Requiem For the Schiano Men

Last year, it was a matter of a foot or two, the margin by which a Minnesota kick sailed wide of the Wrigley uprights and finally give Northwestern a win in that football-cursed ballpark and a bowl berth. The ‘Cats had been sitting on five wins after shutting out Purdue and suffered three losses in a row including an absolute heartbreaker against Michigan in the unfriendly confines, and desperately needed a win in their penultimate game before having to resort to hoping enough bowl-bound teams would be ravaged by the transfer portal or a coach leaving or an outbreak of a formerly obscure disease called like Footman’s Mumps to sneak into the postseason. On Saturday, the ‘Cats mauled Rutgers and got their bowl berth sewed up. It was not yet Halloween. 

Aidan Chiles again starred for Northwestern while demonstrating the new all purple gothic uniforms are not just good for looking menacing in the library

It is rare for Northwestern to be heavily favored over a Big Ten team and even more rare for them to effortlessly crush them. The game was over in the first quarter when Rutgers proved they had no answer for Aidan Chiles, Caleb Komolafe, and the Northwestern offense and when their starting quarterback suffered a headfirst collision with Kobie McKenzie’s shoulder pad. From my seat in a corner near the apex of the stadium, I was shocked not to see a targeting review or even a penalty flag come out. Unfortunately for Rutgers, the injury wrecked any chance of a functioning passing game; Michael Kilbane got a strip sack on their next possession, and their procession of backup quarterbacks had more success throwing to Northwestern defensive players than star wideout KJ Duff.

Rutgers got within two scores in the second half when Northwestern worryingly stopped playing run defense. The Knights ran for more than 300 yards in this game, which was fine in a game where Northwestern also did that and Chiles scored five TDs through both the air and the ground, but it was a mystifying concern that Northwestern's defense went from virtually impregnable in the first half to looking befuddled that it was legal to run the football.

I did watch a little bit of the broadcast, which was more exciting than the live game only because it had so many shots of Greg Schiano. Schiano’s psychological hold on Rutgers may be fading as the Knights plunge into the depths of the Big Ten toilet from which he was brought in to rescue them, and he is giving a tremendous Embattled Coach Performance out there. He is watching the game squinting under a play sheet he holds up to his forehead as an improvised visor while he makes sour Robert De Niro shouting “Bobby” at Wesley Snipes in the movie “The Fan” faces. He paces around and screams operatic arias at the referees.  

Schiano doesn't wear a hat or visor on the sidelines so it looks like he is often spending the entire game doing this while, I assume, planning to dress as an umpire to attack Wesley Snipes in the rain in the climactic ending to a baseball game. We don't get absolutely insane sports/action movies like this anymore like The Fan or The Last Boy Scout that climaxes with Damon Wayans getting shot through the hand but still accurately throwing a football at a guy with a gun and also features the classic trope of a guy falling off a building into rotating helicopter blades, which is how 95% of 1990 action movie villains were killed, to the point that I think that 1990s action movie villains must have had to have specific Helicopter Blade Insurance

Schiano is cratering at Rutgers, and his time there seems like it might be coming to an end. There are two factors saving Schiano from getting instantly fired: his hefty buyout and the crippling fear that he is the only person who has made it work at Rutgers this century coupled with the fear of the unknown, of plunging into an endless void of bad coaching hires that keep Rutgers in the darkness or actually finding a coach who can have success there but would immediately leave for a program that is not Rutgers, but that calculus has changed now that Rutgers is circling the drain even with Schiano. Schiano is 60 years old and could opt to do something else with his life but he does not strike me as a person who is living unless he is gargoylically stalking the sidelines threatening to headbutt an official or screaming for the punting unit like he is a general ordering a massive strike of conventional weapons on a rampaging godzilla. 

The most lasting legacy from Schiano would be that he reportedly referred to certain players as “Schiano Men” although it is unclear where that came from– all of the reporting on Schiano Men comes from a 2013 Andrew Brandt story in Sports Illustrated about his disastrous tenure with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers  that is no longer on the internet except through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine where it says “The players also speak to the influx of multiple Rutgers players from Schiano’s past and the use of the phrase 'Schiano Men,' a term that clearly does not apply to [then-Bucs quarterback Josh] Freeman.” To me, it is unclear from this if the Bucs players came up with this epithet as a sarcastic way to identify the coach’s favored Rutgers-seasoned personnel or if it was something Schiano was saying himself, which was the usage I had absorbed from being on the internet at the time and also because the idea of Schiano telling someone "you're not a Schiano Man" is too funny to not interpret it that way.

CHIP KELLY COMES BACK TO OREGON WITHOUT OPERATIC REVENGE SHENANIGANS

Northwestern is 6-1 and ranked, but things are going to get much more difficult. Other than Indiana, Northwestern has been feasting on the worst teams in the Big Ten before getting to the beefy part of the schedule. This includes Oregon, which has spiraled off its preseason number two ranking out of the top 25 altogether. The Ducks are 4-3 and coming off a dispiriting loss in Champaign with the biggest question remaining of whether a game that kicked off at two o’clock central qualifies for “Body Clock” status.

The biggest issues for the Ducks at this part of their agonizing season is who is not available. They lost star quarterback Dante Moore, and Dan Lanning has just fired the offensive coordinator. It’s always a tough question whether you want to face a team that has just fired a coordinator; on the one hand no team that is playing well is firing coaches and there’s a good chance that the hastily-promoted assistant has no idea what he’s doing and is spending the entire time in the booth sweating into a headset microphone like the guy who freaks out at the beginning of Top Gun, but on the other hand it is possible that the previous coach was so inept or toxic or annoying that players are relieved to be rid of him and/or his ineffective or geometrically impossible schemes that they play inspired football.

When everyone is absolutely sick of your lousy offensive coordinator 

Northwestern is familiar with Oregon’s backup after tangling with Dylan Raiola last year when he quarterbacked Nebraska. But he has not exactly had the Oregon offense humming and was briefly benched and reinstated earlier this month. The Oregon offense seems to be coming into this game in complete turmoil and desperation to try to find a way to score points. But Northwestern’s defense will also likely be playing without human missile Robert Fitzgerald and stout tackle Brendan Flakes, and I’m guessing the Ducks will be watching Rutgers get free for enormous runs in the third quarter of the last game and hoping they won’t have the throw the ball much at all.

The Ducks remain a top defense, and it will be up to Chip Kelly and Aidan Chiles to try to solve them. Northwestern has not faced a serious defense since Indiana and struggled against an injury-ravaged Michigan State state team playing out of its mind. I’m not sure what this means for Chip Kelly; it’s been almost a decade and a half since he left Oregon and this seems like a more pleasant reunion than the Shakespearean Michigan State game that had to pause for Pat Fitzgerald and Aidan Chiles and the Crowd as represented by a small chorus of people in Jeff Smoker jerseys to recite soliloquies about the nature of Revenge that end in rhyming couplets

 

O speak me betrayals and sinister plot

Mine email address is hashtag I care not   

For the third consecutive week, Northwestern is relegated to Peacock, which might be unprecedented. The 'Cats certainly got a lot of national games this year, but it is crazy for a ranked Big Ten team to consistently not be allowed on normal television. I have come to the conclusion that Chip Kelly's CFL formations are too controversial and dangerous for over-the-air or normal cable television and may warp the brains of anyone expecting wide receivers to be in a normal place.

The VHS copy of Chip Kelly's Too Hot For TV promises "unbelievable action," "beautiful formations," and "wild feuds with Michigan State"   

The stakes of this game are tantalizing. A win here puts Northwestern on the fringes of the Playoff Conversation which means absolutely nothing in October except for the fact that the square tie knot guys on the college football TV shows have to acknowledge the existence of Northwestern while bloviating about a playoff that will be determined months from now in a hotel ballroom by a secret committee but nonetheless must be bloviated upon. A loss probably takes Northwestern out of that, but still has them primed for an exceptional season with a bowl game and the possibility to do two important things Northwestern hasn’t done for awhile: win The Hat and annoy Iowa. 

But right now, why not dream on Northwestern doing the impossible? When David Braun said in Big Ten media days “why not us” while facing what looked like an impossibly daunting schedule, it seemed like a ridiculous joke. But in a roiling Big Ten marred by injuries and powerhouse programs plummeting from their lofty perches we have a few hours to ask why not us.

FICTION SECTION

The 2026 college football season is about lawsuits and the people who sue each other's asses. Today's short story is the forward to the new college football legal thriller "Motion To Dismiss" by F. Bernard Borticelli.

The question I get most often at book signings or NCAA law events or around town is where I get so many ideas. After all, this is the 74th novel I have published, and the 63rd about the intersection of the law and college sports. And what I tell them is that the world is a stunning, beautiful place with an endless amount of stories to tell, specifically about Trent Thadhill, the greatest legal mind in college sports who is forever battling against the most diabolical boosters, athletes, and coaches who are up to no good. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t think about a Thadhill story, and I must write them down in books because my wife says I am not allowed to talk about them over dinner anymore and I’ve already been divorced twice.

We live in a world surrounded by imperfect justice– systems that let us down, institutions that fail us, institutions that, for example, would allow a college basketball player to accept a tostada-style sandwich and escape without punishment. That was actually something I read about that found its way into “Throwing The Hammer: A Trent Thadhill Novel.” But in my book, this is not merely a free tostada, but it is a front for an operation that lures college athletes into an international pickpocketing ring that uses their track and field skills to separate tourists from their valuables. So when Trent Thadhill is able to use his legal skills to bring the perpetrators to the stand and tearfully confess, he is at least allowing readers to escape into a world where justice exists for people around the world who went to look at their watch only to see it snatched by an All Big 12 sprinter.

I talk to aspiring novelists all the time, and my main advice for them is to keep their eyes, and ears, and noses and hearts open. You never know where inspiration will strike, and you need to be ready to seize it. For example, my second ex-wife had signed us up for some hideous cruise, despite knowing my distaste for loud shirts. Nevertheless, while enduring the most egregious floral patterns over the bosomous torsos of elderly men and accompanying and subjecting myself to the horrors of things like “Bee Gees karaoke night,” the boat did give me the idea for “Maritime Law,” an adventure novel about a basketball player who finds out the NCAA cannot prevent him from importing expensive sneakers as long as he does so in international waters. A minor altercation I had with a man in a truly loathsome parrot shirt inspired one of my most fearsome and popular nemeses for Trent Thadhill, Randy the Tennessee Judge-Shover.

Of course, sometimes your inspiration can simply be looking at the best-seller list for college sports legal thrillers. That is where you get dreck like Walt Grungrueger’s “Ships That Pass” about a rogue quarterback who has turned a disused freighter into an untraceable distribution center for boosters to connect football players with illegal jet skis on the high seas in his Brock McJack series (never mind that I already had published no less than three Trent Thadhill novels where jet skis played key roles including one where he makes a daring escape while dodging blasts from a t-shirt cannon fired by a compromised mascot).

It is to my great disappointment that I have on numerous occasions been asked about a book by someone purporting to be a fan only to discover that it is some Brock McJack offal. I have had enough practice to handle this with grace and humor, but it makes my blood boil to imagine that someone thinks I am responsible for Grungrueger’s leaden prose. My novels are heightened for the sake of entertainment, but are grounded in important legal and ethical issues whereas Brock McJack who is apparently not only a lawyer but a master of some sort of martial art is constantly spin-kicking people. Yes, Thad Thornhill does also spin-kick people, but only does so when it is an exacting part of the legal process and not done just for some cheap thrill.

It is perhaps because he values pure thrills over any thought in our philistine culture that Grungrueger has had such success on the college sports legal novels charts and why they continue to make that imbecilic Brock McJack television series. I have not seen it, but I have seen the commercial that shows a judge saying “overruled” and then firing a bazooka at a gunship helicopter attacking the courtroom because an international gang of street racers cannot afford to have a volleyball player suspended because she is the linchpin of their entire campus operation and also a formidable street racer in her own right even though she is underestimated as a young woman, but they don’t know she comes from a long line of street racers including her brother who was killed by this gang and actually she is secretly working undercover for Brock McJack to get revenge. If this is the type of preposterous claptrap people-- people like my first ex-wife who I understand is an avid fan-- want, then our culture gets what it deserves. I just hope the ignoramuses who watch this schlock understand there is a series of books about NCAA regulations for more discerning intellects, people who understand that it is very rare for a judge to use a rocket launcher and he or she will only discharge one under the most dire of circumstances.

“Motion to Dismiss” is a novel I took painstaking care researching and also one I hope has the types of thrills and adventure that people enjoy in a Trent Thadhill novel. This also marks the debut of Thadhill’s most cunning and dangerous rival yet, a thug who has no respect or knowledge for the law or the NCAA but is nevertheless able to slip through their grasp… that is until Trent Thadhill manages to track him down. I also want to put to bed the rumors that this antagonist Brack McHack takes any inspiration from or has anything to do with Brock McJack, despite what the articles in Legal Thriller Review: A Vance Mantread Publication have to say in their viperous op-ed pages. The names are a simple coincidence; I liked how it sounded and looked in print. The scenes where Trent Thadhill demolishes McHack’s shoddy briefs and dismiss them as “the writing of an illiterate clod or maybe even a goat temporarily turned into a human” are not some sort of hidden dig at Walt Grungrueger. I am not a child. Nor is the part when Brack McHack tries to do a spin kick but badly injures his own testicles any comment on Grungrueger’s work.

I hope you enjoy spending time in the webs of deception and intrigue in “Motion To Dismiss” as much as I’ve relished weaving them.