Oh No Northwestern is Playing Football Again

 

The Big Ten returns to football

It is clear now that nothing, not outbreaks or worrying health effects or even complete team shutdowns could stop sports from coming back at full force in America.  The NBA went full bore on its bubble idea, essentially imprisoning 22 teams in a Disney resort with no apparent ill effects other than one player quarantined for flying to a strip club, another thrown out for an alleged tryst, and Jimmy Butler charging fellow players exorbitant prices for coffee.  Baseball barreled through COVID outbreaks shutting down three entire teams for extended periods of time then making them play a bunch of double headers and every week forcing through bizarre new rule changes like "how about two outs?" and you can do up to four legal "Manfreds" per game.  The NFL is handling the pandemic by virtually ignoring team-wide outbreaks and having coaches wear masks on the sidelines incorrectly.

In this atmosphere, it has become impossible for any sports league to watch other enterprises shoulder their way through common sense public health precautions when there is a pile of money to consider.  This is especially true in college football, where a complete lack of any leadership has led to bizarre ad hoc attempts to continue playing with no plan even as the season has devolved to barnstorming as large swaths of teams test positive and head into quarantine.  For the past several months, university presidents have stood in press conferences sweatily explaining how they plan to keep their campuses and football stadiums safe by installing plastic sheeting and wiping everything with a damp rag while other university administrators are hurriedly stuffing burlap sacks filled with money onto trucks before everyone starts asking too many questions.  How could the Big Ten resist?

The college football season opened with Austin Peay losing largely because the team's entire longsnapping squad was quarantined.  Each week has seen several games cancelled or postponed; the University of Houston, for example, cancelled each of its first five games because of an outbreak on opposing teams.  Some games have begun with fans in the stands. It is impossible to describe how jarring it is to see fans in a college football stadium-- the entire scene makes me feel like game is taking place in a Mad Max wasteland where fans will attempt to shoot crossbows at each other and do motorcycle lance tournaments in the parking lot in order to get each other's stores of potato chips and guzzoline.  But no matter how insane and fucked up things have gotten in this plague-soaked college football season, no one has stopped it.  The teams can cancel, postpone, and nurture virus clusters all they want as long as the checks keep coming from the television networks, which is the only reason any of this is happening.

The Big Ten managed to hold out exactly long enough to see that people will tolerate an absurd level of chaos without stopping the flow of money before announcing a return to football.  It had held through some hilarious demands to play.  My favorite was the convoy of Concerned Football Dads that drove to Rosemont to sort of mill around in the shared parking lot for Big Ten Headquarters and an all you can eat meat restaurant.  The University of Nebraska has been the Big Ten team most loud about its demands to play football.  Nebraska's spiral into full on football derangement has been enjoyable because they have been roughly as successful as Northwestern in the time they've been in the Big Ten, and there are few things funnier than watching In Football Terms, Approximately Northwestern attempt to throw their weight around.  As soon as the Big Ten announced that it would play this season, Nebraska's athletic director who is somehow named "Bill Moos" reacted to the Big Ten giving into their complaints and threats to leave the conference by complaining the Huskers' schedule is too hard.

Northwestern reacted to the announcement with a frankly insane Pat Fitzgerald tweet depicting a generic Northwestern Guy appearing to rise out of Lake Michigan like he is going to lumber through Evanston, get into a three point stance, and tackle Godzilla into a building with a first floor that is a fast causal pasta restaurant.

pic.twitter.com/y5viQaBtWv

— Pat Fitzgerald (@coachfitz51) September 16, 2020

The return of Big Ten football fits in with the country's full on surrender to the pandemic, at a point where governments, companies, and almost any institution is attempting in varied, patchwork ways throughout the country to return to normal even though the virus has never been under control and is now surging back to its earlier peaks because it is costing businesses money to remain shut down and because people are either stir-crazy or have turned into one of many different types of lockdown-marinated maniacs.  A single positive test in the NBA shut down the entire league and every sport in the United States; now entire football teams serve as major disease clusters and are sort of waiting a couple of days before resuming play.  

One of the fascinating things about watching sports is how quickly even the pretenses of leagues taking the pandemic seriously has faded.  Basketball and hockey had their successful bubbles.  Baseball had players spaced out in the dugouts with masks and other precautions such instead of letting pitchers lick their hands and rub the ball up with their spit they were allowed to use a damp rag.  Within weeks, even after several entire teams came down with Covid, these restrictions all faded and teams spent most of the season huddled together in dugouts that have devolved into the same disgusting pits of baseball detritus filled with discarded cups and half-gnawed out sunflower seeds and several inches of accumulated spittle that baseball players are constantly oozing. 

Football leagues on both the college and pro level have never even seemed to vaguely give a shit and it is almost refreshing.  I can imagine it going the other way, NFL teams deciding that they are going to show America how they can conquer Covid by having coaches dressed in clean suits designed by the United States Armed Forces or have them coaching in Microsoft Surface War Rooms-- I'm right now imagining a coach being rolled out to midfield in a bubble by a phalanx of assistants wearing team polos so the coach can excoriate a referee while bouncing menacingly-- but instead the coaches are all chin-masked, dick-nosed oafs who occasionally deign to mask up while making notes on their cards but immediately remove them when it is time to yell at a player or an official and more effectively spray them down with mouth particles like they are firing a biological weapon in a custom Doom map where Will Muschamp battles demons from hell by yelling at them for lollygagging.

It is customary on this blog to suggest that it is insane under most circumstances to let Northwestern play football.  In this case, though, it is a bunch of people who dress in scholarly robes and regalia while puffing on pipes in wood-paneled rooms lined with books from which they do nothing but send fundraising e-mails who have completely lost their minds and are attempting to play football in the middle of a pandemic so that the Big Ten Network can show me commercials about copper-wired girdles, and I admit have no idea how to approach this season.   

After all, this season was supposed to mark a new chapter in Northwestern football.  The Wildcats have Mike Bajakian, the long-coveted new offensive coordinator who had been brought in specifically to stop them from playing the sort of West Champion toilet football that fans have come to expect and even demand.  Northwestern also has a new quarterback, Indiana transfer Peyton Ramsey, who may throw the football after a litany of injuries last season left former offensive coordinator Mick McCall running the sort of wedge formations that would immediately be condemned by Teddy Roosevelt.  Instead of shrinking to six wins and a berth in the Here Under Protest is Beef Burgers Bowl, we could expect the Wildcats with a daring offense to win up to seven games and a berth in the Dolecoins The Cryptocurrency Inspired by Bob Dole Bowl.

Recently, the Athletic posted a delightful oral history of the 54-51 game where Northwestern beat Michigan, the "basketball on grass" game that helped legitimize the novel spread offense and usher in a new era of offense in college football.  For many years, that was Northwestern-- the spread team that outscored traditional Big Ten teams and then held on for dear life.  That has not been Pat Fitzgerald's Northwestern, who for the past decade have run an offense reminiscent of a semi-effectual World War I tank.  But while Northwestern football has been somewhat excruciating to watch even as the team has racked up wins, I can't help but to have adopted a sort of perverse appreciation for a program willing to disgust and repel any other team dragged into its grasp.  The fact that Northwestern somehow won nearly every game 17-14 has become, for me, a charming bit.  Opposing fans cower in fear from Northwestern not because they worry about losing but because they will have to watch a game with Northwestern in it, a dreary festival of punts and turnovers and the echoing cackle of The Wildcat Sound Effect yowling in ecstasy with every pass thrown directly into the grass.  This is what is at stake if Northwestern somehow discovers the use of the forward pass. 

They shouldn't play football this season.  You know it, I know it, and the people being paid to not know it know it.  No one is even bothering to pretend anymore-- the players have returned to campuses with empty classrooms so that they can fulfill a contract for television programming.  Every year, teams play in dozens of bowl games in front of several dozen people and a top hat guy who is impossibly converting the money from organizing the RodentAway Gopher Assassin Bowl to make make yacht payments so that ESPN has something to put on televisions that flicker in lonely bars on December afternoons.  Now players are being carted into empty stadiums or those otherwise dotted by pockets of maniacs for whom no risk is greater than the pleasure of screaming DEFENSE for the mission of generating TV content without the load-bearing tradition, pageantry, and drunken buffoonery that make the entire sport seem like something more than what it is.  

I have no idea how to approach this season or how to write about something that I don't think should be happening.  For a long time people wondered why Northwestern continued to play in the Big Ten as they sustained years of failure and losing and teams that got blocked through stadium doors and taken through tours of various Big Ten towns in their autumnal splendor before being deposited on a bus and taken home but they kept on doing it year after year; the school wanted to remain in the Big Ten badly enough to endure weekly butt-kickings until they finally could build a program that could reliably frustrate Iowa.  Playing this season under these circumstances, perhaps the people in charge of Northwestern football could ask themselves if it's worth it.   

I am not a Sadist but Clayton Kershaw Getting Lit Up in the Playoffs is Baseball’s Most Endearing Recurring Bit

There is a certain way that Joe Buck says the words “and taking the mound for the Dodgers, Clayton Kershaw” joebuckishly that has become one of the most eerie sounds in baseball, a chilling declaration that is like the phone call whispering “seven days” to the people in The Ring who are normally going about their day until a nightgown ghost lady crawls from their television to tear them apart.

Kershaw is one of the best pitchers we’ve ever seen; there’s a case to be made that he is the greatest pitcher of all time. And yet when the playoffs roll around, Kershaw at some point goes onto the mound and serves up a barrage of hits or a home run at the worst time and then slinks off to the dugout where TV cameras isolate on his anguished face for the rest of the game while Joe Buck says “you just hate to see that” but obviously we don’t because there will be approximately 5-10 minutes of footage during the rest of the game of Kershaw staring off into the distance alone in a dugout strewn with discarded gatorade cups and spit up sunflower seed shells.

The disparities between Kershaw’s playoff and regular-season statistics are glaring. In 2,330 regular-season innings, Kershaw has an astonishing 2.46 ERA. In 177.1 playoff innings, he sports a 4.31. His average of .7 home runs per nine innings in the regular season doubles to 1.4 in the postseason. And it is not that Kershaw is consistently terrible-- he has pitched absolute gems in the postseason-- but it is precisely because he is so otherworldly good that he tends to pitch in the biggest moments, and because of that burden he appears to have trapped himself in a psychological prison where his inner torment is annually on display for an audience of millions.

Kershaw’s predicament is not entirely of his own making. Baseball’s cruel scoring system has left Kershaw responsible for baserunners that his bullpen mates invariably let in. He has spent the last several years fighting off recurring back injuries to the point where it is not clear how healthy he is in the postseason (he only started Game 4 this season after missing several starts because of back pain). Kershaw has lost World Series games two years in a row to teams brazenly cheating: the 2018 Boston Red Sox, and the 2017 Houston Astros who we later learned spent the entire season beguiling pitchers by hitting garbage cans with a stick.

Last night, Kershaw got outdueled by a person named “Bryse” who looks he could be Mitch Williams’s rowdy son who travels the country with his father trashing golf course pro shops after shooting fireworks at driving range balls retrieval cart and threatening to blast other golfers with “fart fireballs.”

There is a haunting pathos to those shots of Kershaw, but also, if I am being honest here, a strange sort of comedy. Kershaw reminds me of a straight man in a Three Stooges short who has unwittingly hired the Three Oafs Caterin’ Company for his swanky affair where he must impress the wealthy dowager on The Board, and while everyone watching knows what mayhem lurks around the corner it is the straight man’s job to pretend nothing is wrong and to be confounded and horrified when the pies invariably start flying. 

Kershaw, normally a stoic figure on the mound, has adopted a series of theatrical expressions for when things go awry. Consider his most painful collapse, when manager Dave Roberts inexplicably and I would say almost cruelly put him into the decisive Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS in the eighth inning with the Dodgers clinging to a 3-1 lead. Kershaw gave up a home run to Anthony Rendon then the game-tying shot to Juan Soto on the next pitch. He whirls around, his mouth agape. He wears an almost vaudevillian expression, the type of face you might see a professional wrestler make when they play a theme song that belongs to a rival professional wrestler. He looks like a Punch Out character who has been hit in the stomach. 

Kershaw has become a hobgoblin to the broader analytics community. Year after year they point to his ludicrous numbers and point out the weird sample size from the playoffs and fight against the Kershaw playoff narrative and every year Kershaw ends up blowing up in their face and sports radio caller maniacs who scream about how he is a choker while weaving through three lanes of traffic bellowing that he should be traded end up being convinced they are right, and while that itself is not funny the idea of spreadsheets enthusiasts who have helped mathematically prove that it is not smart baseball for delightful wiry mustache guys to drag bunt and recklessly steal bases and it is far more efficient for people with no visible neck to either walk or hit a home run or strike out or foul 75 consecutive pitches off of a bearded 6 foot 7 person named Brantley or Trantley who throws 97 with movement get frustrated every season while a doofus who has been screaming to Earl The Maniac’s Sports Zoo about how Clayton Kershaw should be sent to a maximum-security space jail while doing doughnuts in the parking lot of a protractor factory is at the very least, kind of amusing.

Baseball is innately cruel. There is so much baseball every year, and a team that dominates for  162 games only earns the right to have a bad week and get eliminated in an increasing number of playoff rounds that commissioner Rob Manfred would like to keep adding for teams that come in second in the division or win one of dozens of Wild Card berths or manage to get in by solving the beguiling Riddle of Manfred. There are few worse positions to be in as a team or a fan than an overwhelming favorite baseball team entering a crapshoot postseason where a few rough outings or a hot opponent or a manager who has ingested several hallucinogens and had visions of Tony La Russa before the game can fuck the whole thing up and invalidate months and months and months of grueling baseball. For a team with World Series expectations like the Dodgers, the baseball playoffs are not an emotional climax to the season but feel more like being hunted for sport. 

The fact that Kershaw pitches for the Dodgers also does not help. The Dodgers boast one of the very few ownership groups willing to spend money on good baseball players, a model front office, and a propensity for unearthing discarded players who either are refrigerator-shaped guys who put on a blue hat and discover effortless 30 home run power or pitchers who throw an easy hundred. This offseason, they added to the best team in the National League Mookie Betts, a former AL MVP who might be the second-best player in the entire sport because the Red Sox did not want to pay him. The fact that the Dodgers keep getting better almost every year winning absurd numbers of regular season games (a near-record 106 in 2019, a league-high 43 in this shortened season) only to continually to fall short of a World Series victory is also funny in the same way that it is funny to watch Wile E. Coyote purchase faster and more elaborate ACME equipment only to end up under the same rock in an accordion shape, but I imagine Dodgers fans find this less enjoyable.

The brutal cycle of playoff futility certainly is no fun for Kershaw, who inevitably looks shocked and wrung out. It is not particularly pleasant to watch Kershaw suffering again and again on that bench, certain that he has let down his teammates, despondent that he will once again not achieve the one thing in baseball he has not accomplished, and aware that as he sits there a million internet goofs are photoshopping his head onto unflattering objects. Who knows at what point the repeated meltdowns have snowballed psychologically, creating almost an expectation in the back of his mind that this could happen and opening the door to it in an ouroboros of baseball failure. 

And yet there is something strange and almost soothing about bizarre, recurring sports phenomena. One appeal of sports is the unexpected, some team triumphing over seemingly-impossible odds, a previously unheralded player doing something special. And yet, there is also the delight of something happening a few times, becoming a cliché or, in 2020 terms, a meme, and then actually happening. The English national soccer team does not always lose in a penalty shootout, but it is enjoyable when it happens. The Minnesota Vikings do not always lose with a painful missed field goal (sometimes they lose on an egregious Brett Favre interception) but you can bet that each time they do it factors into the Lineage of Painful Missed Viking Field Goals. And while it is not particularly fun for me to watch generations of incredible Bears defenses attempt to win games because every single quarterback they try ends up going 17/28 for 176 yards and 2 interceptions, I can admit that in a way it is kind of satisfying and hints at some sort of order to the universe. 

As of this writing, the Dodgers are down 3-1. They can still come back and win the NLCS and even the World Series. Clayton Kershaw may have a couple of heroic performances in him that he deserves, and he could finally lift that trophy and then drive over to my house and bash me over the head with it like I richly deserve. But if the Dodgers end up going out like this, another wasted postseason, another inexplicably premature loss for baseball’s best team, then I appreciate that Kershaw went out there and confoundingly coughed up a lead. In a year of upheaval, at least one thing remained dependable.