Northwestern Turns Unwatchable Slog Into Overtime Thriller

The NCAA tournament does not care how a team wins its game, only that they win.  If they play one of the worst halves of basketball possible or an opposing player temporarily forgets that basketball exists in a limited amount of time and does not extend infinitely past the temporal limits of human experience or if the broadcast is temporarily halted to show us a message from Buckingham Palace but they still win in overtime then they still get to live another day.

Northwestern and FAU played the first half they had been placed in some sort of TruTV prank show where they replaced the baskets with narrower novelty rims from carnival games that made it all but impossible for a ball to successfully pass through the hoop.  Their game kicked off Friday's slate of games, so for several minutes, this was the only thing on TV: Northwestern and FAU players fruitlessly running back and forth across the court shoving each other and then missing layups until the Owls' seven-foot center got to attempt a couple of free throws.  For Northwestern fans, this was normal and something that regularly happens when the football team is accidentally shown on national television and America is forced to bear witness to the team's Iowa cover band aesthetics on their way to a plodding 17-13 win against Nebraska.

When it's 20-19 in the first half

The first half looked alarmingly like it was following the formula for a Northwestern loss, which was for a team to commit all of its resources to stymieing Boo Buie and for the rest of the Northwestern roster to miss open shots.  The Wildcats, though, stayed in the game with some ferocious defense.  I missed the last several minutes of the first half because I realized too late that my television provider's ads about being able to pause live television on their app only work if I am in my house and not trying to watch the game at work with my finger hovering over the delightfully anachronistic "boss button" that still exists on the official NCAA website and has moved from showing a generic pie chart to, I assume for its 2024 edition, a whole bunch of fake AI bullshit.

The NCAA Tournament's 2045 Boss Button

Things looked far better in the second half.  The 'Cats started to cruise, Boo Buie started to take over as the best player on the floor, Ryan Langborg and Brooks Barnhizer began to hit shots even as Bill Raftery slandered Barnhizer's mustache growing ability, and it looked like Northwestern would easily win.  But then the game started to turn towards FAU.  Things fell apart after Nick Martinelli was whistled for a flagrant after Vlad Goldin put his face right where Martinelli's elbow happened to be while he was going for a rebound; after that the 'Cats couldn't get anything to fall and FAU took a late lead before Barnhizer heroically tied the game on a last-second layup.

Something happens to Northwestern's tournament opponents in the last second of close games where they feel compelled to do forget everything they've ever known about basketball.  In 2017, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis, who had been unstoppable in the second half of that game, inexplicably fouled Northwestern's free throw expert Bryant McIntosh with his team up one with 14 seconds left.  On Friday, Johnell Davis had the ball with with seven seconds left and the game tied but sort of casually loped up the court and dribbled around before launching a hopeless 27-footer into three Wildcats allowing the game to go to overtime. 

Surely there's room somewhere for Northwestern to create an art installation dedicated to its basketball program's greatest work of art: the Ryan Langborg overtime.  I am very sorry to casual readers who might get a little lost in the technical basketball terminology I am going to use here to describe what happened because it's the only way to convey it, but Langborg went absolutely nutso in overtime on Florida Atlantic.  He didn't miss a shot.  He drained threes as the twenty four second clock was losing it's last tenths of a second.  He outscored the entire Florida Atlantic team singlehandedly.  The 'Cats just kept taking 29.999 seconds to hit shots; the Owls couldn't respond, lost, and then their coach pulled up stakes to the University of Michigan.  I knew it was over as soon as Boo Buie hit one of the most preposterous shots a person could take in a high-level basketball game. 

"BOO BUIE, MAJOR SPLASH" 💦#MarchMadness @NUMensBball pic.twitter.com/VauGhv0iyv

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2024

Northwestern has yet to lose its opening game in its three appearances.  They also have yet to advance past the second and this year face toughest opponent the tournament could offer.

TOURNAMENT VIEWING

The NCAA Tournament is one of the great sports TV events, especially the opening rounds with several games happening at once, the potential for incredible upsets, and introduction of this year's class of Midmajor Oafs and NCAA Tournament Guys.  You can find complaints about the current state of men's college basketball: the combination of one-and-done NBA talents with the chaotic movement of players means that there is almost no continuity among teams although it is very difficult to argue that the reasons this is happening which are to allow players freedom to leave their programs and make money are bad.  Player movement has also led to more upsets and the delightful phenomenon of any player who stays with a program for more than a year seem like tenured faculty or even the relatively new phenomenon of a midmajor Upset Hero resurfacing on another program; the ability to see Max Abmas in a Texas jersey and remember him as an enjoyable NCAA Tournament guy is one example, and I'm sure there were a large number of people who sort-of remember Princeton's Sweet 16 run last year pleasantly startled to see Langborg pop up on Northwestern shooting the flaming He's On Fire basketballs from NBA jam.  

NIL has also brought us the incredible brand-new phenomenon of Round One NCAA Guys immediately filming horribly janky phone-camera commercials in hotel hallways, a sports commercial type that is already creeping up the rankings toward the hallowed ground of car dealership commercial where the athlete says the dealership's slogan in unison with a chorus of local children.

The most important thing that makes the NCAA Tournament elite television, though is the fact that it airs during two work days where the appeal of college basketball games between schools you don't care about and have never heard of goes from compelling to irresistible.  There's absolutely no reason to watch a game between like Louisville and Oral Roberts on a beautiful spring weekend but if that is what is happening instead of looking at TPS Reports or whatever it is the most important thing going on in the entire world.

This is why it is crushing to see every close tournament game devolve into unwatchable bullshit.  I know this is not a novel complaint, but the introduction of the referee review is in my opinion a catastrophe.  There is nothing less interesting than watching a bunch of people in stupid-looking shirts squinting at a little television monitor for five minutes while you see the same replay of a ball maybe glancing off some pixels that might be a guy's pinkie 45 times in a row.  There is no reason to ever hear the most unwelcome sound in all of sports: the voice of Gene Steratore.  I have nothing against Steratore himself, but the only you ever hear from him is when the game has gone to the Referee Shadow Zone, the announcers are trying to parse Basketball Molecules, and you are about to see the same insurance commercial for the exact number of times where your brain is no longer able to process the Insurance Iguana without turning you into a werewolf.  

As we've seen across sports, the lie that video replay can actually reveal objective truth instead of revealing a series of finer parsable concepts of truth based on the interaction of pixels at split-second increments beyond any human being's ability to perceive them is one that has turned referee decisions into the boring version of forensic analysis done on those CBS procedurals about crimes people do in the Coast Guard and turns a series of basketball games into a Pentagon briefing.  Also it hurts the viewing experience that basketball coaches no longer have to wear ridiculous formalwear because it is much funnier watching people have tantrums while wearing ill-fitting, sweated-through suits than in athleisure.

The cutting edge of Coach Fashion is a television detective who is being shoved out of an interrogation room

NORTHWESTERN STILL HOPING FOR "THE UPSET"

Northwestern's reward for winning this game is a matchup with UConn, last year's champions and this year's overall top seed that is coming off a 39 point evisceration of the Cowboy Hat School.  The Huskies have only lost three games this entire season and, at a time when basketball rosters are as fluid as they have ever been, emerged as one of the most dangerous threats to repeat as champions since Joakim Noah's Florida teams managed to do it seventeen years ago.  It is hard to imagine there are too many people outside of Northwestern sickos who have picked Northwestern to advance on their brackets.

If your historically shitty basketball team makes the tournament and you care more about winning your bracket than picking your team to win it all, then I am sorry that is the acme of cowardice.  Also, if Northwestern makes some sort of miracle run then you have an enormous chance of winning the online bracket as all of the other brackets having Northwestern advancing far will be disqualified since 90% of them are from sportswriters legally prohibited from collecting prizes

The Wildcats have what appears to be an impossible situation in front of them against an unstoppable basketball machine.  But the appeal of the tournament is that on any given day, these are still college basketball teams and capable of playing an absolute stinker at the worst time.  There's one person in Brooklyn who knows Northwestern can win this one and it's Boo Buie.

Boo Buie Makes It Happen

The last time Northwestern’s men’s basketball team tried to follow up its greatest season of all time, they were not able to get back into the tournament. They weren’t able to conjure up the small miracles they needed year before to get them to the school’s first NCAA Tournament and they were unable to call upon the crowd that had materialized out of nowhere to turn Welsh-Ryan into an actual home court for the first time in recent memory while trying to do so in a windswept 20,000 seat stadium they had to share with the monster truck Grave Digger. They also did not have Boo Buie.

Boo Buie will play the last college basketball games of his life in this tournament. Although the NCAA has relinquished virtually all of its ability to regulate anything in college sports, the one rule they seem to agree on is that Boo Buie cannot stay at Northwestern pursuing multiple PhD degrees and publishing several insightful monographs that are critiqued only by his academic rival, a fifteenth-year senior at Michigan State whom he both crossed up and also neglected to cite in a paper presented on a panel where the Spartan served as the chair. He’s out of senior years. 

In the last two years, Boo Buie has emerged as Northwestern's greatest player. He is not the first player to take the program to the tournament, but he has done something far more impressive at Northwestern which is to make playing in the tournament seem almost normal.

Northwestern has had some excellent players come through, but they always seemed like heroic Sisyphus disciples. During the Bill Carmody era, Northwestern appeared to be playing a different sport from the rest of the Big Ten as he shifted recruiting efforts to overseas and sent the Wildcats out there in novel offensive and defensive configurations as a concession that he would not beat conference teams playing normal basketball and instead had lured them into a diabolical house of mirrors where they would have to watch a bunch of guys gradually back cut them after 33 seconds. Personally, I loved that.  Northwestern basketball was at its nadir and the only rational solution was to play some exotic, janky, rec-spec basketball. I was crushed that America never got an opportunity to fall in love with John Shurna's deadly but goofy-ass jumper for a few hours in March and disappointed that Northwestern's administration never took my advice to simply claim an NIT title like a False Dmitri because no one would ever both to check.

A portrait of the False Dmitri, a man who claimed to be the son of Ivan The Terrible in the early seventeenth century and succeeded in briefly becoming Tsar, which led to a succession of other people also claiming to be Dmitri with decreasingly successful results.  The fourth False Dmitri does not have a Wikipedia page; "some argue that False Dmitry IV is just False Dmitry III due to bad record keeping," Wikipedia says.

It probably would be surprising even two years ago for a Northwestern fan to predict the growing Cult of Boo Buie. Buie arrived as a fascinating but flawed player, one capable of scoring outbursts used mainly to turn Tom Izzo the color of a chuck roast once or twice a year, but also by throwing ill-considered passes or dribbling into situations where he would find himself hopelessly in over his head like the basketball equivalent of a Coen Brothers guy. He was the type of basketball player that probably would be infuriating except in the zero-stakes world of Northwestern basketball it was endearing just because he was willing to just go out there and try shit.  I have absolutely no idea what happened last season, but all of a sudden he kept doing spectacular things. stopped making mistakes, and became one of college basketball’s most reliable floor generals.

Buie has done things I’ve never seen a Northwestern player do before. For the first time I can remember, Northwestern has a player that scares opposing fanbases. It is very rare that other teams’ fans can even name a Northwestern player, but anyone who shares my twisted curiosity for reading the most bottom of the barrel drivel a person can find from opponents’ most deranged and borderline dark web message boards knows that they know who Buie is, they do not like him, and they are wondering why he has been in college for what they estimate as 17 consecutive years. 

Buie has been a key part of making basketball games an event. Welsh-Ryan has become a home court.  Anyone who has ever attended or even watched a game on TV knows that since time immemorial, opposing fans would swarm the arena and make a big ruckus and the only consolation was that the old Welsh-Ryan was such a dilapidated barn that they would have to go home aching with bleacher back and scoreboard dot eyes. The arena largely existed as a place for Indiana fans living in the Chicago area to leave angry Yelp reviews.  

While it has always been a tall task to find more than 30,000 people willing to cheer for Northwestern's football team in its home stadium regardless of its success, it is considerably easier to find 5,000 people who have emerged like 75-year cicadas to root for a team that is actually winning games. Northwestern only lost one Big Ten game at Welsh-Ryan all season. They beat a top-ten rated Illinois team at home, and no one even rushed the court.  Pat Ryan may have paid for the lavishly renovated new arena but Boo Buie owns it.

It might not be fair to his teammates to ascribe Northwestern’s success to Buie alone, but it’s impossible to ignore his presence. He almost never leaves the court. He orchestrates nearly every possession. Every Northwestern set starts with Buie at the top of the key scanning the defense as the rest of the team offers him a menu of picks that he can use to find an open teammate or get a weaker defender switched on him so he can barbecue him with a crossover and his signature floater or casually launch a 27 foot jumper. He is constantly directing other players on offense and defense; in situations when an opposing player has a trademark shot celebration where he acts like he is a delighted Price is Right audience member whose name has been called by Rod Roddy, he is apparently in charge of leading his teammates to make fun of that. When the game is on the line, everyone watching the game knows the ball is going to Buie, and he’s made a shocking number of do-or-die shots against top teams in the biggest games. 

It's almost March! Boo Buie’s game winner lifted Northwestern over No. 14 Indiana 64-62. “More people need to wake up. This isn’t luck. It can’t be luck at this point,” said Buie after the win. Wildcats have sole posession of second place in the Big Ten standings behind Purdue pic.twitter.com/jna9qSc2NO

— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) February 16, 2023

Indiana fans were apparently whining that this move was a push-off to which I tell them to call Bryon Russell about it. Crying about uncalled fouls is ridiculous unless of course the referees ignore an egregious goaltending situation in which case you are not complaining about basketball on the internet but rectifying a Grave Injustice

Buie and the Wildcats have a difficult task ahead of them. They are matched up against Florida Atlantic, which is also a tough, veteran team that returns largely intact from a miracle run to last year’s final four. At the same time, the FAU team seems to be a little bit more inconsistent this season, and I have heard grumblings about their seeding, which is still a very funny bit to a person who has almost no experience rooting for a team in the tournament-- it is impossible for me to see someone complaining about seeding and not hear them yelling "my seeds!" in the same voice Tom Hardy uses The Revenant to talk about his pelts. The Wildcats have been playing some strong defense and if the officials let them do a little bit of shoving and if Brooks Barnhizer and Ryan Langborg get hot from three, they can give anyone an unpleasant afternoon.

Unfortunately, Northwestern is not sending the best version of its team against FAU. The Wildcats literally limped to the end of the season. Two senior starters went down with injuries on a squad that already leaned heavily on its upperclassman-heavy starting lineup. With a fully healthy team, Northwestern looked dangerous enough to me that I could envision a Sweet 16 run. Instead, players in various configurations of casts and scooters were forced to spend the last few weeks of the season watching the Wildcats drop a Big Ten home game, lose on the road to a Michigan State team that they had beaten so badly at Welsh-Ryan that it caused Tom Izzo to uncork an embarrassing podium-thumping jeremiad against whatever he thinks analytics is, and make a quick exit from the Big Ten Tournament.

Izzo, posed like an elderly relative forced into having a pandemic-era zoom birthday party, unleashes his screed about analytics.  One example of an analytic is that at that point, Izzo had lost four out of five of his last games against Northwestern

If the Wildcats manage to beat FAU, they will have their work cut out for them. For some reason, Northwestern was drawn into what I’ve seen described as a very difficult bracket quadrant; if it’s not a Region of Death, it’s at the very least a Region of Gastric Distress. The defending-champion UConn Huskies are lurking for whoever manages to win on Friday; last year’s runner-up San Diego State is also in the bracket and so is an Illinois team desperate to avoid another early tournament exit which always feature slow motion shots of a spittle-flecked Brad Underwood damply screaming like he is engaged in some sort of molting phase and will emerge in the second half with wings, extra legs, and an even stupider haircut.

The expectations for Northwestern in this tournament remain low. No one expects them to win more than one game. But the Wildcats have a purpose beyond basketball: for Boo Buie to keep playing one more game in a Northwestern uniform.