From the final score, it looked close enough. I saw that Northwestern lost to mighty Oregon by only 20 points at The Lake while I was out of town and away from a television, and I was actually pretty excited because what looked going into the game like an inevitable, apocalyptic asskicking that occurs when the Big Ten schedulemakers lob national title contenders at the ‘Cats like Donkeys Kong hucking deadly barrels may have actually featured a portion of the game that was competitive. But as a service to the readers of this blog, I went out of my way to do some extraordinary research on this and actually watched a large portion of this football game and it turns out that Northwestern just sort of squatted on the ball and scored some garbage time touchdowns when already down 34-0 against whatever Eugene-area toughs could be put into Oregon jerseys for the fourth quarter. And my analysis is: that's a bummer.
Northwestern freshman Dashun Reeder zooms for 79 yards in a thrilling moment for anyone degenerate enough to bet on Northwestern football
Still, there were some positives to take from this game. Without Cam Porter, the ‘Cats were still able to string together a respectable running game with a steady diet Caleb Komolafe and Joseph Himon. In fact, there were portions of the first drive, perhaps while the Ducks were still under thrall of the treacherous Central Time Zone and its attendant black magicks affecting West Coast Teams, when the Northwestern offensive line was actually sort of shoving around Oregon. But that was about it. The Northwestern offense went dormant, the defense couldn’t keep Oregon and its Heisman candidate quarterback Dante Moore bottled up, and the result was pretty much what everyone had expected.
But the Oregon game doesn’t matter because Northwestern has much more important things on its plate: the UCLA Bruins are coming to the Lake on Saturday and so far they have looked extremely crappy. In their last game, they got blown out by New Mexico and fired their coach, classic early 2000s Fantasy Football Guy DaShaun Foster. This is a big game; for both programs it represents potentially the only Big Ten win on their schedule.
The firing of DeShaun Foster is a blow to the Early 2000s Fantasy Football Guys Community and I'm sure there was a somber group text among Priest Homes and Az-Zahir Hakim, and Michael Turner
The Big Ten seemed to sense the importance of this game. Both UCLA and Northwestern had byes last week, and they have both been revving up like friction motor cars to smash into each other. The Big Ten or TV people or whoever sets the schedule even gave UCLA a Body Clock-friendly 2:30 kickoff. It’s a classic contest of Disarray versus Ennui.
At first when I saw what happened to UCLA and was only aware of the score of the Oregon game, I was extremely confident. A coachless team would come into the Lake, and Northwestern, by virtue of being a coherent football program, would beat them decisively and claim the crown as the sixteenth or seventeenth best Big Ten team as we had been promised. Having viewed the carnage of the Oregon game now, and knowing that the Bruins have had an extra week to jell under interim coach Tim Skipper, I’m more worried.
Firing a coach after three games usually mires a team in misery as everyone involved begins making plans, especially in the time of the transfer portal where UCLA’s players can find lifelines to a better program. On the other hand, as we saw with Northwestern two years ago albeit under very different and more sordid circumstances, an interim coach can galvanize a team. While UCLA has been awful, Northwestern has not been competitive against either FBS team on its schedule. The stakes could not be higher: a loss on Saturday would make it very difficult to believe the ‘Cats will have a shot against another Big Ten team, even Purdue.
You know you are writing about Northwestern football when you have to start sentences with the ominous phrase "Even Purdue"
In its brief sojourn from Ryan Field, the Wildcats have yet to win a conference game at The Lake. They have also not yet won a game at Wrigley Field since they started playing there in 2010 and in the subsequent games when they were allowed to have more than one end zone. Northwestern perhaps needs the dingy, miserablist atmosphere of rusted bleachers and loose hot dogs served in a pop cup because they ran out of buns in order to intimidate and demoralize Big Ten opponents. Or you could say they just keep facing good teams at home and at Wrigley during a couple of relatively down years, but I’m going to forget about that and assume they need the constant yawping of the Wildcat Noise in order to function at the highest level, qualifying for the Gronk Goin The World's First Rob Gronkowski-Based Crypto Currency Bowl.
The stakes could not be higher for either team, and this is clearly a “must win” for both programs if they want to avoid complete collapse. A bowl game already seems unreachable for both teams but it is impossible to imagine either team doing anything remotely good this season without a win on Saturday. This game is a desperate fight for merely a lousy season instead of a complete disaster. College football doesn’t get any better than this.
UCLA'S JOE BRUIN PRESENTS: THE REMAINS OF THE SEASON
It appears that my trip to the Mid West is more likely to happen. I spoke to Interim Coach Skipper and he told me I did not need to remain with the team while they performed their calisthenics and tackling rituals and that I should take a golf cart that says “Bruins Football” and is used to cart around players with broken femurs and drive up to the Evanston area.
The football facility has been more empty than it was in the days of Coach Foster. In those days, it was full of visiting dignitaries: Bill Walton, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, even Stephen Davis. The best of the Professional Sports landscape convened here, and I was very busy fist-pumping at them and carrying various flags, and occasionally doing complicated hand-slapping rituals with their children. Coach Skipper has favored a more austere environment, wanting the players to focus on the fundamentals and not as he said “taking selfies doing butt bumps with the mascot.” These are not the ideal conditions for mascotry, but I also believe that the professional is able to work within whatever restrictions the Coach sets.
I have, with other professionals, discussed the essential traits of a good mascot. I believe that the essence of good mascotting comes from the principle of buffoonery. The mascot must be a silly, jovial oaf whose antics entertain the crowd without ever becoming a sad or macabre spectacle. One’s thoughts naturally turn to stories of the infamous inflatable velociraptor who attempted to rollerskate down stars, slipped, and went flying as its mouth flopped open in a disgusting, leering spectacle, its tail deflating in silence as it was swarmed by medical personnel. The crowd was not guffawing but terrified that the fool had broken his limbs. My colleague, the duck from Oregon with whom I had passed many hours discussing the finer points of our profession, also pointed to the time the Denver Nuggets mountain lion passed out while being lowered from the arena ceiling before landing on the floor in a lifeless heap in a demonstration that looked like a warning sent from a rival mascot crime family.
The professional mascot should charm and delight, unlike, for example, the dreadful Stanford “tree.” I had endured its disgraceful antics for several years every time it visited, many times suspiciously wavering and tottering in an amateurish stomach-turning parody of the types of wholesome capering about one should expect from a trained mascot.
It is difficult to describe what I mean by professionalism in buffoonery, but I often heard this anecdote from my father, also named Joe Bruin. He told me that he heard of a mascot who had gone over to a section filled with rowdy children who had spent hours at a tailgate ingesting the type of candy where one licks a sugary stick and then swirls it around in pure sugar, and he had een warned that these children had already been chided for roughhousing. Nevertheless, the mascot walked over there, greeted the children and the largest and most aggressive went in for what appeared to be a hug before kicking the mascot in the most sensitive of regions. He wandered off into the tunnel to shake off the pain before returning to the section and another child then repeated the motion. Once again he returned to the tunnel before going out again, knowing the fate that awaited his most delicate parts, and once again another child delivered. A cheerleader organizing t-shirts to be thrown to the crowd said you cannot keep going out there, please find another section, but the intrepid mascot, without flinching, took another five kicks and one punch without showing pain, discomfort, or disgust, and managed to high five and take photos with more than a dozen children in the section. The mascot completed the game before retreating to his quarters with a package of frozen peas, a job honorably and professionally done.
Many mascots become briefly fashionable as the ideal of the profession. For a time, I suppose it was Gritty, a hockey mascot with maniacal eyes and a morbid, terrifying grin. I suppose those in the profession valued a mascot who appears to be performing his duties with the unhinged enthusiasm of an escaped maniac, but I suspect it will not be long until the pendulum swings in the other direction and the professional standard defaults to those of us who have perfected the more subtle mascotry arts instead of flashy, fashionable antics such as breakdancing or leaping from a trampoline and dunking flaming basketballs before getting immediately sprayed by a team with fire extinguishers.
I motored up the scenic environs of Interstate 90 from the airport, bludgeoned by the ubiquity of Brian Urlacher hair replacement billboards. Urlacher is himself one of the most famous Lobos from New Mexico, a program that contributed to an incident that led to the ouster of Coach Foster. I do not care for the slanderous insinuations about Coach Foster. In my experience, Coach Foster was a good, honorable coach who acted from the most noble instincts of his way of life. I do not believe that it was a defect of character that led to the team deploying their linebackers ineffectively against the relentless New Mexico rushing attack, nor do I think it was his intention to put heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava in a position where his statistics are well below where they had been at the University of Tennessee even though he had deployed a large section of the program’s resources to bring him over to our facility.
It is not the job of the mascot to question the Coach on the direction of the program but only to stir up the fans in support, to do pushups after scoring touchdowns, and to never hang one’s head or be caught by cameras in the “surrender cobra” position after an ill-advised turnover or defensive breakdown. These things are simply not done by the professional mascot.
As I motored up the twisting byways of Evanston, I could not help but think of how things had been in the heady early days of Coach Foster’s leadership. In those days, we had a larger staff of mascots, particularly with my colleague Josephine Bruin. From time to time, she would try to show me videos of other mascots such as the time Tommy Lasorda tried to assault the Philadelphia Phanatic after it made a series of provocative belly shakes in his direction and the old Coach was offended enough to try to steal the Phanatic’s personal ATV and to knock down the mascot and beat him with the Phanatic’s own crude effigy of himself, a video that I admit I had watched alone in my parlor during off-hours several times and found very amusing despite the Phanatic's actions that went beyond what I feel is appropriate mascot behavior.
Of course, I had explained that I was far too busy attending to my duties: checking “Let’s Go Bruins” cards to make sure that no one had slipped in a card with obscenities, combing the costume fur, cleaning and oiling every part of the hot dog gun to make sure that it fired consistently and regularly but would not cause an injury to a spectator's face. I suggested if she has time to watch Phanatic videos, she surely had time to take comical photos with Jonathan Ogden where he looks enormous compared to even the largest mascot heads, as I had been alerted that he had just arrived on campus.
I arrived at the Lake and saw another mascot just sitting there, saying perhaps to no one in particular how much he enjoyed the smell of dying fish in the air on a crisp autumn day. He turned to me and noticed that I too was a mascot. He asked where I had come from and I told him I was the Bruin after working for the interim Coach. I am not sure why I did not mention working for Coach Foster.
The Wildcat told me he was slightly embarrassed discussing important matters of mascotry with me, a mascot who worked in the Rose Bowl while he was at home in a stadium that fits fewer people than our basketball arena. But we both, I suppose, were working at difficult times. “I have heard that previous mascots here were locked in a cage until Northwestern scored, which rarely happened, back in the ‘80s,” the Wildcat said. I resolved that no matter what happened that afternoon I would learn some of the more restrained antics that Coach Skipper preferred, perhaps a Jose Canseco-style forearm bump.
No comments:
Post a Comment