BRING YOUR CHAMPIONS, THEY'RE OUR MEAT

The Wildcats return with an extra week to luxuriate in their upset over Iowa and try to carry the momentum toward a bowl berth. For that, they'll need six wins or five wins and a desperate hope that the exponential increase in shitty bowl games outpaces the number of 6-6 teams and they triumphantly ride into the Famous Potato Bowl.

No team should be ashamed of taking a five-win Bowl Berth nor
participating in any sub-NIT basketball tournaments or any other
postseason tournament so bereft of prestige that it serves as the undercard
to a mutton busting tournament to get spectators excited about seeing
children whaled upon by rampaging sheep

Northwestern hopes to bring the quarterback pressure and offensive spark from the Iowa game to bear on a reeling Michigan State team. The Spartans have lost three in a row, including last week's 31-14 mauling at the hands of BYU. They come off a Big Ten championship season, but now stand at 2-3 and have yet to play Big Ten bullies Michigan and Ohio State. A do-or-die game against a potentially feisty Northwestern team is not what Michigan State fans signed up for this season. They too are down in the muck fighting for their bowl lives.

The Spartans' troubles this season have matched Northwestern's. They have trouble moving the ball. Their defensive line has had trouble getting to the quarterback, much like Northwestern until Ifeadi Odenigbo wreaked havoc against Iowa. Unlike Northwestern, they have become mired in a quarterback controversy, while the 'Cats are coming off of Thorson's best game. Michigan State fans, as far as I can tell from a brief foray around the internet, have reached a terrifying state of Big Ten depression where they actually believe it is possible to lose to Northwestern in a sanctioned football game.

Faces of the Big Ten

This game has all the makings of a classic Big Ten punt-fest that deteriorates into punting on every down: pooch punts, rugby-style punts, fake punts that turn out to be actual punts, fake field goals turning into punts, flea-flicker punts that involve Hunter Niswander split wide and blasting the ball into the coffin corner after three or four reverses while delighted fans of both teams sing their punt songs into the crisp October air.

On the one hand, Michigan State has great players from last year's championship team floating around, most notably Malik McDowell. They desperately need this game to staunch the entire program to be engulfed in panic and they should have a robust homecoming crowd because Big Ten teams only bought Northwestern-related homecoming decorations in the 1970s and state legislatures have been unwilling to release funds to decorate against another opponent. On the other hand, this is a knock-down drag-out fight for the right to desperately try to fend off Purdue for a slot at the Seasonal Mall Merchandise Store Discount Gorilla Mask Bowl. Michigan States's players were brought in for Big Ten championships, but this is what Northwestern was built for.

REQUIEM FOR THE EVEN-YEAR GIANTS, WHO SCARED THE EVER-LOVING SHIT OUT OF ME

There are ways rational and normal people enjoy the baseball playoffs by analyzing matchups and numbers and getting angry at relief pitchers and there are ways that Cubs catastrophists prepare for the postseason which is to cast oracle bones and devine the most devastating mode of disappointment. One would think that the Cubs had defied the most ardent depressives by steamrolling through the regular season and handing the Giants an 0-2 hole, but the shamans of baseball misery all knew that this is where San Francisco reforms from a liquid puddle and reassembles into a baseball terminator.

Anything can happen in baseball games, especially in playoff games between very good teams in tiny sample sizes. Every team that wins the World Series has its share of walkoffs, bloops, and craziness blown up in the mythology of what that old poet Dane Cook reminded us is October. Most people can accept this. Yet in baseball there is a split between the even-keeled baseball analysts who know the wisdom gleaned from their carefully sorted VORPs can erode in the playoffs and those who treat the playoffs like a Baseball Fortean Society, and the San Francisco Giants have been their mascot.

The main reason for the Giants' success is their extremely good players: all-everything catcher Buster Posey, twitchy human Q-tip Hunter Pence, and the unflappable lefty Madison Bumgarner who practically willed them to victory in 2014. Even-Year Bullshit, however, doesn't come from superstars but from incredibly unlikely players like Cody Ross and Travis Ishikawa who hit memorable home runs and then immediately vanished into the baseball ether as if they never existed. This year, the Giants had Conor Gillaspie, a player who spent several seasons on the White Sox as a science experiment to determine what baseball would be like if you tried to hit with a tennis racket and then in the playoffs emerged from the Bay like a baseball Godzilla to swat baseballs around the park like the ineffective military hardware that governments continually use to attack it despite decades of peer-reviewed Godzilla science that conclusively demonstrates their impotence against Godzillas, Moth Men, alien spaceships, and Kings Kong.

Illustration from "General, Enough With the Tanks,"
Journal of Convincing People About Space Lasers,
v. 25 n. 6, p. 2234.

When the Cubs suffered a requisite bullpen meltdown in a potentially clinching Game 3 at the hands of Gillaspie (his inhuman, irradiated cries echoing through the park as he spit crushed BART cars from his cheeks), the Even Year narrative gained steam. The Cubs went into a potentially series-clinching game up 2-1 against a team that led against them for something like two innings the whole series and yet it seemed like the Giants would reach for their playoff magic and somehow generate obscure baseball players with sub-.600 OPSes to send the game back to Wrigley Field under a palpable cloud of baseball neurosis.

That nearly happened. The odds of coming back from a three-run deficit in the ninth inning are astronomical. And, though the Cubs are a great baseball team and the Giants sport a historically bad bullpen, the series seemed twisted towards them. Then the Cubs rallied and the Giants sent up pitcher after pitcher to fail to get them out in an assembly line of baseball incompetence. Then the bullshit mojo pendulum swung and suddenly it was the Cubs benefiting from uncharacteristic errors and putting together a historic rally and winning the series in defiance of every narrative of superstition and omen that the baseball's most strident mumbo-jumboists could throw at them.

What remains is baseball. The Cubs still have a series against a very good Dodgers team that has the best pitcher on the face of the Earth. It is very possible that the Cubs get steamrolled or lose in a ludicrous series of events that involves birds or blimp interference or a Jon Lester throwing error that knocks out a bullpen catcher and sparks a massive brawl with sunflower seed buckets and gatorade canisters fashioned into makeshift barricades.

All of these wagon wheels and muskets are still in use by the grounds
crew at Historic Wrigley Field

But the defeat of Even Year Bullshit has, for me, at least, held the goofy baseball fatalism in check. The Cubs are as good as anyone and seem like they'll be contenders for awhile. And should they fall apart this year in a particularly heartbreaking way, then we can all manufacture the Curse of Rich Hill and sell merchandise to the type of people who buy goat masks and L flags.

BOWL ATMOSPHERE

Few Northwestern fans would have guessed the looming road showdown with Michigan State would seem to be a more winnable game than a home test against the suddenly impassible Indiana defense or that the Spartans would be desperate to fight off Northwestern. Perhaps Michigan State will find its form and take out a season's worth of frustrations against the Wildcats. Or maybe Northwestern can strike early and suck the air out of Spartan Stadium as the fans tighten up in anticipation of more disappointment. If they need some discouragement, I have some portents, curses, and general Sports Hokum that I'm not using anymore.

Last week, this website's comprehensive football analytics department crunched the numbers and decided this game would be a low-scoring contest governed by the old slogan "Who Punts Wins." Instead, the 'Cats and Spartans got into an old-fashioned touchdown hootenanny, with Northwestern putting literally more points on Michigan State at home than any other team in history, continuing last game's offensive explosion and sending the reeling Spartans' season into a potentially bowlless death spiral.

The game started sourly with the Spartans' freshman quarterback leading them to a quick score. Then, they capitalized on a quick interception to throw Northwestern in a 14-0. But the Wildcats clawed back as Michigan State defenders could not tackle Justin Jackson, and the defense asserted itself, most notably when Joe Gaziano and Brian Lawerke painstakingly recreated this stirring Samuel L. Jackson monologue scene.

The second half then was, to use a technical football term, completely bonkers. Northwestern's offense, led by Jackson, Clayton Thorson, and emerging star receiver Austin Carr, rampaged through the Spartan defense. Senior quarterback Tyler O'Connor came back into the game and immediately sparked his offense with the Dread Rex Grossman playbook of hucking it up to R.J, Shelton. This worked twice-- once when a well-positioned Godwin Igwebuike inadvertently tipped it to him and another time when Shelton outraced Northwestern's coverage. The Spartans cut the lead to two and then immediately gave up a kickoff return touchdown a zig-zagging Solomon Vault.

Michigan State never got closer. Thorson sealed the game with a fourth-down touchdown pass to Carr, Northwestern held on for their third win, and Big Ten Network technicians powered Matt Millen down and loaded him on the truck for his next appearance where he'll be booted up and ready to explain that in football, you've got to protect the quarterback, right here, on this third down.

54-40

Fifty-four forty or fight, the popular American saber-rattling slogan to claim a large chunk of the Pacific Northwest, is most associated with the James K. Polk's presidential campaign. Though Polk never saw a piece of North American territory that he personally did not want to claim by personally bayoneting people, the slogan itself dates from after his campaign. Polk used different slogans such as "He Will Not Die Almost Instantaneously" and "Let's Annex Texas, They Probably Won't Secede Within 20 Years."

Polk invented a new strategy of hiring speakers to go up to
people on the street, talking about what Henry Clay says
he's for, then screaming WOM and thrusting this picture
into their face

While doing rigorous, scholarly research for this predictable on-brand section, I did come across a bizarre aside in Wikipedia. Whoever edited the article on the Oregon Boundary Dispute felt it was vital to include this information: "Relations were improved when the officers organised a ball at Vancouver on 3 February 1846, later theatrical performances by the ship's crew, including Love in a Village and The Mock Doctor, along with picnics."

Here is how a Wikipedia editor describes The Mock Doctor: "The Mock Doctor: or The Dumb Lady Cur'd was the replacement for The Covent-Garden Tragedy as the companion play to The Old Debauchees."

The play, written by Henry Fielding in 1732 and based on Molière's The Doctor In Spite of Himself, involves a feuding couple where the wife gets revenge on her husband through the oldest trick in English literature-- convincing some footmen that he is a world-class doctor.

The famous beating a man until he admits he's a doctor scene, full text available here

The play involves, as far as I can tell, the main character relishing his quackery and prescribing herbs and bloodlettings and songs and getting involved with a patient's lover who is disguised as an apothecary. If we've learned anything from the Mock Doctor is that the main qualifications in eighteenth-century medicine involve farcical lovers' schemes and elaborate marital revenge plots.

COMES INDIANA THROUGH THE SMOKE

Indiana is good at football. For the past few seasons, Kevin Wilson's team has resembled the old run and gun Wildcats from the Randy Walker era that scored and gave up a million points in games that often came down to the last possession. That's no surprise, since Wilson played a key role on those Northwestern teams. This season, the Hoosiers' offense has fallen off a bit after losing quarterback Nate Sudfeld, and running back Jordan Howard has been cursed to join a profoundly putrid Bears team. Their defense, however has compensated, led by a stingy pass defense that will test Thorson and Carr and made the Hoosiers a tough out for anyone in the Big Ten.

It is impossible to predict this game because Northwestern remains one of the most confounding teams in football. There's no shame in losing to an excellent Western Michigan team, but the results of the season so far look like they can only be explained by Pat Fitzgerald acquiring a monkey's paw. The Wildcats could not move the ball and all of a sudden they are setting records against last year's participants in the Big Ten Championship game. They could not rush the passer and now Ifeadi Odenigbo has been terrorizing quarterbacks with six sacks in the last two games. The secondary remains young and ravaged by injury; the 'Cats may be forced to put the anthropomorphic barbecue sauce bottle from the Wild Wings race in at corner this Saturday.

BASEBALL ON TELEVISION

Playoff baseball is exhilarating, exciting, and nerve-racking. It is also a spectacle of televisual endurance as games stretch past the four-hour mark and drive everyone involved insane. Every few minutes, the game pauses for approximately 17 minutes of uninterrupted commercials. We all know the demographics of baseball favor an older audience; this alone cannot explain why, based on commercials alone, the average baseball consumer is kept alive solely by a complex cocktail of prescription medicines for unnamed diseases except for the infinite varieties of boner medicines, which allow the patients to enjoy outdoor dirty bathtubbing should the other medications effectively tamp down on the poxes, boneitises and mummy curses that afflict all baseball watchers.

The Cubs have been playing on Fox Sports and have therefore unleashed Joe Buck upon a cowering populace. The previous few years have seen a distressing rise in Actually, Joe Buck Is Good thinkpieces. But then here we are in a pivotal Game Five and Jon Lester's on the mound and Joe Buck is here to tell us Lester has a Shermaneque refusal to throw to bases. This is an important strategic note. And then we hear about it again. And another Dodger gets on and they cut to the Jon Lester Lead Cam and they're doing cutaway interviews with every guy who's been on base against Lester this season ("wow, I can't believe he didn't throw to first," says Hernan Perez) and Tim McCarver parachutes into the stadium with a telegram that says "Jon Lester STOP Not Throw to First STOP Not A Lot Of People Know That, Joe STOP" and Fox has hired a singer to go to commercials singing "WILL HE THROW DOWN TO FIRST? WILL HE THROW DOWN TO FIRST? WILL HE THROW IT TO FIRST DON'T THINK HE WILL" and I know this is a production problem and not a Joe Buck problem but Buck's the ringmaster here steering this great, dumb narrative ship and you know he's going to show up at Game Six in full-on Bartman mode knowing he is shielded from crowd-thrown offal by Fox's elite retinue of aggressive football robots.

Jon Lester yelling at first base instead if throwing to it, which, this is an interesting baseball
factoid here, he doesn't do

Fox also has a requisite studio show for former ballplayers to go on television and regurgitate nonsensical sports platitudes at people. The Fox panel is distinguished mainly by the inclusion of genial baseball goblin Pete Rose and Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez spent years as a pariah even before the steroid allegations-- I suspect it was because he came up in an era where hat-wearing columnists still dominated the baseball discourse and demanded that he conduct himself as a bland baseball automaton instead of leaning into the fact that he is a he is a profoundly weird person. If Rodriguez came up now, he'd be free to post all of his centaur paintings to social media that show himself, A-Rod, reared up gloriously on hind legs taking a breaking ball out of the zone instead of going around for nearly two decades coming across as an uncanny valley robot that can only repeat the phrase I AM A NORMAL PERSON. It turns out that A-Rod's shimmering cyberhuman routine translates perfectly to television, where he can showcase his baseball monomania and remain unfazed by Pete Rose floating in and out of frame or pretending he has a hand growing out of his stomach by thrusting an arm through his shirt while yelling "this is my baseball arm, Frank." This whole set up is exactly as dumb as every sports pre- and post-game panel show and considerably less excruciating then the ads for the show where a blow-dried Skip Bayless tries to pretend that yelling a bunch of dumb shit about sports works as gladiatorial combat.

what the fuck is this

WATCH SPORTS ON SATURDAY

Northwestern's season went from looking like a thirteen-week exercise in football depression to a gloriously insane explosion of touchdowns. They put themselves squarely back into bowl contention. Who knows whether we'll see a grinding punt-fest or a track meet on Saturday. But no one is overlooking the Wildcats anymore, that is, unless they all disguise themselves as eighteenth-century apothecaries in an elaborate plan from their revitalized coaching staff. The Chicago Cubs are one win away from the pennant. Nothing in the universe makes any sense.

After two weeks, Northwestern looked doomed to a miserable season of weekly clobberings by even the Big Ten's most abysmal teams. Now, they're 4-2 and sitting in second place in the Big Ten West, their offense has looked at times unstoppable, and they are in a sound position to make a bowl game; none of this seemed possible when an Illinois State field goal bonked off the goalpost, that Northwestern would knock off the admittedly reeling participants in last year's Lucrative Conference Championship Game in simultaneous weeks and spend 30 minutes rampaging against Indiana in a maniacal offensive spree.

The first half of the game, Northwestern mangled the Hoosiers. Clayton Thorson threw over them unchecked. Austin Carr, who leads the Big Ten in every meaningful receiving category, scooted around the defense. The offensive line flattened the defense for Justin Jackson to run over them, and the Wildcats raced out to a 24-3 halftime lead.

After halftime, though, Indiana's defense reappeared. They shut out Northwestern and the Wildcats spent the entire time desperately clinging to a shrinking lead. Hoosier linemen who spent the first half driven into the turf now walled off Jackson's running lines; defensive backs flummoxed by the receivers now found themselves in better positions.

As Indiana narrowed the gap, the Wildcats defense managed to stop them on numerous fourth downs and with turnovers. Montre Hardage ripped a ball from a Hoosier receiver. Kyle Queiro, with one hand encased in a protective club, leaped up and made a one-handed interception that might be the single greatest individual defensive play I've ever seen from a Northwestern player with a club hand, claw hand, or hook hand that he uses to spear interceptions and appear suddenly in the back seat of cars.

Who knows what shifted in halftime to make Northwestern's offense go from an unstoppable touchdown machine to a broken-down touchdown machine heaving exhaust and barfing oil at its own 35-yard-line in the second half. But Northwestern will need its best offensive performance to keep the pressure on the looming ogre of the Big Ten this weekend.

BUCKEYE RECKONING

Northwestern has bullied its last three Big Ten opponents, but now they have to go face big, bad Ohio State in the Horseshoe. The last time these two teams met was during a primetime ESPN Gameday showdown in Evanston, as the ranked Wildcats faced off against the Buckeyes in a Football Apocalypse. That did not end well. Northwestern stayed in the game, but lost even though Kain Colter got that first down and I have been passing out hastily-xeroxed literature about it at Ryan Field weekly ever since to spread awareness of the vast refereeing conspiracy that meets by flickering torchlight, an ancient order that has been denying crucial first downs to generations of Colters. After that game, the Wildcats spiraled into a ludicrous string of misfortunes that all blend together in a montage of ill-timed interceptions, overtimes, hail marys, and footballs adversely bouncing into a sea of opponent arms as the Wildcats plummeted from undefeated and ranked into a melancholy bowl-bereft winter.

Now, Ohio State is coming off its first loss of the season, a shocking upset at the hands of Penn State. There are two ways this can affect the Buckeyes. It is possible that Penn State, and a Wisconsin team that had taken them to overtime the week before, have shown some weaknesses in what appeared to be an unstoppable juggernaut on the way to the playoff. On the other hand, the loss may have refocused the team and whipped them into a football frenzy, with the entire organization from the Athletic Director to the coaching staff to the towel-wrangling student managers unwilling to contemplate anything other than defeating Northwestern and slipping into Jon Gruden's Disease where they are unable to express anything without slipping into a bizarre football argot.

GRUDEN: THAT'S WHY WHAT YOU'VE GOT TO DO RIGHT THERE IS GO SCATTER TWO
BUNCH RIGHT ZIP FIRE TWO JET TEXAS RIGHT OF FLAT X-Q IN THIS
PARTICULAR SITUATION UNLESS OF COURSE YOU CAN AUDIBLE TO THE
HOT GUY RIGHT THERE AND SEND HIM ZEPHYR GORGON 14 SEVEN MARK
THREE Z IF YOU SEE THEM IN ZONE COVERAGE.
GROCERY CLERK: Sir, the question was is this your signature

Northwestern has not beaten Ohio State since 2004. They have not beaten Ohio State in Columbus since 1971 because their plan has disappeared.

Last known image of the man entrusted with Northwestern's
plans to win football games in Columbus

The Buckeyes will be heavy favorites in this game. Northwestern still remains inconsistent and still relies on young defensive backs learning on the fly. Ohio State still remains a national championship contender while Northwestern fans will be delighted with a berth in the A1 Refurbished Ball Bearing Bowl, and the Buckeyes' roster is filled with Mr. Footballs and All-Americans and future NFL stars. But this is college football where the inevitable occasionally yields to the jubilantly improbable.

ALPHA SEASON

The Bulls season is on the horizon after a complete rebuild of the team. Gar Forman and John Paxson built the team using the vaunted Guys You've Heard Of blueprint to bring in a hobbling Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, whose basketball career has devolved into something like the TV show Kung Fu except he wanders the Earth seeking assists and moves on after he's alienated everyone on the team. It should be remarkably entertaining because it has been designed for disaster perfectly, like the first part of the monster movie.

A million basketblogging Goldblums simultaneously uh um huh hey
the Three Alphas problem and next thing you know, Hoiberg is running for
his life through a United Center kitchen and complaining about minutes
and touches

Rondo nicknamed himself, Wade, and Bulls star Jimmy Butler the Three Alphas, and I can't think of a better nickname for the inevitable way this team will collapse upon itself. It's poetic. It's a Greek Tragedy. There hasn't been a better nickname-as-mechanism for destruction since some jabroni swingman would call himself the Jordan Stopper and then get violently dunked upon and tongue-wagged and probably forced to endure some other heretofore unknown form of insane Jordan vengeance like him hiring a team of evil psychologists to disguise themselves as sports therapists and convince the erstwhile Jordan Stopper to unearth some memory of a childhood fear like of clowns or bats or clown-bats and then break into his house as a clown-bat and then use that moment of terror to hustle him at some exotic, illegal except in international waters gambling game.

Jordan Stopper Gerald Wilkins was last seen
cleaned out on a cruise ship in a complex card game
called Purser's Rummy

The team's strong-willed personalities combined with a coach who seems like he calls people a "grumpy gus" are not the only problems with the Bulls. Their style of play remains completely and utterly mystifying. While the NBA's successful teams trend towards utilizing space and shooting, the Bulls have three ball-dominant guards who like to slash to the basket or, in the case of Rondo, refuse to shoot without a resolution from the UN Security Council. The Bulls plan to play retrograde anti-basketball, where their best hope to stop the other team will be to so aesthetically offend them that they walk off the court in a fit of disbelief, like the likely exaggerated stories of people storming out of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at the premier of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The Bulls doubled down on this philosophy by trading Tony Snell for Michael Carter-Williams, a long-limbed brick artist. The Bulls' best shooter will be Doug McDermott, who defends as if he has just been dropped in a Running Man situation and has no idea that Professor Sub Zero is coming after him with a sharpened hockey stick.

D-Wade mean muggin'... pic.twitter.com/RfGICgRf32
— Steve Noah (@Steve_OS) October 28, 2016

(I wrote this all before the Bulls rode an insanely hot-shooting Wade
against the Boston Celtics and Wade uncorked the meanest non-Garnett
mug anyone in the NBA has seen and now I'm all in on the Three Alphas)

The Bulls' top players are talented enough to make the playoffs in the abysmal Eastern Conference. Even if they remain relatively cohesive, even if they aren't sniping at each other through bloggers aligned with each Alphas' camp, even if Fred Hoiberg hasn't been driven back to Iowa into the welcoming arms of seed magnate boosters, even if Rondo hasn't become so toxic that he is being introduced at the United Center in one of those Hannibal Lecter masks, the future of the Bulls is uncertain. They have a few promising young players, several not particularly promising young players and Butler under contract for the next four years. The Bulls are not set up to win anything in the near future, but the Three Alphas era should give us some memorably hideous basketball and intrigue from the reliably dysfunctional front office to entertain us through the entire miserable winter.

UPSET SEASON

It's a weekend of upsets as Northwestern attempts to change the season from delightful surprise to shocking West contender. There's been a lot of work by sports analysts to take the guesswork out of sports as analytics has moved from the basement to million-dollar front offices. But unpredictability remains the bedrock of sports-- I'm sure every stat in the universe has Northwestern getting drawn and quartered by the Buckeyes, but who knows? Maybe they can pull off a ridiculous upset. It's not the only improbable Chicago sports scenario. Maybe the Three Alphas can get past their bizarre, retrograde basketball stylings and fight through the front office meddling to become a factor in the East. And maybe the Cubs can somehow pull off an upset against the larger forces of the universe and win a World Series how am I typing this sentence.

Northwestern headed into Ohio State with an overwhelming losing streak in Columbus. The last time the Wildcats won in Columbus was 1971, when Woody Hayes was at the height of his terrifying powers, able to infiltrate his players' subconscious and force them to do hamburger drills in their dreams. Since then, Ohio State has remained on a more or less continuous rampage through the Big Ten while Northwestern's football team spent the late 70s and 80s aerating their and their opponents' fields by getting repeatedly pile-driven through them.

Northwestern's success in 1971 came from the
unorthodox tactic of punting enormous, blimp-sized
footballs at opponents and then tackling them in the
ensuing confusion

The Wildcats came into the game as heavy underdogs, but this is not the same team that got the Fatal Doink from Illinois State. Clayton Thorson seems to grow by leaps and bounds each week. Justin Jackson remains one of the Big Ten's best backs, and what we get to see each week from Austin Carr is nothing short of astonishing. They gave the Buckeyes all they could handle and managed to pull level. Unfortunately, they could not topple Ohio State. A holding penalty took away an opportunity to tie the game and Fitz settled for a field goal. I did not watch the game live, so instead I followed the end of the game on the ESPN GameCenter website where I then watched little arrows representing JT Barrett gallivant across my phone over Northwestern's digital defenders while the clock ran down to nothing on every clumsy refresh. It was an impressive effort, but it was not enough. The streak was not broken.

A loss is a loss to Ohio State by four or by forty; that’s what it goes by in the books no matter how close the Wildcats came to unleashing a dejected Horseshoe full of Buckeyes unable to fathom what has just happened and a million unhinged message board demands to fire at least one coordinator and send photographic breakdowns of uncalled holding penalties on the next Pioneer satellite so that aliens would have clear understanding of how illegal it is for the guy to have his hand right up in that jersey jesus christ throw the goddamn flag.

FORTRESS WILDCAT

The Wisconsin Badgers have not won in Evanston since 1999. They have not. They have they have won Big Ten Championships, they have sent waves of running backs and beefy tackles over the prone bodies of Big Ten opponents and they have garlanded themselves in roses and every single time this this century that they have come to Ryan Field they have lost the football game and this is the funniest and strangest streak in all of college sports.

The streak is misleading because Northwestern and Wisconsin have only played four games in Evanston since 1999. Still, pretty much every year they've played the Badgers have come in ranked higher than Northwestern and with a retinue of red-clad fans streaming in from the city and down I-94 to take over the stadium and with AP rankings and they still manage to lose close games and it is way more fun to crow about sparsely-played win streaks such as a two-game streak over Notre Dame that dates back to 1995 or a dominant streak over the University of Chicago that dates to 1926 although that was the last time they played and since then Chicago disbanded their football program and left the Big Ten and then revived it as a DIII program. You never know if there is an aged Maroon football player so incensed at Northwestern's Chicago's Big Ten Team billboards that he launches a coup against the Chicago administration and secretly brings the team back to Big Ten contention with an army of cloned Maroon greats like Andy "Polyphemus" Wyatt.

"Polyphemus" Wyatt Mk. VII, his mustache now even
larger and more resplendent, burrows up from the
earth outside Ryan Field with an army of leather-helmeted
clones and a crew of painters stationed at key billboard
locations on the Tri-State Tollway

Wisconsin comes in ranked eight in the country and desperate for revenge after last year's insane game where the Wildcats benefited from delightfully ludicrous officiating. Paul Chryst, I am sure, would like to win decisively enough where a referee that accidentally ingests psilocybin mushrooms and then fancies himself Crimson Ump, the Taker of Touchdowns will have minimal effect.

Northwestern is somehow a far better team than they were at the beginning of the season. Though Wisconsin is favored, they will still have to figure out how to deal with Thorson and Austin Carr. Still, Wisconsin is an excellent team with designs still on the Western Division. The home win streak, as delightfully bizarre as it is, can't hold out forever, especially now that they play in Evanston every other year. But, the Wildcats certainly have the team to upset Wisconsin again, and one more win is more than enough to declare some sort of contrived bullshit curse over the whole enterprise.

THE CUBS WON THE DANGED WORLD SERIES

It is fitting that last night’s game took place under the watch of Joe Buck, baseball’s Grim Reaper, determined to remind everyone about the cavalcade of people these flailing teams had seen to the grave during their long championship droughts. A robed Joe Buck presided over Fox’s organ music, over graphics about milk prices and historical events, over an army of grasping, rotted skeletons as his face melted into a flaming skull, his unearthly cackling interrupted only by a quick primer on Jon Lester’s inability to throw to first.

Fox loads another jittering newsreel from Olden Times as Joe Buck cackles
maniacally over B-roll of coffins, crypts, and cemeteries

The Cubs had spent the entire playoffs manhandled by Cleveland’s pitching, particularly Corey Kluber, Cody Allen, and Andrew Miller, the loose-limbed lefty who had been so unhittable in the playoffs that the announcers had begun to allude to him like he was some dread scourge from over the hills even though he looks like a scruffy human muppet. Miller and Allen lurked in every game like the monsters from medieval maps, and every team knew that as soon as the Indians had the lead, their bullpen arms would come in and slowly squeeze the outs out of them in the most demoralizing way possible.

The Map of Cubs Playoff Baseball Pitching Creatures includes Kluber, Miller, Allen, Bumgarner,
Matt Moore, Rich Hall, and Theoretically Clayton Kershaw

In Game Seven, the Cubs finally got to them: they hammered Kluber, and when the Dread Scourge Andrew Miller came in, the Cubs’ grizzled Mendoza Line catcher who had been violently head-bonked by an errant Lester cutter in the top half of the inning launched a dinger to straight away center. There's something about playoff baseball that does not only involve hitting, pitching, and bullying a nebbishy fan into going into witness protection; if it does not, as we as rational people know, involve communion with some sort of unholy forces, the pressure packed games do everything they can to simulate that feeling. And with these two miserable, exhausted catastrophist fanbases, the forces swirling over Progressive Field appeared to be the baseball equivalent of the green mist from the DeMille Ten Commandments.

The Cubs, who had seized control of the game from the Cleveland Arm Hydra, seemed about to cruise to victory. Then, things took a turn. Joe Posnanski once referred to Tony La Russa as "the Mozart of overmanagers," but Maddon's bullpen theatrics rated at least a Salieri. He quickly pulled Kyle Hendricks for Lester and then put an overworked Aroldis Chapman on the mound. Chapman, shaky and gumby-armed, gave up a dramatic two-run homer to that base-stealing slap hitter Rajai Davis that flew over the fence in left field and then split into subatomic baseball particles to lodge themselves in the panic center of Cubs fans' guts. This was it. The Pandora's Box of Cub Playoff Failures had opened and there were goats and cats and Alex S. Gonzalezes rampaging all over the field preparing to drag the greatest Cubs team we are likely to ever see down out of Progressive Field and into Fox Baseball Tragedy B Roll for future playoff appearances.

And then it was Cleveland's turn to knot their stomachs and clutch at their Omar Vizquel autobiography, The Institgation of Vigilante Beanballism, and watch the Cubs snag two more runs in the inning. But it was World Series Hero Rajai Davis coming up with another RBI to halve the lead, and the giant rat mascot from the 1908 World Series burrowed up from center field, spitting poison on the thousands of Cubs fans in the stands. Finally, Mike Montgomery induced a ground ball, the Contrived Curse of Someone Named Rocky Covalito We're Really Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel Here roared and the Cubs won the goddamned World Series in an amazing game designed to kill remaining fans of the Cubs and Indians that had not already died of natural causes during their championship droughts.

I can't believe it either

The result of this ludicrous baseball ordeal is that the Cubs finally won a World Series. Whatever miserable mumbo-jumboism fueled the hysterical Cubs pessimism is gone, the dread accompanying every playoff appearance no longer exists, and the morbid misery accompanying every strikeout and double play grounder and awful only the Cubs could do this error has been banished for at least the next 25 years. Now they are merely a wealthy, well-run team set up to contend for the near future and almost certainly become widely loathed in the process. Thank goodness.

They were weeping in Madison on Saturday, fans hugging their older relatives and long-time supporters gathering outside Camp Randall Stadium as their Badgers finally managed to knock off the Northwestern Wildcats in Evanston for the first time since 1999, a streak that spans over four entire football games.

The streets of Madison are red in celebration of the long-awaited twenty-
first-century win at Ryan Field

The Badgers dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball; their running backs galloped across the field and kept their rotating carousel of quarterbacks relatively unscathed, and their defense held Justin Jackson in check. Still, Northwestern remained within striking distance largely because of Austin Carr's remarkable transformation into an unstoppable receiving force who was still hauling in balls long after it became apparent that he was the Wildcats' only option and the Badgers were draping defenders on him and hastily trying to build medieval fortifications around him and then hustle the guys with shovels and mortar and the field engineers with parchment blueprints off the field before suffering from an illegal substitution penalty.

Wisconsin's playbook shows its halftime adjustments for defending
Austin Carr, who finished with 12 receptions for 132 yards, a touchdown,
and a claim to the County of Rapperswil

After facing two top-ten teams in a row, Northwestern settles down to the task at hand: winning at least two of the three remaining games to qualify for a bowl game sponsored by a company that will be defunct within three years and, far more importantly, retaining the Hat from rookie head coach Lovie Smith, who has never coached in a game with higher stakes or more national attention. This is after the Illini reportedly retreated from holding its home hat games at Soldier Field, terrified of playing Chicago's Big Ten Team in Chicago in front of last year's showing of dozens of fans. The move also alleviates a concern that Smith would go into a Soldier Field-induced trance where he would continually attempt to send Rex Grossman into the game until an Illini quarterback would have to stuff his cheeks, throw on a number eight jersey, and huck the ball up into triple coverage enough times to prevent Smith from seeing a Brian Urlacher hair billboard and suffering a complete psychological collapse.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

This week, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany announced that the Big Ten will move a selected slate of games to Friday evenings. The move is controversial; Fridays remain associated with high school football, as demonstrated by the television show where catalog models stare at each other, lips quivering, declaring “I ‘preciate that.”

The Big Ten will move to Friday nights as an imitation of the NFL’s strategy of putting football games on at bizarre, unnatural times and then being shocked that no one is watching a Rutgers/Purdue game that they would know was on only if Jim Delany pulled up the Big Ten’s official hot rod to their door and personally implored them to watch it. Northwestern will play in all of these games.

The August Michigan Wolverines will not play on Friday nights because they would never stand for that; you would have a mitchum-scented mob seizing Ann Arbor printing presses to flood the city with strongly-worded open letters and pamphlets entitled “It’s Simply Not Done.” No, Friday night is for the Wildcats and the unwanted East Coast Big Ten arrivistes and will be played only for desperate, grasping attempts to qualify for the Ornamental Truck Testicle Bowl played at the immediate conclusion of the participants’ final game to get it over with as quickly as possible.

The solution, then, is to lean into the change and declare the Northwestern Nightmen the official team of Friday football. The Wildcats, traveling to away games in a purple hearse with blackout windows to keep out the 11:00 AM sun, bursting forth from coffins during pregame introductions by Chicago horror movie personality Svengoolie, all to an endless soundtrack of Dio and haunting monster mashes, will hijack the trucks that contain the stadium lights that the school will now need for all of its games and involve it in arcane Night Rituals. Delany can announce this to Pat Fitzgerald personally, assuming he can locate him in the attic of the disused gothic church where he now lives.

The Vincent Priceman prepare for Friday Night Football

THE MOST IMPORTANT GAME OF THE YEAR

The Northwestern-Purdue game is always a favorite to preview because it’s close to the platonic ideal of a shitty, 11:00 Big Ten game broadcast onto television reluctantly like a terrible sitcom on air only because of the CBC’s Canadian content laws. This game has no meaning, will attract no attention outside of these small fanbases, and by 2:30 pm it might as well not have existed. You could send a fake box score from West Lafayette to any national media outlet in the country and they would print it without scrutiny, even if it said that the Northwestern Wildebeests were led by Claybon Thrognoggin and scored most of their points via incantation. This game rules.

Exciting football action from last year's game

This year, Purdue actually has intrigue. Darrell Hazell was fired for leading his Boilermarkers into an abyss of football futility, and now the Purdue athletic department looks for its next coach by waiting for a clack to echo through the night, for a track that appears through town that no one knew was there, and for a solitary steam engine to pull up with its new savior who arrives with a spread offense and a blond mustache so resplendent that it cascades down from his mouth and turns into an all-weather Purdue parka.

Purdue should just hire Kyle Orton and let him live on a houseboat on the
Wabash River

For most people, even the most degenerate college football fans, this game, as it exists at all, takes place as two numbers at the very bottom of a scroll through a college football scores app. Maybe Minnesota and Illinois fans take a glance and recalibrate their own chances against Northwestern. But this game will take place. With uniforms and everything. As we talk, coaching staffs are gathered in their elaborate cargo shorts conclaves and watching film on the flesh and blood humans who are about to play football at Ross Ade stadium. And I'll be watching to see if Justin Jackson can rebound and continue his climb up Northwestern's all-time rushing list, if Austin Carr can continue to blight defensive backs, and if the Wildcats' secondary can contain Big Ten yardage leader and Purdue Institute of Scrappy Quarterbacking graduate David Blough.

For Northwestern, a win in the first Big Ten game in which they are favored will set them up to potentially qualify for a bowl with another win or potentially by taking advantage of unchecked bowl proliferation to sneak in as a 5-7 team, which is something so Northwestern that I can't believe it has not already happened. For Purdue, a win alleviates somewhat the general atmosphere of football malaise hanging around the program, which has not seen more than three wins in a season during the Hazell era. These are the stakes for a Northwestern-Purdue game, which is less played than inflicted upon people to the point that the teams should play for a trophy called the Big Ten Network Contractual Obligation Oh Wait It's The Big Ten, This Is Now William Henry Harrison's Snuff Box.

The outcomes of sporting events remain profoundly trivial. But even in our insane world where sporting operations suck in unfathomable gobs of money and attention, where taxpayers subsidize massive arenas for billionaire owners and universities have somehow become bolted onto sports leagues that protect the athletes' links to the schools by enforcing ludicrously elaborate text message codes and assign grim-faced investigators to allegations of selling game-worn pants and where the Cubs can win a baseball game and send people sprawled teary-eyed into the arms of their relatives and to consecrate graveyards with officially-licensed World Series merchandise, it is hard to explain why anyone should care about the upcoming Northwestern-Purdue game. It has no bearing on The Title Picture or the Playoff Rankings or the Big Ten West or take place at a Stadium With People In It. It is extraneous football. And I'll be watching every minute.

I remember a time when Purdue cut a reign of terror through the Big Ten, when Purdue regularly sent its quarterbacks to the NFL instead of to SEC teams as ghoulish Big Ten specters, when the mustaches were blond and resplendent on the sidelines like an army of Bounty Men ordering a neverending bombardment of touchdowns while Purdue Pete taunted the opposition with his blank homicide face. That was not that long ago.

Everything Purdue Pete does is disturbing and threatening

But recent years have not been kind to the Purdue Boilermakers who have devolved into a pit of forlorn football ineptitude. The pit is not metaphorical. Earlier this season, a burst water main caused the formation of a large sinkhole in the Ross Ade endzone, as reported by a twitter account described as "The Official Twitter of the Purdue University Intercollegiate Athletics Sports Turf Crew."

pic.twitter.com/VmK3GkOnXY
— Purdue Sports Turf (@PUSportsTurf) October 4, 2016

It was as if Purdue's own stadium had grown sentient, preferring to devour itself instead of bearing witness to the miserable football perpetuated against it, against long-suffering Purdue fans, and against the various interim personnel haplessly watching mediocre teams treat Purdue like sports movie winning streak montage opponents.

The strange thing about the Boilermakers is that they have not played up to their bumbling reputation. They have started games strong and have taken leads to halftime. They leaped to a 10-0 lead against Northwestern on Saturday, and they took close games to halftime against Minnesota and Penn State. Then, it all falls apart. The most foreboding site for Purdue has not been another member of the injury-ravaged roster limping to the sidelines or former coach Darrell Hazell attempting to draw up another ineffectual play with a puzzled look; it is the chilling thump of the World's Largest Drum unleashed during a halftime spectacle to signal the impeding doom of the Dread Second Half.

Normal football fans have pointed to Purdue's injuries and lack of depth for its second-half descent into the abyss. What I like to imagine, though, is that it is completely due to interim coach Gerad Parker's halftime speeches. Parker, perhaps wearing a false blond mustache, walks into the locker room before the game screaming football things at them about clear eyes and full hearts and they go out inspired to football greatness. Then, at halftime, Parker attempts to rally the squad but he starts sweating and screaming before finally a larval Purdue Pete bursts forth from his chest and scuttles into the air ducts and then when David Blough rears back to throw he thinks he sees the creature incubating in the very football he is holding and is forced to repeatedly throw it to Montre Hartage.

BIG TEN FOOTBALL ACTION

The Wildcats will travel to Minnesota to take on the Golden Gophers, desperate to get that sixth win and claim a crappy bowl berth like the third son of a dynasty bumbling into a minor bishopric. The Gophers lost their opportunity to contend for the Big Ten West after falling to Nebraska and now jockey to move up the arbitrary hierarchy of also-ran bowls.

Last year, the Wildcats pounded Minnesota. They were unable to run the ball, and Anthony Walker terrorized quarterback Mitch Leidner into throwing footballs like they had been replaced by lead football sculptures. Northwestern inched over the field on a drive that took almost the entire third quarter. This year, the Gophers look for revenge with an improved team with a tough defense and fearsome running back Rodney Smith, the Big Ten touchdown leader.

But the Gophers will also have to deal with Austin Carr. Yes, Carr was on last year's Northwestern team. He recorded one catch for fourteen yards in last year's Minnesota game. This season, though, Carr has seemingly come out of nowhere and emerged as the best receiver in the conference. Carr has already tied Jeremy Ebert's single-season touchdown record, and he leads the Big Ten in every major receiving category. Carr, along with an improving Thorson, has helped transform Northwestern's offense from a lurching tank designed to throw Justin Jackson at the defensive line long enough for the defense to rest and attain punting position to an actual threat to move the ball.

Northwestern's 2015 offense practices its offensive system known as the "pre-punt"

The Gophers are favored, but these teams appear evenly-matched. The Wildcats hope to head back to Evanston garlanded in Belks.

BASKETBALL SEASON

Northwestern's basketball season is here and so is heartbreak. The 'Cats lost to a buzzer-beater against Butler, and suffered an early blow against the eternal and seemingly-impossible quest to actually make a postseason tournament. Northwestern basketball exists in an endless continuum of buzzer-beaters, overtime losses, and last-second putbacks in every game that they play against an opponent that is not leaving Welsh-Ryan arena with a suitcase full of cash for getting violently dunked on for 40 minutes.

The Wildcats graduated stalwarts Tre Demps and Alex Olah who now play together as noted by the greatest sentence ever written about Northwestern basketball: "Olah joins his former Northwestern shooting guard Demps on Belfius Mons-Hainaut, which plays in the Belgium Scooore! League." (It should be noted that the Scooore! League is now known as the Euromillions Basketball League, which is slightly less delightful).

Belfius Mons-Hainaut's mascot, Le Renard Clip Art

This basketball season will be the final one at Welsh-Ryan arena before it undergoes renovations. The team will move to the empty, desolate All State Arena for a year and move back into a disappointingly opulent arena, resplendent in video boards and actual seats and this is terrible. Welsh-Ryan Arena is a gloriously dilapidated barn, and the only renovations allowed should be to add side backboards like an elementary school gymnasium and a cage from which spectators can hang and taunt the opponents like you'd find in any respectable thunderdome. They should redecorate the arena only if Northwestern qualifies for the tournament and then the whole thing should be decorated with elaborate friezes depicting the team's glorious entry to the four-team quasi-Tournament by dint of winning a second game in the Big Ten Tournament forcing all of Indianapolis to cower before the might of its zone defense.

Northwestern's renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena includes a much-sought cage ticket and
complimentary chainsaw check

INEVITABLE NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL SCANDAL

Anyone who follows college sports does so with clenched teeth waiting for the inevitable scandal because college sports are an insanely corrupt enterprise propped up by a shocking gulf in compensation between the players and the institutions that profit from the spectacle. The whole thing is orchestrated by the NCAA, which polices this tension by drawing up hundreds of pages of guidelines about the exact hours which maniacal coaches can text emojis at teenagers. So it is inevitable that this system that remains a vestige of nineteenth-century mustache guys literally stomping each other to death on football fields leads to shit that can best be described as fucked up.

This week, former Northwestern basketball player Johnnie Vassar sued the school, alleging that basketball coach Chris Collins and the entire athletic department pressured and harassed him into leaving the team after the NCAA rules prevented him from transferring. The complaint argues that Collins, who recruited Vassar, felt he was not good enough to play on the team and wanted him to give up his athletic scholarship and accept an academic scholarship so the school could use it on a different recruit.

The lawsuit alleges that Northwestern tried several ways to get get Vassar to relinquish the athletic scholarship: by replacing his practices with something called the "Wildcat Intern Program" that involved menial janitorial work at athletic facilities, by crudely doctoring his time cards to threaten him with dereliction of duties as a means to yanking the scholarship, and by informally offering a cash payment to "go away."

Northwestern has denied the allegations.

Vassar's lawsuit also attacks the NCAA's transfer rules, which prevented him from moving to a different school. The Tribune's Teddy Greenstein explains the reasoning behind the NCAA's restrictive transfer policy at the end of the article [italics mine]:

NCAA transfer rules exist to discourage schools from "poaching" players from other programs. Schools put in a considerable amount of time and money to recruit players, so the feeling has been that their investment should be protected. Plus coaches believe that if a player can simply leave and immediately play elsewhere when he or she faces adversity or tough coaching, it promotes a bad life lesson.

This last part raises eyebrows considering that successful coaches often leave for more attractive jobs without warning on train cars specifically designed to ferry them out of the town that they have paid for with the giant canvas sacks full of money with which they are compensated.

The Vassar lawsuit's allegations are disturbing. The legal process is ponderous, and we don't know if a court will find that Northwestern's pressure on Vassar to transfer was as grotesque as the methods listed in the complaint.

Collins desperately wants to get Northwestern to the Tournament, and has method includes an aggressive approach to his roster. His arrival saw the departure of numerous walk-ons and players recruited by Carmody to pave the way for players that fit his system. But the Vassar lawsuit shows that, even ignoring the troubling allegations of payoffs and internship time card frameups, Collins is willing to move on from his own recruits just as easily if he doesn't feel they will get him to March Madness.

To me, the appeal of Northwestern athletics has always been its obscurity. The stakes remain low: desperate attempts to qualify for low-rent bowls, a defining failure to make it to a tournament that allows an ever-increasing number of entrants, and the howling from opponents of far more historically successful teams shamed into losing to a team whose most visible fanbase is tarps. I had thought that these low stakes could shield Northwestern from the worst of the NCAA's inherent bullshit not because Northwestern is any less corrupt any other school with major sports programs but because the ruthless recruiting and rostering shell games that are absurd enough in the quest for national championships become unabashedly ludicrous when they apply to a team whose greatest recent success involves disdainfully refusing to play in the CBI.

Of course that is naive and stupid. For Chris Collins and the athletic department, bowls, Hats, and downmarket basketball tournaments that weave perilously in and out of existence are not enough. Collins seems to think that his management of scholarships will help him win. As we've found from the fallout from the football union, the NCAA's byzantine restrictions infect every instance of big-money college sports. Historical crappiness cannot save you.

There is one week left of Northwestern football and the Wildcats are out of time. Either beat a putrid Illinois team and qualify for the Wattle Farms Chicken Gizzard Remainder Bowl or fall apart, a hatless husk of a team forced to try to shamefully sneak into the Harvester Combine Injury Bowl with a 5-7 record, only allowed into postseason play by dint of their Academic Progress Rate like Dolph Lundgren sneaking into the lead of a 1990s action movie called Viscount Cop only after Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, Snipes, Willis, Gibson, and even Emilio Estevez have turned it down and it will only be released on special Bulgarian region DVD players.

What is the plot of my fictional Dolph Lundgren Viscount Cop move? I'm
glad you asked. Dolph Lundgren stars as a sheltered aristocrat brought up
with courtly, nineteenth-century manners who joins the police to track down
a tough, Habsburgh-themed motorcycle gang on the streets of New York City
where only his knowledge of fencing and post-Metternich diplomacy can
stop them while his wisecracking partner assimilates him in what the person
writing a Viscount Cop movie would imagine that hip, New York culture is

The 'Cats are reduced to this after a poor showing in Minnesota. Clayton Thorson spent the entire game in a football version of the Running Man, as various Buzz Saws and Professors Sub-Zero sacked him in a house of bloodthirsty gopher worship. Pat Fitzgerald decided to abandon his kneejerk football traditionalism and go for it on fourth down repeatedly. These plays did not work, but we have possibly seen the emergence of a new Fitzgerald, one who goes for it on fourth down, one who occasionally takes it more than one game at a time, and one who joins with other Big Ten coaches in the Society of Slightly Less Punting and shows up with frosted buzzcut tips, BASE jumping anecdotes, and motorcycle jousting injuries.

Kirk Ferentz appears at a press conference to discuss going for it on fourth and two from Iowa's
36 yardline.

Northwestern caps off a bizarre season. After the loss to Western Michigan and the demoralizing collapse against Illinois State, the Wildcats seemed on target for a bleak, Purdue-esque tribute to football miserablism. Instead, Northwestern rallied, developed a prolific and at times unstoppable offense centered on Austin Carr, and started winning games in the Big Ten/ They even managed to give probable division champions Ohio State and Wisconsin a hard time. The Wildcats could be described as better than you think, although in the given "you" of college football fandom, the baseline seems to be successfully showing up to football games on time and calling at least one recognizable play. Instead, the tough loss to Minnesota shattered that illusion and the Wildcats have returned to their traditional Thanksgiving position: desperately hoping to keep the Hat and qualify for Amalgamated Bleacher Tarp Bowl located in a floating island in the middle of the Great Lakes accessible only by garbage scow. After the first two games, this represents a remarkable turnaround and a tribute to the team's resilience.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

The last time these two teams met in America's Greatest Sports Rivalry with bowl eligibility represented the apotheosis of the Northwestern-Illinois game. Two 5-6 teams met with it all on the line: either a berth in a crappy bowl game against a Conference USA team or football oblivion with no bloated glut of bowl games and 5-7 APR bullshit to bail them out. That maniac Tim Beck Man was still in charge of the Illini, and he took advantage of an injury to Northwestern's superstar NFL quarterback Trevor Siemian to lead Illinois to an unthinkable victory that still chills Chicago's Big Ten Bones.

The Illini's first season under Lovie Smith has had growing pains. Illinois's only Big Ten wins are Michigan State in full collapse and a Rutgers team that is offering the exact amount of resistance towards its conference foes as a henchman in the movie Commando.

This henchman meets one of the dozens of gruesome ends he and his comrades all played by
the same stuntman will meet at the hand of John Matrix

Illinois currently nurses a quarterback controversy between Wes Lunt, who has been in Champaign-Urbana long enough to qualify for tenure, and Literally Jeff George Junior. Northwestern is favored, at home, and will play in front of a sellout hat-thirsty crowd, many of whom will comes disguised as empty bleachers. The status of Northwestern's superstar receiver (and Biletnikoff Award finalist) Austin Carr is up in the air; Carr left last week's came after a head-to-head shot ruled targeting and is listed as day to day with an upper-body injury, although Pat Fitzgerald would also describe the National Convention as voting to inflict an upper-body injury upon Louis XVI.

But throw out the record books. It is Hat Week, it is Big Ten Network Regional Coverage, and nothing would give Lovie Smith and the probably two other Illinois players I can name off the top of my head a better Thanksgiving than to mercilessly yank the hat from the Wildcats' heads and drag it back to Champaign in a bus that Tim Beckman had specially designed to hold the Hat to transport it to and from Beckman family functions.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

It is a sad confession that the Hat Game has lost some its hat luster over the past couple of years. This is the second consecutive year with a new Illini coach. Lovie Smith has not had years to marinate in the spectacle of the Land of Lincoln Rivalry: the parades, the endless media attention, the jawing on the state-wide sports talk radio between fanbases whose trash-talking is based on the relative margin of defeat to Western Michigan.

It is also the second year of the post-Beckman era, and if Illinois fans are not going to get on the internet and become as semi-ironically obsessed with the Hat as I am the least they can do is get rid of the frustratingly levelheaded Lovie Smith and hire another insane head coach who looks like he would never appear on television on Thanksgiving weekend unless he was a victim of a deep-fried turkey incident or giant inflatable pilgrim mishap with a pathological obsession with beating Northwestern.

Perhaps Lovie Smith, an icon of unflappable cool in his days with the Bears where he had to be transported around town in a Popemobile to prevent 300-pound mustache guys from screaming at him about Rex Grossman, will snap and become unhinged in the pressure of winning this great College Football Rivalry Game. Maybe he will become the victim of an insane Face/Off incident where Beckman, now disguised as Smith, attempts to retake the Hat by force before escaping in a blimp while Smith has to feign ignorance of hamstring injuries in order to infiltrate Beckman's gang of rogue, fired football coaches.

Hat/Off

I hope that the rivalry has not already climaxed with a crappy bowl elimination game masterminded by the only coach on the face of the earth capable of caring enough about Northwestern to hate it. Maybe Lovie Smith will bring about an Illini football renaissance which, along with a Northwestern team that has remained semi-respectable in the Fitz era, will allow for a game with Big Ten West implications. Failing that, the dream remains a game between the two teams when they are decent at the same time, which as far as I can tell has never happened.

Or maybe the Hat Rivalry just needs a bit more egregious dick kicking.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

It all comes down to this. The pageantry, the rivalry, the all-engrossing spectacle enveloping Chicagoland as these two titans of the Big Ten clash for the 110th time at Ryan Field. There's a bowl berth on the line for Northwestern. There's an emergence of hope at stake for the Illini. And most importantly, there's the Hat, carried off the field by the victorious team, with a giant metal tophat installed on the Art Institute lions and a mysterious light emanating from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library from a secret chamber that is said to be the source of the Hat's mysterious football powers that no one goes into for fear of resurrecting an angry Lincoln ghost that will rampage across the state, destroying all who tries to stop it with heretofore unknown rhetorical flourishes.

Northwestern and Illinois exist in a shared college football obscurity. They are on national TV only when some Big Ten Football Brand school deigns to flatten them on the way to the Playoff or when they manage a rare upset. It is safe to say that absolutely no one outside of these tiny, tarp-augmented fanbases cares about the Hat Game; the Big Ten Network could run last year's game at 11AM Saturday and have no one actually notice while changing only the graphics to say "Ryan Field" and dubbing over announcers saying "2015" in the same way that Bruce Willis miraculously discourses on melon farmers in network television airings of Die Hard movies. But for Northwestern and Illinois fans, this dumb game and its ludicrous trophy that remains molded to a base instead of allowing the coach to wear it is ours. It is my favorite sporting event of the year.

-Hat-

High noon eastern time and the whole country is simultaneously tuned to Big Ten Country for the nation's greatest rivalry spectacle in college sports. It has been impossible to find anyone with the remotest interest in college football who does not have an opinion on the titanic showdown between the Illinois Fighting Illini and their arch-nemesis Northwestern Wildcats with every snap watched by the selection committees for the Foster Farms, Pinstripe, and possibly Heart of Dallas bowls.

The bowl panels meet to decide the fate of Northwestern

I can't imagine a football game with more at stake: for Northwestern, a chance to secure bowl eligibility for real although they probably would be able to sneak in as a 5-7 team because there are now so many bowl games that teams will be forced to play themselves in brutal scrimmages while executives from Zaxby's bray for blood by waving chicken pieces at the players gang tackling their roommates. For Illinois, all they had was the opportunity to diminish Northwestern's bowl chances and cackle as the Hat blotted out the sun and winds blew in from the Lake and shrouded Evanston in a year of hatless darkness.

In the end, the Wildcats triumphed. Illinois, feeble against the run all season, had no answer for Justin Jackson and John Moten IV, who scored his first two touchdowns by flying past Illinois defenders. The game was much closer than it appeared. The Illini rallied from 21 down to within a touchdown thanks mainly to Wes Lunt's best game. Lunt took advantage of Northwestern's soft coverage on the edges to complete the same eight-yard out route approximately 35 times. The Illini also got a heroic performance from an injured Malik Turner who would come into the game, make some insane diving catch, roll around in agony, and then come back in to make another great play.

Illinois outplayed Northwestern for several stretches in the second and third quarters. But every time they threatened, something went haywire. The Illini fumbled the ball away three times, including one on the Northwestern eight yardline with a chance to tie and once on a punt return down only seven. The most egregiously awful reversal of fortune involved an interception deep in Northwestern territory early in the game negated by a twelve men on the field penalty, an event whose cruelty was mollified only by the fact that it was extremely funny.

Bells rang out in celebration, ceremonial Hats were put onto every statue, and people poured into the streets to celebrate this incredible sporting event. Lovie Smith and Pat Fitzgerald, old friends as Chicago Sports Icons, embraced on the fifty yard line while Smith waited. He'd have the opportunity to prise the Hat from the collective head of Wildcats next year in Champaign-Urbana, where he would now return and use the ceremonial key to the Illini's Hat Loss Brooding room with a full year to plan his revenge.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WEARABILITY OF THE HAT TROPHY

If there is one thing you can take away from your visit to this web log, I hope it is the insane and arbitrary decision to mount the Hat trophy on a base instead of allowing it to be worn by victorious players in triumph. A recent tweet by Northwestern's athletic department caused some confusion on this position:

It's a #HAT. Of course you're supposed to wear it. #B1GCats pic.twitter.com/XzbWBI9vex
— #B1GCats Football🎩 (@NUFBFamily) November 27, 2016

How is this possible? Has there been some sort of trap door allowing the base to be crudely worn in hat-like fashion? Was I succumbing to Hat madness?

For hours, I poured over BYCTOM's detailed Hat Archive for any sort of schematics. I interviewed top statuary haberdashers and scoured the most recent academic journals of hat science, including "(Base) Jumping to Conclusions" in Brims: The Journal of Hat Trophies and Hamburger Restaurant Advertisements and "That's All Pretty Convenient" in The Journal of Implausible Hat Conspiracies, but could not make any headway.

Eventually, with the help of digital photography from years of Hat Trophy photos, including several obscene ones involving Tim Beckman, I began to slowly chip away at the greatest Hat trophy mystery of our time. You can see the shocking conclusion below:

Proprietary BYCTOM schematic

It appears the hat can, in a fashion, be worn by a player as long as his head is not so grotesquely bulbous that it envelops the entire hollow base area. But that only raises a larger question and that is this: why? Why create a trophy of a hat that requires some diabolical secret head chamber in order to fit on a standard-sized head so the only way it can be worn is approximately? Was the base in mind initially to prevent players from corroding the trophy with their sweat-drenched noggins only to be foiled by the statue's only weakness, a base soaked in the head sweat of dozens of Illinois-based Big Ten football players? Is there a heretofore unknown Lincoln habit of wearing a stovepipe hat attached to an unwieldy base, his spindly neck straining to keep the whole apparatus on his head while Stephen Douglas made rhetorical mincemeat of him? I demand answers from government officials immediately on this matter.

Lincoln discovered in a rare photo wearing a gigantic wooden recessed box underneath his
trademark stovepipe hat while guys with standard non-base hats look on sullenly, reaching
into their pockets for a notebook so they can write down reminders to buy bulky wooden hat bases

COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IS A LUDICROUS CIRCUS

While Illinois and Northwestern waged their titanic struggle in front of dozens of tarps at Ryan Field, a minor Big Ten squabble took place in Columbus. There, Ohio State managed to prevail in an overtime game filled with controversy, the best possible result that throws the playoff rankings into chaos and has prompted a Million Michigan Man march on the Capitol where they will read their manifesto entitled "This Manifesto Uses The Phrase Dereliction of Officiating Duties" from You Sir, the News Letter of Michigan Football Harrumphsmanship.

The playoff picture remains in disarray. The Committee will have to figure out how to justify including an Ohio State team that did not even qualify for the Big Ten Championship Game over a Penn State team that has a chance to win the conference and already beat the Buckeyes head-to-head; an undefeated MAC team; and potentially a Big 12 champion with a loss that hinged completely on an erroneous referee decision and a minor miracle.

The task of naming a college football national champion remains the most delightfully arbitrary and absurd ritual in sports. They have tried to do so through polls run by disparate media organizations which means that a large amount of college football history involves a process of claiming championships and defending them through postmodern deconstructionism. They have tried to do so with computers, which is a sound attack on the narrative-driven insanity of college football. And now, they try to fit exactly four teams into a playoff, but do so with an unaccountable committee that meets with the solemnity of a papal conclave.

White smoke by the Playoff Committee signals a triumphant De-emphasis

of Conference Championships

All this week, people have been attempting to make logical arguments to fill the three non-Alabama playoff spots. Conference championship upsets this weekend can occlude the picture even further. But logical arguments and opponent defeat flowcharts have no place in this process. The Playoff is set by the Committee that has its own gonzo decision-making processes that have previously involved things like Body Clocks. There is no way to know what they value or what sorts of formulae they use. They could, for all we know, pick teams by throwing knives at walls or basing their selections entirely on the result of human hungry hippos while they hurl goblets of wine and hoot things like "you call that gobbling, you inadequate artiodactyl."

This twisted spectacle is how your college football playoff field is chosen, probably

College football sells itself as a mythological journey where teams rise up and meet challenges by upsetting high-ranked rivals or winning conference championships or even going undefeated in a minor conference and hope that their deeds prove them worthy of inclusion in the Playoff. Instead, the only mythological elements are a class of powerful, capricious individuals with their own conflicts and agendas that can wipe all that out at a single stroke. If you are lucky enough to follow a team good enough to aspire to playoff contention, all the college football season does it add increasing opportunities for you to get mad. And, as fans of college football fans melting down on the internet, we could not have asked for a better system.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

Northwestern finds itself at the mercy of unaccountable committees when they meet to decide which bowl game they will be inflicted upon. The two main possibilities are the San Francisco bowl, which has has turned over sponsors as often as a postwar Italian government and is now played at the Niners stadium located 2,000 miles outside San Francisco and the Yankee Stadium Hey I'm Playin' Football Here Bowl, which offers Northwestern fans the opportunity to see football played in a baseball stadium with more than one operational endzone.

The game and the opponent do not matter. The Wildcats clawed back from the portents of a miserable year to enter the postseason. They boast the Big Ten leader in rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks. Austin Carr will have one more opportunity to bamboozle defensive backs. Northwestern has a chance to end the season with a winning record. This will all be clearer when the bowl fatcats have emerged from their estates with their scrolls. Until then, we can all luxuriate in the retention of the Hat in all of its mysterious, semi-wearable glory.

The Northwestern Wildcat Football Team shrugged off a hideous loss to an FCS bottom-feeder and managed to defeat Iowa and the fetid rump of the Big Ten West to qualify for this, a mid-afternoon weekday bowl game played in a frigid baseball stadium against a Power Five opponent that is so angry about playing Northwestern that its fans have been complaining about Bowl Tie Conspiracies. I could not possibly be happier.

A long and costly investigation by the hard-bitten journalists of the Pinstripe Bowl website
who spent days sleeping in cars and meeting with informants in empty warehouses overlooking
waterfronts and surviving threats that show that they were getting too close to the truth finally
reveals that both teams are excited to play in this bowl game

The internet hosts a smattering of maniacs who somehow oppose the rabbit-like proliferation of bowl games over the past few decades because I guess it taints the august legacy of for-profit amateur exhibition football. This is insane. There should be more bowl games. There should be a bowl game for every American, each sponsored by a preposterous company or branch of the United States military, played in a weird frozen stadium in front of 85 people at 10:00am on a weekday and if you go to them there should be Official Bowl Events for each fanbase that include all of the pretentious pomp of major sporting events even though it's for the Amalgamated Belt Buckle Corn Dog Bowl located in a disused rust belt buckle factory complete with some obscure 90s band trotted out for an elongated halftime and a national television crew and the President of Amalgamated Belt Buckle swaggering in for the Presentation of the Belt Buckle Trophy punctuated by streamers falling on the empty floor at what had once been the room where they custom embossed "BOSS HOSS" right onto the buckle except for the time they got an erroneous plate and had to recall all those BOSS HOSE belt buckles, but that was not the responsibility of this man, the President of Amalgamated Belt Buckle, under whose stewardship the company has recovered and is now prosperous enough to host a Bowl Game.

College football is too large and too unwieldy for a single championship to cover, and to write off shitty bowls because they don't count also means writing off the vast majority of college football games. Northwestern football games face the same criticisms as those leveled at shitty bowl games: low attendance, prominence of tarps, the involvement of the Northwestern Wildcats, and none of that has any impact on my own enjoyment of it. When you strip all of the glittering grandeur and television talking heads discussing the playoff picture with the same breathless tones as the terms of the Yalta Conference, the end result remains the same: an entertainment product that holds precisely as much meaning as we allow it. And much like Northwestern football, the primary focus of shitty bowl games is to give us a few hours to pass the time, yell at people in a socially acceptable way, and make Big Ten fans angry on the internet.

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH

Once, Northwestern owned a devastating bowl loss streak that stretched decades because the United States suffered through a horrifying paucity of bowl games and robbed us of things like the Dapper Dan Looking Good, Sport Pomade Bowl and also the Wildcats lost the vast majority of football games they participated in. That all changed with the 2013 Gator Bowl, Northwestern's sole postseason victory in the NATO era. Now, the Wildcats enter their bowl game as substantial underdogs, desperate to prove the college football experts wrong and come home with the Pinstripe Bowl Trophy, a statue of former Northwestern coach and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner ordering people to trim their beards like a baseball Peter the Great.

Historical woodcut of George Steinbrenner demanding that
Goose Gossage cut off his beard before being allowed to throw
baseballs at people

Pitt boasts an 8-4 record, victories over Clemson and Big Ten Champion Penn State, and a supercharged offense that last scored 76 points against Syracuse. That game saw a record 137 points scored as both teams attempted to defend using only rhetoric. The Panthers' offensive juggernaut comes as a bit a surprise since they are coached by former Michigan State defensive mastermind Pat Narduzzi. Narduzzi gives the game some emotional heft, as he doubtless seeks to avenge his mentor Mark Dantonio who watched these very same Wildcats rampage for an unprecedented 54 points in East Lansing against a Narduzziless Spartans team that went from Big Ten East contenders to a 3-8 squadron of Purdue impersonators.

Pat Narduzzi is on the prowl for the blood of the Wildcat in his operatic Bowl Game Revenge
Narrative that I've just invented because we need something for this bowl game rivalry these
teams haven't played since 1973

Northwestern combines an unpredictable season with its tendency to turn its bowl games into a complete free fall into chaos where nearly every possible kind of football misfortune becomes possible. Last year, the Outback Bowl descended into a miserable and boring blowout unbecoming of a Northwestern bowl loss. The laws of Probability Science unambiguously declare that Northwestern is due for a bowl game that involves at least overtime, a game-deciding extra point return, a series of preposterous interceptions, and an incident where the entire crowd is distracted and then when they look down on the sidelines Pat Fitzgerald has been poisoned and a New York City detective must interrogate a stadium full of monocled professors all of whom hide a sinister secret.

BASEBALL STADIUM FOOTBALL

At last, the Northwestern Wildcats have returned to their natural home, a Stunt Baseball Stadium Experience. The 'Cats played in a baseball stadium fairly recently, when they took on Illinois at Wrigley Field in 2010. The game's most notable feature was its use of a single endzone after a meticulous Big Ten study of the field layout determined that it would be detrimental for football players to run face first into a brick wall. The unidrectional play did not cause too many problems to the integrity of the game like it would have if they had taken away the hashmarks or the fifty yardline or the people dressed like anthropomorphic hot sauce bottles who are forced into brutal races for the twisted pleasure of braying fans.

Though the Illini only had one endzone, they were allowed to use all of their available Zooks

The game has shifted to Yankee Stadium in its second iteration. Yankee Stadium remains haunted by the ghosts of great Yankees in the past like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, and a fictitious baseball player named "Mickey Mantle" invented by Bob Costas and Ken Burns as a massive prank on millions of American Baby Boomers who swear they saw him play when what they really saw were blurry photographs of dozens of actors in stirrups who could not even consistently remember to hit from the same side of the plate. That stadium was demolished. The Pinstripe Bowl will take place in the new Yankee Stadium which hosts legendary throngs of belligerent New Yorkers who are still screaming at Alex Rodriguez for some reason.

The Pinstripe Bowl's unique setting offers several amenities such as wind burn and the opportunity to see a sport played in a venue designed for another sport. Imagine thinking to yourself, hey, that's where the mummified remains of Derek Jeter used to dive feebly at balls just out of his reach as you watch receivers dive feebly at balls just out of their reach. I am sure the commentators have been working on their comparisons like these to inform the people trying to surreptitiously stream the game because it is on in the middle of a workday. Imagine Jack Mitchell, unleashed in his natural baseball environment, winding up to split the uprights and hit the Scott Brosius statue in Monument Park as commentators Mike Golic and Mike Golic, Jr. (this is true, those maniacs) bellow that this one is for all the pinstripes.

Fans somehow figure out how to mock a guy for bobbling a ball in a football context and also
repeatedly scream FUCK YOU at all and sundry

The Pinstripe Bowl, even by bowl standards that include a single bowl named after Beef O'Brady's and cryptocurrency, at least three bowls named for chicken restaurants as well as one named after a duck call so that you can shoot your own fowl to consume at your leisure, and unmitigated potato worship, is weird. It's in an unconventional venue in a cold city where residents are spending the week bracing for an influx of people who are willing to stand outside for hours to be in the presence of Ryan Seacrest. The setting is anomalous enough that it is ripe for the rarest of all bowl traditions: a Northwestern victory.

Kudos to whatever maniac dreamed up the Pinstripe Bowl, a football game played in a baseball stadium in a city that on a late December afternoon could be overrun by snow, ice, polar winds, and complex societies of hibernating bleacher creatures who spend the winter deep in the bowels of the stadium while composing new clap clap clapclapclap cheers for the springtime and occasionally clashing over whether or not A-Rod is a true Yankee while marching to battle in their souvenir sundae batting helmets. The game drew a healthy contingent of blanket-swaddled fans and surely a massive television audience of people at gyms, muted bar televisions, and people stuck at work forced to stream the game into their cubicle joined by their ergonomic back pillows and a staple remover with googly eyes named "Bite Golic."

ESPN went all out and scrambled all available Golics

Northwestern came into the Pinstripe Bowl as underdogs against a confident Pitt team disappointed to be slumming it with Northwestern in a low-status bowl within the incomprehensible Great Hierarchy of Bowls. Pitt's turbocharged offense managed to march down the field repeatedly but had trouble crossing the goalline. Anthony Walker ripped star running back James Conner from a one-yard score and Godwin Iguibuike came up with an endzone interception. On the other side, Justin Jackson slithered, danced, juked, and stiff-armed his way to 224 yards, three touchdowns, and a slew of prone Pittsburgh defenders laid to rest in an armtackle graveyard.

Justin Jackson temporary stops the rotation of the Earth on its axis for his second touchdown

Pat Fitzgerald coached like he had nothing to lose. I've already discussed Fitzgerald's more aggressive playcalling this season on fourth down. The ESPN commentators made it seem like this was part of the Fitzgerald package, as he recklessly calls for fourth down conversions like a child emperor demanding that courtiers get kicked by exotic animals for his amusement because they haven't seen the thousands of times that the Wildcats have tried to kneel down for entire quarters, or sent out the punt unit in situations that even Kirk Ferentz would find excessive, and asked Northwestern's kickers to kick into howling squalls where the only way to get a ball through the uprights would be to speak some sort of ancient phrase in a dead language. Fitzgerald trusted his offense and they converted all four times on fourth down after watching similar attempts falter this season by cruel inches.

Pat Fitzgerald goes all in on fourth downs

Northwestern drew inspiration from some ESPN personality who picked Northwestern to lose the Pinstripe Bowl on television to the point that Fitzgerald called him out twice: immediately after the game and at the postgame press conference. Fitzgerald made sure the clip of an ESPN blowhard was the last thing that Northwestern players saw before taking the baseball field and this is easily the second funniest aspect of the Pinstripe Bowl except for the existence of the Pinstripe Bowl. One can only imagine how far the Wildcats could go if someone informed Stephen A. Smith of their existence.

If it were me, I would not have kicked it to Jeremy Maclin. I would
have said I'm gonna drill a hole in the dome and I want you to punt
into the real Alamo which is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE but a
MOTIVATIONAL EFFECT. I would have put everyone on the endzone
against RON KELLOGG the THIRD and the FIRST and SECOND for
GOOD MEASURE. I would have called a PLAY against MICHIGAN
where it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for Siemian to fall on his butt.
I would have REMOVED HIS BUTT. I would not have lost 34 consecutive
football games. I would not become embroiled in a basketball
point-shaving scandal instead I would say y'all aren't shaving a TENTH
of a POINT until we at least make the NCAA TOURNAMENT

The Pinstripe Bowl provided a solid bowl experience. It featured wild lead changes, huge plays, a swashbuckling coach who kept going for it on fourth down, controversial unflagged hits that knocked out Pitts' quarterback and inspirational superstar running back, Joe Girardi, a low number of hamfisted baseball references which is good but also slightly disappointing like Al Pacino's performance in Insomnia which was excellent but I spent the entire time waiting for a sleep-deprived Pacino to bug out his eyes and scream at someone like an unhinged maniac which is like the first thing you'd expect to see in a movie about a Pacino character who hasn't slept in days but he's barely even irate, and an upset for an incredibly rare Northwestern bowl victory.

THE REPORTS ARE IN AND THE BIG TEN IS BAD AGAIN

One of the most enjoyable things about bowl season is that thecollege football discourse, already a roiling pot of text-spittle, becomes given over to its favorite topic, whether a conference is bad. Any rational person knows that a small series of one-off games often decided by a few plays tells us relatively nothing about the entire conference; it is hard to imagine a rational person sitting through more than 35 seconds of discussion about college football which consists of either a person screaming at Paul Finebaum while wearing a single-strap unitard or a person who sprays um actuallys around the internet like a sprinkler hooked up to a sewage line.

The Big Ten lost a bunch of bowl games and now it is bad. Ohio State, which grabbed a controversial playoff spot despite not playing in the Big Ten Championship, got annihilated by Clemson. Penn State lost a ludicrous quarterback duel by a last-second field goal. Michigan lost because a delightfully insane series of invents involving an effectively flummoxed kick returner and an interception that featured a potential missed offsides call that has led to the endowment of the Barrett Chair in Drawing Arrows on Pictures of Football. Only Big Ten West powers Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Unstoppable Wildcat of Northwestern managed to win their relatively lowly bowl games.

Michigan scientists analyze the interception in the brand-new Offside and Spot Center

The Big Ten's bowl season flop remains completely meaningless. For one, it is incredibly satisfying to watch the bullies of the Big Ten beaten in bowl games. Conference pride is incomprehensible; why should I root for the very teams that sweep into the stadium every year with their legions of fans and more often than not bludgeon Northwestern? There are few things in college football more satisfying than watching Ohio State get towed out of the Glendale stadium like one of its detachable grass fields with the possible exception of watching Jim Harbaugh explode into a million Harbaugh particles, each of them spitefully calling a meaningless timeout in the dying seconds of the Orange Bowl.

Second, the Conference Argument Industry takes place in a bizarre, lofty space that has nothing to do with the experience of college football fans. While the big teams and the arbitrary playoff committee or BCS or whatever rudimentary scapulimancies used to divine the national champion before then take up all the air in the room, the vast majority of college football teams are either scraping for a bowl in whatever pizza city may take them or having fans argue about firing their coaches on the internet, or doing both at the same time. There are approximately three teams in each conference that determine whether the whole thing is good or bad, and Northwestern has absolutely nothing to do with any of it. The only thing that matters are Hats and bowl games, and the bloviations of various windbags obsessed with which team will lose to Alabama remains as ancillary to most teams' experience of college football as the seeding in the strongman competition where the giant Scandinavians are forced to scuttle around while strapped into economy cars.

Mr. Bay, I'm here to audition for the transformer. Yes, I'm ready, here it
goes: Reet rot roat. Shit let me try that again

BOWL CHAMPIONS

The last time Northwestern won a bowl game, the players participated in a horrifying ritual disembowelment of a plush monkey toy representing the Wildcats' bowl drought. Now, they've won two. Northwestern's bowl losing streak came down mainly to the relative paucity of bowl games and the team's historical football ineptitude. Then, when the walls opened up and flooded these United States with a cornucopia of bowl spectacles, Northwestern ran into what appeared to be a universe determined to shut them out. They played in all manner of bowls against big teams, against small teams, in Pasadena, in Detroit, and in every available venue in the state of Texas and they could not win their final game whether they were matched up against an SEC juggernaut or a cresting MAC team. They lost in overtime. They lost on an overtime fake field goal. They had NCAA officials stop games and invent novel overtimes and special teams scenarios for the Wildcats to falter.

Brandon Breazell has spent the last 11 years returning Northwestern's

onside kicks for touchdowns

The Pinstripe Victory was not as satisfying as that emotional, drought-wrecking Gator Bowl against Mississippi State. That was a ranked Northwestern team in a New Year's Day bowl that had all the pomp you would exepct from a Mid Status Bowl Game: the sun-dappled Jacksonville coast, a guy in a knight suit threatening tax code with medieval weaponry, numerous cuts to an interview with a race car driver.

No sports victory could possibly be more enjoyable than a long-awaited win after losing for decades and decades. Those games, the ones that require the shredding of a stuffed animal monkey and brutal display of its plush carcass in post-game press conferences as a warning to FAO Schwartz, come once in a lifetime. That does not diminish the Pinstripe Bowl, which featured a heavy underdog Northwestern team wearing officially licensed hats in triumph with their third winter victory in program history. I hope there are many more crappy bowl game trophies to come.

Until then, the only thing to do is sit and wait for the next great impossible victory: become one the 68 best basketball teams in the country.

Here they come. The reporters with their feature stories, the announcers with their anecdotes, the Lunardis and the KenPoms and the retinues of seeders and bracketmancers, all bivouacked in Evanston because the Northwestern Wildcats inch ever closer to the NCAA Tournament.

Before, the fresh-faced, short-straw reporters for ESPNRequiredByContract covering a Northwestern basketball game would wait until up to several seconds of game clock had expired to mention the Wildcats' woeful tourey drought. Now, they all live in the Chicagoland Metropolitan Area and spring from elevated train platforms and Italian beef wholesalers to proclaim to passersby that Northwestern has never made the NCAA Tournament.

Did you know Northwestern has never made the NCAA tournament

The Wildcats are 17-4 and rising through a delightfully mediocre Big Ten. This could be the best Northwestern team in modern history, albeit a history of opponents metaphorically dunking on Northwestern for decades at a time, even in decades where the scandalous dunk shot was banned from college basketball and opposing players had to subject them to vicious layups followed by strongly-worded letters to the college newspaper.

Northwestern's historical basketball futility means that every single time they do something, the broadcasters need to break out their historical gas prices. Their latest feat involved downing Ohio State in Columbus for the first time since 1977, as announcers gleefully changed into their disco pants and haircuts. Ohio State plans to change the historical sign from the site of their Big Ear telescope that previously noted that in 1977, scientists discovered a potential extraterrestrial signal with an unknown origin and also the Buckeyes lost to Northwestern in basketball.

BRACKETOLOGY

Northwestern's unending Sisyphean attempts to qualify for the NCAA tournament always bring to the fore the experts in seeding and strength of schedule and all of the statistical models and bracket hokum that usually serve the purpose of telling us that the Wildcats will not make the tournament. While some teams that always make the tournament seem to cruise through losses to non-conference Washington Generals and tournament-tainting RPI infections like Northwestern most years, they seem unaffected, materializing as a seven seed in a far-flung regional. On the rare occasions when Northwestern seems poised to qualify, any loss to any team seems to knock them off the bubble, consigned to the dustbin of the NIT. People who pay attention to and understand NCAA Tournament seeding have logical, iron-clad, and data-supported reasons why this happens, but as a person who wastes enough of my own life immersing myself in dumb sports arcana, I cannot bring myself to learn about this process and get angry over seeding; I prefer to give myself over to the numbers sorcerers and the Selection Committee and watch every Wildcat game in a preventive flinch.

The creation of the latest Mock Bracket

The annual desperate charge towards the NCAA Tournament remains the all-consuming goal for Northwestern basketball despite its meaninglessness. A recent ESPN article compared the tourney drought to the Cubs' historical win in November, but while the Cubs threw off more than a century of thwarted attempts to become the champions of the entire sport, Northwestern desperately hopes to qualify for a tournament that continually expands to more and more rounds to the point where you or I may actually be in the NCAA Tournament right now and not even know it. It's not even a conference championship; at best, it represents a Certificate of Basketball Competence, and a way to end the sole defining feature of the program in January and February where the name of the school for all intents and purposes becomes Northwesternwhichhasnevermadethetournament.

A streak like the Cubs' championship drought tortures Cubs fans but also accumulates folklore and fanciful legends and generational yearning. Northwestern has accumulated droughts in athletic feats so prosaic that they have no meaning at all to anyone. They nurtured a bowl loss streak for more than sixty years, even as the number of bowls proliferated to the point where teams can declare bowl eligibility by filling out a notarized form. Bowl wins have become devalued and instantly forgotten and yet the Wildcats' inability to win one of the crappy bowls they qualified for became an unbearable albatross that inspired nothing other than a plush monkey purchase by Pat Fitzgerald. Their inability to qualify for the NCAA Tournament even as it keeps doubling in size remains an achievement in and of itself. Northwestern's loftiest sports goals of winning crappy bowl games and getting to the NCAA Tournament often serve as fireable offenses at other schools.

These modest goals represent the larger goal for Northwestern's programs, which is to exist in the Big Ten as sports teams and not a traveling museum of historical athletic catastrophe. See the team that once lost a bunch of football games and threw the goalposts in a Great Lake. See the team that has never made the NCAA Tournament. See the stadium so filled with opposing fans that they have to go to a silent snap count or endure free throw taunts echoing from the rafters of their basketball barn, which the opposing fans taunting Northwestern players find inadequate. There are few things in sports more fun than a historically downtrodden team making its run. Let's hope we have a reason to watch the first Selection Sunday I would ever care about.

THANK GOODNESS THE BULLS ARE IN THE THROES OF A COMPLETE MELTDOWN

The Per Synergy Sports basketblogging set have argued that the worst place for an NBA team is on a treadmill of mediocrity, where teams have no chance to compete nor have they been shitty enough to be rewarded with a high lottery pick that could blossom into a superstar. They are wrong. The best thing an non-contending team could do is to throw off the yoke of basketball decorum and descend into a shit-flinging soap opera of madness.

Virtually everyone who pays the slightest attention to the National Basketball Association looked at the Bulls adding an aging Dwyane Wade and combustible brick artist Rajon Rondo to a front office that hires an organist to follow Gar Forman and John Paxson around to play foreboding diminished chords and a head coach who looks like he spends the off-season getting swindled in carnival games had the look of a disaster. Even me, a dullard who knows next to nothing about basketball, described the crowning of the Three Alphas as a nickname that hilariously summed up the exact way that the team was destined to fall apart.

Wednesday night, after the Bulls blew their 400th consecutive loss to the Atlanta Hawks, the entire thing exploded in a glorious cacophony of recriminations. Wade complained to reporters that his teammates suck. Jimmy Butler, the Bulls' All-Star who made a miraculous transformation from a role-playing defensive specialist to one of the best players in basketball, agreed with Wade that his teammates suck. Wade invoked Michelle Obama to complain that his teammates suck.

Rondo, already disgruntled about his descent from major free agent acquisition to a space on Fred Hoiberg's point guard minutes roulette wheel, could not sit on the sidelines without wading in. That's Rondo's nature. He appears to have a reputation so toxic that NBA GMs seem to be only interested in acquiring him to put in a sealed train and send to rivals like how Germany sent Lenin to St. Petersburg. Rondo's innovation in the art of the destructive meltdown involved chastising Wade and Butler through a free verse poem called "My Vets."

(Borat Voice) My Vets

Bulls hero Nate Robinson has been closely monitoring the situation and has put out his own social media postings of angry Wade and Butler quotes with a plea to rejoin the Bulls, where he is only four years removed from his vomit-strewn takedown of the Brooklyn Nets. I think that the Bulls should bring him in and should conduct all personnel business via Instagram.

So it begins. Wade and Butler are marching down Madison Street. Rondo is massing his forces from the East, preparing to siege the Advocare Center. The rest of the Bulls' crappy players are hiding in Hoffman Estates. Paxson has retired to his goblet-hurling arena while Fred Hoiberg wanders the country looking for a Blockbuster Video so he can find some inspirational movies to splice into his game film of the Bulls advancing upon each other in testudo formation. Doug McDermott is having extreme plastic surgery to disguise himself as Creighton's Maurice Watson and claim he has miraculously returned from injury.

Doug McDermott undergoes a Recreightioning Procedure

Thank goodness the Bulls are rotting, dysfunctional mess. They enter the doldrums of the NBA season as an unwatchable mediocrity that relies almost entirely on two players to make contested jumpshots. They will either fade into the late lottery or cling by their fingernails to an eight seed in the putrid east where they will be more or less instantaneously annihilated in the first round. Fortunately, they have decided not to quietly limp to the finish in a parade of missed 75-foot Mirotic jumpers but to implode into a ridiculous black hole of infighting and social media sniping that has filled the void of spending these months wondering if Derrick Rose is Back.

BASKETBALL IS HAPPENING

Northwestern's glorious run hits its most precarious stretch as it faces Big Ten powers Indiana, Purdue, and Wisconsin. They could continue to hang on or they can make a convincing case for themselves with a major upset. This team has come back, it has hung with some excellent teams on the road, and it has closed out games at the line and with defense. The players say they are focusing on one game at a time as required by law, but fans know that every dribble, pass, and shot is weighted with tournament implications. It's nerve-wracking in the service of a modest achievement, but the best basketball in the Chicago area is happening at Welsh-Ryan while the Bulls destroy themselves through poisoned letters and sword duels. Maybe this is the year we don't need to bask in the reflected funhouse glory of Bill Carmody.

Welsh-Ryan Arena is an ear-splitting thunderdome filled with 8,000 Icaruses flying headlong into the sun. The Northwestern Wildcats are poised to make the NCAA Tournament and end the streak that follows their every dribble and appears in the night sky over Evanston after "The Northwestern Wildcats Have Never Made The NCAA Tournament" had been carved into the moon on the final Apollo mission.

Northwestern's quest to achieve its finest hour in men's basketball by qualifying for a 68-team tournament appeared to end at the hands of blood-rivals Illinois. The Illini, driven to hatless misery in football, had decided to exact their revenge on Northwestern by taking their historically great basketball program and driving it to the unfathomable depths of being markedly worse than Northwestern and then waiting for the Wildcats' star guard to become ill, beating them in Evanston, and sending them flying back into the bubble and prophesies of basketball doom.

Northwestern's Tournament hopes faded after the Illinois game

Instead, Northwestern rallied to its greatest victory in the modern era, an upset of Wisconsin, without Scottie Lindsey, in the Badgers' impregnable basketball fortress. The Wildcats' big men neutralized Wisconsin's star Ethan Happ by enmeshing him in double teams, and Bryant McIntosh went off for 25 points. The game even had a Meaningless Dunk Controversy, with Greg Gard appearing furious because Sanjay Lumpkin went for a cathartic breakaway dunk instead of dribbling out the clock. This type of thing only happens in college sports, which have evolved a late-game etiquette as complex as the rules governing the Court at Versailles and devolve into duels where angry coaches meet with their seconds in deserted fields and do disrespectful handshakes to each other at fifteen paces.

It is possible that Gard was less upset about the dunk than Chris Collins's
psychotic Rambo Scream calisthenics

The win against Wisconsin erased the creeping desperation that kicked in after the Illinois loss. They got the Signature Win that the selection committee demands like an overbearing wizard in a text-based adventure game. The bracketmancers and tournament gurus seem to indicate that they've still got an excellent shot to make it, even after a tough home loss to Maryland. From what I understand, they still need a few more wins to secure their bid. They await the return of Scottie Lindsey and a visit from the a Rutgers team whose main offensive play appears to pouring quicksand onto the court and sinking into it. The only thing stopping Northwestern from escaping The Drought is to avoid a ludicrous, Northwestern-like collapse.

NORTHWESTERN'S AGE OF SPORTS GIMMICKS

Northwestern's greatest successes earlier this century relied on any attempt to find a strategic edge. Randy Walker's 2000 football team became one of the first in the Big Ten to embrace the spread offense, and they used to to win a Big Ten championship. Football analyst Chris Brown called Northwestern's 54-51 victory over Michigan the "most important game in the history of the spread offense" that presaged a revolution of shotgun snaps and zone reads, and flinty quarterbacks darting around all over the place and hucking the ball through the Football Brand schools and their elite guard of hulking linebackers.

The Wildcats still run a spread offense, but its novelty has been diluted as even the most lumbering midwestern football traditionalists have adopted it. Still, the 'Cats managed to break their endless streak of bowl losses in part with a satisfyingly gimmicky two quarterback system designed to break the brains of defensive coordinators forced to figure out if Northwestern would run with the passing quarterback while the offense held up placards featuring pictures of a cat-stroking Ernest Blofeld, Professor Moriarty, and one of those comic book villains with a giant head that shows they're good at thinking of diabolical plots, that's why they have a bulbous, pulsing head.

He is the Napoleon of offense. He is a genius, a
philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain
of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider
in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand
radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each
of them and that is why he had Trevor Siemian
slowly clomp over towards the sideline because he
is the "passing quarterback" and no one will ever see
it coming

The recent vintages of the football team have reversed course from insane video game offenses desperately attempting to outscore the other team to smashmouth defenses trying to score a point and then run time off the clock. The ten-win 2015 team clobbered opposing offenses and then spent offensive possessions building an elaborate subterranean network of tunnels and trenches until the game ended.

At the same time, Northwestern basketball had its own unique system. Bill Carmody brought over the Princeton Offense and a 1-3-1 zone defense. The Princeton offense was based on patiently probing the perimeter, waiting for a backcut, and taking all 35 seconds of the shot clock while everyone in the arena inched closer to death. The 2004 team beat Purdue 40-39, and no international agency intervened. Carmody's teams were bizarre and mismatched, and he pulled players from all corners of the globe. Jitim Young, a do-it-all 6'2" All Big Ten guard, led the team in rebounding. There was always a 6'8" guy who could shoot. They arrived, as a collection of spindly limbs and plastic facemasks and undersized players at every position with their rumpled coach who looked at all times like he had been sentenced to coach basketball and they won enough games to qualify for the NIT four years in a row and come within about 20 combined seconds of making the Tournament.

Bill Carmody always seemed about three
seconds away from lighting up a cigarette

The central appeal of these teams was not only that they won, but that they also appeared to be getting away with something. Carmody and Walker won games partially by bamboozling other staid coaches in the most staid athletic conference. The Big Ten, especially in the early 2000s, was known both in basketball and football for bruising, punishing physicality. Northwestern didn't merely beat a highly-ranked Michigan team, they used a then-novel offense to beat Lloyd Carr, the gold standard of Big Ten stodgery. They nearly made the NCAA Tournament behind a jumpshot so ludicrous that it appears to have been designed by Jim Henson.

This was before Shurna's moved to Spain to play in the
Licanthropic Basketball League (Liga de Baloncesto
Licantrópico)

Northwestern fans would take this recent run of relative sports success any way they can-- perhaps the most shocking novelty is that Northwestern teams are winning bowl games and getting to postseason tournaments whether it turns out to be the Elusive NCAA Tournament, the NIT, or the College Basketball Tournament/Underground Splinter Group Chess Boxing Championship that the Athletic Department has refused to participate in despite invitations sent by sparrow in dead of night. But if this marks the end of the teams winning through exotic zone defense or taking powder out of their shorts and blowing it into opponents' eyes, it's worth remembering Northwestern's run as a laboratory of desperate, effective Rube Goldberg strategies.

For the past week, the Bulls have sat on a detonator as the potential catalysts for a blockbuster trade that could have blown a dent in the inevitable LeBron James romp to the NBA Finals. They could have sent Jimmy Butler to Boston for a mix of players and draft picks that everyone decided to start referring to as "assets" awhile back when basketball executives all became spreadsheet-monger MBAs that speak in TED Talk dialects instead of grizzled scouts and former players who based personnel decisions on phrenology.

The Celtics could have used Butler to join scoring dynamo Isaiah Thomas and an armada of interchangeable Glue Guy wing players to try to finally stop a hobbled Cavs team. The Bulls would then begin to rebuild, fortified by at least one of the Brooklyn Nets draft picks ceded to the Celtics for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett after a vomiting Nate Robinson had heroically vanquished them from the playoffs. The trade did not take place. The Bulls were not satisfied with the offer, and Butler will remain a Bull, heroically attempting to drag the carcass of this shambling basketball wreck to the playoffs.

In the end, the Bulls made a trade. They sent stalwart Taj Gibson, Doug McDermott and their 2018 second-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Cameron Payne, Anthony Morrow, and Joffrey Lauvergne.

I don't know anything about Taj Gibson even though he had been on the Bulls longer than anyone on the team. Gibson came in off the bench for most of his career, played excellent defense, sank some baseline jumpers, and stayed upright through the endless maelstrom of Bulls bullshit; he was there when John Paxson allegedly throttled Vinny Del Negro, when Rose blew out his knee and then kept returning as a faded, ghoulish specter of himself, when the front office waged an insane war against Tom Thibodeau of such beguiling complexity that it climaxed in accusations of office bugging, when the entire team turned against each other in an elaborate Instagram-fueled civil war, when the Bulls went from an exciting contender to a bizarre wasteland of bricked shots where everyone yells at each other all of the time. Gibson remained a staid, steady presence, only occasionally breaking out to dunk someone into a coffin and then unhinge his jaw and bellow into the United Center rafters to the approval of a roaring crowd and a roaring Carlos Boozer who spent five years on the Bulls screaming more or less continuously.

This Gibson dunk on Wade from 2011 was
so vicious that Wade plotted to leave the Heat
under acrimonious circumstances five years
later, inexplicably join the Bulls, and begin a
devious sabotage campaign that only looks
like a hall-of-famer marooned on a mediocre,
dysfunctional team coached by a Dairy Queen
night manager

The trade marks the end of the Doug McDermott Era of Chicago Bulls basketball. The Bulls gave up an absurd haul of picks to move up and select him even though he had some red flags: poor combine numbers, the inability to play basketball without a t-shirt. McDermott never justified the price, and played at times like a fringe rotation player; nevertheless he was the Bulls' most important player as Gar Forman seemed to want to remake the team in his image. They cast McDermott as the solution to their offensive woes under Tom Thibodeau, where the Bulls attempted to move the ball on the air currents generated by Thibodeau's horase hollering. They fired Thibodeau and brought in Fred Hoiberg to run an Iowa Offense. Everything McDermott did was at least interesting, whether it was inexplicably catching fire to continue the Bulls' hilarious winning streak against the Raptors or defending by chasing opposing shooters down like Clint Eastwood attempting to stop his partner from being shot in a haunting flashback. We will miss McDermott, who will flourish standing in a corner while four opponents swarm Russell Westbrook while futilely calling for the ball.

The centerpiece of the Bulls-Thunder trade is Cameron Payne. Payne is only 22, but coming off a broken foot and one of the statistically worst seasons of any NBA player this season. The acquisition of Payne, who joins a bloated backcourt of identically flawed young guards remains a mystery; the Bulls now exist as a mystical, ten-armed guard that cannot shoot with any of them. Perhaps Payne, a former lottery pick, can flourish outside of the shadow of Russell Westbrook. Perhaps they favored him because his former college coach Steve Prohm happens to be the man who took Fred Hoiberg's old job at Iowa State, which seems like a dumb theory until you remember that Iowa State now exists as a shadowy Pynchonian institution in the minds of a certain species of internet Bulls fans that keeps popping up in everything surrounding the team until a conspiracy either reveals itself or drives them to madness.

After several letters to Iowa State returned unopened, Stan
from Glen Ellyn came home to a ransacked apartment.
The giant, red bird sat on his stained recliner, feet-claws
propped on the ottoman, smoking a pipe from a tiny hole
bored into the middle of its fabric teeth. He handed me a
card. It said "Dr. Splad Halfnelson, Iowa State Department
of Basketball Conspiracy.""The first thing you need to know
is that this whole thing is because of the perversity. The
freaks," he said.

Both Morrow and Lauvergne are expiring contracts and likely have no future with the Bulls or American organized basketball. Morrow's three point shooting has fallen below 30%, which makes him as effective as a kickboxer coming off a leg amputation. Lauvergne, a sweet-shooting French big man, has the rebounding and shotblocking prowess of a muzzled Tyrannosaurus.

The trade raises more questions that it answers. The Bulls currently exist as Jimmy Butler and a scaffolding of declining veterans and young players that seem headed to the Adriatic League without some sort of holy revelation about jumpshooting. They may eventually decide to deal Butler this summer, sell off any player with some value, and plunge the team into the inevitable morass of basketball misery in hopes of landing another star in the draft. But this trade, and the multifarious draft misses, inept trades, and constant atmosphere of intrigue that surrounds the front office leaves little hope for the future no matter what path they take.

POSSESSED

Russian literature is filled with madmen, half-understood outbursts at receptions, and enigmatic grudges, and that is just the academic literature conventions. That impression comes from The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman's celebration of Russian writers coupled with a memoir of travel to Moscow and Uzbekistan interwoven with digressions on ice palaces and Tolstoy murder conspiracy.
The largest chunk of the book involves a summer spent in an intense Uzbek-language course in Samarkand. She has two instructors: a philosophy graduate student who teaches from a Soviet textbook "exclusively through the lens of cotton production: a valuable lesson in monomania" and an Old Uzbek literature professor who disseminated poems, fables, and history. "Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan did not only ride a bull, but he didn't wear any pants. She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, 'but he didn't wear any pants.'"

In another chapter, Batuman travels to Moscow to write an article on the reconstruction of the House of Ice as part of a St. Petersburg's White Days. Empress Ioannova had ordered the construction of the ice palace in 1740 as part of a festival that would culminate with the forced wedding of two jesters in her court. Armed guards compelled the couple to spend the night in the frozen palace, dancing and running around in order to stay warm. The House of Ice featured functioning ice cannons, ice furniture, ice logs in an ice fireplace, and a water-spouting ice elephant, a dedication to ice so elaborate that even Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze character would suggest that they maybe cool it with the ice before sadly realizing that the ice puns had so colonized his thoughts that he had no choice but to surrender to his greatest enemy, room temperature.

Reproduction of the House of Ice in St. Petersburg in 2006.
Why did the Russian government decide to pay tribute to
a former monarch's insanely elaborate lark to freeze her
subjects? According to Batuman, "[Valery] Gromov, a
former army management official, and [Svetlana]
Mikheyeyeva, a former doctor and healthcare manager,
had conceived of this dream during an international
management training program in Tokyo in 1999, where
they ended up stuck in a broken elevator with the chairman
of the Association of Russian Snow, Ice, and Sand Sculptors."

The Possessed on its surface is a hard sell: come for the exploration of Girardian memetic theory in Dostoevksy and stay for negotiations about artifact captions at an academic Isaac Babel conference, but it all works because Batuman is a wonderful writer and brilliantly funny. Batuman depicts the academic world of literature as absurd and even grotesque while never dampening her own underlying argument about the resonance and vitality of the books and authors she loves.

DEADLINE TO SELECTION

Northwestern followed a panicky home win against Rutgers with a demoralizing loss to Illinois. The Chicago Tribune consulted some Certified Bracketologists who tell us that they are still ok, that one more win should finally put them in the dang Tournament, that the State Farm Center ceiling has not caved in and brought ruin to the season, but my default setting remains tournament-related panic. Still, there is nothing to do but hope they can beat a reeling Hoosier squad, that all the other bubble teams shamefully collapse on their home courts in front of wailing fans, and that the Wildcats won't be exiled to the NIT or an exotic alternative tournament in an ice palace.

There was a risk that it could have all gone disastrously wrong, that Nate Taphorn's overhand, full-court baseball heave could have sailed over Dererk Pardon's outstretched arms into the face of a costumed, bodypainted student and given Michigan the opportunity to win the game with the ball under their basket because that's almost always how these games have ended. There are few basketball indignities that Northwestern has not yet experienced until they put in drastic rule changes that turn college basketball into the inevitable future death sport promised by every science fiction movie, which will give Wildcat fans the opportunity to leave disappointed because a Northwestern player accidentally activated the robotic basketball spider that devours key recruits.

Instead, Taphorn threw his pass, Pardon caught it, twisted, and converted a buzzer-beating layup to beat Michigan, win a school-record twenty-first game, and, in all likelihood, qualify for Northwestern's first NCAA Tournament.

The students swarmed the court, Chris Collins ran around like a video game character controlled by a Baby Boomer, Welsh-Ryan exploded, and the entire Chicago area went berzerk for its Big Ten Team including the enormous number of Michigan fans and alumni in the city who were forced to abandon their school and fall under the sway of Northwestern sports because of those billboards on I-94. No doubt America celebrated as well, spurred on by Northwestern's endless supply of insufferable sports media personalities, with warm feelings for Collins's association with the universally-beloved Duke basketball team.

The win followed a brutal stretch where Northwestern lost nearly every game, squandered leads, ran out of gas, and threatened to turn ESPN's ubiquitous Doug Collins Cam into a horrifying snuff film as he disintegrated before our eyes like the guy who drank from the wrong grail in the Last Crusade.

Doug Collins watching his son's team. Taking the free throw miss in stride. pic.twitter.com/wJfkHDYfmo
— Matt Schick (@ESPN_Schick) February 19, 2017

Northwestern was only days removed from its most painful loss on the road to Indiana. The Wildcats took a late lead against a spiraling Indiana team in a building full of angry Hoosiers more interested in jeering demented hobbit-coach Tom Crean than stopping Northwestern. With less than ten seconds left, Northwestern clung to a two-point advantage before Thomas Bryant muscled in a tying layup with a foul. Bryant's free throw hit the back iron and bounced what seemed to be seven feet in the air before plunging down like a Basketball of Damocles on the Wildcats' tourney hopes. McIntosh's desperation half-court heave clanged off the rim, a play that was probably less ridiculous and improbable than the actual ending to the Michigan game.

Crean in the process of molting before growing a new layer of pants

Sure, Northwestern has not yet qualified for the tournament. Nothing is official until the Selection Committee emerges from its cave, flies the bracket by sparrow to Bristol, Connecticut, has an ESPN guy read out out Northwestern, and I immediately start to complain about seeding and how the Selection Committee HAS IT OUT FOR THE WILDCATS DAMMIT even though as a Northwestern fan I don't really understand what any of that means and am just trying to fit in. Between now and then all sorts of things can happen. They can cancel the tournament immediately because of excessive Northwestern participation. They can get locked in the MCI Center during the Big Ten Tournament and watch the tournament start without them while Northwestern State fills in. They can get in the bus on the way to the first tournament hame and get crushed by a giant Monty Python foot.

Northwestern's greatest men's basketball achievement since the 1930s comes with no guarantees. All they get is an invitation. The Wildcats' first tournament appearance could involve them drawing a Final Four-caliber opponent loaded with NBA players that spends the entire game floating above them on air currents and raining baskets from the rafters. They could draw an obscure mid-major that throttles them. Northwestern players could fall into a giant pie and collapsing tower of unicycles on the sideline or activate a contraption that plucks Chris Collins from the bench mid-tirade and flings him into a rub-a-dub tub. No one will mind much because the closest thing we've had to that so far was to take hallucinogens, turn on last year's Holy Cross games, and squint.

Northwestern fans took desert spirit quests that allowed
themselves to believe, for several hours, that a player
named Rados Šampion had led the Wildcats to Patriot
League glory

Northwestern plays Purdue on Sunday on Senior Day in front of a national television audience. I have no idea if they will flourish, free from the suffocating tournament pressure, or will allow Caleb Swanigan, the Purdue sharpshooters who shot 255 threes in West Layfeyette, and the twelve-foot tall buzzcut guy to once again hammer them while Northwestern fans jubilantly don't care. Northwestern will be honoring defensive stopper Sanjay Lumpkin, who will allow the first 3,000 fans to barrel into his chest while he draws a charge, and newly-minted hero Nate Taphorn. Both players remain the last vestiges of the Carmody era, and it's only fitting that they both had crucial roles in getting the team over the hump.

Northwestern will play its final home game at Welsh-Ryan as we know it, just as the arena finally cultivated a genuinely nuts, loud atmosphere. In previous years, the primary noise in the arena came from Widlcat fans' DE-FENSE cheers overpowered by visiting fans' muttered complaints that Welsh-Ryan was a high school facility. Next year, the Wildcats will move to the gigantic, empty Allstate Arena to play games in between Whitesnake reunion concerts and Monster Jams. As anyone who has gone to a DePaul game in recent years can attest, the arena will easily swallow even a sellout Welsh-Ryan crowd and render the games a sea of empty blue seats and Chicago Rush Arena Bowl XX championship banners. The refurbished Welsh-Ryan will have fancier seats and glowing screens and probably won't allow you to be inadvertently bowled over by a visiting team while trying to wait in line for a hotdog, but it's fantastic that Northwestern got to likely clinch their tournament berth in their ridiculous basketball barn instead of the Grave Digger Sedan Cemetery.

Wildcat fans look forward to their season
at the home of ArenaBowl '88

After decades of broken ankles, dunk victimhood, and general Washington Generalsmanship and even some heart-breaklingly close calls, Northwestern has almost certainly made the tournament on a play so absurd that I still can't quite believe it. Selection Sunday is March 12, and I'll be watching for the first time.

Just a day before the Gumbel Brother put Northwestern on the bracket, Welsh-Ryan exploded in a paroxysm of basketball-related screaming, and the Sports Media Personalities unleashed their unholy torrent of purple-clad selfies, the Wildcats paid tribute to their basketball heritage by getting absolutely waxed by Wisconsin in the semi-finals of the Big Ten Tournament. Most years, that kind of game capped off a losing season in the Big Ten, snuffing the tiniest ember of hope for a miracle Big Ten Tournament run to the dance. This time, it didn't really matter. Northwestern had already beaten Wisconsin in Madison without Scottie Lindsey. They had made it further than any other Wildcat team had ever gone in the Big Ten Tournament by shithousing Rutgers with a record 31-0 first-half run and then silencing a rowdy, mother-booing, pro-Maryland D.C. crowd, and they had, by all accounts from even the most eccentric, apostate Bracketologists, qualified for the NCAA Tournament.

They can't stop it now; it was on television

There is no doubt about it now. Wildcat fans can finally slam that Northwestern button on their internet NCAA brackets. They can send off a glorious, stone-bleachered Welsh-Ryan Arena into Stadium Valhalla after it finally transformed from an empty house of basketball horrors into a venue capable of drowning out Jim Nantz. They can surreptitiously watch the Wildcats at work on a Tournament Thursday while nervously toggling the "boss button" link that activates spreadsheets so profoundly fraudulent that they could only work on Kruger Industrial Smoothing-caliber management.

The "boss button" spreadsheets are a perfectly grotesque satire of
whatever it is people do in offices

Chris Collins referred to the tournament berth as "the beginning of Northwestern basketball." It is not. There has been more than a century of Northwestern basketball, most of which involved losing. More often than not, Northwestern basketball games meant trekking in subzero temperatures to a home arena full of opposing fans cocksure in their teams' victory and, more often than not, a loss. WGN had a great interview with Vic Law (Law comes on around the 1:45 mark) where he talks about wanting to change the atmosphere at Welsh-Ryan. "When we get good," Law remembers telling a reporter when he first committed, "we're going to blow the roof off the place." This was a bold prediction about an arena where the Wildcats traditionally played home games only in scare quotes as rival chants echoed through the rafters. Purdue-Northwestern games traditionally involved Wildcat fans surrounded by train costumes and Gene Keady combovers; whatever Purdue fans came gallivanting into the arena this year got completely drowned out on the television broadcast.

The consignment of Northwestern basketball to a pre-tournament dark age, though, obscures some really good players and teams, some of which could have even gotten to the Tournament if not for a truly beguiling series of separate misfortunes. Northwestern may have lost games, but fans got to see Davor Duvancic take down Illinois, Michael Jenkins sink Iowa, Tre Demps buzzerbeat upon Michigan, and John Shurna break the scoring record with a jumpshot that could only exist at Northwestern.

Someone hoisted a Shurnahead at the Selection Sunday celebration
because Shurnaheads should remain a Northwestern tradition even
far into the future, when Welsh-Ryan is renovated again to have
automated grape dispensers for high-dollar donors and basketball
devolves into Bill Laimbeer's prophesied "combat" phase, a yellowed
Shunahead stands watch over the severed heads of the Big Ten's weakest
basketball robots

Northwestern could compete with and beat other Big Ten schools in basketball, but it had always felt outside the rest of the college basketball world. The Carmody era partly fueled this-- almost no other team in the country played like Northwestern with its intricate offense and zone defenses, Carmody sought out international players that arrived with intriguing nicknames like "The Moroccan Michael Jordan," and he unleashed a masked Luka Mirkovic upon the Big Ten. More than that, though, Northwestern usually hovered nowhere near the NCAA Tournament bubble with its attendant bracketologies and complaints about seeds and everything else. The NCAA Tournament sucks up 99% of discussion about college basketball and Northwestern existed in a strange basketball Siberia, only affecting the tournament by occasionally ruining someone's RPI.

There is something that is ludicrous about Northwestern's Selection Sunday gathering. More than a thousand people gathered to celebrate a committee's decision that they were one of the 68 best teams in the country, promised nothing but an extra game-- should Vanderbilt clobber them in the first round, the hullabaloo over their bid would be as ridiculous as a silent film about a dandy dressing up in his finest tails and spats only to walk out his door and get sprayed by carriage puddles. But more than 1,000 people in Welsh-Ryan didn't care about the sanity of sitting for hours for the chance to scream at a jumbotron showing promos for Kevin Can Wait. Northwestern came in from the cold.

A HIGHLY TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF VANDERBILT

The tournament has spoken and, after sending a bunch of Big Ten teams to some extremely Big Ten cities, the Wildcats will meet Vanderbilt in Salt Lake City. The location is disappointing to Chicago-area fans, but on the other hand, I am pretty sure they could put Northwestern in a regional so remote that it involves a rickety, slat-dropping rope bridge and we'd still be thrilled.

Northwestern will play Vanderbilt, a team that spent much of the season on the bubble because of its fifteen losses. Their inclusion as a nine seed has stirred some controversy over on the Bracket Justice Internet where fans for whom inclusion in a 68-team tournament is not a once-a-century occurrence squabble about regions and paths and sound exactly like the Tom Hardy character from The Revenant replacing his endless pelt monologues.

MY SEEDS

The two schools have little basketball history-- they've played just five times, last in 1992, and have essentially no basketball animus. But anyone who can't dredge up some dumb, sports grievance has no place writing a lightly-trafficked blogspot blog, so let's remember that the schools had a nascent football rivalry before Vanderbilt abruptly canceled a home-and-home series in 2013-2014 without warning. The Chicago Tribune described the cancellation as done in "the coldest possible way--with a letter sent via U.S. mail," a schedule adjustment so callous that it inspired a major metropolitan newspaper to traffic in Dan LaFontaine sentences. You might not think that this passes muster by even the flimsiest of margins, but as we speak BYCTOM rivalry-mongering intern Tim Beckman is hard at work drafting CANCEL THIS, VANDERBILT! (IN REFERENCE TO YOUR 2013-14 FOOTBALL SCHEDULING) signs to distribute in Salt Lake City but he keeps running out of room.

Vanderbilt's coach Bryce Drew made a name for himself in March Madness by leading Valparaiso on a magical run in 1998 most known for hitting a shot from a full-court pass eerily similar to Northwestern's own play against Michigan. As his Wikipedia entry says: "Drew secured his place as a Valparaiso, Indiana, celebrity along with popcorn guru Orville Redenbacher." Like Collins, Drew is the son of a coach, Valparaiso's Homer Drew. Chicagoans, however, may be more familiar with him as a brief member of the post-Jordan Shitty Bulls, where he teamed with Fred Hoiberg in an inadvertent Cradle of College Basketball Coaches.

Drew on the Bulls in the Dragan Tarlac Era

Both teams face a tough path out of the region. The winner of Thursday's game will like face Gonzaga, lurking in the bracket like a Morrison-haired monster. Almost no brackets have Northwestern getting past them to the Sweet 16, except for mine, where I will just keep writing down Northwestern's name because they're finally in the dang bracket and absolutely no one can stop me.

Every other year, that ludicrous 35-foot Vanderbilt three would have gone in. Or that last second halfcourt heave would have banked high off the backboard and through in a grotesque parody of Northwestern's tournament-saving pass, and the Wildcats' first-ever NCAA Tournament game would go into the giant pile of gut-wrenching blown leads, buzzer-beaters, complete bamboozlement in the face of a press, or times when the games seemed to end with the court itself snaring Northwestern players and dragging them into underground service areas and zamboni antechambers. Instead, the Wildcats held on, took advantage of the most delightfully ill-conceived foul in the history of college basketball, and booked themselves into a clash with top-seeded Gonzaga because it is 2017 and Northwestern basketball has become immune to even the most obvious and inopportune Northwesterning situations.

There was no panic in this one. Even as Vanderbilt rained threes upon the Wildcats and the NBA Jam announcer guy elbowed his way through dozens of security guards to try to seize the mic and scream HE'S ON FIRE at America, the comeback didn't hit the impending Northwestern sports catastrophe area of my brain because they had already made the tournament. The never-ending and at times impossible attempt for them just to get there had already wrung everything out-- a blown tournament game lead has nothing on sweating out a home win against Rutgers under the ever-watchful eye of the Selection Committee.

The Wildcats welcomed a national audience of people who had never been subjected to Northwestern sports with a traditional game where nothing makes sense and the play-by-play can be just as easily replaced with maniacal cackling; Northwestern games are not watched much as they happen to people. In the last minute and a half, the two teams swapped leads half a dozen times. Dererk Pardon iced clutch free throw after clutch free throw. Then, just as the Commodores managed to grab another lead and Northwestern prepared to set up the inevitable Bryant McIntosh isolation play, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis, possibly subliminally programmed by years of Northwestern alums screaming at him about sports through his television and then activated by seeing Doug Collins's face turn a particular strain of magenta, inexplicably lunged at McIntosh and sent him to the line.

This is the most Dorothea Lange sports photo since the miserable woman clutching her child
bravely in the face of Browns football

What an absolute bummer for Fisher-Davis, who had heroically shot Vanderbilt back into contention and picked the absolute worst time to blunder-- on the first day of the Tournament, in front of a national TV audience, against a school whose alumni are allowed to crash like an army of Kool-Aid men and women through the walls of ESPN studio shows and bloviate about the Wildcats, and in a situation that features the largest percentage of dudes watching the game who are alarmingly eager to explain to a neophyte why actually it is a bad strategy to foul there.

Northwestern fans showed up at the tournament. A school that has played the vast majority of its home games in front of jeering visiting fans in their variegated Big Ten hoodies managed to take over Salt Lake City's arena with a raucous purple mob.

I can't see the Salt Lake City arena without immediately humming the bridge for Roundball
Rock and waiting for Marv Albert to futilely ask whether or not Karl Malone would be able to
come through in the clutch

The Wildcats' reward for their first win in the NCAA tournament is a dragon from the end of the map. Tournament mainstay Gonzaga has its own tournament burden because the team has repeatedly fallen victim to disappointing tournament exits. This year, expectations are at their loftiest. They've only lost a single game the entire season and they've spent time as the top-ranked team in the nation. Northwestern managed its top rank of 25 for one week where a panicking Associated Press graphics department was unable to locate a Wildcat logo for their poll. Gonzaga will be heavily favored and motivated to break their own, much more ambitious barrier and qualify for their first Final Four.

JAY CUTLER AND THE FACES OF SPORTS

There's that scene in Moneyball where all the crusty old scouts are sitting around chewing tobacco and they start evaluating talent based on whether a baseball player is handsome. This is held up as the acme of Old Scout luddism, old leathery men whose decades spent squatting behind radar guns in the sun and shriveling up in budget hotel rooms can be obliterated at once by knowledge of onbase percentage. Their methods are primitive, outmoded, and absurd and we're supposed to laugh at them and their inability to number-munch. Who thinks like that anymore? Every day, as I sit around descending into the muck of sports takes on the internet and occasionally get dumb enough to listen to the angry, nasal men of Chicago sports radio it becomes clearer and clearer that the majority of NFL fans judge quarterback play almost exclusively by their face.

Football fans demand square-jawed quarterbacks. The steely-eyed guy who can look at the huddle and tell his team they are winning the game and also do the same to issue non-answers about getting caught texting pictures of their penis to people. Sure there are exceptions, but some-- like the Manning Brothers with their grotesque interception faces and Andrew Luck who looks like a spittle-flecked forest troll-- carried such a high pedigree that they were able to blunt criticism immediately. Otherwise, the freak shows like a bloated, waddling JaMarcus Russell or the Super Mario Koopa Troopa lookalike Jimmy Clausen always lead to fans despising them.

Jimmy Clausen takes questions at Halas Hall

That is, I think, the central problem with Jay Cutler. Cutler will go down as the Bears' best quarterback they will likely ever have, which honestly says more about the Bears and their moribund quarterback death-spiral than anything about him. I don't know if I will ever see a more locally despised athlete and it all comes down to his face. Cutler has a leering, scoffing, face, a mug that is so openly contemptuous of everyone and everything around it that he doesn't even seem to have the energy to bother bullying people. The most popular and possibly apocryphal story about Cutler is that he dealt with a fawning fan in a bathroom by leaning his head back and braying DOOOOOOOOOOOON'T CARE to the ceiling and for most Bears fans, that is how he spent his time in Chicago, leaning his head back in indifference and urinating more or less continuously for eight years.

Bears fans would have been able to forgive Cutler, or at the least watch him while suppressing the apparently universal human urge to strangle him, if he had managed to lead them to a championship. And there were glimmers! His greatest run to the 2010 NFC Championship Game ended with an injury. He spend most of his time dealing with incompetent offensive lines and eventually desiccated defenses. At the same time, Cutler was never good enough to rise beyond the Bears' general, inbred incompetence enabled by a swarm of coaches, coordinators, and nincompoop front office personnel. He threw a ton of interceptions so profoundly dumb that they seemed spiteful. It didn't help that the Cutler era paired with the rise of Aaron Rodgers, his opposite in every way, who is so infuriatingly good at playing quarterback that he demands only ten functioning human beings to score a zillion touchdowns.

There have been a ton of really shitty Bears quarterbacks, all of whom were way worse than Cutler but are far more fondly remembered because they were scrappy try-hards. The irony of Cutler is that he was that way on the field, a guy who threw linebackers around with his throwing shoulder, a guy whose greatest weakness came from trying desperately to squeeze a throw into vanishingly tight windows, a guy who got pummeled more or less continuously to the point where the phrase "nine sacks in the fist half" became a reliable Chicago accent shibboleth, yet remains despised because 99 percent of humans who see a picture of his face immediately want to see him karate kicked in the scrotum.

Cutler was also, beyond his face, probably not a pleasant dude. He constantly feuded with teammates and coaches (my favorite story was an assistant coach under Trestman anonymously shit all over him in the media and then tearfully apologized-- imagine tearfully apologizing to Jay Cutler). Maybe if he won enough, all that would be forgiven, the way NFL explains away Tom Brady's infantile flag-begging tantrums or the way the Colts allowed Peyton Manning to summon the energy of the sun and blast it into his teammates' skulls through his gigantic, ray-gathering forehead.

The Bears have a new GM and a new coach and the only reason why they didn't build a catapult and fire Cutler into the lake is because of his onerous contract. Now, they can finally be rid of him and hop back on the never-ending Treadmill of Bears Quarterback Mediocrity. At his age, and with the completely barren team around him, there was no point in keeping him around. But I hope, for the Bears' sake, that my theory of quarterback faces isn't true because look what just rolled into town.

The pre-Moneyball face scouting extends beyond quarterbacks. Cutler's coach for several seasons was Marc Trestman, a guy who looked at all times like he was desperately sprinting after a bus. In college sports, there's no better example than Tom Crean, who I am convinced could have wathered another down year at Indiana except that fans could not handle his uncanny valley face and weird and unsettling body postures that make him look like an incompetently programmed video game character.

ZAGGING

Northwestern is in its golden age of sports. In a single calendar year, they've won a bowl game and qualified for the NCAA Tournament; these are incredible feats for a school with sports teams unknown except for their prodigious and unfathomable losing streaks. The Wildcats have even begun to attract a backlash built because sports media alumni have now begun breaking into people's homes and screaming about Northwestern basketball at them in the middle of the night, and the inability of a middle-aged sports reporters to refrain from dropping Seinfeld references.

Gonzaga will be Northwestern's toughest opponent this season. They're favored by double-digits and all of the analysts have KenPommed the Wildcats out of the tournament by Saturday night. But in a year when the Wildcats have already shattered every expectation in the history of the program, why not add in an insane and improbable upset run to the Sweet Sixteen? After a game when an opponent brutally northwesterned itself in front of a sea of purple, the laws of the universe no longer apply.

The lingering image of Northwestern's second NCAA Tournament game will forever be a hand reaching up from below the basket in a swashbuckling act of goaltending, Chris Collins's berserker rage and then series of press conference De Niro faces.

These are silent film-caliber facial expressions

The controversy, though, followed a spirited second-half comeback after the Wildcats had been completely outclassed to begin the game. The first half started as all analysts had predicted: Northwestern couldn't stop Gonzaga's Nigel Williams-Goss, and the Gonzaga defense stifled Northwestern as the Bulldogs brought all of their KenPoms to bear against an overmatched Northwestern team. Northwestern had managed to keep Gonzaga's enormous center Przmek Karnowski from rampaging against them, although he seemed primed to take over at any time with an array of nineteenth-century weightlifting maneuvers.

Karnowski's landmark case against the NCAA to allow him to wear a

single-strap basketball jersey enters its fifth year

Northwestern's run had appeared to come to an end. The parade of ridiculous finishes and good feelings that began with Dererk Pardon's game-winning layup, continued through the NCAA selection show broadcast and the twitter feeds of approximately 75% of ESPN's Department of Sports Yelling, and climaxed with an insane and emotional win over Vanderbilt that hinged on an avant-garde dance piece subverting our hidebound, bourgeois notions of late-game fouling situations, finally ran into a top-tier opponent, effortlessly clobbering the Wildcats en route to the Sweet Sixteen.

But then, as the game deepened into the second half, Gonzaga's lead began to shrink. The threes that bounced off the rim in the first half began going down, Gonzaga possessions ended on bricks and turnovers, Vic Law threw down a putback dunk, and all of a sudden the Wildcats found themselves in striking distance.

I don't know enough about Gonzaga to know if its fans have developed insane curses and instinctive senses warning of impending catastrophe, but Northwestern's comeback began to take on that feeling. For all of Gonzaga's basketball heroics in the twenty-first century, they could never manage to break through and make a Final Four, and this team, touted as their best yet, and in a seemingly insurmountable position against a team that had spent the past week telling every single media outlet on the face of the Earth that they were happy to be there began to feel pressure. The contorted, grief-ridden face of Adam Morrison began hovering over Spokane.

You all know what happened next.

Dererk Pardon rebounded a Bryant McIntosh floater and a Gonzaga player reached through the basket like a reanimated hand bursting forth from a grave. Chris Collins lost his mind and assailed the referees with a series of misguided vertical karate chops, got a technical foul, and saw the Gonzaga lead balloon to seven.

Collins busts out his signature move, the Muppet Ruiner, where he terrorizes toddlers with

the terrible truth about Elmo

The NCAA Tournament is designed for this: for a team to desperately survive a seemingly endless regular season, endure various bracket-related prediction sorceries, play in a conference tournament for which I have yet to determine a point, and then play in a series of high-stakes win or go home games that all end in errant fouls and missed calls and everyone yelling about them for two weeks until one of the four teams that everyone assumed would win the national championship in October wins the championship. How did we live for so many years without this?

WOW, NICE TOURNAMENT DROUGHT, RUTGERS

For decades, the single distinguishing fact about Northwestern's basketball team was that it had not made the NCAA Tournament. Every single announcer at every game mentioned it. Every year, the newspapers printed the same article about how they hadn't made it, to the point where I speculated that the same article got republished over and over again and years after the original author's death. Every time the Wildcats gained some momentum, the single overarching question about whether it was The Year seemed to hang in the arena, just short of the Athletic Department hanging an "Is This The Year?" banner after a strong round of non-conference games.

For Northwestern, One More Year (That's [obscene number] Straight) Without a Bid

By [Change to Guy Who's Alive]

The pressure on the team must have been enormous. Collins and the Athletic Department leaned into it by adopting the slogan "it's time", a message that for normal people signaled the goal of reaching the Tournament, but to my mind, poisoned by unfathomable wasted hours caring about college sports on the internet, will forever be linked to a video entitled "BigVOLdaddy pisses on kiffin shirt." Collins also adopted the hashtaggable homily "pound the rock" about Northwestern's slow and steady attempt to make the Tournament in contrast to its previous slogan "push the rock up the hill for dozens and dozens of years only to have Jared Sullinger grab it and roll it right down upon you and your loved ones."

The qualification procedure for the NCAA Tournament in the Big Ten remains an arduous and impossible slog. There are top-tier teams waiting to clobber all opposition, and the seemingly easier games against weaker opponents only provide opportunities for devastating, bracket-killing losses, and it seems like there are fifteen of these games a week. Every time Northwestern stepped up with a big win over a top opponent, the University of Illinois would crawl up from the bottom of the standings to drag Northwestern back to the NIT in a grotesque, carnivalesque parody of the relationship between the Northwestern and Illinois basketball programs. It makes sense that it took an absurd miracle play to finally convince me that they would make it; it wasn't until the Wildcats were in the middle of their 31-0 rampage against Rutgers in the Big Ten Tournament that I had fully convinced myself that they were safe, that a tough Rutgers team wouldn't bludgeon them in the tournament and then hack their own computers to add in fictional losses to dental colleges and New York-area improv comedy schools to destroy their own RPI ratings and keep Northwestern out of the tournament, thus preventing the Scarlet Knights from owning the longest power conference tourney drought.

Rutgers AD Patrick Hobbs chugs a beer and announces that Rutgers is
forfeiting all of its wins out of spite and then puts an incredulous Jim Delany
in a series of wrestling holds

Northwestern's basketball season came wrapped in novelty. The quest for the first tournament bid brought out a rare, raucous atmosphere at Welsh-Ryan-- the arena sold out and the team played primarily for home fans. No one knows whether they'll be able to carry that energy over to the Allstate Arena next season which, as Wikipedia notes "was featured in many music videos, including the 1985 music video 'Big City Nights' by Scorpions" but "has yet to host a Royal Rumble."

Northwestern's success also brought out scandal and backlash. The entire season played out over a lawsuit by a former player alleging he was forced off the team. Northwestern's large and loud network of media alums, particularly in sports, took to the airwaves and began going door-to-door yelling at people about the tournament. CBS's cameras focused so much on Doug Collins and Julia Louis-Dreyfus that I'm not sure that Louis-Dreyfus didn't start closing out Vanderbilt shooters in the second half. The Wildcats learned that if they want to do the the hire the Duke coach and Duke up the program dance they are going to have to pay the piper.

NORTHWESTERN PLAYED IN THE NCAA TOURNAMENT FOR REAL

The excitement and relief of Northwestern's actual qualification for the tournament took the terror out of most of the games. The team played in actual NCAA tournament games with the patches on the uniforms and everything. So it didn't bother me much when Vanderbilt fought back from a large deficit and Northwestern needed a complete breakdown of communication between the Vanderbilt coach and player and an unprecedented bonehead foul to win their first game.

When I tap my belt not once, not twice, but thrice, I mean do not foul him under any
circumstances

Similarly, the Gonzaga game registers much less rancor than I'd normally attach to an atrocious referee debacle in the biggest game in the history of Northwestern basketball. It would have been great to see them in the Sweet 16 or even to lose a game that didn't hinge on a terrible call and the coach sealing their fate by going completely berserk and then making hilarious mime faces after the game. But it's also hard to get upset that the greatest Northwestern team we've ever seen that did the one thing we all wanted them to do while in the midst of a cacophony of news reporters and TV and alumni and ridiculous blogspot.com bloggers that chronicled their every move for months didn't become slightly greater.

Northwestern sports are in their golden age. It is a silly golden age, a pinnacle of winning two mid-tier bowl games and qualifying for a 68-team tournament like literally every single major-conference team in the entirety of college sports, but it is also a golden age of throwing off the last vestiges of Northwestern's sports history of unfathomable acts of futility. It comes with a price-- the vast and obscene monies that Northwestern will spend on athletic facilities in the coming years to compete in the Big Ten that are large enough to quantify by using the word monies, the questions about how Collins runs the program, and the queasy expectations that come with any sort of success. For now, though, whenever some announcer wants to dig out some grim statistic about some gruesome Northwestern streak, the answer is probably one year.

Those maniacs did it. And now, after more than a century of ineptitude, a litany of specific playoff humiliations, an angry, mustard-flecked mob that has driven a nebbishy-looking baseball fan to the underground, an intentional reduction of the team to baseball molecules where fans were invited to pay exorbitant prices to watch Junior Lake strike out hundreds of times, and a mythical World Series run that involved the Rebirth of That Beefy Lad Kyle Schwarber from a sausage chrysalis and an impossible Game Seven where the Cubs, in prime Cub position and ready to implode in front of the only other team that can live in their baseball misery zip code had the heavens themselves open up and refuse to allow the Cubs to do what I had predicted they would do for hours in a number of increasingly frenzied and embarrassing text messages. They won. They had the parade and everything. And then baseball had to go and continue to exist.

What happens now? There are rapacious Baseball Alexanders and Yankees fans for whom a single title is not enough and demand them with their unrelenting bobbling the ball gestures while a large, angry man screams fuck you fuck you fuck you behind them. Sure, the Cubs should be really good this season. They've got as good of a shot as anyone. But after a postseason where every single pitch carried with it the portent of doom, where the echo of death so shrouded the team that Wrigley Field itself was turned into an impromptu chalk memorial for fallen Cubs fans unable to wait out a championship drought literally decades longer than the entire existence of the Soviet Union, it's hard to be upset when John Lackey gets knocked around in the 2017 Division Series.

The Cubs have long made hay from romanticizing their failure. But there's no nobility in watching a profoundly wretched baseball team. If there's anything that can be taken from the Cubs' century of failure it's that it was incredibly funny-- a wealthy team, boasting a national fanbase from early cable television, bolstered by a charming historical ballpark teeming with tourists indifferent to the often putrid play on the field manages only to perpetuate a remarkable run of baseball ineptitude where the team's rare appearances in the playoffs more often than not culminate in grandiose, impossible choke jobs and then everyone blames the whole thing on a literal goat.

One of the dumbest legacies of the contrived billy goat curse is
the fact that the goat was ever there in the first place. It should
have been called the "curse of the reasonable stadium barnyard
animal policy"

The 2017 Cubs face an impossible task of following up last season. They face another long, grinding schedule, a host of reinforced rivals, and the unhinged lunacy of playoff bullshit that has made it rare for teams to repeat as champions. And they do so after getting over America's greatest sports hump and in the face of inevitable backlash and overexposure that has already involved an absurd article naming Theo Epstein the world's greatest leader and David Ross dueling Mr. T on some sort of geriatric dancing program.

Mr. T is no stranger to televised competition, as
shown by his entry in the Toughest Man In The
World contest in the film The Toughest Man
in the World where he plays the Toughest
Man in the World, a bouncer who according to
IMDB was "conned into taking over a youth
center" also Mr. T performed the theme song
called The Toughest Man In The World

The 2017 Cubs will not be able to break the longest championship drought in American sports, inspire a montage of crying grandmothers, or feature World Series games that start with ten minutes of Joe Buck cackling over footage of crypts and graveyards. They will merely be an excellent baseball team, and watching them will still be the same pleasant waste of time that comes from watching any other baseball. And from a person who wasted hundreds of hours citing Jake Fox's AAA numbers and watching Tony Campana desperately attempt to reach first base more than once a week, it's a welcome change.

THE CUBS FOR SOME REASON WILL PLAY BASEBALL THIS SEASON

The Cubs, fueled by their young bats, bring back the vast majority of last year's team. They still have Rizzo and Bryant and Russell in their infield along with World Series MVP Ben Zobrist. They can, at any time and without warning, deploy Javier Baez, who was scientifically designed to always do the most delightfully reckless thing possible on a baseball field. Baez will take extra bases and try insane, physics-defying slides. He will always make that ill-advised throw or barehand play and somehow make it work a shocking number of times. He is incredibly good at tagging, which I had no idea was something someone could be good at. He will try to hit every ball he sees into the Upper Peninsula enough times that baseball's cold water pouring statistics brigade can toss out their well actually Javy Baez is not really that great of a baseball player articles because he strikes out so much that he might qualify for a federal wind farm tax break to which I say to this straw man have you seen him do the no-look tag.

Baseball's greatest feat of derring-do

At some point, it is possible the Baez magic will wear off. Baez gained a cult following because of his playoff hot streak, most notably his solo, game-winning home run against a seemingly-unhittable Johnny Cueto at Wrigley, but that's not his typical hitting profile. He will likely remain frustrated by his greatest nemesis, the breaking ball so far outside that it's practically in the on-deck circle that nevertheless compels him to swing. I'm willing to live with that. Baez dwells in baseball chaos, and if his irrepressible desire to do the coolest thing possible turns him into an Infield Kingman, that's all well and good.

The Cubs will not have my other favorite player from the Cubs farm system, Jorge Soler. They traded Soler to the Royals for closer Wade Davis. Soler, along with Baez, embodied the era of Shadow Cubs, where tales of their feats against hapless future insurance adjustors served as the happy counterpoint to whatever sad spectacle was happening to the actual Cubs on a daily basis. Baez had footage of moon tower home runs; Soler came with reports of attempting to singlehandedly charge an entire opposing dugout. Soler arrived on a tear in 2014 with a homer in his first at-bat, and the rhapsodies continued from there. Joe Maddon referred to him as "like Vladimir [Guerrero] with plate discipline;" this came coupled with some delightful Maddon nonsense. "The fact that he doesn't really understand or speak English very well could work in his favor right now," Maddon said, Maddonically. "He's a beautiful man. I really, really enjoy the way he is."

Soler instead had trouble with plate discipline and spent a large amount of time lingering on the disabled list. His greatest asset, to me, was his greatest drawback-- the fact that he is built like the Colossus of Rhodes and it seems stunning when he doesn't launch every single pitch back to the nearest Spaulding manufacturing plant as a warning to future baseballs. To watch Soler hulk in the batter's box, his ominous shadow lurking towards the dugout in the afternoon sun and then whiff feebly on the low and outside slider that we all knew was coming or stab ineffectively at balls in the outfield, or spend all of his free time nursing soft-tissue injuries made his struggles as a kind of OK baseball player harder to take. Soler is still only 25 and escaped from an impossible logjam of prospect prodigies that have passed him by. I hope he can put it together and mash some enormous moonshots out of Kaufman Field when he gets healthy. He'll begin the season on the disabled list.

Farewell to Jorge Soler, whose throw to third after a league-wide shame campaign peer-pressured
Jon Lester into throwing to first is one of my favorite recent Cubs plays

The Cubs' most damaging departure is Dexter Fowler. Fowler came in and did what almost no Cub did during Theo Epstein's years-long purge of competent baseball players for rebuilding purposes by getting on base a ton. He became so integral to the Cubs' offense that he got his own catchphrase ("you go, we go"), and became one of the most likable Cubs of my lifetime. Last year, Fowler had apparently signed with the Orioles and then dramatically popped up in Cubs' spring training to save the day. Now he is gone-- not safely ensconced in the American League, but on the hated Cardinals to torture the Cubs 19 times a season. It's a testament to Fowler's popularity and the general, hazy euphoria that now accompanies all things Cub, that few Cubs fans harbor any hostility toward him (most of the Fowler TRADER references I could find on twitter were either sarcastic or referencing what appears to be a British soap opera), but we'll see how that progresses when he starts slapping hits all over Wrigley Field the Right Way in a pennant race.

The 2016 Cubs hit and pitched well, but they also owed their success to a historically great defense. They will certainly not be that good again partly because that sort of blip is unsustainable, but also because they will start a lumbering moose in left field. Kyle Schwarber may be the most popular Cub because of his world series heroics, his propensity for mashing enormous home runs, and because he is a beefy, genial man in a city of genial, beefy people. The question is not whether Schwarber can acquit himself well in left, but it's how much his prodigious bat can offset his oafish outfield stumbling and occasional inevitably-disastrous catching cameos. As long as he is a Cub, loud, nasal calls will echo across sports radio for him to be traded to the American League, where he can whack moonshots in peace without having to ineffectually flail at baseballs in front of the entire country on a nightly basis. That is unfathomable to me.

Jason Heyward remains a mystery. Heyward, last year's prized free agent signing, spent last season futilely gesturing with his bat in the general direction of a pitch and hit something like 15,000 soft grounders directly at the second baseman. Still, he remained a valuable fielder and baserunner, andevidently a master of locker room rain delay oratory as evidenced by his World Series rain delay speech the Cleveland Urinal Address. Heyward's batting woes remain a fascinating look at how, even for an athlete as gifted as Heyward, his mind can be at war with his body. His every plate appearance featured a series of ticks and timing gestures of a guy who floundered and kept adding mechanisms and hitches to the point that his swing resembled a Rube Goldberg machine of limbs and tendons. This offseason, he has gone on a baseball vision quest to try to find a new swing, tinkering for months until he came up with something that has been roughly as terrible in spring training than whatever he was doing last year.

Heyward's swing enters its Mark IV prototype phase using top baseball science

The Cubs have an old, creaking pitching staff. They have inexplicable ERA leader Kyle Hendricks, who somehow dominated Major League players with an 88 mile per hour fastball and a mound presence that can best be described as impending visit with the vice principal. Every one of Hendricks's pitches last season felt like watching an increasingly elaborate con, waiting for someone somewhere to figure out that he was not throwing hard and exposing the ruse with a series of blistering line drives. Baseball analysts don't know what to do with a guy like him. especially when he looks like a social media intern. They give them nicknames like "The Professor" or "Dr. Brainzo" or "Chest Concave, Doctor of Baseball Flim-Flammery" while he beguiles people by winning the pennant and the World Series. I have no idea if Hendricks will continue to contend for a Cy Young this season, but his mere existence in a baseball system that demands nothing but musclebound giants who break radar guns is a minor miracle.

Kyle Hendricks's theme music is "Sweet Emotion"

There are few things in baseball less fun than rooting for a team with John Lackey. Lackey, a grizzled, anthropomorphic swear word, has managed to gnaw his leg off from whatever bear trap that's ensnared him for the offseason and crawled into another spring training. Lackey started off as a fat young guy who bellowed the word FUCK and has evolved his game to become a skinny old guy who yells FUUUCCCCKKK while hitting himself in the head with a baseball. He's a mean ol' cuss who not only throws at guys who have the temerity to smile after hitting one his ineffective fastballs to Tucumcari, but stalks them in the offseason while doing pullups with the words "BAT FLIP" tattooed on his knuckles. Lackey was a good pitcher last year during the regular season and a not insubstantial part of their success, but he's also the least enjoyable Cub whose starts promise hours of peevish irascibility seethed through clenched, enormous teeth.

Jon Lester was great last season. He does not throw to first.

Leaked footage of Joe Buck's intro to the Cubs-Cardinals game

SPORTS AFTER THE IMPOSSIBLE

I didn't think I'd ever see the Cubs win the World Series or Northwestern play in the NCAA Tournament, and they both happened within months. I would say that this will change how I view sports, but then again the vast majority of teams don't carry with them impossibly long, mythical droughts that make it impossible to watch them on television without a graphic showing the price of bread and at least one old-timey vehicle.

Here's an Old-Timey Base Ball Image to remind you of the many years that the Cubs
afflicted their Fans with Substandard Base Ball-manship

The end of these absurd droughts has taken away single dominant narrative that surrounds everything they do. It has also liberated them to exist as sports and not, in the case of the Cubs, a vaguely baseball-related doomsday cult. The Cubs' 2017 season has no end other than baseball itself. There will be questions about Jason Heyward's revamped swing whether Baez should be starting and whether Willson Contreras can catch Jon Lester. These are normal baseball concerns, not a haunting Joe Buckmanship or invocation of the occult.

No one wants to hear about long-suffering Cubs fans anymore. The television networks and newspapers and, hell, even the Cubs themselves hauled it out to make their dollar and bludgeon every other baseball fan into oblivion with it every time the Cubs so much as threatened to finish over .500 foras long as anyone has been alive. The baseball world has had enough of them and the inevitable Red Sox-like descent into sports villainy will begin on Opening Day. That is when the World Champion Cubs will open on Sunday to defend their World Championship that they won in the World Series.

Brad Stevens must not be sleeping very well in the government-issued mind helmet that he must keep on at night to prevent his genius brain from emitting dangerous waves. The top-seeded Boston Celtics are down 2-0 to the cantankerous old Bulls who crept into the playoffs by the thinnest of margins, who appeared to quit on the season numerous times in 2017 alone, whose members spent most of their time finding newer and more exotic social media websites on which to feud. Brad Stevens is down 2-0 to Fred Hoiberg, who even as we speak is investing his obscene coaching salary in repeated attempts to win a stuffed gorilla in a a carnival peg toss.

Richard Nixon conducted his foreign policy under what he called the "madman theory," hoping to wring concessions out of his rivals in the in the Soviet Union, China, and other governments forced to deal with him as the keeper of a terrifying nuclear arsenal by convincing him that he was enough of a maniac to act on his darkest threats. Henry Kissinger, according to one memorandum, told a general that "the President's strategy has been...to 'push so many chips into the pot' that the other side will think we may be 'crazy' and be willing to go much further."

Fred Hoiberg has been using a similar strategy with the Bulls. How could Stevens or any coach gameplan for someone who spent the regular season rotating point guards at random, shuttling them from moldering on the bench to starting with the arbitrary whim of a basketball Caligula? How can a basketball coach, even one armed with cutting edge statistical models and video replay, determine the Bulls' tactics when Bulls may mutiny upon Hoiberg at any point? How can one discern patterns and strategies when the opponent seems to operate without them?

Fred Hoiberg learns all about dealing with office wiretaps

There is no way to prepare for the Bulls when the exact composition of the Bulls remains a mystery. Sure, the Bulls appear to have a set rotation now. But it's impossible to say at what point Hoiberg will change things up-- he could decide to put in Denzel Valentine to demoralize the Celtics with geriatric post moves or Michael Carter-Williams to silence a raucous road crowd because they rightly fear that his jump shots can at any time fly into the stands to bonk unsuspecting spectators in their heads and or land in their snacks and shower them and their neighbors with nacho detritus. Hoiberg may at any time and without warning unleash Joffrey Lauvergne, whose main basketball skill seems to be playing as if he was wearing the magnetic prison shoes from Face/Off.

Lauvergne hopes to use this playoff run to launch his new sneaker line

The Celtics are run by a vast network of computers spitting out ideal outcomes and advanced three pointer math and icons of basketball religion that the Sloan Analytics crowd refers to as Assets, and the Bulls are bludgeoning them to death with their big, meaty forearms. No one can stop Robin Lopez, who may be adopted into the Bulls' Society of Alphas if they can find a cloak large enough. Rondo, who is so instinctively despised by every NBA fan that he's been non-rhotically abused every time he touches the ball in the Garden even though he's a bona fide Boston playoff hero, has been systematically dismantling the Celtics. Dwyane Wade has gone into Playoff Mode, so if he thinks he has been fouled but did not get the call, he occasionally deigns to get back on defense instead of whipping out his half-glasses and meticulously typing a formal complaint while the opposing team goes on a fast break. Jimmy Butler is a single-minded destroyer.

How about another look? 👀🏈 pic.twitter.com/hnX54aznkO
— Chicago Bulls (@chicagobulls) April 19, 2017

The series comes steeped in the drama of failed trade hypotheticals. The Celtics' and Bulls' front offices spent the days before the trade deadline leaking competing rumors of a Jimmy Butler for Nets draft picks deal to the press. The talks generated thousands of rumors as websites mobilized their content aggregators and dozens perished in the coal furnaces that power the Adrian Wojnarowski tweet factory, but the actual offers remain shrouded in mystery. The failed trade talks disappointed some Bulls fans who see no way forward other than blowing up the team along with relief because absolutely no one trusts the authors of the stop at nothing to acquire Doug McDermott strategy and the Oklahoma City trade fiasco to make another mistake; the state of Bulls fans before the deadline could best be described as pre-swindled. Butler remains a Bull, delightedly dunking on the interchangeable Celtics wings that Danny Ainge was allegedly reluctant to part with for him. The Nets draft picks that the Celtics control cannot do anything in this series because they do not yet have corporeal form-- they cannot be subtly grabbed by Lopez or exchange elbows with Cristiano Felicio and they have not yet been traded to the Bulls to be used on players that some intrepid Bulls blogger will later find have sinister ties to Iowa State.

The Bulls, an aggressively bad and aesthetically revolting team, have fueled their playoff run by spitefully forcing America to continue to watch them. The playoff run will in the long term prove disastrous-- by qualifying they have further eroded their draft position, they have validated the witless scheming endemic to the management strategy of that coach choker John Paxson and his Igor henchman Gar Forman, and they have no chance to advance past any of the other top East seeds. At the same time, this is the most fun Bulls playoff run since a vomiting Nate Robinson brought the Booklyn Nets to their knees. No one, not least of all Bulls fans, wants this godforsaken team in the playoffs, but the Bulls have found their niche, refusing to go away when all the NBA world wants is a respite from their bullshit, ugly, bickering, non-basketball.

The only thing that makes sense for the Bulls is to continue their reviled rampage through the Eastern Conference before their inevitable elimination at the hands of whatever team LeBron James plays for. But because they are the Bulls it is equally likely that they collapse at the hands of the Celtics, going out in a blaze of futility and recrimination while Fred Hoiberg spends the night on the phone with his Blockbuster Video rep to find undiscovered motivational 80s films to splice into his film sessions. The Bulls are a boring force of basketball misery that no one wants in playoffs and they cannot be stopped.

Every 1980s future dystopia movie that takes place roughly now reveled in showing sports that have moved in parallel with the government's inevitable slide into shoulder-padded, neon technofascism by transforming into an increasingly perverse spectacle of violence, consumerism, and some combination of motorcycles and jetpacks. Yet even the most hysterical Damon Killian I'd buy that for a dollar money-shaking flamethrower thunderdome wrought from the most cocaine-addled, seagull-coiffed producer has yet to match the gloriously stupid spectacle of the NFL draft.

The NFL draft was silly enough when it involved a depressing hotel conference center filled with football and television personnel who had all simultaneously purchased the worst suit on the market. Now, the National Football League has taken over entire cities, paralyzed roads, developed filmed skits, brandished as much military hardware as a minor Soviet civic holiday, and filled public squares with thousands of boo-thirsty spectators, all whom have traveled from their homes to hear a three-day list of potential football players, most of whom will be cut before a single game is played.

The overwhelming pomposity of the draft-- Roger Goodell's masterclass in unwarranted swaggering, the conflation of the NFL with a branch of the United States government, the collision between spittle-flecked football guys who want to amend the US Constitution to give them the authority to order hamburger drills on any citizen and Ted Talk-conditioned corporate brand managers, the development of a bizarre NFL draft argot that mixes adjectives that have never been used to describe a human being before with the way that the cops talk on the television show COPS-- these are things I discussed on this blog last year and have been noted more eloquently by competent writers capable of writing normal-length sentences.

The novelty of this year's NFL draft been to take all of the normal draft bullshit and add a bunch of insanely stupid nonsense to it. It's not enough that the draft includes punishing hours of highlights, inane draft patter, slickly-produced human interest stories, and Mel Kiper's 1980s dystopian sportscaster haircut. They've now interspersed skits involving stiff former players bravely battling teleprompters and mascots and contest-winners from globe-spanning satellite links. When you tune into the draft only to see Mark Brunell, acting with the natural flair of a man trapped for decades in a 19th century diving apparatus rusting at the bottom of an ocean, pretend to find the name of a fourth round pick on the bottom of a golf ball, it is mind-boggling.

A lucky NFL fan tries to find the Texans' sixth round pick in a mockup of a
pus-oozing Brian Cushing nose

Anthony Walker, who fulfilled a dream to finally hear his name called at the NFL draft, had his name picked by a disconcertingly tech-savvy orangutan.

I know that this is probably the most You Maniacs sports blog on the blogspot.com platform
if not the entire internet, but this is literally a Planet of the Apes inflection point so please do
not take it lightly when I caption this GIF: YOU MANIACS

The NFL draft serves, even more than the Super Bowl, which eventually has to shoehorn in a football game, as the apotheosis of the NFL experience. The NFL's combination of spectacle, self-seriousness, and complete inability to register absurdity even as they introduce zoo animals to interrupt an analyst grimly explaining whether or not a football player is a football player who can play football in the national football league has become more compelling as it has gotten more ridiculous. Why not have Goodell ride into the draft on top of a tank? Why not have former players reveal picks only after going on a global scavenger hunt for clues-- imagine Rex Grossman, sent to reveal the Bears' fifth-round pick from an Egyptian tomb before surfacing weeks later in the Luxor, the victim of a gang of international baccarat hustlers? It is only a matter of time, because idiots like me continue to watch the draft move further into Paul Verhoeven territory every year because the Bears might trade a bunch of picks to get that quarterback from North Carolina, are you kidding me?

BOOK REVIEW: THE CUBS WAY

It took 108 years for the Cubs to win their last two World Series titles, which is the approximate amount of time it would take to produce the effluvia of Cubs merchandise that we've seen in the past several months using 1908 techniques. The city of Chicago has been deluged by enough hats, shirts, commemorative DVDs, and books to dam up the Chicago river and once again reverse its flow into Lake Michigan to flood the water supply with festive holiday dyes and excrement from the Dave Matthews band tour bus.

Crews dye the Chicago River blue to celebrate the Cubs' victory. They did
not, as far as I know, dye it for the Sox win because it would have looked
like a Cecil B. DeMille plague

It is perhaps unfair to lump Tom Verducci's The Cubs Way with the various picture books and other cash-in products that have devoted thousands of words to asking the discerning reader hey do you remember the Cubs won the World Series. Verducci, a long-time baseball writer for Sports Illustrated and part of Fox's television crew in charge of reminding Joe Buck that Jon Lester does not throw to first, has a far more important mission in mind, which is to ask hey do you know how the Cubs won the World Series.

There's been a tend since Michael Lewis's Moneyball for sportswriters to zero in on teams with cutting edge strategies. This subgenre gets away from the anecdotes and personalities of the team; the star of these books is spreadsheets and the men who program them. Verducci struck gold on the Cubs as the ultimate Process Book-- a historically moribund team bereft of talent and laden with a mystical aura of failure is seized by a spreadsheet savant, headed by a quirky manager, and finally wins a championship for the millions of desperate fans, many of whom will be ready to purchase this book.

Verducci focuses on Cubs President Theo Epstein, and he clearly intends The Cubs Way to read as a sequel to Moneyball. Teams had caught on to Billy Beane's stunning revelation that baseball players should get on base and his acolytes, including Epstein himself, had proliferated throughout baseball unleashing a new order via slide rule. Epstein, like all of the other analytically-minded baseball executives had been to the baseball monolith and found that all of the other apes now had bones of their own. Verducci couches Epstein's attempt to drag the Cubs and Cubs fans out of their peasant superstitions and eschatological playoff watching techniques into the familiar quest understood by anyone who follows baseball post-Moneyball: the Search for the New Inefficiency.

Epstein has decided that one of the new inefficiencies is a player's personality and ability to mesh with his teammates. The revelation came after the collapse of the 2011 Red Sox, which became mired in infighting and vendettas as the team swooned out of the playoffs. Epstein, according to Verducci, vowed to move beyond the statistics to get players who would not only play well but play well together; Verducci never quite explains how that philosophy involved the eventual acquisition of Jon Lester and Jon Lackey, masterminds of the Red Sox'beer and chicken fiasco that became the emblem of the problems on that team.

The fall of the Red Sox due to chicken, beer, and clubhouse gaming is one of the dumbest
baseball hysterias of recent vintage and I can't get over this CBS news graphic, it looks like
Lackey is about to take a Power Glove from a metal briefcase

The emphasis on player makeup did not evidently extend to Aroldis Chapman, who proved that Epstein's emphasis on character included exceptions for people who can throw 103 miles per hour. Verducci does discuss Chapman's ghoulish domestic violence arrest and suspension from baseball as well as the Cubs'bungled attempt to pretend they had soul-searching discussions with him to justify their trade. Here is how Verducci and Hoyer making up some bullshit how Chapman getting upset because he thought he had blown a World Series somehow redeemed him:

[Chapman] arrived as a flamethrowing mercenary, whose behavior in a domestic dispute compromised the buy-in for some fans of the joy teh Cubs gave them. No longer did those fans face the potential conflict of watching Chapman secure the end to the biggest championship in sport. By failing, and doing so to the point of physcial and emotional exhaustion, Chapman became more humanized to a fan base just getting to know him.
"When he comes back in 5, 10 years or so for some anniversary party," Hoyer said "he's viewed in a very different way-- in a very positive way.

The other star of The Cubs Way is Joe Maddon. Maddon, the self-consciously quirky manager who took the microbudget Rays to the World Series, immediately bonded with Epstein over their desire to find new edges and invent homilies. For example, the team adopted the slogan "that's Cub" to preach the proper way to do things throughout the organization and then decided to clumsily retrofit it into an acronym: "C stands for the courage 'to do the right thing,' even if it's scary or uncomfortable; U is for the urgency 'to do the right thing right now; and B is for the belief 'that we can do it.'" That is a viscerally horrifying sentence.

Maddon and Epstein's new techniques include mental skills training, using software to train players in pitch recognition. These types of things will soon travel across baseball, where the St. Louis Cardinals will subject their endless supply of 5'1" guys named Squeaks to simulated reenactments of the farming machinery accidents that have claimed all of their relatives in order to turn them into onbase machines and master cybercriminals.

Cardinals infield prospect Sport Winkelous learns how to identify forkballs and to imprison
rival front offices in their stadiums by turning a network of smart toasters and networked
refrigerators into a remorseless cyber-army

There's very little in The Cubs Way that will surprise anyone who has followed the Cubs or even baseball generally. The floundering Cubs, bought by a wealthy family, hire Epstein and allow him to strip the team of anyone capable of playing major league baseball while the Cubs acquire prospects by trading anyone who plays even moderately well, draft sluggers with the high draft picks that they hoard as a reward for profoundly sucking, and hire Joe Maddon to coordinate pajama-themed road trip costumes-- this is a story that has become as integral to a Cubs television broadcast as footage of the Named Cubs Playoff Catastrophes and satanic goat imagery.

The Cubs Way will not upend anyone's thinking about the Cubs or baseball or Anthony Rizzo's nude shadowboxing rituals. It will not likely change anyone's opinion on Joe Maddon as his Joe Maddonness, complete with an annotated lineup card featuring "proprietary numbers," spills unchecked across the pages. The Cubs Way is a fine and straightforward process book by an experienced and plugged-in baseball writer that I will probably re-read multiple times and then watch the World Series video until the authorities find me suffocated at the bottom of a pile of Cubs merchandise.

Week 7: On Sports Bullshit

Week 8: Polked Them

Week 9: CAUGHT IT CLUB-HANDED

Week 10: Streaks

Week 11: Extraneous Football

Week 12: SINKHOLES

Week 13: Clean, Old-Fashioned Hat

Week 14: Who Cares About the Playoff, They Got the Hat

HEY I'M PLAYIN' FOOTBALL HERE

UNDEFEATED IN ALL HAT-RELATED CONTESTS

Historical Gas Prices

The Golden Age of Sports Gimmickry

Deadlines

THE PASS

NCAA TOURNAMENT PARTICIPANTS

UNDFEATED ALL TIME IN NCAA TOURNAMENT GAMES

NCAA Tournament Review: Five Stars, Would Dance Again

CUBS PREVIEW 2017: NOW WHAT

The Miserable, Awful Bulls Spitefully Refuse to Go Away

The NFL Draft Was Insane Enough and Then They Added Orangutans