Alabama and Clemson will face off yet again in the national championship after effortlessly humiliating the supposed third- and fourth-best teams in college football, and it sure seems like there is once again little point to a college football season with two teams leagues above all others. But actually caring about college football's championship is a sucker's game for the rubes who care about playoff positioning determined in smoking rooms full of athletic directors and war criminals; the essence of the appeal of the sport is the roiling chaos just beneath the lofty heights of the Playoff and playing out in delightfully pointless bowl games that are all called the "Big Boy" Chad's Regional Trash Compactor Bowl That Used To Be The Chugg Energy Drink Bowl and next year will be the PotMom.Com Legal Weed Bowl. Amazon says that this 10th anniversary micronpc.com bowl program is available for $21.00 plus $6.00 shipping The point of the Playoff, with its fancy embossed lettering and tacky crystal football is that those games matter, but the 345 other bowls all know that in the cosmic sense, all human endeavors are pointless and you might as well watch two teams throw interceptions at each other in the Cheez It Bowl because one day the sun will explode. Northwestern has made it to the Holiday Bowl, somehow. This is a consolation prize, a bizarro Rose Bowl between the two teams that lost in their respective Conference Championship Games, a reminder that somehow the Northwestern Wildcats Who Lost to Akron somehow played against Ohio State in Indianapolis in some insane fever dream. Even announcer Gus Johnson could not believe they were there, calling John Moten's touchdown for Wisconsin even though he was wearing purple and wearing a shirt that said (and this is a direct quote) "Northwestern."
No, Northwestern did not beat big, bad Ohio State and win the most improbable Big Ten Championship of the divisional era. They played well enough, but ultimately their tactic of shutting down the run and letting the quarterback beat them was less effective against Dwayne Haskins than the various oaf-quarterbacks of the Big Ten West, and the game got away from them in the fourth. In Week Three, Northwestern lost to Akron and all seemed lost. One could do the dismal bowl math and try to figure out where the other five wins would need to come from to even qualify for a bowl game held on a patch of disused mattresses in the middle of a field somewhere. Instead, they went 8-1 against the Big Ten and won the conference even as every single Numbers Analyst kept insisting they were shitty in one of the most dumb and fun football seasons imaginable and now I own a Big Ten West Champions T-shirt. HOLIDAY BOWL Northwestern's season will end with a bowl game in San Diego against Utah that is for some wretched reason being played on New Year's Eve to a nationally televised audience of people having the least amount of fun on New Year's Eve possible. Given the timeslot and the gray meat and lukewarm potato football played by both of these teams, it would be far more interesting to replace the game with an endless stream of people at terrible New Year's parties trying to feign enthusiasm for the "big game" because they don't want to go into the other room and continue having conversations about how much various things cost. Northwestern has played Utah twice, both times in Evanston. They won in 1927, presumably by dazzling the Utes with a halftime show featuring music from the recently-released Jazz Singer. Then in 1981, they lost 42-0 because it was a 1981 Northwestern game. Utah's football team is apparently an unstoppable bowl juggernaut that just wins bowls. Here's a 1927 season poster from Northwestern's likely depressing History of Northwestern Football exhibit
I am not going to lie to you and pretend that I have watched a single minute of Utah football this year or any other year or am watching film on them to break down how Northwestern will can beat them because I already know: it will be by shutting down their running game, daring their quarterback to have a meltdown, not getting penalties while the other team's fans slowly have an emotional meltdown because of Uncalled Holding, Isaiah Bowser battering people, and Clayton Thorson somehow magicking the exact one play that will give Northwestern exactly enough points to win. The Wildcats have won their last two bowl games. Until recently, bowl games had been another vexing and improbable part of the Lore of Northwestern Sports Incompetence as they kept collapsing in increasingly impossible ways; to anyone who says there is no point to winning bowl games, I would suggest rooting for a team that failed to qualify for one for 47 years, waited until they became ubiquitous enough to qualify for them almost every year, and still keep losing and losing and losing until finally pulling one out and see if your coach does not theatrically destroy a plush toy monkey. And yet, this bowl game may be the most inconsequential bowl game Northwestern has ever played. They already played their thirteenth game in Indianapolis for the entire Big Ten Championship. Does it matter if they triumph here or, by wriggling out of a festering Big Ten West, have they already proven their point? I can make one guarantee: this year has featured the most Northwestern football ever unleashed on this nation, the United States. BOWL GAMES The best part of bowl games is the shameless grift by a mysterious coterie of Bowl Executives and marketing people who are all in charge of skimming millions of dollars from exhibition football games put on by athletes compensated with a Playstation and a digital watch. The Washington Post has a wonderfully entertaining story about a man paid more than a million dollars a year whose only job is putting on the Outback Bowl that starts with this incredible, withering lede:
TAMPA — In the gated communities of
waterfront mansions north of this city, not far from mansions belonging
to the chief executive of the Tampa Bay Lightning and former NFL star
turned broadcaster Ronde Barber, there’s one particularly impressive
home, featuring a 600-bottle wine cellar, a wraparound shower with
massage jets, and a sizeable pool with a waterfall and jacuzzi
overlooking a lake. It belongs to Jim McVay, a sports executive who for
the past 30 years has run the Outback Bowl, a second-tier college
football postseason game featuring third-place teams.
But it's not a goofy make-work job for the man who invented the Bucs firing cannons after scoring touchdowns. The man is working hard. Every night, he has to hire James Brown's Cape Guy when he comes home from another backbreaking meeting in Rosemont.
“It’s not a situation where he sits on his thumbs for three years,”
[Outback Bowl board member Steve] Schember said. “He goes up to Chicago a lot [Big Ten headquarters] . . .
he goes up the SEC offices . . . it’s an important job, maintaining
those relationships.”
"People don’t understand the bowl world. It’s very unique,” [Outback Bowl spokesman Mike] Schulze
said. “People are always going to say, ‘Gosh, I didn’t even know that
was a job.’ But we all work hard. We’re here every single day.” Here I would like to imagine the Outback Bowl Board and Outback Bowl staff sitting around a giant model of the Tampa football stadium with jewelers' eyes and then McVay says we're going to put the end zone here while everyone applauds and they all open up bottles of champaign and inhale powders made from the appendages of endangered animals. My favorite waste of bowl money this year is the Maker's Wanted Bahama's Bowl. This game, pitting Florida International against Toledo, was sponsored for $300,000 by Chicago suburb Elk Grove Village. I can't think of a funnier waste of taxpayer money than sponsoring a bowl game between FIU and Toldeo. As a person who has been to a bowl game, the most horrifying and awkward part of the bowl game is when the Vice President of Bowl Sponsorship or whatever gets to give a little speech only this time it will be some Deputy Comptroller who hopefully has a honking Chicago accent representing an industrial park in the shadow of O'Hare talking about how much it means to the residents of the Village's Little Toledo neighborhood. Bowls fit into a bizarre entertainment landscape where unending television money props up weird spectacles that no one seems to want. Television networks need football content so we have a proliferation of half-empty bowl games between listless teams pawing at each other or, occasionally, letting loose the sublime insanity that happens in college football. These bowl games aren't stupid or pointless or unnecessary for the players or the fans, but their existence also seems on the same plane as a Nic Cage movie released exclusively on Hulu Plus for the benefit of someone who is either unaware of the quality of the Eastern European Nic Cage canon, actively seeking it out for some bizarre B-movie sense, or is on a startling combination of drugs. The lesser bowls, propped up by unpaid players, executive-level hamburgling, graft, chicanery, and wrapped in a chintzy layer of pomp that usually involves a halftime show involving the Original Bassist from 311 are not some bizarre college football sideshow-- in this way, more than the oxygen-sucking Playoff, they are the very embodiment of this , ridiculous sport. https://twitter.com/BigTenNetwork/status/1069044507969110017 https://twitter.com/BigTenNetwork/status/1069044507969110017
For some reason the Bulls, an already crummy team ravaged by every single player tearing the same knee ligament, decided to fire gormless PTA Dad Fred Hoiberg. Hoiberg had little going for him as a head coach. At the same time, he faced bizarre circumstances where he was put in charge of a roiling, conspiracy-prone Three Alphas team that had little time for his pajama party bonding sessions because they were headed by veterans more concerned with invading Silesia. The next year, they tanked; Hoiberg also had a player just completely and utterly destroy another player's face and the organization decided that the guy crumpled on the floor deserved it. And then, just when Lauri Markkanen returned from injury and the team could be poised to Space and Pace as prophesied many moons ago from Ames, John Paxson and Gar Forman burst into his rumpus room and fired him out of nowhere because it was time for them to bring in a Bald Asshole. An extremely normal image that comes up when you google Jim Boylen The Bulls have a pattern for coaches that rotates between ineffective Hair Guys and Bald Assholes. They brought in Scott Skiles to scream at everyone about playing defense for several seasons until they had to stop players from assassinating him after practice. His replacement was Vinny Del Negro, a man with a glorious mane and a confused look on his face. Then they brought in the ur-Bald Asshole in Tom Thibodeau, a bizarre basketball monomaniac who spent all of his time sitting around in the same black track suit watching film and just vibrating with anger that somewhere a basketball player was not boxing out. Thibodeau, with his manic floor-bellowing, his complete inability to take a single play off even during a grinding 82-game season, and his Sipowicz-but-less-put-together aesthetic, fell into an unending conflagration with the front office that went as far as to involve rumors that coaches turned on fans because they feared their offices were bugged. It turns out that Derrick Rose's knee ligaments were the only things holding the fractious Bulls together. Jim Boylen is a classic Bald Asshole. He wants to talk about Defense. And Fundamentals. They're going to do Suicides. And he's going to scream at everyone until his throbbing skull glows red as a heating lamp over a 7-11 hotdog roller. He has been the Bulls coach for less than a week and has nearly incited a mutiny.
It's not Jim Boylen's fault that he looks like a crooked prosecutor who "strongly denies" involvement in a boat license entrapment scheme, but he made no bones about his public image and immediately decided it would be the hardass vice principal from Back to the Future. On Saturday, the hapless Bulls were utterly dismantled by the Celtics in their worst loss in the history of the team. Boylen reacted with hockey substitutions and pulling starters presumably so he could scream at them in practice the next day. The Bulls then started a group text about whether or not to even show up to practice because they did not want a pointy-headed doofus setting up dozens of desks so he could angrily clear everything off of them while yelling that they shouldn't have done the worst loss in the history of the team. Now everyone is saying what they need to in order to prevent Boylen from looking like an even angrier, redder asshole than he already did. What's next for Boylen? Will he stop a game in the middle and just leave? Move into Jabari Parker's house so he can tell him to pick his knees up for godssake pick your GODDAMN KNEES UP? Will he burst forth from Zach Lavine's chest while angrily tooting a whistle? Is there a worse archetype in sports than the Bald Asshole coach, the guy who decides he's not gonna have any LOLLYGAGGING around here? Is there anything more absurd in the NBA, where multi-millionaire adults are really going to listen to some glistening sausage casing who looks like the alderman's brother-in-law who is somehow on the payroll? And, this is a completely unrelated subject, but what are the odds that the Bulls have interim coaches named Jim Boylan and Jim Boylen and they are two different guys because honestly before Coach Tugboat came in there and started throwing things that simple fact broke my brain for several hours? The answer to all of those questions is John Paxson. Paxson loves this shit. A guy who literally choked a coach and who has spent the past two decades in Chicago playing dumb macho headgames absolutely loves it when he opens the door and some guy who is already putting fist dents into a filing cabinet has prepared a rhyme about how every player is dogshit DOGSHIT. Perhaps we can find a the biggest, baldest asshole humanly possible, just a smooth-headed maniac radiating spittle and sprouting auxiliary whistles, just a nine-foot colossus who is so angry that he must be wheeled around in a plexiglass box to prevent him from causing millions of dollars of property damage at all times to come in and yell at John Paxson two inches from his face while blasting on a whistle and punching the walls of his traveling prison-box and telling Paxson to stop running this basketball team like a goddamned opera.
Northwestern football has them all doing the one thing they don't want to be doing and that is talking about Northwestern football for an extra week. The Wildcats did this by remaining standing atop a Big Ten West where every team poisoned itself, by playing a brand of ugly, unwatchable football, and scoring very close to the minimum number of points needed to do so. They are 8-4, lost every single non-conference game including one to a four-win Akron team that had literally never beaten a Big Ten Opponent, and sported a losing record at home. SBNation calls them the "lowest-rated power five team to ever win a division championship." Pat Fizgerald has been named Big Ten Coach of the Year; they are sixty minutes away from winning the Big Ten and going to the Rose Bowl. I had no idea the Big Ten West Champion got a trophy until this year Every advanced metric seems to cry out that the 2018 Northwestern Wildcats suck. And yet, nobody wants to see their team play them. This is partly because Northwestern plays aesthetically revolting football loved by punters and the punters who love punters. Northwestern has a great punter who has also been kicking field goals because it is his turn to score some points and at Northwestern, the punter is king. The Wildcats were bound to break through to Indianapolis at some point, and this is the platonic ideal of a Northwestern team to do so-- reviled, appearing seemingly by default, irritating the hell out of everyone especially Big Ten West teams whose own vile and inept outfits managed to fall short. This is what Northwestern football looks like under Pat Fitzgerald-- not the Randy Walker squads that used the then-novel spread offense to try to beat teams 61-55, but a brutal, grinding, defense and punts machine that has sprung fully formed from the meaty forearms of a neckroll linebacker. Northwestern hangs in against great teams and they rarely blow anyone out. In the last five years of Fitzball in which Northwestern has had arguably its strongest run of the modern era including multiple ten-win seasons and heretofore unthinkable bowl victories, the 'Cats have made almost every clutch play they've needed-- they are probably a few dozen minutes from going like 3-9 every year. For a long time, opposing teams would react to losing to Northwestern
like frustrated cartoon supervillains, shaking their fists and
perplexed that their plans had once again gone awry. It was mildly
infuriating that teams could lose again and again to the Wildcats and
their fans would be incredulous because Northwestern had been really bad
in the 1970s and 80s. How could people not fathom that Northwestern is
sort of good? They put up a spirited fight in the Sun Bowl. But not this
year. Everyone is infuriated they lost to Northwestern because
Northwestern punted 75 times and then a wide receiver teleported into
the endzone or they fumbled and the ball bounced into a roll and hit the
pole, and knocked the ball in the rub-a-dub tub, which hit the man into
the pan, the trap is set, Northwestern ball. Northwestern Offensive Coordinator Mick McCall draws up the "Win The Game" play
The metrics and pundits have no way to quantify exactly good enough, and the Wildcats in Big Ten play have made pretty much exactly every play they needed to at the right time. Maybe it's luck, maybe it is a conference gerrymandered for Wisconsin watching as Wisconsin realizes only too late that Ryan Field is inexplicably a Badger Death Trap, and maybe it is because the Wildcats have some sort of bizarre intangible toughness that allows them to grind out games like this while causing the S&P+ computers to overheat and become sentient, eventually going on an endless wave of destruction. All I know is that the Wildcats are in Indianapolis, the bumbling jabronis of the Big Ten West are not, and I would not write them off. THE INCIDENTAL HAT If hideous, unwatchable victories characterize this Northwestern season, then the 24-16 victory over a malingering Illinois team was their masterpiece. The Wildcats bludgeoned the Illini with Isaiah Bowser; the Illini run defense seemed mainly to consist of reasoned argument. But then, Fitzgerald took everyone out. The 'Cats already played the game with no starting defensive backs, no top receiver, and without a key defensive playmaker. Early in the third quarter, Fitz benched Bowser, and by the fourth had benched Clayton Thorson. The offense basically decided to kneel for the rest of the game, and Illinois inched back with a great game from quarterback A.J. Bush. Fitzgerald decided to win the Hat with one head tied behind his back. And once again Mystical Northwestern Bullshit struck again. Part of it came from Illinois just being a woeful and sorry football team that couldn't stop committing doofus penalties; the game ended on a first down granted from a personal foul. Part of it came from Lovie Smith stoically electing to kick field goals instead of raining touchdown hellfire in order to try to salvage some dignity by seizing the Hat from the division champs. Even me, a person who has written thousands of words about retaining the Hat, was screaming at Lovie for kicking a field goal inside the five, a luxury I could enjoy because the game had no bearing on Northwestern's conference championship position, and a loss would only give them a another truly hideous and embarrassing defeat to drag into Indianapolis and theoretically make them even more powerful. Using archival photos of Lovie as the head coach of the Bears, this blog has expertly recreated what would happen if Lovie shaved his mustache and grew a Lincoln Beard, perhaps the most effective way for him to win his first Hat
I like Lovie Smith a lot. He was a great Bears coach and always struck me as a beacon of calm in the manic football coaching world. I have no idea why Illinois has played so poorly under him and, it pains me to say this, but Tim Beckman would have absolutely won that game. He would have won that game, he would have gotten the Hat, and then he probably would have spontaneously combusted while screaming at his players all the way back to Champaign-Urbana only because he understood the power of the Hat and it drove him into madness. FOOTBALL APOCALYPSE II The last time Northwestern and Ohio State met on a stage this big, ESPN's College Football Gameday came to Evanston. Northwestern was 4-0, coming off its first bowl win in the NATO era, and seemingly poised for a big run in the Legends Division that I still can't believe that multiple people saw that and said that was an acceptable name for a division, sure we'll put it on merchandise and trophies and everything. Instead, Ohio State eked out the win and Northwestern fell into an unfathomable death spiral where they managed a single win the rest of the season. This meeting is projected to be more bleak. He got the First Down This game has Playoff Implications. Because the college football playoff is decided by an unaccountable committee that selects playoff participants from secret chambers with ghastly rites and unthinkable augurs, Ohio State may still qualify. There is no objective way to determine whether, for example, it is better to have Oklahoma's defense where they try to tackle people and then fly back on wires like in kung fu movies or to have gotten annihilated from the face of the Earth by Purdue. The Playoff Committee deals in conjecture, in ratings and money, and just plain old bullshit. But Ohio State will only make the Playoff if they beat Northwestern, and they have every incentive to try to run it up as much as possible. Unfortunately for them, Northwestern football this season is an inflatable clown that keeps popping up. Conventional wisdom says that the Buckeyes will run away with this one. But they do not fully understand the force they are dealing with. Northwestern's 2018 football team was not designed to get blown out, clobbered, or run out of Lucas Oil Stadium. It makes no sense. It defies all logic, reason, and empirical ranking systems, and only exists to profoundly annoy and fuck up college football. Ohio State has the best quarterback in the Big Ten and a high-powered offense. Northwestern has the ability to show up to the Rose Bowl and get asked what the fuck are you doing here before a 25-minute phone conversation clears things up and the Tournament of Roses people react with Marc Maron levels of incredulity. There can be nothing less likely or more ridiculous than Northwestern pulling this one out. Tell the Buckeyes the Wildcats will see them in Indianapolis, they will see them in hell, and they will see them in Overtime.
Pat Fitzgerald has a saying he likes to bleat out from time to time: "stats are for losers." This sort of sentiment comes partly from Fitzgerald's frustration from feeling overlooked and underrated due in part to Northwestern's historical ineptitude, a bizarre and thin-skinned fascination with media figures (it will always remain a mystery to me why he spent so much time calling out some ESPN guy I've never heard of repeatedly for daring to pick Pitt in the Pinstripe Bowl), and a sort of cheeky macho posturing where Pat Fitzgerald feels the need to act like the model of his look, a gritty, middle-aged Duke Nukem. And yet one of the curious things about Fitzgerald's tenure as head coach has been a consistent gulf between Northwestern's rating by various advanced statistical metrics and the team's performance. This comes from a bizarre pattern where the Wildcats struggle against a coterie of profoundly non-threatening foes like the Central Eastern Corner of Illinois Feeblemen or Jabroni Technical College before somehow roaring back to life against Big Ten opponents, all of whom are defeated by seven points or less if they cannot be dragged into Northwestern's overtime chamber. This season, Northwestern has somehow risen to win a profoundly troubled conference and play in the Big Ten Championship game; SBNation/Football Outsiders' S&P+ ratings say that the Wildcats are the 76th best team in the country. College football can work this way because football itself is a bizarre and impossible game where the outcome of games can hinge on one or two plays, and Northwestern has made nearly all of them. “They beat teams just like that," P.J. Fleck said about last week's loss. "Iceman from ‘Top Gun,’ for all the people who know that. Cool as ice. Never makes a mistake." "I.C.E.M.A.N." Fleck said. "Intensity. Coolness. Execution. Mangling. Anklyosaurus. Neurotransmitters." I also want to point out the incredible next paragraph from the Star Tribune article where I got the Fleck quote from columnist Jim Souhan: "Most of Fleck’s speechifying targets 18-year-olds who may be impressed
by such silliness. Iceman from ‘Top Gun’? I may have been one of the few
people in the room old enough to know what he was talking about, yet I
had no idea what he was talking about. He might as well have been
comparing Northwestern to Gatsby, or Shemp." The season is short or, in statistics jargon, the samples are small. With the exception of the world-devouring Alabamas of the world, it is very difficult to tell if a team is better than another, and because of the nature of the game, it is almost impossible to predict if a team will beat another team or whether a team is better. Fans and pundits have several strategies to deal with the ambiguity baked into college football. One way is to try to build empirical models and rankings. The other way is through rhetoric, logical fallacies, transitive property wins, television analysts with tie knots so large that they are orbited by smaller tie knots going on television and talking about the Positional Matchups with grim certainty even though they have absolutely no idea how any of this is going to play out, ad finally people screaming at each other. There is also the tried and true method of Plushomancy, divination by Giant Mascot Head And yet, one of the strange epistemological paradoxes in sports in general, but particularly in college football, is that you could build a computer that takes of several acres with whirling tape machines and people dressed like NASA ground crews scurrying around with armfuls of printout graphs that could tell you precisely how good every team is and it has no effect on what actually happens. The central question surrounding Northwestern football this season is: why? And also: how? A Northwestern team that has not looked particularly impressive has amassed enough ugly wins over the exact configuration of teams it needed to beat to win the West. Have they been profoundly lucky? Do they have some sort of transcendent clutch switch that allows them to make the exact play they need to make at the exact instant they need to make it and no other time? Are they the avatars of a cursed football deity, brought forth by the unholy addition of Rutgers and Maryland brought in to smite the maniacs who dared to divide the Big Ten into this precise configuration of divisions by forcing Jim Delany to watch Northwestern play in the championship game? There are some answers. Northwestern's early-season struggles came from an offense juggling two quarterbacks as Clayton Thorson returned from his horrifying knee injury. Then, star running back Jeremy Larkin retired, and the Wildcats' running game stalled until the emergence of freshman battering ram Isaiah Bowser. Wisconsin played Northwestern with a quarterback making his debut. Kirk Ferentz is being held hostage by a Speed-inspired madman who has threatened to destroy Kinnick Stadium if the Hawkeyes go above eight wins. Northwestern refuses to blow anyone out because the program is in the grips of an overtime cult.
Regardless of what the numbers say or what cavalcade of coincidences and clutch play has allowed Northwestern to make it this far, the fact is that they are the Big Ten West Champions. They cannot be stopped from playing in the Conference Championship Game by anyone. And should they do it one more time, they look at the numbers and the statistics and Pat Fitzgerald prints them out and rips them apart on the sidelines like the time he had the team destroy a stuffed animal monkey when they finally won a bowl game, they would be finally proving once and for all that beating Ohio State or Michigan and knocking the entire conference out of the playoff would be extremely funny. SOFTENING THE CLAIMS TO THE HAT With the big Hat Showdown coming once again, it is important to point out that the state of Illinois is in the midst of a full-blown Hat Crisis, a seething cauldron of intrigue, fraud, and skulduggery involving the prize Lincoln Hat in the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. According to this tremendous report from WBEZ, which I cannot to full justice to in this blog post, the a private collector sold the hat to the museum, claiming that Lincoln gave it to a farmer from Southern Illinois as a gesture of gratitude in 1858. Even that information remains cloudy-- an affidavit from a descendant of the family suggested that William Waller received the hat in Washington D.C. sometime after 1861. Those reports represent the sum total of evidence that the hat ever belonged to Lincoln and is not just some nineteenth-century hat that some people had lying around in the closet. The Lincoln Hat of Dubious Prominence casts a hat-shaped shadow over Springfield According to the WBEZ article, the Lincoln Presidential Library spent $25 million on Lincoln artifacts in 2007, and the hat was the centerpiece of the collection. As the article says "in 2007, an appraiser valued the hat now in Springfield at $6.5 million
and used adjectives like 'transcendent' to describe its apparent
majesty." In my imagination, this involved the entire board of the Library seeing the hat and determining they must have it during a bacchanalian Lincoln trivia contest and speech-reading competition and paying for it with cash in a priceless period-accurate briefcase that may have belonged to Stephen Douglas. Now, with the Lincoln Library and Museum in some financial trouble, the authenticity of the hat is coming into question.
When historians looked into the hat in 2013, they were unable to find much evidence that the hat had ever belonged to Lincoln, although they found nothing to specifically disprove the claim. This is when the foundation called in the FBI and presumably its top Historical Hat Authentication Team led by grim, black-suited agents, battle-hardened from the never-ending Pancho Villa Sombrero Debacle and at least one of whom has scars from a violent confrontation with someone claiming to own a fraudulent Betsy Ross Bonnet. As WBEZ reports, "two tests were performed in 2015, comparing DNA samples from the hat
itself with Lincoln’s blood-spattered handkerchief, gloves, and shirt
from the night of his assassination, and two tufts of Lincoln’s hair,
among other things." But even these sophisticated tests could not prove that the hat belonged to Lincoln.
Here are some sentences from the rest of the article:
"In an interview, Nick Kalm, the foundation’s vice chairman, said his
organization is still satisfied that the hat is Lincoln’s and that
nothing uncovered by the FBI testing or museum curators disproves that.
He went on to note that with some historic relics, “leaps of faith”
sometimes exist in determining their authenticity."
"Underscoring the secrecy, federal agents were encouraged by the
museum’s former Lincoln curator, James Cornelius, to “disguise
themselves as a news crew” when they entered the museum, [Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Executive Director Alan] Lowe told WBEZ,
based on internal correspondence only recently discovered. Lowe described the overall secrecy surrounding the FBI testing as a form of 'subterfuge.'"
"'I have been on the front lines defending the provenance of the hat, but
I have been doing that not having all the available information. This
is unacceptable. We simply cannot operate that way,' Lowe wrote to
foundation CEO Carla Knorowski and foundation Chairman Ray McCaskey." To sum up, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum may have been snookered into buying a fraudulent Lincoln Hat based on just some guy saying so 150 years ago, and at some point an FBI Hat Crew snuck into the museum in disguise in order to DNA test the hat based on Lincoln's bloody death pillow and absolutely nobody knows what to do with this dubious hat other than the obvious thing-- make it the trophy for the Illinois vs. Northwestern Rivalry Football Game and allow the winning coach to parade around in it. HAT GAME Meanwhile, there is a football game to get to. Illinois, fresh off the worst defeat in school history, is in a traditional death spiral to end the season. They have had another difficult year, one where the most notable thing that happened was Lovie Smith growing a spectacularly grizzled beard and then the school handing out some incredibly soggy bottom boys-ass fake beards. The Beard Out is a tremendous gimmick, I sincerely hope none of the beard recipients tried to eat a hot dog The game has essentially no stakes beyond the hat. Illinois will not go to a bowl. Northwestern has already clinched its spot in the Big Ten Championship game, and the only question remaining is whether Jim Delany would hire a mercenary militia to stop a 7-5 Northwestern team with a loss to Illinois from appearing in Indianapolis. The Wildcats are heavily favored but will also be looking forward to next week's game.
There is nothing on the line except for the Hat, the Greatest Rivalry in American Sports, a knock-down drag-out fight between these two august programs fighting for a trophy. And whoever gets it can hire the FBI to figure out how to put it on their dang head already. I am on the front lines defending the provenance of the Hat.
Let's just lead off with it: the Northwestern Wildcats have won the Big Ten West. There are two games left; Northwestern could spend its road trip in Minnesota lounging on hammocks and its Hat Game against Illinois in a beach resort, zinc-nosed and sun-addled, and they can be 6-6, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them from showing up in Indianapolis to represent the entire Big Ten West. Football analysts, burning out their BCS computers and going through cartons of green accounting visors have all stared at their Johnny Mnemonic virtual reality devices and come to the same conclusion: this is incredibly funny. College Football analysts try to deal with their computer models that keep showing that Northwestern won the Big Ten West This is not to take anything away from the Wildcats, who have had a simultaneously disastrous and heroic season. It is to say that Northwestern has managed to win an entire division championship to the point where they get to wear special hats and get a trophy that I had no idea even existed until Saturday by what has been very close to the absolute minimum number points required. Northwestern will be the first major conference team to win a division without defeating a single out of conference opponent-- this includes Akron, a profoundly shitty MAC team whose win over Northwestern was its first over a Big Ten opponent ever in a football history that stretches to the nineteenth century. Northwestern won the West by racing to an enormous lead against Purdue then failing to score a point in the second half, by beating an at-the-time winless Nebraska team in the throes of its worst season in recorded history by scoring ten points in less than three minutes including a 99-yard touchdown drive to send the game to an overtime period won by a backup kicker playing in his first game, by somehow needing to come back against a Rutgers team so putrid that they had been trying to consolidate their turnovers with an agency so they just owed the entire Big Ten a few interceptions on weekly installments. When you're coaching Rutgers The Wildcats have confounded predictions, statistics, numbers, gamblers, logic, and reason. They have won the Big Ten West through what appears to be the absolute minimum amount of success. For three months, the Big Ten West has been told to get its act together and, with minimum competence, seize the division but no one has; Northwestern's stand is like the terrifying and insidious effects of climate change. And so the Wildcats go into their next two games in the perfect position. They cannot lose. Yes, they should beat Minnesota, a team that is currently thrashing about every week while deciding whether or not to turn into a werewolf. And yes, they should beat the flailing Illini, who remain under a tailspin under Lovie Smith who has just decided to cope by getting grizzled, even with the prized Hat at stake. But consider this: what if they lose? What if they get rowed by the Gophers or the Illini sneak by while Northwestern follows their patented just sort of hang out and see whatever happens is good with me gameplan and then they lose? They can't get taken out of Indianapolis at this point. Jim Delany can't deploy a cardboard Yosemite Sam that says "you must win this number of games against the Illini to play in the Big Ten Championship." And while the Big Ten would prefer to set up road blocks between Evanston and Indianapolis for this game than let a 6-6 Northwestern team play there, there is nothing stopping them. Of course, it would be a giant bummer for Northwestern to lose the next two. But it would also be extraordinarily funny, and the Wildcats have seized the mantle of America's Funniest Power Five Division Winner as an avatar of chaos that will easily carry them over whatever unlucky chump gets served to them in the Big Ten Championship that they are actually playing in (you can look it up) and then head to the Rose Bowl to attempt to win their first out of conference game. RIVALRY It has the sorry lot of Iowa fans to wake up in the middle of the night over the last decade and realize they have a rivalry with Northwestern. They would, like most Big Ten fans, like to have a rivalry with a traditional Big Ten Power like Ohio State or Michigan or even Wisconsin, the type of rivalry where you have a Farm Implement Trophy and songs about how you hate each other and the Big Ten Power actually does despise them back but instead they are forced to deal with Northwestern every year. The Iowa-Northwestern rivalry is not a traditional football rivalry where fans taunt each other and letter jacket guys kidnap the mascot and perform sporting japes worthy of stories that will last for generations at the Grim Waterfowl Club; their rivalry is more like the one between homeowners and termites. Northwestern has now beaten Iowa three years in a row. Each victory has been a disgusting affront to football. Last year, in the midst of a howling southern gale at Ryan Field, both teams refused to score until Northwestern lured them into overtime. This year, they battled to a putrid 3-0 half and basically refused to play offense until Bennett Skowronek made one of the greatest catches I've ever seen from a Northwestern player almost at random and then Iowa decided to close the game by bashing themselves in the head with large, comical props. My sources on Iowa message boards inform me that Northwestern got away with numerous Uncalled Holding Penalties. This is what life is like now, for the Hawkeyes. Their fans do not want to give in and debase themselves to admit they have a rivalry with Northwestern; every year, Northwestern comes in and the teams blow raspberries at each other until the Wildcats ruin their season. In 2000, the Wildcats took on an abysmal Iowa team with an outright Big Ten Championship and trip to the Rose Bowl on the line and they lost one of the most devastating games in Northwestern history. It was bitterly cold, and on the way out of the stadium, Iowa fans gleefully taunted anyone in purple to enjoy San Antonio, taking it as a given that the Citrus Bowl would pass up Northwestern for the more lucrative Michigan fanbase even though Northwestern had beaten the Wolverines head to head in one of the greatest games ever played. Those vengeful Hawkstrodamuses were proven right. This time, though, Northwestern's win, combined with just an absolute Rube Goldberg Machine of Big Ten shittiness propelled them to a Division Championship to celebrate upon Kinnick Stadium in front of disgusted Iowa fans who had, along with every other Western team, squandered an opportunity to win this wretched division. Last week, Northwestern took on Notre Dame in another sort of quasi-rivalry game. There is no way that Notre Dame considers Northwestern a rival: all of Notre Dame's rivalry is with the past itself, a sepia-toned succession of leather helmet mustache guys gouging the eyes of Army or valiantly battling the Spanish Flu; Notre Dame's current rivalries seem to mostly be with the entire sport of college football as everyone else has grown sick of the men's hats of the Associated Press constantly vaulting them into title games based on a stale, ghostly aura only to see them humiliated by a never-ending succession of JaMarcuses Russell. This is how Notre Dame exists now, its pugilist cartoon mascot now squaring off at every fanbase in the world waiting for them to lose. It is fitting that Notre Dame will play today in Yankee Stadium as their football program is the closest thing to every Boomer anecdote about Mickey Mantle made flesh. A middling Big Ten program that resurfaces every dozen years when Notre Dame deigns to play them until they lose and mysteriously vanish off the Irish schedule cannot compete with History. A 1991 image of "Mickey Mantle," a fictional baseball player invented in the late 1980s by Bob Costas and Ken Burns has created a cottage industry of fake Boomer Baseball Anecdotes and must be exposed by courageous people not afraid to put the truth on Blogspot.com College football rivalry fits within the sport's completely discursive tradition in that the biggest marker of a rivalry are fans talking about whether or not a fanbase is or is not their rival. Conferences and schools try to cement these with annual games on the schedule, "rivalry week" showdowns, and trophies, but the concept of rivalry belongs entirely to the fans. The greatest moment in the history of college football rivalry was Bob Diacco's laudably insane quest to build a trophy from scratch and instigate a Big Game with UCF and UCF's hostile indifference to the Civil ConFLiCt. No one has seen the trophy since it was abandoned somewhere on a sideline, ignored by UCF who would not even deign to parade it around. In an ideal world, the complete rejection of this Rivalry Overture would eventually twist its way into a real rivalry, with UCONN coaches bringing larger and more elaborate rivalry trophies to the stadium every year while UCF makes more pointed shows of ignoring it until the Huskies roll up with a semi full of life-sized Dog-Knights while UCF has hired a crew of backhoes to immediately bury them. The other great rivalry moment of the twenty-first century is this: The accepted, Branded Rivalries are the most boring in college sports. Instead, it's the ones at the margins, the ones that are constant sources of bickering about whether the teams are actually rivals, whether one team cares as much as the other about a rivalry, ones where there very nature of the concept of rivalry is contested in a way that would make an absolutely unreadable and dreadful paper called like "'Little Brother' or 'Big' Time Rival: College Football 'Rivalry' and the Discourses of Disparagement in American Society 1978-2012" in PAAAWWWWLLL Quarterly.
The sole exception remains America's greatest rivalry game, the Battle for The Hat and I'm concerned because Lovie would look tremendous sporting that thing with his silver beard.
Yes, there may be a person, huddled in a shack somewhere or in one of those vans that are full of computers where people karate chop keyboards and scream that they’re being hacked by an animated ASCII skull, who has analyzed the film and advanced data that can tell you credibly what the hell is going on with Northwestern football this season, but you can stop right there because I can tell you that it is because the entire program has been subsumed into an overtime cult.
These teams do not play nearly enough for this game to have meaning, but it does. They mirror each other. Notre Dame has a large nationwide fanbase that is the closest thing that Chicago has to a college football team; Northwestern has billboards. Notre Dame celebrated national titles in the twentieth century while Northwestern fans ripped down the goalposts after breaking a record for futility. This meeting will the be the fifth time these teams play in 25 years but for some reason the rivalry has a wikipedia page. But Northwestern no longer cares about victory. They are here to drag the Fighting Irish to overtime, to extend the game beyond the boundaries of time and space, to dwell in Evanston in overtime as the universe is destroyed and reborn over ageless eons. The last time Northwestern played them, Brian Kelly's brain became warped and twisted by the promise of overtime, and he kept trying to go for two unsuccessfully until he found himself in overtime and at the mercy of the Wildcats and their Baseball Kicker. We already live in an insane world ravaged by the ripple effect of overtimes. The Northwestern Wildcats currently sit in first place in the Big Ten West-- this game against Notre Dame has far less import for them than the three remaining games against Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois after another stirring Northwestern win against Wisconsin at Ryan Field, a reliable abattoir for Wisconsin title hopes. The Wildcats can literally win the Big Ten West. They can arrive, with their buses and their trucks and their secret unmarked vans carrying Mick McCall's overtime cowl and conjuring lanterns, in Indianapolis where they can unleash upon the dome an overtime heretofore unseen by college football spanning days, months, and eons, the whole time yelling and fistpumping and trying to figure out which configuration of emojis translates to "Beauty and the Beast" or "There Will Be Blood." All Notre Dame is trying to do make the college football playoff.
Northwestern's brilliant 99-yard drive down seven with two minutes to go and no timeouts to tie the game looked fantastic on the stilted play-by-play slowly loading onto my phone and on the anguished face of the Nebraska fan in my train car scowling his phone like it opened to the website that suggested he must try Malort. I was on the train watching the ambiguous Clayton Thorson text updates because I had left the game when Nebraska was up by ten with less than ten minutes left. The weather was perfect. I did not have to change into a tuxedo for a Function with the Arch Duke. I left because it looked like Northwestern was going to lose the game and I didn't want to listen to Nebraska fans celebrating, doing their creepy sing-song "Go Big Red" chant in the exact cadence as Sloth yelling "HEY YOU GUYS" in the Goonies all the way to the Howard stop, so I left and helplessly watched as Northwestern put up one of their greatest if not dumbest comebacks they've had in awhile on the way to yet another overtime victory because I'm an idiotic sports oaf.
I am very sorry for this
Leaving a game early because of Sports Anguish triggers bizarre conflicting emotions: of course I wanted the Wildcats to win in precisely the type of agonizing comeback and requisite Northwestern overtime that they specialize in so they have a chance to qualify for the Camouflage Pants and Ninja Knife Expo '97 Bowl. But there's also a small part of me that was rooting for them to fall predictably short, to justify my ridiculous decision to rage-quit a live sporting event because evidently it is far more satisfying for me to be right than happy. Almost every game Northwestern plays at home against a Big Ten team is a road game, and it is profoundly embarrassing to admit that this annoys me. The other fans have done nothing wrong other than wear a different color shirt and yell different letters and the only thing I want is for them to go home vanquished and disappointed. It is like when a professional wrestler gets so irritated and anguished by hearing his opponents' entrance music that he stares out of the ring in bug-eyed incredulity except it is real and I can't believe I actually do this. The fact that I missed a ludicrous Northwestern comeback is annoying; the fact that it was against Nebraska is depressing. Northwestern has never beaten Nebraska at home. In fact, only two games have ever been won by the home team in this series and both under insane circumstances-- last week's insane Northwestern comeback in Evanston and the other a hail mary by a Nebraska backup backup backup quarterback in Lincoln. Every year, Nebraska fans flood Ryan Field and even though this happens for every single major team that comes here, the Nebraska fans still find this novel and exciting and worthy of the same amount of discussion that one would find at a meeting of the Congressional Committee on Mileage. This year, Nebraska had yet to win a single game and the fans still piled in ready to finally celebrate a win and figured not inaccurately that Evanston was a decent place to get it. The Nebraska fans around me saw their team finally hire the messianic alumnus coach, the hottest lower-tier coach in the country who had played for the Huskers and knew about running the dang option and then the team just fucking cratered into an 0-5 oblivion.We can all admit that it is extremely funny. But given these circumstances, Nebraska fans, seeing their team finally winning, finally, maybe turning it around, were jubilant and over the moon and I sat there seething like that picture of Jack White at the Cubs game who looks like he been confused his whole life about what baseball was and finally saw it in action. Jack White discovers he had been led to believe that the sport of baseball involved lathes and elaborate bat-crafting phases and about 84 percent less spitting This is the darkness inherent in sports fandom. It is an effect for me that is far more visceral in person than on television or on a flickering illegal stream that doubtlessly infected my old computer with thousands of undetectable viruses that have sent my number munchers high scores to the seediest corners of the Dark Web. It is the appalling and disgusting revelation that once again some sickos and deviants have come to my section with the perverse desire to root for the team they prefer against the Northwestern Wildcats who WON the GODDAMN MUSIC CITY BOWL WHAT ELSE DO THEY HAVE TO DO that triggers some horrifying dinosaur-brained impulse to say that I want them to be quiet, I want them to leave, I want them to go home utterly crushed and forced to look their loved ones in the eye and admit they are kind of sad their team didn't win the game. The flip side to Ryan Field being filled at all times with opposing fans is that it rarely occurs to them that they could ever lose and on the occasions when they do it is incredibly satisfying. Their teams only lose to the Wildcats for two reasons: one of the coordinators is incompetent and needs to be fired and Uncalled Holding Penalties. A small sample of the most unhinged Michigan State fans I can find on the internet demanded that their offensive coordinator should be fired after every loss to the Wildcats-- by the third one, I believe they demanded that they fire him, rehire him, and then fire him again while ordinary citizens jeered him with menacing karate poses. One of the funniest things to see if you are a complete idiot and enjoy watching people be angry about football online is to read fans grouse about how wily ol' Fitz has fooled them again with an offensive gameplan while simultaneously reading Northwestern fans demanding that Wildcats' offensive coordinator be fired and then symbolically chopped in half by a distressingly incompetent magician. This is why the most distressing thing I've read this week is that Northwestern is favored by 21 points going into today's game against Rutgers. Rutgers, playing a brand of football so wretched that it appears they have somehow transported players from the mythical first football game to the twenty-first century completely unable to discern the rules of modern football and also distracted by television, indoor plumbing, Instagram, and the relative unpopularity of mustaches. Rutgers fans have succumbed to the saddest fate in the Big Ten: a belief that their team could actually lose to Northwestern. In fact, they seem resigned to a drubbing from the Wildcats. Rutgers players practice for Northwestern by lining up in their signature formation The Nineteenth-Century Conflagration There are myriad reasons why Northwestern should win comfortably. But there are also the Iron Laws of Northwestern Football which clearly state that that the goal of any game above all is to enter that sacred realm of Overtime.
