Bielem It! The Bret Bielema Motivational System

EVANSTON-- Throughout the game, the scoreboard flashed ominous warnings about how anyone who entered the field of play would be captured and thrown into an oubilette, but when the clock hit zero, Northwestern fans were on Ryan Field celebrating a victory over three-win Purdue, a possible Quick Lane Bowl berth, and the imminent destruction of their own stadium.  It was the greatest moment in a populated Ryan Field in five years.

The actual game itself was a festival of Big Ten West football.  Northwestern missed an extra point.  Purdue ran the ball at will until they got close to the endzone and then immediately turned the ball over; Purdue also kept going for it on fourth down and failing including one sequence that gave them multiple tries from within the one yardline.  Neither team made a single kick in the first half.

 

Another disturbing turn of events is that it appears that Willie Wildcat has joined a militia

The overall disgust and misery that the Big Ten West has brought to college football in this, its last glorious season, has been one of the highlights of the year.  In recent weeks, I have been trying to think of reasons why the division is the way it is and why every big ten west game seems like a four-hour presentation on why football should be illegal.  It is not accurate to say that the Big Ten West uniformly plays an outmoded version of football that existed before the invention of the forward pass; the play is more like a collection of teams that have all been told that the forward pass was legal exactly four weeks ago.  It seems like it should be possible that even a single team has discovered a dynamic and exciting way to play but there is only one program trying to change to a forward-thinking pass-wacky style and it is a Wisconsin team that is still mainly made up of rowdy Wisconsinites who all won state championships in shoving, and they are operating the air raid with a bunch of fullbacks who are having trouble learning the nuances of the system because they need to spend each week between games getting extracted from walls they have headbutted too hard.

The Big Ten West has never been good.  The division's representative has lost every single championship game in its history although this is misleading-- it is more accurate to say that no West team has ever been better than Ohio State or Michigan, which are the only two teams to represent the east, although that is something that can be said about the East division as well.  But the Big Ten West's outstanding oafishiness this year is remarkable.  I think that part of it comes down to a down year for Wisconsin, which is usually the default West favorite.  Part of it comes down to the West being dominated this year by Iowa, the most ridiculous team in college football.  Iowa is a bizarre meme team with weird dynastic politics that have left the offense in the hands of an inept princeling like they are a Crusader Kings game where the heir to the throne has rolled perilously low skill in football coaching and has developed the trait "disturbing punt fetish."  Every week, this team goes out with a dominant defense and the most diabolically wretched offense I have ever seen and I am speaking as someone who has grown up watching the Chicago Bears, and you see all of the japes and jokes online and think to yourself they can't possibly be this horrible to watch, they've got to at least be able to run the ball a little, and then you turn on the game and they are just falling down behind the line of scrimmage and the quarterback is spinning around and passing the ball like a discus thrower and two wide receivers have gotten their facemasks stuck together and are desperately trying to pry themselves away from each other while the ref throws the flag for "aesthetically disgusting" and still they are dominating the division by winning every game like 8-6 on a walkoff safety, and despite my natural enmity for the Iowa Hawkeyes I have to admit this is one of the greatest bits I have ever seen a football team pull off.

I also think that some of the reason for the Big Ten West's transcendent putridness comes from a process that is not identical but adjacent to the tech process known as "enshittification."  There, once a tech platform has gotten users and vendors locked into its services, it no longer has any incentive to improve and exists to extract money form both users and suppliers.  In the Big Ten West, none of these teams can ever compete with Michigan or Ohio State, so there is really no incentive to actually try to not play functional toilet football.  They just have to be slightly better than the other Big Ten West teams and become comically more inept and disgusting for their fans and for Big Ten advertisers who are trying to sell extra-large men's pants to people who are lapsing into punt-induced comas.

Or maybe it's because the midwest just doesn't really produce anyone who can throw the ball good.

NORTHWESTERN IS GOING TO A BOWL GAME

There were many ways I could see this season going, but I didn't see it ending in December.  It looked to me like the hazing scandal would destroy the program and lead Northwestern back into its 1980s nadir.  Instead, the team started winning games, first miraculously and then methodically.  

I have absolutely no idea if David Braun will be an effective coach going forward, but it's impressive that he managed to keep the team together, win football game, and not do anything obviously embarrassing during this bizarre and turbulent season. It also has helped him that college football media has turned its focus entirely on a very stupid and harmless scandal where an array of the Upper Midwest's goofiest motherfuckers have been running a Coen Brothers sign-stealing operation while Michigan's most litigious alumni have been preparing legal briefs on their message boards and Jim Harbaugh shows up every week in a wrestling singlet saying he is training to wrestle on the moon's gravity, which has overshadowed Northwestern's very real and awful hazing scandal.  I suspect that once college football re-enters its summer doldrums and the lawsuits begin in earnest, the grotesque practices of Northwestern's football  program will reappear in the news, but Braun got the luxury of operating in the shadow of national indifference to Wildcat Football.

 Of course, the university has imposed another challenge on Braun for year 2: wander the earth.  The Evanston City Council ruled this week that Northwestern can build its fancy new stadium and hold additional events and concerts there over the stringent objections of neighborhood groups.  Demolition of Ryan Field will begin very soon.  Northwestern football will not have a home for two full seasons.  I have no idea where they will play, although I guess it will be some combination of Wrigley Field and Soldier Field.  It is possible they will play somewhere funnier, like a local high school or the parking lot for the disused suburban Kmart where the National Guard gave me a Covid vaccine.  The single season that Northwestern basketball played at the All State Arena while they renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena was a complete disaster-- it is kind of absurd that the small amount of momentum the program has gained to keep it away from the permanent bottom of the Big Ten might be easily destroyed by an obsession with putting Pat Ryan's name on another building that is already named after him.

I have written before about my bewilderment and sadness that Northwestern wants to build a fancy new stadium, but it hits harder now that Ryan Field is being advanced upon by bulldozers.  Let's not mince words: Ryan Field is a shithole.  

At the very least, Northwestern could have the barnacles scraped off the hull once in awhile

It is a ridiculous place to watch a Big Ten football game.  It is small and simultaneously cramped and empty.  It does not have lights.  The grass turf is lousy.  But it was also very accessible and easy.  It doesn't feel like a Big Ten stadium, but it feels like some field they're playing football on in the middle of a neighborhood.  It doesn't feel like some sort of Cathedral of Football but just a sort of run-down place where a game is going on, which really matched the vibe of Northwestern football for a long time.  Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a stadium for this program that will still never have more fans than an opponent in its own building no matter how many times they decrease the seating capacity is so ridiculous to me that I can barely fathom it. I am really disappointed that no one triumphantly tore out the tarp and threw it into Lake Michigan.

GIVE ME THE DAMN HAT

Northwestern's unreal season can be capped with one more improbable feat: to go into Memorial Stadium and reclaim the hat from the Illini.  There was a stretch when Northwestern won The Hat six years in a row and came close to evening the all-time record between these teams.  It took three more Illinois coaches to pry The Hat from Northwestern heads between Tim Beckman, unleashing an unholy cackle as he rode an unending tide of anti-Northwestern propaganda to victory in the greatest Hat Game of all time which was also a battle for bowl eligibility, and Brett Bielema stretching the trophy on his gigantic noggin unceasingly since 2021.  But enough is enough.  The Hat must come home.

Illinois has a lot to play for.  Their eight-win season last year was followed up with a sour sequel, and the Illini must win this game in order to qualify for a bowl.  Northwestern can qualify for a "better" bowl game whatever that means with an additional win and rise in the Big Ten West standings.  There is also the matter of the Hat itself, which has never been worn by many of Northwestern's players.  Here's Braun on his indoctrination in to the Hat Cult:

“It’s been a great learning opportunity for me to ask the staff, to ask our Leadership Council this morning, what this rivalry means to them. The consistent message is ‘Coach, we want the HAT back. It’s time to bring the HAT back.'"

Hopefully Braun has spent the week staring at pictures of the Hat and becoming hypnotized by its power and the prestige that it conveys in this rivalry and in the North American sports landscape.  

BIELEM IT! THE BRETT BIELEMA MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEM

I did not expect to be shivering at Willard Airport and waiting for a someone to take me to the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center where I was supposed to meet Bret Bielema, the head of coach of the Illinois Fighting Illini to talk about his book.  I was out of my element here in the midwest-- my life was on set or in writer's rooms punching up scripts and sampling a blend of exotic cocaines.  For thirty-five years, I've been saving shitty writers and producers from themselves in Hollywood, and I was the best.  They called me Doc Frankenstein for a long time because I'd drive up and dig up some parts of some other failed projects and then use some unholy magic to get the whole thing to work, at least they did until some jagoff executive producer didn't understand that Frankenstein referred to the scientist and not the monster and after he said "hey someone tighten the neck bolts on Frankenstein over there" I tried to run him over with the Batmobile (I was responsible for about 85% percent of Arnold Schwarzneegger's Mr. Freeze cold puns and I am specifically the person who came up with "stay cool bird boy" after which Arnold personally sent me a reproduction of his grotesquely red and swollen head from Total Recall from his own collection in gratitude).  

Every day producers would line up outside my office and beg me to rescue their crummy shows and save their asses.  I started from the absolute bottom of the industry.  We were filming on a set on Eraser and production had halted because Arnold just shot an alligator in the face and no one had any idea what he says (the dummy who wrote the script didn't have anything, like Arnold was just going to shoot and alligator in the snout and then just stand there like a fuckin' idiot) and I, a lowly PA who was already nearly fired for telling James Caan to get his own fucking walnuts and was saved only because Caan said he "liked the balls on this kid" just stood up and said "now you're luggage" and everyone was really pissed but it worked (the writer cut out "now" because he felt he had to do something).  Before long, I was Arnold's top emergency murder pun call.  I was also the person responsible for saving the movie Lake Placid by telling Betty White to say "fuckin" and "shit" and also rescued the dying Texas football soap opera by writing the part where that moon-faced kid kills the guy with a shovel, you're welcome.

I made a crucial mistake, though.  I wanted to finally make something on my own.  For years, I had secretly been working on a treatment of the classic Chekhov story "The Nose" that I had never really read except for instead of a Russian bureaucrat, the titular Nose came from a tough-as-nails Chicago cop named Eddie Noczinsky who just beats the hell out of people for 90 minutes and whose tagline is "I smell crime."  None of the big studios would finance it, not even after I selflessly saved their shitty movies for three decades, so I decided to sink all of my own money into it.  We ran into problems immediately.  No one could get the nose suit right, and none of the top costumers would work with me after I threatened them with one of Christopher Lambert's swords from Highlander III: Sorceror which he gave me after I told them to forget about the goddamn aliens and put the bad guy in a cave.  Also, I had already given millions of dollars to the great Dennis Farina to voice the Nose before he passed.  Unfortunately, I had burned a lot of bridges while desperately trying to raise money for the movie by threatening, attacking, or pissing in the offices of many of Hollywood's top executives, so I started to take whatever bullshit writing jobs they could cobble together.  I don't think that anyone even knew who I was when I was sent over to meet Bielema.

The large, jolly man who picked me up from the airport was Bielema himself.  "Hey man, how the hell are ya?" he asked me as I tried to climb into the truck.  It was covered in cameras and camera equipment for a TV show he was pitching called "Live from Bret Bielema's Car" where he would interview people from the sports and entertainment world with a variety of  ridiculous questions.  "Quick, top Thanksgiving foods," he asked me while practicing staring into a camera while switching lanes.  "I don't know.  I haven't had Thanksgiving since 2002, when Dino De Laurentiis threw me out of his house for trying to slap Bill Paxton with a fist full of cranberry sauce while I was out of my mind on a designer drug called "The Gobbler."  "Whoa, look at this fuckin' guy," Bielema said chuckling as we pulled into his office.

Bielema had a little shtick for everyone we met on the way in.  He shadowboxed a security guard.  He had a complicated handshake for one of the assistants.  He did an elaborate gun finger point at a walk-on which involved him feigning being gut-shot and staggering around a lot before collapsing to his knees and vowing revenge.  It was spellbinding.

When we got into his office, he told me that his publisher explained to him him that they liked to take some life lessons from football and put them into business situations.  They'd sell books, but more importantly they were selling the lecture circuit, boardrooms and hotel banquet halls, a money printing machine.  I asked him if he ever said anything cool after beating someone like "eat some turf" or "touch down to hell."  "One time I called a guy a prick and the university had to send an official apology," he said.  "Hell yeah," I said.

As we talked, I realized that writing this bullshit coach book was a waste of both of our time.  Bret Bielema was a dynamo, a star.  And he had a TV show.  Sure it was just a goofy little web series he was trying to sell to Big Ten Network Omega that would also air a select gas stations and interstate rest stops, but I saw something bigger here.  I saw a big, lovable tough guy who would have everyone in the palm of their hand.  I saw Bielema transcending midwestern football and me getting out of the Hollywood gutter.  I saw Eddie "Da Nose" Noscinsky.  

"Forget about the fuckin' book," I said.  "Everyone's got a motivational book.  Dick Wolf's assistant has a book." He looked at me blankly.  "P.J. Fleck's got a book," I said quickly remembering the name of a football coach I had seen on TV one time looking really weird.  His brow furrowed.  "Really?"  "We can do better than that," I said.  We need to go big.  We need to go to TV.  We need to get into Bret Bielema's car."

I thought I'd collect a few bucks to meet with Bielema, get his pitch and then go back home and buy some illegal lizard gland stimulants and just write the whole thing in a week, but I couldn't go back.  I hauled out my original screenplay for The Nose.  I would have to make some serious changes in order to accommodate most of the action taking place in an SUV instead of on city streets.  We also would have to accommodate Bielema by filming mostly in Champaign-Urbana and make make The Nose an expert on football crimes where he spent a lot of his time hanging around football fields and film sessions.  In this version, the Nose would smell out a guy stealing signs and then throw him from the top of the stadium into an active volcano.  But I knew I could make it work.  We just had to cobble together this first season secretly by stringing along the publisher and then we'd get our sets and our actors and our feature budget.

It took about a week to convince Bielema to come onboard.  I spent every day in his office or hounding him on the practice field, showing him pages of the script and telling him how much easier it would be to get great football players to come to the university if he was an international acting superstar.  He finally one day just said, "ah what the hell, I always wanted to be a detective.  Let's do it."  It felt amazing, like the first time I convinced a producer to spent an extra million on a helicopter because how fucking cool would it be to have a helicopter here.  

I did have one major problem.  There was no nose costume.  I didn't have the money to fly anyone out or even hire someone locally.  The whole thing didn't work without a giant nose walking around dispensing nostril justice and giving scumbags the Big Sneeze.  In desperation, I decided to make the nose myself.  I have no idea how to even go about doing something like that.  I always just wrote something and it appeared.  But now I was absolutely fucked.  I walked into a Michael's and told them I needed to make a giant nose, but no one was that helpful.  Eventually, I found an old mattress next to a dumpster.  I figured I could get something vaguely nose-shaped out of that, get it on Bielema for a fitting and then make some adjustments.  I worked for days not sleeping, measuring, cutting, duct taping, and spray painting until I felt I had a nose good enough for a test pilot.  The nose was too big and unwieldy for me to carry so I found an old wheelbarrow and bedsheet to cover it and pushed it for miles to the Illinois football offices.  The guard stopped me.  "Cool it, buddy, I've got a nose here for Coach Bielema," I said.  He told me to get lost. It took a lot of pleading, begging and even tears until they finally called Bielema and he came down.  He pulled the sheet off and took a look at the nose, which after the end of my nose-obsessed reverie I now saw was just a dirty, mangled mattress with uneven nostril holes and a deviated septum.  "Why don't you put that away and we can talk later," he said.

It took a few days, but Bielema finally told me to come by his office.  I appreciated that about him.  No bullshit, a straight shooter.  "I'm not going to bullshit you," he said to me.  Bielema finally talked to his agents about the Nose and they told him the whole project was insane and in fact really stupid.  He told me they didn't want him working with me on the book either because I clearly was a "crackpot."  I wasn't that upset.  I had been thrown out of fancier offices than the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center.  One time, Michael Ovitz had a dumpster flown in from an especially disgusting Chipotle parking lot for his goons to throw me in after I told him that First Kid should have been called First Shit.  But this one stung.  "Look, for the record, I really liked the part where the Nose drove my car into a guy so hard that he landed in a paint manufacturing plant and then I said to him 'let's paint the town red,'" Bielema told me.

I was waiting to get a plane back to Chicago and eventually Los Angeles when I got a message on my phone from a number I had never seen.  It was from James Franklin, the coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions.  The college football world is small and talks a lot.  "First of all, does the Nose drive an ATV?" he asked.  "Consider that my first note."

Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters's Guide to Success in Football and Business

When people say college football is predictable they mean that Alabama and Ohio State are in the playoffs every year and the same half dozen programs are in position to win the big championship that ESPN cares about but they do not account for a scandal-plagued Northwestern team going up to Camp Randall against a Wisconsin team with one of the flashiest coaching hires of the offseason and absolutely beating their ass.

I don't recall any Northwestern team ever doing that up there.  Usually if Northwestern beats Wisconsin it is because the referees have nullified several Wisconsin touchdowns while the student section rains snowballs on the field in disgust or because Wisconsin's coaches have seen their metric ton offensive line wipe the Wildcats across the field like a five-man squeegee but then let their quarterback who has been the same guy for 35 consecutive years throw a single pass that is so bad it causes them to instantly lose the game.  I have never seen a Northwestern team go up there and shove the Badgers around like they are the dyspeptic trucker touching up Clark Kent in that part in Superman II when he loses his powers and has no idea how to fight anyone other than by getting repeatedly thrown into a jukebox.  

The boos rained down on the Wisconsin team as they trudged off the field at halftime losing 24-3, and the sarcastic cheers came out when they scored with less than twenty seconds left to pull it to 24-10 and avoid the indignity of their worst offensive output at home since a 3-3 tie with Illinois in 1995, which I have scientifically determined is very close to the funniest Big Ten score line possible.

 

After years of running the data, Big Ten football scientists have determined that the objectively funniest score in a Big Ten game is Rutgers 2, Iowa 1.

Wisconsin has been in a recent tailspin with losses to a putrid Indiana team and a hollowed out Northwestern.  New head coach Luke Fickell is trying something that is on its face completely insane: a transition from the school's proud tradition of unstoppable Oaf Football to a complicated air raid offense while the team is still made up largely of players that were recruited to shove people.  It i like asking the Blue Angels to execute their precision aerial maneuvers except they are now all flying blimps. 

It would seem rational for Wisconsin fans to give their new coach and his radical new system a chance to settle in, but I believe that I understand why they are so irate.  For one, the Badgers have been in a steady holding pattern of boring competence for so long that it remains genuinely shocking for them to get thrown into a dumpster by the Northwestern Wildcats at home regardless of whether they are transitioning to the air raid offense or to Olympic Breakdancing. 

Another reason why Wisconsin fans are so irate is because this is the last year of the Big Ten West and I believe it has driven the entire division insane.  The Big Ten West has been the conference of dreams since its inception because every team in it has ranged from beatable to unwatchable while no one in the East has any hope of unseating one of the two big teams-- no team other than Ohio State or Michigan has ever represented the East in the conference championship game.  Every program is desperate to win the Big Ten West this year before the West Coast teams come in and the easy path to Indianapolis disappears, and in that desperation every team seems to have grown more feral and Big Ten West-like as they develop more exotically repellent offenses and break new frontiers in cowardly punting.  In its final year, the Big Ten West has reached its apotheosis as the most aesthetically disgusting collection of teams in the entire sport and possibly in the history of college football since the forward pass was invented and teams were no longer literally stomping each other to death in the mud.  

Consider that nearly every Big Ten West team has the exact same record and that every game ends on a score of approximately 17-9.  Consider that the division's standard bearer is Iowa, the most absurd winning team in the country that is so allergic to basic offensive competence that it has become some kind of bit in the same way that people in the early 2000s discovered that Christopher Walken being weird was funny and then every one of his roles after that was him performing as a caricature of Christopher Walken; this is exactly what happens when people make fun of Iowa football and its manifold Ferentzes and then you watch a game and they do actually punt that many times and throw passes exactly that badly in a way that is scarcely possible to believe is possible for an FBS team and yet they cannot be stopped.

An Iowa fan watching the team attempt a play on second and nine

Wisconsin didn't lose that game just from playing poorly; Northwestern looked fantastic.  The offense shredded Wisconsin's defense in the first half with pinpoint passing and gouging runs that led to first down after first down.  The defense shut down Wisconsin's run game stifled their newfangled passing attack.  The unexpected and thorough destruction of Wisconsin finally gave the university an opportunity to take away David Braun's interim status and hand him the keys to the program.  The team's performance has been so remarkable that it is almost shocking. I don't think anyone thought Northwestern had any chance of even being mediocre even in the generous confines of the Big Ten West.  Nearly prognosticator before the season pegged them as the worst major conference team in the country.  My posts from August and September still exist, and you can see I thought the future of the team was bleak: they would lose and lose and players would desperately try to escape while it would be nearly impossible to convince anyone to ever play here again.  I thought the combination of the scandal and the fact that Northwestern historically struggles to be seen as a real football team with uniforms and everything would essentially kill the program as it no longer offers anything to the Big Money Big Ten.  That may still be the case, but after the Wildcats wobbled on the precipice in the dying years of the Pat Fitzgerald Imperium, David Braun has somehow managed to keep this group together and has them tantalizingly close to qualifying for the Ahab and Sons Barnacle Solutions Bowl.  

After seeing this graphic, I am crushed that I did not learn the news about Braun losing the interim tag from Dave Wannstedt Tonight

A lot of stories about Northwestern will frame this team as going through adversity and while the circumstances are adverse, this is the most self-inflicted trouble imaginable.  This is not the Big Ten and NCAA coming in and threatening to suspend people because some goofus was going around doing Marine Recon Infiltration Maneuvers against Central Michigan but because the program tolerated an alarming amount of weirdo sadism among players for decades.  We've learned that David Braun has something that players respond to and an ability to keep a team that seemed likely to break together.  We've also learned he is, at the very least, much better at telling defensive players how to successfully tackle someone than Jim O'Neil, who was apparently showing players instructional tapes of hired goons surrounding Jean-Claude Van Damme and then ineffectually attacking him one at a time only to get victimized by The Splits.  What remains to be seen is whether Braun can do something more important than taking the 'Cats to a bowl game which is finding a way for the football team to function without gross Shrek rituals.

NORTHWESTERN ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY PURDUE, OWN STADIUM

Northwestern can do the seemingly impossible and qualify for one of the infinite Dreck Bowl Games by simply beating the team in last place, the Purdue Boilermarkers.  Purdue also has a very young first-time head coach in former Illinois defensive coordinator Ryan Walters taking the reigns after Jeff Brohm went home to Louisville.  Purdue has only won three games this season but two of them have been offensive outbursts.  Last week, they ran over a fading Minnesota team while P.J. Fleck desperately acronymed on the sidelines.   

The records indicate that Northwestern has a pretty decent chance to win.  But nothing is given in the Big Ten West, where records and statistics have no meaning from week to week and games tend to resolve themselves based on what is stupidest and most baffling.  There are no easy wins in this division because every team is almost equally bad; for Purdue, Northwestern is also one of the most winnable games on their schedule.

There is one fascinating subplot to this game is that it is possibly the final game that will ever be played at Ryan Field.  The stadium plan remains stalled in the grinding mechanisms of Evanston city government, but it at least seems likely that Northwestern will get its way and build one of the most inane and pointless stadiums in the history of inane and pointless stadium boondoggles.  If the city approves the plan, Northwestern will spend several years wandering the Earth before they will cut the ribbon on their new football Xanadu for visiting fans.  Of course, Northwestern is not a real sports team flinging its weight around because absolutely no one cares about Wildcat football-- it is possible that Evanston ultimately rejects the stadium based on the school's demands for more events than seven football games and a graduation ceremony, in which case it is important to note that the team being forced to return to a Ryan Field that has decayed into unimaginable decrepitude on the assumption that it would be torn down is in fact extremely funny.

While I would like to see a Northwestern win here, there is one force that it is making me uneasy.  It has nothing to do with anything going on with Northwestern or Purdue or the players or the tactics.  Northwestern and Illinois are both currently 5-5.  If both Illinois and Northwestern lose (Illinois is matched up with the apparently indomitable Iowa Hawkeyes), next week's Hat Game will serve as a Bowl Game Eliminator Showdown.  It seems impossible to believe that a game between Northwestern and Illinois to determine who gets to go to the Quick Lane Bowl will not be the glorious end that the Big Ten West deserves.

JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF MADNESS: RYAN WALTERS'S PLAYBOOK FOR SUCCESS IN LIFE AND BUSINESS

The following is repurposed from the journal and correspondence of film director Wolfram Krenkel relating to his unfinished documentary Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters’s Playbook for Success in Life and Business before his mysterious disappearance in 2023.

Letter to the Institute of Wolfram Krinkel Studies, June 21, 2023 

I was on location in a remote island I am legally not allowed to disclose filming a new picture called “Murders from God” when I got a telegram from the United States. The film was not going well. My entire crew was suffering from an ailment that translated loosely as “the devil’s rivers” that was known around the camp as “diarrhea 2.” Our financing had run out two weeks before when accountants noticed that the eccentric count who had lavished us with funds for the production was declared legally demented and his heirs were preparing to tear each other apart in the legal system.  We were trying to get to the mainland to regroup. The leading man played by the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had been rampaging throughout the set for weeks in a home-made “reverse loincloth” that covered his entire body from the neck down except for his nipples, buttocks, and genitals.  He menaced everyone he encountered after telling us he was beginning an intense biting regimen and was only held at bay with staves fashioned from tree branches. The telegram had told me that an American University in the midwest was offering me a substantial amount of money to make a film about their annual headbutting championship. I was intrigued.

Journal Entry, July 18, 2023
I have arrived in West Lafeyette, Indiana, but quite late. They were anticipating me flying, but I explained that I had instead chosen to travel with a group of steamship enthusiasts crossing the Atlantic in a homemade vessel. The seas were violent, and I spent most of it ill alongside most of the crew. When we were not vomiting, the steamship enthusiasts quarreled among each other about the authenticity of the rivets and whether the food on board was period appropriate. Every night, a particularly irate retired professor of train literature from Italy threatened to mutiny with much screaming and wagging of his elaborate mustaches. Finally, this man managed to successfully pull off his coup after we had arrived in port by getting off the ship first and declaring himself the captain to a baffled customs agent. The crew got into an intense shoving match that lasted four hours until police intervened.  The university bursar who I told about my voyage in order to try to convince him that I had a valid reason for arriving late had no interest in hearing about the debased madness of man at sea.

Journal Entry, July 19, 2023
There are complications with the film. It appears that while I was on my sea voyage, I had missed some budgetary window to secure funding. The film professor who contacted me told me he had found some funds if I was willing to alter my project. It appears the football team was looking to document the activities of the team and had money for a film. I was instructed to meet with Lorenzo “Wayne” Kragg, the chief financier of the football team who somehow had no direct ties to the university but is instead a man who made his fortune selling decorative truck genitalia. I have no knowledge or interest in football but the professor was so apologetic that I felt I had to have a meeting out of politeness.

I was taken to Wayne Kragg’s mansion overlooking the scenic Celery Bog Nature Area. Mr. Kragg (“Call me Lorenzo “Wanyne,” he said) met me at the door and led me into the foyer. Everywhere I looked there were images of trains. On one wall, the famous nineteenth-century film “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” ran on a loop from a projector while speakers blared train noises and whistles constantly. This agitated me greatly. I do not like trains, which I have always seen as the vanguard of man’s violent incursion against nature. Also I was told that my maternal great-uncles were all killed in separate and unrelated train accidents. One of them was bludgeoned to death, but it happened on a train. Lorenzo “Wayne” led me to a room covered in pictures of football players. He told me he had heard that I am a filmmaker of some international renown and he was honored to host me. I could tell he had not seen any of my films, not even my popular bird documentary “Shrieks of Hostility.”

He told me he wanted to make a motivational film about the leadership techniques of the program’s new coach. The coach was young and inexperienced and Lorenzo "Wayne" wanted to burnish his reputation and rally the other rich men who donated their money to the football team around this man. I told him I appreciated the attention, but I do not make those kind of films. I know nothing about football. In fact, I find the spectacle of violence and pageantry disgusting and anathema to everything I think about humanity. I am not opposed to violence, for example if a man is torn to pieces by a large, flightless bird. But the organized, symbolized warfare in American football is something I find odious and intolerable.

Then, I noticed something that changed my mind. In the corner, I saw a gigantic totem of a man wearing a football uniform and a hard hat. He is not quite a man. He is a grotesque caricature of a man, like if a person was drawn by a disturbed child like my school friend Dieter who was taken away and described as Bavaria’s youngest pyromaniac. This totem has gigantic bulging, dead eyes and a swollen, jutting chin. He carries a hammer. It is the stuff of waking nightmares. I asked Lorenzo “Wayne” what is this repulsive creature? He told me it was the school mascot “Purdue Pete” and he prowls the sidelines during athletic contests. I told him I must study this perverse abomination and the unhinged people that worship him. He said great, people here love Pete you can put him in the movie as much as you want. He also offered me enough money to restart my other film and hire a person specifically to restrain Kaspar from his normal course of biting and gouging attacks between scenes.

Journal Entry, July 20, 2023
I met the football coach Ryan Walters in his office. I told him I was there to learn his leadership secrets. I had already decided that my film would include none of the nonsense about leadership and I would instead investigate the twisted iconography of the terrible train goblin that had repulsed and intrigued me, but I needed to maintain the pretense. Coach Walters laughed. He told me that he thought that a motivational film about a first-year head coach was absurd, but he figured it was an easy way to keep Lorenzo “Wayne” happy, and he had to indulge him from time to time. Consider that his first Leadership Secret. I immediately liked him. I understood that you need to occasionally entertain the whims of maniacs in order to secure funding for your football program or film about a man who loses his mind trying to build a homemade spacecraft while you simultaneously try to build a homemade spacecraft as part of the filming process.  Over his shoulder I noticed a smaller totem of the Pete grimacing at him and seemingly peering into my soul. I asked him what he thought about Purdue Pete. He told me that everyone loved Pete. I asked him why because he looked like he was a demon dedicated to murder. Walters’s face changed. “I don’t think it’s a great idea to make fun of Pete like that. People here don’t like that.”

I thought he was joking but he appeared deadly serious so I changed the subject. I told him that I noticed from the pictures on the wall in the facility that many of those who came before him seemed to have large mustaches. Perhaps he should consider growing a mustache. “I haven’t earned mine yet. Not until he says so,” Walters said. Not until who says so? Uh, not he, I meant them. The fans. The fans, he said. Then he told me it was nice meeting me but he had a practice to prepare for.

Journal Entry, July 21 2023
I went to the library to research the iconography of Purdue Pete. The librarian handed me a dusty book on past showing the evolution of the Pete mascot through the years. He told me to enjoy the book and flashed a sinister smile. It turns out that Purdue Pete had gone through several changes dating back to the 1940s. The book showed photos and drawings of earlier, cruder designs where Pete was somehow more menacing and more deranged. In one earlier incarnation, he has broad shoulders and a tiny pin head emanating malice. In another, he has rosy cheeks like an evil California hamburger mascot. I wanted to retch and recoil but I could not look away. I sat for hours staring at these photos lost in some sort of demonic reverie. An unearthly cackle seemed to bounce around my skull. Eventually I threw down the book and ran out as the librarian chased me and scolded me, but I could not bear to touch the book anymore. On my way out I passed a drawing of a Purdue Pete reminding students to return their books and I threw my knapsack at it in disgust, exploding the half a turkey sandwich I had saved from my lunch all over a poster explaining the Dewey Decimal System.

Journal Entry, July 21, 2023
Last night I was unable to sleep. I had a vision that I was trying to move but was unable to because I had ingested some sort of psychedelic or poison that prevented me from using my limbs. I was affixed vertically on some sort of plank like I was standing up and could not see below me but I felt a rattling. I was able to move my eyes enough to see that my plank was mounted to a railroad track. I heard a blood-curdling bellow that sounded like someone trying to make a train whistle. That’s when I saw it coming. A shadowy figure was pumping one of those old time railroad vehicles and heading straight towards me. There was a blinding lantern mounted on it but I could see it also had a battering ram shaped like a Purdue Pete head. As it came closer, I could see the figure pumping was a malformed Pete, a sort of hideous amalgam of all of the historical and discarded Petes. The pump car was increasing speed and coming straight for me. Right when it was about to collide with me, I woke up screaming.

In fact, I had actually faced this exact situation when I was filming "The Grim Melánge" with the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden. We were in the desert and had run out of Kaspar’s favorite sarsaparilla brand. One night, I awoke to find myself lashed to a train track and Kaspar coming at me with a similar hand cart. His eyes were wide and he was singing passages from "Salome" in an agonized shriek. He rammed me thirteen times. My ribs were badly bruised. I could hardly speak and the doctors told me that if I laughed I would collapse into agony but fortunately I never laugh.

Journal Entry, July 24, 2023
I arrived at the football facility to get practice footage. The players are engaged in inscrutable drills and the coaches are bellowing out an indecipherable array of football jargon.  During breaks, I filmed short interviews with whatever players were around. I received very few usable answers. My line of questioning was simple and straightforward: what do you think about nature’s indifference to man’s thoughts and suffering? Most of the players simply laughed or said "I don't know" or asked me who I was and what I was doing there.  One player told me that “I am the indifference of nature to man’s suffering, on the football field.” I was so disturbed I had to leave.

I tried to interview Coach Walters on film. It took me several hours to light his office. The Purdue Pete on his shelf still stared at me, and I ended up covering it with a camera case. But when it was time for him to start, an assistant told me the coach was too busy. I began to pack my things. As I put away my camera equipment I thought I heard something stir at the door. I looked up but no one entered. Then a piece of paper shot under the door with my name on it. I opened it. There was a hasty and careless scrawl that only said “Pete Says Stop.” I opened the door and looked to see anyone who could have slid the note, but the hallway was empty. The door slammed behind me and locked with all of my equipment inside. I had to try to convince a janitor to let me back in, but he had to talk to three different people in the football department to find someone who had heard of me until I found someone who had recognized me as the villain from the action movie "Operation: Cobra Strike: A Jack Kicker Film."

As I headed back towards the hotel, I noticed something strange. A startling number of people I passed had large, blond mustaches. I thought I had noticed a slightly larger number of people you ordinarily see with a blond mustache, but now I was seeing them everywhere. And every person with a blond mustache seemed to look at me, if even for a second, and glare at me. I have only seen that look of pure hatred once in my life, and it was when the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had chased me for three days through the Cambodian wilderness with a homemade nunchuk because I had told him to say “excuse me” instead of “pardon me” in a scene.

Journal Entry, July 25 2023
It is the middle of the night. I have heard a nonstop rattling in my room for several hours. I initially thought it was the air conditioner, so I turned it off and the room immediately became impossibly warm and humid in the steamy Indiana night. I am soaked in sweat. I tried to call the front desk but no one answers and the humidity seems to have swelled my door closed and jammed. A storm has rolled in and the rain pounds on my window while the thunder bellows outside. I pound on the door and scream for help but no one answers. Perhaps I am going mad. But I have suffered from the entire scale of filmmakers’ madnesses in my career: desert madness, jungle madness, and space madness, and this does not feel like any of them.

I look outside the window and see only my own face reflected in the window, but when a flash of lightning illuminated the courtyard I could swear I saw the face. The eyes. The chin. I thought I should

The journal ends there.  Wolfram Krenkel has not been seen since.

Football Leadership Book, by Luke Fickell

Everyone spent all week saying that the Iowa game was going to be repulsive and disgusting and set back the game of football forever etc. and the casinos said I bet you don't think they can score the fewest points we have ever let you gamble on and the TV networks said we will not allow this to be broadcast on the airwaves where it is subject to FCC regulation and instead put it on a streaming service where they can show whatever they want like illegal badger baiting competitions and cooking shows called American Botulist and everyone had a good laugh at Iowa-Northwestern playing their signature brands of shit football at each other in a baseball stadium from the 1910s and then somehow the game was actually worse than that.  

 

Iowa vs Northwestern but it’s a Silent Film pic.twitter.com/tmEGbSMyrY

— Mr Matthew CFB (@MrMatthew_CFB) November 4, 2023

Twitter user Mr Matthew CFB cut the highlights of this deranged contest into a silent film 

It was 0-0 at halftime.  Northwestern managed fewer than 30 passing yards in the first half.  I had thought to myself that there was a possibility that Iowa offensive coordinator and son Brian Ferentz, who had been Future Terminated like he was in a 1980s science fiction movie and therefore had nothing to lose would pull out all the stops and just run the most insane plays possible like double flea flicker reverses and those plays where the quarterback pretends he can't hear understand the call coming in from the sideline and wanders towards the coaches only for them to snap the ball to a running back, or a pass that travels more than 14 yards, but I suppose if Brian Ferentz was capable of doing things like that he would not have been pre-fired.  Instead, the Iowa offense did what everyone expected the Iowa offense to do and fell down a lot and called for the punter and absolutely nothing happened for approximately three excruciating hours.

You said you'd call for the punter.

It's third and three we can get a first down.

It's fourth and two.

I'll call now

The star of the game was the Wrigley Field turf, which continued its mission to maim and devour football players.  Last year, players slipped and slid all over the field like it was a hockey rink.  This year, a few downs of vicious goal-line football produced a gigantic sink hole at the two yardline.  It was if the earth itself had seen and rejected the nauseating attempt at football going on around it and tried to intervene.  The game paused for several moments as the shovel-wielding grounds crew desperately hacked at the hole and did sad little riverdances on it to try to fill the divot.  It was perhaps the most literal interpretation of the Timeout On The Field.   This was the most exciting part of the game.

The game managed to have some juice at the very end, when Northwestern somehow managed to find the endzone and tie the game at 7-7 with fewer than 2 minutes to go.  I thought it would be very improbable that Iowa's towtruck offense could march down the field in time to score, but a few penalties and the one actual pass completion of the game got them in field goal range for a kicker who had already doinked one from similar range earlier.  Instead, Iowa got it through the uprights, won the game, and the kicker made the very rude go to sleep gesture and the Hawkeyes secured their place at the top of the putrid Big Ten West.

Now Northwestern faces Iowa's erstwhile rival for the West crown, a sputtering Wisconsin team.  It's a new era for Wisconsin football under Luke Fickell.  Fickell, who had turned Cincinnati into a powerhouse in the AAC, is trying to do something different at Wisconsin.  The Badgers tended to promote their own and run the same kind of Badger football you remember from time immemorial where the five largest men in Wisconsin are airlifted onto Camp Randall every week and knock over everyone so they can run the ball while three to four times every game a quarterback throws the crummiest pass you've ever seen.  Fickell, though is trying to chanve this.  He brought in Air Raid guru Phil Longo to run the offense and SMU transfer quarterback Tanner Mordecai.  This was a shocking development-- I imagined Wisconsin trying to run the Air Raid like a military trying to form an air force by driving tanks up a ramp.  The results have not been there for Wisconsin this year.

Wisconsin, playing at home, is heavily favored against Northwestern.  But the Wildcats have been managing to hold their own against Big Ten West opponents, and Wisconsin is coming off a loss to an Indiana team whose coaching situation for most of the season could best be described as "death throes."  Both teams face quarterback uncertainty with Mordecai's status in question for Wisconsin and Northwestern potentially bringing back Ben Bryant, who had played under Fickell at Cincinnati.  Once again, the key for Northwestern is to make the game as horrible as possible.  The Wildcats thrive playing in Big Ten West slop conditions much like how the Predator requires a hot and humid climate in order to successfully tear apart Carl Weathers.  If anyone has any fun at all watching this game, it augurs poorly for the 'Cats.

THE NCAA KILLS JIM HARBAUGH WITH DEVASTATING DEATH PENALTY OF NOT BEING ABLE TO COACH THE TEAM FOR THREE HOURS A WEEK

The Michigan sign-stealing scandal continues to take up all of the oxygen in college football media, much to the relief of Derrick Gragg, who is probably sending an edible arrangement to one of Connor Stalions's dead drops.  Last year, my running bit on this blog was a series of short stories about a fictional NCAA investigator named Buck Duckett where the central joke was that the NCAA had no power anymore with NIL and the investigators who spent their time digging in trash cans for P.F. Chang's receipts from illegal recruiting visits or whatever no longer had anything to do.  I did not see the NCAA's investigative wing having a such a major resurgence because a weird guy with a silly name was (allegedly!) doing recon wet work on the Central Michigan sidelines.  

This week, the scandal has escalated on two fronts.  On one, the increasingly Coen Brothers-inflected saga of Connor Stalions took more strange turns when we learned about how his vacuum repair business got him into an argument with his HOA where he legally responded by claiming the entire dispute was a psyop directed by his Michigan State fan neighbor named Jeff who was out to sabotage Michigan's football operations by complaining about the dozens of vacuums Stalions left idling on his porch in a business that also apparently included Michigan's star running back who denies any affiliation with Stalions' vacuum repair operation.

Any Big Ten team that does not use this picture as part of its sideline signals when they play Michigan is not a serious program

The other is that the Big Ten is taking action.  On Friday, the conference swooped in to levy a punishment against Harbaugh by banning him from the team's sidelines during games for three weeks but not suspending him in any other capacity.  The punishment was a masterclass of college football bureaucracy: it did nothing other than inflame Michigan and its fans who claim the conference acted against them without the opportunity to even defend themselves and irritates Michigan's opponents because it's a pointless horseshit penalty that doesn't do anything.  The fact is that Michigan will fight tooth and nail against anything the conference or NCAA will do to it, so they might as well have gone all in and ordered that Harbaugh has to be sent to the international space station or allowed on Michigan sidelines only if he is restrained like Hannibal Lecter.

The Michigan saga unfortunately seems to be turning a corner from a delightful series of increasingly absurd revelations to the tedious arguing in various courts phase.  This certainly pleases Michigan fans who get the benefit of feeling persecuted for being too good, which is the greatest feeling that can ever be accessed by a college football fanbase.  Michigan fans, who fairly or not have the reputation of being pedantic rules-mongers, also now have something even more pleasing to them which is a set of regulations to comb through and the opportunity to compose long-winded briefs about bring wronged.  If this is the trajectory that the scandal is going to move along, which has been dominated for the past 24 hours by an impenetrable argument about the timing of when an injunction can be filed or something, I no longer care at all because that is boring and just need to know whether a Michigan staffer named Jackson Rhinoceros has been spotted hiding under a tarp at Ryan Field.

FOOTBALL LEADERSHIP BOOK BY LUKE FICKELL

Luke Fickell doesn't eat anything.  I'm sitting across from Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell at "Well I Can Eat," one of Madison's trendiest new restaurants and I'm trying to figure out what to do.  I got in the habit of meeting sports people at restaurants when I was profiling them for magazines because it made a great lede: "Marv Albert digs his spoon into the chicken a la king;" "Jeff Van Gundy orders an entire Thanksgiving meal off-menu;" "Buddy Ryan eats a steak with his bare hands;" but if I was profiling Fickell, I'd be at a loss.  He doesn't order anything, not even a glass of water. He is staring at me like he's trying to see through my skin.  "Jeff Van Gundy told me this place has incredible cranberry sauce," I say.  "No thanks," he says.

I wasn't here to profile Fickell.  My magazine writing days hit a speed bump when Man's Man: A Magazine for Men got purchased by thirteen different companies in two years, got spun off into a series of branded bar and grills and a show on the short-lived streaming network "THIS," and then finally got liquidated with the back issues sold to paper magnate Glen Masted, the Pulp King of Michigan City.  After a brief plagiarism scandal (I lifted a chapter from Rick Reilly's Who's Your Caddy* because of a bad reaction to gout treatment) and the recent resurfacing of some profiles of women from the early 2000s I wrote that had these censorious outrage-mavens desperate for an apology even though I have a mother and a step-niece, I was looking for work.  That's how I ended up traveling around the country trying to pitch coaches on leadership books.  They certainly did not exist in the higher literary plane I had lived in when I wrote things like "What's Eating Gordon Ramsay?" and "Rick Fox is Ready for His Closeup" but they were fast and easy and tended to sell well if the person was famous enough.  With enough traction, I could even go around giving lectures in hotel ballrooms.  But I had been having a tough time finding collaborators.  I had already been turned down by Quin Snyder, Dawn Staley, Ben McAdoo, Jim Boylen, and Jim Boylan.   

"So," I say to Fickell.  "If we were to start working on this book, what do you think you'd want to focus on?  "Leadership," Fickell says.  "What elements of leadership? You know you were really thrown into the crucible there with Ohio State, with,  you know the whole Tressell thing."  Fickell got his first head coaching job unexpectedly when his the famed NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett caught numerous Buckeyes players in the grip of a notorious midwestern pants-trafficking ring.  The NCAA moved in to punish Ohio State coach Jim Tressell for the infractions. Tressell wouldn't go quietly-- the result was a thirteen hour siege of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. They took Tressell to a maximum security NCAA facility for three years where he had no access to football or pants.  While locked up, he penned Tressellball: The Art of Integrity- In Conversation with Chad Crad that topped the New York Times bestseller list for 49 consecutive weeks.  In the midst of all of the chaos, Fickell, then serving as the defensive coordinator, got promoted into leading the powerhouse program.  "I don't want to talk about that," Fickell says to me. "That's personal."

Perhaps, I suggest, he could talk about his second stint as defensive coordinator.  After his one season in charge of Ohio State, the university fired him as head coach and brought in the former Florida coach who had retired for health reasons to a TV job but suddenly found himself invigorated by the Ohio State offer.  Fickell stayed on as defensive coordinator under Meyer, which is certainly an unorthodox move in college football coaching. "Maybe you can talk about what you learned about leadership under Urban Meyer." "No," Fickell says. 

(Fair enough.  Last year, I pitched an exposé detailing Meyer's time with the Jacksonville Jaguars as an A Told To with Josh Lambo called Who Kicks The Kicker? He declined.)

"OK, maybe we leave your own personal history out of this and approach things a little more philosophically.  How do you personally prepare a team to win?" I ask, starting to panic a little.  "Winning mentality.  Winning mindset," Fickell says.  "That's perfect," I say.  "How do you instill this winning mindset?"  Fickell's brow wrinkles.  "Winning mindset.  You have to be about winning."  "OK. But how do you become about winning?" I ask.  "Because you want to win. Either you do or you lose," Fickell says, looking as close to incredulous as I can see a person look who does not have facial expressions.  "OK," I say.

I try one last move.  "Look, we can talk about what's in the book later on, but these things really move with good titles.  I was thinking 'A Fickell Twit of Fate.' Or, how about 'Football: Not For The Fickell?'" "No," Fickell said.  "No Fickell puns."  The man had no idea how literature works.  I could have sold a profile on a football coach called "Luke's Not Fickell" to Man's Man sight unseen even though my main sports editor Victor Flugge would have no idea who Luke Fickell is.  He did not even know the basic rules of football and only watched an illegal, combat-oriented version of Jai Alai called "Montserrat."  

"OK then, thanks for your time, Coach," I say.  I pay for my bloody mary that was mainly three full sized sausages and a quirt of tomato juice and start to head for the door.  Thinking I was out of earshot I mutter to myself "Puke Sickell" but I guess I am not.  I don't hear him move.  I don't hear the chair and I don't hear footsteps from anyone coming near me, but before I reach the doorknob someone grabs me.  It is more like being enveloped. My right arm feels like it is being torn from its socket and my left shin seems like it is somehow being thrust upward to stab my own knee.  Fickell, a high school wrestling champion, has me in his legendary trebuchet hold that he had used to subdue 195 consecutive opponents from 1990 to 1992.  Somehow, instead of just screaming out "aaaaahhh and my shin" I manage to blurt out "aaaaaaggghhh trebuchet trebuchet" and Fickell releases me.  

"I see you've done your research," he says.  He's not smiling but he's no longer scowling.  "You know, I like you.  I think we can work together."  He gestures towards the table.  I limp back over there and order another sausage mary.  "It's called Football Leadership Book," he says. 

 --------

*This is a real book

Going Iowanfinite: The Rise of a Football Revolutionary

Reports of the death of Northwestern's football program have been greatly exaggerated.  The team, reeling from the fallout from the hazing scandal, the firing of Pat Fitzgerald, the promotion of a coach with so little experience that the university felt it necessary to install Skip Holtz as some sort of guiding figure, and a team that had looked barely competitive in its previous few seasons seemed to augur a disaster of a season from a win-loss standpoint, a return to the early 1980s Northwestern of entire seasons without a single win and a program turning into a weird nineteenth-century vestige in one of college football's expanding major leagues.  And then that didn't happen.  The Wildcats are fine.  They are a perfectly cromulent Big Ten West team slopping around their division with other teams that are simply dealing with being Big Ten West teams.  It is the strangest outcome to a season this season that I could have possibly imagined.

Evidence that Northwestern is not in last place
 

When Northwestern started playing other teams in the division, I thought they had a proof of concept of how they could win.  They would go headbutt with the other Big Ten West teams in a frankly obscene display of offensive rectitude and occasionally come up with a victory.  But that was not supposed to happen against Maryland from the Big Ten East, with its 5-0 record to start the season, star quarterback and ability to hang tough against the likes of Ohio State.  Instead, Northwestern simply outplayed them.  The defense harassed Taulia Tagovailoa to the tune of six sacks and an interception, Brandon Sullivan threw for 265 yards and rushed for 56 more, Coco Azema was everywhere and sealed the game with an interception, and the Wildcats managed to hang on.

Northwestern is now 4-4.  They have a decent shot at a bowl game.  They are even I guess sort of technically in the race for the Big Ten West but only because whoever leads the Big Ten West gets a phone call that says "seven days" and then J Leman crawls out of their jumbotron the next week and the team fumbles the ball 55 times and loses 6.5-3.  This is remarkable.  David Braun has seemingly stepped in and managed to get something out of this team that is enabling them to compete in football games and it seems more and more likely that he will at some point get a shot to take the job permanently.  The fact that Northwestern is managing to even function at this point in a year where they were considered the worst major-conference team in all of college football has certainly raised some questions about what Pat Fitzgerald was even doing although I am sure his legal team will be prepared to discuss it.

Of course it is still difficult to separate what Northwestern is doing on the field with the lingering rot in the athletic department.  On Friday, former players Rico Lamitte and Noah Herron spoke at a press conference detailing a culture of racism in the Wildcat football program dating back to their playing days in the early 2000s.  More than 50 players have filed more than 20 lawsuits against the university in the wake of the scandal alleging incidents of racism, abuse, and sexual hazing in the football team and other athletic programs, and it is likely that more and more appalling incidents continue to filter out.  

WRETURN TO WRIGLEY

Well, here it is.  They took the most Big Ten West possible game and, in the final year of the Big Ten West, they have shunted it to a paywalled streaming service that mainly shows old episodes of Frasier, and they are doing it in an ancient baseball stadium which has yet to successfully mount a college football game without calamity.  

 

NILES: I have never heard such disgusting, vile language in a crowd than from those visiting Iowans.  Maris is glued to her fainting chair.

FRASIER: Her fainting chair?

NILES: We're having the couch upholstered, I had to improvise.

MARTIN: Have you seen that rowdy crowd out there? I tell ya, those Iowa fans really like to see their team punt. They're even chanting for it.

NILE: Punt? They were saying punt? (Grabs coat and sprints out the door) I have to intercept a strongly-worded letter I sent to the university provost.

In the original Wrigley game in 2010, the Big Ten famously forced both teams to only go one way for fear that using both endzones would risk players smashing each other into brick walls only padded by dead ivy.  Last year, the field was so slippery that a Purdue player could not even successfully execute a kickoff without falling down and it felt like they had just left the infield dirt, bases, and a few bats and catcher's masks laying around in the middle of the field.  

Now the Wrigley game features Northwestern's less than stellar offense against Iowa's notoriously non-functional attack. The pundits expect a shockingly low-scoring game, perhaps one in the negative numbers.  This would fit in the parameters of historic Northwestern-Iowa games in this, the final season of the Big Ten West, where true aficionados of toilet football expect both teams to get together and produce one of the most disgusting football games available on the college football calendar.  

There are some actual stakes in this game-- Iowa is still somehow leading the Big Ten West title race and Northwestern can get closer to bowl eligibility with a win, but the real intrigue is in both coaching staffs.  The Hawkeyes already did something very strange and pre-fired offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, saying he will serve out the rest of the year but not return next season, as if to say that they no longer could sanction his putrid anti-football but he needs to keep doing it a few more times, as a bit.  This awkward half-dismissal ends a favorite parlor game for a certain segment of online college football weirdos, which was to monitor Iowa's scoring output each game based on a clause in Brian Ferentz's contract that would reportedly void it if the Hawkeyes did not score 325 points by the end of the season (an average of 25 per game); it is possible that Iowa prematurely announced that Ferentz was not coming back because the athletic department noticed that people were having fun with some element of Iowa football and they moved immediately to quash it.  Northwestern, on the other hand, is working with an entire interim coaching staff.  This game might lead the nation in the most Temporary Coaches working a regular season game.

At the very least, the imminent dismissal of Brian Ferentz certainly will make for a tense Thanksgiving at the Ferentz house, where I imagine things already get irksome if anyone asks for a dish to be passed

Despite its world-famous offensive ineptitude, the Hawkeyes are favored in this nominal home game for the Wildcats because they still boast a sinister defense. Wrigley will be completely overrun with Iowa fans.  I am sure the broadcast will find ways to play up the baseball angle by comparing a potential low-scoring game to a pitcher's duel or discussing how Brian Ferentz has ordered his quarterback to bunt, but hopefully this game ends the Big Ten West the way an Iowa-Northwestern game has traditionally ended: as an unwatchable game that Northwestern wins on a very stupid Iowa penalty that gets at least three Iowa message board posters investigated by a federal entity.  

GOING IOWANFINITE: THE RISE OF A FOOTBALL REVOLUTIONARY

Note: The following excerpt from the author embedded within the Iowa football program in the spring of 2023, is from a book originally completed before the 2023 football season and published on Friday, October 27, 2023.     

“Let me ask you something,” Brian Ferentz said to his offensive coaching staff.  He sat at the head of a large u-shaped desk at the Hansen Football Performance Center leaning back, his arms behind his head.  “What’s the most efficient play in football?”

He stared at the group before him, wizened old coaches whose heads bore permanent marks and indentations from years of headset squinting through half-glasses, eager young graduate assistants still in playing shape and looming like distant mountains in the corners of the room, afraid to say anything, and me, trying not to be noticed as I wrote everything down.

“Three point three yard run,” wheezed out Mackett.  Walt Mackett had been with the Hawkeyes since he played as a nasty fullback in 1952 and unofficially led the Big Ten in biting incidents.  Mackett officially retired in 1997, but still hung around in meetings and prepared detailed longhand scouting reports that he passed around.

“Wrong,” Ferentz said.  “Plannitz.”

Plannitz, a nervous assistant who had just graduated after five years as a walk-on and who never got into a single game because the one time they decided to send him in in a blowout against Western Illinois he was on the toilet, gulped.  “Uhhh, five yard out,” he said.

“Wrong.”  He began randomly pointing around the room with his marker.

“Tight end screen.”  

“Nope.”

“Jet sweep.”

“No.”

“Flea flicker.”

“That's not even real. Oh Grady, you think this is boring?  Well, enlighten us.”

Grant Grady, a hotshot receivers coach who was not too fond of Ferentz’s little quizzes, had been folding a playsheet into a paper giraffe in a sort of hostile origami.  “I don’t know Brian, what about a fuckin’ punt.”  

Everyone laughed.  The stagnant nature of Iowa’s 2022 offense was a running joke in the football media and one that Ferentz didn’t think was very funny, which is why he was in the meeting room.

“You know what you’re not that far off.”

Ferentz stood up and sauntered over to the whiteboard.  He maintained the bulk and bearing of a former lineman.  He uncapped his marker and wrote a two on the board.  

“Safety.  How many plays did the offense run?”

“The offense, coach?” said Plannitz.

“Yeah.  How many did we run?  It’s not a trick question.”

“Uh, none,” Plannitz said.

“Damn straight.”  He put a slash sign with a zero next to the two.

“Fumble return, how many did we run?”  He wrote a six on the board.

This time two or three coaches chimed in at the same time.  “Zero.”  Six slash zero on the board.

“Right.  Punt return?” He wrote another 6 then a slash.  

All of the coaches said “zero” in unison as Ferentz wrote it on the board except for one or two that said “none” and Grady, who was intently drawing teeth on his giraffe.  

“How about a situation where a team lines up for an extra point or two-point conversion but somehow manages to lose possession of the football in its own endzone on the complete other end of the field?”

“Zero,” they yelled out because that was the pattern but many of them looked confused.  “That’s right,” Ferentz said and then wrote a one slash zero.  “Do the math on those.  Which one is most efficient? We’re talkin’ points per offensive play.  Who here knows basic division?”

A few brows furrowed.  Plannitz pulled his phone halfway out of his pocket and then sheepishly put it back when he noticed no one else doing that.  A heavy silence settled in the room.

Grady looked up.  “They’re all horseshit.  You can’t do ‘em.”  “You can’t divide by zero.  It’s not allowed or something.”

“That’s absolutely right.  They’re all exactly the same.  The same efficiency.  Zero plays for the offense.  It’s so efficient that it is scientifically impossible to determine.  Every other offense in the country is running plays.  They’re trying to do yardage.  They’re trying to do points.  Well guess what, you take the best offense in the goddamn country and you know what they’re doing?  Look at their efficiency numbers.  They exist.  Ours don’t.  There’s no defense in the goddamn universe that knows how to stop our shit.”

Grady exhaled deeply.”

“Got something to say, Grant?”  

“This is the absolute stupidest shit I’ve ever heard, Brian,” he said.  Ferentz walked over to him and they met forehead to forehead.  

“Get the fuck out of my football performance center,” Ferentz said.

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Grady said as he gathered his stuff and walked out.  “Good luck, fellas.  I mean that.  Good fuckin’ luck.”  Ferentz grabbed the giraffe in his meaty hand and crushed it.

“Undetermined.  That’s our strategy.”

**********

You would not think that Iowa’s football team, a notoriously staid institution where Brian’s father Kirk has been churning out the same defense, tight ends, and punts operation for decades as the longest-tenured coach in the Big Ten would be something I would write about.  My interests tend towards the cutting edge.  For example, in Jeeves Nation, I explored the world’s most innovative search engine poised to remake the entire concept of searching the World Wide Web.  In Liar’s Pogs, I examined the burgeoning pog economy emerging in schoolyards that turned into a complex international financial system of its own.  My own interest in sports came out in The Trestman Cometh, a story about a coach whose battle to bring revolutionary strategies from Canadian football to the NFL was derailed by the fact that he looked like a ventriloquists’ dummy from the cover of an R.L. Stine novel.

College football represents a far more diverse array of strategies than the NFL.  Teams are limited based on their own resources and available players.  Teams are also molded to coaches' idiosyncratic preferences.  Some teams like to try to gradually run over their opponents like a slow-moving molasses calamity.  Some teams try to move as quickly as possible and exhaust their opponents.  Other teams, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force teams unable to field players with the wide-bodied bulk of their peers, like to confuse opponents by running archaic option configurations that befuddle defenses unsure of who can run the ball.  

At Iowa, though, whatever system they had was not working.  In 2022, Iowa ranked dead last out of 130 total teams in yards per game, averaging nearly 30 yards fewer than the next-worst team Eastern Michigan.  They averaged only 117 passing yards per game; the only teams that threw for fewer yards were Navy and Air Force, which intentionally eschew the forward pass as part of their offensive strategy.  Despite the pitiful and ineffectual play of its offense, Iowa's defense still managed to carry the team to eight wins, including a victory in the Music City Bowl.  But Brian Ferentz was sick of hearing about how crappy his offense was.  With his offense already at rock bottom, Ferentz was prepared to unleash his new concept and forever change how college football was played.

I first came to know Brian Ferentz after publishing “Boylenball”, an article for the New Yorker that featured a coach who revolutionized the concept of the timeout in the NBA using innovative mathematical models to time them while philistines dismissed him as a bald asshole taking pointless timeouts while already hopelessly behind because he was mad.  Ferentz reached out to me to ask about a photo that ran in the article where Boylen wore a pork pie hat because, as a man with an equally enormous head, he had trouble finding a one that could accommodate his bulbous cranium.  I told him that Boylen was no longer talking to me because he thought the article made him seem like a “boob” but the photographer tipped me off to a place called Fred Gazoo’s Huge Haberdaschery that specialized in hats for the large-headed gentleman.  We started corresponding after that and finally met for a drink when he was scouting a player not far from where I was embedded with the founders of WebTV.  This is when I learned about Undetermined Football.

The easy way to talk about Brian Ferentz is with the cliched story of a son desperate to escape the enormous shadow of his own father.  After all, that is how things appear.  He played for Kirk and then, after a brief foray coaching in the NFL, returned to coach for him, steadily rising through the ranks, rankled by charges of nepotism while never being able to satisfy the old man.  The book practically writes itself.  But, at least as Ferentz tells it, that has nothing to do with his entry into football.  He instead sees it not as some sort of complicated King Lear-style family drama but as an intellectual puzzle.  He’d be happy to run his experiments anywhere.  But Iowa provided an opportunity and a head coach who would at least have to listen to his ideas because his mom would yell “Kirk! Listen to Brian’s ideas.”

Ferentz had been nurturing the idea for undetermined football for some time.  He tells me that the idea is rooted predictably in rebellion.  He had grown up with the idea of staid Iowa football and as a teenager became obsessed with offense, with elaborate ways of marching down the field and scoring points.  He studied the then-novel spread offense, the air raid, the old run & shoot.  As a boy, he hid play sheets showing the run/pass option under his mattress.  But as he got older, Ferentz grew tired of exotic offensive looks.  He had in mind something better.

“Do you know about Napoleon in Russia?” he said.  I told him I did but he kept going as if I said I did not.  Ferentz, a history major and the owner of several books about horse-based  warfare, began to explain how, as the Grande Armée penetrated deeper into Russia, the Russian forces defeated them by retreating further, stretching the French supply lines as winter encroached upon it.  “I thought to myself, well in the Big Ten we have a hell of a winter.  What if we also have retreat?”  

Ferentz told me that his new offensive gameplan was not just based on mathematics and the impossible “divide by zero” principle but also had elements of psychology.  He showed me papers on the concept of “mirroring” where humans as social animals had an unconscious need to emulate other humans in a similar setting.  Therefore, instead of having his team model brilliant offensive behavior such as by completing multiple forward passes or earning first downs, his team would instead foster an environment hostile to offense.  His running backs would run pointlessly into defensive tackles.  His quarterbacks would throw the ball mainly to the turf.  The other team, unaware of basic human psychology, would find themselves also playing like dogshit subconsciously out of a fear of ostracization that resided in the vestigial lobes of our primate brains.  Pretty soon both quarterbacks would be hurling themselves into linebackers or letting snaps fly over their head but only one would be doing so by design.  “Everyone's trying to run plays that work.  But we don't.  That’s the advantage right there,” he said to me as he drilled his running backs on letting a ball hit them in the face.

The idea was as counterintuitive as it was brilliant.  An offense that functionally refused to act, that performed the minimum amount of offense allowed in a football game, would act as a fulcrum where the defense and special teams would have more and more opportunities to score points.  This process would become so efficient, at least according to Ferentz’s calculations, that Iowa would become one of the highest-scoring teams in the country.  And this year he was going to find out.

It was unclear around the program whether Kirk Ferentz was on board with his son’s program or simply didn’t notice.  I tried speaking to him about this, but during our brief allotted interview time he simply squinted at me and ate an entire white onion like an apple.  

I had found a new innovation.  My publisher told me to go ahead and embed myself with the Iowa offense during training camp for the 2023 season.  To make things even more interesting, Ferentz had Iowa’s athletic director add in clauses to his own contract about how many points the team would score.  I was nervous about fitting in, so I started wearing hats and coach-style sunglasses and constantly spitting and calling things “horseshit” until I seamlessly blended into the sideline. That summer, I observed Iowa secretly installing new drills that no one had ever seen: fumbling, taking idiotic penalties at the exact wrong time, and summoning the punt team.  My publisher sold the film rights for $12 million.

It was obvious that Ferentz had stumbled onto a revolution in football strategy.  No one in the Big Ten knew what as coming.  No one in the football press knew this would happen, except for one person: me.

Please enjoy my next project Planet of The Apes: How NFTs Reshaped the Global Economy.