Winning the Argument

One of the defining features of the early 2000s that went hand in hand with the increasing spread of the internet was a clear dichotomy between old-fashioned "dumb" and new-fangled, stats-inflected "smart" sports opinions.  This manifested itself most clearly in baseball, where an emerging vanguard of stats-focused fans and analysts got a stronger foothold into the mainstream with game-changing revelations like “it is bad to make outs for no reason.” It helped that the opponents were a true rogue’s gallery of oafs and dunderheads: baseball lifers marinated in a cocoon of tobacco juice, mummified local announcers telling decades-old Mickey Mantle anecdotes, and newspaper columnists (there were still locally well-known newspaper columnists) who were photographed grimacing over typewriters and churning out sentence-paragraphs about how there’s only one stat that matters and it’s Heart. 

Their argument was based on That's How It's Always Been Done, This Smacks of Math That Belongs in a Mother's Basement, and That's Not How The Mick Would Have Done It even though I have conclusively proven in this blog over the years that the existence of a ballplayer named "Mickey Mantle" was invented by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal as a CIA psy-op on Baby Boomers in 1988. Despite the fact that these people controlled 90% of the narrative in the game and had most of the airtime, they were, to anyone remotely capable of listening to reason, buffoons.

Eventually the rational argument won out. Stats guys replaced grizzled former players in front offices. Managers are now jacked 45 year-olds in hoodies, replacing the pot-bellied, hooch-nosed older breed who all regardless of their actual age appeared to be 77 years old after a lifetime of exposure to the sun, liquor, and the fact that 43% of all plate appearances before 1993 involved a guy getting a baseball thrown at his face because he may have smiled at some point. Baseball broadcasts now feature statistics that come from sophisticated cameras measuring every movement that happens on a diamond. All of the Hat Guy sports columnists took buyouts or retired and have been replaced by a bot dispensing gambling advice.  

But what did the baseball fan gain from this? Front offices are obsessed with efficiency meaning they have a justification to avoid signing pricey free agents. The three true outcomes-style of optimized baseball is more boring than the objectively stupider method of having little slap hitters out there running around. Every team is run by a hair gel guy wearing one of those investment vests instead of a crusty baseball creature who makes dumb trades in order to feel alive. Starting pitching is disappearing from the game as dozens of identical guys who throw 98 with nasty movement are beltfed from the bullpen and are constantly bouncing between the majors and minors and subsequently batters just get up there and strike out. It’s enough to make you want to turn on the moneyball movie and hope John Connor has traveled back in time to take out Jonah Hill before he can start replacing production in the aggregate.

Another classic early 2000s "smart guy" sports opinion was to demand a college football playoff.  The concept of a college football championship had been, for most of its history, a process where the most boorish second-generation ski-doo salesmen in each state yell at each other and hire airplane billboards in order to essentially demand their team win a national championship.  Every once in awhile, teams just go back in history and decide they won a championship like they are forging documents to claim a minor principality in the Holy Roman Empire.  The entire sport was based on hollerin’.  To a rational person, this was incredibly stupid. Why not just have the best teams play each other?

Finally, college football acted and arranged for the two best teams to meet in a national championship game. Unfortunately there was rarely a consensus about who the two best teams were, and more often than not the answer was more hollerin’ and also bellyaching by the team or teams left out as expressed by rude airplane banners.  It seemed to make sense to simply do what every other level of football does and simply have a playoff. So they unleashed a playoff that is constantly growing and threatening to swallow the entire sport.

An institution as corrupt and rickety as college football could not elegantly implement a playoff.  They decided to ignore all of the rankings that had traditionally been used and consecrate a conclave of recently retired coaches and athletic directors and the occasional war criminal to disappear themselves into bland executive hotel conference rooms and emerge with their own rankings based on mysterious and whimsical criteria.  Every week the square tie knot ESPN guys have to go on TV and guess at what the Committee was thinking by portentously intoning that "By its new rankings, the Committee has shown that it really values ranked road wins" like they are trying to divine the whims of ancient gods by the arrangements of fish bones on a beach.  

And once ESPN and the conferences got a whiff of playoff money, the question would not be if the playoff expanded but to how many teams.  Last year, the playoffs expanded to twelve teams, including higher seeds getting to play home playoff games.  The atmosphere for those games was incredible, but the conferences are too committed to the big bowl games to move the next rounds off of neutral bowl sites.  But that is not enough. The Big Ten has now proposed a playoff that consists of 28 teams.

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti announces plan for 28 team playoff

The problem is not with the playoff itself, but with the way the playoff has devoured the rest of the college football landscape.  The bigger the playoff gets, the more its shadow covers the rest of the college football landscape.  Unfortunately for ESPN, which along with the Big Ten and SEC is driving the push towards a more NFL-style setup in college football, there are not 32 teams in FBS football but 136.  It is impossible for ESPN and the other TV networks to both focus increasingly on the playoff picture that affects a handful of teams while simultaneously trying to build up their inventory of other games, which they market as narratively meaningless.

The playoff is not the entire problem.  The constant realignments, the merciless pillaging of rival conferences, and even the desperately-needed implementation of player payment under a grungy and haphazard system governed by collectives of alumni determined by who has the stupidest goatees instead of making these players employees with unions and employee protections-- these are all vandalisms against the sport that the conferences and TV networks are trying to paper over with the spectacle of the playoff, the promise that we will eventually have a champion where 40 years from now a university president standing next to the smirking heir to the only plot of fresh water not yet claimed by an LLM data center can decide that they actually won the 2031 title. Unfortunately, while the so-called "smart" sports argument was to beg for a rational answer to the question of awarding a title in college football, it turns out that maybe having people yell at each other on the radio was the best way to do it.

Before the playoff, the best way to ensure your team was in the playoff was by creating BCS acronym themed signs and also hiring airplanes to fly them over your rivals' games; another way would be to hire a fleet of Napoleonic war ships to denounce your team's rival with a series of saucy semaphore codes.

The playoff is a fun and entertaining mechanism for crowning a college football champion.  It also has nothing to do with how college football is experienced on about 100 of the 136 campuses where it is played.  The networks and conferences now has to figure out what to do with all of the excess football that has nothing to do with the playoff that is left around like overstock inventory. Perhaps these games never mattered before either in the grand scheme of the mythical national title chase. But they had weight because the sport seemed at least to acknowledge that the title chase was only part of the picture; college football was a self-justifying enterprise because there were drunk college students willing to yell about it and regional rivalries and dumb trophies that meant as much as turning the World's First Monster Truck Lawnmower Boca Raton Bowl into a playoff game between the 34th and 36th seeded teams.  As the sport gets rationalized into a more and more efficient way of distributing money to the biggest programs in the two big conferences, that seems to be getting lost.

Early 2000s sports arguers got the college football playoff, advanced stats in baseball, optimized shot distribution in the NBA, and even (and I remember this being sort of part of all of this conversation as well) legalized gambling.  But when the optimized and rational idea gets combined with the obsession with chasing efficiency in money, we get obsession with salary cap arcana, bland homogenization of tactics, and idiotic gambling being forced into everything.  I'm sure that people arguing for better baseball strategies or normal ways of crowning a football champion at the time were not aware that their cries for rationalization would get swept up with the ruthless and efficient financialization of everything in sports.  The one silver lining is that I strongly believe that college football is too stupid to ever be fully contained.

NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL 

Whatever they do with the playoff, it is not my problem because I root for Northwestern, a team that will almost certainly not qualify for the playoff no matter how many teams they let in.  Every change in college football bodes terribly for the Wildcats, who feel to me like they are sort of floating in the Big Ten and just waiting for the axe to come down and send them into DIII the second the conference can justify it by adding a lawsuit in university form like Florida State or Miami.  But here we are in 2025, the Big Ten is one of the two pinnacle quasi-major league conferences in college football, and some of these august teams are going to have to waste their time on the 'Cats and their makeshift stadium that holds 25 people or play in a baseball stadium that regularly devolves into a muddy pit.

Last week, the university finally settled its lawsuit against former coach Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired in the wake of a widespread hazing scandal where several former players described ugly incidents, many of which inexplicably mentioned the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek. Fitzgerald sued the university, claiming he was shocked, shocked! to see hazing going on in the Northwestern football program and demanded $130 million for costing him his career coaching at the only school in the country where a guy who goes 1-11 is not even on the hot seat.  

The last game Pat Fitzgerald won involved him somehow squeezing a crystaline football helmet over his head so he could look like a warlord in a movie where the prop budget involved stealing a bowl from the director's mom. 

Fitzgerald seems to have prevailed in his lawsuit.  We have no idea how much money the school ultimately paid to Fitzgerald, but they were forced to put out a humiliating press release claiming that Fitzgerald knew nothing about the hazing, possibly because during the time he was the coach, he was one of those Guillermo Del Toro guys whose eyeballs are on his hands and he was always holding something.  The ruling presumably clears the way for Fitz to get one of those bullshit "analyst" jobs for disgraced coaches and eventually reenter the coaching ranks for any program in the market for a guy who failed to win a single played game in the United States in his last active season and who will denounce NIL and player movement as some sort of new offshoot of communism.

THE 2025 WILDCATS

There have been two recent vintages of Northwestern teams: those where there is a capable veteran transfer quarterback who can at least manage to keep the offense on the field long enough so the defense doesn't keel over from exhaustion in the third quarter that is good enough to get to a bowl game and teams where there is functionally no quarterback and they win one 0-1 Big Ten games.  In David Braun's first year, they had Ben Bryant and a vicious defense, and that was enough to win eight games. Last year, they played offense like they were on the game show Slippery Stairs.  

This year, the 'Cats will have heralded transfer quarterback Preston Stone, who was last seen grimly watching his replacement at SMU self-destruct in a playoff game against Penn State while Stone was functionally en route to Evanston.  There are some questions about who will catch the ball-- Northwestern's receiving corps is most politely described as "untested"-- and some key losses and transfers on defense, most notably with stalwart captain Xavier Mueller's graduation. 

And even is Stone is as good as advertised and the defense is as much of a pain in the ass as it has been in the past, it might not be enough.  Northwestern's veteran-quarterback-and-defense program was optimized for the Big Ten West, where teams would simply bash their heads into the locker room walls for 60 minutes and the winner was the last guy to stagger onto the 50 yard line and vomit.  The Enormous Ten has taken away these comfortable environs and traded them for an absolutely brutal schedule.  Stone will not be hanging out on the sidelines against Penn State this time.  They also have to face Oregon at home and Michigan at Wrigley in what has been described as the most annoying football game ever played.  I would rather lick the L tracks at Addison than sit with 40,000 power-shushing Michigan fans and I am a person who willingly pays money to go to Cubs games and sit next to a group of 48 year old guys wearing backwards hats and loudly having "tell my lawyer she doesn't get the audi."phone calls.

It is possible that Northwestern is both a much better team this year and also has an equally bad or worse record simply because the schedule is marked "thar be dragons."  Even Illinois is good now; the only Big Ten team that anyone has any expectations to beat is Purdue which will either be very bad or can be expected to have the entire roster at one point in the game ensnare itself in a giant net on the sidelines.  Either way, I'm not sure how this bodes for David Braun, who unlike his predecessor cannot rely on a legacy of being one of the greatest players in the history of the program to shield him from criticism.  Braun's success seemed like a minor miracle under the gross circumstances surrounding the team in 2023, but no one is particularly tied to him and they're opening a shiny new stadium next year.  It doesn't help that I have watched a lot of Northwestern football and I could not tell you anything about Braun's personality other than "football coach." Maybe also "regularly photographed with mouth open."  In the end, what may save him if he has another rough season is the classic Northwestern conundrum of who else would even be willing to coach here.

The 'Cats will have to open the season on the road against Tulane, a very good team in out of the American Conference.  The Green Wave face some uncertainty at quarterback, where they are choosing between latecomer Jake Retzlaff from BYU and former Northwestern quarterback Brandon Sullivan who has been hovering around the Wildcats like a specter.  Sullivan, who served as the backup for Bryant, ended up in Iowa last year and came off the bench to lead the Hawkeyes to a dispiriting romp against the 'Cats.  It would be at the very least awkward, in my opinion, to see him getting the better of his former team again and hope he does not have three more years of covid-related eligibility so he can barnstorm around the country every year playing for at least one Northwestern opponent that he gets to by traveling via one of those pump railroad carts with a bindle sporting a Tim Beckman-inspired anti-Northwestern symbol.

The Tulane game is a good measuring stick for Northwestern.  Tulane is favored to win by about as large of a margin as you'll see from a team outside the Power Four against a Big Ten opponent this time of year. A surprising Northwestern win would instill some hope that they could seriously scrap for a bowl this year. A crummy loss does not mean the season is instantly over, but Northwestern desperately needs every win that that it can manage before facing the Big Ten manglers.

Northwestern's first year in the brutal, unforgiving Enormous Ten was discouraging.  And yet, there has been no reason why the Wildcats should have been able to field a competitive program for more or less the entire modern history of the school, and for about 20 years in the new century, they were able to be reliably annoying if not occasionally outright good.  The fact that Northwestern will constantly have to face off against playoff powerhouses in whatever stadium they happen to be playing in that year is a blow to their hopes of making crappy bowl games should they still exist, but on the other hand, each of those games offers a rare but tantalizing opportunity to do something incredibly funny.  

Unfortunately, the playoff means that, should the Wildcats manage to do the impossible and actually knock off a ranked team in front of an overwhelming number of opposing fans at what is supposed to be a Northwestern home game, it does not have the destructive power that a loss to crummy or mediocre Wildcat team could have in the past. Before the playoff, a loss to Northwestern usually meant an absolute annihilation of that big time opponent's dreams of winning anything.  The playoff has meant that teams like Northwestern can't single-handedly derail a opponent's national championship season by punting them into hell but what the playoff can't take away is a bunch of those fans going on the internet demanding that they fire their coach and whining about uncalled holding penalties, which to me is the greatest prize of them all.  Let's hope we get one of those this year.

The Chicago Cubs Have Spiraled Into The Toilet Zone

It is a quirk of American professional sports where many teams are heavily incentivized to be bad, and avaricious owners and their penny-pinching henchmen in the front offices can sell the move as strategic.  For several years, the Cubs pursued an active Being Bad policy, refusing to compete in the open market for superstars, riffling through the bargain bin for washed up veterans, and selling off any useful parts for prospects.  Watching an intentionally bad or even unambitious and mediocre team for a season is mildly infuriating as they putz away another meaningless year that is one of the finite ones you have on this planet but it is at least comforting that the wins and losses don't really matter.  

On the other hand, watching a team that has been very good suddenly and inexplicably nosedive into an active volcano while being hunted for sport by a rival team that is enjoying an endless series of the most sports movie-ass walkoff victories is one of the shittiest sports experiences that exists and one that makes me wish my TV provider had a "you sure about that?" warning every time I try to record another three hour festival of stranded runners, bullpen collapses, and glassy-eyed ballplayers striking out and then staring wistfully into the outfield like they have just sent all of their sons off to fight in the Civil War.  

The once baby-faced Counsell is aging like an American President in his second year with the Cubs 

The Cubs are miserable and frustrated. The best offense in baseball has instantly vanished.  The entire team is on a two-month long slump to the point where the only explanation for what has happened that makes sense is some sort of coordinated industrial action.  They've got Kyle Tucker-- a man who is boring to the point of it being some sort of avant-garde art project, a guy so stoic and devoid of personality and emotion that I am convinced that if he were to undergo questioning by Jack Bauer and his array of rusted implements and car batteries and jumper cables that are just lying around, Bauer would still only manage to get a "we just you know need to keep seeing the ball out there" from him-- throwing his helmet in the dugout and bellowing FUCK after striking out.  It's harder to tell if he's more upset that he can no longer play baseball or that he is costing himself tens of millions of dollars from his free agent contract with the Dodgers next season.

The Cubs' Terminator-style plunge into melted steel has marred what had been the Cubs' most promising season since at least 2018.  Tucker was playing like a star, unheralded free agent lefty Matthew Boyd was mowing people down, Carson Kelly inexplicably became an offensive weapon and, most importantly, Pete Crow-Armstrong turned into a superstar.  Crow-Armstrong is a live wire, the best Cubs center fielder I've ever seen who pairs his speed with a rakish daring on the basepaths, and for most of the season his Baezian swing at everything approach was connecting as he bashed home runs.  He also is 23 years old and clearly having the time of his life being a star for a good cubs team in a rocking Wrigley Field and instantly became every single 10 year-old's favorite player; every time the Cubs have had a walk-off win he starts running on the field from the dugout before the runner has even crossed the plate because he's so happy his teammate did something cool.  If he played in the early 1990s he would already have a Costacos Brothers poster of him casually hovering 45 over a fence robbing a home run dressed in goth makeup and a leather jacket on a shoot with the most amount of smoke machines that can be legally operated in a photography studio with the legend "The Crow Flies." 

By my estimates, PCA has struck out in 95% of his plate appearances in the last six weeks.

Crow-Armstrong has filled the rare Cubs archetype of "infuriating baseball goblin" for opponents

The Cubs went from a comfortable lead in the division to giving up an insurmountable lead to the impossibly annoying Brewers who by now have probably called up a sickly Depression-era child who can barely manage to lift a bat out of the stands to pinch hit who immediately blasts a walkoff home run four times in the past week. They are technically in the Wild Card race but at this point even if they manage to cling on without being overtaken by the Reds their postseason prognosis seems to be two futile, punchless losses before an offseason with the departure of Tucker all but certain. Right now, the state of the Cubs is just Craig Counsell sitting pinch-faced in the dugout making his signature "we're not going to challenge that" gesture that looks like a toddler refusing to eat a single piece of broccoli for three hours every day.

On the other hand, baseball vibes can change quickly.  It wasn't that long ago that the Cubs were having a ball smashing home runs everywhere and winning games and not sweating out 2-0 losses to the Pirates. In 2001, with the Cubs in a similar slump, rookie backup first baseman Julio Zuleta decided to invent some rituals to unlock the bats based on a holy spiritual text, the 1989 movie Major League. According to this wonderful Sports Illustrated story from 2001, Zuleta's ritual sprang from the most perfect use of Ballplayer Brain that I've ever seen:

The next afternoon Zuleta gathered two oranges, an apple, a banana, sunflower seeds and a tube of the analgesic Flexall. He placed the items on a white towel in a sunny spot in the Cubs' dugout. Then he took a bat from each member of that evening's starting lineup and stacked them atop the mishmash. "I can't explain it all," says Zuleta, "but I thought that maybe the bats were hungry, so I gave them some fruit. I put them in the sun so we could get hot."

The Cubs, aided by what they called Zudoo ("I don't practice voodoo," Zuleta said in the SI article. "I am Catholic, and I believe 100 percent in God. But the way we were losing, something had to be done.") had an offensive explosion and a 12-game win streak that briefly catapulted them into first place.  "Look, I don't know what the heck Julio's doing, but as long as he's not killing any chickens in his hotel room, I'm not going to complain. Winning is winning," third baseman at the time and current Cubs radio analyst and Sandwich Uncle Ron Coomer told Sports Illustrated.  I can imagine Coomer telling Pat Hughes that he was rubbing his bats with a gyros spit until an umpire complained about the flies while Zach Zaidman maniacally cackles in the background.  Perhaps it's time for one of the Cubs to try something from Major League II or even Major League: Back to the Minors.   

So it's possible that sometime between now when it's too late, the Cubs will manage to get their shit together and remember how to play baseball again. Or they will continue to spiral into one of the most depressing collapses in recent Cubs history and the ballpark will be so miserable that you can get into Wrigley without having to take on an onerous personal loan and hope to see the token one win they get in each series.

I WILL NEVER STOP BELIEVING THAT THE BEARS ARE WHO I THOUGHT THEY WERE

The motto of this Bears season is not officially This Time It Will Be Different, but that's what it might as well be.  The Bears went out and got the hottest coach on the market in Lions madman offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, they are entering the second year with Caleb Williams under center, and they brought in a tight end and receiver with their first two picks after spending a great deal of free agent money to bring in a new group of offensive linemen who will hopefully prevent Williams from spending the majority of the season buried in the turf. Inept henchman-coach Matt Eberflus and his rotating collective of flunky assistants either in the process of being fired for incompetence or for vague and unspecified acts of "inappropriate behavior" that may or may not have involved an FBI investigation is gone. The Bears are behaving like a serious football team and not the Chicago Bears.

I have never seen a coaching move funnier than Matt Eberflus, asked about how after a disastrous and inept season where no one could figure out why he wasn't fired and why he should be trusted to work with a number one pick quarterback, appeared back at Bears camp with the explanation "I have a beard now." Eberflus is now the defensive coordinator for the Cowboys and his move for this season is "Now I'm wearing glasses. I'm learned. I know about the existence of time outs." 

But you will have to forgive me if I am reluctant to believe that this new Bears regime will bring about the never-seen holy grail of Bears football: a competent, functioning offense.  The Bears have, with the exception of a year under Ron Turner and that one year when Marc Trestman had Josh McCown playing out of his mind for a few games while Jay Cutler was injured, never had anything resembling a passing offense.  For my entire life no matter who is on or running or coaching the Bears there has been one kind of good Bears team, the one where the majority of touchdowns are scored by linebackers.  

Already, there have been some disturbing signs from camp.  Reports from beat writers describe an offense in disarray.  While GM Ryan Poles spent the offseason revamping the interior of the offensive line, the all-important left tackle spot remains up in the air, and a lot of playing time is now going to an undrafted free agent who played Canadian college football.  There was a video of Caleb Williams unable to throw a ball through a net and being mad.  The Bears also face a brutal schedule, not only having to get through their own meat grinder division but also having to play the brass knuckle enthusiasts of the AFC North.

Adding to the unease, ESPN reporter Seth Wickersham's book on quarterbacks includes revelations from Caleb Williams's overbearing Sports Father about how he didn't want his son to go to the Bears because it's "where quarterbacks go to die" as well as claims that the Bears left Williams alone to watch film with no instruction. These reports, excerpted to ESPN, stoked a brief local outrage, although I don't understand it-- I also would not want someone I cared about to become the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears and would have encouraged Caleb Williams to pull an Eli Manning-style power play or play in the Canadian league or fake his own death and change his name, reemerging as a promising Mountain West quarterback named Kraydon Armgun rather than play for the fucking Bears.  

Williams could have hired the people that made this hideous and unconvincing disguise for Eli Manning when he did a stunt try out for Penn State for some dumb marketing purposes that I can't remember 

I like Caleb Williams, enjoyed watching him in college and his rare moments of magic on the Bears last season and don't think he is bad, no matter how much a lot of the national media inexplicably seems to want him to be.  I also, despite a general discomfort with the offensive mastermind guys with Wermacht haircuts who form the current state-of-the-art in NFL coaching, have no reason to think that Ben Johnson doesn't know what he's doing.  I want both of them to succeed.  But I have watched enough Bears football where I need to see them actually throwing the ball like a normal NFL team for a whole season before I can believe it's possible.  

The Bears, as sclerotic and stagnant an organization that exists in sports, have undergone some change. Team matriarch Virginia McCaskey passed away at the age of 102, and her son George who looks like a kindly train conductor on a children's TV show and probably should have been put in charge of do-gooder charity projects so that you could see a few special parking spaces at Soldier Field reserved for EVs and the Virginia could say "oh George did that" to visiting football dignitaries, has been feeling himself a little more; for example the Bears are not wearing their orange uniforms and now the end zones are navy blue for the first time. Reportedly, team president Kevin Warren who you last saw putting 45 new teams in the Big Ten, has taken on a more active role in football operations. The notoriously tight-fisted organization spent an enormous amount of money to get the top coach on the market instead of a cheaper Matt Eberflus type. They will likely soon announce that they are building their dumb, domed Xanadu out in Arlington Heights after years of releasing Hypothetical Stadium Renderings in various Chicagoland locations. George McCaskey would love to not have his usual once every three to four years press conference after firing the head coach and/or front office to say "well everyone involved has made terrible decisions again but this time I swear the exact same people will not make that mistake."

Fortunes change quickly in the NFL. It's not unheard of for a team to go from five wins to vaulting into the playoffs.  But there are some teams for whom this does not happen, the joke meme teams who always suck no matter what they do that can never get their act together-- teams like the Browns and the Jets who are always surrounded by dysfunction led from their idiot owners and their inevitable collection of bumbling, malevolent sons.  The Bears have been living in that territory since they fired Lovie Smith.  It will take more than hiring a coach and drafting a quarterback for me to think they can overcome their tendencies and be a normal football team instead of The Bears.