opportunity to aggressively point to their arms in an effort to remove Hammel from the game in world where it was possible to make citizens' pitching changes. The move to keep him in seemed even more ludicrous in the second, when Maddon sent Hammel to bat with men on base. Hammel responded with an RBI single, setting the stage for Javy Baez to homer home the go-ahead runs and for Cardinals pitcher John Lackey to argle-bargle his way back the mound in a delightful display of baseball fury. A Cardinals rally (started by a scrappy backup catcher who hit .200 this season, whose crucial RBI double against the Cubs was fore-ordained by the Big Bang) was answered by thundering Cubs dingers including a Kyle Schwarber blast that affected the rotation of the Earth.

If the Cubs can defeat the Cardinals, if they can make it to the National League Championship Series, then hell, why can't they make it to the World Series? If all it takes to break through the playoffs is a team full of young people who do not realize they are Cubs, a manager who manages the team with cuddly zoo animals, and a lumpy, chin-bearded home run machine, then I suppose it is worth unmooring ourselves from an entire baseball cosmology and actually believe. Or, do what I plan to do and miserably watch every playoff game, spending the most fun Cubs season of all time in a protective flinch waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Playoff baseball makes Larry Kings of us all

IMAGINE DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY SPORTS THIS WEEKEND

Northwestern faces off at 11:00am in Chicago's Big Ten time slot against Iowa at Ryan Field. Perhaps a return to confines of Ryan Field alongside the '95 team can shake the team from whatever hit them last Saturday at Michigan. All that's at stake is a bowl berth, contention in the Big Ten West, and avoiding a Ranked Northwestern Death Spiral that has claimed so many other seasons. The vestigial quasi-rivalry with Iowa, Homecoming, and a stadium filled with hostile Iowa fans will certainly lend the game an intense atmosphere.

There is no fatalistic doom-and-gloomery that hovers over a Northwestern/Iowa game. Instead, it is a shared horror that both promising seasons can simultaneously implode by slobberknocking so hard that it causes some sort of rift in the slobber/knock continuum, throws the earth off its orbit, and opens the Big Ten West to be claimed by Purdue. After all, we are living in a world where the Chicago Cubs have beaten the indomitable St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series and the Laws of the Universe no longer apply.

Sports fandom is inherently silly. Watching people you do not know chase balls up and down fields or courts or regulation handball galleons is pointless. Touchdowns? Pointless. Slam dunks? Wastes of time. Butt bumps? Sophomoric, airborne, gluteal showoffery. Bullpen cars? Only three have ever understood the point of bullpen cars-- Chief Wahoo, who is dead and problematic-- Tommy Lasorda, who has gone mad-- and I, who have forgotten all about it.

The baseball helmet-shaped car taps into the primal fear of hitters,
reminding them that all that stands between them and a baseball to the
cranium is a thin, plastic helmet, but look there is a larger helmet, and its
cruel master is the relief pitcher and he probably has a mustache

Spectator sports are a pointless diversion. Instead of spending free time screaming at neckless people slam dunking on each other and then making fart faces, we should probably learn how to harvest legumes, fend off attackers with nunchuks, and successfully build operational nunchuks. Or maybe read a goddamn book or something.

Emotional involvement in sports is ridiculous; some guy runs to the other end of a field with a ball and a bunch of people throw their arms up in triumph like we just walked on the goddamn moon and other people watching the same thing are visibly exacerbated, only slightly less devastated than discovering that it was Earth all along you maniacs. For a ball! It's madness.

And yet, here we are. If you are reading this blog you probably like sports to a level of derangement that involves locating a blospot.com blog about Northwestern football that is only less ludicrous than actually writing several thousand words about Northwestern football and nineteenth-century mustaches and reviews of books about botanical piracy that are read by fewer people than attendees at a Lincoln Chaffee rally, he wrote, chuckling then pausing to adjust his blogging gloves at that topical political reference.

Of course, the reason why it is fun to get all wrapped up in sports is because there are no real consequences. There's three hours of yelling and cheering and incredulously making gestures at the referee and feeling elation or dejection at something that we have no control over and has no bearing on the rest of our complicated lives. There's a simple line: there's our team and the other team and our ONE WEEK DAILY FANTASY SPORTS TEAM IT'S SO EASY JUST SELECT YOUR PLAYERS AND GIVE YOUR CREDIT CARD INFORMATION AND YOU TOO CAN MAKE MILLIONS JUST LIKE THIS MONOTONE IN A WES WELKER JERSEY WHO LOOKS LIKE THE WORD ACTUALLY BROUGHT TO LIFE WHEN A BOLT OF LIGHTNING HIT A PACKET OF COMBOS.

Or maybe this is all just a long justification for why it is kind of a bummer when all of your sports teams lose badly in a single week in the Anthology of Sports Horror.

CHAPTER ONE

Northwestern has been mercilessly clobbered in its last two football games. Have the Wildcats just run into two very good teams? Are they still good at football? Have they entered some sort of ranked football zone Logan's Run scenario where whenever they hit a certain AP Rank they are then hunted down by Big Ten teams and run over by fullbacks? No one has any idea.

Iowa takes a commanding 33-10 lead at Ryan Field

The vaunted Wildcat defense has succumbed to a rash of injuries and tired as an unceasing succession of punts and turnovers has kept them onto the field. The offense over the past two games has resembled a hungry dog spotting a raw stake on a counter but unable to devise a plan to get it because it is a dog. Northwestern's struggles to move the ball are nothing new; the 'Cats have relied on defense, turnovers, and special teams all season and remained content to use Justin Jackson as a battering ram against lesser defenses. Now, against tougher Big Ten defenses that have had seven games to scout the Wildcats' leather helmet offensive playbook, the offense needs to find ways to stay on the field and score points or Mick McCall needs to reveal that college football's new inefficiency is punt muffs, and Northwestern will revolutionize the sport by giving opponents as many opportunities to drop punts as possible.

Northwestern has had a baffling season. Few fans started the year with high expectations as the 'Cats had to break in a freshman quarterback and faced two tough non-conference opponents. Then, Northwestern surged to 5-0, inspiring dreams of a run for the West. After two brutal blowout losses, Northwestern seems lost. Two years ago, when Northwestern's last dream season fell off the rails, the 'Cats suffered a series of ridiculous close losses. This season, they have been completely outclassed, unlikely to be favored in a Big Ten game again except home against Purdue and maybe against Illinois in Hatpocalypse: Soldier Field. It is still possible, even likely that Northwestern grabs a bowl bid, which would be a vast improvement over the past two miserable bowl-less years. But six or maybe seven wins and a bowl, which would have delighted fans over the summer, now feels hollow. A win over a reeling Nebraska team could give the 'Cats an opportunity to turn the faltering season around. Another miserable blowout could put in the meager bowl dreams in question and allow Northwestern's lawyers to file an injunction against the Associated Press from ever ranking them again.

CHAPTER TWO

The NFL season is not even halfway finished, but there was already no point to a Bears-Lions game. The Bears had come off two consecutive thrilling comeback victories and the Lions had yet to win a single game all season, but everyone had seen enough to know that these two teams specialize in futility. After 60 minutes of uninspired nincompoopery, the teams proved themselves equally bad and, for some reason, the National Football League allowed the game to continue into overtime. After some 11 minutes of helpless flailing, the Detroit Lions managed to scrape a field goal, win the game, and begin a season of jockeying for position against the Bears in order to determine who will draft a guy who will instantaneously shed all of his ligaments like a molting caterpillar, completely forget how to tackle people, or disappear of the face of the earth only to return a decade later with an eyepatch and a team consisting of 52 helmeted brooms to apply for an expansion franchise.

Detroit's overtime win prevented the team from sinking into the ignominy
of the Matt Millen era, who has slunk back to television as a professional
ignominy

The game was marred by a questionable call on an apparent interception in the endzone by a Bears linebacker that was ruled a touchdown. The Lions are no strangers to bizarre catch calls. Calvin Johnson was famously victimized by catch ambiguity in a 2010 game-- now the so-called "Calvin Johnson" rule is invoked whenever a wide receiver makes a spectacular catch in the endzone that, after 25 minutes of review and a pixel-by-pixel analysis and Troy Aikman saying "Joe, I don't think that's a catch. Joe" a dozen times, the the catch is inexplicably ruled an incompletion. At this point, the NFL no longer needs an instant replay booth-- it needs to send questionable catches to a conference of French postmodern philosophers who, after two years of peer review, will determine that a catch is shaped by systems of language and state-imposed power structures while a haggard crew of NFL broadcasters grow haggard in their booths, surrounded by copies of Representations.

AIKMAN: Joe, if you take a look at that discourse there, I mean that's just
a philosopher's thesis right there, just the type of argument you want at the
philosophy position.
BUCK: Joe.

Regardless of the call, the Bears had no business winning the game. It featured a patented Jay Cutler endzone interception, which he tosses out at this point like a catchphrase from a washed-up sitcom actor at a mall appearance before wearily collecting his check. The Bears have actually had exciting games; the maligned Cutler seems to have found his niche heroically leading comebacks against other terrible teams as every other phase of the team falls apart around him. Meanwhile, the Bears have fallen into traditional Bear dysfunction. The Bears released Jeremiah Ratliff after the police removed him from Halas Hall because he reportedly got into a screaming altercation with the General Manager. Maybe it would help to change the name of the Bears' facility because Halas Hall sounds like the name of an English estate where languid aristocrats pass the summer months scheming against each other and enlisting footmen their intrigues.

A Midnight Modern Conversation at Halas Hall

The Bears' loss featured not only a bizarre call, but also a Detroit comeback allowed by John Fox's punt 'em all and let God sort 'em out philosophy while clinging to a lead with less than three minutes left. But it's not a particularly painful loss, since the Bears are abysmal and Fox's conservative gameplans will not affect anything that matters. Fox remains a breath of fresh air after replacing arc Trestman, who seemed to relate to his players by having his face suddenly appear in their windows when lightning flashes.

CHAPTER THREE

The 2015 season was the most fun summer of Cubs baseball I've ever experienced. The desperation emanating from a 107-year title drought dragging the corpses of generations of disappointed Cubs fans in its wake tried to ruin it. The future of the Cubs, with their heralded group of dinger zealots is bright. The future of the Cubs today and until the moment they either hoist a World Series trophy or baseball is outlawed by an Evil Future Government as described in every science fiction movie for the past 30 years remains bleak.

BASEBALL IS CANCELED, AMERICA, YOUR ONLY SPORT IS GROWING MUSTACHES
AND GRABBING

There should be no heartbreak in Wrigleyville. The Cubs relied on five rookies this season. They started Kyle Hendricks and Jason Hammel in key spots. Hammel never recovered from an injury and gradually transformed from an effective starter into a batting practice pitching machine. Hendricks throws dipping, darting sinkers and changeups and looks like he spends the days he is not pitching maintaining the Clark the Cub twitter account. It goes without saying that he is one of my favorite Cubs, but he is also not the most comforting sight on the mound in a do-or-die playoff game. The team, laden with cheap rookie contracts and the deep pockets of the Ricketts family, will attempt to bolster the rotation with high-profile arms.

The Cubs got completely walloped in the series. The Mets' equally exciting young pitchers completely shut the Cubs down. Lester and Arrieta could not respond in kind. Nothing, though, was more dispiriting than the transformation of Daniel Murphy, Anonymous Middle Infielder, into the best baseball player on the face of the Earth. Murphy has hit half as many home runs in nine playoff games as he did over the course of a 162 game season. He has hit them off Zach Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Jake Arrieta, all vying for the National League Cy Young Award. It is as if the universe had allowed the Cubs to enjoy too much success and sent a scourge to the Earth in the form of a guy with a career .755 OPS. His run would be delightful and absurd except when it is your team that is being viciously murphied out of existence in front of an inceasingly horrified crowd.

The Cubs were not supposed to be here. But that is cold comfort. The Cubs certainly seem to be set up for a period of contention, but nothing is guaranteed and even making the playoffs each year is an arduous task unless your root for the grimly inevitable St. Louis Cardinals. Next season will bring an inordinate amount of pressure on a young team from Cubs fans who expect a championship. The one positive is that we have all been liberated from ever having to hear about Back to the Future again and the next person who brings up Back to the Future should be flung head first into a pile of manure that is bought specifically to ram Back to the Future people's heads in.

WE GET IT

There is no curse. For most of the past century, the Cubs have been inept at baseball, and they have rarely even had a chance to completely implode in the playoffs. The Cubs could one day make it back to the World Series since the invention and fall of the Iron Curtain. Until they make it, every playoff pitch carries the weight of crushing inevitability, of the possibility of never seeing them win a championship, of the punishment of an infinite series of Murphys that will only end with the Cubs eliminating their ridiculous drought and finally taking their rightful place as one of the most reviled teams in baseball that no one ever wants to see ever win anything again.

EPILOGUE

Sports misery is absurd. We can all turn off our televisions, turn in our tickets, and go about our lives without it making an iota of difference. Northwestern can be ranked 120 or 1. The Bears can continue to play like they have all season forever. The Cubs can miss the World Series for the rest of our lives and all of the lives of our descendants. It does not matter. But it's fun that for a few hours a week, it sort of does.

Northwestern's performance this Saturday against a down-on-its-luck Nebraska team means nothing in the larger context of our lives. It means very little even in the world of college football, with two Big Ten West also-rans slugging away at each other for bowl positioning. But I'll be tuned in on Saturday, riveted as ever. Because what is at stake should they win this game or any other is the relative prestige of hypothetical fly-by-nite bowl game operations and that injustice demands reckoning.

It's been two long years, but the Northwestern Wildcats are going bowling again. They have six wins, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them from appearing in the Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants Bowl located in an illegal industrial meet freezer accessible only by a six step handshake and the password "McGarigle." As a wise football proverb once said "yow yow yow yow yow; yow."

These wholesome Wildcat cheerleaders from 1953 have no idea they are about to be torn
asunder by what they thought was Willie but was actually a failed thesis project conjured
by the Department of Unholy Incantation

There is no better way to get back into the Northwestern spirit as we head into a bye week than by checking out this Evolution of Willie article from Northwestern Magazine. It comes with a link to one of the great websites in the history of the internet called Faces of Willie, allowing us to take at how the Northwestern mascot Willie the Wildcat spent most of its time as resembling a terrifying Hittite deity of death and destruction that has come back to the Earth to devour the souls of football fans and haughty professors who spend most of the semester arrogantly denying the existence of terrifying Hittite deities until they find out too late that pointers and compasses are no defense for vengeful, ancient mascot gods.

The Northwestern band plays the Song of
Suppiluliumas in order to appease its
terrible claws

Northwestern managed to fend off Nebraska. The defense spent most of the game on the field, repeatedly blunting Nebraska's running game and frustrating Husker quarterback Tommy Armstrong. Dean Lowry terrorized Nebraska's offensive line. Nick VanHoose scored when an errant Armstrong pass entered VanHoose's Land and was immediately spirited away to the Nebraska endzone. The offense continued to stall in the first half, except on two occasions when Clayton Thorson got loose scrambling room. Thorson herky-jerked his way to 126 yards, and his running set up two crucial Northwestern scores as 90,000 Nebraska fans looked on incredulously. Thorson came to Northwestern as a running quarterback, but his ungainly scampers still take opposing teams by surprise, in the same way that Mike Kafka took Minnesota by surprise with his record-setting jaunts in the Metrodome, where he underwent a metamorphosis into something that cannot be described via clumsy literary references. In the second half, Thorson connected on passes, including a touchdown to Superback Dan Vitale. Yet, it wouldn't be a Northwestern-Nebraska game if either team easily waltzed through. Nebraska managed to come back to within two late in the fourth quarter, but their rally fell short when Marcus McShepard knocked down the pass on the conversion and the Wildcat offense ran out the clock.

For Northwesten, the win served as a tonic to the miserable bludgeonings the team had suffered in two consecutive weeks. It secured another bowl game after two miserable 5-7 seasons. For Nebraska, on the other hand, the close loss continued an astounding trend of last-second losses. New coach Mike Riley has faced criticism as the once-proud team now has a tough path toward bowl eligibility. On the other hand, it is difficult to attack a first-year coach for a string of unfortunate Rube Goldberg losses. Once a team loses via Hail Mary and series of impossible fourth-quarter collapses, it is time to start looking for a fan with a Monkey's Paw that had wished for the Huskers not to be blown out in any game this season.

AN ABSTRACTION

From time to time, the United States Congress creates a special committee to dig into issues pressing the nation. Wikipedia's helpful list of defunct committees chronicles hundred of committees from French Spoliation to Space Travel to everyone's favorite Mileage (this is a committee of Senators screaming "MILEAGE" before sucking on opium or betting on congressional cobra fights). Many of these are eventually folded into larger committees. Others run their course. And one involved an investigation of congressional library books, threatening to bring the weight of the United States Congress to bear on scofflaws.

In February of 1861, a New York Times report alleged that Representatives from seceding states had no only left the Union, but had also made off with hundreds of dollars of books from the Congressional library to add to their treasonous Confederate library:

(click to expand)

Perfidy! Secessmanship! Webster's Dictionary Defines As! The United States Congress was not going to stand for a library looting and commissioned a thorough investigation using a series of nineteenth-century epithets. Here, for example, is the initial author of the New York Times article, hauled before the committee and forced to explain to them and to the American People how he knew of librarous larceny. And, when called to testify, H.H. Pangborn came through:

An enormity had been perpetrated upon our volumes. The Committee on Alleged Abstraction of Books was determined to get to the bottom of it. I imagine that nineteenth-century editors had this handy chart: abstraction for ill-gotten books, abscond with ill-gotten persons, and abscond upon a slow-moving train, the number one choice in absconding from 1870-1945. The committee's voluminous report is available here.

The Committee dug into the alleged theft. They questioned Pangborn on the extent to which his depiction of the theft library books as an act of low-level treason was his own creation. Pangborn mentioned that he sent his stories back to New York on the telegraph, where they were transcribed and rewritten, more or less, by a night editor. He writes quickly, he said, and could not remember all the details. Congress listened, skeptical and disapproving. They hauled in the editor and the night editor and the telegraph transcriber. The committee questioned Col. Daniel De Jarnette, the freshman Congressman from Virginia accused by the New York Times of ordering hundreds of volumes to be secreted away in preparation for secession (the hearings took place in February 1861; Virginia did not secede until April, and De Jarnette would serve in the Confederate Congress). They did not question Milledge Bonham, the South Carolina Representative accused of stealing dozens of volumes because he no longer considered himself part of the United States.

Daniel De Jarnette (l) and Milledge Bonham, the two alleged abstracters.

Both came under scrutiny for looking as Confederate as humanly possible

After days of testimony, it became increasingly clear that the special committee had become a search to blame whomever had insinuated to the New York Times that Confederate Congress had developed an arch plan to clean out the Congressional library's valuable volumes of Jefferson speeches. They finally find their man: Frederick Soulé. Soulé worked for the Post Office and tracked down missing books from the Congressional Library. He had been told of the missing books and told Pangborn of the Confederate plot. Everyone else agreed that the alleged theft came solely from Soulé's imagination. Here is some intense questioning on D.A. McElhone, the assistant librarian from whom Soulé claims to have heard about the missing volumes.

QUESTION: Did you say anything to Mr. Soulé that occasion to warrant the impression on his part that these gentlemen had fraudulently carried away these books?
ANSWER: I did not say one word about that.

And here's a more pertinent question that preceded it:

QUESTION: Does Mr. Soulé drive a wagon around?
ANSWER: I have seen him in one; I do not know whether that is his business.

It was Soulé, the rumor-mongering postal worker who might or might not have a wagon. The rest of the case fell apart. De Jarnette showed that he never took delivery of the books he had ordered. The hundreds of dollars of missing books supposedly packed and sent to the Confederacy by Bonham were revealed to be a clerical error. The report, which summoned 13 witnesses, commissioned a list of every book checked out by a Congressman from a Southern state, and covered a solid week of testimony, ultimately blamed the media:

The alleged abstraction of books remained alleged. Two months later, Beauregard's Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter.

NBA PREVIEW

For this year's preview of the 2015-16 NBA season, bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com reached out to literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard. In between a busy schedule of international literary festivals, appearances on Norwegian radio programs about him, and rustic shed-brooding, Knausagaard has agreed to turn his unique observations about his life and European ennui to slam dunks and bounce passes.

WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO WRITE ABOUT BASKETBALL?
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Special Basketball Correspondent

I don't know why I agreed to do this. I have no interest in basketball. I logged onto the web and found an e-mail from my American agent. He told me that highbrow American publications love it when foreigners go and try to understand American phenomena. Every time I protested, he just said "that's why it will be great!" It was like wrestling with a boa constrictor. Eventually I said yes because it was too exhausting to keep replying to e-mails. I still did not know anything about basketball.

They are tall. Everyone knows that. How am I going to write for an American audience that basketball players are tall? That is the one thing people know about basketball. Fucking bullshit. Fuck. I was in Edinburgh at the literary festival. I had spent the afternoon in their largest auditorium, reading, answering questions from bearded men with canvas satchels. People lined up for hours for me sign their books. It was hell on Earth. The next morning, I had to kill some time before I left. I found a cafe across the bridge, in a residential area where I didn't think anyone would recognize me and ask me questions about my books. No one did. There were no bearded men with canvas satchels in there. I opened my notebook and looked inside. "Basketball players are tall," I had written. Shit.

I decided to call Gunnar. Gunnar lived in New York for a few years in his 20s as an editor and there is a chance he may have seen a basketball game. "Karl Ove, good to hear from you," the voice said. Damn it. I had clumsily dialed the wrong Gunnar. This Gunnar had been in my daughter's class in Stockholm several years ago and I must have forgotten to delete him. Years ago, before mobile phones, I could have mumbled about a wrong number. Now, everyone knows who has called. There is no room for error in dialing. I thought about saying I found a phone and had randomly selected a number, but my voice already gave it away. "Gunnar, how is Emma?" I said because I could not bring myself to tell him I had no intention of talking to him today or ever again and I had always avoided him at children's birthday parties. We agreed to have a beer next time I was in the city. I know too many Gunnars.

After a month of e-mails that I had not returned, the American agent started calling. "How is it coming?" he said casually although both he and I knew there was nothing casual about it. He suggested that I purchase something called "NBA League Pass International" that would allow me to watch every basketball game on my computer. I put in my credit card information. It did not work. "Password not found." I tried again. "Not found." I lit a cigarette. I clicked on a button that said "Forget Password?" I hadn't forgotten it; it was a Norwegian curse word that a friend had scored into a teacher's car. He always kept a pen knife on him that he had found somewhere that summer. His favorite use was petty vandalism, but he was secretly waiting to brandish it in a fight. We all saw him scratch the car, but none of us would talk, not even when they threatened to call our houses, not even when I cried. We were eleven years old, and we had dared him to. The janitor saw us and we ran into the forest. It was a cold, rainy afternoon and the forest was damp with pits of mud. It didn't take long for him to stop pursuing us, but we kept going for at least a kilometer and managed to hide in a tree. The damp bark pressed through my too-thin jacket. It seemed like hours. We eventually climbed down and then we had to find a way to clean our shoes and our pants. It wouldn't take long for our parents to connect our muddy clothes to the car knife incident. That was my password, the word Isak had carved into the car: FUCK FAC. He did not have time to finish the e. The new password, a mishmash of letters and numbers, did not work either. I called tech support. "I am trying to watch basketball for a blog post," I said.

Eventually, I saw basketball, mostly in clips on the web. I typed basketball into the search engine and I saw tall men leaping in the air and jamming the ball into baskets. I saw others stop this from happening. Sometimes, at seemingly-random intervals, they would take penalty shots, although not as often as the players seemed to want. Every so often, the game paused for the stars to convince people to buy cars or insurance. It is a slick, modern sports product. The game was not recognizable to me, but the sponsors' logos, the inane television commentary, the players dramatically hurling themselves to the ground in order to get a penalty, these I understood. There was nothing meaningful I could say about it. Sport as spectacle that meant nothing unless you were young enough for it to mean something. I e-mailed that to my editor.

[Editor's Note: Karl Ove thinks the Cavs will beat the Warriors in seven]

BYE

Northwestern can neither heroically win nor ignominiously lose this week. Regardless of what happens, Northwestern will go to a bowl. As the website thebattleofthebowls.com puts it, "the bowl has been made for thousands of years."

The Big Ten West has almost certainly passed from their grasp, and the rest of the games are for bowl positioning. And on November 28, at Chicago's Big Ten In-State Rivalry Neutral Site, the battle to seize The Hat begins. It is time to set the clocks back. It is time for Hat Reclamation Month.

Well, the College Football Playoff Committee has come out of its walnut-lined antechambers and released their rankings. There's still a month left of college football action, and the rankings have essentially no meaning, yet here we are, in a world where college football playoff rankings have been released with the subtle dignity of an Imperial Durbar.

The Delhi Durbar of 1903, marking the ascension of Edward VII to the throne with an
elephant and pith helmet party

What is the best college football team in the country? There are three polls that tell you. The Associated Press poll ranks the top 25 teams in the country and is voted on by a panel of newspaper men selected on the quality of the old-timey reporter hat they wear in their newspaper column photographs. The College Football Playoff poll is compiled by ten people involved in collegiate athletics, a former USA today reporter, a retired Air Force general with "3,261 flying hours," and a former Secretary of State whose expertise on the Soviet Union has given her unparalleled insight into the byzantine bureaucracy of bowl subdivision football. The Coach's Poll is not actually filled out by anyone and appears, fully formed, on the desk of a USA today sports editor every Sunday written on crumbling vellum and enclosed in a hollowed-out mastodon femur.

DID FORBES NAME ANYONE ELSE IN THIS ROOM THE MOST POWERFUL WOMAN
IN THE WORLD? I DIDN'T THINK SO. SIT DOWN, RADAKOVICH.

What is the best college football team in the country? The best way to tell is through head-to-head competition. Unfortunately, there are few opportunities to set up games directly between the best teams. Instead, the preferred method is innuendo, insults, shaky applications of the transitive property, arguments about the strength of conferences that are not entirely but still sort of fueled by residual Civil War animus, and screaming at people.

What is the best college football team in the country? The best way to tell is to take a playoff committee of randomly-selected bureaucrats and put them in a conference room where they change into tunics and headbands, take psychedelic drugs, and hallucinate football games that cannot happen. "I see Alabama taking the lead against Clemson by turning themselves into a swarm of bees that move to the score of a pipe organ played by an octopus made of colors," one says. "I see Notre Dame and Ohio State, wait I don't see them anymore now it's a really graphic depiction of the conception of a griffin with the roars and screeches and I can't look away," says another. "Third and three and it's a dive play up the middle for a first down, great block by the right guard," says Barry Alvarez.

What is the best college football team in the country? Fuck it, it's probably Alabama. It's always Alabama.

FESTIVAL OF FIRED COACHES

We are still a month away from the end of college football season, and the Football Bowl Subdivision is a smoldering heap of fired coaches. Two coaches have retired mid-season: Jerry Kill has left Minnesota because of health concerns; Steve Spurrier just threw up his arms, said fuck it, and immediately left South Carolina to shirtlessly drive dune buggies around golf courses and yell PLAYING THROUGH before showering unsuspecting foursomes with empties. Al Golden was fired after angry Miami alumni demanded it through a series of airplane-borne banners in much the same way they buzzed an MLA convention to demand a new vice provost. Maryland fired Randy Edsall, who spent weeks attempting to avoid detection by hanging out on the sidelines of Maryland football games. Former Illini coach and man who woke every morning to shake his fist in the direction of Evanston Tim Beckman lost his job shortly before the season.

The only thing college football fans enjoy more than winning is ousting a struggling coach. For one, college football coaches have an enormous effect on programs from recruiting players to setting strategies, to gland-handing administrators and pretending to care about what some old cigar-chomping, ostrich boot-wearing, scowling, combed-over plutocrat has to say about running the option in an effort to convince him or her to donate millions of dollars for new facilities in the ludicrous college sports facilities arms race.

College football coaches, millionaire tyrants on the practice field, whose visages are splashed
across local papers and who leverage their fame into lucrative local commercials bereft of
dignity, have their jobs depend on the largesse of a person with a name like "T. Boone Pickens."

When a program sputters into a futile, bowl-less wilderness or, for a big-time team, stops winning a national championship every year (the Unacceptable Valley, named for fans using the word UNACCEPTABLE on radio shows, message boards, and other places where otherwise rational human beings temporarily transform themselves into professional wrestlers), firing the coach cuts the head off the snake slowly squeezing the life out of the program. In addition, football or basketball coaches at public universities are, without exception, the highest paid public employees in each state, and demanding that they are fired for losing to a MAC team is the closest thing that Americans have to accountability for their public officials.

THESE THOUGHTS ABOUT JAMES FRANKLIN ARE NOT UNHINGED

It's a battle of two-loss teams at Ryan Field as Penn State attempts to avenge last year's cruel bludgeoning at the hands of Northwestern. The Wildcats won that game 29-6, the worst Nittany Lion home loss since the legendary 2001 Miami Hurricanes crushed them 33-7. Northwestern's win over Penn State involved my favorite play of all time, the Manchurian Linemandidate, when a Penn State lineman blocked a teammate into oblivion allowing the Wildcat defense to swarm in and erased the running back from the face of the Earth.

The look of determination on number 72's face as he executes a textbook block against an
enormous man whose only thought is "why are you blocking me, I'm your friend" makes this
an all-time great Northwestern sports gif that does not involve Pat Fitzgerald contorting
himself into a Jim Carrey The Mask face

Penn State James Franklin has never beaten Northwestern. The 'Cats beat Vanderbilt twice in a row (though Franklin was only coach for the second game), and then the Commodores canceled a home-and-home series with the Mighty Wildcats of Northwestern because of scheduling concerns, a hollow excuse that Franklin and the athletic department used out of cowardice, the terrifying image of the Colter/Siemian monster rampaging through his nightmares. In 2014, the very year the Commodores were scheduled to steam up to Evanston, Franklin jumped ship. He took over Penn State. Some might say that Franklin left a tough job at a Northwestern-like private school with little history of football success in the ridiculously tough SEC conference to run what had been one of the great programs in college football. From a different angle, though, his strategy was clear. Much like how Dutch monarch William of Orange married into British royalty and then used the resources of the British Empire against his arch-nemesis Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, James Franklin clearly accepted the Penn State job for one reason only: to one day ride into Evanston with a highly-touted quarterback and stout defense and finally do what the lowly Commodores could not and crush the Wildcats in their own stadium while checking Northwestern's claims on the Duchy of Savoy.

William and Louis's rivalry was marked by massive European wars, fierce mercantile trade
policies, and an unceasing competition to build the largest and most elaborate Cape Swirling
Rooms in their respective estates

Northwestern shrugged off its tough losses to Michigan and Iowa with a close win over a terrible Nebraska team. They are coming off a desperately-needed bye week for an injury-riddled squad. Cornerback Matthew Harris, who leads Northwestern in interceptions, for example, is expected to return after recovering from a broken face. Nevertheless, the 'Cats face a tall order against one of the country's best defenses. There is no doubt that the Wildcat defense can give Northwestern a chance to win, even against a superstar quarterback like the Nittany Lions' Christian Hackenberg. They will stand little chance, though, if they spend the entire game attempting to stop him after a series of sputtering three-and-outs from the offense. Nebraska could not stop Clayton Thorson from gradually loping down the field, and that made the difference last game. This week, Thorson has a chance to show he can move the ball through the air for a whole game and lead the 'Cats to another big upset in front of thousands of screaming tarp enthusiasts. Or, Penn State lineman can heroically block each other at inopportune times enough for a Northwestern win.

The stakes between these two unexpectedly decent Big Ten teams are not particularly high. Both teams would need an astounding confluence of events to propel them to the Lucrative Conference Championship Game. The winner will probably enter the top 25 poll. These teams, however, are mainly jockeying for bowl position, which will tend to be disregarded by bowl committees eager to throw in for the biggest Football Brand they can attract regardless of record, with bowl representatives stuck with Northwestern over a bigger school due to arcane bowl selection rules forced to impotently stand around in their bowl selection command centers and hurl pottery at their butlers and footmen in fits of rage. Most importantly, though, Northwestern is playing to frustrate the designs of James Franklin, who will be forced to once again retreat to his lavish traveling quarters and angrily stab daggers into maps.

PLAYOFF EXCITEMENT

After five weeks of excitement, Northwestern's pipe playoff dreams fell apart with two crushing losses. One the one hand, it is disappointing that the Wildcats have fallen off the radar. It is much more fun to beat Iowa and Michigan while Jim Harbaugh throws Daffy Duck tantrums on the sidelines than see those teams nonchalantly dispatch them.

A dramatic reconstruction of the Northwestern-Michigan game

On the other hand, it is liberating to escape the inscrutable machinations of the Playoff Committee, the next step in college football's arbitrary method of choosing a champion. Fans of teams with a legitimate claim wait on tenterhooks every week for the Committee to emerge and welcome that team to the Promised Land of lucrative playoff football or get cast out into the dustbin of the Holiday Bowl, and this goes on for a literal month before the rankings actually mean anything and no one has been able to explain why this happens other than the Playoff Committee enjoys issuing pronouncements.

Meanwhile, Northwestern's season is far from over. There are still four games remaining, and the 'Cats can still put together a memorable season. They are going bowling. They have an opportunity to force James Franklin to leave Evanston shaking his fist. And, somewhere over the horizon, just visible if we squint, the Hat is out there, Chicago's Big Ten Rivalry Trophy to be seized within the city limits themselves and not just in Chicago's Big Ten El-Connected Suburb. Welcome to big time college football, Bill Cubit. Give us our damn hat and we'll be on our way.

This week, the Playoff Committee released its newest rankings which, we should all remember, remain entirely meaningless at this stage. For example, the Playoff Committee could rank Purdue at #2, just ahead of Faber College and Texas State (not the Texas State in San Marcos, but the one carried to glory by a chemistry graduate student with NCAA eligibility played by Sinbad in Necessary Roughness) and it would not matter one bit until the Playoff Selection Committee selects the actual playoff teams.There is still no explanation as to why the Playoff Committee spends much of the season as the Sure, These Teams Might Make The Playoffs Committee.

The current Texas State had previously been Southwest
Texas State and originated as Southwest Texas State
Normal School. Lyndon Johnson attended and,
according to Robert Caro, immediately turned the
student government into a polarized hotbed of political
intrigue before he went on to the White House to deploy
the the Great Society and perfect a
bunghole-sensitive pants ordering procedure

The playoff picture once again revolves around Northwestern. The Wildcats own the only defeat against #7 Stanford, while they were obliterated by the undefeated fifth-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes. The Cardinal, however, remain in the playoff hunt. Playoff Committee Chairman Jeff Long explained that Stanford's loss to Northwestern counts less than other losses because the arduous journey from the California Bay Area to Evanston wreaked havoc on the players' body clocks.

I think we would not be doing our due diligence if we didn't recognize that a team was playing at 9 a.m. Pacific Time, and I recall last year we had a game, I believe UCLA traveled to Virginia. So we look at those things. They're a factor. How big of a factor? I can't quantify that for you, but I know it was discussed by the committee members and probably should have been.

There is no other satisfying explanation for a loss to Northwestern. It was the beguiling Central Time Zone, conceived of by midwestern railroad barons specifically for football purposes, that made Stanford players incapable of tackling Clayton Thorson or stopping Kevin Hogan from lofting a passes to Kyle Queiro in the endzone.

Ryan Field's dozens of home fans and aggressive tarp arrays already bring the Big Ten's
fiercest home field advantage, but what can teams do when the very laws of time and space
are brought to bear on their helpless players?

It is a good thing that the Playoff Committee is here to sift through the unpredictable and impossible riddle of college football and come up with rankings that factor in time zones, humors, and phrenological analyses of quarterback skull shapes to throw into chaotic mix.

"I think we would not be doing our due diligence
if we didn't recognize that the quarterback's
forehead indicated docility and inability to diagnose
defenses at the point of the snap is a factor when
arbitrarily determining a list of good football teams
because 45% of power in the Southeastern United
States is generated by people yelling at Paul
Finebaum," Long said

The issue of body clocks has obscured the week's more important clock revelation. The University of Illinois released the full Beckman Report. The report, available in full here, is more than 1,200 pages long. Under the heading "Team Culture and Environment," the Beckman Clock is revealed, an ominous Instrument of Intimidation that counts down to the Hat showdown between the Illini and "The Team Upstate."

Time is a hat circle

Here is the report's sixty-fifth footnote that might be my favorite thing ever written about Tim Beckman:

Some players complained that Coach Beckman’s requirement that injured players wear purple jerseys and placement of an anti-Northwestern sign in the athletic training room improperly communicated to players that being injured or seeking medical treatment was the equivalent of being a hated rival, at least to Coach Beckman. The vast majority of players, coaches, and sports medicine staff interviewed dismissed any such notions and reported no concern or even interest in either issue. Instead, witnesses interpreted these motivational tactics as meaningless.

PENN STATE RAN OUT OF TIME

Penn State faced numerous obstacles coming into Ryan Field. For one, they bravely transitioned from Eastern Time to Central Time. Then, they had to face the Wildcat defense. For most of the first half, Northwestern stymied the Nittany Lion attack. After an injury to Clayton Thorson, Justin Jackson took over, going for 186 yards on the day. Northwestern led 20-7 at the half, with at least one other scoring opportunity sailing past the uprights. But in the second half, Penn State came back. On one drive, the 'Cats got a stop only to give their opponents second life with consecutive roughing calls on a punter and a sliding quarterback. Then, wide receiver Geno Lewis picked up a fumbled reverse like an Australian Rules football player and heaved a perfect pass to his colleague in the endzone.

Jack Mitchell's missed extra point gave Penn State the slimmest lead in the fourth quarter. But when the defense stuffed Saquon Barkley and backup quarterback Zack Oliver managed to complete a long pass on third and the approximate distance between Evanston and Happy Valley, Mitchell got a chance to win the game. Jackson moved the ball effectively into range and Mitchell blasted one through the uprights for a thrilling comeback. Penn State got the ball back with nine seconds, in which they did nothing. This unfortunate turn of events stymied reporters' efforts to call it a walk-off kick because Jack Mitchell plays baseball and the Iron Law of Sports Announcing clearly states that if an athlete plays another sport, it is necessary to shoehorn that into broadcasts as much as humanly possible until viewers want to declare that they play a second sport of kumite fighting and are going to travel to the press box and pummel some godforsaken Joe Buck acolyte.

Sports announcers were probably responsible for Pro
Stars, a cartoon product where Michael Jordan, Bo
Jackson, and Wayne Gretzky used their sports skills to
defeat the forces of evil in lairs that, because of the
participation of Gretzky, always inexplicably contained
at least one large sheet of smooth ice

Clocks once again played a central role in the game. Penn State coach James Franklin deployed an avant-garde use of timeouts during the final minute, inexplicably allowing the 'Cats to run the clock down instead of allowing his offense about 30-40 seconds to get into field goal range on their final possession. Some Penn State fans took exception to his clock management and responded in the best way possible: by flying into an incoherent rage on the internet. Something about college football turns ordinary men and women into capricious space emperors, ready to cast out coaches, athletic directors, and anyone else involved in the football team into the space pits used for henchman and failed head coaches of as-yet-uninvented space sports.

The entire apparatus of a university is not safe from the wrath of football fans. Nebraska supporters, already reeling from a streak of improbably close losses including one at the hands of Northwestern, suffered the ultimate indignity of a loss to Purdue. Purdue fans spent the week confused, like they were henchmen who managed to kill Batman in the first 20 minutes of a movie and then had to figure out with the next two and a half hours. Nebraska's most unhinged fringe sent e-mails to the university chancellor. Every fanbase, including Northwestern I'm sure, has its epistolary football maniacs, but not every fanbase had their letters conveniently loaded onto the Worldwide Web so we can see internet comments brought into the Academy for the first time outside of a seminar entitled UNCALLED HOLDING PENALTIES: Discourses of Internet Football Commentary, this moderator is a joke and MUST BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY by the Department of Internet Football Semiotics.

Purdue faces Northwestern at Ryan Field on Saturday. The Boilermakers suffered a 48-14 shellacking at the hands of the Illini last week. Purdue fans have gone past pessimism and resignation to a rarefied football nihilism, staring stoically at another touchdown drive that means nothing. The Wildcats are heavy favorites in the game. At the same time, the appeal of college football is its unpredictability; it is a sport fueled by improbable upsets, jubilant goalpost-handling, and sour-faced upset victims staring despondently into the unknown. Purdue will rely on its strength: the Big Ten's greatest reserve of really scrappy-sounding quarterback names. Darrell Hazell will has benched Austin Appleby for freshman David Blough, both of whom train by having Purdue Pete burst through the walls in their lecture halls and chase them around campus on one of those old-timey railroad handcars. There are no guarantees in college football except that a Purdue win will result in a liveried footman delivering my angry scroll letter to Northwestern's president demanding he turn in his University President’s Sword.

CLEAN THEIR CLOCK

College football is the story of desperate teams running into each other at the mercy of a callous clock. Teams can stop the clock, they can eat clock, they can kill the clock. In the end, only the clock decides when the game ends, unless the game ends on an insane series of laterals with zero time remaining and then there is no time, everyone is simply floating in an ether beyond the concept of time itself between the fourth quarter and infinity, inscrutable to even our most learned scientists, philosophers, and ACC video replay officials.

Our clocks are oblivion devices, counting down to our inevitable demise one picosecond at a time. There is no way to stop or reverse time; our regrets remain alive and the dinosaurs remain dead. Stanford can do nothing about its loss to Northwestern except complain about body clocks, James Franklin can't get those 30 seconds back, and the Beckman Clock is always counting down to the next Hat Game on the horizon.

Purdue football is a depressing morass of football ineptitude that nearly turned Ryan Field into an unimaginable house of horrors. The Boilermakers managed to accomplish that with the dangerously plucky play of their football team and not by unleashing the pure creepy power of Purdue Pete, a mascot so unnerving that the students who portray him are invited to spend a semester abroad appearing briefly in mirrors in Japanese horror films.

Don't play this video or else seven days later you have to watch a Purdue
football game

It is astonishing that decades of focus testing a mascot with a giant plastic head simultaneously wielding a hammer and the placid, blank expression of a loping movie slasher has made the current version of Purdue Pete the least harrowing. Behold the 1960s version of Purdue Pete, who looks like a cross between a malevolent bad-trip Bob's Big Boy and a prescient antecedent to Frank from the movie Frank.

This really should be the new Purdue fight song

On Purdue's first play from scrimmage, Boiler quarterback David "The Bloughman's Crede" Blough hit a streaking receiver for a 68-yard bomb to tie the game and from there Purdue did not yield an inch. At the half, the Wildcats clung to a 14-7 lead and had managed something like 19 passing yards, because the forward pass is an unmanful and unsporting instrument of deception.

The ineffective pass attack led to a miniature quarterback controversy. Fitzgerald replaced quarterback Clayton Thorson with Zack Oliver after an egregious interception. Oliver moved the ball somewhat more effectively until an equally egregious interception convinced the coaches to give Thorson another shot. The quarterback rotation either showed a desperate attempt to spark the offense or a brilliant ploy by Mick McCall to use the fact that number 10 and 18 look similar enough on Northwestern's jerseys that the Purdue defense can be easily discombobulated by a classic quarterback switcheroo with the ultimate goal of convincing the opponent that any Northwestern player can become a quarterback at any time without warning.

McCall's substitutions ideally cause the opposition to yell out he's
quarterback no he's quarterback no he's quarterback in the classic play
known colloquially as the Reverse Quarterback Spartacus

Thorson recovered from his temporary benching to lead the Wildcats on the game-winning drive with his patented ungainly giraffe runs. In the fourth quarter, a sleepy Northwestern defense came alive, keeping the Boilermakers out of the endzone. There is little to learn from this game. Purdue has given many Big Ten teams scares despite the team's moribund record, and Northwestern's offense continues to resemble a Rube Goldberg machine designed to manufacture punts. Nevertheless, Northwestern is an unexpected 8-2 and any Northwestern fan who is disappointed should be immediately fitted with a Napoleon hat. With two games to play, this is already the third-most successful team in the Pat Fitzgerald era.

CAMP RANDALL REVISITED

After three consecutive wins, the Wildcats face their toughest challenge since Iowa on the road at Wisconsin. The Badgers are also 8-2, and their only losses were to mighty Alabama and the undefeated Iowa juggernaut that is devouring the Big Ten West. Wisconsin has flown under the radar this year, with some underwhelming wins and without the mesmerizing brilliance of Melvin Gordon who had one of the greatest seasons in the history of college football last year.

The Wildcats have their work cut out for them at Camp Randall. They have not beaten Wisconsin there since the 2000 Damian Anderson game. In fairness, the Badgers have not won in Evanston in the same period, which has to be the most confoundingly wonderful stat in college football considering the fact that Ryan Field is at best a neutral venue during Wisconsin games. There are typically so many Wisconsin fans at Northwestern home games that the Wildcats appear to have been victims of a slick marketing scam that promised a home crowd and the customer service number is now a deli.

Last year, a ranked Wisconsin squad came to Ryan Field against a struggling Northwestern team at a time when Gordon threatened to explode for a touchdown every time he touched the ball. Instead, the Badger coaches decided to put the ball in the hands of their quarterbacks Tanner McElvoy and Joel Stave, who had missed most of the season to that point struggling with the yips. The 'Cats picked off four passes and had a tremendous game from Justin Jackson to secure the upset.

Joel Stave is shown celebrating the upset with his primary receiving
targets

This Wisconsin's team is markedly different. Head Coach Gary Andersen departed for Oregon State and UW alumn Paul Chryst has come over from Pitt. Stave has improved considerably and is enjoying a far better season. Wisconsin's defense is as fearsome as Northwestern's and, though they lack a running back as terrifying as Gordon and starter Corey Clement will likely miss the game, there is no doubt the Wisconsin Badgers are going run the ball a ton because they ought to change their team name to the Wisconsin Running Behind 400-Pound Manifestations of the American Midwest. The weather forecast calls for bitter cold and accumulated snow and is being televised on the Big Ten Network as the Big Tennest football event of the year as two running backs slam into defensive linemen for three hours in between commercials for extra-large men's pants.

Northwestern and Wisconsin have identical records and wildly different reactions to it. Northwestern fans are giddy for the 8-2 season, even if both losses involved a systematic dismantling of the team into subatomic football particles. The Badgers expected to effortlessly romp through the division-- during their opening game with Alabama, the broadcast put up a graphic of Wisconsin's schedule while the announcers cackled like televised von Schlieffens explaining how the forces of the Kaiser will trample unopposed across Western Europe. Instead, Wisconsin lost the de facto Big Ten West championship game at home to Iowa in an unbearably ugly 10-6 game. Wisconsin is heavily favored, but they, like Northwestern, are playing only for a shot at a "New Year's Six" bowl game.

"New Year's Six" is apparently a football term now as part of the Iron Law of College
Football Terms that says they all have to sound like nineteenth-century anarchist regicide
cells

Northwestern will rely heavily on the defense and its running back trio of Justin Jackson (the ball! carrier!), Warren Long, and electric kickoff return man/receiving threat/hardbitten noir detective operating out of the Monadnock Building Solomon Vault. Perhaps Godwin Igwebuike, who intercepted three Wisconsin passes last year, can continue to fool Wisconsin's quarterbacks into throwing to him by convincing them that he just spilled a bunch of purple gatorade on his jersey. No matter what, it will be a difficult task to manage to scrape a victory in this series dominated by overwhelming home field advantage.

IT IS TIME TO MAKE A DAMN TOURNAMENT ALREADY

Northwestern basketball season has begun. Chris Collins's third year features an intriguing mix of young players, but is led by two vestiges of the Bill Carmody era. Those two are center Alex Olah, a bruising seven-footer from Romania who has quietly turned into one of the conference's best big men who is not temporarily hanging out in the Big Ten because the NBA won't let him in, and Tre Demps, an undersized gunning guard who specializes in insane clutch shots.

Buckets! @NUmensbball guard Tre Demps hits a HUGE 3-point shot to make it 59-59! #IntelGoesB1G #MarchOnBTN http://t.co/edBWV6b2cw
— Northwestern on BTN (@NUOnBTN) March 4, 2015

The Wildcats return sophomores Bryant McIntosh Scottie Lindsay and introduce sharp-shooting freshman Aaron Falzon. These promising players, plus a forgiving out of conference schedule against an unending stream of Chicago Dental Colleges, should allow the 'Cats to rack up enough wins to contend for an NIT berth. Unfortunately, their hopes of finally breaching the NCAA tournament took a big hit when Vic Law underwent season-ending shoulder surgery. Law, a heralded Chicagoland recruit, seemed to come into his own at the end of last season and had fans excited for his next season. His injury also seriously harms Chicago-area pun headline writers, who spent last week sadly filling notebooks filled with headlines such as "McIntosh reboots Northwestern's backcourt" or "Alex Olah says 'Adios' to backboard" before dramatically hurling a whiskey glass to the floor and storming out of The Siemian's Paw, Chicago's Big Ten sports pun headline bar.

Pun headline writers receive no solace from the news that freshman
forward Dererk Pardon will redshirt this season

The NCAA Tournament is Northwestern's El Dorado. Every November begins with a faint hope of making it in; every March reveals it to be mythical. Before the Law injury, this season seemed like the best shot they've had since Shurna brought them within a Big Ten Tournament game of a shot. Northwestern's weak non-conference slate does not help, nor does a season in the brutal Big Ten against some of the best teams in the country.

Last year, Northwestern qualified for the College Basketball Invitational, a gray-market sub-NIT tournament that probably operates from illegal Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball rules, but the Wildcats declined to participate. Northwestern declared that it was above such a lowly tournament. This was disappointing for fans of underground sporting events such as the CBI and illicit wrestling matches in which Bonesaw is ready.

Northwestern University does not officially endorse the use of any kind of saw

This Northwestern season gives fans an opportunity to see young players like McIntosh and Lindsay come into their own and send off two senior stalwarts. A young, exciting team should bring out supporters. There is no reason why Welsh-Ryan Arena, a tiny, ridiculous bleacher barn, should not become a tiny, ridiculous, sweat-soaked death barn filled with raucous fans actually cheering for Northwestern. A pro-Northwestern crowd at a home game against Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, or Michigan would so discombobulate the visiting team they'd have no idea where they were and that would lead to at least one easy backcut layup.

TWO TO HAT

Northwestern faces a tough challenge on the road at Wisconsin. The Badgers are incredibly difficult to beat at Camp Randall and the game will be played in miserable cold and snowy conditions. A Northwestern win would solidify them as the second-best team in the West and set them up for a potential New Year's bowl game. A loss on the road against a good team would not be catastrophic. We are only two weeks from Chicago's Big Ten Hat Vengeance Game at Soldier Field and the delightful, improbable, and terrifically fun season would be substantially dampened without reclaiming The Hat.

The Illini face a tough test on the road against an improved Minnesota team that gave Iowa all it could handle last week. If the Illini falter, then the Hat Game will not only be for the Hat and a win in College Football's Greatest Rivalry Just Look at the Anti-Northwestern Merchandise, it will have an Illini bowl berth on the line. Even though Northwestern and Illinois are sworn blood-rivals according to Tim Beckman's Clock, I've been rooting for them this season as they've played well in the midst of institutional chaos. That all ends November 28th in the fog of Hat Rage. All of Chicago will be watching this clash between Chicago's Big Ten Team and The Team That is Annoyed About Chicago's Big Ten Team Even Though Chicago's Big Ten Team is Pretty Much Every Big Ten Team But Northwestern and Illinois.

An Oral History of the Greatest Rivalry in College Football

For more than one hundred years, the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, separated by about 150 miles, have nurtured the premier rivalry in college football. Both situated in the heart of Big Ten country, their annual game has not only stopped the state in its tracks, but has captivated millions of Americans. The Northwestern-Illinois game goes beyond college football. For residents of Illinois, this is a way of life.

I. THE EARLY YEARS

The first Illinois-Northwestern game, played in 1892 ended in a 16-16 tie. The next ended in a 0-0 tie. This portentous refusal to yield or play watchable football marked the rivalry for the next century and beyond.

PUTNAM WALNUT-RUMPP, Northwestern Wrench-back, 1893 [Interview appears in October 22 edition of the Occasional Northwestern]: We stood at half-field, us and the fellows from Illi-nois. Spirits were high. The crowd gathered ‘round the football circle and jostled each other. A monocle was brandished in anger. After twenty minutes of fisticuffs, we could not locate the foot-ball and so we declared it a tie and the Illinoismen retreated to their football wagon.

Northwestern and Illinois continued to play their annual game, but the rivalry lacked a trophy, something to be carted away by the victors. Several objects were tried: a mummy, a carved, anatomically incorrect dinosaur, a defaced picture of Kaiser Wilhelm, but none stuck until the 1940s.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ, Northwestern Football Historian: The mummy was a purported artifact looted from the Pyramid of Sensuret I and obtained in a complex black market mummy trading scheme. It began as a sort of reverse trophy. Students tried to hide the mummy in the visitors’ stadium to supposedly curse the rival team before the big game. Illinois students once successfully set the mummy up in Walter Dill Scott’s office with a nameplate reading Walter Dill Sarcophagus. The mummy, of course, wasn’t a mummy at all. It was a poorly done papier-mache thumb that was rescued after being hurled in anger at a professor. But this was around the time the Boris Karloff mummy picture had come out, and all anyone wanted to talk about was mummies. After a few years, it petered out as these things tend to do. After that, it was all wolf-men.

A. BARTLETT HARRUMPH, Daily Northwestern, 1944-1949: I obtained the original trophy, the cigar store Indian, when the theater department was throwing out props. It had been used in a production of a play called The Tobacconist’s Wife about the proprietor of a cigar shop whose marriage of convenience draws him into a web of international intrigue. I remember grabbing the sculpture, scoot it into the newspaper offices and bellowing, “my wooden friend, what mischief can we get into?” My first idea was to hurl it at the provost, as provost-hurling was the fashionable university prank.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: As Harrumph will tell it, he bumped into some Illini fans at a bar and got into a fierce drinking contest. Heavily intoxicated on brandy and Northwestern football braggadocio, he claims that he then offered the statue as a trophy.

A. BARTLETT HARRUMPH: I had been dragging the statue around as my new features editor Wally Scoop. It was right there with me in the tavern that night!

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: What I have heard is that Harrumph lost a high-stakes game of Suicide Whist. He was already cleaned out, but, out of pity, the Illinois fans took the trophy instead of the traditional wager of kidney punches and throttling, the usual fate of the destitute suicide whister. They then decided to give it back to him based on the outcome of the upcoming football game in order to stop his sobbing.

A. BARTLETT HARRUMPH: When I came up with the idea of exchanging the trophy, I was hoisted upon the patrons' shoulders as everyone shouted in unison "THAT'S A CAPITAL IDEA."

The original cigar store Indian was stolen. Afterwards, the schools only began to pass the tomahawk back and forth. The "Sweet Sioux" Tomahawk became the symbol of the rivalry, but the circumstances behind the theft remain murky.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: There are two main suspects in the theft of the statue. One is State Senator Copernicus Smelt, a wealthy industrialist who hated the statue and wanted to replace it with a gigantic classical sculpture called the Spirit of the Prairie, which was basically a Colossus of Rhodes standing astride Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River with hands replaced with mittens in the shape of Illinois. The other is a group of drunken fraternity members.

OTTO CORNELIUS SMELT III, Nephew of Copernicus Smelt and Chairman of the Smelt Foundation: Yes, it is true that my uncle had grand designs for the trophy. He used to refer to the original wooden trophy as "that wood trinket" that is "good for bestriding nothing." But there is no evidence to link him to any theft, no matter what fairy tales Pince-Nez wrote in his book.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ:He Who Smelt lays out a convincing case not only for Smelt's desire to steal the statue but also exposes his entire occult philosophy. Only snippets remain on the record: Smelt's letters to both university presidents. His pamphlets involving iconography of deities with Illinois hands. And the treasure trove of rumored papers and books that vanished after his bizarre disappearance in 1974.

OTTO CORNELIUS SMELT III: My uncle died in a tragic falconry accident.

A. BARTLETT HARRUMPH: After the theft of the statue, both universities were thrown into chaos. I wrote an editorial suggesting the tomahawk replace the full trophy and it was greeted with cheers from the simple man in the street all the way to the top levels of the administration. I had to stop the Daily from running the headline "HARRUMPH TRIUMPH."

WINSTON FARMGRISTLE, Assistant Editor, Daily Northwestern 1946-48: I've always suspected that Harrumph stole the trophy.

II. AGE OF THE ILLINI

In 1978, Northwestern and Illinois tied 0-0. Northwestern would not win again until 1986. The Sweet Sioux became anchored to the Illinois football trophy room. In Evanston, the football program descended into the worst stretch ever suffered by a top-division football program. The rivalry had fallen into disarray as the Wildcats no longer posed a threat.

HORACE GROAT, Host of Illinoize AM 1580 The Voice of Illini Football: The 1980s were good for Illinois football, they were good for neon pants, and they were good for Horace Groat.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ, Author of Lose Cruise: On the Bus with the 1981 Wildcats: In 1981, Northwestern lost its 34th consecutive game. After the game, the students rushed the field and tore down the goalposts. That's how I lost this eyebrow.

HORACE GROAT: At one point, Illinois didn't even bother to bring the tomahawk with them to Evanston. They even recorded a novelty rap song in 1985 called Keep that Tomahawk.

BYRON "SATURN" HERMAN, Member of Planet Boogie: They hired me to write Keep That Tomahawk. I had a small production company and I was really blowing up in Champaign-Urbana. What I did was, I took a person's name and then I'd mention what they had to say and I'd bring it around like that. Before that, people were turning on raps and they had no idea who the guy was or what he was about to say. Everyone was pretty confused.

HORACE GROAT: They made a video, I don't know, I haven't seen it in ages. It's got all the Illinois football players, and they're all dressed in neon orange jumpsuits in front of a painting of the trophy. And for some reason, the first verse is some guy named Saturn wearing two headbands.

BYRON "SATURN" HERMAN: My name is Saturn and I'm here to say, I'm rapping all night and I'm rapping all day. See that there? I introduced myself and let people know that if they needed to find me rapping, it was a process that was not stopping. Yeah, I got myself on that video. Two headbands, like the rings of Saturn.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: That song was preposterous.

BYRON "SATURN" HERMAN: Well, in 1986 they lost the Tomahawk at home, man. You can't record a song called "Keep that Tomahawk" and then lose that Tomahawk. I'm here to say that totally blew up in my face.

III. NEW TROPHIES, NEW ERA

In 2009, Northwestern and Illinois decided to replace the Sweet Sioux Tomhawk as part of Illinois's effort to remove Native American imagery. The question was how to replace the trophy symbolizing College Football's Greatest Rivalry.

A. BARTLETT HARRUMPH: After years of hard-fought games that captured the imagination of America, the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk had become an icon. Sure, I agree we had to replace it, but with what? One day as I was driving I saw a license plate. It said "Land of Lincoln." I pulled over. Bingo. I wrote a letter to the editor.

J. SMELT ROBERTS, University of Illinois Trustee 1994-2012 [published in Mascots and Trophies, July 2009. Roberts died in a falconry accident in 2012]: It was down to three choices: Lincoln, the Tully Monster (the state fossil of Illinois) and a Colossus majestically bestriding Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, his hands fearsome mittens in the shape of Illinois.

A. BARTLETT HARRUMPH: I naturally gravitated to Lincoln's favorite piece of equipment: the rail splitting axe. Those sons-of-a-bitch went for a hat. A hat! Who associates Lincoln with a hat? Go ahead and stop someone in this state, and grab him by the lapel and say "Lincoln, did he have a hat, my man?" The answer, you'll find, is "get the hell away from me!" That's how preposterous it is.

J.G.A. PIDLOW-MACE, Northwestern Dean of Football Iconography, [Letter to A. Bartlett Harrumph, August 22, 2009]: I am afraid that the decision is final. We believe the hat is a universal symbol of Lincoln to this great state. Your desire to commemorate President Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, as fine an orator as we've had in this nation, as a rail-splitting ignoramus shows a disrespect to this great man and his hat as I've ever seen. Though I am writing you a letter, I direct you to get out of my office on principle.

In 2010, the Northwestern-Illinois rivalry once again attracted the notice of the college football world as the game moved to historic Wrigley Field. ESPN's College Game Day followed them there.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: No one had played football at Wrigley since the Chicago Bears left for Soldier Field in 1970. Dozens had tried with disastrous results.

HORACE GROAT: You could have taken the dinosaur bones out of the Field Museum that day. No one cared about anything but the game.

RON ZOOK, Fireronzook.com: Baseball? Football? You tell one thing to Zook and that's this: get the dang ball. This isn't pee-wee football. This isn't cricket. This isn't tiddly-winks. This isn't Hungry Hungry Hippos. This isn't the game where the wind-up dinosaur spins around. This isn't Cluedo, which is what they call Clue in England. This is football, gentlemen. And Zook has one rule about football: you go after the football. Ron Zook.

PAT FITZGERALD, Northwestern Head Coach, 2006-present: Any time you get a chance to get your young men into a position to take things one game at a time, you take that opportunity. And we saw this one and we circled it on the calendar. I said, young men: Take a look at this. Don't think about it. Don't look at it. One day, and we're not thinking about that day young men, but one day we'll take it one game at a time and the game it will be time to take it one of will be this game go 'cats.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: Just before the game, they were told they could only use one endzone. For the whole game. Ludicrous! Sure, there was an unpadded brick wall at the end of one of the endzones. But what else was going on in that endzone? I'll tell you who didn't want you to know: Jim Delany and his goons who denied me at least four requests to investigate the banned endzone.

OTTO CORNELIUS SMELT III: The stenciled occult symbols found in the unused endzone are a ridiculous coincidence. Those tasteful Illinois-handed reptiles were a child's graffiti or a drunken fraternity prank.

RON ZOOK: One endzone, two endzones, three endzones. This isn't baccarat. This isn't Battletoads. This isn't Step Up 2: The Streets. This is football, gentleman. And this is what Ron Zook has to say about football: You've got to get into football mode, you've got to have a tough football mentality if you want to win at the game of football. That's a quote from Ron Zook.

IV. THE TIM BECKMAN ERA

In 2012, Illinois hired Tim Beckman from Toledo. Beckman, who festooned the locker room with anti-Northwestern signs, imbued the rivalry with unprecedented rancor.

PETER FRANCIS GERACI, ((infotapes.com)): My client, Tim Beckman, will not be answering questions about University of Illinois football.

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: There had always been some animosity-- after all it is Northwestern-Illinois--but Beckman's swaggering demonstrations seemed not only to be a football rivalry but an ideology based entirely on hostility to Northwestern.

J. SMELT ROBERTS [Interview in the Daily Illini, December 10, 2011]: I applaud the hiring of Tim Beckman, who will help this University take the next step in the Legends Division and win whatever pitiful unbestriding trinket they have representing the rivalry with Northwestern.

JOHN BARGLE, Director, Big Ten Network Presents Tomahawk Tomfoolery: In 1963, Northwestern fans spent months creating a fake student organization at the University Illinois with the ambiguous title of FEST!. Students put on shows, raised money, and ultimately secured a float in the Homecoming Parade. People were really excited about Fest!. What Illinois's student government did not realize was that FEST! was an acronym for Fake Equine Statue Task(!). The float, a literal Trojan Horse, burst apart in the middle of Green Street revealing a horde of Northwestern students contorting their palms into fist-claws and yelling incoherently. That really put the quietus on that celebration.

HORACE GROAT: In 1987, I distributed eight counterfeit Willie Wildcat costumes. There were Willies flooding the field celebrating Illinois first downs. It took until the third quarter for seven to be subdued. The eight got tangled up with the real Willie. The authorities had no way to telling which was the real Willie. Security shouted Willie trivia questions, but both remained in character, mute. The standoff lasted for hours.

GABRIELLE MOLDOVA, Editor of Big Ten blog ArtisanalPunts.com: Beckman's first Big Ten Media Day was certainly memorable. They had to get a new podium for the next coach because of all the fist dents.

TIM BECKMAN, University of Illinois Head Coach [Big Ten Media Day 2012]: PURPLE? I DON'T HAVE ANY PURPLE CLOTHING. WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT? FOR TOO LONG ALL WE HEAR FROM THE MEDIA IS THAT TEAM UP NORTH THIS, THAT TEAM UP NORTH THAT. WELL I'VE GOT SOME NEWS FOR THE TEAM UP NORTH. I'VE BEEN UP NORTH, BY THE TEAM. WHEN I'M DONE THEY WON'T BE THE TEAM UP NORTH ANYMORE. THEY'LL JUST BE THE...TEAM. OSKEE! OSKEE! OSKEE! [By this time, Beckman had removed his visor and was punctuating each oskee with a blow against the podium until he tired himself out.] THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.

GABRIELLE MOLDOVA: The anti-Northwestern propaganda in the Illinois locker room was insane. There were anti-Northwestern signs strewn everywhere, even the urinals. One player Instagrammed a picture of a series of posters from Beckman's office where he stuck his own head on a picture of the Macho Man Randy Savage elbow dropping a wrestler with a Wildcat head taped on it, but the picture was quickly deleted.

PETER FRANCIS GERACI: That is absurd blog nonsense.

H. BERTRAM JESSUP, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Interim Athletic Director of Communications [from August 2015 press release]: What you are holding is a list of confirmed anti-Northwestern propaganda brought by Tim Beckman onto university property. However, in the interest of dispelling certain rumors, let me make it clear. At no point, did Tim Beckman bring the following items onto campus: A set of purple wooden sticks perforated to be broken apart in a single headbutt, a spittoon with an anti-Northwestern symbol, a portrait of a caped Beckman charging the streets of Evanston in on an orange steed with a horse mustache, and a Russian Soviet-style poster with a legend that Beckman thought says "We Will Crush the Decadent Wildcat With Tractor-fists (it actually translates to "We Will Bring Hydroelectricity to the Republic of Turkmenistan.")

NEIL PINCE-NEZ: One has to be a skeptic of the list of Beckman objects. There was something dark and sinister going on in the bowels of Memorial Stadium. It wasn't just Soviet propaganda or headbutt planks, like you'll find in any college locker room.

DERRICK HARMS, Illini tackle, 2010-2013: It was intense. Rivalry is a big deal in college football. You're keyed up. They're keyed up. The fans are juiced up. And the coach made it a point every year in training camp when he rented a decommissioned tank and drove it over a cardboard Evanston screaming GENTLEMEN, THE HAT. But we just couldn't win it.

The feud reached its boiling point in 2014. Northwestern and Illinois were both 5-7. There was more than just state pride on the line. Whoever won the game would go to a bowl game. Whoever lost would stay home. A century of football animus had reached itsapocalyptic zenith.

GABRIELLE MOLDOVA: For two weeks, every time we tried to run a story about any other Big Ten game, the comments just filled up with people talking about the Hat Game Bowl Game.

PAT FITZGERALD: There was a lot on the line in this game. It was for our young men, for our seniors, a big game. A chance to go 1-0 one last time. Their young men, our young men, probably your young men were geared up to take it one game for this particular game, which hadn't yet been playedone play at a time go 'cats.

The Illini prevailed and went to the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl. Beckman disappeared with the Hat for weeks. The Land of Lincoln Trophy spent the offseason under an armed guard of Lincoln impersonators. But Beckman would not have a chance to defend it in Soldier Field. He was fired only eight days from the start of the 2015 season.

Northwestern is 9-2 this season and ranked sixteenth in the country. The 5-7 Illini once again need to beat Northwestern to become bowl-bound.

For months while reporting this story, Beckman and his attorneys refused to answer questions. Two days before this story was published, I found a voicemail from Tim Beckman. He refused any further contact. The following is a transcript:

TIM BECKMAN: ENOUGH OF YOUR LIES AND MISEXAGGERATIONS. I AM THE HATMAN. I AM THE BRIM. I BESTRIDE LAKE MICHIGAN AND THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER. ILLINOIS AND NORTHWESTERN MAY BE PLAYING THEIR FUTILE QUOTE-UNQUOTE FOOTBALL GAME AT SOLDIER FIELD, BUT THEY'LL NEVER HAVE THE TRUE HAT. I HAVE MELTED IT DOWN AND INJECTED INTO MY VEINS. I AM MORE HAT THAN MAN AT THIS POINT. WITH MALICE TOWARDS ALL AND CHARITY TOWARDS NONE. PLEASE TRANSCRIBE THIS IN ALL-CAPS.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Neil Pince-Nez, who died in October in a tragic falconry accident.

Winter arrived last weekend in Madison. The northern winds swept ice and snow across the Midwest and buffeted the stadium with freezing air and football misery. It is as if Jim Delany, sitting comfortably in his LeaderLegend Big Ten Command Center flipped the switch from "football" to "Big Ten football" all the way up to "Ludicrously Big Ten football" and a torrent of sleet and cold and inability to pass the football like it was 1944 and we needed to send all our forward passes to the front and the Big Ten chaos referees all flooded into the stadium while the Big Ten Network beamed the debacle to dozens of American homes. And, in the end, the Wildcats came away with a 13-7 victory, their ninth of season, and a chance to make it a 10-win Hat season.

Both defenses played heroically. Wisconsin's held even as the offense refused to hold onto the ball. The Badgers turned the ball over five times; Wildcats continued to bedevil quarterback Joel Stave, who threw two picks and fumbled. Tanner McEvoy, who threw an interception as a quarterback last year and now has become a receiver, fumbled as well. Yet, time after time, the Badger defense held in their own end of the field as the Wildcats stalled out and missed field goals. After an early pick led to a Northwestern touchdown, the coaches decided to run the Besieged Citadel offense. Justin Jackson's 139 rushing yards accounted for about two-thirds of their entire output.

The Wildcats' play calling was so conservative that they only ran packages called "The
Bourbon Restoration"

But the entire game was overshadowed by referee decisions.

CALL ONE: THE RETURNER'S PREVARICATION

With the third quarter winding down, Northwestern had satisfactorily run into the Wisconsin enough times to get in punting position. Badger receiver Alex Erickson caught the punt, shrugged off two Northwestern tackles, and weaved his way into the endzone to put Wisconsin up as Camp Randall erupted. OR DID HE? As the punt bounced its way towards him, Erickson signaled for his teammates to clear out. As the referees later explained, Erickson's attempt to move the ball was an act of deception, of grave duplicity where he would signal a fair catch-- when the fair catch becomes not fair at all. There is some precedent here. Two weeks before, a Penn State returner had clearly made a fair catch signal then advanced the ball in an act of fair-catch signal derring-do that the officials ignored. An apoplectic Fitzgerald charged onto the field, his head so red that he resembled a human matchstick. This time, the ball was handed back to an incredulous offense with six points removed. The Badgers could do nothing and punted.

As a Northwestern fan, I applaud the officials for their enforcement of clear, well-known rules against that rogue Alex Erickson. If Erickson wanted to make sure he got credit for his touchdown, he should have gone to the Memorial Library, requested a book from off-site storage entitled "Approved Football Gestures," and studied up on it instead of deceiving the Wildcats and preventing them from ineffectively attempting to tackle him. I will quote here from the NCAA rule book:

VERDICT: THEY GOT IT RIGHT

CALL TWO: THE POSTMODERN CATCH

With less than a minute remaining, the maligned Stave drove Wisconsin down the field. Tight End Troy Fumagalli appeared to score the winning touchdown. Instead, his knee was ruled down at the one subatomic molecule line. On the next play, Stave appeared to have hit Jazz Peavy for the winning touchdown. Peavy caught the ball, ran several steps, and then bobbled the ball as he fell out of the endzone. After a lengthy review, the referees determined that every Wisconsin football player has an incredible name. Then they lit up a few Gauloises cigarettes, consulted their Derrida, determined that it is impossible to determine what a "catch" is anyway, and ripped away the winning score. On the next play, Stave was sacked and knocked out of the game. Backup quarterback Bart Houston entered the field through swinging saloon doors and tossed an incompletion aimed at McEvoy.

While Peavy appeared to snag the ball and possess it for several steps, the rules are clear. Peavy may have caught the ball, stopped, filled in the proper catch paperwork (the Transfer of Football from Quarterback to Receiver is available as a PDF on the NCAA website), but failed to get it properly notarized before falling out of bounds. This unfortunate oversight on the part of the Wisconsin coaching staff cost them dearly, but is clearly stated in the rules.

VERDICT: NORTHWESTERN WINS YOW YOW YOW YOW YOW YOW

The sloppy pace of the game and the numerous sound and rational refeeeing decisions left a small but rowdy group of Badger fans with no recourse but to pelt their own cheerleaders, officials, and Northwestern players with snowballs. It was a difficult loss on senior day, particularly for Stave, who thought he had rallied his team to victory twice. Northwestern had numerous opportunities to extend the lead to the point where the referees would have no part in it, but the Wisconsin defense and the Wildcats' ultra-conservative play calling kept it close. Northwestern fans in the stands had no idea how they won. Pat Fitzgerald was delightedly perplexed. And the Wildcats canceled their bus service back to Evanston so they could ride back in rum-running getaway cars.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

The Hat Game is upon us! This blog has already covered hat-lore in Thirty Days: Hat November, An Oral History of the Northwestern-Illinois Game at length. Last year, the Hat Game reached its apotheosis as it became a bowl eligibility game. With the Beck Man at the height of his powers and Northwestern desperate to salvage a miserable season, it is hard to imagine a more perfect Hat Game scenario than as the Golden Ticket to what turned out to be the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl against a superior Conference USA team.

This year, the teams have gone in opposite directions. Northwestern has powered its way to a 9-2 record. The Illini are reeling. They fired Beck Man eight days before the season and released a 1,200-page report that depicts him as Will Ferrell's impression of George W. Bush. After making fun of Beckman's absurd anti-Northwestern crusade for the past three years, many of his actual, real life behaviors turned out to be something like 15 percent less insane than this nonsense blog that claimed that he had an anti-Northwestern command center and crafting shed where he built shoddy replica Willies to set on fire and assault first-year players during Illini training camp.

There's no evidence that this is Beckman's car, but the man has crossed into the Beck Man
Valley, where no piece of ludicrous anti-Northwestern activity can be ruled out unless
specifically mentioned by a 1,200-page report.

The University of Illinois is also in turmoil. The university sports an Interim Chancellor, an Interim Athletic Director, and an Interim Football Coach; the game will be played at Soldier Field, making this an Illini Interim Home Game. Bill Cubit is playing for more than just a Hat. He hopes a win and a bowl game will keep him in Champaign-Urbana for a long time. It is hard to root against the Illini this season as the team has fought through the disorder, and Cubit's Northwestern-related pronouncements remain within the bounds of normal football person behavior.

What happens to the Illinois-Northwestern rivalry now? I've noted earlier that the intensity of the Hat Game developed as a rivalry not between the two schools but between Northwestern and Tim Beckman himself. Without the Beck Man and his avant-garde dada interpretation of football rivalry, can the Greatest Rivalry in College Football persevere? The Illini, like Northwestern, are a historically moribund team often left for dead by the Big Ten Football Brands, all of whom are insufferable. Nevertheless, it is important to soldier on and remember that, no matter how well the Illini have coped through a tumultuous season, they have The Hat. That is no way to live.

After last year's debacle, Northwestern has hired its Assistant Dean of
Procuring Rivalry Trophies By Any Means Necessary

So, it is with a heavy heart and with all respect to our friends at That School South of What Beckman Called The School Up North, I say:

Give us that hat, Cube Man.
Give us that hat back.
Want that Hat.
Hat Hat Hat

Hat.

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Northwestern Preview

Week 1: Fall of the House of Beck Man

Week 2: The Day of Two Noons

Week 3: The Northwestern-Eastern Illinois Game is Decadent and Depraved

WEEK 4: A Twenty-One Punt Salute

Week 5: UNDER THE LIGHTS

Week 6: Big Ten Carnival

Week 7: BIG TEN SLOBBERKNOCKIN' and the Laws of the Universe

Week 8: It is a Sad Day, When Your Sports Team Loses the Game

Week 9: Welcome to The National Juried Bowl Show

Week 10: Playoff Picture

Week 11: Clocks

Week 12: WINTERBALL

Thirty Days: Hat November

Week 13: The Sound Decisions of Learned Referees