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HELL YEAH I'M GOING TO PANIC ABOUT THE CUBS WHY NOT

June 2, 2017, 9:37 am
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The Chicago Cubs, the Reigning Champions of Baseball, have returned this season and they are floundering.  They are under .500, in third place in baseball's most putrid division. They have just dropped six in a row; the last time that happened was in 2012 when they were literally trying to lose as many baseball games as possible so they could draft Kris Bryant, and their roster consisted of a bunch of Spinal Tap drummers.  That was the year they sent a possibly fictional baseball player to the All-Star game who then vanished from the face of the Earth like a reverse Roy Hobbs.

A new controversial theory suggest that Bryan LaHair eventually, over 
the course of millenia, evolved into modern birds

The Let Cooler Heads Prevail people are blogging away about their BABIPs and Regressions to the Mean, and the Cubs' placement in a division full of teams that appear to have just learned about baseball through Wikipedia entries illustrated solely with blurry pictures of Matt Stairs.  Yes, the Cubs will play more than 100 more games and have plenty of time to right the ship.  And yes, after last year's long-awaited championship ended a century-long drought, the Cubs could move to St. Louis, form a splinter group of ultra-Cardinalism that preaches a more stringent, boring, and righter way to play baseball, and slather themselves in ketchup while denouncing all of the weird condiment, sausage, and pizza preferences that have somehow become sacrosanct markers of civic identity and I wouldn't care for like five years.  The Cubs are shitty right now and it's time to strike while the iron is hot.

The Cubs destroyed the world last year and seemed to have enough young superstars, prospects, and briefcases full of Ricketts money that is currently being used to terraform the entirety of Lakeview into Wrigley Field to remain a juggernaut for years.  The Cubs would, by all accounts, continue to rampage through the NL Central and threaten in the playoffs.  Instead, the Cubs have stumbled and instead of having to write about how the Despised Cub Men are bludgeoning the National League with their Run Differential and Joe Maddon is now managing entire series as a new kooky character he invented called Vance Goatwright, we can settle into the comforting routine writing about how the Cubs are beefing it in the field, stranding enough players on the bases to require the mobilization of a baserunner helicopter rescue service, and altogether playing a flailing, inelegant, moron baseball that can only be described by years honed watching the Cubs try to play baseball.

The Cubs' main problem all season has been the starting pitching.  Their collection of Vintage Pitchers have begun to show their age.  John Lackey now exists only as a gleaming-toothed grimace tracing the path of a ball into the bleachers.  Kyle Hendricks accidentally erased the program on his graphing calculator that allowed him to strike guys out with 86 mile-per-hour fastballs.  Brett Anderson is on the Disabled List with standing on the mound emitting an unearthly howl as his skull exploded all over "Cowboy" Joe West.  Jake Arrieta's chest is swallowing up his arms and legs.  I read somewhere that this Jon Lester guy can't even throw to first.

Highly scientific diagram of the past two seasons of Arrieta pitching

The Cubs are balancing out their shaky pitching by swinging bats made of ashed cigarettes.  The most visible example of this is the struggling Kyle Schwarber but that might be because he is large enough to be visible from space.  Schwarber, who beefed his way into fans' hearts by waddling around and damaging Wrigley Field signage with his towering ding shots has been one of the worst hitters in baseball this season.  A man who made a miraculous recovery from a catastrophic knee injury to become a World Series hero against some of the best pitchers in baseball after a couple days of live pitching is now flailing against anonymous innings-eaters on tanking teams and relievers recently discharged from the Kevin Gregg Institute of Goggled Belly-Itching.  Schwarber is also a contributor to the Cubs' regression from a world-historical baseball defense to something resembling ordinary by doing things like belly-flopping so hard during a pouring game that the umpires immediately called for the tarp and a large piece of Schwarber-shaped turf.

Schwarber is not the only Cub struggling, though.  Only Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Ben Zobrist, and part-timers Miguel Montero and Jon Jay have a wRC+ over 100.  Addison Russell is hitting barely better than Schwarber, but still at least playing stellar defense.  The problem has been exacerbated by a road trip where the Cubs refused to knock in baserunners-- thousands of years from now, they will find the silhouettes of runners trapped forever in scoring position in Southern California.
Cubs advanced analytics tell us it is impossible to score from third 
base because of Zeno's Paradox

The sample sizes are small.  The division is bad.  The Cubs preceded their 0-6 slump with a 7-2 homestand, and they returned to Wrigley Field with a chance to get right back into it with a series against the Cardinals.  

But I'm going to take it in and savor it, this rare patch of Cubs Panic.  Last year, they came out of the gate as the best team in baseball, made it to the World Series, and won it in a game that exorcised all of the Cubs demons by essentially running through a truncated greatest hits compilation of choking before finally holding on in rain-delayed extra innings. Before last year, every hiccup was a stumble in a race against the destruction of another season in a losing streak so endless that the televised footage of their playoff games featured a large number of cemeteries.  They were a doomsday cult. Now, the Cubs are a mere underperforming baseball team.  This losing streak has been irritating and frustrating, and completely lacking in the existential despair that has accompanied every Cubs downturn in any year that they've actually been supposed to be good, but after a lifetime of pessimism and reflexive baseball doom-mongering, it's been strange to watch the Cubs flounder around, briefly worry, and then reach for the nearest piece of licensed championship memorabilia and go back to watching baseball like an approximation of a normal person.
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The Inevitable, Ignominious End of the Three Alphas

June 27, 2017, 2:48 pm
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Lost in all of the losses, the roster upheavals, the endless disinformation campaigns, and the instagram recriminations, there was a cold comfort to the Three Alphas era of Chicago Bulls basketball.  The front office, fresh off of proclamations that the team would become younger and more athletic, signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, two decorated, headstrong veterans with big personalities and collectively two and a half functioning knees between them to a universal chorus of disapproval from the basketbloggerati, and the entire enterprise collapsed exactly along the lines that everyone predicted.  In a year that has seen the entire project of prediction and conventional wisdom fall by the wayside, it is at least reassuring to know that when Rajon Rondo is introduced to a volatile environment of executive sabotage, espionage, and bumbling coaching howdy-doodery, a rational person can still count on the inevitable dysfunction.

The Bulls ended the Three Alphas project by trading Jimmy Butler to their old nemesis Tom Thibodeau, who committed the cardinal sin of winning with enough vomiting Nate Robinsons that people gave him credit instead of John Paxson and Gar Forman.  There is no need to go over the details of the trade-- there is an entire internet of that for the universal condemnation of the hideous return the Bulls got for one of the best players in the league.  That was to be expected.  While there's a decent case to be made that the Bulls should cash in Butler, no Bulls fan wanted the flustered Adam West-era Batman Villain front office to get swindled for a package headlined by a Knee Guy.

Chicago fans once again go into the attic to get the 
crutches for their ironic knee-related art installations

The Bulls are left a smoldering crater of basketball horror, the remnants of poor drafts, lopsided trades, and a bizarre commitment to targeting players despised by fans.  The Three Alphas turned out to be a lone alpha operation.  Rondo, who honed his game into a Shermanesque repudiation of jumpshooting, played competently only in select national TV contests.  Wade disintegrated before our eyes like the guy who drank from the wrong grail in the Last Crusade on numerous dunk attempts.  He will pick up his option and gleefully pocket his $24 million while easing into semi-retirement-- it is possible that he will replace his seat on the bench with a hammock.  With the exception of the time he paid $25,000 to make throat slash gestures at the Boston Celtics, Wade's willingness to put up with the gruesome specter of hoiball in order to take more of Jerry Reinsdorf's money is the only thing he's done as a Bull that I respect.  The Bulls are now left with two vestigial alphas clogging the salary cap and sowing dissent as the team sinks to the bottom of the standings like a rotting ship floating aimlessly because the entire crew has already mutinied and eaten each other.

The Three Alphas devolved into increasingly bizarre social media feuding

The Jimmy Butler trade has ignited a firestorm of fan anger towards the Bulls' front office.  John Paxson, the floppy-haired hero of the 1993 Finals, has transformed into a bald, flinty-eyed executive who runs his front office like a crime boss in an action movie who spends all his time sitting angrily in an overstuffed office chair waiting for someone to be brought in to be either berated or fed to a carnivorous animal.  Paxson holds press conferences infrequently and only after an earth-shatteringly boneheaded move where he irritably fends off questions by people who he clearly thinks are too dumb to comprehend his plan even though he works in a field with the most literal definitions of success and failure possible.   Gar Formans' job is to burst out of ducts and gnash his teeth at people.

Bulls fans secretly hope for a Terminator incident to prevent Paxson 
from sinking that shot in the 1993 Finals in order to prevent him from 
trading Jimmy Butler for a guy who is going to be dunked into a Wile E.
Coyote accordion

There is little to look forward to.  A team with Butler and the largely incompetent roster from this season would battle again for a brief playoff cameo.  The Bulls acquired no additional draft picks and sold their second-round pick, a pick so old that it's riddled with those s that look like f letters for straight cash to the Golden State Warriors.  That money should, at the very least, go to upgrading the fleet of t-shirt blimps, hiring dozens of playwrights to come up with a new Stacy King catchphrase, or at least lowering the free big mac threshold to 99 points.  The Bulls are a sclerotic organization run by people who seem to have given over the entirety of their jobs to petty feuds and contracting exotic gouts. Thank goodness the city has an entire Big Ten team to fall back on.

FORD'S RAINFOREST

There are few things in the world more unnerving than a wealthy, powerful industrialist who decides that it is time to do something especially if that industrialist has enough money to buy a tract of land the size of two Delawares and has a vision of society includes strict and specific ideas about folk dancing.  By 1927, Henry Ford had developed a company powerful enough to try to industrialize the Amazon rainforest while indulging his belief that he could also build a community based on his own bizarre beliefs in a non-existent idealized America in the heart of the jungle.  Greg Grandin's Fordlandia follows Ford's disastrous Amazon rubber plantation between its founding and abandonment in 1945.  Grandin argues that, in Fordlandia, Ford saw the rainforest as not only a source of rubber but a blank slate upon which he could project his interpretation of American ideals that were, he believed, under increasing attack in the United States from forces like the government, unions, Jews, and as Grandin suggests, the very forces of consumerism unleashed by his own ubiquitous automobiles.  Grandin shows how this grand Amazonian Fordism fell apart in the face of remote and incompetent management, workers who chafed against Ford's strange and exacting behavioral expectations, and the jungle itself, which laid waste to millions of rubber trees and rendered the entire enterprise futile.

Ford's foray into Brazil came from a concern over the rubber supply.  Brazil had been the world's foremost rubber supplier.  That all changed when a bumbling, hard-luck British man named Henry Wickham managed to spirit a cache of rubber seeds back to Kew Gardens.  British cultivators brought them to Sri Lanka and Malaysia where the trees thrived with no natural predators.  Soon, Asian production outpaced the less efficient Brazilian supply and brought rubber under British control.  Wickham's story is chronicled in Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World, which ends with a brief section on Fordlandia, and which I reviewed although I focused mainly on a brief passage that involves one of Wickham's ancestors getting cheated in a horse race by the slovenly George IV.  As Grandin describes it, Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone resented that the British government had the ability to tax and restrict their access to such a precious resource and began to scheme to grow their own rubber, free from taxes and restrictions and the grubby fingers of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill.

Grandin describes how Fordlandia from the start had problems with managers who were hired to build cars and then found themselves shipped out to carve an America from the rainforest.  One early manager, an overmatched ship captain, turned to drink as disease claimed three of his children.  His successor, a Ford engineer from Detroit, left after the heat made him swell up.  He did two stints, and I like to imagine that he returned, fit, and glowing with health only to step off the gangplank, blow up like a parade float, and get rolled back into a cabin.  Willis Long Reeves Blakely, the first manager and an acolyte of Ford's enforcer Harry Bennett, established himself by repeatedly subjecting the port city of Belém to his naked ass:
Blakely quickly gained a reputation among the rogues and expatriates as a drunkard and exhibitionist.  He stayed in the best corner suite on the second floor of the Grande Hotel, Belém's finest, with a veranda an floor-to-ceiling windows, the shutters of which he left open as he walked around naked and made love to his wife.  The hotel, since demolished, was located on the city's central plaza, and Blakely's room faced the majestic Theatro da Paz, where the city's gentry promenaded every evening, coiffed and bedecked in formal wear.  "Everyone on the street could see," complained the hotel manager...
When Ford came to a region, whether it was a Michigan lumber town or millions of acres of rainforest, it brought the promise of investment, infrastructure, hospitals, and high wages. The price, as anyone clamoring for Ford involvement found, was a demand for conformity with Henry Ford's ideas about how to live. These ideas included enforced temperance, refraining from jazz age "sex dancing," and not unionizing; Ford unleashed Bennett's Service Department, a violent, cudgelous goon squad, to intimidate, infiltrate, and physically attack any group with a whiff of union about it.
 
Bennett (l) with Ford (c) sporting his signature bow tie 
look that he wore because of its strategic value in fistfights. 
 Bennett's most interesting role in the company was in a 
bizarre Ford family psychodrama where Ford set him up 
as a rival to his son Edsel.  Ford delighted in taunting and 
insulting Edsel, who he saw as weak and unable, unlike 
Bennett, to call in swarms of violent goons to render violence 
against his enemies and hammer them with his fists 
probably with weird nineteenth-century boxing stances

In Fordlandia, the Ford proscriptions extended to Main Street USA style houses wildly unsuited to the climate; Grandin's interviewees and archival sources described them as "hotter than the gates of hell,""galvanized iron bake ovens" and "midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares." A switch to a sweltering mess hall and buffet system so incensed workers already pushed past exhaustion clearing brush through a maze of biting insects and poisonous snakes provoked an uprising in late 1930 that could only be quashed with help from the Brazilian army.

Ford's greatest folly was his belief that industrialization could be brought to bear on the Amazon. The grand economies of scale that had turned Ford into an automotive juggernaut could not produce rubber.  The company's attempt to mimic the enormous plantation production in Asia failed Brazil, where an entire ecosystem had developed around destroying tree clusters.  As Grandin describes it, the rubber tree canopies became highways for blight as waves of insects, fungi, and caterpillars leveled the trees year after year.  Ford's management figured out how to perform elaborate tree grafts, but production remained dwarfed by Asia and, by the late 1940s, petroleum-based synthetic rubber. In 1945, Ford's grandson Henry Ford II took over the company and sold Fordlandia back to the Brazilian government for the cost of back wages owed the workers.

Grandin trawled through archives and traveled to Brazil to chronicle a largely forgotten monumental enterprise.  Parts of Ford's settlements and factories still exist with roads and water towers and homes and possibly stacks of mildewed newspapers with strong a strong editorial voice in favor of the fox trot.  The strength of this book is its profile of Ford as a man with the resources and will to not only bring a Fordlandia into existent but to suffuse it with his various monomanias, to send armies of people to clear and plant and build and die, and to try to control how hundreds of thousands of people ate and dressed, learned, and thought about time itself. The whole enterprise invites an inevitable comparison to Fitzcarraldo on a massive scale, Werner Herzog's movie about a madman trying to move a boat against the unyielding rainforest while yelling and making Klaus Kinsky faces. If Ford yelled at the rainforest, though, he did so in Detroit.  He never visited Fordlandia.
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On Dreams and Heads

July 27, 2017, 11:13 am
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The Crosstown Cup is in full sway, delighting Chicago's fans of interleague baseball and extremely nasal arguments that end with the brandishing of switchblade sausages.  There's even more underlying tension in this year's matchup as Cub fans continue to bask in their team's championship and the White Sox languish in a rebuild. It has been the sad lot of White Sox fans to suffer through decades of historically moribund baseball only to be overshadowed by the Cubs because the Sox have been less famously and catastrophically inept.  Even ESPN got into the act, omitting the Sox's 2005 championship from a list of Chicago sports titles while giving themselves over to the sporting world's unchecked Cubmania.










ESPN's 2005 World Series graphic vs the graphic shown on its 
Oct. 25, 2016 broadcast

The other bit of intrigue floating about the Crosstown classic comes from a rare blockbuster trade between the two teams.  The Sox sent their ace Jose Quintana to the Cubs as part of their scorched earth rebuild strategy, a grand purge of baseball competence.  In return the Cubs sent four prospects headlined by their heralded outfielder Elroy Jimenez.  The front offices hope this trade benefits both teams, with Quintana helping to stave off the grim reaper that has been stalking the Cubs' aged rotation this season and Jimenez joining the Sox's armada of superstar prospects to launch them into contention down the line.  For fans, the stakes are much higher-- if the trade turns out to be lopsided, fans of the swindled team will have to read about the exploits of their lost superstar in the same paper every day and will be unable to move about the city without being confronted by opposing fans sporting their Barrett or Pierzynski jerseys mocking them with fingersnaps and pirouettes.

This year's series has already erupted into fireworks.  John Lackey, the grizzled old Cubs pitcher who looks like he has hunted Tony Robbins for sport and taken his teeth as a trophy, hit four White Sox batters, including an astounding three in the same inning.  Lackey's maniacal beanball rampage provoked the ire of White Sox announcer Hawk Harrelson, who managed to drag himself to Chicago for the series in case anyone needed to be challenged to a duel.
The venomous way he spits out the word "LACKEY" is his greatest achievement in a long baseball announcing career of threats and grievances. Harrelson further clarified his comments on Lackey on Wednesday, telling a Tribune reporter "“I was hoping that they would drill his ass big time because he’s an idiot.”  "He's full of shit and you can print that," Harrelson continued, adding that Lackey's "gonna look pretty funny tryin' to eat corn on the cob with no FUCKIN' TEETH."

The Cubs-White Sox rivalry has seemed to cool after the novelty wore off; the crosstown series has reached its twentieth year, and interleague clashes have faded into the fabric of the regular season.  Perhaps the Lackey-Harrelson feud can spice things up beyond the Quintana trade and the Rick Renteria Vengeance Quest.  Or they can find a way to drum up excitement beyond baseball by throwing each other off the Reichenbach Falls.

HAULING THE SHIP

Here in 2017, Werner Herzog has been more or less Walkenized, almost entirely engulfed by his own caricature of a grim-voiced German who looks at an idyllic meadow and sees a hissing cauldron of murder.  Herzog is the maestro of the word "murder."  The word murder was invented for Werner Herzog to use it over narration of adorable penguins; in the same film, he repeatedly pronounces the McMurdo research station in Antarctica as "McMurder."

There are elements of that in "Burden of Dreams," the 1982 Les Blank documentary about the making of Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo." Towards the end, after years of fighting the logistical and political difficulties of filming in the Amazon and the impossibilities of shooting a Werner Herzog movie in the Amazon with its attendant Herzogian problems, Herzog breaks down and goes on a Herzog rant:


But the Werner Herzog in most of the movie is not the expected despairing sourpuss.  He's possessed, singularly focused on finishing his movie, seemingly indifferent to the suffering of his cast and crew and workers that will be placed in wholly unnecessary danger by his unwieldy, bulldozer-driven winching system. 


"Fitzcarraldo" is about a 1920s opera buff who hopes to finance an opera house in the Amazon lavish enough to lure Enrico Caruso through a quixotic rubber scheme that hinges on hauling a ship over a mountain between two rivers.  Herzog tries to make a movie about a man's quixotic quest to haul a ship over a mountain by hauling a ship over a mountain, quixotically.  At one point, a frustrated Herzog explains to his engineer that he simply must haul the ship over the mountain because of his metaphor.  But there is no metaphor.  The struggle to haul the ship over the mountain has become completely literal.

"Burden of Dreams" continuously plops viewers down in the middle of various crises-- the departure of his two stars Jason Robards and somehow Mick Jagger; the delicate political situation between his crew, indigenous groups, and various South American governments; a late-night arrow attack; the laws of physics-- but the larger question of Herzog's obsession with hauling a 320-ton steamship up a mud-slicked mountain remains barricaded in Herzog's psyche.  Somehow, the film, which is more or less an unbroken chronicle of calamity, always seems to hint at something stranger going on in the background as Herzog offhandedly explains some other insane, herculean task by pointing out how a ship has been towed through thousands of miles on a map or with snippets of a scowling, jumpsuited Klaus Kinski stalking about the set.  I would watch a documentary about the documentary crew filming this movie, complete with a documentary about that crew in an endlessly recursive pre-taped call-in show loop of televisions until we can get to the bottom of the ludicrous lengths Herzog went to in order to film "Fitzcarraldo."

HEADS

There are a multitude of uses for severed heads: triumphant displays of justice, phrenology, cryogenically freezing them for some sort of future resurrection that I always imagine involves being medically stapled to a robot body and and then rampaging about New England as a terrifying Irving-esque Reverse Horseman, and Frances Larson explores them all in Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found. Larson has a serious-minded and scrupulous approach for a topic that in lesser hands could lend itself to the pages of “Gross Let Me Look At That Magazine” for summer camp twelve-year-olds. Nevertheless, the book does not dilute the bizarre and macabre element of its subject by including sentences like “Rosenbaum vomited in disgust, but his physical revulsion could not temper his desire to take possession of Haydn’s skull.”

Larson writes that she decided to write this book while doing research at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, famous for its collection of shrunken heads. She places the collection at the center of a booming nineteenth-century trade in shrunken heads as curios for the Victorian elbow-nudging set and for museums and other institutions on a worldwide mission to collect and categorize artifacts. As Larson explains, lecturers and museums used shrunken heads to titillate and unnerve Victorian patrons by presenting them as barbarous practices to contrast with Western civilizations. At the same time, Western demand for the heads completely divorced them from any cultural context as they became commodities produced exclusively for export; some British head collectors in New Zealand, Larson notes, became victims themselves, their heads posthumously tattooed to be sold as Maori heads betraying an expression of simultaneous horror and appreciation for grim irony.
 
Augustus Pitt Rivers, a man who could 
not possibly look more like the exact 
person you are picturing when thinking 
of the namesake of a museum known 
for a dubiously-sourced collection of 
shrunken heads

Another important nineteenth-century use for skulls was phrenology, the pseudoscience that I hope influenced numerous plays with stage directions like MRS ORKENNEY dropped her ladle, for she could see in the flash of lightning that MR CAVENDISH had the brow ridges of a monomaniac. Here’s Larson, with one of the greatest sentences ever composed in the English language: “Historian Roger Cooter has described how, by 1826, ‘craniological manica’ was said to have ‘spread like a plague...possessing every gradation of [British] society from the kitchen to the garret.’” Phrenology dovetailed with a general mania for collecting and studying skulls. Larson points out that, like with the collection of shrunken heads, this scientific collection of bones encouraged gruesome behavior; scientists colluded with all manner of tomb raiders and grave robbers to build their head caliper ossuaries then used them as the basis of bogus racial science that these scientists would invariably find proved to them that the most advanced civilization was the one that had the scientists ankle-deep in purloined skulls.

Larson writes that prominent phrenologist 
Franz Josef Gall's "appetite for skulls became 
so well known that eminent men began to 
fear for the safety of their crania."

Larson provides an eclectic and broad, if sometimes scattershot, look at our severed heads and ourselves.  In doing so, she expertly walks a fine line between historical rigor, contemporary resonance, and, let's face it, the type of oddities a person seeking out a book described on the jacket as "an idiosyncratic history of decapitation (the New Yorker)" would be looking for-- grotesque stories involving medieval executioners attacked by bloodthirsty mobs with flaming projectiles for their lack of beheading competence, pictures of frowning muttonchops standing around large piles of labeled skulls (there are few things more unnerving than reading a book about severed heads and immediately being presented with a multipage listing of illustrations), a historian of phrenology named Roger Cooter. Severed does not offer up a Grand Theory of Head Collection; it can be read almost as a catalog of things people have figured out to do with heads including shrinking, guillotining, graverobbing, dissecting, worshiping, and cryogenically freezing them.  Larson displays an impressive breadth of research into these disparate practices raising all sorts of fascinating questions that would have never popped into my head that remains for the time being anchored safely into my neck until I insult the Dauphin. 
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Football Flim-Flammery

August 25, 2017, 10:01 am
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College football is coming back and at some point some sorry team is going to be swindled, bamboozled, flim-flammed because their opponent is doing something they’re not supposed to and football is the most supposed to sport ever conceived.

There are few things more satisfying than watching your team pull off a trick play and leaving opposition hornswoggled to oblivion; the only thing better is watching an opponent dial up a failed trick play that snowballs into football disaster to the point where the only word to describe a coach's scheme is foiled.


Football's bloated maximalism means that it is not just a sport of people flinging themselves into each other with restless abandon, but flinging themselves at each other with reckless abandon within the strictures of an impenetrable and inscrutable set of ossified rules several of which remain vestiges on the books but unobserved, almost like religion.

Only the fanatics practice the Old Ways as seen in 
this mosaic of abandoned football practice

It is the only sport where the defining coach move is to defiantly rip off the headset because of course the coach is wearing a headset to talk to the coordinators in the booths above, why the sideline is swamped by laminated binders and Official Tablets of the National Football League and elaborate pictograms of Lee Corso and internet memes, why every single play starts with a brief meeting conducted in an insane and incomprehensible football argot codified into Domesday-thick playbooks, why every five minutes the referees gather under daguerreotype camera hoods to look at pixels and the beefiest among them attempts to explain whether something is a catch, the gravest epistemological question of our time.

Football's elaborate Court of the Sun King ruleset allows the slightest deviations to throw an entire game into giddy chaos: an unexpected guy is throwing the ball, a lineman has declared himself eligible (in the NFL, this requires a literal Declaration of Eligibility read over the PA system), a great big fat person handles the ball in any way.  Football coaches seethe and complain when they become victims of trickery-- rival coaches banned the A11 Offense that was entirely based on a high school loophole that allowed teams to ignore rigid rules on offensive line formation by lining up at all times in a punt return formation in a football version of fraudulent accounting; Mike Ditka got so angry about Bill Walsh using an offensive lineman as a fullback that he started giving the ball to William "The Refrigerator" Perry over and over, building an entire gimmick offense off of indignation about the unconventional use of fat men.

With so many moving parts, with roles so specialized that people are constantly running to and from the field of play because they need to install the Third Down Pass Rushing Package, it is possible for teams to dupe their opposition just by counting on them to lose track of all the people punching in and out.  The Ringer's Rodger Sherman had a fun article tracking how teams have had tiny backs hide behind behemoth lineman, unsportingly pretend to get subbed out, and camouflage themselves into the endzone only to pop out like the time Rambo disguised himself as an entire forest. 

Football has its moments of outright cheating as well.  Pop Warner used to hide the ball in secret compartments and sew patches onto jerseys that look like footballs and instantly transform their offense into a hall of mirrors where the defender tackles a guy who stands up empty handed while the rest of the offense taunts him with synchronized cackling. Contemporary football cheating, however, has become stilted and artless.  The most egregious recent case has been the Great Ball Deflation Media Event, a scandal so preposterously stupid that it involved the United States Supreme Court. Other sports have much better chicanery.  The best cheating in any sport right now is in cycling where some enterprising bicycle miscreants have set up hidden motors.  They call this "motodoping," easily the weirdest and most insane possible name for this practice, like robbing someone by threatening to hit them over the head with a 1990s computer monitor and calling it "Cybertheft 2020: Compucrime."

 College football represents the zenith of football chaos.  The staid NFL, with its strict rules on player numbering and overwhelming concern with illegal pants and sock combinations does its best to deliver a uniform product.  College teams, rife with gulfs in talent and resources, will resort to any strategy to gain an edge.  Recruiting is governed by absurd guidelines impossibly byzantine and ineffectual policed by an army of weirdo bureaucrats whose entire life revolves around sidling up to enormous college students and asking them how they paid for that tattoo and unhinged, self-deputized fans on maniacal social media detective sprees, desperate to prove that some player or coach has broken some inane NCAA rule even as every team breaks every rule while hurling accusations at their rivals.

College football returns this Saturday in all its anarchic glory, and someone is going to fake a punt. Some overmatched coach will try a desperation flea flicker, order a wide receiver to throw a pass, line up in Wing T formation, set up a complex chain of events that ends with a 350 pound tackle either thundering triumphantly towards the endzone in a wake of defensive backs trucked beyond recognition or getting too excited, not having any idea what to do, losing the ball in sun flash from a waggling trombone and watching the pass bounce off his helmet and into infamy.  A coach will use two quarterbacks.  A coach will use no quarterbacks.  A coach will storm onto the field, red as a cartoon thermometer, laminated playcards streaming from his coaching pants, to protest the Eligibility of the Downfield Lineman because he has no other recourse, he's been had, it's technically in the rules for that fullback to throw that lateral, there's nothing he and the thousands of slack-jawed, incredulous fans can do about it, and it might have Playoff Implications.  
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Portents and Signs

September 1, 2017, 11:03 am
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There is no shortage of radio callers and message board maniacs that would take a 7-6 football season and berth in the NCAA Men’s Tournament as an invitation to launch an entire wing of prop planes with increasingly unhinged demands to fire a Gary Oldmanish everyone at their school. This is the Golden Age of Northwestern sports.

Northwestern returns with all the pomp one would expect from the Pin Striped-Bowl Champions, with a life-size replica of Justin Jackson erected in Monument Park and Pat Fitzgerald appearing at Pittsburgh, as bowl tradition dictates, to dress like an umpire and scream YER OUTTA HERE (IN REFERENCE TO THE PINSTRIPE BOWL) at the Panthers while doing burnouts on their practice field in a custom-built Pinstripe Champion bullpen car.

Pat Fitzgerald engages in the traditional spoils of the Pinstripe Bowl 
Championship

Northwestern’s triumphant sports mediocrity has not happened in isolation but from an attempt to operate like a major athletic conference sports school instead of a program for wayward youth to build character through getting run over and dunked upon. Scaffolding has sprung up across the campus watered by a money hose. Northwestern is building a ludicrous quarter-billion-dollar luxury sports fortress along the lake. The basketball team has been forced to a suburban arena for monster trucks, wrestling, and people dressed as monster trucks who wrestle at each other in a production of Grave Digger: The Grave Musical to make room for renovations so they can renovate Welsh-Ryan with things like chairs while sacrificing the crucial home advantage that comes from forcing opposing teams to get onto the court by shouldering past the hot dog line.

Welsh-Ryan Arena, shown before renovations began just before a 
Big Ten contest

Northwestern football has been at least consistently decent for nearly a quarter century.  The basketball team appears to be moving in the same direction.  An entire generation of visiting fans may be growing up seeing Northwestern win bowl games and play in a basketball arena without cigarette machines and in a football stadium with gleaming, gilded tarps and actually believe that their team could lose.  At that moment, it is possible that Northwestern will have lost its way, that the entire mission of sports at the university could have faded from its highest ideal, which is treading on its shitty sports history of crappiness to make opposing fans really, really mad.

NORTHWESTERN SEASON PREVIEW

They are supposed to be good.  SBNation has them raked #23.  The AP Poll has them just outside the Top 25.  They return a promising quarterback, a stout secondary, and one of the greatest running backs in school history.  They miss Ohio State and Michigan and the Big Ten West remains the province of dreams where anything is possible.  Illinois has been cowed back to Memorial Stadium after their last attempt to play at Soldier Field, embarrassed by a legion of dozens of Chicago's Big Ten fans in mewling purple showed up to take up several rows.  This is dangerous territory.

If you are like me and prefer to take something as frivolously enjoyable as sports fandom and inject it with doom and dread, then it is not hard to see problems on the horizon.  Northwestern has more often than not sputtered after putting together big seasons. Last year, the Wildcats followed up a ten-win season with an inexplicable 9-7 loss to an Illinois State team clawing at the coffin lid of the Missouri Valley Conference.  The last ten-win season spawned a preseason ranking and ESPN College Gameday matchup with Ohio State  that turned into a horrifying death spiral; the Wildcats lost that game and literally every other game until they managed to walk off with a consolation Hat.
A person with a sign saying that "the Exaltation of Mercury shows that 
Northwestern won't even go to the Meineke Car Care Bowl" was 
escorted from the Gameday set, the warning unheeded

College football remains unpredictable game by game.  Northwestern's disastrous five-win 2013 season involved a three game stretch where they lost in overtime, in triple overtime, and on a hail mary pass by a quarterback named Ron Kellogg III who earned that suffix as Nebraska's third-choice signal caller.  The 2015 ten-win campaign involved close wins from a failed two-point conversion, James Franklin's avant-garde time management style, and referees simply refusing to award points to Wisconsin that incited the Badger crowd into attacking them with a barrage of snowballs.  There's an entire school of analytical thought dedicating to pooh-poohing the results of individual games that are determined by small sample freak events like fumble recoveries, missed field goals, and players falling down and clutching at their hamstrings over the hushed, lilting tones of Fox's injured player version of the Football Robot Murder March before playing a bunch of commercials for truck boner dorito pills.  The entirety of college football is an epistemological project proving that human beings cannot actually determine whether football teams are better than each other.

After a long and fruitful discussion, two college football fans agree on 
the importance of Conference Championships in the Playoff Picture

In this uncertain sports environment, it is silly to try to make predictions.  Northwestern's star linebacker Anthony Walker has gone to the NFL, picked by the Colts through the inscrutable whim of an orangutan.  Clayton Thorson will face a challenge in the passing game without Austin Carr, a receiver who was always open, caught everything, and drew the attention of defenses who by the end of the season were covering him the way Illinois law enforcement covered the Blues Brothers.  These are not cause for panic-- the Wildcats have stalwarts returning like all-everything safety Godwin Igwebuike and exciting up and comers like Montre Hartage and Joe Gaziano, the Scourge of East Lansing.  They still have Justin Jackson The Ball Carrier who has spent the summer attempting to track down wayward Pittsburgh players who have been wandering Eastern Seaboard after becoming too confused by his juking maneuvers to find their way out of Yankee Stadium.

I haven't run the numbers.  I haven't analyzed the schedule.  I have not pored over depth charts, watched filmed, attended practice sessions, disguised myself as Skip Myslanski and attempted to gain intelligence on the team by pretending I am writing an iambic pentameter poem about field goal holding techniques. There is no insight here beyond an irrational sports pessimism.  That is counterproductive.  There's no point attempting to shield oneself from disappointment when it comes to college football, where the worst outcome is have an Iowa fan sneer at you triumphantly in the parking lot.  It is time to be equally irrationally positive.  So here's the season preview.  Wisconsin? Divided in two and run blocked into Lakes Mendota and Menona.  Penn State? Remember when Vanderbilt sort of abruptly canceled a game with Northwestern when the SEC schedule changed and everyone was upset about that for some reason?  Well, the mighty Wildcat will not forget, as Northwestern players burst from the tunnel crying for vengeance, specifically in reference to football scheduling procedures for the 201 and 2014 seasons.  Nebraska?  We will see how the Cornhuskers play under the pressure of playing in front of their fans as opposed to at Ryan field where they also play in front of slightly fewer of their fans.  

The Wildcats will, according to my proprietary HOKUM model, run roughshod all over the Big Ten, leave the Hat safely ensconced in its guarded, climate-controlled Hat Chamber, and be good enough to force irritated college football pundits to have to get yelled at about them when they start inexplicably releasing meaningless Playoff Rankings because the college football media is entirely dependent on yelling about meaningless rankings for weeks at a time and so will I, traveling through American cities with a bullhorn demanding that the Playoff Committee take note of Opponent Schedule, Second-Half Hot Dog Shortages, and Body Clocks.

DRY RUSSIA

Prohibition lives on in the popular imagination as a time of rum-running, bootlegging, speakeasies, and gangsters who all talk like Edward G. Robinson all the time, just a mass of hardened criminals in pinstripe suits all staring at each other through sliding peepholes with hot jazz inaudible under the din of guys saying myaah.  This is a romanticized version of it, but people do get the general sense of the problem of trying to ban alcohol through the rule of law, of trying to enforce it through officials who may like to drink themselves, of creating an entire class of casual criminals who have probably already been punished by drinking corn mash fermented in an old sock.  

The Soviet Union tried to curtail drinking in the 1980s.  Stephen White's 1996 monograph Russia Goes Dry examines the Soviet anti-alcohol campaign with an academic flourish of figures and numbers.  White remains concerned with studying the anti-alcohol campaign as a critique of Soviet campaigns against social ills.  He susses out patterns, examines difficulties of enforcing campaigns over sprawling localities, and looks at societies, journals, and posters.  

Posters from London's Pushkin House exhibition on 
anti-alcohol campaign posters

White and the Russian sources he cites struggle to identify consumption statistics.  Soviet statisticians included alcohol in broad categories such as "other foodstuffs" during the 1960s; White cites scholars that surveyed emigres or extrapolating from earlier categories of expenditures.  The Soviet government found that alcohol had a twin problem-- White estimates that in the 1960s and 1970s, alcohol taxes provided about a third of all government revenues but meted out a staggering cost in lost productivity, health, and even security. For example, White describes a Soviet crew in Czechoslovakia that bartered its tank for several cases of vodka, pickles, and herring; the bar owner then sold the tank to a recycling plant.

The Politburo announced an anti-alcohol campaign in 1985.  White stresses that the Politburo remained divided.  Mikahil Gorbachev came on board.  The most zealous anti-alcohol crusader was Yegor Ligachev, a teetotaler who had long desired to curb drunkenness.  The campaign was met with internal opposition from other officials who felt that the campaign was misguided or ill-planned-- one minister resigned, and Boris Yeltsin later wrote that the campaign was "amazingly ill-conceived and ridiculous" and that he "could not reconcile [himself] to [Ligachev's] obstinacy and dilettantism."

The campaign limited the supply of alcohol in stores, cracked down on homebrewing, and released a large number of posters involving bottles being crushed by hammers.  White claims that initially, the campaign did discourage drinking and manage to change some public attitudes.  But, within a few years, the campaign began to wane.  Homebrewing increased and led to vast quantities of sugar bought or even stolen.  Local Party officials varied wildly in enforcement.  In one Ukranian Village, local officials housed their own elaborate brewing apparatus described by Pravda as "45-degree first-grade hooch." The sober lifestyle had not caught on in Novosibirsk, where White notes that fewer than three percent of of Party members abstained; "A Communist is also a human being" was the local slogan.

The campaign faltered after several years.  Like in the United States, the attempt to reduce availability of alcohol sparked an enormous trade in illicit brewing.  The campaign also hurt revenue.  White notes that the government had planned to offset decreased spending on alcohol with increased spending on other goods, but the supply of these goods never materialized, and profits from alcohol sales ended up in the hands of private, illegal brewing concerns.  By 1988, one official critical of the policy had, according to White, referred to it as "a blunder unequaled since the time of the Sumerians."

FOOTBALL SEASON BEGINS
Nevada comes off an uninspiring 5-7 season with new coach Jay Norvell and a new Air Raid-style scheme led by Matt Mumme, son of legendary Air Raid innovator Hal Mumme.  Northwestern is somehow favored by 24.5 points, although I should note that betting lines are meant to encourage betting on all sides and in this particular case to entrap people with gambling problems who would actually wager on a Northwestern vs. Nevada game.  The sun should be out.  The tarps will be gleaming.  Northwestern will be dressed head to toe in purple in a sponsorship arrangement with Dimetapp.  The videoboard is set to show us hundreds of images of Pat Fitzgerald's jaw jutting against an American flag.  It is football season again with all of the joy and disappointment and yelling and complete absurdity that entails.  
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Northwestern and Duke Face Off Again, I Guess

September 8, 2017, 9:19 am
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Football returned to Ryan Field in a fanfare of bands, pyrotechnics, parachutists, and the one red firework they shoot off when they get to the rocket's red glare part of the anthem that always looks like it's going to hit one of the parachutists in a grisly act of errant patriotism. Then the Northwestern Wildcats went out there heavily favored against Nevada and won a football game to a concerned, grim-faced crowd.

Northwestern fends off the Wolf Pack

Nevada frustrated the Wildcats all afternoon.  They took a lead into halftime and the game remained tense until Northwestern sniffed out the last remnants of a Nevada comeback by smothering the quarterback on a fourth-and-one.  The Wildcats won, but had issues up front on both sides and continued to hemorrhage defensive backs.  Marcus McShepard and Brian Bullock both left the game, and the team announced that Keith Watkins will miss the whole season again. Northwestern remained determined to stick with its vague, hockeyish injury reports in the tradition of coaches waging asymmetrical information wars.  Last week, for example, John Harbaugh and Jim McElwain engaged in a ridiculous, petty battle about naming the actual players on their football teams, with Harbaugh suggesting that he might send buses full of dummy players that have never played football before to stand around in terror in kickoff formation before the actual Michigan players who have been living in Arlington Stadium for months building a subterranean tunnel society would burst from the ground, dragging the Gators into a hollowed out cavern because Harbuagh believed his team had the advantage closer to the Earth's Core.

Harbaugh and McElwain continue their mind games, 
with McElwain refusing to look at Harbaugh and 
Harbaugh using a fake hand so that Florida can't use the 
contours of his palm print to divine any information about 
defensive formations

There is no such thing as a disappointing win at Northwestern.  The Committee will not be looking for style points, betting lines, or body clocks when they select the participants for the DoubleWide Extra Large Men's Pant Bowl.  Northwestern's preseason hopes did not instantaneously evaporate like last year in a slow motion football bouncing off a goalpost in a cacophony of FCS cackling.  Northwestern won.  In a sport where wins and losses often turn on a kick here, a pick there, or a quarterback attempting to run for a two-point conversion instead but then opting for a two-cheek conversion when he falls upon his butt, there is no reason not to hoard every win.  Let the pollsters and the committees and the BCS computers that are still in a basement threatening each other with modem noises worry about all of that.  The Northwestern Wildcats are undefeated.

THE BIG GAME DUKE VS. NORTHWESTERN

Duke is probably the closest thing to a non-conference rival the Wildcats can muster.  The teams have played eighteen times since  1985, with the woeful 1980s Northwestern teams supplying an easy W for Steve Spurrier and Northwestern grabbing crucial, Royal George Gout Balm Bowl-qualifying wins over a nominal power five opponent this century.  Despite the frequency of play and the schools similar enough to provoke the narcissism of small differences that fuels college football hatred, the teams have not really built up a decent amount of enmity.  Perhaps it is because the teams remain preoccupied by their own conference rivalries. Perhaps it is because both schools await the appearance of a heroic Beckman figure to inexplicably to come out of the mist with clocks and signs of the team's logo with a slash through it.  Most likely, it is because entire sports energy of Duke University involves bracing themselves against the endless onslaught of people despising the basketball team more or less continuously for decades, for standing in ad-hoc tent cities to get tickets to an ACC game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, and for working on a serum to make sure Coach K's face does not freeze like that.

Northwestern and Duke football don't have much a rivalry because Duke fans don't seem to care much about their football team and Northwestern fans know deep down that the conditions are ripe for any lasting sports success to provoke to type of ire felt by Duke basketball.  Northwestern got a small taste of it last year; their foray into the NCAA tournament sparked in some quarters an almost immediate backlash, not least because of a homeopathic amount of Dukery in the basketball team.  

Duke will not inspire parade floats, memes, or shrieking mania at Wallace Wade stadium this Saturday.  What it will do, though, is determine the course Northwestern's season.  The Wildcats have ambitions to compete at the top of the Big Ten West this season.  A win at Duke and then in an inexplicable night game against Bowling Green will have them at 3-0 heading into games against Big Ten colossi Wisconsin and Penn State.  A win against either of those teams could set the Wildcats up for another run.  A loss at Duke probably means the 'Cats should settle in for another season heroically scrapping their way to bowl contention and clinging to the Hat, the glorious default position of twenty-first-century Northwestern football.

BASEBALL CYBERCRIMES UPDATE



We all thought we could sleep safely at night from the malcontents that have now turned baseball from a bucolic national pastime into a terrifying den of cybercrimes ever since the Cardinals guy got caught for doing elite hacks like remembering that the password was Eckstein123.  But every day baseball's cybercriminals are jacking themselves into mainframes, banging on keyboards, and yelling I'M IN, which is exactly what all of the crusty old sports columnists who are wearing a men's hat in their photos taken in 1987 tried to warn us all about when they got really irate about spreadsheets.

This week, the New York Yankees accused the Boston Red Sox of stealing their signs by wearing a post-human cyber-watch device.  It remains unclear exactly how they processed the signals, but studies show that the most likely thing that happened is that Red Sox manager John Farrell immediately saw the entire field exactly like how we all assumed computers would see things in the 1980s, and he used the gridlines and blocky text to decode the Yankees' complex baseball stratagems.  The Red Sox  countered with allegations that the Yankees had developed nanobots capable of living within Red Sox players and coaches for the entire season, transmitting all of their biometric data to a supercomputer that could determine what pitch they would throw before they even threw it, before the pitcher and catcher and pitching coach had met on the mound and talked gravely into their mitts about Pitch Selection.  As we speak, every major league team has interns talking to sophisticated AI programs that can at any moment turn sentient and develop opinions on bat flips.

This is what baseball looks like now 

Baseball players have been cheating from time immemorial.  Baseball's cybercheating is easily the best kind because it riles up the sport's stodgerati who have spent more than a century imbuing a goofy spitting sport with all sorts of bogus moral frippery so hoary that they probably use the word "manful" and perpetuating the myth of fake baseball player "Mickey Mantle," who was originally drawn on a cocktail napkin by Bob Costas in 1987. Decades from now, our crusty baseball columnists will look back with nostalgia at how the Red Sox used a smart watch with the sort of rogueish élan that we associate with baseball teams that used binoculars or electric boxes or staged elaborate train robberies as a distraction to steal crucial early baseball information technology such as tobacco covered notebooks that said an opposing player probably had a wicked curved-ball based on the way his brow ridges demonstrated a most unsavory propensity towards deceit and guile and also we heard he has a mustache. 

QUARTERBACK CONTRUBISKY

There are a million articles now on the internet on the grim, foreboding death march of the NFL. It is difficult to tell how much of that is the columnist's solipsism or if the decline of the NFL also fits with larger trends in sports- and television-watching habits and has nothing to do with the league itself.  It is overwhelmingly tempting to point to issues with the NFL, though, because the NFL is the most insane sports league on the planet.  There’s a case to be made that all professional sports resemble a corporate retreats department accidentally showered with billions of dollars; the NFL is the only league that wants to subsume the entire sport into the corporation itself with its dress codes and constant injection of staid legalism and the way everyone involved with it speaks in an incomprehensible business-violence jargon. The league is controlled by 32 men who all demand to be referred to as “Mister” with all of them yelling at everyone at all times that they were sent here by Mitch and Murray.  The NFL is the only sports league in the world that is constantly investigating.

The NFL is rife with problems: the sobering reality of the damage the sport causes to players and the sickening way the league has tried to cover it up, the unending, replay-ridden games, the attacks on anything fun or expressive to the point where a league document has, without further explanation, specifically banned "incredible hulk," and alliance with the absolute dumbest shit imaginable at all times.  All of this has been the problem with the NFL forever.  The major issue now is that your team is almost certainly dogshit because there are like eight guys in the world capable of playing quarterback and without one of them the team you like descends into a stark exhibition of Bortleism.

A solemn Goodell steps to the podium, for another 
press conference about the latest NFL imbroglio. 
"You may not incredible hulk," he says.  "No questions." 

The Bears engineered a ridiculous quarterback controversy by spending a princely sum on shitty backup quarterback Mike Glennon and then, without informing him, traded up in the draft to select Mitch Trubisky as the Quarterback of the Future. Glennon already had a tough road in Chicago; Glennon is the apotheosis of shitty backup quarterbacking not only because he is stiff, inaccurate, and saddled with a remainder pile receiving corps but also because he looks like a gangly doofus. It is not Mike Glennon’s fault that he was put in this situation, paid an enormous and unfathomable sum of money and then more or less instantaneously replaced by someone who has not lurched around the NFL for several years ineffectively, nor is it his fault that he looks to me like the long-necked monster from the little-seen movie Big Man Japan about a guy whose duty it is to step into an enormous set of underpants and get shocked into turning into a giant superhero tasked with battling a bunch of grotesque monsters attacking Tokyo.


Glennon did not help his cause by entering the preseason and immediately performing a Medley of Historical Bears Quarterbacking while Trubisky looked great.  All season long, Glennon and dead-end coach John Fox will hear a nonstop nasal bray about playing that Trubinsky kid (Trubinsky is his Chicago Sports Talk Radio Caller Name, it's in his football contract) every time Glennon comes in and does the type of football fuckup that everyone expects from Mike Glennon.  No one is happier than Chicago's sports columnists, a cottage industry with a job description that is literally complaining about the Bears' quarterback; this has kept them employed long past the existence of newspapers.  At some point Trubisky will get his chance, whether from pressure or from Glennon accidentally wrapping himself around the field goal pole.  Who knows if Trubisky represents an actual Bears quarterback or if he will be, like the dozens of and dozens of men before him swept into the giant dustbin of Bears quarterbacks.  My prediction is that he will be great, amazing for one season before football is immediately and probably rightly banned and we all go around ashamed we ever watched it and him, that Trumbinskly Kid, maybe could have gone to the Super Bowl, if we all didn't immediately decide to stop watching a horrifying bacchanalia of violence designed to sell trucks.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL INTERNET POSTING HYPE VIDEO 2017

Finally, here is your college football internet posting hype video for 2017.
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THE ARCH-DUKE

September 15, 2017, 10:32 am
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Northwestern survived a shaky opening game and went to Durham to prove that they would not repeat last year's out of conference nightmare that changed season from one where they hoped to compete for a division title to one that involved scrapping for bowl contention.  Instead, they went to Duke and got run over by trucks.

Foiled once again by the Duke Boys

The 42-17 bludgeoning at the hands of Duke promises a repeat of last year's season where a disastrous start to the season somehow turned into a feisty run through the dregs of the Big Ten to a Pinstripe Bowl Championship.  The revamped schedule only has one more non-conference game that could turn into white knuckle terror before the 'Cats have to face the two most terrifying games on their schedule.  Meanwhile, Illinois has shown alarming signs of football competence and Purdue has thrown away its staid old playbook of painting tunnels on the side of a cliff and then running into it to a series of plays where Purdue runs triple-reverse flea flickers at all times and distributes propaganda leaflets to opposing defenses that sow confusion and dissent while the Purdue quarterback strolls towards the endzone.  P.J. Fleck now coaches Minnesota with the insane stare of a man who has literally paid $100,000 to continue yelling at people to row the boat; I don't know what Fleck means by Row the Boat, but there are few things more dangerous than a football coach with a monomaniacal mantra that is now his intellectual property.

Fleck explains that part two in the Row the Boat Process is The Boat

The Big Ten West looks far more dangerous than it did a year ago, and after two games Northwestern's path to its most important goal, a berth in the Go Ahead and Bite It Attack Dog Arm Protector Bowl has become fraught.

DUKE GAME RECAP

Pat Fitzgerald shouldered past the dial-a-down. Planning on taking it one game at a time. Sound practice advocated by such diverse football tacticians as George Halas, Bum Phillips, Dr M.H.H. Rarritt advertising on the back pages of Football Man's Advocate PO Box 412. One game at a time makes sense, temporally; no madman could possibly play two games at the same time, two fields, two quarterbacks, two head coaches and replay officials, all jumbled in the same corner of space-time, unfathomable. If that happened, Pat, you'd have a much larger problem than the Wisconsin Badgers is what the professor professed at him when he pulled him aside and very quietly inquired about the physics of taking it two or even three games at a time. You can't do that, young men, he told them every day at camp, halfglassesed, chalksmeared. He suspected Mick McCall thought otherwise, but the two had decided not to discuss theoretical physics, not again.

DURHAM-- The blue-clad spectators indulged in their joyous Satanic rituals as they watched their Blue Devils make minced-meats upon the hapless Wild Cat of Northwestern.  They rejoiced as their heftiest Dukemen tossed aside Northwestern's line men, sacked their quartered-backs, and browbeat them with a variety of approved touchdown dances.

The grisly rampage took place in front of a group of Duke notables: the Vice Chancellor, the Bursar, the Acting Bursar, the Landlord Shelden Williams, Three Cameron Crazies, A Duplicate Krzyzewski-- one of many deployed against the numerous attempts to kidnap or poison him upon the Tobacco Road, an Eminent Professor of Semiotics, a Slightly Less Eminent Professor of Semiotics who is preparing a devastating attack upon his colleague in Fightnote: The Journal of Learned Insults, the Committee for the Ducolax Opiod Related Constipation Bowl.

FITZGERALD
(Grabs his wrist, his face in strained gutshot pantomime.) Held. Held. Armpinioned and engulfed.

REFEREE
(Stonefaced. Staring at the dial-a-down.)

FITZGERALD
(Makes a series of pained referee gestures). Rough-tackled. Illegally celebrated. Persecuted for false targeting. 

REFEREE
(A gargoyle.)

AIR WILLIE
(Its tongue lolling, its eyebrows arched. inflated by some sort of sulphurous gas as it sways side to side). HISS HISS

CATPOSTS95
(Logs on.) Unacceptable. Horrifying. Fire him. Siege his office and take his memorabilia.

CHATCAT
(Also logs on.) Fire him. Roast him. Slash him with an iron claw.

FANOFCATS77
(Shimmers through carbon fiber.) Disgraceful. Unimaginable. An appalling and low moment to the program, that this Pat Fitzgerald would present himself in front of America and his God in short pants.

CATPOSTS95
(Whips computer mouse around in a threatening nunchuk pattern). Scratch him. Fight him.

CHATCAT
(Breaks keyboard in half with his forehead). Claw him. Bite him.

FANOFCATS77
The shorts are not only the sartorial choice of a languorous child, they present numerous tactical disadvantages vis. exposure of the knee to the elements.

FITZGERALD
(Rides through the Canyon of Heroes brandishing his Pinstripe Bowl trophy.)

NEW YORK SPORTS FAN
(Throws newspapers. Strains to get a glimpse, dangerously halfway through a window, beckons to a coworker to hold on so he does not go plummeting into the Canyon of Heroes himself.)

VENDOR
(Sells bootleg Pinstripe Bowl merchandise that contains the misprint Pinstripe Bowel to throngs of fans shaking money.)

THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY
(Bestows on FITZGERALD  the key to New York, awarded for winning the city's most prestigious Sports Championship.)

MIKE GOLIC
(On the dais, sweating, howling as a MIKE GOLIC buds off of him.) Mike?

BUDDING MIKE GOLIC
(Coming into being.) Thanks, Mike.

FANOFCATS77
I have read that Nick Saban often wears two pairs of pants. Even if, during the course of a game, his pants become ripped, soiled, or otherwise damaged, he has with him an entire extra set of pants.

RON ZOOK
(Waterskis through the Canyon of Heroes). Trousers? Slacks? Hot pants? This isn't haberdashery. This isn't fine Italian silks. This isn't monocle accessories. You go and you get the dang ball. This is football, gentlemen. Page 27, from Gentleman, Comma by Ron Zook.

CATPOSTS95
Impossible.

CHATCAT
Meaningless

A KRZYZEWSKI IMPERSONATOR
(Bites FITZGERALD.)

FANOFCATS77
Knute Rockne never wore regular pants, but had surplus US Army tents cut down and made into specialty Coaching Pants. For it was a different game back then, when spectators would lunge, attempting to take the opposing coach's pants as a trophy. Vincent Lombardi sewed his pants into his legs, and they could only be changed via a painful surgical procedure.

FITZGERALD
We will take it one more game at a time I promise.

AN EMINENT PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS
(Assembles unwieldy mound of charts and books.) R. Deborah Pwy, "Football Time, Football Space," the Journal of Coaching Science; J.A. Shermanesque, "A Theoretical Construct of Two Games at a Time,"International Review of Time-Game Literature; Chasen Mantis, "What If They Play No Games at a Time Did I Just Blow Your Mind,"No Way/Way. 

FITZGERALD
It is the sound conclusion of the scientific community.

BOWLING GREEN 

Here's an interesting and reassuring fact about Northwestern's UNDER THE LIGHTS clash against the Bowling Green Falcons: Northwestern has never beaten them.  They have only played twice-- once in a November shootout that they lost 43-42, and another in the ill-fated 2003 Motor City Bowl, at that point the lowest ebb of Northwestern's bowl loss streak that wasted a 237-yard day from running back Jason Wright.  I expect to see an intimidating flock of Falcons fans descending upon Ryan Field with numerous reproductions of the Motor City Bowl trophy.


There are dedicated football wonks who have film and two-deeps and sophisticated computer rankings about Bowling Green, but these types of games represent opportunities to project the hopes and fears for the coming Big Ten season.  I don't know whether Bowling Green has a good defense, but I do know that if Northwestern continues to struggle running the ball against them it bodes ill for a coming clash with the literal tons of Wisconsin linemen.  I have no idea what Bowling Green's offense looks like, but it will be encouraging if the limping, wounded remnant of Northwestern's flight-suited Sky Team manages to match up with their receivers before Trace McSorley comes to town.  I have no idea if Northwestern can get over psychological mind games that the Falcons will certainly use from the 14-year-old bowl humiliation, but that sort of thing is crucial when it comes to overcoming Fleck's boat taunts not to mention the crucial contest for The Hat. 

Northwestern remains, for some reason, heavily favored once again, when the lights and the cameras of Big Ten Network Regional Coverage will be on them once again as they attempt to defeat the Bowling Green Falcons for the first time.
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Northwestern Reduces MAC Team to Subatomic Football Particles

September 29, 2017, 8:16 pm
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Northwestern faced down a nailbiter against Nevada and suffered a humiliating blowout against their equally historically inept ACC Doppelgangers Duke, and then in the middle of the first quarter the Bowling Green Falcons scored a touchdown, the lights dimmed, the representatives for Viscount Claw's Imitation Imitation Crab Meat Bowl got on the next train to West Lafeyette, and the icy hand of football terror throttled the crowd.

Then Northwestern responded with a bomb to Bennett Skowronek and more or less annihilated Bowling Green from the face of the Earth with a display of football brutality rarely seen except against the FCS teams that don't beat them.  They defeated the Falcons for the first time ever and finally shut up the Bowling Green fans who been assailing Northwestern with signs, parades, and continuous aggressive skywriting to crow about the famous Motor City Bowl upset in 2003 for fourteen years.
 
One of the many monuments to that famous Motor City Bowl victory 
that dots the Bowling Green campus

In this early going, it remains nearly impossible to tell what kind of team to expect every week.  The Wildcats looked bedraggled and listless in two of their three games.  The bye week has helped give them an opportunity to prepare for upcoming games against juggernauts Wisconsin and Penn State and time to build cornerbacks out of wire and straw after hemorrhaging them in these early weeks.

MADISON MAYHEM

Every five or six years the Wisconsin badgers send a non-conference cornerback down an elevator shaft in a sweatshirt upon which is written in blood "Now I have a quarterback. Ho ho ho."  Wisconsin doesn't traditionally need a quarterback because the Badgers' preferred method on offense is to assemble a literal ton of offensive linemen and have them carry their opponents around for an hour in their dank armpits.  The Wisconsin quarterback's usual job is to bark incomprehensible football jargon in the huddle, hand it off to the running back, throw it around every once in awhile to make sure everyone's paying attention, and then play for 10-15 years in the NFL as a backup to a hall-of-famer. 

The Badgers may have a more dangerous option under center with a person who is somehow, impossibly named Alex Hornibrook.  Hornibrook has looked great as the Badgers have spent their non-conference schedule on a merciless rampage through the state of Utah.  They too have had a bye week to try to solve Northwestern's confoundingly inconsistent attack and for their linemen to absorb the bodies of lesser linemen.

Wisconsin's passing firepower will test Northwestern's bruised and battered secondary.  In addition to Hornibrook, the Badgers will send out star tight end Troy Fumigali, Jazz Peavy, and freshman running back Jonathan Taylor, who looks terrifyingly capable of zooming all over the field while opposing defenders recover from grisly steamroller injuries.  The Badgers return a typically stout defense, although we can all rest easy that they appear to have finally exhausted their supply of Watt brothers, although even as we speak, Wisconsin scientists are somehow hoping to roll out an even larger, stronger Watt with a squarer haircut and a even more monomaniacal devotion to football that will cause him to break out of the research area and go on a horrifying fundamentally-sound tackling spree across the greater Dane County area while he is hunted down by the only people who can stop him: the Watt Brothers but don't worry they are also watching film while they are hunting down their evil clone and carrying tires around with them the whole time because training never stops.
 
Scientists publicly claim that the Fourth Watt Brother remains theoretical

ROCK DOC REVIEW

My favorite moment in Mistaken for Strangers, the 2013 Rock and Roll/Sibling Resentment Documentary is when Tom Berninger, the film's director and The National frontman Matt Berninger's brother who has joined the band's tour as a charmingly incompetent roadie, has evidently misplaced the guest list for an LA show.

It's the presence of the "Lost Cast Members" and Matt Berninger's perfect bug-eyed Looney Tunes take that sells the whole thing to me.  Werner Herzog would later have his revenge on The National by threatening them with elaborate music video setups.  “I want to put the whole band on a live volcano, very close to the lava. I want it to be very dangerous for you, and I want to see you try to play your instruments while the lava  is all around you,” is what Matt Berninger claimed Herzog told him in an interview.
 
HERZOG: I would like to film the National playing their songs while 
rancid pies fly into their face with expired whipped cream exploding 
into their mouths and nostrils. I would like to see The National run 
through an album while wearing helmet-beakers and trying to fill it 
with fluid from water balloons.  I would like to film the National taking 
on the Aggro Crag.

The story of Mistaken for Strangers is this: Matt (I'd like to think that the Berninger Boys would be ok going through the rest of this review on a first-name basis), invites his brother, an aspiring filmmaker with a back catalog of homicidal maniac movies, to join the band on tour to bond and get him out of his parents' house.  Tom brings a camera and films himself asking band members inane questions ("do you bring your wallet onstage?") and irritating the band's tour manager by filming, pilfering booze, and genially breaking things.

Tom, who has prepared himself for rock and roll debauchery, is stuck with The National, a band whose greatest excesses may involve indulging on designer neckware and who write sad dad songs about how sometimes it is sad to be a dad.

Somehow, this is not the only unconventional documentary about the National, which is good because a normal talking head documentary where, for example, every baby boomer band talks about listening to the Beatles before they cut to that same clip of Ed Sullivan saying Ladies and Gentleman the Beatles like it's enshrined on a fucking code of Hammurabi before spending the rest of the film talking about how they turned all of their money into cocaine and mustaches and then spent the 1980s assembling legal teams to send threats about karate chopping until they run out of money and reunite, the National would probably talk about how they fought for months about a mix and also one time Interpol was in their practice space and Spin Magazine took pictures of them in their suits.  A Skin, A Night, Vincent Moon's earlier film about their Boxer album, mainly involves impressionistic slow pans across bus windows, recording equipment, and intense, flaring nostrils and contains zero Lost cast members.


Mistaken for Strangers is not about rock music or touring or hanging out backstage with a group of extremely 2010-era sitcom stars but about aging past creative dreams while your droll, persnickety brother somehow becomes a global rock star.  The film works as an origin story for itself as Tom gradually figures out that this is what is film is and manages to transcend himself while continuing to fall into reliably oafsih fuckups (according to this interview, for example, the first thing Tom did on tour was to ram a truck into an awning in front of an awning store.  This is not in the movie).  The most affecting part of the film, to me, is occurs when the brothers are able to bond over The National's early failure to attract any audience for years.  There's an anecdote that Matt Berninger tells about The National rehearsing in the same building as Interpol watch their neighboring band posing in their sharp suits for Spin while The National remain unable to get a gig.  Berninger has told this story in so many interviews that I have started to think about it like a Charles Atlas cartoon that involves the National getting revenge by walking into a Brooks Brothers.

NO RULES IN MADISON
Last time Northwestern played in Madison resulted in one of the most insane football games I've witnessed.  They played in a the aftermath of a snowstorm, in freezing cold and it ended with the referees taking away a game-winning Badger touchdown in a hail of angry snowballs.  Last year, the Badgers managed their first win at Ryan Field in the twenty-first century despite being favored against Northwestern, I would assume, in literally every single one of those games.  Both teams are entering Big Ten play to resolve questions: Wisconsin on whether Hornibrook will finally be the element to lead them to the Playoff, Northwestern on whether they have managed to overcome another early-season disappointment and find the offense that they managed against a wretched and miserable Bowling Green team far removed from their Motor City Bowl glory days.  The Wildcats face two very good teams and we'll see if they can regain some bowl traction or limp through the season trying to salvage whatever bowl and hat they can muster.
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The Gauntlet

October 6, 2017, 10:29 am
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Northwestern held the lead at halftime.  They came into a hostile and raucous Camp Randall as heavy underdogs and managed to keep Wisconsin's offense and Alex Hornibrook in check mainly because the Wisconsin Badgers all agreed to replace their hands with the robotic grasping claws from the pick-a-prize carnival game and could barely manage to hold onto the football for more than a few plays at a time.  The Badgers' opening kickoff rolled into Northwestern hands and the Badgers fell on several more fumbles.

Wisconsin's ball security was affected by each player going back into
time and accidentally preventing their parents from falling in love at
the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance 

Unfortunately for Northwestern the turnovers and defensive stops only led to a few points.  Time after time, Northwestern faced a third-and-one and Wisconsin's defense clamored through the line to tackle Justin Jackson and force a punt.  In the second half, the Badgers made an adjustment to the Tecmo Bowl Called Play defense that left Clayton Thorson scrambling for his life so profoundly that he leaped between graphical planes and appeared in one of the approximately 35 cut-ins that showed Hornibrook playing catch with someone named Brock Huard that ended when Hornibrook chopped off his head with a sword and absorbed his left-handed quarterbacking powers through a lightning storm while a barely visible speck of Thorson hoofed it across the field in the background hoping to avoid any Wisconsin tacklers who had also transcended time and space.
  
JAMES FRANKLIN'S REVENGE

James Franklin has never beaten Northwestern.  He lost as coach at Vanderbilt, and then struck the 'Cats from their schedule in a minor bureaucratic move that readers of this blog may be familiar with because I have put far more thought and energy into disparaging him for this than any other human being on the face of the earth for literally years.  I have suggested that Franklin had ducked Northwestern in order to qualify for a bowl game and that he moved to Penn State to marshal their resources against the Wildcats much like how William of Orange assumed the British crown in order to have a better chance of defeating his arch-nemesis Louis XIV; according to the person who edits his Wikipedia page, "Louis described William as 'my mortal enemy' and saw him as an obnoxious warmonger."


This time Franklin has with him the most terrifying player in college football.  We thought that had been the case with quarterback Christian Hackenberg, but Hackenberg turned out to be a bizarre case of people anointing him as an NFL quarterback after his Freshman year, watching him repeatedly throw the ball to defenders and patches of otherwise undisturbed turf, and continuing to rate him as a professional quarterback because the Football People once decided he was one until he managed to, through the sheer force of inertia, make it into the New York Jets' Quarterback Purgatory where he backs up at least one McCown Brother although spiritually he might be backing up all McCown Brothers past, present, and future.
 
A McCown in action 

I have no idea how a team is supposed to stop Saquon Barkley, a sentient monster truck who is somehow allowed to play college football.  One way may be to rig the field with traps like the end of Predator, where Barkley breaks free and crosses the fifty after knocking over dozens of Northwestern players and spectators before leaping over pits, log traps, and Northwestern's safeties who have coated themselves in grass and are screaming I AM HERE, JUKE ME NOW.  It may also be possible to form a complex Defensive Alliance among Big Ten West teams by offering to annex five yards of Ryan Field to Iowa in order have their linebackers secure it.  Or, Northwestern could do what they did the last time Barkley played at Ryan Field and stuff him on the very last play of the game while James Franklin refuses to call timeouts because he left them all at Vanderbilt.

THE CUBS ARE IN THE PLAYOFFS AGAIN

The Cubs are in the playoffs for the first time in a century without the goat, without the curse, and without a cackling Joe Buck bursting forth from a grave to deliver solemn Vincent Price Thriller monologues about how many people have died watching the Cubs fail to win the World Series.  The Cubs are in the playoffs as a baseball team and not the wretched personification of failure.

Last year, the Cubs had been designed to foment baseball anxiety.  They led baseball in everything, won 103 games, and earned a trip to baseball's playoffs that exist only to eliminate the regular season's best team.  They survived a tour of baseball's mystical bullshit, first against a team whose fans have come to believe in numerology, then against a team that shut them out repeatedly, and finally in a World Series that seemed designed specifically to induce emotional breakdowns from both teams' catastrophist fanbases.  This year, the Cubs meandered their way through a crappy division and have sort of popped up in the playoffs again.

The World Series was supposed to have exorcised the playoff demons and silenced Cubs fans' overrwrought and irritating pessimism and obnoxious public displays of baseball woe, but habits die hard, and it is very difficult for me to watch the Cubs in the playoffs without immediately looking for the most humiliating and awful way they could lose.  Last year, for example, I was sure that Cubs castoff pitcher Jeff Samardzija would shut them out in the playoffs because ex-Cubs always came back to haunt them and then he gave up a home run to a relief pitcher.

This season, the obvious Cub hobgoblin is Dusty Baker.  Baker is older now, a little more stooped and Piniellabellied, and suffering from Kirk Hinrich Sports Accessory Syndrome where he is slowly being overtaken by wristbands.  A lot of Cubs fans blame Baker for the tens of thousands of arm and shoulder injuries that slowly engulfed Mark Prior and Kerry Wood and the subsequent collapse of the Cubs, although Baker could not possibly be responsible for the dozens of times Prior collided with baserunners, got struck with comebackers, fell into open manholes, and had vivid dreams about demons slashing his shoulder capsules with claw-fingers and then woke up and collapsed during a towel drill the next day while some surreal dreamland Anti-Prior gained shoulder capsules until his shoulders were nothing but capsules that turned into wings as he flies around knocking out other dream people's teeth and taking their pants before public speeches.  Baker and the Nationals have a tremendous pitching staff and a fearsome lineup, and it is possible that Baker will have his day celebrating at Wrigley Field.  This time, it will be because his team played better and not because he has been reborn as an avatar of Ironic Cub Destruction.

Cubs Perennial September Call-Up 
Augie Ojeda, picked up by the Diamondbacks, 
became another Avatar of Ironic Cub 
Destruction and batted like .450 against 
them the in the 2007 NLDS while his eyes 
glowed an unearthly red light after exposure 
to anti-Cub artifacts secretly buried in the 
Wrigley visitors' locker room by a heretofore 
unknown Cubs curse mystic  

We now live in a world where the Cubs will be playing in a series against a fanbase worried about its own nonsensical set of curses and inexplicable playoff failures.  The Nationals have yet to get out of the Division Series with their loaded roster, and the Cubs will try to continue that streak in an attempt to one day cultivate a group of fans as performatively sad-sacked as those who root for the Cubs.
  
Now famous, the World Series Cubs can be found on 
local commercials

The world is, for now, free from having to hear about Cubs fans rhapsodizing about how they will never win and from announcers throwing up pictures of old-timey cars on broadcasts and the Litany of Cubs playoff failures and the people saying "black cat" in profoundly Chicago accents, and the harrowing footage of Steve Bartman escaping Wrigley Field while 20,000 people simultaneously menace him with beer bottles.  Humanity now faces something perhaps more dangerous: confident Cubs fans who travel en masse across the Midwest, waving W flags and honking Go Cubs Go at otherwise innocent bystanders. 

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The Narrative

October 13, 2017, 9:52 am
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James Franklin has finally done it.  After losing to Northwestern at Vanderbilt, canceling a game against the Wildcats by ordering a specially designed goblet that said "home and home series against Northwestern," and smashing it against the walls of his palatial Coaching Mansion and then mailing the shards to Northwestern's athletic department, and then moving to Penn State to build them up specifically, one presumes, to defeat Northwestern, Franklin stood triumphant on Ryan Field under a darkening sky with a cloud of crows and ravens and other species ordered off the Foreboding Birds catalog released to terrorize Evanston, and he departed victorious, with nothing left to play for.

Sportswriting exists to invent narratives for events that involve a lot of luck and happenstance. Wisconsin, for example, had failed to win a game at Ryan Field from 1999-2016; this streak comprised of four whole football games, each with its own discrete improbable insanities that had nothing to do with one another but became perfect for inventing a narrative of the Badgers unable to win at this lakeside doom fortress in front of a hostile crowd of nearly 40% Northwestern fans.  I have absolutely no idea if James Franklin cares at all about Northwestern or about his epic three-game losing streak dating back to Vanderbilt, but I also know that in my brain he spends most of his time skyping with Tim Beckman about his cadence in late-night fireplace-lit pacing as he composes angry couplets about Pat Fitzgerald and the yowling Wildcat noise on the PA system and Air Willie, which I am pretty sure has not existed during Franklin's entire Big Ten tenure but is something he could have read about on the internet.

James Franklin, as he always does, pondering how to beat Northwestern, 
a real rivalry that I know for a fact has consumed him

Another misleading narrative would be to look at the final score and assume that a febrile Northwestern squad flailed against a top-five Penn State team.  Northwestern's defense bottled up Penn State's fearsome attack for the first half, and Saquon Barkley, that terrifying running back who trains by leaping canyons and stiff-arming university buildings marked for demolition, could do nothing at all.  The Wildcats' offense, though, bungled a few early opportunities to take the lead, including a sequence of penalties near the goal line where they were called for holding, false starting, conspiracy to false start, and mail fraud and then turned it over.  The defense in the second half, often called upon to stop the Nittany Lions from within Northwestern territory, eventually faltered, Barkley finally unleashed his most terrifying move by psychically moving a referee into the way of a helplessly diving Wildcat, and Penn State romped through the rest of the game.  This is the second time Northwestern has played a top-tier opponent tough through a half of football, which may not count in the standings but does count in the extensive glossy literature that will be sent for the consideration of the people at the Bleedgrowl Bear Trap and Bear Trap Accessories Bowl should the Wildcats successfully win Big Ten games.

MARYLAND

Maryland has been in the Big Ten since 2014, but has been hiding in the conference's weakling East Division the entire time, safe from the Northwestern Wildcats and their onslaught of occasional bowl-caliber football competence.  No longer!  The Terrapins will now face a desperate Northwestern team coming off consecutive losses to two of the Big Ten's best teams while Maryland hopes to build on the momentum of a season featuring wins against the crumbling rot of late Ottoman Empire-era Texas and P.J. Fleck's Order of Rowboatsmanship, both on the road.

What does Maryland look like this season?  This is a blogspot website that is all about integrity, and I will not insult you by pretending to know anything about Maryland football.  I remain in shameful ignorance; the only Maryland football I can recall watching was the end of last year's Quick Lane Bowl, a tedious Goal Line Fumbles Exhibition in front of 47 people, the apotheosis of the Quick Lane Bowl experience, and one I desperately want for the Northwestern Wildcats.  From what I can tell through extensive minutes of research, a runaway combine harvester has mown down all of the Terrapins' quarterbacks, and they hope that third-stringer Max Bortenschlager, who sounds like the video game boss second form of Blake Bortles, will be healthy.

These projections predict the emergence of a third Bort Quarterback by 2025

The narrative here is confusing: either Northwestern has valiantly struggled against two top teams to open Big Ten play or they are bad and the only thing to do is to go on the internet and call for the citizen's arrest of all of the coaches for the crime of calling ill-advised speed options.  Last year, the Wildcats found themselves in a similar place before rallying against the middle of the Big Ten. This game, against a team outside the AP top ten, will let us know which narrative to pursue: a miserable decline that depends on only on holding onto the Hat, or another triumphant march towards bowl eligibility.

CURSES

Sports narratives are part of the atmosphere of the baseball playoffs; they roll in like a ghostly fog carrying the ominous spirits of every baseball fuckup that has ever happened to a team stretching back generations.  Baseball playoffs are the province of snake-bitten managers, dominant pitchers forever labeled as postseason chokers, of grudges and of curses because the events of a baseball playoff game are almost completely random and defy rational explanation.

Last night, the Cubs and Nationals played an operatic 75-hour baseball game, a tortuously long time for anything that is supposed to be entertainment, but especially baseball because playoff baseball is an exercise of prolonged dread.

Every agonizing moment of playoff baseball, of watching the manager turn his roulette wheel to another shaky relief pitcher with guys in scoring position, of grimacing through errors, of knowing the guy coming up with two outs and men on base is the guy who is going to chase balls out of the strike zone every time why would you swing at that it's in the goddamn dirt, of Jon Lester staring at a man who is sitting down cross-legged between first and second, and the human mind is incredible at knitting those anxieties into prophesies of doom.

The Washington Nationals are cursed.  Not in the supernatural vengeful spirit in disguise who is not at all happy about getting sprayed by that chariot sense, but in the sense of the narrative overwhelming the rational, of the ridiculous baseball catastrophes congealing into a palpable wad in the pit of every fan's stomach, and the desperate search for a connection between every misfortune into a larger explanation of why the team cannot win.  

The Washington Nationals are cursed because it is almost impossible to believe the following things happened in the same baseball game: an ace pitcher comes out of the bullpen as a reliever (a tremendous playoff baseball wrinkle*), gets two quick outs, and then the following sequence of events happen: a infield single, bloop hit and RBI double, a controversial dropped third strike involving an arcane baseball rule about hitting the catcher with the follow through that I've literally never heard of, a catcher's interference, a hit batsman, an egregious error, a valiant comeback against a Cubs bullpen that appeared to be throwing the weighted baseballs that pitchers grab to make Pete Townsend windmills motions as they warm up, the ending of an inning against a beleaguered, laboring Wade Davis on a pickoff play where the officials determined that numerous Lobaton Molecules had strayed from the bag for several microseconds as measured by the New York Office's electron microscope.

Javy Baez's controversial and possibly illegal backswing against Matt 
Wieters gives him his A.J. Perizynski Moment. You know that this was 
a rule because if it was not, A.J. Pierzynski probably would have spent 
his career walloping catchers on follow-throughs or kicking them in the 
facemask before loping over to first while already pointing to the section 
in his rulebook that he has taken from his pocket that has numerous 
post-its pointing to where it doesn't say you can't do that

The Washington Nationals are cursed because they are managed by a man who has been engulfed by the narrative.  Dusty Baker has made numerous mistakes in this series, but so does every manager; in a league overtaken by the tenets of La Russism where a manager is expected to use at least a dozen pitchers in every game, where the most radical thing a baseball manager can do at this point is to identify his nine best players and ask them to play an entire game of baseball, there are an infinite number of decisions that will look dumb in retrospect.  Baker's most controversial decision, the bizarre public waffling on the Many Ailments of Stephen Strasburg eventually revealed with the subtlety of Chairman Kaga unleashing the asparagus, worked out when Strasburg heroically struck out 12 Cubs and even allowed the Nationals to survive long enough to invite this debacle.  But Baker has overseen too many catastrophes to avoid having the narrative swallow him, where Baker's various baseball management mistakes have been compounded by the inexplicable and the unholy.

Dusty Baker signals for a relief pitcher and an explanation of why this 
keeps happening

Sports curses exist because we need to make sense of things, because the truth that every single baseball game is its own discrete event and that sometimes fatal flaws intersect with weird luck more than once and sometimes that happens to an entire city's worth of sports teams in the playoffs for decades is cold comfort.  It is because we need stories and explanations beyond sometimes shit happens, in baseball.  It is because people naturally find it much easier to believe that something that has happened before will happen again than to believe that something that has not happened will; the Cubs choked and imploded in every playoff series my entire life and therefore it was easy to believe that they would never win, that there was some bizarre, inexplicable force preventing them from winning anything ever instead of individual events like Lou Piniella deciding to save Carlos Zambrano for a game that will never come one year or the Cubs' bad defensive infield biting them another year or having most reliable bullpen arm be a person named "Joe Borowski" in another.

For the first time, the Cubs are not only the team without the narrative, they appear to have been getting all of the breaks.  They head into the NLCS with a strained, exhausted pitching staff against the best team in baseball.  Their only fresh pitcher is aged prospector John Lackey who seems capable of only giving up home runs and bellowing the word fuck; Lackey has hinted at retirement after this season and there is nothing more terrifying than a Lackey with nothing to lose, a Lackey who could even come in from the bullpen and rip his jersey off to show he has the word FUUCCKKK tattooed on his belly, which he is exposing to the entire world while also bellowing.  

The Cubs this year are not the best team in baseball in a desperate fight against the narrative.  They are a good team going against a better team in a playoff format where being better matters only slightly and where chance and ill-fortune swirl intersect with every move.  I have no idea how to watch baseball without desperately groping for doom, I have no idea how to react when the other team has imploded and are blaming obscure rules infractions and mystic forces beyond our control, but I have to say it's not bad.



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* MCCARVER (bursting through the studio show set in an MRAP and handcuffing himself to Alex Rodriguez before dramatically swallowing the key) Not a lot of people know this, Joe, but in the movie Major League, Ricky Vaughn was the starter coming out of the bullpen. He was not the closer, Joe. He was clearly a starter coming out of the pen in a Game 163 situation.  Tell them, Joe.  Tell my family not to forget me and also not a lot of people know this but a lot of managers don't like to use their starters in these situations because (he cannot be heard over the grinding sound of from the sawblade cutting through his handcuffs).
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Undefeated All-Time Against Maryland

October 21, 2017, 6:34 am
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After back-to-back neck wringings at the hands of the Big Ten's top teams, Northwestern finally had a chance to test its mettle against a Big Ten team that will be scrapping around with them for a berth in the Yelling Fist Generic Flesh Colored Hulk Hands Bowl and they bulldozed through them with the assurance of a team that will get to six wins if they have to infiltrate Big Ten headquarters and rearrange the Big Ten's computerized punch cards.
 
A Big Ten technician adds the statistical
 data from last year's Northwestern-Michigan State 
game into the official database

Maryland seemed to have the Wildcats' number at first.  Star receiver D.J. Moore jetted through the Wildcats' defense, already depleted from injury and suspension for trying to tackle receivers through the inside of their chests.  But then the 'Cats came alive.  Maryland, down to a third-string quarterback named Bort Bortenschlagen could not move the ball, and Northwestern wore down their struggling defense by battering them with Justin Jackson.  What looked like another nail-biting game turned into a solid victory in the yet another chapter in this storied Big Ten football rivalry.

Jackson owned the day.  He broke the all-time school record for rushing, carried Northwestern to the win, and delivered impassioned French monologues about how the French word for touchdown is "touchdown."  Northwestern has had its share of great running backs in recent years, but Jackson may go down as the best.  Jackson is not a big back nor is he blindingly fast.  His specialty is poking and prodding through holes and shimmying away from contact.  Some of his most impressive runs have been in games where the offensive line has struggled against conference behemoths and he has had to dodge three or four tacklers just to get back to the line of scrimmage.  When he gets into the open field, he is shifty enough to bamboozle would-be tacklers into lunging at air.  Yet, Jackson's greatest attribute is probably his resilience.  There have been many games when the entire offensive game plan seems to have been to keep giving Jackson the ball against teams that have moved their entire defense into trenches surrounding the line of scrimmage and hope that it's enough to win the game.  It didn't always work-- that kind of thing can't work unless you're a Wisconsin team that has specifically engineered linemen from the largest and most virulent strains of locker room fungus available on the black market, but it takes a back like Jackson to make it a conceivable strategy.
 
That Pitt safety was absorbed into the grass of Yankee Stadium

OH C'MON IOWA AGAIN?

One of the sad effects of the Big Ten's adoption of conferences has been to see the same teams every year.  In some ways it is a boon, especially since Northwestern plays in the blighted West, which reliably serves up the requisite three jabroni teams that keep Northwestern in low-tier bowl swag.  Conferences, though, have created six annual games, instead of the protected annual games that featured a mix of hated rivalries with trophies named for weaponry and farm implements and matchups generated more or less at random.  The conferences mean that Northwestern has to weather an irritating biennial Invasion of the Nebraska People and getting sat upon by Wisconsin every season.  It also means that the Wildcats are constantly playing Iowa.

I don't know what to make of Northwestern-Iowa matchups anymore.  Northwestern and Iowa should never be playing every year when they're both fighting for mid-tier bowl games.  They should appear like wraiths on the schedule in one of the years when one of the teams is good, waiting as a dangerous three-win team nonetheless hellbent on ruining their opponent's season.  Iowa or Northwestern should forget about each other's existence except when they're on an impossible Rose Bowl hunt and then fall into a trap door into filled with turnovers and overtimes and, to read on the internet the next day, a shameful bounty of uncalled holding penalties. 

Iowa lost CJ Beathard and talismanic cornerback Desmond King.  They still have their star linebacker, the comic book-named Josey Jewell.  And they still have Kirk Ferentz, their Forever Coach.  Ferentz has solidified his power by naming his eldest son Brian to the role of offensive coordinator.  He will supplement his coaching staff with other Ferentz from throughout the Spanish and Low Countries branches of the Ferentz family until college football is, like Europe in the early twentieth century, essentially a deteriorating mass of branches of the Ferentz weakened by generations of inbreeding until they all declare war on each other.
 
Guards come to escort Rolph Ferentz IV from the Sun Belt branch of 
the Ferentz Family to accept ULM's invitation to participate in the 2345 Belk Bowl

Is there a point to trying to predict an Iowa-Northwestern game?  Iowa sure looks like the better team. Northwestern is coming off its best performance of the year against an injury-ravaged Maryland team.  Iowa's only losses have been a near-upset of the same Penn State team that pulverized the Wildcats at Ryan Field and a narrow loss to a resurgent Michigan State.  The Hawkeyes will be looking for revenge after having their homecoming spoiled by Northwestern last year, but this game remains a big one for the Wildcats-- a loss keeps them scratching for three more wins against a putrid conference that might not be putrid enough.  A win might do what last year's game against Iowa did and wake them up from a disastrous non-conference performance that ended in the most famous Pin Stripe Bowl victory.  Either way, the unfortunately annual Iowa-Northwestern undoes the hoary maxim about familiarity breeding contempt.  Contempt grows best from rare meetings that end with recriminations and devastating quarterback injuries.

BYCTOM NBA PREVIEW

NBA analysis has changed from its original barebones boxscore to a cornucopia of fancy statistics, impressions gleaned from the numerous terminator cameras feeding biometric data to teams and to the per synergy sports bloggers, and, most importantly, running updates about the various feuds, social media kerfuffles, and free agency betrayals that pepper the NBA year-round and make it by far the most compelling sports league in this country.

There are, perhaps, basketball purists who sit around longing to root for crew-cutted ciphers who run pick-and-rolls and hoist jumpshots, for basketball broadcasts without allusions to a twitter war between opponents, or try to follow teams without learning which players’ embarrassing sexual peccadilloes have been instantaneously broadcast to a worldwide instagram audience.  For the rest of us, the NBA has become a glorious dunk-adjacent soap opera.

Every sports league has its outsized personalities, but the NBA sells them better than any league.  The NFL is dominated by its owners; every year, the major storylines involve some sort of rules conflict and the NFL meting out its own bizarre brand of football justice.  MLB's players remain in a weirdo Twilight Zone episode where overexuberance at doing things most normal people would find near-impossible is met by a hail of baseballs.  When I think of the culture of American baseball (if anything, the World Baseball Classic demonstrated that literally every other country seems to have way more fun playing baseball than the USA's square-jawed hall monitors), I think of John Lackey, a man who has taken his cues on manful stoicism from 80s action movies and speaks in a weird tough-guy argot that seems to be taken from a disastrous Stephen Seagal-penned Western.  

Imagine Seagal sitting atop a lifeless plastic horse in front of green 
screen wildly whipping the bridle around as he pretends to be chased
 by a ruthless gang of Bulgarian cattle rustlers

The NBA is rife with drama because players have been forming and reforming superteams and appearing to take things extremely personally.  Trust no NBA preview that doesn't feature a list of feuds boiled down like the incomprehensible What's Happening on Your Favorite Soaps columns that used to be in newspapers:

LeBron is feuding with former teammate Kyrie Iriving because Irving's inexplicable decision to wade unbidden into the waters of flat-Earth theories pre-empted LeBron's attempt to troll the media by earnestly speaking about the Mole People.  Chris Paul and Doc Rivers have been trading barbs in the media until they will finally reconcile years from now when they both simultaneously wheel and turn to belittle the same referee.  Tom Thibodeau is attempting to recreate his Bulls teams in Minnesota and is currently building his own Kirk Hinrich out of compression sleeves.  The Lakers drafted a player with a maniacal basketball stage dad who has already provoked a feud with LeBron.  LeBron, who is very busy, is also feuding with Comic Sans mortgage-goblin Dan Gilbert who is going around firing people like a mad emperor.  Carmelo Anthony finally accepted a trade after the Knicks' attempts to alienate him enough to waive his no-trade clause became increasingly indistinguishable from George Costanza's attempts to get fired from Play Now. 
 
Jackson torturing Anthony with his famous Zen koans such as "how 
shitty is Carmelo Anthony? Still here?"  Jackson left the Knicks to 
have several expensive surgeries that will transform him into a human triangle
 
SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES FOR LUKA

At least the Three Alphas had an obvious tragic downfall.  The Bulls surrounded Jimmy Butler with combustible personalities with a poor fit on the court and the entire season was spent waiting for it to combust.  The collapse happened quickly-- Butler was shipped to Minnesota in a trade that immediately made living phrenology exhibit Gar Forman the laughingstock of the NBA, then the Bulls paid both Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo substantial sums of money to prevent them from playing for the Bulls again.
 
I don't think there will ever be a funnier self-inflicted sports
 nickname than the  Three Alphas

Last year's Bulls had infinitely more compelling drama of washed-up stars, a grotesque parody superteam scratching and clawing for the eight seed over the other shambling corpse teams in the Eastern Conference.  This year, they will be bad.  Barely anyone on this team is an NBA player; their best player is somehow still a guy recovering from knee surgery.  All of the Bulls' hopes lay in the spindly arms of Lauri Markkanen, a sweet-shooting Finnish beanpole who will spend the season being wrapped around the stanchion by bruising NBA forwards. The Bulls will likely be the worse team in the league, clobbered night in and night out, trying desperately to turn over a top-three draft pick to a front office so beleaguered that they have literally inspired a protest movement.

And yet!  This team, a team that featured players so anonymous that they were not issued their own jerseys on media day, that has been assembled to be the largest mass of humanity ever collectively dunked upon, is not content to get beaten by opponents.  They are instead beating upon each other.  Niko Mirotic, last seen being pulled from a rut five feet behind the three-point line, had his jaw broken in practice by Bobby Portis.  There is nothing funny about an altercation that lands someone in the hospital.  There is something vaguely amusing about thinking about Fred Hoiberg trying to stop this fight by repeatedly and ineffectively blowing a whistle.

The Bulls will be almost unwatchable this season, as abysmal as their post-Jordan unraveling that featured awful players like Dragan Tarlac, Marcus Fizer, and Fred Hoiberg.  The NBA's draft structure that rewards awful teams with the chance to draft superstars will change after this season to make it slightly harder for teams to guarantee high picks just for sucking.  This change has created a terrifying race to the bottom among the NBA's shittiest teams and has destroyed the entire point of basketball; bad teams are so desperate to be bad, especially this season, that any win that the Bulls get by running into a team ravaged by the flu or coming off a back-to-back or so distracted by Cam Payne repeatedly falling down that they actually start throwing the ball directly to him, will be potentially catastrophic.  It's no revelation that savvy fans should root against their own rebuilding teams-- this is, after all, what has sparked the rules changes.  But in a bleak year where even the Bulls know they have no chance one night, it deprives Bulls fans the ability to enjoy their greatest achievement of making another team's fans really really angry.
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IOWA AND NORTHWESTERN FIGHT TO THE DEATH OF FOOTBALL

October 27, 2017, 9:24 am
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Whatever it is Northwestern and Iowa do, it is not playing football.  It would be more accurate to say that the Big Ten continuously allows them to commit football against each other, the Greater Chicagoland Metropolitan Area, and whatever bar happened to have their TV permanently stuck on ESPN2 after Lenny hit the TV with his pool cue again while demonstrating his Steven Seagal barfight techniques and that son-of-a-bitch never paid for it he didn't. 

Last Saturday, a howling wind from the south led both offenses to perform like they were Napoleonic generals terrified to cross the end zones and move too far from their supplies of gatorade and butt towels.  The game was marked by stymied drives, heroic stands, astonishing punts, and appalling acts of football cowardice; with 90 seconds to go and two timeouts Pat Fitzgerald ran out the clock to play for overtime, unwilling to trust his team to proceed into the gale.  It ended up working out because Justin Jackson is dropping smoke bombs and reappearing ten yards away whenever some jabroni tries to tackle him and because an Iowa player dropped a wide-open fourth-down conversion so egregiously that it appears that Brett Walsh (Northwestern #10) actually goes into a full-on Iowa Fan Surrender Cobra because he can't believe what has happened.
 

Behind every ugly win is a great defensive performance, and the Wildcat defense has quietly become a wall.  Iowa's plan was to once again unleash Akrum Wadley to run through the tracks he dug into the Ryan Field last time he played there.  This time, Northwestern linebackers smashed through the Hawkeye defensive line and brought him down repeatedly.  This time, on fourth and inches late in the game, the Hawkeyes, surely confused by the ferocious home crowd of nearly four dozen Northwestern fans, moved offside and had to settle for a field goal.

In some ways, the loser of this game was the sport of football as two teams more or less shouted at each other for three hours before agreeing to go home in a perfect display of stereotypical Big Ten 11AM anti-football.  But, in a more accurate way, Iowa lost this game, the indomitable Wildcat triumphed once again and greatly improved its odds of making the Old Macbeth's Industrial Iron Shards bowl or even the Repurposed Magic the Gathering Server Dark Internet Cryptocurrency Bowl.

UPDATE ON THE IMPORTANT NORTHWESTERN-IOWA RIVALRY

Iowa fans would never say they have a rivalry with Northwestern.  It is unseemly.  Only one man has ever sunk low enough to court Northwestern as a rival, and he is now in jail.  Yet, Northwestern has been a hilarious thorn in the side of the Iowa Hawkeyes for more than a decade.  Pat Fitzgerald is 7-5 against Iowa with the Hawkeyes favored in nearly all of those games; the average Northwestern victory has been by just about a touchdown.  Over and over, Iowa rigged their boulders, built their rockets, donned their elaborate ACME Bat-Man's Outfit, and then run into a tunnel painted on the side of a cliff after watching Pat Fitzgerald disappear into it in defiance of all known laws of physics and the AP Polls and it is incredibly funny.


Northwestern and Iowa appear to be locked in the same cycle of infuriating losses to one another, grandiose punting exhibitions, and you and me we're not so different monologues because they have the most entrenched, unchanging leadership in the Big Ten.  Ferentz, who has been coaching at Iowa so long that traces of Feretnz molecules from the Big Bang have been found in Iowa City soil, has entrenched his position by appointing his son as offensive coordinator, sending a clear message to any rogue Iowa coordinators who would scheme to depose him or slip reptile poisons into his cream of wheat that a Ferentz will remain on the throne.  Pat Fitzgerald has gone from the young, fistpumping boy coach to a beefy, gray-templed J. Jonah Jameson.
 
I'm very proud of our young men for going out there this week and 
executing and also for not letting that wall-climbing FREAK run amok 
around this city leaving web residue all over the buildings for us, the 
taxpayers, to have to CLEAN UP that FLUID or the DEBRIS from the 
time he got into a fight with a guy dressed like a HUMAN RHINOCEROS go cats

While neither head coach seems to be going anywhere, frustrated fans have turned on the most obvious targets: offensive coordinators.  Iowa fans have been frustrated with Brian Ferentz because if Iowa's offense stagnates then it appears his key value is the ability to pass as a Kirk Ferentz impersonator from a distance when the elder Ferentz is otherwise indisposed.  Northwestern fans (on the internet at least) remain irritated with Mick McCall, who, in the insane business of goatee guys named Skip and Bobby replacing each other every year, has remained in charge of Northwestern's offense and will stay there until he dies and is entombed in Pat Fitzgerald's pyramid so Fitz can have someone call ill-advised speed options in the afterlife.

College football fans love to complain about coordinators and assistant coaches.  In many ways, it makes sense-- teams without flashy recruiting rankings routinely shock better teams with better schemes.  And in many ways it is far more palatable that college football fans' deranged ire is focused on the people actually getting paid.  At the same time, the sense of coordinators and coaches as maestros singlehandedly responsible for magicking their teams points or turnovers can stray into the realm of the ludicrous.  Football is an insane, complicated game based on violence-diagrams ruled by the bounce of an oblong ball and even the greatest football brain genius cannot account for one single slip or mistake or a guy falling down on his ankle weird which means the athletic training staff should probably be fired because they should be preventing injuries, say the maniacs in the stands who are screaming at these behemoths to run into each other for our amusement and maybe it is possible that everyone is not a holy shit he called that inside handoff again.

MICHIGAN STATE

Last year, Michigan State and Northwestern seemed primed for a miserable punt-off.  Instead, we were treated to an insane shootout with Austin Carr rampaging through the secondary and Michigan State bringing in a backup quarterback who just kept bombing the ball down the field. Solomon Vault fielded a weird bounce on the kickoff and ran 95 yards.  A Northwestern team that couldn't get more than seven against Illinois State scored more points than any opponent in Michigan State history.  So it might be prudent to not predict this to be a miserable, cold, low-scoring shitfest.  At the same time, man does this game look like it is going to be a miserable, cold, low-scoring shitfest.

Michigan State appears to be back after last year's nightmare season.  They are 6-1 with their only loss to an unthinkably resurgent Notre Dame team that should have been stopped by the government, they had a trademark ridiculous win against Michigan in a monsoon, and they come into Ryan Field ranked sixteenth in the country.  Yet, Michigan State has not been blowing people out.  Their four Big Ten wins have been by a combined 19 points.  Their approach seems have been to assemble some bludgeonous defenders and occasionally deign to move the ball towards the endzone only when it becomes necessary to score more points than their opponent.  They play like football has some bizarre new Price is Right rule where you can't go over one touchdown more than the opponent.

Michigan State quarterback Brian Lewerke hopes to impress 
with his offseason tunneling out of Spartan Stadium regimen after this safety

Northwestern seems to want to play the same way.  A resurgent defense has frustrated opponent running games.  The offense will give the Spartans a heavy dose of Justin Jackson and a plan to inch towards their goal line.  Neither team seems that interested in doing much on offense other than not allowing the other team to have the ball.  But maybe the script will flip and in a chilly, windy, possibly rainy Ryan Field, the two teams will throw caution to the wind and ball to hand and not get a one-point lead then spend three plays building an increasingly cozy mud den on their own twenty-five for 120 seconds before punting it to the other team who will get busy passing around trowels and flagons of warm tea.  

Michigan State is very good.  They're ranked, they'll be supported by an invasion of green men and women, and they'll provide the greatest test for the Wildcats yet.  But, the both teams' love of hideous garbage football and the weather conditions mean that this could be anyone's game, that Northwestern could pull the home upset and vault itself back from middling obscurity to slightly less middling obscurity.

THE BARCELONA ART WORLD

I'm reading Robert Hughes's Barcelona, his 1992 tome about the history of art and architecture of Barcelona.  Hughes, an author and art critic whose books on Australia and Rome I've reviewed here in the past was a dyspeptic flamethrower who had never met an early 1990s post-modern building he had not wanted to jackhammer.  He specialized in long histories (both this book and Rome go back to the Roman period) while causally tossing out withering asides about any artist he does not like, which is most of them.  

I do not often like to do this, but I should be upfront and say that I have not finished Barcelona.  This is always a foolish thing to do when writing about a book but especially with Hughes, where there is danger on every unread page-- his book on Rome, for example, ends with a wild, maniacal assertion that Italians cannot be trusted to preserve their art history because they watch soccer on TV, for example, and there is no guessing what sorts of insane early 90s fire takes on Spanish government lurk in upcoming chapters.  The reason for posting this is an excuse to include this passage, not only for him casually name-dropping Dalí, but putting this information into my life and now yours.

Further reports on Barcelona as they develop.
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EXTRA FOOTBALL

November 3, 2017, 10:57 am
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Maybe they should just skip straight to overtime, the pulse-pounding, heart-stopping, thrust and riposte style of maniac football instead of requiring us to sit through an entire Northwestern football game to get there.  Once again, Northwestern played a Big Ten opponent in a Festival of Stereotypical Big Ten Football, an ugly punts-and-fumbles act that exists in a universe where it is impossible to score more than 17 points.  And once again, that game yielded to a lunatic touchdown spree that ended on the world's least necessary hail mary, delivered a fifth win to the 'Cats, dethroned a ranked opponent, and led to all-out delirium among the 58 people at Ryan Field rooting for Northwestern.

In 2004, Northwestern played an unfathomable four overtime games, including the program's only win against Ohio State in the Cenzoic Era and somehow overtime wins against both Indiana and Illinois.  The Wildcats celebrated by unleashing the greatest piece of Northwestern football-related art we've ever seen, a poster where Wildcats players pretend to hold various construction implements like miniature chain saws and toilet plungers.

This is also the box art to the world's grisliest Clue knockoff

Northwestern managed to hang on through solid run defense and through some lucky breaks-- the Spartans turned the ball over, fumbling once deep in Northwestern territory, and their kicker had two bounce off the crossbar as the Spartans learned of Ryan Field's true home advantage, the disguising of Northwestern fans as human goal posts that swat their kicks back onto the field with a resounding thunk.  Michigan State quarterback Brian Lewerke, meanwhile, caused problems all day, setting a Michigan State record for single-game passing yardage and leading the Spartans on a last minute game, tying drive that involved him somehow evading all of the traps in the Raiders of the Lost Ark temple and heaving the ball downfield to a wide open receiver before falling in overtime by trying to do that again then getting simultaneously getting crushed by the a giant ball, getting impaled by 800,000 poison darts, and watching Alfred Molina scamper away with the rope.

Northwestern salutes Big Ten Special Teams Player of 
the Week An Inanimate Carbon Rod

The Michigan State game provided the Wildcats' third consecutive Big Ten win and has changed the trajectory of the season from despair at the type of bowl game that could happen to them to elation at the quality of crappy bowl game that awaits against the largely crappy teams left on the schedule.  Given Northwestern's dedication to reviving the Cardiac Cats this season and winning in heart-stopping overtime periods. anything is possible.

WHOSE TURN IS IT TO WIN THE NEBRASKA GAME

Nebraska is reeling.  They're 4-4, they just barely eked out a comeback win over surprisingly feisty Purdue, and Nebraska fans are already tracking the flight patterns of coveted Central Florida coach Scott Frost.  They go into a game against a Northwestern team that is streaking through the Big Ten West the way that a loose-wheeled shopping cart can be described as streaking through the produce aisle.  The result should be absolute chaos. 

A screenshot from Nebraska football's official website shows scant information about the upcoming game against the Wildcats

Nebraska and Northwestern have been more or less alternating road victories (Nebraska's lone home win in this series came on a hail mary) and grimly menacing each other.  This is not what Nebraska signed up for.  They came to the Big Ten to meet Wisconsin every year in an unwatchable sumo wrestling match to determine who gets to get annihilated by Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game and not grit their teeth against a Northwestern team that few of them had probably recognized as an actual football program before joining the conference.  

Nebraska may be having a down year, but it still represents a tough matchup.  Only fools and monomaniacs should try to run on Northwestern, a team that has Paddy Fisher and Nate Hall ready to knock over any running back that tries to sneak his way undetected past Tyler Lancaster.  But Nebraska can't really run the ball anyway and have heralded quarterback Tanner Lee and star receiver Stanley Morgan Jr. to torture the Wildcats' injury-riddled secondary.  On defense, Northwestern will be relying on Justin Jackson, who is basically a load-bearing pillar supporting the offense, and hoping that Thorson's overtime heroics and the emergence of receivers like Riley Lees and superback Cameron Green can continue against a defense that should not be as rough as the non-Maryland Big Ten units the Wildcats have faced.

Nebraska is favored but barely.  Nevertheless, I am pretty sure that no Nebraska fan has contemplated for a moment that the Huskers could possibly lose to Northwestern. Based on my own diligent and frankly insane and disappointing life choice to occasionally venture into websites maintained by rival fans, only two Big Ten teams exist whose supporters will ever believe it is possible to lose to Northwestern: Illinois and Purdue (Northwestern has yet to play Rutgers; if you are a Rutgers fan, please feel free to write in or leave a comment and let me know whether you think your team can ever lose to Northwestern).  For every other fanbase, Northwestern lost a bunch of games in the 1970s and 80s and therefore they can never win a Big Ten game again.  I am reasonably confident that nearly every Big Ten team could be destroyed by the NCAA Death Penalty for extremely Big Ten infractions like wooing fullbacks by promising agricultural sabotage that is exposed when a number of Midwestern corn mazes become poisoned and easily solved by disappointed nine-year-olds, fans of the resulting teams now made of frail walk-ons who have been training by practicing cowering will be certain that they will nevertheless crush the full-strength Wildcats and if they lose it will be because the offensive coordinator needs to get fired or because of all the uncalled holding penalties.

BASEBALL'S GRAVE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS THE "K ZONE"

There's a small crisis brewing in sports that has nothing to do with work stoppages, sports leagues deciding to embrace broad investigative powers, the endless stadium war between those who want us to clap clap clap clap our hands or for everybody to clap ya hands clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap.  It's a division between the naked eye and the camera's eye, the widening gap between observed physical phenomena and sports rules, the unmooring of objective, empirical truth from the authority of sports officials.  It's video replay, and it is making everyone a maniac.

In football, video replay has reduced everything to pixel.  We no longer know what a catch is-- when the Michigan State receiver came down with the ball in the waning seconds of the game, I held onto a fraction of hope because even though he clearly caught the ball in any reasonable definition of the term, football fans have by now trained ourselves to wait for an Official Explanation to celebrate, for some beef-armed referee to come out and get on a microphone and explain in the stilted institutional argot that every person with any modicum of authority now uses whenever addressing more than three people to explain that the receiver did not properly secure the ball through the process of the catch or the League will not at this time comment on the ongoing investigation as per policy or the Team and its sponsors will be reviewing its safety policy in light of the incident in question when the Jacksonville Jaguar drove its pyrotechnic motorcycle device into three or four individuals.

The League understands fans' concern over the expansion of seating 
into the Meineke Wheelie Zone Fan Area and Play Zone and will be 
reviewing its safety policy, pending a full investigation of the incident 
in question

But baseball is the most vulnerable because every single play depends on the judgement call of a single person.  Umpires' strike zones are not perfect-- we know that since the first person bellowed at them you flat brain-panned hog-fellow, that was a striked-pitch and threatened them with nineteenth-century fisticuffs-- and an entire branch of baseball analysis has discovered that the a catchers' most valuable defensive skill may well be his or her ability to fool umpires with various chicaneries in order to bamboozle them into calling more strikes.  Now, though, every single pitch is run through a computer processor to determine the calls' accuracy, pitch tracking technology tracks each pitch, and entire twitter accounts show how often a pitch is called a ball or strike and exist specifically to be quote tweeted with a caption about how that anthropomorphic wattle Cowboy Joe is fucking us over again.

In this way, the "K Zone" or whatever the broadcaster is calling it has quietly undermined the entirety of baseball.  Baseball now exists in a tense battle between parallel realities, between the empirical location of the pitch as determined by technology and presented on an ever-present Umpire Tattling Graphic and the umpire's decision on whether the pitch is or is not a strike.  MLB has long insisted on accepting the umpire's word as law on balls and strikes largely because of baseball's traditional love for postmodern literary theories that accept reality as constructed by the vagaries of language shaped by power structures.  And fans have always protested calls throughout the history of baseball by suggesting that umpires need pince-nez, monocles, glasses, and prescription rec-specs.

Baseball broadcasts have dedicated themselves to unraveling the umpires' already suspect authority by presenting viewers with an alternate reality that runs counter to officials' pronouncements for the entire game.  To watch baseball now is to be asked to parse two simultaneous realities, one of which technology has been telling us is objective fact and one of which is the interpretation of a beleaguered, masked functionary.  Either the strike zone is a term of art subject to interpretation with a flexible structure that smart pitchers and catchers work around or it is a rigid zone established firmly in physical space, but it is odd and disconcerting that baseball presents us with both simultaneously in a way that is designed only to confuse and frustrate viewers and enrage players and managers whose only recourse is to waddle out of the dugout and theatrically yell at the umpires in an unhinged way that is bereft of the dignity we expect from septuagenarians bursting out of their baseball pajamas.

Here, this is what you look like doing a Karloff impression look at me 
look at me I'm the shitty mummy 

Replay has changed baseball's rules.  Now, every close play at a base ends with a three-minute headphone conference.  In the Cubs-Nationals NLDS Game Five fever dream, replay officials provoked the Baseball Online into a frenzy when they ruled that José Lobatón had strayed off of first for a millisecond while still in the clutches of Anthony Rizzo's tag.  That play offered three competing truths-- the evidently veritable physical fact that Lobatón had left the bag for some quantifiable segment of time, the question of whether baseball's slow-motion, high-definition replay cameras injected a bizarre pedantry into rules that originated from a time when it was legal to slide into a base while menacing fielders with a blade concealed in the runner's side-whiskers, and the spiritual truth of the Nationals' propensity to shit themselves in playoff games paired with Dusty Baker's seemingly cosmic attraction to impossible baseball mishap.

Sports leagues have implemented video replay, they say, in order to get calls correct, in order to prevent them from perpetuating egregious sports injustices, but replay has also ushered in an epistemological crisis.  Video replay has undermined and complicated fundamental and basic sports activities: What is a catch? What is a strike?  Was that foul a level one technical or a level two technical with malice and forethought?  What we have now has not necessarily clarified the rules but brought to bear on them competing rules discourses one of which depends on the subjective judgement of people who have chosen to go into a line of work that involves them getting screamed at more or less constantly and one that depends on physical phenomena all but invisible to the human eye without technology and thrown them against each other for fans to argue about.  I don't know what the solution is other than if it involves repeatedly taking touchdowns away from Wisconsin for no apparent reason then it should be allowed because that is extremely funny, to me.     
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VICTORY RIGHT AFTER THIS GAME GOES TO OVERTIME

November 10, 2017, 9:26 am
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We live in overtime now. The strictures of regulation football no longer exist to constrain the Northwestern Wildcats; they start now at the 25 yardline, the clock no longer moves, there is no longer field position or quarters or movement of the sun across the horizon. Here in this dimension beyond time and space and logic and reason the Northwestern Wildcats are unstoppable, indomitable, also receiving votes.

Northwestern has won three consecutive overtime games, a feat that has literally never been done by any other team. This record reminds me of the people who decide that they're going to break the record for skijumping off a mountain into a basejump and then landing on a jetski and that is also on fire in that sure they are doing something unprecedented but it's only because no one else in their right mind would even think to do it.

I just watched the movie McConkey, which details Shane McConkey's
career from extreme skiing to BASE jumping and then combining
them with wingsuit flying after designing a mechanism to release his
skis midair and you learn that like 90% of extreme skiing stunts exist
because of Roger Moore

The Wildcats are 6-3 and ranked #25 in the Playoff Poll even though no rational person has explained to me why the Playoff Committee, which solely exists to pick the top four teams in the country after entire college football season including the Lucrative Conference Championship Games have finished, has a full set of rankings going down to #25 weeks beforehand other than to thrust us further into a chaotic world where we now have three sets of more or less meaningless top-25 ranking systems between warring factions of Playoff Bureaucrats, reporters, and graduate assistant coaches who are all as we speak publishing their own newspapers and pamphlets attacking each other.

Literature sent to discerning college football bloggers by
various rankings including the Playoff Committee's
"Have You Gone Mad?" and the Coach's "A Diffent
Against the Affociated Preff"

Northwestern is bowl eligible. Their previous overtime victories came against teams that spent last Saturday opening a black hole in the Big Ten, creating a swirling vortex that may well suck the entire conference out of the playoff picture and has already destroyed the entire Big Ten East. Michigan State, which fell to Northwestern in an insane three-overtime denouement that ended only when their quarterback panicked after fumbling, grabbed the ball, and Rex Grossmanned it into the ripped and bloody hands of Nate Hall, outlasted Penn State in a seven-hour rain epic where the Spartan Stadium field might as well have turned into quicksand for the Nittany Lions and devoured the entire team. Iowa annihilated Ohio State from the surface of the Earth. No one knows how it happened. The Buckeyes went into Kinnick Stadium and got rampaged upon by a team that had spent the entire season treating the scoring of a twentieth point like Moses searching for the Promised Land. They dropped 55 on them. They did a fake punt, a religious desecration in the House of Ferentz. The result was so baffling that football archaeologists have begun excavating Kinnick stadium in search of proof.

Both of those teams would have prime playoff positioning now, with Michigan State able to seize control of the East with a win against the Buckeyes and Iowa heading into a showdown with Wisconsin except they made the mistake of traveling to Ryan Field to get overtimed and now I want nothing more for them to win out, for them to miss any chance at playoff glory under the triumphant cackle of Northwestern's Generic Wildcat Growl #15 sound effect.

NEBRASKA LOST IN OVERTIME TOO

When Thorson's hail mary got batted down, I relaxed knowing that the game had shifted from hostile Memorial Stadium to the Realm of Overtime, a fissure in time-space where the laws of football no longer exist and Northwestern becomes a dominating football force.
The game featured much of what Northwestern has brought to bear against the Big Ten-- tough run defense, an offense that moves in fits and starts like an old pull-to-start lawnmower, Justin Jackson. This week, the Wildcats got a tremendous performance from Kyle Queiro, who picked off Tanner Lee twice and nearly ended the game on a third that just slipped out of his grasp. Pat Fitzgerald added to his increasing museum of avant-garde clock management by basically running out the clock for no apparent reason at the end of the first half when the team had a decent shot to at least give Charlie Kuhbander a better shot.

Once again Northwestern played well enough to win; a team that does nothing but go to overtime has, in fact, discovered how to be literally the exact amount of better required to beat another team.

when you win three straight games in overtime

Nebraska fans have reached their breaking point. They demand that Mike Riley be fired, removed, and arrested, and 90% of Nebraska football sportswriting is just Scott Frost fanfiction where all Hypothetical Scott Frost dialogue has been hastily repurposed from the 1997 film Batman and Robin.

"I AM HEUH TO RETOOURN NEBRICEKA TO DA COLD
STANDAHDT," says the lede from the Lincoln Journal-Star
in a column entitled "The Ice Man Hiredeth: Eighteen
hypothetical columns about hiring Scott Frost"

It is impossible to tell how good Northwestern is. Part of that is the chaotic nature of college football, where all rankings and formulas are ridiculous because the entire season is 12 games of unpredictable chaos dictated by an oblong ball and dependent on the emotions and consistency of teenagers and grown adults who have decided on a career path that depends a lot on yelling and also blowing whistles at people. The Wildcats, left for dead after a listless victory over a putrid Nevada team and a complete dismantling at the hands of what turned out to be a fairly crappy Duke team, now have six wins and will be favored in their three remaining games. It is not impossible that they could somehow win nine games or for them to lose all three or to play Purdue to so many overtimes that they manage to cross over into Sunday when they are still going for two-point conversions and Ryan Field is converted into an Overtime death cult where fans cut the North stands tarp into robes and demand more overtime periods to slake their overtime lust.

TRAINING DAY

Purdue is here. Purdue under Jeff Brohm, which has transformed itself from the hapless punching bag of the Big Ten with its sinkhole-riddled field and despondent fanbase of train spotters watching a postmodern art installation of football despair to an actual, frisky, scary team that let's not get ahead of ourselves here they still lost to Rutgers.
Purdue and Northwestern is the essence of an 11:00AM Big Ten game, one to be played and forgotten as soon as humanly possible, and the lunatics in charge of college football television have moved it for some reason to a night game. Night football, prime time, national broadcast on ESPN2 no doubt under the strictures of some arcane Big Ten/ESPN contract that prevents them from moving it to ESPN: Handball where all channel descriptions are written in English phonetically but in Cyrillic. Under the lights, where Northwestern and Purdue will inspire millions of college football fans in the Chicago area to stand around anxiously as bar staffs fumble around complicated satellite television systems to get the Notre Dame game while Purdue Pete peers ominously from the preview box.

Purdue actually has to apply for a waiver to allow Purdue
Pete to be used at night. Here is what Purdue Pete originally
looked like before it was destroyed, buried, resurrected,
buried again and burned, resurrected again while taking a
human host who transforms into Purdue Pete when in
proximity to certain brands of train engine, and finally
defeated in combat by Ross and Ade, who trapped it in
a concrete slab from which it has only escaped four times

Purdue comes in with a much-improved defense and a coach who likes to do things like call reverse flea flickers while scanning a playbook taken from NFL Blitz. The Boilermakers, though, will be without one of their quarterbacks after David "That Name Again Is Mister" Blough suffered a gruesome ankle injury against the Illini. Elijah Sindelar will take over as starter, although Brohm had been rotating both this season in order to sow chaos and terror among opponents. Northwestern will hopefully be able to figure out how to beat Brohm's squad instead of the usual method of intimidating Purdue by wearing helmets, repeatedly confusing Purdue's linemen by convincing them of radical changes to the rules of football moments before the snap, and doing nothing and watching the entire Purdue football team walk one by one in to an open manhole.

Northwestern sits as a consensus top-30 or so team in all the rankings and will probably be ranked should they keep on winning through the soft part of their schedule. But there are no guarantees with this team, which has risen to stonewall some bizarrely good teams and struggled against decidedly mediocre ones, with the status of those teams constantly fluctuating through this insane Big Ten season. The Wildcats have been riding a razor's edge for the past three weeks where a single play could have beaten them in all three previous games, and Purdue hasn't rolled over for anyone. They're on their way up. But all I can say to them is that if the Boilermakers want to win this game in Ryan Field under the towers and the weird, emaciated blow-up Wildcat tunnel and night sky they need to do one thing: for their own good, they had better not let the game go into overtime.
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A Win Streak

November 17, 2017, 8:29 pm
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After 15 minutes of game time or approximately Lawrence of Arabia in real time, neither Purdue nor Northwestern had scored.  It was a cold, endless, inexplicable night game so perfunctory that Northwestern did not even bother to break out its Night Game Gothic alternative uniforms but instead paraded around in a ridiculous industrial camouflage.  The game was marred by strange penalties, an unending aerial assault (Purdue asked backup quarterback Elijah Sindelar to throw the ball 60 times).  By the end of the game, Northwestern looked fairly certain to win, but Purdue hung around enough in the fourth quarter to theoretically tie it-- by the end, I was hoping they would, that they would get their 15 points or whatever they needed to even the game and send it to overtime where I am pretty sure the remaining dozen Northwestern fans deranged enough to stay through all 19 hours of this game would have immediately smeared themselves with hot dog condiments, constructed cardboard capes, and chanted as Northwestern ceased being a football team and immediately became a bizarre overtime cult.
 
Remaining Northwestern fans prepare for The Overtime by performing 
their profane ritual of putting their hands in the air, putting their hands up in the air

The Wildcats hung on for their seventh win and fifth straight by maintaining their fearsome run defense, daring Sindelar to beat them.  Purdue, though, refused to allow the 'Cats to bash them with Justin Jackson.  They plugged every running lane, bringing in safeties and linebackers and Purdue fans with the most robust Joe Tiller mustaches to crowd the line of scrimmage.  That seemed to work until Riley Lees unleashed a brilliant punt return only to have the officials call it back-- with no clear footage of the infraction, a confused Ryan Field crowd unleashed a torrent of abuse screaming out SIR YOU WILL HEAR FROM MY LAWYER in disgusted unison.  The Wildcats responded with a quick drive and did not look back; a blistering 94-yard drive after a near goal line stand just before the end of the first half further increased the lead presumably because Pat Fitzgerald was unable to signal in his traditional end of half play to take the ball and tunnel underground.
 
Riley Lees gains a new nickname the Aggrieved Punt Returner

Wisconsin's win over Iowa ended any hope of Big Ten insanity somehow leading the 'Cats to a near-impossible berth in the championship game.  Northwestern will now try to avenge last year's defeat against the Gophers, who spent last Saturday sending the Nebraska Cob Nobblers to the Harsh Realm and extend their win streak.  It's all bowl positioning and hat trophies now, and the possibility of a nine-win season that would have seemed impossible after the Duke game.

ROW ROW ROW

More than any sport, college football nurses cults of personalities around charismatic coaches, none more so than Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck, who is charismatic enough to start his own cult.  The Gophers nabbed Fleck from Western Michigan where he led the Broncos to becoming a MAC powerhouse that may have also been no less than the third best team in the Big Ten West last season.  He also invented the greatest football slogan of all time in "Row the Boat," a motivational mantra he developed after the tragic loss of a child.  "Row the Boat" became inextricably linked with Western Michigan football, a horse team that somehow became confusingly adorned with all manner of nautical symbolism.

Western Michigan puts up a hippocamp statue of its Martime 
Horse theme outside Waldo Stadium

Last year, I wrote about Fleck being trapped by his popular catchphrase, tiring of rowing the boat but constantly harangued by those who want to hear about boats and rowing.  But that was a deranged fantasia written on the the world's final blogspot website.  Fleck has gone beyond rowing the boat to a host of ludicrous motivational acronyms.  Here for example is Fleck explaining F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Forget About Me I Love You) and H.Y.P.R.R. which is somehow an acronym for How Yours Process Results Response, which is a completely insane thing for an acronym to stand for.

Fleck is an acronym savant, the kind of person who would blast into a 
room prepared to tell a group of people about A.L.U.M.I.N.U.M. 
(Always Leave Unused Melodicas In Numbered Utility Modules) and then, 
finding himself in Canada, improvising to Actually Lackadaisical Ungulates 
Make Intolerable Neighbors In Unkempt Meadows without blinking

I normally think ludicrous motivational acronymeering is ridiculous and insipid, but it works for Fleck because he comes across as completely sincere, as someone who believes wholeheartedly in whatever HYPRR is and is ready to HYPRR with you and your entire family for months if necessary.  It also works for Fleck because he works in an insane business, the business of asking large young persons to smash into other equally large or sometimes even larger people while literally a 100,000 people scream at them and point at them accusingly with foam #1 fingers. Maybe Fleck hopping around in a rented hotel conference room with a wireless microphone telling his players about the revolutionary SCOMPTT Method (score more points than them) can bring the Gophers back to contention in this hilarious and miserable football conference; maybe his slogans will collapse in on themselves and remain plastered on the walls as ironic icons of football ineptitude like Butch Jones's Champions of Life rhetoric or Tim Beckman's numerous propaganda posters.
 
Illinois locker rooms are dedicated with the
 tattered remains of Beckman's information campaigns

I am not predicting anything about this season because Minnesota and the non-Wisconsin and non-Illinois Big Ten West is completely inscrutable.    

NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL NO LONGER MAKES SENSE

The single defining fact of Northwestern basketball had been its absence from the NCAA Tournament.  College basketball exists in a strange netherworld where teams play what seems to be like hundreds of games on frozen, anonymous weeknights and flash through on the ESPN score crawl in obscure, indecipherable initials before finally emerging in March as a fully-formed sports product kept aloft by buzzer-beating triumph, crowd-sobbing heartbreak, and a vast and technically illegal gambling apparatus.  There is winning those endless games, rising through the various arcane rating systems, and getting the team's name on one of those brackets and there is nothing, and for the entire history of the NCAA Tournament Northwestern did not exist.
And then there they were.  They appeared to clinch their tournament appearance with a miraculous, last-second heave.  Then, buoyed by the emergence of Northwestern's vast alumni network of sports personalities that have somehow cornered the market on the world's dumbest profession, by Celebrity Moms and Dads, and through a tournament run that included The World's Least Advised Foul, a Goaltending Rules Controversy, and A Child-Meme, Northwestern became ubiquitous and almost instantaneously overexposed and despised.

This year's Northwestern team arrives in a different universe.  For years, every Northwestern team just wanted to make the tournament, to appear on that bracket, and to return to getting dunked through the Earth's core.  Now, the team has expectations to make the tournament.  The transformation of the team from a desperate also-ran to a very good team is welcome but the experience is totally different.  The Wildcats will be favored in several games.  Every win comes with the question of how it affects the Tournament Resume instead of being judged on the traditional Northwestern metric of how angry opposing fans are to lose to Northwestern.  A failure to make the tournament this year would be disappointing instead of a soothing swoon into the embrace of a sports curse.

Northwestern basketball will be unrecognizable because they are playing in an airport-adjacent monster truck and wrestling arena.  The school is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an awful and bullshit renovation of Welsh-Ryan arena that will have things like seats and lighting and ways for players to enter and exit the court without having to get all fired up and do their IT'S GAME TIME chants and then politely wend their way through the hot dog line, but this is a mistake as grave as the grave digger that plies its trade regularly at the All State Arena.  Welsh-Ryan was a glorious shit dump that turned into a bona fide home court by the end of the season, when Northwestern fans-- more than the other team even-- packed the cramped stands that floated on top of the court and turned it into a raucous thunderdome and now that the school has had like three games of this atmosphere they are off to play in front of a quarter of an arena filled with the skeletons of hardy explorers who attempted to sit in the top deck during a DePaul game and were never seen again.     
 
Northwestern saved money on Welsh-Ryan Arena renovation costs by 
making the NCAA Tournament and therefore opening a hole to other 
dimension from which energy flowed and destroyed the site of this unholy occurrence

The administration is trying to build Northwestern sports into brand that doesn't have anything to do with historical lousiness.  They've got a football team that makes bowl games.  They've got a basketball team in the tournament.  They've got the facilities and arenas from exorbitant amounts of money raised by top-hatted boosters.  And, as befitting a college sports program, there's even a discomfiting scandal complete with a disturbingly inept attempt at a cover up that looks like someone in the athletic department tried to run off a player by framing him for not performing in the bullshit make-work program they invented by forging his signature and repeatedly misspelling his name.

The Wildcats return nearly every key player from last year's run, bring back a few more from injury, and add additional recruits.  But last year's run was on a razor's edge-- McIntosh's dagger against Rutgers saved them, the Mighty Heave of Nate Taphorn got them in, and no one is as aware of the precariousness of NCAA qualification than the team that watched that Juice/Shurna team miss it by a combined total of  like five points spread over several agonizing games.  There's nothing guaranteed this season; they won't take anyone by surprise, they are playing in an arena on Mars, and they still rely on their starters to do nearly everything.  Northwestern basketball has cleared its greatest hurdle, but now, after the ecstatic excitement of filling out a bracket and seeing Northwestern players in One Shining Moment, the question is what can they do to follow up. 
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BOAT RACED

November 24, 2017, 1:40 pm
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Northwestern has won now won six consecutive games, a rare feat not accomplished in more than 20 years by going repeatedly to overtime, outlasting coaches and adventure quarterbacks and receivers whose hands have turned to stone at precisely the wrong time, by living impossibly long in a zone between winning and losing and beating Purdue but also letting them hang around and so it makes sense that they went out on a cold, wet, and miserable day and let the Earth envelop the Minnesota Golden Gophers.

Teams can no longer run on Northwestern's defense and Minnesota could not pass or hold onto the ball or do much other than stand around in the rain and write beleaguered civil war letters to their loved ones.  This has somehow become par for the course.  The Gophers haven't scored a point in Evanston since 2013.  Two years ago, the Gophers could not stop Northwestern from eating almost an entire quarter on a single drive.  Saturday, Gopher quarterback Demry Croft managed only two completions on the day while throwing three interceptions.  And a week after Purdue shut down the Northwestern running game, the Wildcats steamrolled the Gophers as Justin Jackson continued piling up yards and moving up in the Northwestern, Big Ten, and college football record books. 

P.J. Fleck rues forgetting to instruct his 
team in the art of S.C.O.P.R. (Score Points in Rain)

This game's theme was misery as rain and later sleet pounded the stadium.  Though it made the gameday experience unpleasant as the wind roared through the north endzone and rain seeped through saturated gloves and everyone involved wanted to go home and clutch at a mug of warm cocoa, it appears that Northwestern has found a winning formula to stem the tide of visiting fans from overwhelming the stands by largely making the entire stadium uninhabitable, much like how the Russian army destroyed their own cities to slow down the advancing Napoleonic forces.  Next time a Big Ten opponent rolls through, be it Iowa or Wisconsin or Michigan, Northwestern should consistently spray water at spectators, hurl small ice chips at them, and bring in gigantic fans to blast them with howling, frozen winds to empty the stadium of all but a handful of Northwestern supporters jumping around on defense in order to feel their limbs (this would not work on Nebraska fans who would somehow bud off each other to form ever-larger chains of red-sweatered colonies that would engulf the entire stadium while talking about how many more of their buds there are in the stadium and also yelling "let's go shirts").

Northwestern's largest ratio of Northwestern fans during a Big Ten 
home game this season

The Wildcats now have eight wins.  They are heavily favored over a truly wretched Illinois team trying to salvage a miserable season with a Hat and a deathblow of Northwestern's hopes to play in a higher-ranked bowl that will invariably skip them over for a better Football Brand school anyway at stake. 

Northwestern has had a truly bizarre football season that has played out like a higher-stakes sequel to last year.  While the 'Cats certainly could not match the original's shocking home loss to a bad FCS team, they raised the emotional stakes by looking shaky against crappy non-conference teams and dead in the water against a Duke Blue Devils team that has spent the ACC season getting repeatedly exorcised.  But the highs have been higher with a preposterous and literally unprecedented three-overtime winning streak, eight wins, and even a narratively satisfying blowout over the very same P.J. Fleck who had beguiled them in 2016 with a Big Ten roster to boot.  There is no way they can top this rollercoaster unless the team is literally disbanded in August, forfeits at least one game, and then reconvenes in time to inexplicably beat an Iowa team that is contending for the West title and also P.J. Fleck has now taken over at Alabama.  

There is no reason why Northwestern should not beat a young Illinois team whose best days are surely ahead of it.  Yet there is no telling what the promise of the Hat does surely makes madmen of anyone, and the Illini will certainly come out mustering all of the offensive firepower and Jeffs George that they can in this storied Rivalry Contest.

GUEST COLUMN: YOU WILL PRY THE HAT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HEAD

The following column was mailed to BYCTOM's North American Headquarters stapled to a crude, papier-mache Abraham Lincoln head and a flip book indicating various karate moves that would be inflicted upon the editorial staff of this website and the corporate hierarchy of the VIL Network, an entertainment and sports portal presented by Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants.  


They sent me out with a cardboard box
Full of orange ties and laminated cards
With OSKEE acronyms
But what those bureaucrats will never know is
I took the Hat.

The current hat's a crude replica
I had done in the trophy underground
The very shop that made
The Civil conFLicCT for Diaco
He disavows


I wear the Hat around the house
And when I watch the Illini lose on TV
Yes it's quite heavy 
And my neck aches, hunched and stiff
Hamstrings are fine

Look at the woeful Illini now
On the eve of this Rivarly
Winless in the con'frence
Imagine how they'd do with signs that said
"No Northwestern"

Or Northwestern pinatas
Or plush Willie Wildcats mauled by trained falcons
Or shredded to fluff as I run them down in a combine harvester
While I yell over the roar to the team THIS IS WHAT WE WILL DO TO THEM
ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD
WE WILL COMBINE HARVEST THEM
ON OFFENSE, DEFENSE, AND SPECIAL TEAMS
And then I light myself on fire in a special suit
And run around screaming and making a scene
It's a metaphor for the team
To get Fired Up

Admit it, you miss all of this
With Lovie Smith and his placid dignity
Instead of signs and clocks
And literally falling and while I'm prone on my behind
Getting flagged

Here's my prediction for the game
I don't care at all
In fact I will spend the day in my Hat Shed looking upon the Hat, shining it and buffing it because I BUILT THIS HAT SHED AND SOMEONE CLOSED THE DOOR AND IT LOCKED BECAUSE I DIDN'T PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE LOCKING MECHANISM OK? I WAS TOO FOCUSED ON THE RECESSED HAT CHAMBER AND AREAS FOR CLOAKS TO MATCH WITH THE HAT AND I'VE BEEN TRAPPED HERE FOR WEEKS SO PLEASE AFTER YOU'RE DONE READING MY POEM AND PLEASE CALL A LOCKSMITH OR SOMEONE WITH A GOOD, STRONG KARATE KICK BOOT TO GET ME OUT OF HERE THIS IS A VEXING SITUATION, PLEASE MAKE SURE THIS PART IS RENDERED IN ALL CAPS.
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ILLINOIS/NORTHWESTERN RECAP

December 8, 2017, 8:46 am
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I.

There was nothing at stake beyond the Hat in this game.  Northwestern had already locked up a mid-tier bowl, cemented its best winning streak in decades with a preposterous series of overtime wins literally unprecedented in the history of the sport, and the Fighting Illini had spent the season laying in a ditch and getting poked.  The game had originally been planned for Soldier Field, but had been moved back to Memorial Stadium after a hilarious debacle of low attendance and Interim Coaching; now the game took place in front of an equally woeful smattering of brave Illinois fans who had come out to see the team collectively thumbs up and sink into an orange morass of melted steel.  This series of events is exactly like the decline of the Hanseatic League.

"The Hatman Cometh,"Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com

The Wildcats have many reasons to be favored. But it's now or never for the Illini, who hope to avoid their second winless Big Ten season since 2012. The last time Illinois beat Northwestern was 2014, when the current seniors were freshmen. There should be added motivation to capture the Land of Lincoln Trophy. Can the Illini catch the Wildcats looking forward to a bowl game?

Shannon Ryan, "Saturday's Matchup, Prediction: Northwestern at Illinois," Chicago Tribune

Line: Northwestern by 16 1/2

Lance Gravedigger's Guide for Northwestern Football Bettors and Other Maniacs

Guys I'm at the game and I think there are legitimately 45 people here.

Stilltalkinboutthechief, Comment on "Gamethread: Northwestern vs. Illinois" at AvoisTheNois.com

It was the lady refilling a tray of mini-hamburger buns in the press box who informed me that stadium staff had been told to expect a crowd of less than 10,000 — far punier than the announced crowd of about 30,000. I took her word for it. There was no need for a specific confirmation to see there was no one here.

Steve Greenberg, "Northwestern crushes Illinois 42-7 in a setting with no, um, rival,"Chicago Sun-Times 

I've spent the afternoon in a fine purple Lincoln get-up rousing the purple horde and antagonizing our Intrastate Rival with some fine oratory from ol' Honest Abe, my friends, and the few Illinois fans are cowed and concerned #HATHATHAT

@Arch_Hatton

guy dressed as a Purple Lincoln tripped over his enormous, draping coat and fell into a tray of cotton candy and he's trying desperately to pick it out of his fake beard.

Stilltalkinboutthechief, op. cit.


II.

There was the sound again, that thin roar.  Not much of a crowd.  Looked like the gray concrete stands, cracks of orange, smattering of purple, couple of Ditkas.  

bill cubit

It was all on the line, though. One win, two wins, no wins, I would say listen up, men.  Men.  This isn't fly fishing.  This isn't high tea with the Cultural Attache of Azerbaijan.  This isn't middle school social dance where they teach you the fox trot instead of the 2 legit 2 quit dance.  This is football, gentlemen.  That's the kind of thing you would hear from Ron Zook.

ron zook

I checked to see and they still had the Hat.  Still the trophy.

bill cubit

Hats. Trophies.  Trinkets.  For me, it's about looking them straight in the eye and telling them, gentlemen you know what you did out there.  Hold that feeling.  Wear it.  Carry it with you when you leave here, in your greatest triumphs of designing skyscrapers and piloting hydrofoils or at your lowest moments of being abandoned by your love at the top of Aconagua and having to silently make your way down the mountain alone carrying nothing but your supplies and your perforated heart with you and I say, do you really need a cooper hat?

ron zook

I always thought the hat was kind of sharp.

bill cubit

It's mounted on a base.  I really wanted to wear that hat.

ron zook

There's a hollowed out area there where you could stick it on your head.  You didn't know that?

bill cubit

Ah, hell.

ron zook

III.

And yet, hapless, beleaguered, and starting a true freshman quarterback in the place of Chayce Crouch and Literally Jeff George Jr., the Illini managed to stop Northwestern and take a 7-0 lead; it was as if the vast football cosmos had decided that if the Wildcats were going to do the win an impossible three overtime games in a row to preserve a ridiculous win streak and look great against Purdue and Minnesota dance , they would have to pay the losing to the most wretched vintage of the Illini in a god-forsaken away game and watch as the Hat transfixes the entire state and ushers in an Illinois football reniassance piper, this is a single sentence.

Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com, op. cit.
 
TOUCHDOWN! some teens are playing keep-away with the lincoln guy's hat, he's calling them ignorant dough-faces and one of them is telling him that he's using the insult anachronistically.

Stilltalkingaboutthechief, op. cit.

As I mentioned before, this type of shameful display is the type of thing you would expect from Pat Fitzgerald, who, I shouldn't even have to mention, had spent the beginning of this season cavorting around in short pants.

Fanofcats95, "Game Thread,"IncessantWildcatNoise.com forums


IV.

The sun had already started setting.  4:30 tops this time of year, in Champaign-Urbana.  Probably still playing after Thanksgiving, those turkey and gravy leftovers still sloshing around in the linemen's bellies, maybe putting on a little paper pilgrim hat that their baby cousin made before coming back here to put a hat on a guy and drive 'em into the field turf.

bill cubit

We were stuck watching as they gave up the lead, completely unable to do anything about it.  The first few years, I tried.  Tried to grab a linebacker and give 'em a butt slap.  Tried jump into a huddle and say listen up, how you respond today is not just about lines of scrimmage and yardage.  Gentlemen, it's about how you respond when you're in trouble, when you're down, when you're laid off and offered a buyout with a kind of crappy severance package because the online crane and heavy equipment online rental startup couldn't handle the recession and you've got to get back out there on the road and you're about three weeks from having to park the car in the White Hen lot down the street to throw off the repo guy.  Nothing.  No one saw me.  No one heard me.  Hands went right through the butts.  Tried to rip off my shirt and just kept having more shirts.

ron zook

Spent a long time ripping shirts.

bill cubit

It was because they were weak.  And soft.

tim beckman

Ah shit.

ron zook


IV.

I remember the smell of the workshop.

tim beckman

Oh jumping junipers.

bull cubit

Yes, that smell, my friends.  The smell of freshly-sawed wood, wood glue, the smell of steel and sparks and ash from the stove in the corner.  Grandad hammering away with the records on his old phonograph of that man reading the bonesaw catalog.  Grandad took me on a walk and we hit that clearing, the sun straining through the branches around us.  It was like a stadium, I thought.  Like the one over at the school on Friday nights, all lit up with bark grandstands a few curious squirrels cheering us on and that's when Grandad turned to me and said Timbus (it was a family name), Timbus take a look around you at this clearing right here in the woods.  I want you to ask yourself if there's ever been a better spot that the good Lord could have made if he was making one of those pretty paintings like in your Grandmother's book, just look around and imagine a more perfect spot for a bear to come out of absolutely nowhere and maul the absolute shit out of us.

That night, he showed me The Book.  It must've taken him years, lonely years sitting in his old chair by the window, sipping on that rotgut that Mr. Millman used to slip him even though he wasn't supposed to, drawing up detailed plans for a suit to repel a bear attack.  But he was getting older and gaunter and more tired and he said to me Timbus there is one thing I want from you in this life and that is for us to build this suit and when you're big enough we're gonna put it on you.  And then I want you to fight a bear.

tim beckman

Oh gravy, the bear suit.

bill cubit

Grandad wouldn't let me use the power tools, but sometimes I'd fetch wood and sometimes he'd measure my skull, and much of the time he had me sitting in the corner practicing my headbutts against a bear head that he took from the lodge one night because he said those sons of bitches owed him money.

You know, we moved away and I didn't see Grandad much and I got bigger and into football.  But every once in awhile I'd hear from him-- a card on my birthday, maybe a quick trip (never more than a night) around Christmas time, a flip book of a person in armor just socking a bear in the jaw.  I sort of indulged him, I didn't think he'd ever finish it.  Then one night, a truck pulls up in front of the dorm and a guy brings by a giant crate and tells me he believes in me and vanishes.  Shit, fellas.  Shit.

Dad told me Grandad was sick, and I have no idea how he managed to finish the thing, the will it took to even polish it up and stencil URSA DANGER onto it while he coughing and shaking, but I couldn't just ignore it.  Couldn't.  There was a note written in a brittle, fading hand that said "Promise me."  So I tried.  Spent the whole summer driving around, suit in the trunk, looking for bears.

tim beckman


I told him to get to the part about the circus.


ron zook

Why on Earth would you do something like that?


bill cubit


Gotta be honest, I kind of like the part about the circus.


ron zook


Long and short of it, fellas: couldn't find a bear.  Not on any land where I wouldn't immediately be searched and questioned.  So we were all drinking one night and I told my buddy Dewey about the whole thing and he said, Timmy ya gotta fight that bear.  I'm gonna help you.  Your problem is that you're trying to go to the bear.  Why not make the bear come to you?

Ya know, I thought it would be tricky to find a bear circus desperate and on the brink of financial ruin, but let me tell you fellas: that's pretty much all of them.  And we found one and pooled some cash that I made running a football camp where I clobbered 12-year-olds with one of those American Gladiator jousting q-tips and Dewey got from selling gray market iguanas and he came back he told me with a bona fide circus bear, probably pissed off and ferocious.  So I went out there and I put the thing on for the first time-- I just couldn't bring myself to do it before and it took ages, there were diagrams and strap mechanisms and epaulets that were just for show, and I threw that sucker on and hit the claw deployment button and prepared to kick some bear ass Beckman-style, and I saw what Dewey had done.  It was a cub, tiny, shaking. I couldn't hit that little guy.  I have no idea if it even knew how to fight a regular man, let alone a man with spring-loaded foot-talons and pneumatic karate chops.  Dewey you asshole, I told him.  He was laughing his ass off in the corner, snapping pictures.  I wouldn't fight that bear unless it at least had a helmet and maybe some shoulder pads.  Dewey, you shifty lizard fuck.

I drove hours in silence.  I was going to do it.  I was going to lie and tell the old man I beat the heck out of a bear, that it tried to slash and claw and maul me, but Grandad the neck guard held perfectly and I was able to snare the big ol' bastard with the wrist net, would've been the easiest thing.  But I just couldn't.  I looked at him, wasting away in that sad bed, and I told him.  Look, we found a bear.  But he was small, and he needed at the very least some kneepads and a mouthguard, and Grandad just lay there, blank and shrinking.  Christ, Timbus, he said.  Christ.

I drove out of there and threw the suit into Lake Erie.  Every day, I tell myself he would have eventually understood that deep within him he'd want to make a bear an anti-human suit. I have to.  I have to.

tim beckman


And that's why you always had walk-ons running windsprints in papier-mache wildcat heads while you threw cans of fancy feast at them?

bill cubit


Did you know there was a hollowed out recess in the hat trophy where you could stick your head?

ron zook


You're shitting me.


tim beckman

V.

It didn't take long for Northwestern to take its first lead following the turnover on downs as Thorson threw a 53-yard pass to Bennett Skrowronek on the first play of the drive to put the Wildcats at the Illini's five-yard line. A jet-sweep handoff to Jelani Roberts on the ensuing play went for six and put Northwestern in front, 14-7. It was the second touchdown of Roberts' career.

"Wildcats Earn Seventh-Straight Win, Keep Land of Lincoln Trophy"Nusports.com

The Wildcats scored on a Joe Gaziano strip that defensive end Samdup Miller recovered and ran in from 3 yards out for a 21-7 third-quarter lead. Linebacker Paddy Fisher's interception led to Jeremy Larkin's 4-yard touchdown run for a 35-7 edge in the fourth quarter.

Shannon Ryan, "Northwestern wins seventh in a row with 42-7 drubbing of Illinois,"Chicago Tribune

this is fucking miserable, the lincoln guy found a stephen douglas guy in his section; they're doing debates at each other, and the security guy told me that he'd have to throw me out if i whipped some polish sausages at them, but he said believe me, buddy. i know

Stilltalkingaboutthechief, op. cit.

Meanwhile, the Danish forces of Queen Margaret battled a gang of ruthless privateers known as the Victual Brothers who kept running the blockade. They later evolved into a group of other raiders called the Likedeelers whose most important legacy is the creation of this stupendous Wikipedia Sentence: "Their most famous leader was Captain Klaus Störtebeker, who first appears in the record as a Victual Brother around 1394.[7] The Low German word Störtebeker means "Down the beakerful". He allegedly got his name because he could swallow four litres of beer without taking the beaker from his mouth."

Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com, op. cit.

What no one realizes is that I have concealed copper spray paint on my person and i'm sanding my hat.

@ArchHatton 


 VI.

We found quickly that we could pass through and somehow stay inside of people.  Inhabit them.  But not really compel them to do anything.  Like tracking down Paul Kowalcyzk and hitting him with a pool noodle.

bill cubit

That's not quite true.

ron zook

You could nudge them.  Coax them.  Maybe draw their attention to something just out of view.

bill cubit

You could coach 'em up.  Get in there and really focus and let that vendor know in his mind that for a split second that he might want to select not the popcorn nearest his hand, but the next one to his left.  Gentlemen, I would sort of radiate out of my being into this person, you can think about the obvious popcorn but I say we surprise 'em, we call an audible on this one, just you and me right here, looking at the guy dressed like purple lincoln.

ron zook

Yeah, you got him to pick the other popcorn.

bill cubit

I immediately managed to inhabit a guy who was going to chest bump just to feel it.

ron zook

We weren't sure how Beckman figured it out.

bill cubit

Next thing we know Beckman's floating through a scrum and he's sort of melting straight into the big kid's nostrils and he's talking about the flag.

ron zook


Couldn't make anyone do anything they didn't want to do, it's a Hat Game and you've got to do flag stuff.

tim beckman

We tried to stop it, tried to float through the other nostril.  Whole time I'm yelling Son, you're on television, this isn't the XFL, you don't have a nickname like Dale Unsportsmanlike on the back of your jersey.  This is football.  You go for the ball.  You go for the ball.  Well not really yelling, sort of emanating into a corner on the horizon of the consciousness.  

ron zook

It was too late.  The kid grabbed the flag and just underhanded it right into the ref's face.  Guy flew backwards like he was a kung fu henchman. Beckman cackled.  First time I ever heard that guy laugh.  Usually it was all yelling and bear anecdotes.

bill cubit

God damn I always wanted to do that.

tim beckman

Of course you wanted to do it, I had to be held back from chop blocking a line judge in '97.

ron zook

I wanted to stab a ref with a dial-a-down.

bill cubit

Let's see if I can get someone to knee a Wildcat in the scrotum.

tim beckman


VII.

"This doesn't happen by accident," Fitzgerald said. "There were a lot of people taking shots at (our players) There were a lot of people taking shots at our program, taking shots at the coaching staff.
"I thought (our players) answered that by shutting the noise off and doing the only thing you can in those circumstances: Go to work. The Chicago work ethic. Roll your sleeves up and go to work. That's what they did and that's why we're Chicago's Big Ten team."

Shannon Ryan, op. cit.

Chicago's Big Ten Team

A billboard on I-94

Illinois. Our State. Our Team.

Short-lived billboard on I-94

And so, after a rampage over a reeling Illinois team, Northwestern collected its ninth victory and bowl berth.  The Hat returns safely to Evanston in a Hat Transport Vehicle.  An improbable season where Northwestern was all of about a minute of overtime away from barely scarping a berth in the Disused Robocop Set Dressing Bowl sees them going to Nashville against a squad of Pretender Wildcats.

Northwestern found itself at the center of minor bowl intrigue.  As Ohio State fans raged about the Playoff and the impossible and arbitrary selection system did its job of consistently riling up at least one particularly annoying fanbase, the Outback Bowl committed crimes.  They selected Michigan over Michigan State and Northwestern despite the Wolverines' inferior record and head-to-head loss to the Spartans.  Apparently there was some sort of arcane rule that would prevent the 'Cats from appearing in the Outback Bowl because Northwestern players are still being peeled from the Raymond James Stadium from a New Years' Bowl game only two years ago that seems impossibly distant, when Tennessee under Butch Jones was thought to be an ascendant young team and not a collection of flop-sweating bureaucrats desperately mailing out job offers and self-addressed-stamped envelopes to football coaches and television personalities.  The Holiday Bowl selected Michigan State despite their head-to-head loss against Northwestern due to their stronger Football Brand.

Here is where I am going to admit that any rage about Bowl Game Hierarchies on the part of this blog is disingenuous because I don't really care what game they go to, but raging about slights is a large part of the fun of following this insane sport that is literally governed by committees of weirdo bureaucrats and committees just picking things.  College football takes a chaotic sport and supports the entire thing with an impossible infrastructure built from a century of going from a few side-whiskered hooligans literally stomping each other to death to an unwieldy and inexplicable billion dollar entertainment complex.  Of course there's a loose hierarchy of prestige around the 40 more or less interchangeable bowl games that, on the margins, disappear and reappear with the regularity of pun-named headshops on a main shopping street near a college campus.  But the decisions of these bowl committees make sense only when you consider them as a money-making apparatus; wherever there is a mid-December bowl game played in front of fifty people, there is some guy in a tophat skimming money somewhere, someone making money off of merchandise that looks dated and ridiculous exactly 12 minutes after the game ends, someone somewhere making off with a truck of stadium nachos destined for the black market.  

Bowl prestige is ridiculous, funny, and fits perfectly with college football, which is run completely on grievances.  So yes, Northwestern probably could have gone to a slightly more prestigious bowl, but they have 80 fans and no National Brand, so they will go to Nashville to play their SEC mascot doppelgangers as a reward for this bizarre season of overtime fist-clutching.  They will try to hoist their second bowl trophy in a row and fourth all time, and they will send out a remarkably successful group of graduating players including Justin Jackson, an all-time great while letting Pat Fitzgerald complain about Bowl Position for an entire month.

Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogpost.com, op. cit.


VIII.

The lights juddered and turned off.  The spectators filed out leaving a trail of soda cups and anguish.  And as the last of the security, vendors, stat-men, and mascot wranglers all left, a pale, unearthly light began to light up the stadium brighter and brighter invisible except to us, standing on the fifty yardline.  

bill cubit

It was only then that we could really see each other as more than just murky forms and abstract blobs.  Cubit, face contorted into a grotesque yowl, his heart perforated by daggers.

ron zook

Zook, squinting quizzically, his limbs frozen into a waterski ready position.

Beckman dragging himself across the ground, holes where his hamstrings had once been, and covered in tattoos depicting his enemies the University of Illinois Board of Regents, the 2012-14 Northwestern Wildcats, the clerk who had kicked him out of home depot when he lost patience waiting for someone to help him grab a lawnmower bag from the top shelf and took a ladder himself before he fell sending a palette of lawn care accessories crashing to the floor and rolls of duct tape rolling through the toilet aisle, tripping other customers who unleashed a rain of plungers and rakes, ad signs that say "caution: venomous reptiles."

bill cubit

I told them, Gentlemen, the light had arrived.  And sure enough, we were starting to dissolve, to fade.  I had no idea what our purpose was.  Before, it was always clear.  To get the ball.  To control field position.  To get off the field on third and short.  And off the field to make sure that the guys were growing, preparing to take what they'd learned about getting the ball and figuring out how to take it to the boardroom, to their families, to writing and directing a one-man show that sure, maybe a lot of people aren't coming to, but it wasn't really about the audience, it was about getting it off their chest and moving quickly through the impression of their dad and their eighth-grade science teacher who told them they wouldn't be shit and wouldn't he like to see them now, not specifically in that moment, in a dank basement performing for a chagrined grandmother, but you know, in the larger sense, they've got families and jobs now, is the sort of thing that I would break down the players with after practice.

But here, I don't know exactly what the point is.  There's no score.  There's no winning.  There's showing up for this exact game somewhere in Champaign-Urbana, in Evanston, in a baseball stadium or neutral site only with the two other souls, with no idea why we're flung together or what we're supposed to accomplish with nothing in between.  Just an endless cycle of fading in and out, an endless cycle of Northwestern and Illinois football games.  Gentlemen, I said.  Gentlemen, we might not know each other or like each other, but here we are and it's been an honor...

ron zook

He faded out.  It wasn't gentle.  Not awful either, just a bizarre sensation of sort of loosening but all over. 

bill cubit

It's kind of like taking off eight layers of bear armor, except your entire being.

tim beckman

I asked him if he thought this was all just some interim state, something that happened to everyone-- professors sent as whatever we are over to academic conferences, insurance adjusters sent to floods and mudslides, plumbers appearing whenever they pull out one of those hundred-ton municipal sewer grease balls?

bill cubit

I had an answer for him.  A good one too.  But he had already begun to fade and soon I would too.  But I'd tell him that we were here to win the Hat.  That's the concrete goal.  That's what unites us.  That's why we're at the Hat game.  I believed that the Hat, wrested from that jowly crewcut, grayer than I remember, would absorb us and let us finally rest.  The Hat, glowing, pulsating.  That was why.  But we couldn't do it.  We watched them get bowled over and touchdowned.  There had to be football at the root and the goal had to be winning the football game; you win the game and you win whatever the hell this is and we'd be stuck here until we figured out how.  I had to believe that because anything else, manifesting, as it were, forever at an Illinois-Northwestern football game with no purpose and no escape was otherwise too bleak to 

tim beckman
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THE NBA DRAFT LOTTERY IS A ROTTEN SCAM PREVENTING ME FROM ENJOYING THIS INCREDIBLY DUMB BULLS WIN STREAK

December 19, 2017, 3:31 pm
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The Chicago Bulls, a collection of castoffs, incompetents, and basketball players recruited from postapocalyptic mutant wastelands, have won six games in a row.  They are undefeated since the return of Niko Mirotic, that maddening Montenegrin pump fake maestro who was sidelined for the opening months of the season because Bobby Portis did the exact thing that it always looks like Bobby Portis is about to do.  They are winning because Kris Dunn has become a viable NBA player after a disastrous rookie season, because scrap-heap bench find David Nwaba has quickly become a Bulls folk hero through his defense and his thunderous dunks, and because Fred Hoiberg appears to actually run some sort of an offense sometimes.  In a season where the Bulls had managed to win three entire games while spending most of their time on the court running into stanchions and suffering crises of confidence wrought by jaunty, canned organ music, this should be a minor miracle.  Instead, it is a goddamn disaster.

The NBA bloggerati have spent the past decade sifting through the Great NBA Tanking Question in the three modes of NBA blogging: analysis of where draft position means relative to success Per Synergy Sports, describing Sam Hinkie as a Reflection on Late Capitalism, and performative JR Smith fandom by quoting tweets.  There is no doubt that any rational person can see that the Bulls as presently constructed have no chance at winning anything and their best chance at a championship is to gather up lottery ping pong balls and hope that one of the numerous strapping teens available at the top can be good enough to convince actual good players to join the Bulls, but it is equally true that the Bulls play on bleak winter Tuesdays and is it so much to ask that them somehow beating NBA teams because Niko Mirotic is dominating everyone and then flexing and beard screaming except when he's in the general radius of Portis, whom he sort of gingerly avoids not be fucking poisoned by draft talk?

Of course the Bulls' win streak is not sustainable, but that's what makes it miraculous.  Of course they aren't going to keep barely beating other crap teams and of course Nikola Mirotic isn't some bizarre talisman who will rally them to the Eastern Conference playoffs although let's be honest it would be incredibly funny if he did. 

The Bulls are a listing team run by delusional incompetent and phrenology textbook cover models.  They are bad and confounding and the only joy we've gotten from the Bulls recently has been their occasional refusal to go away and keep inflicting themselves upon basketball fans.  This is now their identity.  Forget about Jordan and Pippen; the Bulls should be represented by their greatest achievement of the twenty-first century, a forgettable playoff series victory led by a vomiting Nate Robinson.  Of course the Bulls should lose as many games as possible, but let me ask you what is more entertaining-- watching Gar Forman's lizard eyes staring hungrily at lottery balls as the remnants of his weirdo Fifth Element hair undulate against his scabrous scalp so he can draft a prospect who will immediately become felled by nineteenth-century illness that was thought to be eradicated or to watch Robin Lopez completely humiliate a team filled with NBA players who can't figure out why they're down by five to a team that features Denzel Valentine forever driving in the lane like he is trying to find his footing across a river on slippery rocks?  Do you want to watch Fred Hoiberg attempt to develop a raw, superathletic wing into a competent NBA player or watch David Nwaba dive across four rows of seats on a Wednesday night against the Suns? 

These Bulls were built by maniacs and for the past six games we have had the pleasure of living in their fever dreams: a world where Kris Dunn hits pullup jumpers after spending a season throwing basketballs at the hoop like he's trying to knock someone into a dunk tank, a world where Fred Hoiberg's team actually does pace and space and where somehow Shot Doctor Hoiberg has taught Dunn how to shoot after unleashing the brickiest basketball team on the NBA for the past several seasons, a world where draft picks pan out and Mirotic looks like the star he was in Europe and Markkanen looks like an offensive force, and Bobby Portis does things on the basketball court other than look like he is bursting into rooms in the Overlook Hotel, that somehow this slapdash, improvised, panic-traded version of the Bulls makes sense instead of sinking to the bottom of the NBA standings for years and years while Paxson and Forman pretend they have their own version of the Process.

Yes, this win streak is bad for the Bulls' draft, especially in this year's hyped draft and with lottery reform coming next year to make it slightly harder for a team like them to secure a top pick by being profoundly shitty.  Everyone knows that.  Fine.  But what kind of insane, ludicrous sport are we watching when it is literally bad for the team to rally behind a man who has been resurrected after having his face broken by his own teammate who is still on the team and they sometimes fist bump each other have we talked about how completely odd this is when for me watching a team as dumb and weird as the 2017-18 Bulls somehow pull off a seemingly-impossible win streak is the entire point of watching sports? 
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The Decadent, Inferior Wild Cat

December 27, 2017, 8:59 am
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We're in the middle of Bowl Season as dozens of fans trek out to a series of impossible and ridiculous locations to watch their teams battle the dregs of the Sun Belt under the watchful eye of sponsors like Dr. Lawnmangle's 50% Louder Mowing Equipment, American Ninja Knife and Nunchuk Expo '98, and the United States Armed Forces and Northwestern will be joining them soon.  They've been chosen through the arcane and nonsensical bowl selection procedure to play in Nashville's Music City Bowl against Kentucky for the greatest prize of them all: the Cardboard Football Trophy.

The Music City Bowl trophy was doodled by a bowl committee executive 
on the back of a grocery bag and then taken to the Extremely Literal Bowl 
Trophies and Stonehenge Prop Company

Anyone covering this game has already noted the most exciting part of this matchup: Northwestern and Kentucky have the same mascot, the Wildcat.  Kentucky even got their nickname the same way, according to their Wikipedia page, when a group of students decided they had fought like Wildcats (for Northwestern, it was a Chicago Tribune headline).  This origin has raised questions about how common it was to witness or fall victim to wildcat attacks in the early twentieth century, as college students could hardly walk three feet without one of them springing upon them and gnawing at their spats while they futiley whack at them with walking sticks while yelling things like "I say back off, you vile vermin, with your claws and teeth and line-backing."

Another Wildcat team, Kansas State, defeated UCLA in the Cactus Bowl 
with the help of their mascot, a prop from the Lars Van Trier film "Antichrist"

Kentucky's Wikipedia page claims that the school has three mascots: Blue, a live bobcat who lives in a state preserve; The Wildcat, an anthropomorphic wildcat like Northwestern's Willie; and Scratch, a "more child-friendly version of the Wildcat" who "wears his hat backwards, drinks Mountain Dew, and loves to party," a description so perfectly ridiculous that I am halfway convinced it was conjured up by a cackling Louisville fan with Wikipedia editing privileges.

The Wildcat and Scratch, whom I would describe 
as Divorced Poochie

The most insightful thing anyone can say about this matchup is that the game will be played with NCAA regulation rules.  Kentucky has a worse record, worse advanced stats, and are underdogs by more than a touchdown.  Northwestern won nine games with the help of three overtime victories, which have turned the fanbase into an overtime cult donning robes and headgears while staring vacantly at the scoreboard as the timer goes to zero.  

The Northwestern Wildcats are looking for a ten-win season, an unprecedented consecutive bowl win, and an opportunity for Justin Jackson to make mincemeat of an opponent for the last time.  Kentucky has an excellent running back that will try to test Northwestern's impossible rush defense.  But there are no guarantees in bowl season.  The game will be in a cold, wind-whipped, and half-empty stadium between two teams listlessly vying for a shitty trophy sponsored by a mortgage company between two teams who have not played since the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.  In other words, it is the apotheosis of the unnecessary, packaged, nonsensical Shitty Bowl Experience, and I hope that the bowl brings in the Wildcat sound effect for both teams and just leaves it on after every play, an endless Wildcat yowl echoing through the streets of Nashville and on every television tuned to ESPN2.

I INSIST ON MOSCOW RULES

I spent the past week coughing, turning my nose into a craggy, kleenex-ravaged scab, and immobile on a couch watching the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People and falling asleep to incoherent cough syrup-fueled fever dreams about Soviet agents and Cold War mustaches.

The BBC adaptations are slow and talky and set in dingy hotels, bars, and conference rooms, especially when compared with the 2011 version whose dinginess and 70s beige was achieved through extravagant expense.  The 2011 film rests on bravura acting from an all-star cast and interlocking flashbacks, but the film suffers from the impossibility of compressing Le Carré's sprawling narrative to feature length and renders it nearly incoherent.  The 2011 movie is also pitched higher-- there's more yelling, more nerves, more tears, even from Tom Hardy's tough-guy Ricky Tarr who talks like a more or less normal person because Hardy had not yet developed the power in the movie industry to demand that he use the insane Bane voice that Tom Hardy now uses more or less constantly.

My favorite part of the trailor for Hardy's double-role 
crime opus Legend is when you hear Hardy's voice in the 
trailer and you think oh that's a normal person voice 
before he appears as a twin brother immediately starts 
screaming OI ROIGHT COCKNEY BANE 'ERE

The BBC's versions of Smiley are better though because they have Alec Guiness.  Guiness's Smiley resembles Gary Oldman's Oscar-nominated version-- both are old, tired, melancholy, and angry at being pushed out of the Circus at the hands of rivals that Smiley considers lesser and at the fact that 65% percent of their encounters involve someone referencing his wife's affair.  The Guiness Smiley, though is a revelation in that those feelings become tamped down into a man with a singular purpose that cannot be deterred from his investigation even when that investigation involves his own life.

Guiness as Smiley from the BBC series with Terence Rigby as Roy Bland.  
Bland doesn't have a huge part in either the series or the film (he's 
played by Ciarán Hinds, Julius Caesar in HBO's Rome in the movie) although 
I much prefer the BBC's version because his schtick is constantly puffing 
on cigarettes and then falling into coughing fits and being made almost 
entire of muttonchop

The power of George Smiley is that there is nothing extraordinary about him-- peering out through his thick glasses, he blends easily into the background.  Yet, Guiness's Smiley possesses an extraordinary unshakable resolve.  He's introduced getting dragooned into a dinner and drinking session with a hapless old gossip and for what appears to hours, Smiley remains a stone.  He offers nothing, refuses to attack old colleagues, and deflects questions, his words always precise and polite while his tone and the pauses that Guiness puts in to weight certain words radiate contempt; his Smiley talks at all times like he assumes a transcript of all of his conversations is being prepared for Moscow Center.  This opening scene both sets up the rest of the series (the gossip is also there to fill in the audience on all of the goings-on at the Circus from my favorite expository device, a person spending a long time saying hey do you remember all of these things that happened to you) and establishes everything you need to know about Smiley as the rest of the series unfolds as a piece of office gossip with dire geopolitical implications.  

Smiley spends the rest of the film talking to old friends, colleagues, and enemies about the events that had led to his downfall and, even as people praise him, tell him he has been done wrong, yell at him, cry, and threaten, he never ever reacts, hammering away at his questions like a sculptor turning a block of granite into a statue of himself, staring at them.
The BBC Series also features spies looking extremely spy-like, from Ian 
Bannen's Prideaux modeling 1979's most fashionable Espionage 
Turtleneck to Guiness's Smiley dressed at all times like an East Berlin walk signal

The more I think about Guiness's Smiley, and please remember that I have done so while literally in the thrall of numerous antihistamines and fever reducers, is that he is played as a monster that we all root for because he is the main character.  Guiness's Smiley sits, stone-faced and unmoved, as he manipulates everyone around him to unearth the mole.  He cajoles, threatens, and plies people with alcohol, always at the emotional center of a story about betrayal and camaraderie but unable or unwilling to register anything emotionally, always keeping everyone at arm's length.  Yes, the search for the mole has grave Cold War implications and the lives of hundreds of British informants and agents scattered around the world.  And yes, Smiley has been the victim of a literal communist plot.  But Smiley's main motivation seems to be revenge and power, not as an end in itself like for his rival Percy Alleline, but because he does not trust anyone else to do the job properly-- even though it's a job that Smiley himself comes to question by the end of Smiley's People.

Le Carré, especially in the Smiley books, sought to demystify spies.  His British operatives are not martini-soaked, gadget-mongering James Bonds but dreary Oxbridge functionaries obsessed with office politics and consumed with their own affairs.  That was the MI6 he knew before he was exposed by the famous double-agent Kim Philby (there's a strange documentary currently on Netflix about Philby called The Spy Who Went Into the Cold that features a guy pointing an iphone camera at a dilapidated building in Beirut and saying that is where Philby sat around and drank).  Smiley's heroics come from his unshakable competence in the face of a sclerotic organization that no longer values it.  Guiness brilliantly conveys Le Carré's ambivalence about the use of this organization by stripping his performance of almost anything to latch onto-- it is only at the end when Smiley cracks for an instant and allows his feelings about his personal betrayal to show.  "Poor George. Life is such a puzzle to you," his wife Ann tells him.
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Music City Bowl Review: Pre-Overtime

January 1, 2018, 8:07 pm
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“I think the kids wanted to go for it. They wanted to try and win it and I don’t fault the effort at all…They deserved the opportunity to have it in their hands,” is what Kentucky's Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart said about coach Mark Stoops's decision to go for two at the end of the game.  But I prefer to think that Stoops knew that he did not want to go to overtime against Northwestern, a team that does nothing but allow teams to go into overtime, to watch the scoreboard hit zero and to win games in a vortex where linear time no longer has meaning, where the game could stretch into infinity and there's no clock to manage, and that Stoops had stayed up all night reading a monograph entitled Schroedinger's 'Cats: Quantum Mechanics and Northwestern's Inexplicable Nine-Win Season and the implications were terrifying enough for him to do anything he could to end things in regulation.  Also it was cold and the game had already entered its nineteenth hour.
 
Opposing coaches go to overtime against Northwestern 

The Franco-American Music City Bowl ended on an exciting last play, but will be best remembered as an all-encompassing descent into madness.  There were bizarre coaching calls on all sides-- Stoops's decision to go for two, Fitzgerald's disastrous trick plays dreamed up after a pregame meal of hot chicken spiced with psilocybin mushrooms, and the takeover of the game by a Maniac Referee who entered the field dressed in a cape and headdress made of writhing snakes.

The program said that the referee crew came from the Pac-12 Conference, but my guess is that a group of wilderness raiders drove up on the referee's vehicle, seized it in a daring heist using balancing poles and grappling hooks and numerous bellowing guys with Aron Baynes haircuts and leather armor, and impersonated the crew with the goal of sowing chaos. 
 
The Pac-12 Conference sends its officials to a Bowl Game

That would explain the reason why the first half took more than two hours to complete because they sent every call to a grotesque carnival parody replay crew, why they ejected Paddy Fisher for targeting a receiver with his arms, and why, when Kentucky running back Benny Snell lightly brushed against a grasping official, they had him thrown into a pit beneath Titan Stadium.
The Nortorious Benny Snell begins his reign of terror against innocent referees

Northwestern's win prevented the bowl from becoming a complete debacle after they carted Clayton Thorson off the field.  The Wildcats then turned to veteran backup Matt Alviti, a senior who never started a game and whose major contribution to the anticipated game plan involved growing a spectacular mustache.  Alviti didn't make mistakes and moved the chains with a quarterback rushing attack Kentucky would have never seen coming unless they dusted off their Kain Colter tape.  Alviti's heroics were bittersweet for Northwestern fans who had been rooting for him for years and were hoping he'd have a chance to get into a game and apparently made those wishes known to the nearest monkey's paw.

Northwestern won the same way they managed to win all year-- a stout defense against the run (though it helped that Snell got ejected, Northwestern's rush defense battled without Nate Hall and without egregious ejection victim Paddy Fisher whom I hope spent the second half commiserating with Snell in that fancy ice cream place on Broadway), a timely interception from turnover hero Kyle Queiro, and of course Justin Jackson.  Jackson finished his Northwestern career with 157 yards on the ground, two touchdowns, a second consecutive bowl MVP trophy, and a mind-melting bevy of records including virtually every record at Northwestern, third all-time in Big Ten rushing yards, and an ascent to the top ten in rush yards in major college football history.  Even Jackson's records and accolades don't fully explain how good his career has been at Northwestern; the Wildcats' offense for four years has hinged on Jackson or the threat of Jackson causing teams to use the entirety of their scholarship players to try to stop him and allow Northwestern's quarterbacks to throw the ball to open receivers, many of whom are also Justin Jackson. 
 
Justin Jackson the Trophy Carrier

The Music City Bowl managed to be the apotheosis of Northwestern's bizarre season.  They got stuck in a perilously close game, battled through heart-rending late comebacks, persevered through a truly bizarre array of fourth-down decisions and ludicrous trick plays that Wile E. Coyote would scoff at as unnecessarily complicated, and managed to hang on to a win.  The egghead football statistics guys say that close games decided by a touchdown or less not to mention overtime are toss-ups completely dependent on luck; Northwestern won every single one of them and did so in a fashion that seems to defy science and mathematics and gets into metaphysical realms that turn into religion.  The 2017 Wildcats were an excellent football team and one that also seemed buoyed by a series of football miracles. 
 
Game-saving Two Point Conversion Preventer Marcus McShepard 
defends the pass with an Unholy Incantation

By the time that Stephen Johnson's pass floated through the fingertips of a heretofore unstoppable Tavin Richardson, it was no longer possible to root for Northwestern as a football team but necessary to do so with robes, orbs, candles, foam hats in the shape of wildcat heads, and other miscellaneous religious implements as they watched another pass fall incomplete to the ground and Pat Fitzgerald bellow from the sidelines in an otherworldly tongue and the band launch into its ancient hymn "U Northwestern Rah" into the ashen faces of the fans of the Apostate Wildcat fleeing into the freezing Nashville air and back into the arms of their true religion because did you see the score of the Louisville game.
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