ESPN Has Been Very Unfair To Me About the Rece Davises

It takes a certain kind of courage to look at the state of college football, which is hanging on a thread as every team rotates turning their teams into mobile disease distribution units, and stand in front of the cameras to denounce Joey Galloway for a mild football insult, as Pat Fitzgerald did after the Wildcats' enormous win over Wisconsin last Saturday.  We're starting there because this is the funniest thing to happen with Northwestern football in this blighted season other than the fact that it has won multiple football games.  Earlier, before the game, Galloway had described Northwestern as a "bunch of Rece Davises."  Fitzgerald took exception to that after the game and called the team the "Fightin' Rece Davises" while cutting a promo on Joey Galloway as a bunch of Northwestern players whooped out the name "Rece Davis" in triumph.  Northwestern's official twitter account temporarily changed its name to the "Fightin' Rece Davises."  This is so deliriously dumb that I have not been able to stop thinking about it all week.

The funniest part of this feud is the invocation of the words "Rece Davis" as an unutterable football insult.  Rece Davis is, of course, the generic sportscaster host of ESPN's College Gameday pregame programming.  The way that Fitzgerald took it is that Galloway was insulting the team's athleticism but instead of just saying something normal like that, he invoked the dreaded Rece Davis and now has made that name into a staggering and apparently inexcusable football epithet.  After the game, Fitzgerald characterized Galloway's statements, which, I repeat, were him referring to the Northwestern team as "Rece Davises" as "incredibly disrespectful."  How would you feel if I referred to you or your loved ones as a "Rece Davis" is something Pat Fitzgerald did not ask but it merits consideration.  

Coach R---- and Coach M---- meet after one has called the other a R---e D---s

 

 

I have e-mailed ESPN's PR department asking for a comment from Rece Davis about his name becoming an egregious football insult and I will update if I hear back from him on this matter as well as if he prefers the plural of his name to be styled Rece Davises or Reces Davis.

This is not even the first time Fitzgerald has gotten all red-assed about an ESPN commentator.  You may recall that after the 2016 Pinstripe Bowl, Fitzgerald got on the microphone immediately after the game to denounce then-ESPN personality Danny Kanell because Kanell had used all of his 40 "confidence points" on Pittsburgh defeating a Northwestern team that had barely squeaked into bowl eligibility because they lost to FCS Illinois State at home 7-6. Kanell was doing one of those pointless time-filling ESPN shows about bowl games no one cares about because the ratings for these ill-attended, barely-watched games is somehow worth gazillions of dollars. I don't blame Fitzgerald or any coach who trawls for Insults and Adversity the way that large whales feed themselves by straining the water for barely-visible bits of kelp and protozoans, but it is also extremely amusing watching Fitz huff and puff and toot like a cartoon steamwhistle at these vacuous talking heads; it behooves everyone at Northwestern athletics and ESPN to immediately get Stephen A. Smith to say something vaguely unflattering about Northwestern football.

Fitzgerald could get all riled up at Joey Galloway because Northwestern defeated Wisconsin 17-7.  The Wildcats remain unbeaten, they have beaten the toughest team on their schedule, and seem almost certain to have clinched a berth in the Big Ten Championship game against Ohio State.  The victory over Wisconsin is now moot; the Badgers will miss Saturday's Axe Game against Minnesota because of a Covid outbreak on Minnesota's team, and Wisconsin is now ineligible to play in the Big Ten Championship Game.  If Wisconsin had won, Northwestern would still be likely to head to Indianapolis, but at least this way Badger fans will not completely lose their minds and express themselves in what I assume is a new Big Ten tradition of driving down to Rosemont and screaming at a Meat Restaurant, and while I am glad Northwestern won, we have to admit that this scenario is funnier.

The Wildcats won an ugly, near-unwatchable game with smothering defense, turnovers, and just enough points, which has become their signature style.  They forced five turnovers, including two more interceptions for ball-hawking prodigy Brandon Joseph, they ran for 24 yards; the third quarter consisted of nine consecutive punts from both teams.

Northwestern's win fits with a general carnival atmosphere in the Big Ten this season.  In a world where college football should not be played and this season represents the most deranged capitulation to advertising money in a sport that is entirely an advertising money racket, the Big Ten has delivered its funniest and most satisfying season in years.  Historical doormats like Northwestern and Indiana have surged.  Traditional powers like Michigan and Penn State have gone completely to shit, and not in the annoying way where they win eight or nine games and all of the fans melt down about it, but they are legitimately awful teams who stink.  Michigan needed a Jim Harbaugh jaw-grinding triple-overtime victory over Rutgers to get their second win.  Penn State hasn't beaten anyone, literally.  Nebraska continued to exist as the Big Ten punching bag when they got annihilated by Illinois and then brutally tweeted-upon.  Only Ohio State remains grimly inevitable, the only thing stopping the American people from what we all deserve: a Big Ten Championship Game between Northwestern and Indiana.

The Wildcats have three remaining games against relatively bad teams Michigan State, Minnesota, and Illinois.  At this point, because of Wisconsin's disqualification from the Championship Game, they need only one victory to clinch the West.  Everyone is acting like this is a fait accompli, but anyone who has ever rooted for Northwestern knows that they are capable of getting upset at any time; two years ago when they won the Big Ten West in a year where no team was disqualified for contracting an extremely contagious airborne virus, Northwestern lost to an Akron team that had never beaten a Big Ten team in a streak dating back to the nineteenth century.  And when a team plays a style that involves scoring exactly as many points as they need to win, it seems like other teams have a tremendous opportunity to get an upset.  Northwestern fans are aware that you can never take any Big Ten team lightly from the experience of supporting a Big Ten team that has consistently won at least one game a year that gets other teams very mad.

I have been getting through this season by treating Northwestern's continued success as a punishment for the college football world.  As they continue to dangerously push forward with games, I have argued that the outcome they deserve is more Northwestern football, a team nobody wants to watch playing an aesthetically hideous form of bludgeoning football, continuing to roll through a season that shouldn't be happening.  But this is all a dodge.  I'm railing against college football on this blog while watching every Northwestern game, cheering the results, and continuing to write about it.  To accept college football at some level means accepting a place that values the opinions of the Playoff Committee who continues to meet in person for the vital purpose of making a list that is literally unnecessary until the final week of the season, even if I just want to watch Northwestern gradually beat Michigan State for three and a half hours Saturday.  It's Dabo Sweeneys all the way down.

But despite the ugliness inherent in college football this season, there is one thing I hope to avoid and that is a team being referred to as "Rece Davises" twice.

The Big Ten Copes with Its Disaster Scenario (3-0 Northwestern)

The college football conferences have heedlessly decided to go through with football despite a pandemic that has never been even close to under control, teams figured that they could invent fantastical safety protocols, do some rudimentary testing, and otherwise pretend that a pandemic was not happening so they could sell television commercials and fundraise from people named Ernest "Dip" Trebuchet III heir to the stick on googly eyes fortune who has a direct line to the university president and has been threatening to come right down there in his town car with googly headlights and kick the offensive coordinator right in the behind.  They were obviously prepared to accept that hundreds, if not thousands of players would get sick and spread the disease around college towns and that fans would create superspreader events in the stands and at watch parties and in bars.  But what no one in college football could have possibly anticipated or they would have stopped the whole thing is that undefeated Northwestern and Purdue are playing the most pivotal Big Ten game this week for control of the West division.  It didn't have to be this way.

Here, from CBS.com, is a list of games canceled just this weekend

 

Northwestern football has been good this season and my initial reaction was oh no.  In their first game against Maryland, the Wildcats came on and wiped the Terrapins from the face of the earth, a world-historical butt kicking that they haven't done to a Big Ten team in literally a half a century.  This looked like it could be the year that the bruising defense melded with a competent offense to finally reveal a team that did not necessarily have to win hideous games by turning the field into a toilet and it was happening during a season that by all accounts should not be happening.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and Northwestern returned to winning games in the delightfully grunt-laden, artless ways they tend to win games against Iowa and Nebraska.  Here, Pat Fitzgerald decides sometime after Northwestern goes up by between 1-3 points that he has seen enough and calls the rest of the game; the rest of the results can roll in with a series of punts and turnovers and then the whole thing ends with the opposing team holding a press conference and citing irregularities in the offensive holding calls in front of an interstate landscaping concern.

While it is always satisfying for Northwestern to beat Iowa in the most perfunctory and frustrating way possible, the real prize has been a win over Nebraska.  The Cornhuskers have spent the entire football offseason being a tremendous pain in the ass.  University administrators and head coach Scott Frost went berserk when the Big Ten initially canceled football, threatened to secede from the conference and wander the Earth demanding people play them in football, accused Wisconsin of ducking them when the entire Badger team came down with Covid, tried to illegally schedule a game against an FCS opponent, and just generally acted like Nebraska football was some sort of crucial Grain Belt infrastructure and not a deeply embarrassing football team that has spent its entire time in the Big Ten struggling and failing to be better than Northwestern, a team that most college football fans baely remember exists.  For all of their hollering and whining, Nebraska is winless after getting sat on by Ohio State and Northwesterned by Northwestern.  

As enjoyable as it is for Nebraska fans to have stormed Big Ten headquarters demanding to get their asses kicked like an army of Arties Fufkin, it seems unlikely if not impossible that the irony of this situation is apparent to anyone in charge of Nebraska.  Though Nebraska has been walking around the Big Ten like Yosemite Sam firing pistols at the ground so they can levitate over the floor at a meat restaurant and demand that someone beat them in football, no one else in the Big Ten seems to mind putting their teams out there week after week so they can rake in the Big Ten Network advertising dollars from the company that makes giant glasses that fit over regular glasses.  Nebraska may have been the most ridiculous Big Ten team, but we all live in Nebraska World, letting the Huskers go out and get humiliated while Big Ten university presidents quietly rake in the same cash.  It is just as stupid for Northwestern to be out there as anyone else and the only difference is that for once it appears that Pat Fitzgerald has managed to stay relatively quiet because the mask is a pre-war technology that he can accept instead of a cursed Electronic Email App.

Northwestern is 3-0.  They could win the West.  Or they could be shut down at any point because of a Covid infection as the entire Chicagoland area is once again engulfed by the pandemic.  It is not a football season but a matter of attrition.  No one has any plan.  The entire edifice of college football is a billion-dollar media concern that claims to have the resources to be able to manage this but are in reality a coterie of clumsy mustache guys desperately trying to keep a bunch of plates spinning for as long as they can for their associates to grab the money and get on the next train out of town.  They can stop this at any time and nothing, not a pandemic, nor the threat of Northwestern in a potential title game against a Covid-ridden Ohio State starting Brutus Buckeye at linebacker who gets repeatedly penalized for targeting because the head takes up 27 percent of its entire being seems to be able to bring this to a halt.

SUSPICIOUS CIRCLES

I do not know if it is depressing or almost reassuring in this moment of political crisis to read enormous books about how odious and fucked up American politics have always been.  Over the summer, I spent a considerable amount of time with The Invisible Bridge, Rick Perlstein's account of the 1976 presidential primaries and rise of Ronald Reagan.  Perlstein specializes in the rise of the far right staring with the Barry Goldwater movement in 1964 and is popular history's master of the political grotesque.  The Invisble Bridge traces the fallout from Watergate, the bitter end of the Vietnam War, and the continued hardening of ideological lines and parallel realities and how all of this festered in an America that barely seemed capable of being held together.  

Perlstein is not interested in scouring archives for novel documents or applying overarching theory to his work.  Instead, he is interested in recreating, almost curating, a selection of the inane, bizarre, disturbing, and familiar events that occur during the scope of his book.  Reading a Perlstein book sometimes feels like getting strapped into the Clockwork Orange Eyeball Device as a series of events everyone knows from living through or the preserved in the popular imagination co-mingle with forgotten campaign ephemera until it all blends together in a slurry.  It is, I think, an attempt to make sense of a political era by reproducing in miniature the confusing chaos of politics in the mass media age that upends pat attempts to characterize the era.  For example, one of Perlstein's favorite themes was that after Watergate, a substantial number of people were not scandalized or upset by Nixon's actions, and while the sophisticates in Washington knowingly smirked at Reagan for refusing to criticize or attack Nixon, he actually brilliantly courted a growing movement so awash in anger and grievance that Watergate had nothing on the horrors that they believed liberal politicians were unleashing on their communities, and they were poised to take over the Republican party and eventually the country.

The Invisible Bridge, like Nixonland, weaves a psychological biography of its main character into the contemporary accounts.  Perlstein's Reagan comes across as a striver from a poor, almost itinerant family headed by a drunk, abusive father.  Reagan, fueled by novels about heroic characters, invents himself as an athlete and a big man on campus, remembered by his classmates either as a shimmering golden boy or an obnoxious braggart who, for example, never tired of telling stories about his daring lifeguard rescues on the Rock River even if embellished or made them up.  And while Perlstein's Nixon reflected a sort of disgruntled, flop-sweated striving against the elites that connected with a group of people sick of intellectuals and entertainers and swells telling them what was best for them, Reagan offered something different-- an actor, yes, but one knocking around in talking ape pictures, a smooth folksy broadcaster who lent the right's cultural grievances a touch of homespun common sense and effortless charm; in short, Reagan was able to channel the burbling rage against the Great Society and civil rights and the anti-war movement and those freaks and eggheads on TV without coming across like a total maniac. He had the great advantage of appearing as someone none of his opponents thought to take seriously until it was too late.

No politician comes across particularly well in Perlstein's books-- even the most well-meaning do-gooders are chained to mass media optics, and their ambition in Perlstein's view warps their actions-- and he suggests that is impossible to attain any sort of office without indulging in hypocrisies that demean everyone.  He paints surprise phenomenon Jimmy Carter as a dissembler willing to say or do anything to come across as the straightforward, honest governor designed to appeal to what Perlstein dubs the "suspicious circles" of people disillusioned by Watergate (Perlstein loves these kinds of phrases to label groups).  Perlstein does display a modicum of sympathy for Gerald Ford only because he found himself in an impossible position of running against Reagan, who deploys the proven and virtually unstoppable campaign strategy of just lying constantly and making shit up that proves his followers' points while Ford's people spend all of their time fruitlessly fact-checking long after anyone remembers or cares.  Perlstein also points out a weird phenomenon where the Saturday Night Live caricature of Ford as a bumbling doofus also somehow manifests itself into reality as Ford, seemingly out of nowhere, starts stumbling and bonking his head into things in front of cameras as if he developed a yips condition for moving his limbs.  In the end, Ford and the more mainstream Republicans barely clung to the 1976 nomination, but they lost the war; the party's enthusiasm and energy belonged to Reagan.

Perlstein frames the book with several recurring incidents that feed into the culture war: the return of POWs, the Patty Hearst trial, Watergate hearings, the movement to ban textbooks.  He also has an eye for perfectly absurd details, sometimes too good to be true (for example, Perlstein mentions that in Cleveland's Ten Cent Beer Night riot, fans wielded ninja-style throwing stars.  When I went to his website where he keeps his footnote, the link was to a wikipedia page that made no mention of throwing stars, nor did any of the articles in the page's footnotes.  A search for ten cent beer night and ninja stars only found two hits and both were extremely 2011 epic wacky history blogs that barely functioned, much like bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com).  Perlstein uses sources to emphasize the sense of threat, chaos, and a broken country that was, if not ubiquitous, certainly available to Americans in the mid-70s, where the people of the United States seemed united in disgust, fear, and cynicism except directed in very different directions.

I will get to the bottom of how many people on ten cent beer night had Ninja Weapons

 

In any sort of book like this, there is the overwhelming temptation to look for contemporary resonance. Perlstein himself hates this, especially when people tweet him about it.  But Perlstein is himself a person writing in the twenty-first century; it is impossible for me to believe that his understanding of the rise of Reagan is not informed by the Tea Party movement growing as he wrote (the book was released in 2014).  More importantly, though, it is not really necessary for Perlstein to wink to any sorts of contemporary arguments in this book because he does not need to.  The movement he has been writing about remains aggrieved about largely the same things; the arguments are not inert but shift between parties, areas and groups of people (Reagan successfully brought in the Evangelical movement as a bedrock), and the use of novel communications technology to organize while being underestimated by rivals on all political spectrums remains a constant.  We all live in Rick Perlstein's world all of the time.