All week long the football pundits were screeching about the twisted hideousness of an Iowa-Minnesota matchup. Look at this disgusting freak football, they all said about a Peak Big Ten West game where everyone expected the teams to spit and blow their noses on the football for three downs before forcing the other team to handle it. And they were right. The 12-10 affair won by Minnesota on a controversial Illegal Punt Gestures penalty was a gruesome mess that no one but the most deranged midwesterners huffing pork intestine fumes could watch for extended periods without intense vomiting. But that was a game with actual stakes and intrigue with Iowa vying to lock down the division. Further down the dial on Big Ten Network Regional Action and, presumably, the only game available for inmates in the Face/Off Magnet Shoe prison for psychological reasons, was the deranged anti-football available between perpetual football ruiners Northwestern and Nebraska.
A football fan settles in with to watch the afternoon slate with his beloved pet bees but has just learned the only games available on TV feature Big Ten West teams
I assume anyone who is deep enough down the Northwestern rabbit hole that they are not just reading normal internet football stuff but have found themselves on a blogspot web page that is now mainly a repository for experimental coach-related fan-fictions is also a person sick enough to have watched an entire Northwestern-Nebraska game, but I am going to recap the first few drives anyway because only by explaining them to other people can I convince myself that what I saw actually happened and was not some sort of AI rendering of the prompt "Northwestern and Nebraska play a game that gets football banned in the United States."
Nebraska's quarterback, on the very first play of the game, throws a ridiculous interception directly to a Northwestern defender. Northwestern gets the ball and moves backwards then punts. Nebraska gains three yard and punts. Northwestern gains five yards and punts. Nebraska's quarterback then throws another interception in the Huskers' own ten yard line. Northwestern loses 14 yards and kicks a field goal. Emergency medical teams in the stadium report dozens of people are succumbing to Punt Madness. The Big Ten attempts to intervene to force the teams to move the ball, but the sadistic Nebraska governor mobilizes the national guard to stop them. A Nebraska fan is arrested outside the stadium for completing a pass during a tailgate. Only a Nebraska touchdown late in the first half prevents a wide-scale riot as anxious Nebraska fans prepared to leave the stadium en masse and run the option all over Lincoln. "These are the eventualities that you have to prepare for and execute at," Northwestern coach David Braun said at the half.
If you look at this you will get a call that says Seven Days and then a spooky woman will crawl out of your television and run for a -2 yards.
Northwestern was unable to regain the lead and eventually scored another touchdown to ice the lead. The Wildcats never managed to find the endzone. The loss probably ends the team's unlikely quest for bowl eligibility because it is very difficult to imagine them playing a Big Ten team worse than Nebraska that spent the entire first half sending strongly worded telegrams to the Northwestern sideline all but demanding that the 'Cats take an enormous lead. But it is still possible. The team is slowly regaining its identity as a pain-in-the-ass defense that can make it very difficult to score without an effective passing game, and they play in the Big Ten West: Home of the Oaf Quarterback. They no longer look like the worst major-conference team in college football but merely a recent-vintage Northwestern team enjoying its final year rolling around in the garbage with its lumbering midwestern peers.
Unfortunately, they do not face a lummoxing punt factory team this week. Maryland is 5-2 this season, and averages about 33 points per game. They are, however, coming off two losses-- one to Ohio State and one to fellow Big Ten West slopsmen Illinois, but are also coming off a bye. Maryland, like all Big Ten teams is heavily favored against the Wildcats. Autumn has finally descended upon Chicagoland, and a nasty, blustery, and gray day will match the general vibes of Ryan Field. I received an email from Northwestern offering a "flash sale" on tickets earlier this week, so I assume there will be approximately seventeen people in the stands forcing Northwestern on crucial downs to rally its army of tarps. This might be the least-anticipated football game played today.
MICHIGAN SKULDUGGERY UPDATE
Last week, the college football world met Michigan Intelligence Asset Connor Stalions, who allegedly masterminded an elaborate sign-stealing operation by sending his network of agents out to various Big Ten stadiums to record opponents' sideline signals. We have learned more this week. Stalions is, according to reporting, the author of a strange Manifesto about Michigan football, which is something I cannot really make fun of because what you are reading on this blog is equally embarrassing. The NCAA, ridiculed and stripped of almost all meaningful power, is rallying around its ability to investigate an actual Football Crime and as we speak Stalions' network of Joes and Lamplighters is getting rolled up while the association takes aim at its nemesis Jim Harbaugh. This, at last, is a perfect NCAA football scandal where everyone involved seems to be a nincompoop and the results only affect football games and undermines Michigan's self-described Football Paladin reputation while its fans begin going rogue by making right turns on red lights or ringing up organic produce as normal produce in the self-checkout aisle.
Stalions and his agents, adorned in this cloak, were able to roam the sidelines undetected at eleven Big Ten stadiums.
Last week, I asked readers to submit their own Airport Thriller paragraphs about Connor Stalions. I'd like to thank everyone who wrote in, and here are their contributions, each of which I have titled.
Codes Blue, by noahcoffman22:
Ask anybody in Ann Arbor about Connor Stalions, and one of the first things they'll tell you is that he's a man with a code. Right now, he has several of them, actually, burning up the inside pocket of his vintage leather jacket as he hightails it out of Piscataway. His Harley squeals into a sharp left toward the New Jersey Turnpike, discarded milk bottle (a present from "Big Jim" himself) clinking away behind him. Slowly, he allows a smile to creep across his grizzled visage. Cupping his custom earpiece, he mutters the only two words he needs for the man on the other end to know the job has been done: "signs.....stolen."
Ooooo RAWR RAWR RAWR by Kermit Van Jensen
A naked bootleg is not unlike an amphibious landing. An operation drunk with stupid courage, yet critically reliant on tactical deftness. Any Marine, no matter how hard-headed, knows no feat of bravery can save a botched landing. A forewarned defensive battalion will massacre an amphibious force left with nowhere to run.
This thought repulsed Stalions, who now envisaged himself holed up in a pillbox, directing perfectly sighted fire on his hapless brothers in arms.
He shut his eyes, hard, and briefly pulled the binoculars away from his face.
What he did see was a grad assistant in neon green wildly flailing both of his arms from a proud kneel.
“This shit makes me sick,” he muttered to himself, referring not only to Northwestern’s offense, but also his own betrayal of the Corps’ values.
“Semper Fi … Go Blue,” he sneered with sardonic cadence.
“Doesn’t mean nothing to a grunt like me”
The Spider Weaves Its Own Web: A Connor Stalions Novel by Joshua L.
“You’re a long way from the Big 10,” Kiffin chuckled softly, almost wryly.
Under other circumstances it might not have been an unfriendly sound, but here—with a sixth consecutive Jaxson Dart bubble screen throw headed directly toward Connor Stalions’s already bruised eight pack abs—it was the very chorus of evil. “You wanted a look at our playbook, Mr. Stalions,” the Ole Miss coach whispered from underneath his signature white visor before leaning close to look directly into the flint-gray eyes of Stalions, who remained bound firmly to the tackle dummy.
“Well, you got it. Jaxson! bubble screen, strong side, hut!”
Stalions had trained for this. Bracing his abdominals for impact, he began working the razor edge of Kiffin’s laminated play sheet, which he’d lifted from the coach’s windbreaker just moments before, against his bonds. Harbaugh had to know what Stalions had seen in Oxford. The world had to know.
Day of the Jackal 2: Different Day, Different Jackal by Anonymous
Ryan Day laughed.
Operation Cheeseburger failed to turn public support against the Enemy, but this would achieve that aim. Deep Punt had come through with the needed intel. Now he just needed to get to the drop site undetected and RonEnglishFanJS09 would finish the mission.
He knew that Stallions had cracked his publicly exposed signaling network like the Allies had deciphered the Enigma Machine. That must be the only reason they experienced setbacks; not their inability to block Aidan Hutchinson. Now he would rectify this.
Day knew that when Mike Leach’s network was compromised, he arranged an elaborate ruse to exploit his enemy’s assumed faulty intel. But the rogue pirate’s tradecraft was flawed. Don’t plant false information to use against the opposition. Complain to the teacher instead!
He reached the spot. Glancing around nonchalantly, Day reached into the back of his pants and pulled out the laminated A0 play-card and finished the dead drop. “Who is born on third base now?” he muttered as he walked into the cold night.
LOCK IN SUCCESS THE MIKE LOCKSLEY WAY
And when it ended, all Mike Locksley wanted from me was an explanation. I told him I was desperate and that I needed money. More than that, I wanted a shot-- I spent all day answering calls and turning people down on my boss's behalf as they tried to throw money and plaudits at him, but no one ever called and asked for me. He told me this was not a road to success the Mike Locksley way. I know, I said. I had read all about it in his papers.
I had been working as the assistant for legendary sports personality ghostwriter Roddy Pfampfor about eight months. My novel, an experimental work about hypotheticals and the objectivity of "truth" that I explored by writing about something happening and then writing "or did it?" right after or sometimes in a footnote, had been rejected by 71 small presses, journals, quarterlies, websites and even some 'zines, and I had just been fired from a job proofreading manifestos. I got the job with Pfamp after seeing a bizarre ad for a "Literary Fetchman" in the print shop where I was picking up another copy of my manuscript that I was going to send to a publisher that specialized in vintage microwave owner's manuals. I learned that I was the only one who answered that ad, and soon I found myself at the right hand of Roddy Pfamp.
Pfamp was not a household name, but most people encountered him at some point by picking up one of his ghostwritten memoirs. He written hundreds, including The Hat Had It Coming by Lou Piniella, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Literature, and Climbing to the Majors: A Matt Stairs Story. Pfamp was a ghostwriter's ghostwriter, always refusing credit and press. On any occasion where he had to be credited as an "as told to" or even a "with," he always used a different pen name; no one knew that Losing to Win by Matt Millen with Herb Nadacky was by the same author as Winning to Lose by Marv Levy as told to Larry "Gred" Gredsonof. Pfamp also refused to be photographed and wore elaborate disguises every time he met with an author in order to maintain his air of mystery.
Pfamp needed an assistant because he had been seriously injured on his last assignment. No one knew that Pfamp had another secret career as the ghostwriter for the entire literary output of famed sportswriter Warren "Plaid" Blanton. Blanton had been a fixture in the sports press for decades, known for his outrageous participation stunts, his love for an exotic form of Flemish badminton, and his ever-present pipe. What no one knew was that everything under Blanton's byline was actually written by Roddy Pfamp. Blanton never wrote a word of his book Fly Me To The Ground chronicling his attempt to win a home-made flying contraption contest nor did he write the famous prank article where he invented a legendary baseball player named "Mickey Mantle," which bamboozled an entire generation of Baby Boomers. Blanton was a handsome man who sounded vaguely European despite having grown up entirely in the United States and who divided his time between the literary fête circuit and by expounding from his book-lined study in documentaries about boxing, squash, joust injuries. The two had met when the they were covering a varsity squinting competition. Blanton was a young stringer for Cudgel, and the two of them essentially invented the Plaid Blanton persona over a drunken, weeks-long bacchanal that resulted in Pfamp ghostwriting Blanton's first "I Say" column and Blanton purchasing his first ascot.
Pfamp's injury occurred when he was writing a book about Blanton secretly joining the new Slamball revival. What people didn't realize is that Pfamp also silently joined in these stunts, working alongside Blanton as a lion-tamer, monster jam driver, and competitor in the New England Maritime Salty Sea Dog competition. Pfamp felt he needed to join the Slamball league disguised as someone named Titus Slamballicus despite being 77 years old, and he instantly severed 70% of his leg ligaments on his first attempted slam.
It was not particularly fun to work for Roddy Pfamp. I thought he would be full of interesting and colorful stories about the famous sports-men he met, but he was gruff and quick to anger. I'm not sure he ever learned my name. Instead he just called me "egghead" because of the remarkably round and admittedly somewhat bulbous shape of my skull. "You, Egghead, get me the 1959 Almanack of Yachting Winds," is something he might say. Or "How can I get it into your head to get no pulp orange juice? I'm speaking literally, how does anything penetrate that cranium?" I brought up my writing often and even left copies of my manuscript around in areas where he would normally read it but he became so agitated even seeing it that a doctor told me that I had to burn it in front of him or he might suffer from a rare condition common in old, mean writers called Literary Agita.
My main job, aside from helping with the basic household tasks, was dealing with Pfamp's voluminous correspondence. Even in his ailing state, publishers bombarded him with requests. Sports personalities needed memoirs, magazine profiles, and apologies written on the notes app on their phones and posted to social media. I was told to turn them all down. I learned that this was Pfamp's preferred technique. He had not accepted a pitch for decades. Instead, the publishers and editors he preferred to work with and those who knew how to handle him all understood how to find him. Others who didn't know him thought they could win him over with elaborate gestures. One publisher, desperate to sign him onto an untitled Rony Seikaly project, sent over fourteen singing telegrams. Another disguised himself as a meter reader from the city in order to get an audience with Pfamp, who then chased him from his apartment with a game-used Mickey Morandini bat. Others sent elaborate meals, expensive liquor, blank checks. Every day, I sifted through a pile of proposals and sent pointed letters to them on Pfamp's letterhead telling them to buzz off.
I was tired, frustrated, and broke when I found a small packet buried under some papers. While Pfamp rejected all proposals on sight, he still read all of them in the off-chance something special caught his eye and also so he could ridicule the book when it was inevitably published by one of his many ghostwriter rivals. But he had not seen this one. It had gotten lost among his notes for an abandoned project called A Life In Fifteen Shoves by Charles Oakley that ended in a shoving match. The packet held a proposal for a book to be titled Lock In Success, a life advice manual from a fellow named Mike Locksley. The offer was a truly astronomical sum. I began to get an idea.
Because of his elaborate disguise regimen and reclusive personal life, almost no one knew what Roddy Pfamp actually looked like. I could easily present myself to this Locksley, write down his Business Secrets from sports, and produce a book very quickly. The money would allow me to quit this job and tell Pfamp where to cram it while knowing that my giant head had outwitted him and then self-publish my masterpiece and even market it to the discerning literary public at various high society functions. It was a scheme so devious and simple that I chuckled to myself when I first game up with it. I wrote the publisher and told them that Roddy Pfamp accepted and then detailed instructions for payment to his assistant who handles those sorts of things for him as he was too busy to get bogged down in the details of business (unlike Mike Locksley, I presumed).
I figured that Locksley would appreciate a punctual man, but I my planned subterfuge to get several hours away from Pfamp had not worked. He had a difficult time getting his VCR to work and he wanted to watch an old Olympic fencing match from 1984 to heckle the participants, but the tape was old and worn and Pfamp kept telling me I was causing "cranial interference" so by the time I was able to pry myself from him and get to Locksley's hotel room, I was nearly an hour late.
Mike Locksley, I learned, is not a man you want to keep waiting. He is detailed and precise and busy. I knew from previous research that he was a football coach, and that implied to me a certain type of disciplinary fetish. I told him I had been detained by car problems and began inventing an elaborate story about a zoo truck that had unleashed two or three irate rhinoceros on the main highway. "Let me tell you what Nick Saban used to say about excuses," he said. I took it that Nick Saban was some sort of football personality that I should know about. "The minute you give me an excuse, you excuse yourself from consideration." He stared at me and then smiled, so I let out a nervous chuckle as if to say yes that is something Nick Saban would say. "Well you made it here, let's see if we can work together."
He handed me a a sheaf of papers. It was an outline based on some motivational seminars he had been given, some anecdotes, life lessons, etc. that would form the basis of the book. Lock in Success, they were called. There were a lot of football metaphors. This was a problem. Though I worked for a major sportswriter, I had no interest or knowledge of any sort of sport or sporting pursuit. I despised them and saw them as grunting circuses for troglodytes. I had no working knowledge of football whatsoever. I suppose, in my excitement for the scheme, I had not ever considered that ghostwriting for a football coach might at some point require learning about football. Locksley told me to look over the materials and come back in a week with a few samples so we could see if we were on the same page.
On the way home, I started to read. "When life gives you fourth and inches, don't punt." I was lost. I tried to subtly get Pfamp to explain football to me, every time I brought it up he said "You, Egghead. You're blocking the afternoon sun. Move that melon of yours before I freeze." I even tried to research football at the local library, but a quick glance at some books made everything seem even more complicated. The deadline loomed.
It was four AM and I had consumed several bags of coffee at the time (I had lost my coffee pot in an ill-fated night of gambling with my old peers at an experimental writing workshop that I eventually left after exposing them all as charlatans and at this time I was simply chewing the beans). I was set to meet Locksley in only two days. It was impossible to ask for an extension because that would be a dreaded excuse. I began looking at the pages again, my eyes barely able to focus, when I had a brilliant idea, one so simple yet ingenious that I could not believe it did not strike me earlier. I would simply make up football. A parallel system that had its own equally confounding jargon and terminology. Because Locksley was a master coach and technician, the lay reader would only assume he was talking about stratagems so complex and diabolical that he or she could not grasp it and would simply skim through it to get to the valuable life lessons.
I began writing. Now, instead of facing something called fourth and short, which I imagined to be some sort of adverse position, the quartered-back would be cowering in Strife Position (as a writer, I could not simply holster my literary weapons altogether). I assumed one of the appeals of football was its violence and mayhem so I wrote many anecdotes about football players fighting out of dire circumstances by kicking and biting the opposition. In fact, I enjoyed the concept of sports-biting so much that I invented a designated chomper-back, a strong-jawed specialist who would be lowered onto the field in a cage and then left to set upon anyone in his path with savage abandon.
I became so taken with my own version of football that I quickly abandoned Locksley's materials to elaborate on the astonishing game that flowed from my pen. Once every thirteen minutes, the visiting team may legally perform a Reverse Oxen. During the fourteenth period, players may craft artificial limbs to attach to themselves including tails, claws, mandibles, and fins. In certain conditions, the coach can call for the game to take place entirely within a body of water where both teams must attack each other on skiffs. There are times when the ball was illegal but it was only possible to figure it out by deciphering an elaborate riddle. Points are awarded in lengthy arbitration hearings.
I was very excited to present my new vision of football to Locksley. As a discerning sportsman, I figured he would easily see the superior qualities of my version of the sport and become an ardent promoter. This is not what happened. Locksley was perplexed. "This was a very simple assignment. I did almost all of the work. I know people respond to these life lessons packaged with football because I did these presentation to literally thousands of people. It's as if you have no idea what you're doing whatsoever."
I decided to switch tactics. I told him that I ghostwrote for a lot of people in a lot of sports. It would be too easy to get mixed up. For example, what if I was writing a memoir about a tennis player and then a swimmer and pretty soon I had the tennis player doing laps at Roland Garros? He frowned. I explained that in order to clear my head in between projects I practiced a mental technique called "shamanic forgetting" where I would attempt to completely rid myself of all information about one sport. I had just done a baseball book, and had completely cleared it out of my head. "I could not tell you a batsman from a quickjobber," I said. He continued to frown and stare. He said "I'm sorry but you seem like you are really full of shit."
I apologized and confessed to the ruse, telling him of my desperation for money and literary fame. This did not move him. Another excuse. This time he didn't laugh. I was ruined and humiliated. Locksley would get word back to the publisher and, though I controlled most communications with Pfamp from the outside world, the ghostwriting community was a small world, and someone would quickly tell him what I had done. I could not face the browbeating. I simply stopped going to Pfamp's house with no explanation.
Several months later, I was walking past the bookstore when something caught my eye. Lock In Success. Dozens of copies of it in the window. The sign said "best-seller" and "top book for 45 weeks in the Life Advice With Football Metaphors genre. I ran in and grabbed it. In small print, it said "with Reginald Ox." I knew it immediately. It was a Pfamp.
