BRING YOUR CHAMPIONS, THEY'RE OUR MEAT

at! The Hat has returned to its rightful place in Evanston after the Northwestern Wildcats managed to pry it from the heads of the Illini. Last year, a miserable debacle, the Hat game to end all Hat games with an appropriately miserable bowl berth on the line, the Illini won. Northwestern turned the ball over four consecutive times and Northwestern's Hat-Nemesis Tim Beck Man stood in Ryan Field cackling as his three-year reign of madness in Champaign finally culminated in him hoisting the Land of Lincoln trophy to a horrified purple throng. "Look upon this Hat," he bellowed defiantly. "This justifies my ludicrous three year anti-Northwestern campaign. This is normal! This is normal!"

In the year since, things have changed. Tim Beckman became Shit Canman. Bill Cubit, toiling as interim, took over the Illinois program in perpetuity, the Cubit name guaranteed to ring across Illini football for two entire years. Northwestern rode a spectacular defense, a running game led by Justin Jackson-TheBallCarrier, and the sane and rational decisions of referees to a 10-2 record, a national ranking, and a bowl game.

Clayton Thorson came out firing in the first half as the 'Cats scored three touchdowns. It appeared as though the Wildcats had spent the entire season refusing to throw before unveiling the Trojan Pass in the crucial Hat Game. In the second half, though, Pat Fitzgerald and Mick McCall turned to their innovative Run 'n Punt offense, relying on Jackson The Ball Carrier to Carry The Ball while the defense took over. All-Big Ten linebacker Anthony Walker terrorized the Illini backfield and the Wildcat secondary kept the passing game in check. They were helped out by Illinois receivers who dropped an almost unfathomable number of balls-- Illinois quarterback Wes Lunt had a much better day than the box score indicates. No sequence better sums up the snake-bitten Illini than their effective drive to a fourth-and-one near the Northwestern goal line. The Illini lined up to go for it, then false-started. Down ten, Cubit decided to kick a chip-shot field goal which then shanked wide right. This series of plays will be displayed in the Van Pelt Museum of Football Cruelty.

HAT IS GREAT. ALL HAIL HAT

Illinois fans seem disappointed with the Bill Cubit contract. Cubit was certainly not one of the marquee names changing jobs during this Flight Aware season. On the other hand, Cubit presents a few advantages to the University of Illinois:

1. Players seem to like him and he has weathered the storm of general administrative tumult.
2. Probably believes in hamstring injuries.

Illinois's interim athletic director seems less than excited about the hire. Here is what Paul Kowalczyk has to say about Cubit:

"Obviously, it's not ideal but for now, I don't think it'll put a dagger in the heart of the program."

I am not an athletic director. But I am fairly sure that is not a ringing endorsement. And I am also sure that you should use the phrase "dagger in the heart" unless your profession involves antechambers.

It is disappointing to see Illinois fans disillusioned about their football program, even if the schools are sworn enemies forever destined to clash as foretold by Beckman's Clock. There would be nothing more satisfying than seeing a Hat Game have actual consequences in the Big Ten West. There would be nothing more exciting than seeing ESPN College Game Day come to a Northwestern/Illinois game not because it is an embarrassing one-endzone baseball stadium sideshow novelty act, but because the winner would be going to Indianapolis.

Both Northwestern and Illinois have had great seasons this decade, just never at the same time. The Northwestern/Illinois rivalry is in that way like a seesaw, although most of the time it is more like a rotting plank of wood moldering in a dirt patch four feet from a rusted seesaw mechanism. Yes the teams compete for recruits, for media coverage, and in a grimly farcical branding war futilely focused on the Chicago market that climaxed in Saturday's game at a well-nigh empty Solider Field.

But, in the larger Big Ten, both are traditionally moribund programs overshadowed by the conference's Football Brands that expect to effortlessly plod through them on their way to yet another Rose Bowl. Despite the in-state rivalry, Northwestern and Illinois remain bound together in Big Ten also-ran solidarity.

HATCHAT SIDEBAR

Northwestern's stirring victory over the Illini not only gave them bragging rights in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry, but it also gave them America's Greatest Rivalry Trophy, the Land of Lincoln Hat. But there is one thing about the Hat trophy that has bothered me and that is this: the Hat is permanently attached to the base and it cannot be worn.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at our locker room celebration after we reclaimed the Land of Lincoln Trophy. #B1GCats https://t.co/cSaz4SPUeK
— #B1GCats Football (@NUFBFamily) December 1, 2015

Look this Wildcat sadly attempt to mime wearing the Hat. He cannot. There is a base in its way. This is madness. The Hat should be removed from its base and worn triumphantly upon the victorious heads of the hat-winners, not reduced to a grotesque locker-room burlesque.

Abraham Lincoln did not travel through Illinois carrying his hat on a trophy base. That would be ludicrous. The Lincoln-Douglas debates would have never helped publicize Lincoln enough to take Democratic nomination in 1860 because no one would consider voting for a hat-carrying maniac.

LINCOLN: That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of
Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these
two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.
DOUGLAS: Why do you carry around your hat on a base instead of wearing it on your head?
LINCOLN: At this time of strife and division, you wish to discuss my hat?
DOUGLAS: Your hat practices are discomfiting and peculiar.
ANGRY BYSTANDER: Answer the question, Lincoln!
ANGRIER BYSTANDER: Go back to Kentucky, you hat-carrying scarecrow!

I urge you to write school administrators and your representatives about this travesty and to engage in pointless hashtag activism about this by tweeting #WEARABLEHAT at all involved parties. I plan to publish a 3,000 page screed about this in a new screed format I have invented called the monomaniagraph. Together, we can unite and probably amuse ourselves for nearly 45 minutes.

BOWL POSITION: DANGER ZONE

By Monday, Northwestern will know its bowl fate. The Playoff Committee awaits the results of Lucrative Conference Championship games. The bowls begin their dance of selecting teams by trying to land the biggest Brand Teams allowed by their slotting. The combination of bowl selection and playoff rankings have made this a week for the brandishing of advanced statistics, complex transitive property arguments, and the traditional claims that teams ain't played no one. It's Recrimination Week. Northwestern, for once, is in the middle of this because they are jockeying for a more prestigious bowl game and higher rankings. This is exciting because it implies a small amount of relevance for Northwestern's football program and also because it is fun to complain about things on the internet and make snide remarks about body clocks.

Of course, bowl positioning does not really matter. The entire hierarchy of bowl games after the playoffs is a meaningless system where older bowl games that have names that appended by ridiculous sponsors rank higher than games that are named completely by their ridiculous sponsors; thus, the Gator Bowl (now known as the TaxSlayer.com Bowl) is more prestigious than the GoDaddy Bowl, the Quick Lane Bowl or the arrestingly bellicose Armed Forces Bowl.

The Beef O'Brady's Bowl, played at the decrepit Tropicana Field, was such a perfect shitty
bowl game name that it burned out like a glorious comet. Then, it metamorphosed into the
BitCoin Bowl, which was somehow even more ridiculous before settling into the
disappointingly stolid St. Petersburg bowl. I have pledged $45.00 in naming rights for the
bowl to be called the Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com St. Petersburg Bowl.
If you are a representative of the St. Petersburg Bowl, please contact me and let me know
when to fly down a present the trophy.

The hierarchy of bowl games is, I suppose, a way to differentiate the bowl games that have multiplied across the nation. This year, there are more so many bowl games that there are not enough teams that have reached the magical 6-6 threshold of Bowl Eligibility to play. Therefore, 5-7 teams will receive invitations, in order of Brand Status. This means that Illinois, despite dashing itself upon the rocks of Northwestern's defense for four quarters last Saturday can still go to a bowl (and I hope they are selected). Nebraska, America's most prominent 5-7 team, will almost certainly receive one. At this point, matchups and rankings and hierarchy are all that separate the bowls until the NCAA decides to thrust all of the non-playoff teams into a giant fishbowl and select bowl matchups by lot.

This is not a time to become stressed about Northwestern's ranking or bowl positioning. The Wildcats have won ten games and they are ranked and I am still sort of dreading a flood of hail marys that will somehow take them all away.

NORTHWESTERN SEASON IN REVIEW

Northwestern has finished off a season of the impossible. In the past two years, the Wildcats won ten games combined, and lost in mind-bogglingly improbable ways. In two games, Northwestern fell victim to passes bouncing off a defenders hands at the last possible second. In one game, they lost to a field goal team that successfully assembled itself like they were in aBuster Keaton movie. They lost in overtime and they lost in the final seconds of regulation attempting to prevent overtime when the quarterback fell on his buttocks. They literally lost to Tim Beckman.

This season, the Wildcats went an astonishing 8-0 in games decided by a ten points or fewer and every one of those weird breaks fell their way. This season, Northwestern managed to stop the tying conversion. This season, the winning field goal went through the uprights. This season, the referees took an apparent game-winning touchdown off the board because the whimsical hands of fate have decided that Northwestern should have that win fair and square by redefining what the terms fair and square mean. This year, the Wildcats got the Hat.

Northwestern won with ugly football. They unleashed a defense rivaled only by the 1995 team and seemed content to score only as many points were necessary, as if by winning by more than the bare minimum would trigger a loss through an innovative Price is Right scoring system.

Coming this spring to Big Ten Network, contestants bid on Rotel, extra-large men's pants,
and luxury vacations to Indianapolis

Fitzgerald and McCall were content this year to let Justin Jackson ball carrier at people until they got within scoring range. If not, they were happy to punt and let the defense back onto the field. Every once in awhile, Thorson would find a receiver or, more excitingly, find a lane to gallop down the field with gangly strides through a baffled defense. This offensive approach was effective, but also kept Northwestern's games within terrifying range of Northwestern events at all times. Wildcat football is not often going to roll into a Big Ten stadium and demolish the opposition, and good seasons thrive on plays designed for wild swings of fortune. The head football coach doubles as the endowed Dr. Ray Arnold Chair in Butt-Holding.

It is possible to look at the Wildcats' numerous escapes this season and see their record as dependent on luck. Advanced statistics appear to think the Wildcats have wildly overachieved. But college football is itself an anarchic scrum relying on young people, the bounce of an oblong ball, BODY CLOCKS, weather conditions, referees deciding on increasingly arbitrary and obscure definitions of a catch, and a host of a zillion other things that wreak havoc on a twelve-game sample. No teams, not even the championship-caliber, coach-firing, juggernaut nightmare teams win all their games without weird bounces and luck. Northwestern not only played lockdown defense and had an effective running game, it also enjoyed the favor of the football chaos deities for once. They won ten games, went 6-1 at home (and 1-0 at Chicago's Big Ten Neutral Stadium), and will finish the season ranked and in a prominent bowl game. And our reward is to get to watch them one more time without the pressure of a bowl drought that originated in the Truman administration. Most importantly, we have The Hat.

The ball will drop on 2015 and the curtain will rise on a bowl sponsored by a dubiously Australian chain restaurant in stadium with a pirate ship. The Outback Bowl pits a surprise 10-2 Northwestern team gunning for a record eleventh win, continuation of a storied bowl winning streak, and the coveted Crystal Boomerang.

Much like the #WEARABLEHAT campaign, this blog site endorses the
#DETACHABLEBOOMERANG because you should be able to menace a group of Kangaroos,
which Wikipedia tells me can be called a mob, a troop, or a court

The most disappointing thing about the Outback Bowl is not its exclusion from the mysterious New Year's Six grouping or its noon kickoff time in the Eastern time zone; it is the lack of absurd and bogus Australian trappings. The Outback people should have the game announced by a perplexed Australian Rules Football broadcaster who spends the entire time making fun of the teams for wearing helmets and padding and unable, under the rules of football, to jump on each others' heads. The chain gang should should be replaced by a pair of taxidermied kangaroo hands like in this classic Australian television program.

Skippy's tiny paws signal fourth and inches

BOWLS AND VENGEANCE

The 2016 Outback Bowl marks a return from a two-year bowl wilderness. The Wildcats had managed to make five in a row, climaxing in the 2013 drought-snapping Gator Bowl that marked their first postseason win since 1949 and the savage demolition of a monkey stuffed animal, its head paraded to a press conference like it was a scene from Christopher Nolan's Curious George. Now, the Wildcats not only return to bowl play but get a chance to exorcise the ghosts of Raymond James Stadium.

Five years ago, Northwestern played in its first Outback Bowl against Auburn. The opening kickoff shattered the space-time continuum and the rest of the game was played in an alternate dimension, one identical to our own world with the exception that football games become maelstroms of insanity. Quarterback Mike Kafka was simultaneously the best and worst player in the game, in a performance that cannot be described with a literary reference. He threw five interceptions but also scored five touchdowns. His 47 completions (on 78 attempts! This would be remarkable, but remember this football game took place in an alternate dimension), 532 passing yards and also his five picks all set Outback Bowl records. The 'Cats came back from 14 down twice in the second half and took to the game to overtime. During overtime, Auburn hit a field goal. As Northwestern attempted to tie it, kicker Stefan Demos was injured. Undaunted, the Wildcats lined up for another attempt as Fitz signaled in the the play, the World's Most Obvious Fake Field Goal. It failed, Northwestern lost, and the hole in space-time sealed; no evidence of the game exists except for Kafka's Outback Bowl records and the existence of the 2010 direct-to-video Bulgarian Steven Seagal movie Born to Raise Hell.

According to an anonymous IMDB contributor,
"Fueled with vengeance, he leads us on an action
packed thrill ride while avenging his friend's death."
If Northwestern and Auburn had played a normal
football game in our dimension, Steven Seagal
would have starred in a Bulgarian action movie called
"Headbutt Mercenary" where a vengeance-fueled
Seagal avenges his partner's death, vengefully

The 2010 Outback Bowl is somehow not the most insane way that Northwestern has lost a bowl game in the twenty-first century.

If the last Outback Bowl is not enough for you, then the Northwestern Wildcats have a bone to pick with the University of Tennessee. They last met in the 1997 Citrus Bowl. The '96 Cats repeated as Big Ten champions and returned Fitzgerald, Darnell Autrey, Steve Schnur, and many of the 1995 Rose Bowl mainstays. The Volunteers had Peyton Manning, who went on to a glittering NFL career highlighted by several prominent commercials and getting to be on the same team as Trevor Siemian. Manning strafed the vaunted Northwestern defense using his arm and the secret third eye hidden in his gigantic forehead, and Tennessee prevailed 48-28. This is the only game these two teams have ever played so the stakes have never been higher; Knoxville-area Northwestern alumni are prepared to launch a "do you remember when you beat us eighteen years ago? No? Well, you did, and now we are even" parade at a moment's notice.

VOLUNTARISM

Tennessee football is a program on the rise. They finished 8-4, with two losses to playoff powerhouses Oklahoma and Alabama. They share with Northwestern a disdain for deceitful and unsporting passing offenses, ranking 98th in total passing yards to Northwestern's Roosevelt-era 122nd.

Northwestern's complex offense broken down

I have not watched a single second of Tennessee football this season and have no idea what to expect. They have an excellent running back in Jalen Hurd, a quarterback who doesn't turn it over, and a good defense that will need to contain Justin Jackson from The Ball Carrying Northwestern into better punting position. Though they are ranked below Northwestern, odds-makers favor them heavily over the Wildcats. Northwestern has managed to bludgeon its opponents with its defense all season and eke out close wins. The question is whether Anthony Walker, Dean Lowry, and the rest of the tackling horde can hold off the Vols even without injured star cornerback Nick VanHoose. While the numbers people, the gambling community, and the general Knoxville area believes that Tennessee will win in a romp, there are several factors that can contribute to an Outback Bowl upset, according to the latest science.

The latest science

Clayton Thorson: Northwestern's freshman quarterback has not put up gaudy passing statistics this year, but he does have one thing that can tilt the game in Northwestern's favor-- the ability to take off on ungainly gallumphing runs that freeze opponents in disbelief at their majesty. Here's how Northwestern media guides describe Thorson's runs:

The Thorson was sprinting down the High Street. He was running so fast his black cloak was streaming out behind him like the wings of a bird. Each stride he took was as long as a tennis court. Out of the village he ran, and soon they were racing across the moonlit fields. The hedges dividing the fields were no problem to the Thorson. He simply strode over them. A Purdue defense appeared in his path. He crossed it in one flying stride.

Big Kick Jack Mitchell

The Annexation of Tampa: Northwestern has declared itself Tampa's Big Ten Team, thus securing home field advantage, according to the age-old NCAA rule "Whatever Team first declares itself the Official Big Ten Team of that City, Village, Dwelling, or Post-Apocalyptic Thunderdome-adjecent Settlement becomes the Home Team for the Football Contest by proclaiming it on a Bus. All otherwise-unaffiliated Residents of said City must comply with the Home Team Advantage for the duration of the Bowl-Game under penalty of Chop Block. This is the Law, we can really enforce this."

Northwestern unilaterally declaring itself the official Big Ten Team of a variety of indifferent
cities is the greatest marketing gimmick of all time that would only be better if it were done
by a cape-wearing administrator and his or her retinue of trumpeters and parchment-holders

An Unorthodox Travel Route to Tampa: Traveling west, across the continent, crossing the Pacific, taking the Trans-Siberian railway from Vladivostok to Moscow and continuing across Europe and finally sailing across the Atlantic, rounding Florida to the Gulf of Mexico and into Tampa Bay, the Northwestern Wildcats mitigate the ruination of their body clocks.

General Northwestern Bowl Insanity: Northwestern does not play football in bowl games. Instead, the team agonizes through a series of trials, calamities, and triumphs that I am currently selling as a Young Adult book trilogy called The Onsiders: A Sun Bowl Novel. The 2010 Outback Bowl is just one small example the chaos-laden world that a Northwestern bowl game thrusts fans into. By the end of the game, it is entirely possible that the game has, against all predictions, turned into a shootout, that the pirate ship has become fully operational and in the throes of a mutiny, that Pat Fitzgerald is pumping his fists at another Fitzgerald that is wearing an eye patch, or that Northwestern may even somehow win eleven games.

I SAID G'DAY

The Outback Bowl is the culmination of one the greatest seasons in the history of Northwestern football. The Wildcats can, with a win, win two consecutive bowl games for the first time, win eleven games for the first time, win the Outback bowl for the first time, beat Tennessee for the first time, and win a bowl game without severing the head of a plush monkey doll for the first time since 1949. This has been a season of outrageous fortune, reversing two years of seeming to be on the end of every bad break and bounce possible to continually seize close wins. Perhaps it is possible that the 'Cats can pull out one more in 2016, hoisting that crystal boomerang to the sky, and putting it in its rightful place next to the Hat.

It is February, we've subjected ourselves to ritualistic rodent-bothering, and Northwestern athletics have sunk into a pit of despair.

The innovative camera-tophat gives viewers a livestream of groundhog manhandling

On New Year's Day, Northwestern took it's 10-2 record and dominant defense to the Outback Bowl and got mercilessly trampled by Tennessee. I've spent the last several weeks painstakingly editing the Outback Bowl footage to show exactly where the 'Cats went wrong with an in-depth look at Northwestern's football strategy:

In the end, Northwestern's defeat at the hands of the Volunteers looked identical to its previous two losses. A tight defensive game gave way to a complete dismantling in the second half as the offense sputtered to a halt and turned the ball over repeatedly. The 'Cats were unable to pull off another upset, and their bowl streak halted at one.

Despite the sour ending, this has been one of the greatest seasons in the history of Northwestern football. The Wildcats, predicted to spend the season scrapping with with the likes of Purdue and Illinois in the dustbin of the Big Ten West, went 10-2, tortured opponents with a legitimately great defense, and, in classic Northwestern fashion, attempted to kill fans with a series of cliff-hanging wins. These victories included an opening-day upset against one of the best teams in college football that involved turning Stanford's own body clocks against them, which, if you think of it, is the greatest defense of them all. They also saw the return of Big Kick Jack Mitchell, a Legitimate Victory granted when referees disallowed an apparent game-winning Wisconsin touchdown catch because a catch is now an indefinable abstract concept determined only by communion with unholy forces beyond our comprehension, and a reclamation of the Hat from a listing Illini team in front of what appeared to be a dozen people at Soldier Field. This is a glorious season. Not every team gets to go home a happy bowl winner; in fact, a recent study shows that nearly half of all bowl participants lose their bowl games.

Next season, the Wildcats face Big Ten East powers Michigan State and Ohio State. Their perfect record in close games will likely not repeat. Pat Fitzgerald and the coaching staff will have to figure out how to replace Dean Lowry, Nick VanHoose, Deonte Gibson, Superback Dan Vitale, and other senior standouts. At some point, Fitzgerald and Mick McCall will have to devise an offense besides Justin Jackson The Ball Carrier and his Merry Punting Brigade. The playbook will hopefully expand as Clayton Thorson enters his second year under center; the Wildcats have enough talent returning on defense that even a mediocre offense could put a good scare into Big Ten opponents beyond the possibility of the deployment of a Spooky Tarp.

Northwestern should just lean into the gothic uniform and put unsettling
images on the tarp so an opposing wide receivers will be startled and
chilled in the crucial seconds before making a catch

Northwestern does not win ten games often. It has happened only three other times. Next year, The Wildcats will come into the season with higher expectations. Hopefully, next season the 'Cats can keep the momentum going, securing the Hat, making a bowl game, and claiming adding another city to its expanding list of cities Northwestern is the Big Ten Team of.

NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL IS AN EDVARD MUNCH PAINTING

This was supposed to be the year until it wasn't. Everything had set up for Northwestern to make a run at the NCAA Tournament with an emerging young team and old Carmody stalwarts Tre Demps and Alex Olah. Instead, the Dance dream ended before the season began with Vic Law's injury. The 'Cats still flew out of the gate with a 12-1 record to enter Big Ten play, losing only to basketball superpower North Carolina. The record, however, was deceptive in that many of the Wildcat's famous victories came against obscure teams that materialized at Welsh-Ryan arena, lost, then vanished into the night never to be heard from again. Both big men, Olah and The Flying Dutchman Joey Van Zegeren, injured their feet and literally limped into Big Ten play. Then, as the season threatened to fall apart entirely, Chris Collins unleashed The Pardoning on Nebraska. In only his second college game, freshman Dererk Pardon, who had been slated to sit out the entire year, burned Lincoln to the ground with a 28-point 12-rebound performance.

Nebraska is mercilessly Pardoned

Northwestern basketball inspired dreams of a long-awaited tournament berth that were quickly dashed by the Big Ten. The Wildcats faced an unprecedented gauntlet of top-ranked teams who formed themselves into a single gigantic forward that dunked furiously on the entire city of Evanston. Though they annihilated Minnesota and beat a rebuilding Wisconsin team, the 'Cats have also been unceremoniously blown out by Maryland, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan State in home and away venues.

At the very least, Northwestern is coming precariously close to developing a mini-rivalry with Maryland. Though the Terps blew Northwestern off the court in Evanston, the 'Cats managed to take them to overtime in their College Park rematch. In this second game, NU played strong defense and destroyed Maryland on the glass in order to drag them into a miserably unwatchable early-twenty-first-century Big Ten slopfest. Last year, only a ridiculous tip-in buzzer beater from Dez Wells with no time remaining prevented the Wildcat upset. I think we can work with this. As the old college sports rivalry saying goes: "Nearly lose to Northwestern once, shame on you, nearly lose to Northwestern twice I will send away for an ACME Bob Diaco Rivalry-Starting Kit."

UCONN's Bob Diaco spent most of 2015 in a truly remarkable
attempt to unilaterally create a rivalry with Central Florida
by making his own trophy, creating a Beckman Clock, and
persevering in the face of UCF not wanting to have anything
to do with it before winning his own trophy back. "They [UCF]
don't get to say whether they are our rival or not," Diaco said,
inadvertantly creating the first postmodern college
football rivalry

Northwestern's already-gossamer tournament hopes are completely gone. The chances for NIT qualification are vanishing with every clanged jumper. On the other hand, the most terrifying stretch of the schedule has passed. A few wins against teams that are not already tournament locks could give them enough momentum to sneak into the NIT or one of those sub-NIT tournaments where entry is granted only by reciting the password through a slotted door should Collins and the Wildcat brass deign to participate.

SUPER BOWL ANALYSIS

The Super Bowl arrives this Sunday and the entire beer-guzzling, nacho-hoovering, going on websites to see the unrated version of the commercial population of these United States is focusing on Denver's superstar quarterback. And, with the lights on him, Chicago's Big Ten Quarterback Trevor Siemian is going to turn Super Bowl L into Super Bowl "El."

Siemian, who made his stunning debut against the Pittsburgh Steelers, has been described as the "Bronco's secret weapon" and "the linchpin of the Super Bowl" by Outlandish Pullquote magazine.

Siemian calmly rallying the troops before organizing a critical half-ending kneeldown

Siemian had success as part of a two-quarterback system at Northwestern with Kain Colter. Colter handled the option and the it's third and long and everyone in the solar system knows he is going to take off right here no one can stop it and he got the the fourth down against Ohio State I have several hinged videos about this on Youtube offense while Siemian threw passes. Now, though, Siemian is in the NFL where two-quarterback systems are laughable anachronisms. Instead, he is part of an innovative three-quarterback system. Peyton Manning's job is to gesticulate for 39 seconds like a frustrated middle manager hell-bent on promotion before wobbling passes into the void. Osweiler's job is to stand on the sidelines and use his height to shield manning from the sun. Siemian's job is to instruct Manning on when to switch from Omaha to another Midwestern city in a move that will paralyze the Carolina defense in the same way that Rocky switched from right to left-handed against Apollo Creed in Rocky II. Imagine the look on Luke Kuechly's face when Manning paces behind the line of scrimmage with his face scrunched up, pointing to the mike and key popcorn vendors with an unusual cadence that can screw up the snap count before looking Kuechly right in the eye and yelling ROLLA or DAVENPORT or OCONOMOWOC and then handing off to a running back with the Panthers on their heels.

Here's ace CBS analyst Phil Simms's breakdown of Siemian's game from his NFL debut:

@insidenu Trevor's NFL debut pic.twitter.com/RHs62GBi18
— Sports Godfather (@sportsgodfather) December 20, 2015

"WELL I KNOW THEY LIKE 'EEM," Simms says, "WELL OF COURSE THEY LIKE 'EEM THAT'S WHY HE'S THE BACKUP QUARTERBACK. BUT WE'VE BEEN OUT TO A FEW BRONCOS GAMES, I'VE WATCHED HIM PRACTICE, HE THROWS THE FOOTBALL VERY WELL."

As you can see Football Expert Phil Simms is pointing out that Siemian's got all the tools to succeed in the National Football League. First of all, he's on the team, and, as Trent Dilfer has said "YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM TO SUCCEED IN THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE EITHER THROUGH THE DRAFT OR THE FREE AGENCY PROCESS IN THE [glances quickly down to his palm where he has discreetly written in marker] NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE." Second, he throws the football. There's some controversy over this lately, but according to advanced numbers, a quarterback has to throw the ball to help his team in this League that is National and Football. Otherwise, quarterback is left with few options: to run and risk fumbles and injury, to lateral the ball to a nearby running back or offensive lineman while screaming "AAAAHHH YOU THROW IT" before scampering in the direction of the sideline, or to propel himself across the line of scrimmage by rigging up an illegal slingshot mechanism in the dead of night. No, my misinformed friend, the quarterback needs to be able to the throw the ball and according to Phil Simms, Siemian throws it, and this is a direct quote from his months of painstaking Siemian analysis "very well." Expect the Broncos to sign Colter this off-season and rig up an offense that will propel them into an NFL dynasty.

BATTLE OF THE DUDES

Nineteenth-century America was a rough-and-tumble time when an ordinary dude could not walk down the street without being forced to change into dandyish costume at a moment's notice. At least, this is what happened in the "Battle of the Dudes" between Evander Berry Wall and Bob Hilliard. The nineteenth-century dude differed from his contemporary counterpart; it referred to clotheshorses with elaborate costume, sartorial flourish, and, it goes without saying, impeccable mustaches.

Evander Berry Wall (l) and Robert Hilliard, whose ferocious dude battles
terrorized New Yorkers who lived in constant fear of getting hit by a stray
greatcoat flourish

Berry, who had already been crowned King of the Dudes in 1883, defended his title in 1888 in a newspaper-sponsored Battle of the Dudes. I'll let a 2005 article from the New York Sun that unfortunately does not have any further sources that would let me fall down a dude rabbit hole explain:

Wall became famous after meeting Blakely Hall, a reporter hungry for good copy. Thereafter, every week or so, Hall's articles publicizing Wall's adventures in clothing appeared in newspapers across the country. Then one of Hall's competitors set up a rival, actor Robert "Bob" Hilliard, another flashy dresser. Thus began the Battle of the Dudes, in which each sought to eclipse the other in sartorial extremes. According to the Times, Wall finally won when, during the Great Blizzard of 1888, he strode into the Hoffman House bar clad in gleaming boots of black patent leather that went to his hips. (Nonetheless, some social historians claim Hilliard won with the high boots, supposedly part of his Western gambler's costume from a play in which he was then appearing).

Yet, some dispute this result, explained in this glorious Wikipedia sentence that I want as my epitaph: "Nevertheless, some historians still consider it was Hilliard who won that dude battle."

Wall, however, would not let his Dude Crown rest upon his head. As the Sun article elaborates:

Wall won another contest in Saratoga when daredevil financier John "Bet-A-Million" Gates wagered that he could not wear 40 changes of clothes between breakfast and dinner. On the appointed day, Wall repeatedly appeared at the racetrack in one flashy ensemble after another until, exhausted but victorious, he at last entered the ballroom of the United States Hotel in faultless evening attire to wild applause.

The visual on this is astounding: Wall, flying to and from the racetrack changing his clothes like a panting off-stage Daffy Duck before crushing Bet-A-Million Gates with his splendor of his tuxedo. Gates made his initial fortune in barbed wire, where, according once again to a brilliantly stilted Wikipedia editor, he "provoked cattle into charging into a barbed wire fence which did not break."

WALL: You mean I need forty combinations, each unique,
each mesmerizing, each perfectly-tailored, tip-top-fashion,
elegant, graceful, beguiling, all in the course of the single
day my man?
GATES: That is our concern, dude.

CHEER UP, DUDES

Northwestern football ended its glorious season on a sour note. Northwestern basketball has suffered a string of blowout losses during a brutal stretch of games against some of the best teams in the country. Nevertheless, there is reason for optimism. The basketball team is still very young and may have discovered an inside force with Pardon. It is still possible for the 'Cats to catch fire at the end of the season, steal a tourney game or two, and make an unlikely run at the NIT. The football team just received a bunch of faxes from teenagers who want to smash into people for Northwestern. Trevor Siemian has a chance to win a Super Bowl ring. And, should all else fail, and should the Wildcats fall short this spring and next fall, they can still win in the way that counts more than any other: by changing into 40 nineteenth-century gentleman's outfits in the course of a single day climaxing, of course, in the donning of a wearable Hat trophy, together we can do this.

The Chicago Bulls have nothing at stake this season and yet they remain the most infuriating team in basketball outside Sacramento. They had virtually no chance of contending for a title this season; LeBron James cruelly lords over the Eastern Conference like a surly Prohibition-era bouncer who no longer recognizes the password "Derrick Rose," and the Western Conference superpowers loom on the horizon like mythical creatures from medieval map. But they have had reasons to hope for a good season. Jimmy Butler has improbably blossomed into an All-Star. After years in the wilderness, Pau Gasol has become a stalwart. Yet, with all of this good fortune, the Bulls remain wracked by injuries, haunted by the ghost of a spurned coach, sunk into the fringes of playoff contention, and constantly mired in a never-ending saga of ludicrous intrigue that has made following this team an exhausting slog.

The Bulls are a professional basketball team that pays millions of dollars to find tall people to violently slam a basketball into a hoop more often than the other team of tall people and they are attempting to do this by going about their business like a coterie of Holy Roman burgraves making hushed midnight plans to assassinate someone with a poisonous reptile or otherwise disrupt the nuptials of the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg to the daughter of a fossilized Spanish count.

Many mediocre teams play in the NBA. The Bulls operate with operatic levels of dysfunction, backbiting, reporter-assisted character assassination, and Shakespearean press conference statements delivered from a windswept cliff imported to Chicago at great expense.

Reinsdorf's press release announcing the firing of coach Tom Thibodeau was unusually venomous

The Bulls front office has a history of feuding with coaches. Jerry Krause drove off Phil Jackson and then hired Iowa State head coach Tim Floyd. John Paxson literally attacked Vinny Del Negro over a dispute over Joakim Noah's minutes.

Reenactment

The Bulls then fired Del Negro and hired Tom Thibodeau, a basketball monomaniac who spent most of his time screaming ICE at the top of his lungs at a slightly less frequent clip than Arnold Schwarzenegger in that terrible Batman movie. Thibodeau built the Bulls into an East contender until Rose began tearing his knee ligaments on an annual basis. Even without Rose, the Bulls had an enjoyable never-say-die team that remained a pain in the ass for the East. The Thibs Bulls reached their zenith in the 2013 playoffs when Joakim Noah and a vomiting Nate Robinson led them past the Brooklyn Nets. The Nets were so aghast that they traded away all of their drafts to bring in some aging veterans and now are left a smoldering wreck. After that triumph, Thibodeau began to feud with the front office over minutes. At one point last year, Adrian Wojnarowski reported that a Bulls' assistant coach had been using fans in his office to drown out conversations because he was worried the room had been bugged and he was apparently using the Moscow Rules.

Thibodeau was fired in order to hire another coach from Iowa State. Fred Hoiberg's first season has not gone smoothly. Hoiberg removed Joakim Noah from the starting rotation and claimed it was his idea. Noah disagreed. Jimmy Butler criticized Hoiberg in the press. The Bulls' offense, which Hoiberg was supposed to revolutionize, has languished. It's not fair to write off a rookie coach in his first half-season, but it appears possible that the only person who wasted more money in Iowa this century than Jerry Reinsdorf is Jeb Bush, he blogged almost topically.

Following a sports team is silly; following a sports team through the bizarre edifice of interviews, statements, leaks to beat reporters, bloviation by local sports radio bloviators and calls from and endless number of Stans from Glen Ellyn, blog posts attacking beat reporters for being allied with various configurations of agents and front office sources and the Soviet Union, and players cryptically tweeting emojis is so profoundly stupid that it is irresistible. I suppose it is possible for a smarter and more well-adjusted fan to follow the Bulls without falling victim to the miniature tempests of dysfunction that infect everything the Bulls do, but I don't know how.

Storylines from the Bulls' thrilling season have included: is this the year Derrick Rose is back; is this Jimmy Butler's team; is Derrick Rose jealous of Jimmy Butler; Derrick Rose buys Jimmy Butler a watch; Noah is coming off the bench by request; Noah denies asking to come off the bench; who elbowed Derrick Rose in the face; when is Derrick Rose back; Jimmy criticizes Hoiberg publicly; is Derrick Rose the worst player in the NBA; does Hoiberg know the NBA rules; is Derrick Rose back now that he no longer has a mask; is this Jimmy Butler's team; is Niko Mirotic being operated on with Bulgakov instruments; Derrick Rose-- is he back.

Is Derrick Rose back

I have no idea how a sports front office works. They control a multi-million dollar business based on the skills and health of a dozen players and a group of coaches and support staff. They are constantly assailed by thousands of fans who literally boo and cheer them and are covered by an absurd network of reporters, bloggers, television personalities, and interested amateurs who delve into the workings of the team with the tenacity of a Nicholas Cage character splitting the Declaration of Independence in half to reveal a Secret Declaration of Independence written in a code that can only be solved by stealing the Liberty Bell and aligning it with the moon on a secret panel hidden underneath Monticello. Yet, the Bulls have decided that they should be portrayed in the media as an organization that runs by smashing goblets against walls, by hurrying rumors out to the press by their swiftest courier, by publicly telling employees they have failed them for the last time and then paying them millions to go away only because it is not currently legal in the United States for basketball teams to operate trap doors that open into a bottomless pit.

The Bulls are no longer in contention for anything. Joakim Noah is injured and has probably played his last game as a Bull. Jimmy Butler hurt his knee and plans to return this season before inevitably succumbing to the endless cycle of back and not back. Derrick Rose has become an albatross. Niko Mirotic lies languishing on in a hospital. Pau Gasol may or may not be traded in the next several hours. Kirk Hinrich is now more compression sleeve than man. The fate of the Bulls remains in the hands of their Brains Trust: John Paxson, the Latrell Sprewell of General Managers, and Gar Forman, a dead-eyed human iguana. The Bulls may look radically different by the time you read this, but the endless Bulls soap opera will continue until a long-lost twin Derrick Rose with amnesia is discovered with two healthy knees and the picks the Bulls traded for Doug McDermott.

There is no more Northwestern basketball. The Wildcats compiled their greatest regular-season record in school history with twenty wins. That record, bolstered by a string of non-conference victories against school with programs so woeful that they host workshops on getting dunked on and attempting to stay in a defensive stance while being showered in buckets of glitter, combined with an inability to score major upsets in Big Ten play has left Northwestern out of the NCAA tournament and the NIT.

While watching Northwestern in action on television this year, you may have heard announcers mention that the Wildcat men's team has never appeared in the NCAA tournament. I've spent many long hours at the university archives researching this and it turns out to be true. We can look forward to reading the "Northwestern Continues to Have Not Made Tournament" articles in local publications originally written in 1955 by a person who is no longer alive.

The original Northwestern has not qualified for the NCAA Tournament
article was originally printed next to an ad for teething cigarettes

Northwestern's season has ended. The school will not play in the CBI, the Vegas 16, nor any other downmarket basketball tournament taking place in a ship's hull or in the background of a Street Fighter video game. Northwestern will also not form a swing band called Mr. Cat and the Vegas Sixteen to barnstorm across the county fairs and pomade sales conventions.

MICHIGAN, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THESE GUYS

NIT bracketologists are like hazmat suits or Jeff Goldblum characters in a science fiction movie: you only need them when things have already gone disastrously wrong. After a tough loss to Michigan on February 24 after leading for most of the game, the path to the NIT was clear: win out and steal a Big Ten tournament game or spend Selection Sunday researching the various Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Dune Buggy Decathlon and College Basketball Tournaments. Northwestern obliged. They obliterated Rutgers in front of a packed Welsh-Ryan arena filled with Wildcat fans braying for blood against a team so profoundly hopeless that it was possible for Northwestern fans to bray for blood against them. They dispatched Penn State and Nebraska. And they set themselves up against Michigan in a do-or-die struggle for an NIT tournament berth, this is a sentence that can only exist on a Northwestern basketball blog.

The Big Ten Tournament crushes Northwestern. Northwestern has never won more than one game. In 2012, when the 'Cats were about as close as they have been to tourney qualification in recent memory, they fell in overtime to Minnesota as a trap door opened in the Bankers Life Fieldhouse and immediately deposited them in the NIT. This year, an NIT berth itself was potentially on the line; it was not for a chance to shed the weight of an eternity of basketball ineptitude but would at least ease the pain of putting up the school's best record in history only to fail to qualify for the postseason.

They came so close. Michigan pummeled the Wildcats in the opening minutes, seemingly unable to miss. But, Northwestern hung around within striking distance. In the second half, Northwestern came back. Alex Olah and Tre Demps, playing in what we now know was their final game, bravely battled to subject America to more Northwestern basketball. Olah drilled a three with 17 seconds left. Then, with Michigan ahead two in the final seconds, he put up the most memorable shot in his career.

Clutch. Putback. @NUMensBball& @umichbball go to OT. #MarchOnBTN https://t.co/aMC9vEue7F
— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) March 10, 2016

It was not quite enough. With six-tenths of a second left in overtime, Nathan Taphorn's shot fell short and the Wildcats went home, dejected. Collins spent much of the end of the game apoplectic at a blatant missed travel. He accused the officials of favoring Michigan as a sports brand. Tre Demps fit officiating into the broader spectrum of American injustice:

Tre Demps, who scored 21 points on 8-for-21 shooting and played all 45 minutes, put it more boldly.
Speaking to the Tribune and one other reporter, the fifth-year senior said: "There's this thing called politics. They want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. That's just the reality. You have to stand up and keep fighting. Eventually this program will get to a place where we get those benefit calls.

"That's the reality of the world we live in, in all aspects ... basketball, economics, race. You can't blame the basketball world because that's the way the world works, period."

I am hesitant to dismiss Collins's insinuations of a vast officiating conspiracy against Northwestern because it is incredibly funny; imagine Jim Delany meeting with a cabal of Big Ten referees in the ancient Society of the Inconsistent Whistle. It is far more likely that the Wildcats, like all college sports teams, are subject to universally crappy college sports officiating. Northwestern like a target because any win against a decent team involves a tense, close game where missed calls are brought into sharp relief during the games' traditional 35 minute foul and timeout-riddled denouement.

But let's not delude ourselves, that Michigan guy took like 45 steps are you
kidding me

AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE UNFOLDS IN WORCESTER

Northwestern's big game against Michigan took place in the shadow of Holy Cross's triumph. The Crusaders, who managed only ten wins the entire season, qualified for the NCAA Tournament with a miracle run through the Patriot League Tournament. Holy Cross is led by Bill Carmody, fired by Northwestern for failing to bring Northwestern to the Dance. Carmody had used the Princeton offense and 1-3-1 zone defense to get the 'Cats to four consecutive NIT berths and the edge of the NCAA bubble. With the same purple and white color scheme, each Holy Cross tournament game is like watching Don Draper's wheel speech, every slide a melancholy backcut or sourfaced Carmody grimace.

It is a small tragedy that Carmody could never get Northwestern into the Tournament because his teams were gleefully odd. They were, especially in the early years, excruciating to watch, grinding all 35 seconds off the shot clock and scoring fewer points than the football team. He sent against the Big Ten bizarre squads of mismatched basketball parts: a 6'2" guard that led the team in rebounding, a United Nations of 6'8" guys who could shoot, a lanky scoring machine with a shooting motion modeled on a malfunctioning oil derrick, a guy named "Juice." Not only did Northwestern often seem like it did not belong in the Big Ten because of a lack of NBA players and behemoth big men, the Carmody teams seemed like they played an entirely different sport, like a handball team that somehow found itself in Assembly Hall.

Moreover, Carmody had the right demeanor. He coached with the fatalism of a man who, in the back of his mind, realized the Sisyphean futility of Northwestern's quest to qualify for the NCAA tournament. You half expected him to finish a tirade to a referee by yelling "ah, the hell with it" and then collapse into an easy chair at the end of the bench before realizing it was time to start exhorting the team to backcut again.

Carmody triumphantly brings his "will you just ah dammit" coaching
style to bear against Lehigh in the Patriot League Tournament
championship game

Holy Cross's unlikely run to the Tournament coincides with the last vestiges of the Carmody era at Northwestern. Olah and Demps, who played for Carmody, have finished their Northwestern careers (Sanjay Lumpkin, a Carmody recruit, took a medical redshirt during Carmody's final year and remains on the roster). Since then, Northwestern has new uniforms, a new court (after flirting with a purple court design that would have turned Welsh-Ryan arena into the site of a Willy Wonka factory disaster), and a new offensive scheme. The only thing that has not changed is the lack of appearances in the NCAA tournament, a fate that dooms every Northwestern basketball team to an endless cycle of heartbreak regardless of player, coach, scheme, or venue as we all rot away on our bodies unable to watch the 'Cats even crack the bullshit play-in games that we are all pretending are part of the tournament.

This is a Werner Herzog sentence

THE GREATEST RIVALRY IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL

The Greatest Rivalry in College Football is heating up. New Illinois Athletic Director Josh Whitman wasted no time dispatching Bill Cubit not even a single game into his newly-signed two-year extension. Cubit never seemed to have the full endorsement of the university; his extension seemed designed to relieve the athletic department of the burden of conducting an actual search. Interim Athletic Director Paul Kowalczyk described the Cubit contract as unlikely to "put a dagger in the heart of the program," a turn of phrase that sounds like it was crafted in a committee meeting by torchlight in a windswept Champaign-area castle. It invited intrigue. Sure enough, the only dagger in Illinois's program was quickly embedded in Cubit's back.

Fittingly, Cubit's last act as Illinois coach was to remove a Hat

Cubit's ouster was not the act of a new athletic director feeling his oats, but a designed coup. Whitman, quickly enough to suggest behind-the-scenes machinations, replaced him with NFL veteran Lovie Smith, late of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Smith, whose greatest football accomplishments include taking the Bears to a Super Bowl and unleashing Kyle Orton upon the world, hopes to bring the Illini back to relevance and stem the unrest generated by three years under Tim Beckman's football performance artistry. More importantly, Smith offers a new chapter in the eternal quest for Lincoln's Hat, the greatest spectacle in amateur athletics.

Josh Whitman heralds Smith as a transformational hire; that is why he broke out the color
printer

Smith will have an enormous impact on the Hat rivalry. Just think of the three Illini head football coaches from the past nine months on a sliding scale of dignity: Lovie, calmly repeating the "Rex Grossman is our quarterback" mantra in the face of triple-coverage interceptions; Cubit, an avuncular man who probably refers to pancakes as flapjacks; and Tim Beckman, who has spent the last four months trying to get his head freed from a stairway railing. Smith also represents a direct shot at Northwestern's undisputed claim as Chicago's Big Ten Team by bringing in a successful and respected coach from a team that people in Chicago actually care about. The last time the Illini hired a former Bears coach, Ron Turner led them to a Big Ten championship. No matter what Illinois does, though, Northwestern has an unstoppable plan to maintain its reign as Chicago's Big Ten team by continuing to buy those billboards.

The Smith signing has redefined the rivalry. Lovie Smith will never be able to top the operatic heights of the Beck Man era. I like Smith and enjoyed his time with the Bears. I want to see the man succeed despite the instinctive need to protect the Hat at all costs. With Smith in charge, the Beckman era will retreat further into memory. Though it has somehow been less than a year since the Beck Man stalked the sidelines, he already seems like a surreal collective delusion-- it seems almost impossible that an unhinged, incompetent maniac who dedicated himself to destroying an equally moribund program with the zeal of a parody comic book villain undone by a refusal to believe in hamstring injuries actually existed. The only threat to Smith is the possibility that the Hat exudes some sort of power over Illinois coaches causing them to go insane like the Treasure of Sierra Madre until he succumbs to his hat-greed and incurs a sideline penalty.

The most indelible image of the Treasure of Sierra Madre is a gold-crazed
Bogart referring to everyone as "mugs"

Lovie Smith is great coach and an encouraging hire for the embattled Illini. I hope he can bring Illinois out of program's malaise brought about by turmoil and literally allowing Tim Beckman to be in charge of things for an extended period of time. But that does not change anything. The stakes for the Hat remain the highest in college football and Smith will discover that on Big Ten Network regional action.

In retrospect, it is incredible how much crap managed to fill up video stores. The VHS cassette sustained ubiquity for about 15 years, and during that time approximately two zillion forgettable movies moldered on local outlets' shelves. Local video rental places, before they were driven out of business by Blockbuster locations sporting 40 copies of whatever Val Kilmer action movie came off the truck that week, offered new releases, old classics, and whatever junk the owners could get hold of: forgotten bombs, little-known arthouse films, fifty minutes of Ernest commercials called The Ernest Film Festival which I once rented on VHS and now some person has put on youtube.

Somewhere, there is a dark, unreleased direct-to-video Ernest movie where Vern and the authorities
finally find out wha' he mean and it is unspeakable

Streaming services are these new video stores. Alongside well-known films and television shows, there exists a seamy underworld of filmed entertainment on the remainder pile-- crappy movies relegated to the dustbin internet, straight-to-dvd stoner comedies no doubt acquired as the televisual equivalent of players to be named later in a byzantine rights deal, reality television shows about either trucks or people slapping each other, and sports documentaries. There are countless sports documentaries on Netflix alone outside prestige brands like ESPN's 30 for 30 series, and it is impossible to tell if any of them are decent or 90 minutes of a person alternating exercise and talking into a go-pro camera.

The motley menagerie of streaming sports films includes the sports hagiography. These films are soft-focus biopics of current stars. They tell the story of an athlete's brand and how that brand overcame obstacles to become good at sports and heroically inform the populace about insurance and cell phone plans. Some of these films are well-made and straightforward. Nowitzki: The Perfect Shot, for example, focuses on Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki and his unconventional training regimen with trainer Holger Gerschwinder. It is basically a feature-length Michael Lewis story. The most interesting thing about the film is that it is German and therefore requires Mavs GM Donnie Nelson to explain the concept of the NBA draft.

Nash is a sports hagiography with more ambition. It profiles Steve Nash the basketball star, Steve Nash the philanthropist, Steve Nash the filmmaker, Steve Nash the Renaissance man and in doing so becomes at times indistinguishable in tone from a multi-level marketing scheme.

Nash boasts a star-studded list of talking-head interviews that includes basketball figures, celebrities, and the literal sitting president of the United States.

The film comes to life after an endless flourish of production company logos and throws a whole lot of Steve Nash at the viewer: a Steve Nash press conference about staying on the suns, an arty Steve Nash montage, some encouraging words from Ron Howard, Owen Wilson, and President Obama, and a Nietzsche quote.

Then Nash, with his gravelly Will Arnett voice, tells the story of Sisyphus over an animated stick figure.

Nash contains multitudes. There are at least two or three sports movies stacked within the film like matryoshka dolls. The traditional Steve Nash origin story unfolds to chart his improbable rise from a slight, obscure Canadian to improbable NBA stardom. The film covers his bitter divorce from the Dallas Mavericks. Nash's first scene takes place at a press conference announcing his decision to stay with the Phoenix suns and then picks up on the thread some 45 minutes later. It is only after the hobnobbing with Ron Howard, the riding of skateboards, and the discussion of digital marketing that the music swells and we find ourselves in the 2010 NBA playoffs. Somewhere in between, Nash himself narrates a segment about him lighting the Olympic Torch and playing in the All-Star game in the style of a reality TV show before the conceit is mercifully dropped. The movie ends with what appears to be a hastily-inserted coda detailing his move to the Lakers; the credits roll before he succumbs to injury, becomes a scapegoat for an underachieving team, and is subjected to an entire season of Dwight Howard who I like to imagine spent several days following him around yelling Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve before making a Dwight Howard face and collapsing into a fit of giggles alongside a paid entourage that laughs alongside him, its members shoving each other in fits of simulated mirth.

The rest of the film is devoted to Nash's manifold interests. Numerous talking heads note that Steve Nash dislikes celebrity, despite "celebrity" appearing on the film's opening word cluster of Steve Nash traits in a movie devoted entirely to Steve Nash. The film devotes large amounts of time to his nobler efforts like his global philanthropy and outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. They appear alongside his efforts to break into filmmaking and extremely 2010 digital marketing that promises to give clients a presence on Flickr. The two occasionally make odd juxtapositions:

More than anything, Nash reaches for arthouse sophistication through sheer visual spectacle. As it careens from topic to topic, each transition requires an overwrought time-lapse montage set to post-rock music. How, for example, are viewers supposed to understand that Nash is in New York without seeing commuters blur through Grand Central Station or understand he is in Washington without a dramatic dutch-angle view of the Lincoln Memorial leading into a Barack Obama talking head helpfully chyroned "Barack Obama: President of the United States." This isn't just a Nash problem; the grammar of helicopter shot and time-lapse transition is so deeply embedded in documentary films and reality television that I'm surprised that airports don't feature large screens with them so people can understand they've moved to another location; oh I'm in Los Angeles now, the city with the slowly tracking palm trees and the time-lapse cars whirring around the freeways in red streaks.

Nash is disjointed; its scenes appear to have been assembled like a magazine cut-out murder threat. The addition of the Lakers coda suggests that the film sat idle for some years while acquiring production company logos. My theory is that the actual Nash-related parts took a few weeks to film and then the directors spent the next several years capturing time-lapse train station footage, rare shots of the Hollywood sign to convey the concept of "Los Angeles," and hours of bucket drumming to sprinkle throughout.

Steve Nash played enjoyable basketball. He has always come across as unusually thoughtful and self-aware, not only in this film but in the Jack McCallum Seven Seconds or Less book or in his melancholy comeback film that turned into an elegy for his career. Nash offers a portrait of him beyond his NBA feats as a complex, thoughtful, human being while at the same time offering complex, thoughtful, and human as a brand in its own right. Of course, it is hard to tell exactly what this movie is driving at beyond the fact that some time-lapse enthusiasts got a lot of access to Steve Nash, Ron Howard, Barrack Obama, Kobe Bryant, The Guy from Entourage, and not Mark Cuban and managed to pour it all into Netflix like molten steel to be forged into a forgettable on-demand sports media entertainment product. As the philosopher Steve Nash once narrated, you can't always get that rock up the hill.

Netflix Sports Hagiography is part of an occasional series of on-demand sports movie reviews that seem like a good idea but let's face it I probably will do like one more and then it will fall by the wayside.

A storm cloud has appeared over major league baseball, as sure a mark of impending doom as the sport can muster: the Chicago Cubs are overwhelming favorites to win the 2016 World Series. Fortified by lucrative tanking, using the Ricketts family's war chest to bring in free agents, and riding an improbable Cardinal-vanquishing playoff run to last year's National League Championship Series, this could be The Year. And by invoking The Year and putting together one of baseball's best teams on paper, the Cubs have merely summoned the Four Goat-men of the Apocalypse: Ligament injuries, Player Regression, Cardinals Bullshit, and The Entire History of the Chicago Cubs Since The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.

Baseball has long overthrown the anti-intellectual chewing tobacco luddism of its past. Now it is the purview of lawnmower men who sit in their reconstructed mother's basement front offices. This is an advance. It took decades to convince the Tim McCarvers of the world that players who make fewer outs are more valuable than players who knock the ball in play and reach safely discounting the times they walked to first base and ignoring sacrifice bunts and flies except in certain situations where they are not sacrificial enough as determined by a person who has seen the play once from a hole in the scoreboard which was good enough to beat the forces of the Kaiser, damn you. Now, baseball executives become implicated in high-tech hacking scandals involving typing "Eckstein123" into a terminal, shouting "I'm in," and mining valuable baseball data to their own twisted ends.

Cardinals executive Christopher Correa prepares to infiltrate the Astros'
intricate computer network

Baseball analytics scoffs at the type of things you will read in this blog post because they are unscientific hokum based on recency bias, coincidence, and full-blown delusional pessimism. Every season is a unique event; these Cubs have nothing in common with the century of failed Cub teams except their uniforms, Wrigley Field, and the same legions of demented drunken mustaches nasally honking about the traffic on the Dan Ryan. At the same time, it seems like the most probable route to a Cubs victory would not involve heavy preseason expectations inspiring myriad panics during a 162-game season and one of the most fraught playoff systems in professional sports. The Cubs gave us the most delightfully unexpected seasons last year; this season will play out like a Blimp of Damocles hovering over the stadium.

THE CUBS ARE INVETERATE BASEBALL MURDERERS

Theo Epstein dismantled the Cubs. They lost bunches of games. They flipped any remotely competent player for prospects and arcane spoils like international bonus slot money and sandwich picks. This garbage team showed up in last place filled with a bunch of rail-hopping barnstormers one beard away from the House of David and this plan, to the detriment to all that is fun in professional sports, worked. The fruits of the Cubs' drafts, trades, and forays into the Sydney Greenstreet world of international free agency came up last year and they can sock baseballs to Mars.

The Cubs arrived a year ahead of schedule. Addison Russell, the slick-gloved shortstop, appeared to replace an injured Tommy LaStella. Kris Bryant, the most ballyhooed Cubs prospect since Mark Prior, appeared amid a flourish of union grievances. Kyle Schwarber debuted in June and took his place as the prototypical stump-shaped lefty slugger, awing spectators with his power to smash baseballs into the stratosphere and his endearingly bumbling attempts to do anything else related to baseball. Javier Baez and Jorge Soler spent most of the season injured and ineffective only reappear in the postseason as the revolutionary vanguard against Cardinal hegemony.

The Cubs have nevertheless made some sweeping changes. They traded the enigmatic Starlin Castro to the Yankees in exchange for reliever Adam Warren. Castro spent his entire career as Cubs fans' alternating symbol of hope and scapegoat for despair. During that time, Castro lost. He lost as the only cornerstone player while the journeymen and organizational filler around him disintegrated into trades, designations for assignment, and far-flung baseball leagues around the world. The capricious whims of BABIP guided his success: in the years when his balls found holes in the defense he was an All-Star; when they did not he ranked as one of the worst players in all of baseball. He never acquitted himself well to short, accumulating a staggering array of ludicrous errors comparable to the beer league softball player who appears in jeans, immediately in over his head.

Kyle Hendricks's screams of "Starlin, Starlin STARLIN" while an oblivious Castro castigates
himself for an error fall upon deaf ears. It is too late

By the middle of the season, Castro found himself on the bench. Then, Maddon moved him to second. Something switched. Castro became one of the Cubs' best hitters in September. Beat writers filled column inches about the effect of his change of position and approach. Cubs fans cheered him, bolstered by his walkup music. Now, after years as the face of some of the shittiest teams in the Cubs' woebegone history, Castro is out. He was never a Theo Epstein guy. His mercurial bat did not fit with the Cubs' patience-strikeouts-and-dingers regimen. He has a chance to start over with as a change-of-scenery castoff in the one media market less forgiving than Chicago. This is how baseball works in the twenty-first century.

The Cubs replaced him with a bonafide World Series champion. Maddon favorite Ben Zobrist plays nearly every position, switch hits, gets on base, has a little pop, and is basically pretty good at every facet of baseball. He has two main drawbacks: at 34, those skills may begin to diminish and Chicago authorities remain concerned about an outbreak of Zobrism in North Side neighborhoods as Zobrists menace the city with their occult obsession with wispy beards and advanced fielding metrics.

The Cubs raided longtime nemesis St. Louis for key contributors. Pitcher John Lackey, last seen screaming at a baseball after giving up a demoralizing NLDS hit to Jason Hammel, has vaulted over the Mississippi River. Lackey, a grizzled 37 year-old, hopes to add stability to the Cubs' rotation after a surprisingly fine season for the Cards. More importantly, the Cubs absconded with "Trader J" Jason Heyward. Heyward came over to the Cardinals as a one-year rental from the Braves then rejected their offer to join the Cubs in one of the finest days in the history of sports internet. Heyward initially projected as the Cubs' center fielder. He would replace Dexter Fowler, who had left the Cubs as a free agent and agreed to sign with the Orioles. Instead, Fowler spurned them and appeared out of nowhere in Cubs camp. The Cubs' offseason was essentially an opera featuring the aria "Trader: The Homonym of Sports Perfidy."

THE CUBS WERE BETTER AT PITCHING THAN HITTING LAST YEAR

The Cubs brought in Jon Lester in for $155 million. You can recite that number by heart because "they paid $155 million for a guy who can't throw to first?" became appended to his name, like an honorary title for a medieval king. Lester is a fine pitcher and a comical disaster in everything else relating to baseball. In his first appearance, a nationally-televised season-opening rivalry game, Lester's inability to throw to first base became as evident to fans as Wrigley Field's inability to accommodate their urine. He cannot hit, his fielding remains suspect, and he demands the services of catcher David Ross, whose batting average is "he calls a good game out there." Yet, by the end of the season, Lester scraped out a hit. He laid down some competent bunts. He hit a home run in spring training to a pitcher who may or may not have been a Cubs intern in disguise.

Lester may have been the big story in camp last year, but he quickly became overshadowed by Jake Arrieta's unworldly Cy Young season. Arrieta, acquired in a scrap-heap deal with the repeatedly victimized Baltimore Orioles, turned himself into a better pitcher with the Cubs. Then, in the second half of the season, he became Death Incarnate. No one scored off Arrieta. He gained the ability to control the ball with his mind. He threw a no-hitter then changed into mustache-themed footie pajamas. He sparked a donnybrook in the Wild Card playoff game when he hit two Pirates, took one in the buttocks, and started a bench-clearing that got out of control enough for Pirates' first baseman Sean Rodriguez to pummel a Gatorade cooler with a Zambranoan fury. It was the greatest half a season since the deadball era.

Rodriguez plans revenge in this year's Gatorade Kumite

The Cubs rode Lester, Arrieta, and a host of reclamation projects and junkballers to the third-best ERA in the majors. The bullpen contributed; Justin Grimm, Pedro Strop, and Hector Rondon formed a dependable late-game trio, and the Cubs turned a conveyor belt of scrap-heap starters like Clayton Richard, Trevor Cahill, and archery mime Fernando Rodney into a shockingly effective unit. They kept most of it together, adding extra arms like Adam Warren and Rex Brothers, the King of All Brothers. There is, however, nothing more volatile than a major league pitching staff. Arm injuries can claim anyone at any time, aces will turn to meatball artists with no warning, pitchers will move in and out of the lineup at seemingly-random intervals. The Cubs' bullpen will look shockingly different by the end of the season. Let us hope that Arrieta, Lester, and Lackey remain in place.

LOOK UPON THIS MIGHTY TEAM AND DESPAIR

There are several rational reasons why the Cubs will not win the World Series. For one, the baseball season is endless and unpredictable. Players get hurt, players come out of nowhere, great players play like absolute dogshit, relief pitching is essentially determined by oracle bones, players change teams, BABIP commands the game like a vengeful god, the banishment of a thirteen-year-old bat boy causes widespread locker room revolt, the playoffs are a completely random confluence of baseball events. Yet, this is not the place for rational thoughts. This is a place for exalted Cubs miserablism unbound by the physical laws of the universe.

The Cubs are not cursed by a disgruntled goat-owner or vengeful baseball spirits. They are, however, confounded by very real pressure fueled by a century of futility, where winning a dumb baseball trophy has acquired life-and-death stakes as their title drought has seen generations of fans to the grave. The Cubs' identity is wrapped up in futility; every playoff run drags with it the combined weight of previous failure amplified by media into a cacophony. A hypothetical Cubs World Series appearance would require a three-hour special to get in the full litany of Cubs' ineptitude.

BUCK: YOU'RE WATCHING THE WORLD SERIES ON FOX. I'M JOE BARTMAN,
WITH MY CO-HOST WILLIAM GOATS
GOAT: EHHH
BUCK: 1908

The Cubs at least seem aware of this. Joe Maddon's slogan for the season is "Embrace the Target," which sounds either like a stealthy conduit for branded content or an extremely Dolph Lundgren direct-to-VHS movie from the mid-90s. Maddon has attempted to ameliorate the pressure on the Cubs by turning Spring Training into a literal circus involving clowns, mimes, a shredding guitar player accompanying the sound system, and tiny baby cubs.

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears in Cubs Spring .
Training, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only
the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as
a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored
interest in food

The Cubs still play in a thunderdome division against the Pirates and the Cardinals. You may think the Cubs have weakened the Cardinals by stealing two of their best players from last season, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Cardinals work. There is no Cardinals team more dangerous than one that has increased access to scrappy call-ups that you've never heard of. As we speak, Cardinals scientists have altered Eckstein DNA to make a ballplayer smaller, weaker, and more gritty in a reverse Captain America process to create a feeble toddler whose sole MLB hit will be a walkoff against the Cubs.

And there is no way to dabble in baseball mysticism without mentioning the San Francisco Giants. Since 2010, they alternated World Series victories with playoff absences. By their third championship in 2014, the Giants' Even Year Bullshit has been canonized in baseball lore. The Giants signed star pitcher Johnny Cueto. But, in a move of greater concern for the Cubs, they have also signed former Cub Jeff Samardzija. Samardzija's value remains unknown; he followed an All-Star half-season for the Cubs with a dismal season for the White Sox. Regardless of how Samardzija pitches, he is destined for a high-leverage start against the Cubs late in the season or the playoffs where he shuts them down as written in the Scrolls of Hypothetical Baseball Misery.

Baseball's playoffs are lightning rods for fluky horseshit. The Royals won the World Series partly by turning themselves into an engine of chaos, slapping the ball all over the field and daring the Mets not to do the single dumbest thing possible at any given time, and the strategy worked. Should the Cubs make the playoffs, they could avoid insane pratfalls. Or they could well fall victim to a gaffe currently outside of the realm of baseball possibility by running the bases backwards or having a ball ricochet off another ball in the bullpen causing havoc as multiple balls appear on the field or somehow allowing every fielder to simultaneously collide, their I got it cries lost to a howling October wind. It is entirely possible that this is The Year. I hope it is. But there is nothing more Cubs than squandering this loaded, young squad into another century of heartbreak and despair.

Rejoice! Baseball is back.

For the past week, the National Football League has taken over Grant Park, the Auditorium Theater, and the surrounding environs for a three-day list-reading spectacle. Now, it has blown town like an indolent carnival, only leaving the indentations from the CHRYSLER DRIVE TO THE ENDZONE LEGAL BRIEF ZONE and the VERIZON 4G LTE ENTERTAINMENTS TENT featuring some hideous corporate simulacrum of a good time. Now, after a fanfare-laden Schedule Announcement, there is little the NFL can do until the Beginning of Minicamps and the inevitable revelation of some hideous football scandal that requires Roger Goodell to grimly sit behind a lectern in front of a gaggle of gravely tweeting reporters.

All of the major American sports leagues have expanded their drafts into spectacle. Major League Baseball now televises its draft, even though many top prospects will need to be outfitted with cadaver ligaments before they throw a pitch in the big leagues. The NBA has turned the ordering of lottery picks into a show itself, where general managers cringe as the capricious whims of fate reward their season of tanking with the rights to draft high-upside teenagers who might not know how to play basketball and wispy Europeans harangued by basketball xenophobes. The NBA draft itself has become a fashion spectacle, far removed from the days when players would dress like bellhops and, during the 1990s, an entire textile's factory worth of fabric hastily cut into the shape of a suit.

Bonzi Wells's NBA career was undone by a massive scandal
when he was revealed to be three children sitting on each
other's shoulders

The NFL draft's bloated, grotesque self-importance has become its most entertaining aspect. Over the course of three days and countless hours of coverage, the draft broadcasts features men in suits discussing some MAC tight end with the gravity of an unfolding missile crisis interspersed with ineptly stage-managed spectacles involving children or the armed forces. The draft combines the demented square-jawed football authoritarians with the uncanny valley corporate branding strategists who are genuinely excited about product integration in an exciting contest to determine the most irritating type of person on the planet. The ringmaster is Roger Goodell, the loathsome avatar of swaggering corporate dick-swinging in whose hands a minor rules infraction about football air pressure turned into a months-long legal siege that has generated thousands of pages of legal briefs and tied up the actual United States judicial system.

Roger Goodell reacts to boos like an indignant vice principal while dressed, inexplicably, like a
secret policeman from a dystopian future movie who works for a shadowy government cabal with
a name like The Curators

The NFL draft also serves as an annual symposium on stilted language. Draft analysts, driven mad by the existence of their job, struggle each year to come up with new and increasingly abstract ways of describing players as fast, strong, and skilled, which are the same qualities that football teams have looked for in their players since time immemorial. Instead, they combine a desperate desire to say something new witbh the requisite QUARTERBACK POSITION IN THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE dialect that surrounds the sport to convince anyone listening that they are finally suffering the neurological effects of a lingering elementary school dodge ball injury. This year, analysts decided to, for the first time in the history of English, describe human beings as "sudden." That nonsensical usage could only appear in an NFL draft broadcast or by an unhinged Dostoevsky translator in one of those scenes where the protagonist is thrown out of a tea reception when everyone becomes incredibly hostile for some reason.

You do not need me to tell you that the NFL draft is tedious, ponderous, and hilariously self-serious. The entire NFL brand revolves watching enormous men tear each others' ligaments described by a panel of shouting Jack Webbs that pauses only to sell us trucks and boner medicines. And yet, the biggest moron of any person involved in the NFL draft is me for paying attention to it because Chicago's Big Ten Draft would possibly involve Wildcats.

GODDAMMIT I CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT THE STUPID NFL DRAFT

Two Wildcats were chosen in the draft. Dan Vitale followed in the footsteps of Drake Dunsmore and went to Superback City. He enters the NFL as a fullback because superback sounds like it is a position that exists only in those fake intramural Harry Potter sports.

Dean Lowry's draft selection video features a man broadcasting from a creepily-preserved Vince Lombardi office mausoleum. Then, the draft analyst immediately denigrates Lowry as short-armed and possessing the brain pan and skull contours of a rotational player who may lack the alimentiveness of a full-time defensive end.

McSHAY: This fellow's ratio of brow-ridge to frontal cortex indicates such a pronounced
deficieny in the philoquarterbackal instinct that I should look askance at anyone
who drafts him as anything other than a common grout-monger
KIPER: Must improve: skull

Most distressingly, Lowry now plies his trade for the hated Packers. While I hope for Lowry to have success in the NFL, his victories will be won over the prone body of Jay Cutler. I don't know how fans of teams with armies of draftees reconcile their divided loyalties between college and pro football other than by yelling roll tide at all football occasions and damning everything else.

The Chicago Bears performed a number of trades to draft a bunch of people I've never heard of based on the work of dozens of scouts and phrenologists. I'm pretty sure they drafted a linebacker named Kwiatkoski specifically for the benefit of sports radio callers so they can demand he play more because dat guy's hard nosed instead of calling to complain about Jay Cutler or attempting to order Italian beef sandwiches when they mistakenly think they've hit the other number on their speed dial.

CHICAGO IS THE BASEBALL CAPITAL OF THE UNIVERSE

Chicago is the epicenter of baseball. The ballyhooed Cubs have lived up to the ballyhooers, storming their way to the top of the NL Central. Jake Arrieta has continued his rampage from last season with another no-hitter. He now appears in hitters' dreams to strike them out and terrorize them with fiendish wordplay. The Cubs have walked and bashed their way to victory after victory, even after the beefy lad Kyle Schwarber tore all of his knee ligaments running in the outfield like a Chuck Jones cartoon character.

Schwarber flies too close to the sun

Meanwhile, on the South Side, the White Sox have been equally destructive. The Sox, bolstered by a new infield and nuclear pitching rotation led by enchanted Fantasia broom Chris Sale, have lain waste to the American League. Last year, a young and exciting Cubs team became the darlings of baseball while a promising Sox team languished. The Sox have succeeded this year while managing to overcome the all-consumingly bizarre Spring Training saga of Adam LaRoche. LaRoche retired after the Sox attempted to prevent his thirteen year-old son from spending every single moment with the team. This protest spun into a near-mutiny, with LaRoche's supporters on the team hanging the younger LaRoche's youth-sized jersey in the locker room and describing the precocious lad as team leader. The whole affair climaxed in a interview with the Elder LaRoche that detailed his work in overseas prostitution sting operations.

Adam LaRoche's season unfolded like the first chapter of a Murakami novel
(Original ambiguously sinister caption from the Chicago Tribune)

It is the sad lot of the White Sox that, through no fault of their own, they remain overwhelmed by the droning media cacophony over the Cubs. Both teams are historically terrible; after the Versailles Peace Conference, both Chicago teams dedicated themselves to complete baseball ineptitude. While the Cubs and Red Sox garnered the losing streak sympathy, the White Sox, whose streak eclipsed the Red Sox, attracted far less attention. When the White Sox finally won a World Series in 2005, the national baseball media treated it like a baseball championship; the Red Sox victory a year earlier was greeted with the cathartic jubilation usually associated with the end of world wars. Ken Burns's Tenth Inning addendum to his endless baseball documentary included what seemed like an entire feature film's worth of people in book-lined studies rapturously celebrating the Red Sox victory while barely acknowledging the White Sox; this is even though the White Sox won with a stunning series of dominating pitching performances, a dramatic fourteenth-inning game-winning homer from an anonymous bench guy who could have been invented by Ken Burns, and an unhinged maniac manager. As the Cubs suck up all of the baseball oxygen, the White Sox have quietly matched them in heroics. Chicago boasts the two best teams in baseball.

That said, there is nothing more likely than the White Sox winning a World Series in a year filled with overwhelming Cubs hype.

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IT IS COMPLETELY INSANE THAT THE NFL DRAFT IS LIKE IT IS

It is possible to trace the evolution of the NFL draft into the ludicrous spectacle it has become. Americans like professional sports, they love football, and even after the league has added national games, invested in football-adjacent products like fantasy pools, and purchased an entire television network to broadcast old football games and football talk and underwear-clad draft prospects running around cones, they still have not managed to exhaust interest in professional football. The overproduced telecasts with 37 panelists and aggressive animated robots makes sense as well-- football's maximalist pageantry is part of its appeal. The attachment of advertising and sponsorships to everything but the air surrounding the stadium can be explained because this is America.

Yet, while the NFL draft makes sense within the insane context of twenty-first century sports, its grave tone and air of pompous pronouncement remains jarring. Each pick immediately becomes subject to a tribune of solemn haircuts who sit in judgment of their 40 time, game tape, and phrenological skull construction. Players may rise and fall based on a few hundredths of a second in a drill or because of "character concerns," an amorphous concept that covers prospects equally tainted by marijuana usage, saying dumb things on social media, and terrorizing people with violence. None of this bloviating has anything useful to say about the success or failure of any of draftees, but that does not stop anyone from releasing voluminous grade reports made of guesswork and, more recently, tedious value charts that add another layer of abstract analytics talk to people smashing into each other.

The worst part about the NFL draft, though, was that it did not take place in New York when the Jets moved up to take Christian Hackenberg.

A championship has returned to Cleveland. The Oracle Arena, described by the press and the Warriors' ownership as a virtual reality laboratory for the development of New Age basketball by players wearing those ping pong ball motion capture suits, may already lie in smoking ruins. The Warriors capped off a historical run, won 73 games, and nearly clinched their second straight title. Instead, LeBron James did the one thing more impressive than that by actually winning a Cleveland sports championship. The effort required a mythical performance; when James somehow outraced every player in the history of organized basketball to impale an Iguodala layup against the backboard, he all but came down from an ancient frieze. The win capped off the Coming Home chapter for our most narrative athlete, embodied the hopes and dreams of American sports' most loudly martyred fanbase, and vanquished a team considered the greatest ever with an unprecedented comeback. So let's talk about the Chicago Bulls.

The Chicago Bulls have cast a dunkman-shaped shadow over this NBA season. The Warriors not only broke the Bulls' wins record, but did so with a freewheeling style utilizing absurdly long jumpshots that directly refuted the theology of 90s basketball. All season long, the old players made their pilgrimages to television and radio studios to talk about how the Warriors were soft, how magical basketball sprite Stephen Curry would have been drawn and quartered by Antonio and Dale Davis, and how Michael Jordan would have broken into the Warriors' hotel and poisoned them because that is the type of competitor he was and then while they were bent over vomiting they would have been roughed up by Bill Wennington and Dickie Simpkins. There is nothing a retired basketball player loves more than shitting on current players by threatening them with hypothetical violence. But as the Warriors demolished all comers, the howling from the veterans of the Pat Riley Wars sounded like what it always had been: the anguished shriek of man against his own mortality and the diminished use of post moves.

Then the Warriors made history as the first team to squander a 3-1 lead in the Finals. Their effortless shooting ground to a halt against a lineup featuring the mummified remains of Richard Jefferson. Basketblogger punching bag Kyrie Irving outplayed Steph Curry. Draymond Green became the Icarus of penis clobbering. Their wins record is for naught.

Joe Lacob, the Warriors' swaggering tech-goblin owner made it easy to root
against them when he said“The great, great venture capitalists who built
company after company, that’s not an accident. And none of this is an accident,
either...We’re light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in
planning, in how we’re going to go about things," embodying the irritating hubris
of Silicon Valley's aspirational App-Warlords. This feeling will last exactly as long as
the first appearance of the Cavaliers' swaggering mortgage-goblin Dan Gilbert
when he tries to take credit for James's unprecedented investment in the civic
identity of Northeast Ohio even after Gilbert attacked him in the world's dumbest
Corenlius Vanderbilt letter written in Crayola

As the Warriors closed in on the record, I was surprised by how much I became invested in their failure. Nothing the Warriors did could rip those banners from the United Center. Nothing they did could take away their six championships. They could not make Jud Buechler fade from those hideous '90s caricature shirts like a McFly sibling.

Phil Jackson looks like a generic evil businessman, all grace and manners and you and me
we're not so different speeches until Dolph Lundren threatens his production of
Cocaine II: The World's Most Potent drug. Scottie Pippen is about to burst forth from
someone's chest cavity

My own desire to see the Bulls' 1995-6 season enshrined at the top of an arbitrary hierarchy has no basis in any sort of value system. I have nothing to offer to the Michael Jordan Take Industrial Complex or manifestos on the superiority of hand checks and apostate illegal defenses. I only want the team I like to remain garlanded in whatever accolades I can cling to, and one of them is a claim to the nebulous title of the Greatest Team of All Time.

The decision to anoint the Greatest Team of All Time is such a fool's errand that we throw our most foolish hot take jesters at it. Teams from past generations cannot play each other without folding space-time against itself. Sports grow and evolve with new strategies and rules and, as movies and television tell us, into inevitable future death sports. The whole enterprise devolves into hypothetical games of ghosts against ghosts. It rests on a the deployment of numbers stripped of context and an-almost religious fervor. There is no Greatest Team of All Time.

For Bulls fans, though, it is all we have. Twenty years ago, they obliterated all comers, an overpriced sneaker stamping on the forehead of Karl Malone, forever. Now, they remain, like their nemesis Eastern Conference Teams from the '90s, trapped in irrelevance because of a single dominant player. The same LeBron James who safeguarded the '96 Bulls' claim to Greatest of All Time status has simultaneously ruined any hope the current Bulls have of contending. Chicago's great hometown hope has been strangled by his own knee ligaments. They now have fallen into the pits of NBA despair: lottery picks, trade rumors, and a uniquely Bulls tendency to coat all of those things with a thick layer of unnecessary back-biting and soap-opera intrigue. So forgive me if I forgo reading another article about whether or not Jimmy Butler is a leader to argue about Michael Jordan hand-checking Steph Curry down to mouthpiece and goatee particles. The Bulls have been organizationally posterized, now only capable of reflecting the greatness of today's champions.

You can see it on the grainy videos online. Tyrus Thomas grabs a rebound, lopes down the court, and feeds a streaking Derrick Rose who two-hand jams it on a hapless Goran Dragic. The Bulls' bench players theatrically pretend to hold themselves back from storming the court while Stacey King admonishes Dragic for trying to block the shot, for futilely exposing himself to posterization, for daring to exist in the same basketball universe as Derrick Rose.

It's the 2015 playoffs. The Bulls, going toe-to-toe with a Cavs team expected to roll through the Eastern Conference like a monster truck over a pile of broken sedans, give the ball to Rose. Somehow, he gets off an awful, off-balance three and banks it in as the clock expires. And, as the United Center explodes into rapturous anarchy and his teammates mob him and hold him aloft, Derrick Rose stares out into nothingness, no expression on his face, not even a cool, studied walking away from an explosion in slow-motion like this is a thing that is normal to me, the guy who blows up Apache helicopters full of drugs and counterfeit money and illegal reptiles expression, but almost like he has been disconnected from reality around him. It is a blank mug. It was less a catharsis than an exorcism from the unending series of catastrophic knee injuries and comebacks and hot takes and Bulls' front office skulduggery brought about by the deafening scream of 20,000 people who wanted nothing more than to believe in him again.

Derrick Rose's time with the Bulls reads less like a basketball career and more like a litany. His knees, once a pair of pistons that pinballed him through defenders and powered his circus layups and soaring dunks, exploded into loosely-packed bags of ligaments. The constant rehabs and battles with the media and a front office filled with Magoo Machiavellis brought an element of melancholy to his game. Rose never again played only against other basketball teams, but against the ghost of his own self; watching Rose for the past three years was like watching a cash-in reunion tour Derrick Rose on the county fair and riverboat casino circuit.

Chicago's relationship with Derrick Rose came closer to a religious experience than basketball fandom. Bulls fans became swept up in a cult preaching an endless cycle of Back and Not Back. Rose's transition layups turned into prophesies. One day, he would be Back, floating into the United Center in gilded robes, levitating over the hoop, teaching his teammates the Way of the Back, mastering the three point shot, and because this is a religious scenario he would also suddenly be good at defense too and he would vanquish all of the apostates who did not believe he was Back out of the Eastern Conference like so many febrile Karl Malones and then, he would lead the Bulls Back, he would lead the Bulls fans, his disciples of the Way of the Back into Grant Park and the fountain would turn from water into an ethereal light that would flow through him and turn him into Michael Jordan, which is what we all wanted him to be in the first place.

There is no other professional basketball player who could inspire an
ironic shrine art installation unless there's a guy in the Adriatic League
who starts an Ancient Order of the Trapezoidal Key

Derrick Rose's constant barrage of injuries (for fuck's sake, he broke his goddamn face last season and then spent months wearing a clear plastic mask that had "I am wearing an overwrought symbol of my transformation into a simulacrum of Derrick Rose" written on it) destroyed the Bulls' hopes of breaking through the Eastern Conference's LeBron hegemony. Instead, his absences liberated fans from expectations, and the Bulls turned into an enjoyably scrappy outfit of hard-nosed defenders, tiny shoot-first point guards, and Carlos Boozer, who spent four consecutive years refusing to close his mouth for a single second and once got so excited screaming AND ONE that he punched Danny Crawford in the testicles.

I will remember the horrified expression on the woman's face after witnessing Boozer's
brutal testicular assault on my deathbed

Now, Rose joins Luol Deng, Kirk Hinrich, Tom Thibodeau, most likely Joakim Noah and possibly Taj Gibson in exile as the front office molds the Bulls into Fred Hoiberg's brand of draft lottery basketball.

Rose leaves the Bulls for the equally languid and dysfunctional New York Knicks. The Knicks, bereft of draft picks, reliant on the maligned Carmelo Anthony, and owned by a monomaniac obsessed with his corporate retreat blues music, will subject Rose to an even more unforgiving and unhinged basketball media. He has gone from the Lusitania to the Titanic. The Bulls will be terrible next year with or without Derrick Rose. But he takes with him a brief hope for resurrection, for an unstoppable drive and one of those looping layups, when Stacey King half-heartedly warns some hapless bench player about the futility of standing in the way of Derrick Rose and invokes the holy cry of Back, when you can see the MVP Derrick Rose straining to break free from his body sarcophagus. But Derrick Rose is not back; he will never be back; that is, until the first Knicks game when he comes back, knees and the Good Lord permitting.

The best parts of Face/Off are when Nicolas Cage, playing a heroic FBI agent who had his face swapped with his sworn enemy using biotechnology and Windows 95, realizes that he has become, to the outside world, his own archnemesis and the only way to cope is to adopt his enemies' criminally insane behaviors, thus becoming what he hates-- and to show this internal emotional conflict by making extremely Nicolas Cage faces. This also describes what the Chicago Bulls have done this offseason to their bewildered fans.

It was not enough for Gar Forman and John Paxson to send the faces of the team to New York and subject Bulls fans to maniacal Joakim Noah dunk screams in the hated uniform of John Starks and Patrick Ewing. They also signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, the Bulls' own archnemeses. Every time Wade grabs at his eye imploring the refs to call a foul or Rondo sourly walks away from Hoiberg in the middle of a timeout and then gets in a tiny scooter and just drives home in the middle of a game, Chicago fans will instinctively start to boo them only to realize they are on the Bulls now and so they are forced to imitate Cage's simultaneous weeping and maniacal leering out of sheer confusion.

Travolta is clearly doing an impression of a maniacal Cage for most of the movie while Cage
has to pretend to be a reasonable man forced to impersonate a maniacal Cage so the effect is
like Being John Malkovich where all the leads are just maniacal Nicolas Cages making this face
and blowing up vehicles at each other for 138 minutes.

The qualified Per Synergy Sports basketbloggers can explain better than me how Wade and Rondo make no sense for the Bulls. Neither fits with Hoiberg's pace and space philosophy that exists on a chalkboard somewhere in the bowels of the Advocate Center. Wade shot less than 16% from three last season; Rondo does not seem willing to shoot under any circumstances and appears to be modeling his game on the time Ricky Davis futilely shot at his own basket to get a triple double. It has been about two weeks since Gar Forman justified the Rose trade by claiming the Bulls would get younger and more athletic. Now, he has acquired two players in their thirties with a history of knee problems. But that is immaterial. The Wade and Rondo moves are disasters because they the are two of the Bulls fans' most hated NBA players and I hate their jerk faces.

Rondo's crimes against the Bulls date back to the epic 2009 Bulls/Celtics playoff series when he threw Kirk Hinrich into a table like a professional wrestler and bludgeoned Brad Miller about the face. A wobbly, dazed Miller could not hit his free throws. Compounding the humiliation, the primary video evidence of the hit has been uploaded by a person named "patsfan000026" with NOT FLAGRANT superimposed on the bottom of it in such an obnoxiously-implied Boston accent that my computer has become infected with a virus and screams about Tom Brady being railroaded at random intervals. Rondo managed to quit on a playoff team in Dallas so egregiously that they pretended he was injured. His time on the Sacramento Kings, less a basketball organization than a boiling cauldron of insanity, climaxed with an ejection for screaming homophobic slurs at a referee.

The most interesting subplot on the Bulls this season will be the ways that Rondo manages to psychologically break Fred Hoiberg, who coaches with the intensity of a substitute math teacher. Perhaps Rondo will humiliate Hoiberg in Connect Four in front of the entire team. Perhaps he will convince Ol' Fred that everyone on the team is growing mustaches in November and then when Hoiberg walks into the advocate center as the only person with a mustache he is greeted by pictures of Ned Flanders plastered to the walls with a legend that says "HOIBERG." Maybe Rondo will re-edit Hoiberg's game film, switching out the coach's beloved inspirational '80s movie scenes for horrifying Cronenbergian body horror while Hoiberg yells C'MON YOU SAID YOU NEEDED FINAL CUT PRO FOR FILM STUDY at him.

Benny the Bull disdainfully showers Rondo with popcorn when Rondo
was injured and therefore forced to hurl insults at the Bulls on a regional
television broadcast

Wade has, as far as I can tell, never used a part of the arena to attack Kirk Hinrich. Nevertheless, he earned the ire of Bulls fans as the ringleader of the hated Heat. Wade feuded with the Bulls when they had Ben Gordon and Ben Wallace and he feuded with Derrick Rose before Rose's knees disintegrated like the guy who drank from the wrong Holy Grail. Wade's sins are more prosaic than Rondo's. He flops. He moans at officials so operatically that opponents easily dunk on the next possession because the NBA doesn't allow players to assign ghost players to defend while they are berating Scott Foster. More than anything, Wade has existed as a very good player on a team that consistently beat the Bulls for more than a decade, the grossest basketball evil that can be committed against a team.

At the very least, the Wade move has backfired on Pat Riley. Riley, a basketball innovator who invented advanced strategies such as telling Anthony Mason to elbow people and telling Alonzo Mourning to elbow people, has been irritating Bulls fans since the 1980s. Now Riley has seen his carefully-cultivated Miami family narrative upended by a power play gone awry, which should give him something to think about as he sinks into the hair gel sarcophagus he sleeps in every night. Miami has cap room, but it will be useless if Riley's hard bargaining tactics scare off potential free agents. It is at the very least gratifying to imagine Riley striking out with big name free agents and then angrily feeding some flunky to the shark he keeps in his mansion to use as a metaphor for winning.

A threatened Riley instinctively displays his Championship Ring the way a startled lizard
deploys a skin-fringe or puffs itself up by inflating gaseous sacs

Sports fandom represents, at best, a crude pantomime of emotions for fans. Players can be gone in an instant, teams removed at the stroke of a pen, and all of the billions of dollars for pyrotechnics and jumbotrons and irritatingly peppy people walking around asking a seven year-old to name their favorite player for a t-shirt and television networks and guys in suits who are paid unfathomable sums of money to scream KEVIN DURANT IN MY OPINION IS NOT MAKING A MAN'S MOVE, KEVIN I AM LOOKING AT YOU NOW AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED, CHAGRINED, I AM GOING TO THROW HARD-BOILED EGGS AT YOUR FAMILY KEVIN and absolutely all of it is completely and utterly devoid of meaning.

Stephen A's speech threatening Kevin Durant is the funniest thing that has ever been on television

We can accept that and yet we will turn on a Bulls game to see the sneering face of Dwyane Wade and disgruntled surl-mugging from Rajon Rondo and wonder how this all happened. And when the Bulls play the Knicks next season, against Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose, we'll all feel as if we've seen the faces swapped, the tenets of basketball villainy undermined, the United Center filled with doves. In an entertainment product as insane and capricious as professional sports, perhaps the most reasonable way to cope is to make Nicolas Cage faces and embrace the chaos.

If you are a fan of a Big Ten team, you have no doubt received, alongside ceaseless entreaties for money, e-mails about the Big Ten Alaska Cruise. What kind of depravity and hedonism takes place when the stoutest denizens of the Midwest are allowed to run rampant and talk about fullbacks for days on end? BYCTOM and its parent company Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants' VIL Blogging Network sent one intrepid blogger to find out.

The fan cruise exists as the logical endpoint to fandom; beyond the websites and message boards, conventions, and newsletters, the fan cruise asks if you can enjoy something so much that you are willing to lock yourself on the inescapable sea with 300 equally deranged people. It was inevitable that the same impulse to gather hundreds of fans of comic books or hair metal or “Bones” or Gronkowski torsos would want to expand to football conferences, where fan enthusiasm is based on drunken, adversarial screaming at each other. And it makes sense that the Big Ten ship goes to Alaska, a colossus plodding its way towards the furthest northern reaches of human civilization.

With nothing but the sea spray at my back, an official reporter’s notebook in a satchel, and the latest blogging apps, I decided to venture forth with an advanced reporter’s technique called “participatory journalism.” This is same approach that led Hunter S. Thompson to start a motorcycle gang and George Plimpton to join the Detroit Lions and shout things like “sport, if you wouldn’t mind hiking the ball my hand is appropriately close your buttocks, ah well met.” What you are about to read-- edited for length, but not clarity-- is my account of a week at sea on the ill-fated Big Ten Cruise.

DAY ONE

The Big Ten Cruise is not actually a Big Ten Cruise. It is a special package on a normal cruise ship. That means there are hundreds of people aboard only realizing now, after seeing Big Ten Ambassador Ron Dayne lowered by crane onto the the ship’s deck, that they have been doomed to endless discussions of sixteen-year-old fullbacks’ 40 times with no possibility of escape.

As a members of the Big Ten Cruise Package, we were welcomed to the ship with a medley of piped-in Big Ten fight songs, handed itineraries (preciously referred to as “syllabi”) of Big Ten events, and greeted by a phalanx of mascots. Herky Hawkeye was there. Willie Wildcat high-fived children. I did not see Purdue Pete, but we have been promised that he will appear intermittently in port windows between fleeting beams of moonlight when we least expect it.

The ship set off with a rousing cacophony of key jangling and a spontaneous bratwurst-mouthed rendition of Zombie Nation. A bar television was tuned, as it would be all week, to the Big Ten Network. As the ship departed, it was airing a documentary called “Crouching to Victory: Big Ten Legend Eric Crouch.”

DAY 2

Part of the Big Ten package features, in keeping with the conference’s reputation as a constellation of elite academic institutions, a series of lectures by onboard Big Ten professors. This morning, cruise-goers can choose from:

“‘Head’ of the Class: A Structuralist Reading of Mascotry” from R. Paula Brumaire, Associate Professor of Mascot Semiotics, the Pennsylvania State University.
“March Madness: Sousa as as a Locus of Trombone-Centered Discourse” from H. Fred Monktons, Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of Iowa
“Sixty Minutes of Linebacking So Bonecrunchingly Brutal It Can Only Be Shown in International Waters,” a documentary film

Above decks, the Big Ten fans appear to be integrating well with the rest of the passengers. Without their lanyards and Big Ten apparel, they can roam undetected amongst the other cruise-goers chatting, walking the deck, and scanning the seas for birds and whales. It all seems like normal cruise behavior until a group of seemingly-unaffiliated passengers burst into a melancholy rendition of an alma mater or an unnecessarily aggressive argument about recruits’ ACT scores.

DAY 3

At breakfast, the Big Ten passengers were abuzz about the Verne Lundquist lecture later that afternoon. “It’s gonna be special,” said Bert Johanssen who has brought his wife, Bonnie, and his two children Phil and Walter from Blaine, Minnesota. “We’d always wanted to go to Alaska, and never in my wildest imagination did I believe I could see it with Verne Lundquist.” The family sported matching gold Minnesota t-shirts with Lundquist’s head crudely photoshopped onto the head of Goldy the Golpher. “We’re Verneheads,” he said.

The ship also offers an 11:00AM lecture from Beth Mowins.

The Lundquist lecture was packed wall-to-wall. I managed to get a great seat by telling them I was a journalist and patiently explaining the importance of the Fourth Estate in American society and on this ship. But, before the talk could even begin, the ballroom hosting the lecture erupted into chaos.

A disheveled man charged the stage. He had no Big Ten package lanyard. His heavy beard had been stained by chewing tobacco. A mushroom cloud of white hair was held up by a battered visor with an orange “I” turned into a B with faded magic marker. He pulled some notecards from his nylon jacket.

“Big Ten football,” he said, reading directly from the card. “Well in my house we call it…” he said, trailing off as he desperately rifled through the cards, “Bad Ten football.” A crew member hustled him off stage. The only discernible words he screamed as he was dragged off were “Lincoln hat” repeated over and over.

The big draw in the evening was a special screening of the Werner Herzog film “Grizzly Man” with commentary from Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh was not on the ship; he came to us live from a recruiting visit to a go-cart track.

“I admire Treadwell,” Harbaugh said into the microphone on his helmet-mounted camera as he passed a seventeen year-old cornerback. “That area was a prime recruiting area for bears, but he just set up shop like he was supposed to be there. His only problem was GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY,” he shouted, bumping a father and son off the track, “ it was that he didn’t want it enough, and to be honest I think if someone told that German guy how to attack each day with focus and tenacity he wouldn’t fear nature’s callously unfathomable power compared to the futile designs of man.”

Harbaugh skidded across the finish line and moved his helmet cam inches from his face.

“There is no doubt in my mind I would have been accepted into bear society,” Harbaugh said.

DAY 4

The trouble began earlier during the Ultimate All Big Ten tailgate. A sudden shudder and jolt on board sent two guys arguing about whether the bean bag throwing game is called bags or corn hole flying into a Big Ten Network-sponsored Rotel pyramid. I grabbed a guardrail and was able to get out of the way of some grilling equipment that managed to topple over and light a life-size cardboard cutout of Tom Crean on fire, his face enveloped in demonic flames. The ship stopped.

After a few minutes, the captain got on the PA system to tell us that we had some engine trouble. We had intermittent electricity and were not going anywhere for awhile. I waved over a crew member and told him I was an influential blogger and pressed him for the real story. I even used the phrase “deep background” but he was clearly not savvy around the press, and he told me to "scram" so he could “do his job.” That’s a direct quote; he was willing to go on the record.

The Big Ten passengers appear disappointed, but remain steadfastly dedicated to Big Ten entertainment while onboard. That evening, I bumped into a group of lanyard-clad fans still in high spirits. They told me that they had convinced Harold Krusp, a history professor from Wisconsin, to give his “Depression America: The Golden Age of Big Ten Football” talk under a flickering emergency light and they invited me to come by. I apologized and told them that I was a journalist in a crisis situation and needed to gather information. I rooted around my baggage and found what I had desperately hoped I wouldn’t need: a khaki vest with dozens of pockets.

DAY 5

The first few days of the cruise, the ship was filled with chatter about activities and processions of replica Land Grant trophies and Old Oaken Buckets. Now, the tenor of the ship has changed. There are no activities. The passengers spend their time trading gossip and what little snatches of information they can come by.

There’s a divide building between the Big Ten group and the rest of the passengers. The Big Ten fans decided to hold a Big Ten trivia contest after lunch, but without microphones the group continuously yelled Curtis Enis across the room, unable to discern whether that was the question or answer. The session ended when a large group of unaffiliated passengers silently surrounded the trivia contest until one of them stepped forward. “We really need you to stop talking about the Big Ten,” she said.

DAY 6

For a second day, the ship sat idle. Most of the perishable food has spoiled. This morning, I saw a beefy old man turn away heartbroken as deck hands callously tossed a palette of rotten cheese curds overboard. Information remains scarce and unreliable. The crew has been reassuring us that they are doing all they can to repair the ship; the captain’s grim, stubble-ridden face tells us otherwise, and frustrated mechanics occasionally surface from the engine room.

The passengers have become irate. The initial disappointment has given way to a creeping fear that we may be stranded for some time. Around 4:00, I bumped into a group of Michigan fans in a quiet corner hallway near my stateroom in the evening. “I’m concerned about the leadership on this vessel,” one of them told me (he would not tell me his name even though I explained to him the problems with anonymous sources, it's journalism 101). “This crew-- not a Michigan man among them. You can tell from those flashy epaulets.”

The Michigan Men do not appear to be the only ones planning a mutiny. Earlier, I heard a small commotion and followed the noise. The visored man responsible for the diatribe before the Lundquist lecture had gathered a small crowd around him. I was startled to realize that he was former Illinois football coach Tim Beckman. It appeared that he had used his legendary motivational skills to convince the non-Big Ten passengers that the Big Ten contingent has been plotting against them. He held up a life ring.

“I know how those Big Ten people think,” he thundered. “I can get us to land, but you need to trust me.”

“Wait, aren’t you the guy who doesn’t believe in hamstring injuries?” one of the passengers asked.

“I’m the one holding the speaking ring,” Beckman said.

At some point you cannot just be a passive reporter, standing on the sidelines. Some things are bigger than the story. I decided then and there to tell the captain about the multiple plots to take over the ship. As luck would have it, I saw him pacing the deck with a retinue of anxious-looking crew members. I ran up to him to talk, but he told me to get lost and said the next time I tried to talk to him he would use me as a propeller. Little did he know he had fallen for a classic reporters’ trick. “Possible propeller issue,” I wrote in my notebook.

DAY 7

We were all pressed together shoulder-to-shoulder to hear the captain tell us definitively what was going on. I had tried earlier in the day to pressure one of my sources, a crew member who had seen me weeping on a staircase after getting rebuffed for a quote, but he told me that he didn’t understand why I needed to know anything before the other passengers. My lecture on the sanctity of the First Amendment fell on deaf ears. So there I stood, sandwiched between Hal and Carole Mitchell from the Quad cities, straining to hear the captain. That’s when the drums started.

At first, it blended into the clanging and whirring of the futile engine repairs over the past several days, but eventually it broke through with the unmistakable cadence of a Big Ten drum line. It was Beckman, with Big Ten streamers tied into his beard leading a small but desperate-looking band of mutineers towards the bridge. He was carrying a giant rolled up canvas; his followers wore decorative helmet snack bowls on their heads. They banged on plastic goalposts pilfered from the remains of the tailgate. The crowd instinctively parted. I fell in line behind them with no regard for my own personal safety and drew a fresh pen from a vest pocket.

“Captain, I think you should step aside before you send us all to a watery grave,” Beckman said . “This,” he said, shaking his canvas scroll like the Cecil B. Demille Moses, “this will get us to shore.” His supporters fell into a reverent silence as he unrolled it. It was a sheet with a crudely-drawn Big Ten logo with the universal circle-slash “no” symbol drawn over it. He held it aloft.

“Hey, you told us you were drawing up a plan to move the ship,” one of his followers said, brandishing his goal post. “That took you, like, seven hours.”

Beckman blankly stared at the faces surrounding him. Even his most ardent followers pointed their goalposts and aimed their pop-a-shot basketballs at him. He scampered away from the crew, grabbed a giant inflatable Lil’ Red mascot, and leapt overboard. Together, with equally maniacal grins, they drifted towards the horizon.

With that, the cruise was over. The captain told us the ship could not continue in its current condition. We would have to be towed to shore. A small but defiant group of Big Ten fans steadfastly clung to the Big Ten experience. All evening, they gathered in a circle, clutching the children, telling tales of past Big Ten glory. “Kunle Patrick tipped the ball right to Sam Simmons. They called it Victory Right,” said one purple-clad man miming a tip drill. “Son,” said another, looking at a group of children, “let me tell you about Ron Zook.” A man in an Iowa shirt walked up to the crowd as they yielded the center of the circle. He looked each of them in the eye, his voice quavering. “Robert Gallery,” he said.

EPILOGUE

The tugboats eventually arrived and pulled us to the closest port in Ketchikan, Alaska. The ship had been running out of food, lost the ability to deal with passengers’’ waste, and had become marred by growing strife between the Big Ten passengers and the rest of the ship. One particularly irate cruise-goer toppled a life-sized talking Gus Johnson bobblehead that could not be stopped from wheezing out a chilling “RISE AND FIRE” death rattle for hours.

It took days for everyone to sort out their travel plans and make their way back to Seattle.

Once in town, I did some extremely journalistic digging on the status of the ship by calling the cruise line’s customer service number. They told me the ship had not been fully repaired in Ketchikan and would be towed back to Seattle. I went down to the port and asked around and, even though no one would answer my questions because I had clearly discovered a conspiracy so diabolical that they would stop at nothing to prevent me from unearthing it, I eventually figured out that the date of the ship’s arrival was posted on a website.

I stood on the pier and waited when it appeared-- first as a shimmering white dot then coming fully into view. A few other Big Ten fans, still clutching their lanyards, still clad head to toe in colorful university apparel, had come by as well. They stood there, half in awe, half in mourning, watching the Big Ten boat limp into port, coated in sewage and stale tortilla chips, still upright, three yards at a time.

There's no more sure sign of the impending return of college football than the first dispatches of Northwestern media hype products. In 2010, the Wildcat Department of Athletic Aggrandizement peppered Chicagoland with billboards declaring Dan Persa "Chicago's [Big Ten] Heisman Candidate" and sent weights labeled "Persastrong" to the media. In 2013, they built a custom Goalpost On Wheels and traveled to regional news outlets threatening to tie reporters to them and assail them with kicked footballs until they agreed to add Jeff Budzien to the Groza Award watch list. Northwestern promoted the 2014 season with a flurry of pamphlets denouncing unionization.

Other promotions considered included a jeweler's eye labeled
PersaAccurate and a bracelet that says Persascape that, when put on
the wrist, summons a group of dangerous persons with themed costumes
that hunt the ultimate prey: Big Ten beat reporters

This week, Northwestern announced a campaign promoting superstar linebacker Anthony Walker Jr. as "The Franchise" because of his propensity to license the Anthony Walker Jr. name to enterprising linebackers around the country. According to Insidenu, they sent selected media members a lunchbox, t-shirt, and custom Anthony Walker comic book that references body clocks and contains the single greatest comic book panel of all time:

Photo by @rodger_sherman

The outsize world of college football should have the heroic exploits of players, coaches, and stodgy commissioners in comic form with an applied photoshop filter aesthetic. So here is a collection of Big Ten comic panels showing the conference in action outside of Big Ten Network Regional Coverage.

BYCTOM Big Ten Comics encourages you to send away for the nunchuk starter kits, x-ray specs that allow you to find BTN2 in your TV listings, a Purdue Pete that grows in water into a figure so grotesque that it could be banned by the government at any time, and special crystals from Rosemont, Illinois that, when configured correctly, will reveal the next eight members of the Big Ten. Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery.

There are crew cut guys in polo shirts stalking the sidelines; there's a meaningless poll released spawning a million blog posts deriding it as meaningless while at the same time assailing its rankings as the meanest injustice; there's a caller to Paul Finebaum who becomes so enraged about Alabama that he tears off his second shirt; there are inept announcers preparing to allude to hideous crimes and blatant institutional malfeasance as "off-field issues;" a thousand internet commentators simultaneously attempt to fire a thousand offensive coordinators. College football returns this weekend.

College football breeds the most colorful atmosphere than any other major American sport because of the bizarre nature of its fans and participants: young people who are adept at drunkenness and memes, the unpaid players who study in theory alongside them, rich alumni boosters playing at the levers of power intriguing against the coaching staff, the coaching staff that consists of several hundred goateed guys all named Jimbo or Skip who replace each other every season, and the universities that inexplicably attached to this splitting atoms and producing articles about modes of The Masculine in John Donne or professional wrestling and fuck saw demonstrations.

It's the passionate fans that mark the college football experience

The atmosphere lends itself to all-consuming spectacle. College football fans do not only participate in cheering their team on the field but also in the bizarre metacompetitions for facilities, for ever-flashier uniforms, and, most importantly, in the mind-bogglingly ludicrous battles for teenagers to join their teams. It is a game of games.

These battles are not new; the history of college football is the history of every underhanded recruiting tactic humanly possible wrapped in paeans to Amateur Athletics. What is new is that a sufficiently deranged fan can instantaneously read about a recruiting battle weighed by arbitrarily-assigned grades, insult the teenager and his loved ones for not choosing his or her team, taunt opposing fans on a message board and accuse them of dirty tactics, and then watch a bunch of videos of that monkey-chained-on-dog racing that they tried to ban from the Lake County Fair in a single afternoon. It is now possible that a die-hard not only knows the two-deep going into training camp, but the projected two-deep two years from now with kids who have yet to graduate from high school or a litany of highly specific grievances about why they'll be suiting up for the Team Up State.

Smaller programs mainly concern themselves with attracting attention. They have eye-catching uniforms, dyed turf, weeknight games. In my favorite move, Bob Diaco of UCONN unilaterally started a rivalry with Central Florida and created his own trophy and countdown clock while UCF desperately tried to deny that the rivalry existed. I will remember this on my deathbed.

UCF reacted with the same bemused agitation that Golyadkin had in
The Double when a second Golyadkin appears and no one else finds it
odd and the footmen bodily throw him out of the fancier nineteenth-
century Russian tea houses

In big schools, the clashes are operatic. They include races to build more opulent facilities, bellicose press statements, and intrigue worthy of the most Habsburg of courts, if these intrigues were all conducted as grotesque, ham-handed attempts by middle-aged megalomaniacs to lure athletes to their opulent facilities so they can scream at them for several years and fake their own funeral as a motivational ploy.

A rare but inescapable species of fan not only wants to beat State at the big Homecoming game but also have more underwater treadmills than them and a better fundraising apparatus and better marketing so they sell more tickets so they can afford better coaches who can lure better players and beat them for all the Homecomings from now until the End Times.

LOVIE SMITH, WELCOME TO THE PARTY PAL

One does not have to look far on a Northwestern football blog for an example of an equally desperate and futile marketing war: the eternal battle to be Chicago's Big Ten Team. You may think that the intense Northwestern-Illinois rivalry has cooled since Illinois fired forklift negligence spokesman Tim Beckman and then fired his replacement because he was tainted by him and hired Lovie Smith. You were wrong.

At Big Ten Media Day, a place for Big Ten coaches to put on suits and puff out their throat sacs and eyes spots for reporters, Lovie claimed that Illinois could become "Chicago's Team." This directly contradicts Northwestern's "Chicago's Big Ten Team" slogan that they had earned by purchasing a bunch of billboards. Neither team plays in Chicago.

Lovie Smith, pictured with the Big Ten East, West, and Conference trophies
which will one day be united. arranged on their podium deep in the bowels
of the O'Hare Hilton Conference Room B, and aligned with a Harvest Moon,
casting a path on a crude map carved into the wall that shows the way to the
Meineke Car Care Bowl.

Those enjoined in the battle to claim Chicago like it was a Holy Roman duchy in the hands of a childless noble about to succumb to a litany of incest defects imagine a marketing and recruiting bonanza. Both schools court football-mad Chicago fans to fill their empty stadiums and Chicago athletes to bring them to the top of the Big Ten West.

The results, however, remain barren. Chicago is a great college football city, but only because it shelters so many Midwestern alumni, who cluster in their own bars to watch the games or show up at Ryan Field to complain about it instead of leaving us alone with our tarps and yowling Wildcat sound effects. Chicago's closest thing to a college football team sadly plays in South Bend, Indiana. Northwestern and Illinois count a total of five players combined from Chicago proper, according to the rosters on their websites. Neither team has been able to tap into the city's astounding amount of NBA-caliber basketball talent. The Northwestern-Illinois game at Soldier Field appeared to be attended exclusively by the players' families.

Chicago's Big Ten Teams face off for the Hat. Not pictured: Chicago

Far more important than this foolish battle for the attention of an indifferent city is the actual stakes of the Illinois-Northwestern rivalry: the Hat, the greatest prize in college football. Will this game live up to the bombastic zenith of the Tim Beckman era, complete with his complement of anti-Northwestern apparatus? Lovie Smith, at the very least, seems interested in trying.

TACKLE YOUR LOVED ONES

College football's metagame makes it eerily fascinating. The specter of recruiting hangs over the entire sport in a complex, chaotic system: the thinking is that a jersey sponsor may introduce an alternate helmet that trends on social media and gains the attention of an enormous fifteen-year-old who two years later tours the facilities and is interested by the quarter-billion-dollar athletic fitness facility with a waterproof X-Box jacuzzi and also the academics of course let's not forget about those and then somehow signs a letter of intent and years later is leading the team to the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl while the rival team sits at home in a grim, potatoless hellscape.

He explained, Goldblumically

Does any of this relentless brand-mongering have any effect on the quality of the team on the field? I have no idea, but the relentless scheming of tightly-wound megalomaniacs desperately competing for the fickle attention of teenagers in front of their fans, reporters, and the whole entire internet while backed by a chorus of unhinged radio show callers accusing them of every type of possible skulduggery makes it impossible to look away. The sideshow has almost superseded the games.

Let the insane internet accusations and berating of coordinators as inept return. College football is back. Everywhere but within the municipal boundaries of Chicago.

The barricades are up on Lake Shore Drive, the helicopters are circling, and Ryan Field prepares for the annual pilgrimage of thousands of fans from Chicago hoping to catch a glimpse of their Big Ten team. Last year's Wildcats surged to an unexpected and delightful ten-win season for only the fourth time in school history based entirely on Body Clocks, and now they hope to take their assault on opponents' circadian rhythms to Indianapolis.

The 2015 Wildcats had a simple gameplan-- to smother the opposing offense, run Justin Jackson into the other team, and bury them beneath a merciless hail of punts. When the strategy worked, the defense erased the other team and the running game wore down the clock in an excruciating exhibition of football brutality. When that didn't work, they put their fist-claws in the hands of the insane gods of football-- they won a game on a botched two-point conversion, a last-second field goal gifted by incompetent clock management, and brain-disrupting satellites launched into low orbit that subjected the referees to space hypnosis and forced them to continue taking touchdowns away from Wisconsin until they were roused from their stupor by a hail of snowballs.

Alex Erickson's attempts to reason with a referee fall on deaf ears

Will Northwestern be able to repeat their extraordinary feats of football derring-do? Bah-humbug football experts say no, based on their fancy statistics, distrust of a football team that wins numerous games by opponents unveiling ludicrous Twilight Zone coaching tactics, and the tendency for Northwestern teams with preseason rankings to become grotesque, avant-garde parodies of football as part of someone's senior thesis.

"M00N: 100 Yards of Sorrow" captured a jury prize in the Exhibition of Football Nihilism for
demonstrating "an apt metaphor for the purposelessness of violence"

Yet there are some reasons for optimism. The 'Cats return several key contributors to last year's dominant defense, including superstar linebacker Anthony Walker. Quarterback Clayton Thorson has a year of experience under his belt and hopes to improve his passing game to complement his herky-jerky auto lot inflatable running style. Former running back Solomon Vault and cornerback Marcus McShepard have switched positions to bolster the receiving corps and expose opposing defenses to the terrifying possibility of the forward pass, virtually unknown in the modern game of football.

There is no more pointless pursuit than predicting Northwestern football. They have to play Ohio State and Michigan State on the road. Their chief rival is no longer coached by a maniac who came out of a Joseph Conrad novel about football. The difference between a Northwestern victory or loss usually comes down to a play so ridiculous that it turns into a Wes Anderson version of football where a blank-faced twelve-year-old coach with a false mustache calls a play out of John Dominic's Manual for Foot Ball Aptitude and players dressed in immaculate old-timey football costume are unable to catch a papier-mache football that goes through an intricate series of Rube Goldberg devices involving a hamster wheel, a 1960s style vibrating weight loss belt machine, and a tricycle before the ball crosses the line and a blank-faced referee played by Bill Murray unenthusiastically signals for a touchdown.

By my statistical formula, devised on a vision quest through the mystical environs of the Greater Chicagloand Metrolitan Area, Northwestern is going to the Rose Bowl.

BRONCO NEWS

NFL analysts have spent the last two weeks with their corkboards and pushpins trying to piece together the beguiling series of events that have led to Trevor Siemian starting at quarterback for the defending Super Bowl Champion Denver Broncos. Peyton Manning retired. Backup Brock Osweiler left for Houston. And the main competition for Siemian was journeyman quarterback Mark Sanchez, known mainly for attempting to run through another man's buttocks like he was Wile E. Coyote charging through a tunnel made of paint.

Mark Sanchez with the haunted expression of a man who sees butts every
time he closes his eyes

Certain maniacs have suggested that Siemian may struggle in the NFL because he put up some of the worst statistics by a Northwestern quarterback in recent memory. These so-called football experts, who spend their summers sorting through index cards in their homes filled with arcane statistics, know nothing about Northwestern football. Do they know, for example, that Siemian spent most of his career as a change of pace co-starter who only came in when it was time to throw like one of those World War I cannons mounted to a railroad car? Or the psychological toll taken on him by the strain from coming in as the “passing quarterback,” which set off a whole series of diabolical mind games about whether he would actually pass or he'd run or he'd pretend to run but still pass or he'd pass anyway or he'd spend the entire offseason disguised as a Western Illinois player named A. Augustus Vermillion only to betray his new teammates in the second game and lead Northwestern to a 24-7 victory?

Siemian should, according to proprietary BYCTOM algorithms, immediately become the greatest quarterback in the NFL because of his expert kneel-down game, Super Bowl experience, and the time he led Northwestern to victory against Notre Dame and created a mass-hysterical event where thousands of Notre Dame football fans attempted citizen firings of Brian Kelly through their most unhinged message boards. Expect Siemian to blithely swat down all challengers as he rampages through the futile professional defenses of the NFL.

Entertainment impresario Carl Denham cautions against allowing a
rampaging Siemian to climb to mile high heights

The Trevor Siemian Era of Broncos football begins now. I can't believe it either.

ADDITIONAL BRONCO NEWS

Northwestern faces the Western Michigan Broncos Saturday at Ryan Field. Coach P.J. fleck, a wide-eyed football evangelist who has out-recruited the Big Ten basement, led the Broncos to an 8-5 record last year, knocking on the door of perennial MAC bullies Northern Illinois. SBNation's Bill Connelly graded them higher than Northwestern last season, using his mysterious S&P+ rankings. Though Northwestern is favored, this is no easy contest to ease into the football season; the Broncos play in the Eastern time zone and have therefore fortified their body clocks against the dangerous football disruptions caused by Central Time.

P.J. Fleck will bring his exciting “Row The Boat” catchphrase back for yet another season. Sometimes I wonder whether Fleck ever gets tired of his performative rowboating, like he’s at a pep rally and the band’s about to break into Western Michigan’s disappointingly non-maritime fight song and Fleck is just staring at the crowd who are all wearing row the boat shirts and some are hoisting oars and maybe one or two students is dressed up like a Gorton’s Fisherman and they’re all waiting to explode into an orgy of rowboat pantomime and he just can’t do it anymore, he’s out of it, the boat in his mind just sitting dead still in the center of a pond, but then the booster comes in, a Colonel Tom Parker type, and he’s staring at him through dead, flinty eyes, and he says Jesus Christ Fleck these people paid their damn money to see you row the GODdamn boat so why don’t you just get some pep in your step and give ‘em a show, who the fuck do you think you are, Bear Bryant? are these folks here to watch you diagram a sumbitching OFFtackle play? no they aren’t, he says, and so Fleck goes out there and when the klieg lights hit him and the trombonists start waggling their instruments around you’d have no idea about any of this, the doubts, the desperation, the nights spent with a chalkboard where he’s written and erased “drive the car” and “pedal the bike” and even “hang the glide” and the smile is there and the jaw squares around that football chin, and the eyes sparkle with conviction. “Row the boat,” Fleck says, and the cheers engulf him and his team streaming out onto the stage in padless jerseys.

Or maybe he just really likes to say row the boat

Western Michigan, like most college football teams, holds a precarious spot in the football ecosystem. Fleck's recruiting prowess has elevated them to a MAC championship contender. With each victory, though, Fleck becomes a more tempting target for a powerhouse team to poach in the offseason, wined and dined in the stately dining cars of the Power Five's suspender-thumbing boosterati. Regardless of Fleck's future, the Broncos hope to make a statement by coming into the most intimidating stadium in the Big Ten and come away with a win. The 'Cats have no choice but to row them to hell.

Western Michigan returns to Kalamazoo across the Lake Michigan

OPENING WEEKEND

The lines are painted, the field is green, the tarps are set, and the Northwestern Wildcats hope to prove that last season was not a fluke. We have absolutely no idea. It is a fool's errand to predict football, where a fraction of a second can change a triumphant march to Indianapolis into a desperate fight to qualify for the Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants Bowl in some god-forsaken Rust Belt thunderdome. Even the Alabamas, Ohio States, and Oklahomas will at some point this season have to hold onto their butts. Northwestern will probably lose some game they should win and author a heroic upset that causes the cry of UNACCEPTABLE to echo across the college sports internet.

It is unlikely that Northwestern will benefit from as many weird bounces and space-hypnosis referee decisions as last year. But they could also be better. They could somehow replace the rain of punts with a hail of airborne passes, discovered by offensive coordinator Mick McCall as an exotic punt that potentially allows you to retain possession. Trevor Siemian is the starting quarterback for the defending Super Bowl champions. Anything can happen.

Football is an insane game dreamed up by a maniac and altered by generations of maniacs, each more maniacal than the last. There is an oblong ball that bounces irregularly. The rules have become so complicated that the concept of a catch has transcended the empirical to the realm of metaphysics. They play in withering heat and blizzards, on grass and artificial turf, in front of tens of thousands of bellowing football zealots, in a flurry of flying limbs and football equipment and those inscrutable playcalling cards that show a walrus, the HMS Bounty, Chester A. Arthur, and Herm Edwards dressed as his alter-ego The Herminator. There's an infinite number of ways to lose football games.

Northwestern has seen its share of normal losses, outmatched, the victims of butt-kickings so profound that the team was driven from the field and forced to mournfully snap the ball from a neighboring backyard swing set. The Wildcats have also suffered a profound number of losses so absurd that they have formed a litany: the Hail Marys, the Double-Tip Firewagon Field Goal, the Onside Kick Returns, The Entirety of the 2010 Outback Bowl, The Time Tim Beckman Won The Hat and The Entire Earth Was Temporarily Shrouded in Darkness, His Unearthly Hat Cackle Summoning Forces Beyond Our Comprehension.

Beckman, having looted the Hat and placed it in its Hat Cradle to catch the light of the Blood
Moon, planned a Reign of a Thousand Hats, proclaiming once and for all Illinois as Chicago's
Big Ten Team, the fearsome billboards of the Illini lined from toll plaza to toll plaza but then
he got fired

The loss against Western Illinois belongs in this woeful gallery. It has all the elements: a MAC opponent viciously rowboating through an erstwhile dominant defense; a blown lead; a heroic drive stalled by the fumble-touchback, the single most damaging reversal of fortune play in organized sports; a spectacular, potentially game-saving blunder by an opposing player so grotesquely misguided that his own inept execution of his plan actually turned out to his benefit,; a 25-minute replay challenge that ended in misery.

To quickly break it down: Thorson's fumble into the endzone would be ruled a touchback if
Davonate Ginwright either grabs it or falls down or grabs it and takes it from the endzone.
Instead, Ginwright hurled the ball back into the endzone like he was John McClane throwing
an explosive device back at a Gruber Brother before leaping out of a window, which is literally
the only way Northwestern could get the ball back. BUT, Ginwright did not manage to stay out
of bounds, foiling his own plan to do the single most foolish thing in the situation. The only
way for the play to be more costly for the Wildcats is if the NCAA had spraypainted a "Dr. Pepper
Fumble Here to Lose Game" logo on the exact spot Thorson dropped it

The loss undid a heroic effort from Justin Jackson who ball carriered and ball received all over the WMU defense. Clayton Thorson and the new crop of receivers played solidly until Thorson fumbled his way into a Rube Goldberg catastrophe. The loss could be chalked up to an excellent game from Western Michigan's Zach Terrell and Jamuri Bogan and a disappointing day for a Northwestern defense that sorely missed Deonte Gibson and Dean Lowry. On the other hand, Northwestern lost on a controversial endzone replay, which clearly means that once again the College Football Establishment is conspiring against the Wildcats, the insidious tentacles of their agents reaching into replay rooms operating out of dozens of shadowy organizations. Chris Collins identified a Michigan referee conspiracy against Northwestern during the Big Ten Basketball Tournament, and I've discovered some mindblowing evidence that will shake you to the core:

THERE IS ANOTHER GAME

Last Saturday's disappointment gives way to this week's hope. Fortunately for Northwestern, the cats face FCS Illinois State at home. Traditionally, FBS teams and especially major conference teams take this opportunity to steamroll FCS squads while touchdown-crazed fans bray for the walk-ons in a twisted football bacchanalia. This is not that game. For one, Illinois State is a season removed from a berth in the FCS championship game, where they lost a close game to FCS powerhouse North Dakota State. For another, Northwestern has lost home games to lower-division teams in the past, most recently Chip Kelly's New Hampshire team in 2006. Despite the recent success, the history of Northwestern football remains a museum of football indignities, and there are few types of losses the Wildcats have not suffered with the exception of the consistent domination over defunct Chicago-area dental colleges, whose team message boards to this day are filled with tooth-taunts from swaggering Northwestern partisans.

The 1903 Wildcats handled Chicago Dental according to this Tribune article
that describes an unrecognizable sport featuring dental backs and line bucks:
"In a game which showed Northwestern weaker than even the most pessimistic
feared, the Methodist school yesterday allowed the Chicago Dental college
eleven to make two touchdowns, scoring only three itself, so that the final score
was 18-11. One of the touchdowns made by the Dental college was scored on a run
of 105 yards, but the other was made by straight playing, the dental backs
pushing the ball by line bucks the length of the field."
This information comes from Hail to Purple, which not only tracked down
the game but successfully lobbied to change inaccurate accounts of the game
that dared to insinuate that Northwestern had lost to the dental college. I count
this as their greatest victory

More importantly, Wildcat football over the past several season has alternated between indomitable luck and turns of events so catastrophic they seem to be the provenance of trickster football deities. Last season, the 'Cats got every bounce in close games, every big stop, and every call on their way to ten wins. The two years before, a snakebitten Wildcat team innovated increasingly baroque and intricate ways to lose games. Every game remains its own discrete event. But in a season that has already begun with disturbing harbingers of chaos, of footballs bouncing off arms and crossbars and a crimson Pat Fitzgerald storming onto the field in protest, his fists pumping not with the vigor of victory but ineffectually against the referees and the laws of football and physics, it is hard not to be on guard.

FOOTBALL AND AMERICAN SOCIETY

Football was originally developed as a way for college students to beat the ever-loving snot out of each other so they can grow up to be monocled industrialists and talk about manfully looking into the eyes of a hale-hearty fellow who attempted to put his head through their sternum. Now, I am convinced that its most important function is as a release valve for monomaniacs that would otherwise be sieging post offices or filibustering through Costcos and instead they’ve channeled their energy into making kids run through those nets that make you keep your knees up while yelling KEEP YOUR KNEES UP.

All coaches of sports at high levels work insane, unreasonable hours to justify the insane and unreasonable amounts of money and attention we shower on professional and college sports. Football coaches represent the extreme end of the coaching version of monomania. NFL coaches all but move into coffins in their offices, emerging only to draw a bunch of Xs and Os and reluctantly talk to the press about injuries. They operate at all times under a veil secrecy usually associated with government space laser programs that we all know exist. In the offseason, they are usually fired. Those that keep their jobs disappear from view until the next Mandatory NFL Event.

A resigned Belichick breaks down under a hail of reporters' questions to admit that the New
England Patriots play football

College football coaches have a similar job except they spend their entire off-season text messaging with teenagers and filming commercials for truck dealerships and debasing themselves with internet meme gaffes. This, it turns out, is extraordinarily useful. Instead of passive-aggressively tweeting at each other and gang-stalking sixteen year-old nose tackles, we could have armies of goateed men named Chip and Bobby diagramming whiteboard coups and aggressively blowing whistles at helpless citizens.

EMBRACE CHAOS

Northwestern hopes to recover from the disheartening display of rowboatsmanship at Ryan Field last Saturday. If that game is any indication, though, the chaos has only begun. Expect desperation heaves, multiple fumbles, dozens of laterals, natural disasters, plagues, and bands of unemployed coaches interrupting games to attack with their fearsome retinues of practice tackle apparatus. Expect a grizzled Chris Collins, his purple track suit in tatters and stained with the ink of mildewed newspaper archives to appear with reams of new information about the Michigan Referee Conspiracy and its attempts to infiltrate the highest levels of college athletics through shadowy networks accountable to no one. This is a lunatic sport designed for heartbreak and incredulity. This is every season of Wildcat football.

On opening day, Northwestern and Western Michigan grabbed each other and dove off the Reichenbach Falls as they tried to simultaneously lose the game on the same play. The Wildcats had been outplayed, but still had a shot to sneak away with a victory until they were foiled by a Bronco unable to successfully lose the game on a delightfully boneheaded miscalculation. Last Saturday, the 'Cats faced a frisky Illinois State squad from the Missouri Valley Conference and sank, thumbs up, into a vat of molten steel.

I know now, why you cry, but it's something I can never do along with understand why they

had Thorson throw the ball 41 times

There are a few ways to cope with a disheartening loss to an FCS opponent whose joyous fans thronged Ryan Field. One way is to remain positive, hoping the team has stared into the abyss and spends the rest of the week in an unending 168-hour-long sports montage featuring synth-heavy songs that all sound exactly like this poster of the 2005 Wildcats team looks.

This might be my favorite piece of football-related art

The other way is to spitefully revel in the damage that a free-falling Northwestern team can do to ranked opponents on the schedule. By merely playing them, they can destroy their opponents' ranking like a football virus that eats away at the host and, should the montage work and the Wildcats become inspired by a song called "Not (Line) Backing Down" and they beat one of these teams, we can enjoy watching their ranking sink, forcing disgusted opposing fans to become so enraged that they enter their message boards in a clumsy virtual reality, determined to fire the coach from cyberspace while doing battle with rival fans who invade their message board through virtual reality and they perpetuate cyber violence against each other across smoking modems.

Still from a treatment of my new screenplay called Re: UNACCEPTABLE

DISPATCH FROM ILLINOIS STATE
When the college football honchos got together and devised their byzantine championship system, the last game they had in mind was a mid-September contest between Northwestern and Illinois State. But that is what they have created. College football presents a great ordered hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being from the juggernaut teams that clash in titanic bowl matchups to the tiniest Division III schools(1) whose games are attended by a lonely sports reporter for the student newspaper and small detachment from the nose tackle's seminar patiently waiting for the game to end so they can finish their group presentation on Great Expectations. So when the kicker for the Illinois State Redbirds(2) bonked the football off the left goalpost, he played into college football's most attractive selling point: the setting of up an intricate arrangement of teams within a neat football ecosystem defined by real inequities in money and resources and prestige and then watching college football utterly destroy it as fans of the upset teams stare into the distance, their hands on their head, their butts kicked.

College football upsets come from two streams of inequity. The first is structural. Northwestern plays in the Big Ten, a major conference(3) commensurate with big money and television exposure(4) and the ability to qualify for the playoff by beating other Big Ten teams. Illinois State plays in the FCS(5), a lower-tiered league that does not have its own television network and pants sponsors and allows fewer players on scholarship. In 2015, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said that Big Ten teams should not play FCS schools anymore, characterizing them as an "opponent that is not tantalizing for fans, for players, for television or even for rivals." In other words, Cmsr. Delany thinks that Big Ten fans, even agitated into their most crazed football bloodlusts, have no interest in watching their teams whale on some overmatched lesser-conference detritus before getting back to the serious business of qualifying for the Ducolax Opioid-Related Stool Softener Bowl. Cmsr. D's edict means that the Northwestern Wildcats will not have a chance to avenge their loss; assuming that the Cmsr.'s plans remain in place, the Redbirds will own an perpetually-increasing winning streak against the Wildcats and can spend the next several decades accusing Northwestern of ducking them out of fear of another killing bonk.

The other source of college football inequity comes from perception and media coverage. College football's championship depends on its discursive elements; it is post-modern. There are too many teams to accurately determine which ones are better than the others when they have similar records. Even when they do not, the press, fans, and constellations of football personalities that influence the sport can find ways to dismiss teams by derogating their opponents' record and conference (the "ain't played no one" refrain), rejecting losses from early in the season, weighing the effects of circadian rhythms(6), and referring to the team's general place in the history of college football. College football championships had been lawless affairs awarded based on the votes of hat-wearing reporters. Fans eventually demanded a more accurate championship assessment. For fifteen years, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) tried to balance some of this subjectivity (not to eliminate it since politicking and shit-talking form central parts of the appeal of college football) with a computer formula.(7) The new College Football Playoff has rejected the terrifying Skynet implications and returned the messy business of college football championships to the humankind-- an unaccountable cabal of thirteen notables.

All sports depend on the tension between what is supposed to happen and what actually happens, but few sports set the perennial power teams (PPT)(8) up for perpetual victory as much as college football. Their advantage reaches beyond the money and facilities and taps into habitual resignation. Fans of PPT fallen on hard times resemble bleary-eyed aristocrats forever pulling sleeves to tell passersby about how volleyball arena used to be a ballroom where they waltzed with Maj. Berensky, resplendent in his hussar uniform, before the revolution. Northwestern is not supposed to beat a PPT because they lost dozens of games in row the 1970s and 80s. Illinois State is not supposed to beat Northwestern because they play in a division so far below them that they are not even eligible to play for the same championship. The Redbirds could revel in their ability to beat a team despite a college football infrastructure dedicated to preventing that outcome. For the Northwestern fans trudging back to their cars and trains, Yr. Corresp. can only report that they seemed utterly bummed.

NOTES

1. That's just the NCAA. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) fields teams, and schools also field a number of club teams in all sorts of competitions, but you get the point.
2. Sean Slattery, a Junior from Rockford, Ill.
3. These teams are now referred to as the Power Five (P5) and include the Big Ten, Big Twelve,* the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Southeastern Conference, and the Pacific Twelve. These conferences tend to attract the lions' share of attention, money, and television time, and their champions automatically qualify for the playoff. The remaining FBS teams play in the so-called "Group of Five" conferences. This was clearly an attempt to find some sort of name that did not inherently taint them as a group of also-ran football conferences, and what they came up with sounds like a nineteenth-century anarchist cell.
* The Big Ten has twelve teams and the Big 12 has ten teams, but the conferences have decided their brand names have become more important than numerical accuracy. Yr. Corresp. would find this highly irritating, but does anyone want the people who came up with "Legends and Leaders" (see Note 5**) in charge of renaming an entire conference?
4. The Illinois State-Northwestern game was carried on the Big Ten Network, a television network owned by the conference. The arrangement gets the conference direct money from advertisers that sell, based on a few games' worth of samples, salsa additives, tractor equipment, and extra-large men's pants. The network televises games that would never previously air, puts less prominent sports like volleyball and wrestling on TV, and allows for hilarious documentaries of players from newly-added teams that never had anything to do with the Big Ten but are now lumped in, like if the USSR started airbrushing Nikolai Yezhov into pictures.
5. Football Championship Subdivision. The Big Ten plays in the Football Bowl Subdivision. These designations replaced 1A (FBS) and 1AA (FCS) in 2005. The FCS points to the fact that its teams play in a sixteen-team championship playoff, whereas the FBS traditionally decided on a champion after a series of bowl games, a group of polls, and a system of computer rankings (see Note 7). The FBS adopted a four-game playoff for the 2014 season, but it remains the FBS because the playoff games are also bowls and they probably did not want to change the name again and order a bunch of new business cards.**
**These names always come from some marketing committee and spring into being, authorless and fully formed and immediately adopted by fans and reporters. The whole thing is kind of Orwellian, although occasionally successfully resisted when the nomenclature becomes too dumb even for college football, like when the Big Ten called its new divisions the "Legends and Leaders" to almost-universal derision.
6. The Very Same Northwestern Wildcats scored an upset of their own last season against eventual Rose Bowl champions Stanford. Stanford dismissed the loss by claiming that their body clocks had been affected from having to play a game at 11:00AM CDT and they were physiologically still asleep or at the very least mentally pyjamaed.
7. Fans became so upset at computer projections that they tweaked the ranking after the 2003 to increase the input of human polls, even though these polls were still filled out by reporters whose knowledge of West Coast football remained limited by their own circadian rhythms and by harried graduate assistants who fill out the coaches' poll because the coach has no time to watch other games w/r/t his schedule of watching film and yelling at teenagers and walking around all the time in shorts expecting everyone to call him "coach."
8. As distinct from the Power 5

NORTHWESTERN VOWS TO CONTINUE PLAYING FOOTBALL
The two consecutive debacles at the beginning of Northwestern's season have certainly dimmed expectations. This Saturday, the Wildcats take on Duke. The Blue Devils hammered FCS North Carolina Central and lost to ACC rivals Wake Forest. They hope to avenge a loss to Northwestern in a spectacularly hideous game that featured a sequence of eleven consecutive punts.

Northwestern has sustained more injuries to an already injury-ravaged roster of defensive backs. Fitzgerald has juggled the defensive lineman after watching them get mauled for two consecutive weeks. Justin Jackson will hopefully get to carry the ball again. Let the sky turn brown with the rain of a thousand punts enough punts to sap the enjoyment of football from everyone in the stadium including Duke's players who get discouraged and just want to go back home and get into arguments about basketball recruiting.

The key to Northwestern's strategy may be on
this VHS tape

The Wildcats' season is not over yet. They still have an opportunity to rediscover their defensive prowess and upset teams or possibly beat Purdue by arranging a convoy of fans to go to Ross Ade stadium and stage a popular vote to determine the outcome of the game instead of subjecting themselves to it.

More importantly, they have an entire season to focus on the single most important goal this season, which is to keep the Hat at all costs. Lovie Smith, for all his Chicago protestations, and his NFL pedigree, has never been in a Hat situation. He does not yet understand what is at stake: a tophat that is mounted, infuriatingly, to a base and unable to worn on the head like other hat trophies, possibly out of some justified fear of Hat Madness.

I don't think Northwestern will finish 0-12. At some point, some team, overconfident in their place in the Great Chain of Football Being will swagger into Ryan Field and leave with a loss, with baffled fans questioning their entire understanding of college football, and most likely punted into oblivion. I know exactly how they feel.

In 2013, the Wildcats won their first bowl game in more than sixty years and celebrated by violently revenging themselves against a plush monkey doll that Pat Fitzgerald used as a symbol of the bowl drought. Three years later, Northwestern reversed a moribund two-game losing streak by duct-taping themselves to the Duke Blue demons and flailing away for sixty minutes until they got a win.

LOGAN: Jesus Christ, it looks like someone assassinated FAO Schwartz
BRISCOE: (Trenchcoatically) That's one way to get a monkey off your back.
(He order 17 hot dogs from a nearby vendor). With dynamite.
(Script from "Monkey Business, "the ripped from the headlines Gator Bowl
episode of Law and Order aired Sept. 18, 2013)

Northwestern's first win came against a "Power Five" opponent that may have been the weakest on its non-conference schedule. The team seemed destined to a season of doom and gloom after losses to Western Michigan and a stunning upset by FCS powerhouse Illinois State. To be fair, it does not take much to send Northwestern fans spiraling into doom and gloom. The entire Wildcat football programs sways suspended over a gorge of historical football ineptitude not yet quelled by two decades of competitive and even Big Ten championship-caliber play and pushed at all times by opposing fans who don't believe Northwestern should even be in the conference.

Poster for Northwestern's Doom and Gloom-themed
1980 Football Season

Northwestern's glorious victory over its equally insufferable quasi-rival relived the terror at the prospect of an 0-12 season. The Wildcats did not necessarily look like world-beaters, but they did look like a team that defeated a major-conference opponent and put the Big Ten basement teams on notice.

BYCTOM deploys its Purdue Confidence Meter, built to measure how
confident Northwestern fans are in beating Purdue

Clayton Thorson had a career game, scoring with some impressive strikes against a Duke defense monomanically obsessed with stopping Justin Jackson from ball carriering. Austin Carr climbed to the top of the Big Ten receiver leaderboards. A young, injury-ravaged Air Team Secondary rallied in the second half to hold rumored Henry Higgins inspiration Daniel Jones in check. But the game itself devolved often devolved into a comedy of errors as depicted in this highly technical game analysis:

THE SPORTING MAN'S CURSE

"Did you hear about Bunto Rawlford-Munch?" I said during lunch one day at the Goose Society Club. "He's been receiving all sorts of sporting paraphernalia: jodhpurs, pneumatic golf clubs, falconing trousers, football helmets." As soon as I said football, Chompy Stodgeaway-Mopp turned, his face twisting into the look of a man whose oyster dinner had betrayed him and led its foodstuff comrades on a rampage through the intestines. “A bunch of oafish rot if you ask me. You can keep your football and any other configuration of violent human pyramids.” He stomped off, leaving a trail of chicken feathers.

“Poor old Chompy, you won’t hear a good word about football from him for a long time,” said Puffer Festoon. He explained the odious turn of events that had turned Chompy from a football enthusiast to a man just short of forming a subscription society to ban it.

Chompy, you must understand, has an excess of the sporting blood. He was nearly chucked out of school for running an exam score wagering ring that fell apart in a scandal of score-lowering where promising students unknowingly had their science textbooks swapped for old alchemical treatises.

Chompy's sporting enthusiasm was not tempered despite his almost clairvoyant ability to pick losers. George Saint-Mutton financed his honeymoon by betting against Chompy every time. So Old Chompy was prone to touching his friends for a tenner, but having exhausted the largesse of every sharp, horseman, and old school chum within the City, he had to turn to investors of the rougher kind. When Vercingetorix wheezed to seventh in the Bumperton Stakes, Chompy owed no less than 45 quid to Victor Darnton, a man whose associates, the colossal Pumbleswan twins, liked to practice their amateur chriropractics on Darnton's most unfortunate debtors.

With nowhere else to turn, Chompy trudged into his uncle's office. His uncle, Theodore Herodotus Stodgeaway-Mopp, earned a fortune with Pleasant Farms, the country's largest chicken processing concern, which patented the first gizzard-chopping apparatus. The elder Stodgeaway-Mopp looked down on his nephew's sporting pursuits and their rare encounters tended to end with entreaties to quit the racetrack and enter the chicken business. It was only when Chompy demonstrated, using a model chicken in his uncle's office, precisely how the Pumbleswan twins would rearrange his beak and redistribute his feathers that his uncle agreed to pay his debt. But he imposed a condition. Should Chompy fail once again to pay this loan back, he would join Pleasant Farms from the bottom as an apprentice gizzard-grinder. Chompy would sooner join a the circus as an apprentice bear-taunter, but he had no choice. He grabbed the notes.

But when Chompy stopped by the track for one quick race, he found an opportunity so golden that it it only existed in fairy stories guarded by some noxious giants who go about walloping people with tree trunks. A great, purple faced man with a walrus mustache was holding forth about his sporting prowess to everyone who would listen. Chompy quickly saw that this gentleman did not have the benefit of his full faculties. To be honest, this fellow appeared so pickled that he seemed to be keeping himself upright through the wind power from his own voice.

Everything he picks comes up a winner, he boasted to the small group of punters assembled around him. He grabbed a sporting newspaper and announced his infallible picks. "The Mad Vicar in the seventh," he said, jabbing with a wobbly sausage finger. "Blowtorch Jack Blonnett over Ironknuckle Kitchen by knockout," he cried as the sporting paper fell apart into component pages, leaving him squinting at the most obscure matches on the last page, which was the only one he managed to hold onto. "Wildcats versus, what’s this? Blue Devils? Gentlemen," he said, "I am not a religious man, but I will simply not allow for blasphemy in the…what sport is this? Football, you say? Well these impertinent devil-worshipers should be banished to whatever lightning-stricken mansion they perform their rites in." That is when Chompy perked up.

You see, during his brief adventures hiding away from the Pumbleswan Twins, Chompy had become so desperate for sporting action that he sought out increasingly obscure papers for games he could not even follow. In the course of his researches, Chompy came across an article, a small blurb more accurately, that deprecated the footballing prowess of these very same Wildcats. According to the article, they had comported themselves in their first two contests like an old dandy so riddled with rheumatism that he can barely shake a cane when a gang of exuberant youths comes by on a hat grabbing expedition.

Chompy knew that he possessed solid scientific information, as mathematically sound as anything that Euclid chap came up with. It was as if a beam of light emanated from the heavens into the Turf Club and offered the solution to his problems in a single bet. “I say,” Chompy said, as the gesticulating punter spun about trying to honed in on Chompy. "This tenner says these Demon chaps will thump those Wildcats into a carton of mince-meats.” “Is that so?” the tout replied, his sidewhiskers flaring up like a startled lizard. “I am so confident that these sinister lucifers will be driven underground that I will spot you five, what do they call them? Points?”

“Suits, me,” Chompy said.

"Dash it, I certainly won’t allow that sort of impudent demon-worship in this sacred house,” the portly bettor hiccuped at Chompy. “I’ll give you seven points.”

Now, Chompy will swarm to a sure thing like a shark to a bleeding sea lion, but he was raised as a proper gentleman who never lets a fellow sportsman get more than ankle-deep in the soup if he can help it. “I think we’ve already settled on a bally good wager,” he said, but his magnanimous gesture only further agitated the tout, who turned an even deeper shade of purple. “My Whatsitcats will roll your Satanic blackguards into the very hell where they presumably reside," he bellowed. "Eight points!"

Chompy attaches the greatest honor to the noble art of bookmaking, but even he has his limits, and he was not about to be buffeted about the Turf Club by some grandiose eggplant. “Well, then, if you're so confident, give me nine and I’ll pay out double,” he said. The tout roared and lurched towards him, only kept off the carpet by a graceful lunge onto a sturdy chair. “You coarse hare! Ten!" he said. "But you'd better be prepared to pay out triple.”

That sealed it. Chompy handed three tenners for safekeeping to Old Grousey, the head valet who assiduously kept these sorts of arrangements amongst gentlemen. For a split second, Chompy thought he saw a glint in his opponent’s eye, but the man quickly collapsed into a heap of guttural snores, and Chompy was so excited he forgot to place a small one on Quagmire, which (it turns out) came up lame in the first turn.

The day of the match, Chompy arrived at the club resplendent in ties the color of his favorite football club, the Duke Blue Demons. He arranged updates via telegraph and we brayed like agitated hyenas every time another footman came in breathless with a new update. His face fell when the Wildcats took a quick lead, but he improvised a jig when his side tied it up.

Two footmen barreled in with news. Northwestern had missed a three-point goal, the first said, and Chompy spun his devil-topped walking stick with vaudevillian élan. Then his face fell as the second man told him that a Duke player had roughed up the kicker to in excess of the violent standard of the sport, and the Wildcats would get a closer try. “How can you get a penalty for running into a person when the whole bloody enterprise depends on running into people?" Chompy said, his gesticulations knocking the decanter out of Gulpo Yarrow-Mawp’s always sweating palms. “For all I know they're out there swinging billyclubs and blackjacks at each other.” Just then, a cab pulled up with a third footman. “Out with it, already,” said Chompy. He read the telegram and Chompy beamed. “He missed.”

It continued in that vein for hours in a flurry of telegrams. Chompy had no idea what was going on, but managed to follow the movement of the score and the ten points that separated him from an unthinkable consignment to his uncle's dashed chicken prison. Both sides kept approaching a scoring position only to carelessly discard the ball like a pair of soiled spats. Time after time, the Duke team appeared to have the Wildcats about to relinquish the ball before committing some confoundingly illegal action. At one point, a forlorn footman came under a hail of dinner rolls after he solemnly announced that a Blue Demon had lashed out at a Wildcat and been forced from the premises. “Here I was told that this was a rough-and-tumble game for vigorous roustabouts and you’re telling me a chap’s been chucked because he gave them all a free spot of pugilism?” Chompy said, before aiming a dinner roll at a the valet, hidden behind a tray he kept around for precisely these circumstances.

Chompy’s celebration turned morose after Northwestern went up by seventeen when, according to a telegram, the Duke defenders had abandoned a Northwestern player like Robinson Crusoe in the middle of the field. He peevishly dismissed a footman who he sent away and told him to fetch a catalog for chicken-resistant outerwear. But the footman refused to move, insisting that Chompy would want to see his latest despatch. Chompy read the message and he let out a pretty good elephant bellow. “They’ve scored!” he yelled. His beloved Blue Demons, with no hope of winning the game, still managed a ripping series of football maneuvers toward the end-zone. All he needed was a nearly automatic extra point to get him to ten points, get his money that would keep him safe from his uncle’s diabolical chicken facility, and keep him in the sporting life until at least the Hamwattle Stakes. He caroused about, striking a number of what he believed might be football postures. “Sir,” the last footman wheezed, grabbing at his cramped abdomen. “A final telegram has arrived.”

THIS SUBTITLE HAS A CORN PUN

Northwestern has a serious challenge ahead when it begins Big Ten play for all intents and purposes on the road against Nebraska. The Huskers are undefeated, coming off an impressive Reverse Body Clock win at Oregon, and look to have exorcised themselves of their propensity for ludicrous close losses last season where they lost, by my recollection, 17 games by a row by a hail mary hook and lateral combination designed by the Sinbad character from Necessary Roughness. Northwestern has historically played the Huskers close; last year's narrow victory in Lincoln came from Nebraska's inept, Tecmo Bowl-style tackling attempts on Clayton Thorson as he triumphantly gallumphed through their secondary, which is something I will treasure for the rest of my life.

This year's Nebraska team looks like it could be the class of the Big Ten West and brings with it the traditional swarm of Nebraska fans to Ryan Field. All Big Ten opponents that are not currently too depressed to handle football take over Ryan Field because there's twice as many of them in every class as Northwestern's total enrollment and the Wildcats have essentially no casual fans except for people who I've buttonholed at social gatherings and yelled at about Northwestern football until they pretend to care. The vast majority of these visiting fans are friendly and nice and hilariously distraught on the occasions when Northwestern upsets them. But it's still frustrating to go to a home game knowing that Northwestern will probably have to go to a silent snap count.

This site, like many members of the Blogspot Family, is a fount of ideas, and throughout the years of Nebraska Crisis I've proposed numerous sane and normal solutions to the visiting fan problem: enforcing a strict purple dress code with doormen recruited from the finer clubs who have Crimean War experience, a Voight-Kampf Test for Ohio State partisans, constructing a Potemkin Evanston a mile north of the city complete with a cardboard stadium to lure opposing fans away from Ryan Field. The Northwestern Athletic Department, however, refuses to take action on these reasonable and practical solutions and will therefore expose me and hundreds of other Wildcat fans to the psychologically damaging high-fives and fist-bumpery in my own section. To any Nebraska fan who happens upon this blog while searching for football fan fiction on the internet know this: I will be mildly disappointed if the Wildcats lose this game.

For the second consecutive week, Northwestern ended up in a 24-13 game because of a missed extra point. This time, though, Nebraska came out on top by taking over in the second half and Northwestern plummeted to 1-3 with a brutal Big Ten schedule looming.

The Wildcats got another strong game from Austin Carr, but the injury-riddled defense still struggled against tenure-track professor Tommy Armstrong, who has been the Huskers' quarterback for seven years. The best play for Northwestern's defense was the goal-line fumble as Nebraska players repeatedly had touchdowns turn into touchbacks. The fumble in the endzone, which may well have cost Northwestern the game against Western Michigan, is college football's most ludicrously punitive play. The only thing more damaging would be for a goal-line fumble to result in the guards from Legends of the Hidden Temple appearing and escorting the offending player out of the game unless he can provide them with a pendant won from answering multiple choice questions about previous events in the football game.

The NCAA has not yet adopted this rule because there are so few places for a guard to jump
out: the guy fumbles in the endzone and hey nobody look behind the goalpost, oh there he is
(unless they start disguising guards as members of the chain gang or the mascot or maybe
even the endzone grass itself, wait a minute this is actually a fantastic idea, let's call it
Legends and Leaders of the Hidden Temple)

Northwestern fans in the stands were once again treated to the deafening cacophony of thousands of invading Nebraska fans, which made the stakes higher. The Wildcats have never defeated Nebraska in Evanston; both victories have come on the road, where a small guerrilla detachment of Northwestern fans managed to disrupt the Nebraska offense by constantly mentioning to every single human being they encounter how few of them there are at the stadium in the tradition of the attendance reports trumpeted by literally every single Nebraska fan who has ever come to Evanston.

We get it

The schedule does not get any easier from here as Northwestern deals with the representatives of the Big Ten title game on the road in consecutive weeks.

IOWA

Two Big Ten Teams have fallen to FCS opponents in the same season twice, according to five minutes of research I just did. To no one's surprise, both involved Northwestern. In 2006, the Wildcats were demolished by Chip Kelly's New Hampshire team that I assume was stocked with future NFL hall-of-famers while Indiana lost to Southern Illinois. Much to the disappointment of the then-nascent Big Ten Network, the teams did not meet during the season, although I think they should have been allowed to have a quasi-bowl game on a closed-off section of the 80/94 Corridor. This year, Northwestern and Iowa will meet at Kinnick Field after Iowa lost to FCS juggernaut North Dakota State, which does nothing but win championships and beat FBS teams and Northwestern lost to Illinois State which is also an FCS team and therefore both losses are exactly the same.

The Hawkeyes not the world-devouring force from last year where they destroyed the Big Ten West, nearly won the conference title, and got destroyed in the Rose Bowl by a Stanford team unleashed by a complete lack of Body Clock issues. They followed their loss to NDSU with an uninspiring 14-7 victory over Rutgers.

Still, Iowa can afford to worry about style points when they are 3-1 and facing a struggling version of a team they mangled last year on the road. They will be heavily favored, and Northwestern will have to find another gear that they've lacked all season to pull off the upset. On the other hand, the Wildcats have played poorly enough that an improbable victory would cause Iowa City to collapse into a paroxysm of complaints about uncalled holding penalties, a grand Pynchonian conspiracy of holding calls dating back to a medieval society of holders called Societatis Capto who have melted into American society, becoming government officials and heads of companies who hide their secret veneration of holding in the texts of plays and radio shows and psychedelic rock music and the entire art of football refereeing, which on this Saturday and only this Saturday, results in a free for all of uncalled holding penalties and you can tell all of this is going on when all of the officials have names like Oblong Whistlelung, Steak Ligament, and Flesh Harbaugh.

Uncalled holding depicted on the
Bayeux Tapestry

YOUR WEEKLY SWORD DUEL UPDATE

In The World That Never Was, Alex Butterworth tries to unravel the multifarious strands of revolutionary philosophies, internecine revolutionary fighting, terror cells, secret police organizations, and agents-provacateurs across Europe from the rise of the Paris Commune to the First World War. It's an ambitious book, not least because a lot of the activity he describes comes from criminal conspiracies and secret police operations with no desire to create official records and so riven with double-dealing on both sides that it is impressive that he, and other historians of the period, have been able to piece together any sort of narrative.

At times, the book, which spans decades and countries and oft-competing revolutionary ideologies can get a bit muddled. It can be difficult to keep track of the writers, agents, counter-agents, and government officials, even with the endless, intimidating "dramatis personae" glossary of people at the beginning of the book. Butterworth, though, sticks with a half-dozen or so major characters who keep cropping up and anchor the rest of the events around their shifting perspectives and allegiances. There's a lot this book tells us about the emergence of modern terrorism and the state police surveillance apparatus that grew to combat it and how all of these things get mixed into the historical record when it suits states to distort it. But this is a profoundly dumb blog about college football, and I'm going to focus on inept aristocratic counterintelligence organizations and sword duel entrapment plots.

Russia's Holy Brotherhood formed in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The members of the organization styled themselves as a secret counterintelligence unit to counter the radical groups that had planned the deadly attack on Alexander and other officials. It also featured some masonic and secret society undertones, presumably because its members wanted cool robes. Butterworth describes them differently, as a small and bumbling unit of Yacht Club aristocrats and characterized their plots as "illegal and ill-judged...in reality little more than than the superannuated adolescent fantasies of men who should have known better." The plots included dispatching femmes fatales to marry and then murder enemies and publishing fake radical newspapers that urged readers to acts so transparently preposterous (exploding cattle, for example) that no one took them seriously.

Alexander II had survived numerous bombing attempts by the People's

Will before they hurled explosives at his carriage and killed him in 1881

The greatest plot that the Holy Brotherhood concocted targeted the venerable Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and French provocateur Henri Rochefort. The Brotherhood planned to hire expert swordsmen to provoke the two men into duels and then slice them to ribbons with their suddenly revealed sword-fighting skills. Kropotkin heard about the plot and leaked it to journalists. The plan made a bit more sense with Rochefort, whose wild-eyed duel-mongering keeps popping up throughout the book. As Butterfield describes it, it is hard to see where he got the time for his work of running incendiary newspapers, fleeing the New Caledonia prison colony, and exchanging his radical ideals for anti-Semitic authoritarianism when he was constantly swordfighting at people. A former Communard, angered by Rochefort's ideological shift, glove-slaps him in a carriage. Rochefort is accused of post-duel extracurricular stabbing. Rochefort goes to Belgium specifically to duel people because Britain and France had banned the practice and apparently he used the sand dunes outside Ostend as his personal swordfight thunderdome.

I'm just trying to imagine how this plan would go: The swordfighter walks
up to the target and pokes him with his cane or throws some wine on him
or tells him his writing is florid and ungrammatical and then they start
glove-slapping and several days later they meet up on a Belgian sand dune,
with the target not having researched the man who has insulted him even
though he knows there are legions of ostensible swordfight experts waiting
to skewer him and then they get surrounded by seconds and weirdo
swordfight enthusiasts guys and they throw off their overcoats and their
spats and all of a sudden the swordfight guy is doing all sorts of fancy swinging-
the- sword-around moves and Rochefort or Kropotkin thinks to himself oh shit
they've got me this time: it's a sword guy

The Holy Brotherhood occupies a tiny slice of the actual sinister plotting in Russia's Okhrana and other secret police organizations in Europe. Butterworth describes how agents infiltrating organizations at times put into motion and sometimes carried out bombings and murders just to worm deeper into organizations. By the end of the nineteenth century, the line between crimes perpetuated by revolutionary organizations and police organizations ostensibly against them had blurred considerably.

DAY FOOTBALL RETURNS

The Wildcats have their work cut out for them against Iowa on Saturday. Perhaps the defense can find some of its 2015 form in time to slow an Iowa rushing attack. Maybe Thorson and Carr can continue to add some life to Northwestern's passing attack. Perhaps Northwestern has been holding back this entire time, like a hypothetical nineteenth-century swordsman only trying to provoke the Hawkeyes into a duel and then revealing themselves as expert football men and then it will be too late for Iowa, stunned by a fancy passing attack and ferocious defense and dozens of impossible field goals. Even a struggling Northwestern team is due for a ridiculous upset every season. Unless they're saving it for Ohio State.

Last season, Iowa and Northwestern had tremendous seasons. Then, they both got utterly demolished in bowl games-- Northwestern by a budding Tennessee power and Iowa by a Stanford team drawing on weeks of uninterrupted access to the source of its strength, Pacific Standard Time. Both of their 2016 seasons have been disappointing and involved gruesome home losses to FCS teams. Still, Iowa fans felt confident about their Homecoming showdown against the Northwestern after winning three in a row, the last two in hideous blowouts.

Northwestern plays so many Homecoming road games that they have started traveling to
opponents in a parade float

Instead, Northwestern held on for a demoralizing 38-31 win over the Hawkeyes. Ifeadi Odenigbo beat C.J. Beathard hard, sacking the Iowa quarterback four times, occasionally using a helpless lineman as a battering ram to more effectively knock him over. Justin Jackson ran for 171 yards, including a 58-yard breakaway. And Clayton Thorson had a tremendous game, running for one touchdown and finding emerging star receiver Austin Carr for three through the air.

Thorson downloads football data into his brain, not only preparing for Iowa but also for a
lucrative career as a futuristic data courier able to match wits with the Yakuza Cyber Dolphin

This year's version of Iowa has played like a shadow of last year's undefeated Rose Bowl juggernaut. At the same time, Northwestern managed to win its first road game, deploy a functioning offense, and sow uncertainty and disappointment in an Iowa fanbase inaugurating a new contract for Kirk Ferentz that will last until the end of his life and then allow him to remain on the Kinnick sidelines stuffed like a Jeremy Bentham autoicon for generations.

THE PLAY IS THE THING

Last week's post explored the possibility of an upset triggering cries of uncalled holding penalties that would resonate throughout Johnson County, and the game became weighted with referee controversy. The crowd became so angry at ludicrous refereeing decisions at one point that they hurled a chorus of abuse at the officials. A few miscreants pelted the field with refuse. This situation is not new. Last year, a series of sound decisions from learned referees that kept erasing Wisconsin touchdowns led to some rowdy Badgers to hastily assemble snowballs in a gruesome reenactment of the Godfather tollbooth scene against their own cheerleaders.

Their complaint stemmed from a sequence where Odenigbo appeared to grab Beathard's facemask on a sack and drew no penalty. The Hawkeyes punted and, on the ensuing drive, an Iowa player got flagged for a facemask against Justin Jackson and then got an additional fifteen yards for reciting Rule 9 Article 8 of the Official NCAA Football Rules of the Game at the referee. Ferentz was left with no recourse except to stage a play for the referees featuring egregious missed facemask penalties and hope that the ensuing guilt drives them to madness, allowing him to unmask their villainy to the world and maybe get a break on a pass interference penalty sometime.

PLAYER KING: Out, out, thou zebra, Fortune! All you refs,
In general synod 'take away his flags;
Break all the spokes and fellies from the facemask,
And bowl the round ball down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends!'
LORD DELANY: This is too long

I have no idea why Northwestern has benefited from postmodern touchdown catch rules or facemask indifference, but we can all assume it is part of a vast Big Ten conspiracy to promote Northwestern football at the expense of its larger and more well-known opponents because that possibility is incredibly funny to me.

THE CHICAGO CUBS ARE MY DOOMSDAY CULT

Well, it’s finally here. The Chicago Cubs lived up to their threat of dominating 162 games of regular season baseball, becoming the best Cubs team any of us will likely see in our lives, and entering the playoffs as World Series favorites. May whatever god you believe in have mercy on us all.

The baseball playoffs constrict the game's leisurely pace into a maddening, stressful crucible. They are coin flips-- thrilling, exciting, unpredictable, incredible for a team that unexpectedly blunders into them, and seemingly designed to drive to madness the fans of the game's best team whose chance to end a century-straddling championship drought are roughly the same as ending up on the wrong side of Russian roulette.

Baseball, like all sports and entertainments, remains entirely ancillary to our life, but for me the times when the Chicago Cubs manage to scrape their way into the playoff grinder become stressful because they are the only sports team whose every success is shrouded in the morbid certainty of death.

The Cubs cannot make the playoffs without that grim reaper Joe Buck appearing on our televisions with his phalanx of satanic goat heads, reminding us that the Cubs have seen generations of fans stretching back to times before widespread motorcars back through two world wars and peak mustache ubiquity to their graves and they are coming for you. This is not a surprise since Buck himself revealed that his own obsession with youth and aging led him to nearly losing his voice from repeated visits to the Monkey's Paw Hair Plug Clinic.

Autumn, when Joe Buck appears to remind you that you will die

I have often said after 2008, when another loaded Cubs team failed to win a single playoff game, that I had accepted that I will never see the Cubs win a World Series in my lifetime. But I clearly don't believe that fully, because if I did, I would not have spent this entire season dreading the playoffs which have a very good chance of once again dashing whatever faint hope I pretend not to have. This is not a normal person sports relationship. My relationship to the Cubs is less like sports fandom than fealty to a doomsday cult, whose certainty in the end of everything only reinforces the desire to see it happen.

Maddon promises that, after the baseball demons come and reveal that playing the right way
actually means that they devour continents and send them to their digestive systems, which
are portals to far-away galaxies, the believers will travel the galaxies in this interstellar vehicle
that only looks like a crappy airbrushed van right now, in these pre-demon times

None of us have any idea whether the Cubs can live up to the expectations they've stoked this season. Not even the irritating numerologists in San Francisco, whose faith in even-numbered years forms a bizarre counter to Cubs fan fatalism, can tell us the outcome. And the outcome is meaningless-- the only real-life difference between a Cubs win and loss this playoff season is probably a few million dollars of Wrigleyville property damage. The Cubs will play baseball whether I ignore them or spend the next several days in a flinch, waiting for whatever Mendoza-line castoff the Giants find on the scrapheap to hit multiple game-winning home runs.

It doesn't matter whether the Cubs win. There is, as far as I know, no theology that promises some sort of afterlife reward for those of us who had talked ourselves into Ryan Theriot or own Rod Beck merchandise. The Cubs' championship drought has nothing to do with mysticism or curses or the incredible bad luck of a shell-shocked headphone guy who got to listen to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo do play-by-play of an insane, bloodthirsty mob that threaten to thrash him over baseball, but with the team's decades of incompetence. The sun rose on October 15, 1908 and it continued to rise after the Cubs' few and spectacular baseball-related fuckups throughout the ensuing century. The season's ending in elation, despair, or relief from victimized baseball fans tired of hearing about the Cubs will quickly fade.

But, if you were to ask me personally, I think it would be cool, if they won.

WELCOME HOME, HAT

OUTBACK BOWL PREVIEW

Northwestern 2016: This Is Our Concern, Dude

The Chicago Bulls are a Wailing Pit of Despair

Requiem For The NIT Berth: An Extremely Northwestern Blog Post

Netflix Sports Hagiography: Nash (2013)

The Chicago Cubs Will Not Win the World Series

The NFL Draft is a Collective Hallucination

The Futile, Asinine Task of Determining The Greatest Team of All Time

Derrick Rose's Sad Limp To Basketball Oblivion

The NBA's Pantomime Villainy and the Chicago Bulls

The Ballad of the Sloop John Belein

MINT CONDITION BYCTOM #1

College Football: The Game of Games

Week 1: Bronco News Letter

WEEK 2: A Reversal of Fortune

Week 3: I'm Not Mad, In Fact This Is Funny To Me

Week 4: FOOTBALL JUGGERNAUT NORTHWESTERN STEAMS TO POWER FIVE WIN

Week 5: 24-13, A CRUEL AND FICKLE SCORE

WEEK 6: The Vandals of Homecoming