The P.J. Fleck Fiction Issue

Northwestern came off the high of its commanding victory over UTEP, an important win that indicated that the Wildcats would be closer to normal bad this season rather than apocalyptically bad. The dozens of fans who were not put off by the program's futility "on American soil" and the scandal that engulfed the program and several of the people who were all in charge when it happened and are still there defiantly standing tall against themselves got to finally celebrate a win at Ryan Field for the first time since 2021. But despite the excitement of vanquishing the UTEP Miners as a home underdog, most people understood they probably would not fare as well against a surging nationally-ranked Duke team, and they didn't.

I am not going to lie, I did not really watch any of this game. I could not because my home does not get the ACC Network, so I to reverted to my pre-cable days and enjoyed the sonorous voice of Mr. Cat Dave Eanet on WGN for a chunk of the first quarter listening to the sound of someone describing a festival of shanked punts. Here I feel the need to make a correction: while last week's post implied that the nobody in the Greater Chicagoland Metropolitan Area got ACC Network, people with certain ubiquitous TV streaming services apparently got it, and I spoke to numerous people with different services who were able to easily watch Northwestern shank punts in real time. Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com apologizes for the error.

Hopefully this correction will prevent Jim Phillips from siccing his personal retinue of ACC goons to attack me for implying that the ACC Network is not available on multiple carriers in the Chicago area market if you want to watch Duke throw Northwestern into a port-a-potty in high definition

This Saturday, Northwestern returns home to an inexplicable night game against Minnesota. I understand that Northwestern must play night games under the terms of its contract with the Big Ten Network and have been playing them more or less at random for years, but they used to almost never play them, so night games to me still feel like Big Games under the trucked-in lights. This one is not. Minnesota looks to be right in the Big Ten West Zone this season, squeaking by over Matt Rhule's Cornhuskers, bludgeoning Eastern Michigan, and then getting wiped out by a ranked UNC squad. But a middling West team should likely not be threatened by this year's Northwestern team. The Gophers are heavily favored, even if stalwarts Mohamed Ibrahim and Tanner Morgan have graduated after several decades of excellent play.

The collapse of Northwestern's football program has conveniently lumped it in with the rest of this city's dilapidated sports scene. The Cubs, who looked poised to earn a wild card berth and get triumphantly swept out of the playoffs, instead suffered a series of embarrassing losses to some bad teams that put them squarely in the crosshairs of the Marlins, a team that has haunted them-- it remains one of the most underrated embarrassments for the Chicago Cubs, a team that is fueled by a history of failure and foundering, that they are continually bested by the Florida Marlins. The White Sox were numerically eliminated from the playoffs and Tony LaRussa has returned in some sort of consulting capacity as Reinsdorf's personal Baseball Rasputin. The Sky were sweatlessly escorted out of the WNBA playoffs by former Sky hero Candace Parker and the Las Vegas Aces.

No Chicago team, however, managed to embarrass themselves more this week than the Chicago Bears. After an unsurprising but embarrassing defeat at the hands of the miserable Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Bears spent the week having football pundits making 45 minute videos of themselves talking where the thumbnail is them making the youtube googly-eyed open mouth face at Justin Fields about how the Bears' offense is the worst thing that has ever happened to the National Football League. On Wednesday, the day began with what appeared like a standard Bears day of press with Justin Fields upbraiding his incompetent coaching staff for being incompetent before claiming that he was taken out of context and actually both he and the coaching staff are incompetent. Then, defensive coordinator Alan Williams, who had missed the game for vaguely defined "personal reasons" abruptly resigned under mysterious circumstances that the Bears coaching staff, which already operates at a level of ridiculous Fake Military Secrecy that Pat Fitzgerald used to use when refusing to say who would be playing quarterback in the home opener against Northeastern Illinois Stage Beard and Mustache Institute, refused to elaborate on. 

Looking to see if maybe I could find a picture of a football player with an elaborately funny fake beard, I stumbled across this artifact from March 2020 where the entire article was someone horrendously photoshopping beards on soccer players because of Covid lockdown, each one with a profoundly stupid caption, I cannot believe this still exists online.

While this was going on, wild rumors began to circulate online about Williams. The rumors escalated to the point that random Bears youtube guys were somberly saying that Halas Hall had been raided by all of the hut hut hut guys from the end of the Blues Brothers and that Charles Tillman who is actually in real life an FBI agent was running barefoot through broken glass and shimmying through vents in order to catch Williams. Then the Bears circulated an odd resignation letter from Williams, and an attorney representing him called into a sports radio show to quash the wildest of rumors but also not say anything else. On the one hand, this information frenzy is the result of the insatiable demand for information now now now now on something that is not consequential-- Williams is a person almost no one who does not follow the Bears closely had ever heard of and his resignation from coordinating a bad defense for an awful football team is not a matter of national importance. If there is some terrible scandal here, it will certainly come out. On the other hand it is hard to imagine the Bears handling this situation in a weirder way.

This clip might contain the greatest set of captions I've ever seen on a youtube video

Sports fans in this city are looking down the barrel of a pretty bleak winter. Boo Buie will have to do some heavy lifting.

AN ACCOUNTING OF THE LITERARY EXPLOITS OF P.J. FLECK

I first encountered P.J. Fleck through my publisher. I had gotten stuck after three years working on my novel, an autofictional account of the time I tried to return an ill-fitting sweater and how I felt it reflected on me in terms of masculinity, the self, the time I let out a massive fart during freshman English and even the teacher laughed at me and everyone called me Professor Rips Von Ass until I had to change school districts, and also Late Capitalism. The publisher was about to demand that I pay back my advance when they decided I could keep it if I took on a job ghostwriting Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat by P.J. Fleck, the head football coach at the University of Minnesota.

I do not follow sports at all, least of all football (an interesting fact about me is that I don’t own a television) and had no idea who this Fleck was or why he was writing a book about boats. Nevertheless, I was determined to try. I was in the midst of another divorce (one thing that kept derailing my autofictional memoir was that I had to keep adding ex-wives, although I combined the second and third into a single composite ex-wife), and was very close to losing my modest apartment and moving in with my other thrice-divorced writer friends onto Dirk’s houseboat. Besides, the agreement did not say anything about actually completing the book. I figured I would show up, let this Fleck character vomit off some incomprehensible hut-hut-hutsmanship gibberish, and then get dismissed by him as a hopeless football ignoramus. 

I arrived at Fleck’s estate just outside Minneapolis. There was a nautical-looking gate and instead of a bell, you pulled a rope and blasted a ship’s horn across the subdivision (later, I was told that the battle between Fleck and the HOA lasted years with Fleck’s attorneys citing his first-amendment rights as well as several sections of maritime law). Fleck answered the door himself. His eyes were ringed and hooded, like he had not slept in weeks. I greeted him as “P.J.” and he told to please call him either “Coach” or “The Admiral.” I smiled and asked him if admirals regularly were concerned with row boats. “Don’t question me about boats in my own home,” he said. We were not off to a good start.

We went into an office. There were legal pads everywhere, and crumpled yellow sheets covered the floor like autumn leaves. One of the walls was covered in letters and numbers. In the middle, he had written the word “W.R.I.T.E.” I asked him about it.

“That’s my writing process,” Fleck said. “WRITE. Waiting for ideas. Ruminating. Imagination. Torment. Editing. Got it?” 

“That’s a pretty good summary,” I told him. I had been stuck on Torment for about eight months after scrapping three chapters where I zinged my third grade bullies with a series of witticisms that my editor discovered that I had borrowed from a website called rejoinders.info. 

I asked Coach Fleck how he envisioned the book. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “The first thing people have to have in order to succeed is vision.” What sort of vision?" I asked. “Vital. Integrity. Smart. Intelligent. Omnivorous. Now.” 

“Oh, ok,” I said.

It turns out that Fleck had a lot of these acronyms and motivational sayings that he believed were the key to succeeding at life the P.J. Fleck way. He was constantly throwing them out and then explaining them to me: T.O.T.A.L.; E.F.F.O.R.T.; V.A.S.T.N.E.S.S.; M.I.Z.Z.E.N.M.A.S.T. Eventually I said to him I think that those are great, but what can you tell me about yourself, about your life. “Oh, you’re one of those,” he said.

He dug under the pile of notebooks and pulled out a manuscript held together by a binder clip and there it was: an outline of the highlights in the life of one Pteranodon J. Fleck (his actual name). It turns out I was not the first to try to ghostwrite Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat. Thirteen others had tried. Six left after two hours of acronyms. Two quit later. Fleck dismissed four more because he said they had no idea what he was trying to accomplish. One died.

The rest of the notebooks, though, had almost nothing to do with his book. They were filled with acronyms. Every time he got to a part he wanted to emphasize he ended up coming up with another acronym, stopping then and there to figure out each word. If it had something to do with the nautical life, he would highlight it and write it in a gigantic tome that he called his logbook for greater consideration. 

I thought we should try an exercise by writing the hypothetical first sentence, which would let him set the tone. “Rowing the boat,” he said. “Rowing the boat is not a slogan. It’s a lifestyle.” 

“That’s two sentences,” I said.

But he had already grabbed a fresh pad and started writing. “R.O.W.I.N.G: Reading Or I Will Never Grow. Now that’s about literature,” he said. “THE.  T.H.E. Do you see it? Do you see it?”

Coach Fleck got up and lifted his hands up in the air (I would later learn this was a Touchdown gesture) and sprinted out of the office, through the manse, and down the driveway to the gate where he began triumphantly tooting the ship horn as neighbors glared at him through their drapes. “This is it! Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

I understood. He was going to write the boilerplate book the publishers wanted but every word, every single word including articles would be an acronym which he would explain in a separate volume, his Master Annex of Acronyms in Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat. I was stunned.  I had not come to Minnesota to be confronted with a new literary form that would revolutionize non-fiction and finally get me on one of those panels where I can talk and chuckle at the same time. 

Publishers ridiculed my first experimental novel, which I planned to write in a not diabolical but somewhat challenging cipher that readers would have to decode. The real innovation would be that not every copy would use the same cipher– readers who had managed to solve it would theoretically be useless assisting their friends, whose copies of the book would present not only an entirely different cipher, but require an entirely different mechanism. Some, for example, would be elaborate pictograms, whereas others would be complex word and number replacements. The reward would be reading a transcendent novel about a code-making novelist whose most mysterious cipher would be his own vulnerability. Every publisher passed. The rejection letters I received were venomous– in one case a letter was actually coated in a rare snake venom but it had gotten lost in the mail and lost all of its potency before it was delivered, and the editor who attempted to poison me had his snakes seized. But this was now the chance to make my literary mark.

The months went by in a blur. The coach and I came up with sentences while crafting acronyms together. It was an arduous task. He put his fist through the wall after running into the third X for the day in the word “axiom,” which he insisted had to be in the book. We never left that office, and I began to sleep in child's sleeping bag in a guest room in the otherwise empty house. Fleck soon realized that his coaching duties were too demanding, and he requested a leave of absence, explaining that he and I were not just writing a book but developing a vital blueprint for life, the Acronymic Lifestyle. The university described it to the press as a leave of absence for mental health reasons, and Fleck agreed saying that he was so sane that it was blowing their minds.

It took about a year to finish the book and the original codex. I told the coach it was time to go to the publisher and release our masterpiece together (Fleck did not know this but I was going to try to get the “as told to” credit changed to the valedictory “with”). He looked at me in shock. We were not finished, he told me. No, we had just begun. You see, he had a vision and it was that the annex itself were all acronyms and they would be put into a third volume, The Appendix. Where was my V.I.S.I.O.N.?

I did not see it. The entire project was beginning to look like it was an exercise in madness. At this point I understood that I had allowed myself to be consumed by an insane task, that the power of turning words into acronyms with vaguely positive messages had taken over my life and the promise of literary fame and glory through working with an innovator like P.J. Fleck had blinded me to the immensity of the task. But I was not yet prepared to abandon the project. Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat was mine as much as Fleck’s. I was the one who came up with the second Boat Chapter. I was the one who came up with R.H.I.N.O.C.E.R.O.S. I could not leave simply abandon it and Fleck.

But the project quickly spiraled out of control. You cannot simply just make acronyms into other acronyms. We had to begin revising the master text in order to fit the Appendix acronyms, which affected the Annex acronyms. Fleck had thrown the entire mechanism off. It was at this point I noticed he had stopped sleeping. I would wake up and the light would still be on in the office, with Fleck writing away (he hated typing on a computer. I was the one who digitized everything because it would be impossible to do this without building an elaborate network of interconnected spreadsheets).

It was around this time that I began planning my escape. It was clear that if I did not leave then, it would consume the rest of my life. I had also begun to get tipped off from my third ex-wife that the second had hired the famed literary assassin Vancent Mant to murder me, and he had learned of my whereabouts at the Fleck estate. So one day, while Fleck was stuck pondering what Q.U.A.L.I.T.A.T.I.V.E.L.Y. could stand for, I slipped out and left the country for a decade or so until I had learned that Mant was himself killed by a literary assassin assassin, and I was free to return to the country and finish my own work.

I decided to stop in Minneapolis. The Fleck estate property was overgrown with vegetation. The horn at the gate had been disconnected and did not even let out a single AOOGAH. The front door was ajar and every room of the house was now covered in legal pads, the telltale periods dotting every line. The walls were all scrawled with notes saying “Annex 13” and “Endnotes and Arcana.” I saw the light on in the office but I whatever I had known of the coach would not be in there. P.J. Fleck was rowing his boat out to sea, alone.

On "On American Soil"

The times you see someone using the phrase “on American soil” in 2023 are in a Congressional hearing where a representative named something like Ladd Hacklin gets incredibly angry about children’s toys and after Northwestern’s big win over UTEP last Saturday. It is true that Northwestern had not recorded a win since last year’s opener against Nebraska in Dublin. It is also true that the Wildcats had not secured a victory within the de jure sovereign territory of the United States of America since October 16, 2021, a 21-7 victory of Rutgers. That distinction is meaningless in college football but it is important to point it out because winning a weird one-off Week 0 game overseas against Coach Scott Vomit and then getting absolutely roasted by every other team is very funny. It is also disingenuous to count the nearly 700 days between Northwestern wins “On American Soil” because they were only able to play games on 20 of those days, although to be honest I prefer not to think about what Northwestern Football is up to off the field.

Another milestone from that game is that is the last time fans were able to watch Northwestern football with subsidized beer

The notable thing about this game is that Northwestern looked so awful and discombobulated at Rutgers that UTEP, a team that managed five wins last year in Conference USA, emerged as a slight betting favorite on the road. And for the first half, it looked like that was the right call. The Miners’ opening drive looked like a pretty good facsimile of how Rutgers gradually ran over Northwestern in a way reminiscent of the gag in Austin Powers where a very slow-moving bulldozer runs over a guy who screams frozen in terror for several minutes. The game was tied at the half only because UTEP missed a field goal in the waning seconds. But then, in the second half, the defense starting getting stops and turnovers, the run game got going, and Mike Bajakian began feeling himself and rotating through quarterbacks. The result was a strangely dominating Northwestern win in front of 55 people.

It has been mildly fascinating to see how the Big Ten Network would deal with the ugliness surrounding Northwestern's football program. I have been watching the interviews with David Braun to see if he will ever say something interesting or even to identify anything about him beyond existing as NCAA Create-A-Coach Young 2. The interviewer alluded to the hazing scandal but never broached it, mastering the type of subtle courtly etiquette one would expect from the retainers surrounding the Sun King Louis XIV and the Big Ten Network. I do not expect a sideline reporter to ask Braun “how do you feel Northwestern can have success without organized dry humping rituals” but the interviewer never mentioned it other than referencing a difficult offseason. After the game, an elated Braun and the team celebrated. Braun got to frame it as the team triumphing over adversity. What was the adversity? Uh, gotta go.

Head Coach David Braun remains a mysterious Vest Cipher.

A convincing win over UTEP does not necessarily mean that Northwestern is now good. Even in 2021, the Wildcats managed a big win over Ohio as well as over FCS Indiana State and then went on to win the famous Victory Over Rutgers in the United States that Wildcat fans had clung to and cherished lo those 693 days. But the win managed to show that Northwestern was still up to the standards of a struggling Big Ten team, and had, at least for one season, managed to stave off a 1980s-style football apocalypse season where they would just get effortlessly clobbered by all comers until they lose 34 consecutive games and then throw the goal posts into Lake Michigan. 

It is not surprising that Northwestern football has faded from the news the second that the college football season began actually playing games and can now function as a team that essentially no one cares about and that television broadcasters will have to spend 30 seconds awkwardly discussing why Pat Fitzgerald is not in his normal Ozymandian position on the Wildcat sidelines in case there is an as-yet discovered human being who is watching a Northwestern football game but is not aware of the hazing scandal. That will likely change when the lawsuits begin and more ugly news leaks out, but for now Northwestern can remain tucked safely and anonymously into Big Ten Network regional action playing in front of the smallest Big Ten crowds imaginable. The announced attendance for Saturday’s game was less than 15,000 people, a miniscule crowd even for an early September non-conference game at Northwestern, and one that was padded by hundreds of local high school band members.

The rest of college football media has turned away from Northwestern and to topics that actually affect the football part of college football-- laughing at Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney eating shit in early-season games or breathlessly reporting on everything that Deion Sanders does and says. The Deion controversy du jour involves Colorado State coach Jay Norvell attacking him for wearing sunglasses indoors, which is a serious charge; the documentary film They Live taught me that the only answer to another person demanding you put on or remove sunglasses is to suplex them into a parking lot dumpster for seven minutes. Woe be to the program that levels the ultimate football insult at Sanders: calling his players “rece davises.”

While Deion Sanders does not seem like a person I would personally want in charge of anything I cared about, the one thing I can't knock him for is being a flamboyant weirdo.  Above, please take a look at the greatest sports manager in the world, the NPB's Tsuyoshi Shinjo who goes by the nickname BIGBOSS, designs his own team's weird uniforms, and is shown here entering the stadium on opening day on a hovercraft.  Now try to imagine what would happen if a Major League manager  tipped his hat too extravagantly.

DUKED ONCE AGAIN

Saturday, Northwestern will take on apparently perennial non-conference bete-noir Duke. Unfortunately, the programs seem to be going in opposite directions. Duke won nine games last year and opened this season with a home win over ninth-ranked Clemson in what was by all accounts a ridiculous game where Dabo Swinney kept putting on the ACME bat suit and falling off of cliffs. Swinney is, even in the unhinged world of college football coaches who are all professional maniacs, a particularly ridiculous person who combines the berserk intensity of a football guy with the desperately oily flop sweat of a traveling nineteenth-century revival preacher. He looks he goes from city to city on one of those hand pump rail cars. It is always funny when his team, which is one of the very few to regularly travel in the juggernaut echelons of college football, gets completely smoked, but Duke's victory augurs poorly for the Wildcats attempting to prove they can actually be competitive.

Duke comes into the game ranked #21 in the country. They have an NFL prospect quarterback and a stingy defense. The Wildcats have their work cut out for them. One of the most dangerous developments from last week was having a Mike Bajakian offensive adjustment actually work, when he went deep into his workshop and discovered that he could use a running quarterback to run. Years of experience shows that it is nothing short of an emergency when Bajakian decides to get creative and decides to do a double jet sweep that leads to a 45 yard loss or some sort of wide receiver pass play that accidentally opens a portal to another dimension and looses an ancient, primordial evil upon the world that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons.

The defense, unable to get a stop against a Rutgers team slowly moving across the field like liquid spreading through a paper towel, fared better against UTEP.  David Braun is still calling the defense while also functioning as head coach, which has raised some other questions about the coaching staff.  Most pressing is where Assistant to the Head Coach Skip Holtz is during games.  Is he there physically or is he calling in from Birmingham Stallions Headquarters with one eye on the game and the other devouring game tape against the Memphis Showboats while moving players around on a giant map of the football field while using those little tank-pushing sticks?

Northwestern may be using a heavily modded version of NCAA 2004 in order to get Skip's advice

A Northwestern win under these circumstances seems unlikely. But who would know? The game has been taken off normal television and sequestered to the ACC Network, a mysterious channel that can only be accessed in this area by making a yellow mark in a certain park and then waiting to exchange precious metals with an underground cable operator who will come to your home and either install the ACC Network or perform some sort of devious bait-and-switch and leave you stuck with the PAC 12 Network, unable to watch Wake Forest or Louisville and left without redress to the authorities. Presumably there are some people in Chicagoland who will rig up giant antennas or call up a streaming service that instantly infects your computer with something even worse than a Northwetern-Duke game or people who are able to watch the game but only by constantly driving around the city in a van, and they will be rewarded with access to a game where the home team is favored by nearly twenty points.

Braun and Northwestern can be glad that they can retreat to the comfort of a win against a program from a smaller conference and getting televised on a network that no one has.  But should they somehow manage to pull of an enormous upset on the road, they may once again run into an opponent that the entire university and its athletic program cannot ever handle which is increased attention.

Well This Doesn't Bode Well

 It looks like it may be another one of Those Seasons.  Northwestern followed a Big Ten West winning season in 2018 with a three-win campaign in 2019, and the 2020 season seems to be headed toward that same disastrous conclusion.  Pat Fitzgerald has once again unveiled the 2019 Menagerie of Quarterbacks, and what seemed like a position set in stone even after the Michigan State loss now appears to once again be in flux.  More worryingly, the defense that has carried Northwestern through the Pat Fitzgerald era seems to be struggling against Power 5 opponents, with running backs carving their way through the defensive line and receivers slicing their way through the Wildcats’ vaunted secondary.  Fitzgerald is used to punting and trying to advance the ball through one of those party games where you pass it down the field using only your neck but I am not sure he will be able to handle watching his beloved linebackers get pancaked into the depths of the Earth every week.

Pat Fitzgerald looks like he is about to be attacked by a terminator robot in this picture

 

At 1-2, Northwestern is not out of anything yet, although the Big Ten does not appear to be as delightfully chaotic as last year’s deranged Pandemic Season.  Still, even if things continue to go south for the Wildcats, we can take comfort only in the looming showdown with Illinois under Bret Bielema and the possibility of the greatest football game ever played hopefully with cameras on the coaches the whole time so we can watch Fitzgerald and Bielema bellowing at each other until one of them suffers a serious neck vein injury and needs to be airlifted to a clinic for the Severely Pissed Off.  

 

I had wanted to put a picture of Bielema yelling here but what I found was 

this headline and I think we can all agree that this is better
 

DUKE-NORTHWESTERN RECAP

This week, BYCTOM has brought back special correspondent Karl Ove Knausgaard to go analyze this matchup.  Knausgaard, the brooding Norwegian author of the six-part My Struggle series of autofiction about being a brooding Norwegian author and the forthcoming The Morning Star, shares his thoughts on college football.

 

 

I told my agent a thousand times that I would not under any circumstances write about American football.  Every day I am assailed with e-mails from American editors saying Karl Ove how about you write a feature story for our magazine about the Los Angeles Rams and I tell them I cannot because it is absurd.  I do not know anything about football, I have no interest in it, the visceral violence is appalling, the beer-soaked facepaint atmosphere is ridiculous, and frankly the concept of a Los Angeles Ram is insane to me.  Several times a day, I log onto my e-mail account and I tell them I will not write about the Jacksonville Jaguars even if you are telling me that they are an avatar of futility and meaninglessness and try and tempt me by saying that I bet it reminds me of my friend Geir knowing that I know several dozen Geirs and it is likely that one of their lives resonates in some way with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Ultimately, what they get you with is the money.  I am not too proud to admit it.  One thing that nobody tells you when you become an international literary sensation is that your expenses soon outpace your own earnings no matter how many conventions you do where thousands of people watch panelists chuckle-talk at each other and then ask you what you meant when you spent 237 pages writing about having a tedious and embarrassing parent-teacher conference because your daughter had been hogging all of the glitter and then running into the teacher in the supermarket and having to make awkward small talk after he took an hour implying that she was not learning about glitter sharing at home before spending the rest of the afternoon ruminating on the concept of Masculinity.  There are payments due on rustic brooding sheds and fresh divorces and lawsuits from angry family members.  So at some point I simply had run out of ways to say no to a prestigious American publication when all I had to do was watch a football game.  
 

I had no idea there was so much football.  I assumed I would be writing about the National Football League, the one with the Super Bowl and the Los Angeles Rams but I was shocked when the editor insisted that I write about college football, which I did not know existed.  This is football played in universities by university students-- not normal university students who spent their time listening to Roxy Music and desperately navigating the politics of the student literary magazine, but hulking young men who play on national television every week.  The editor explained to me that these university games on the biggest level were played in thundering stadiums of 100,000 people with pyrotechnics and bands and sometimes live animals in cages with unruly mobs of drunken students howling and sometimes taking to the streets to burn couches.  But then I was told I would be watching a game that was not like that at all and would be played between two middling programs in front of a sparse crowd for almost no stakes.  The e-mail explained that this is also an important college football experience, and to understand the game as most fans enjoy it, as a revel in the pointlessness of it all housed in “a simulacrum of college football pomp.”  I wanted to kick this person in the throat but had never met him before and I had taken his money.  I had never been so humiliated by an editor that actually used the word “simulacrum.”

An American television with cable has thousands of channels and seemingly dozens of college football games on at any time.  I could, for example, watch Mississippi State versus Memphis or Georgia Southern vs. Arkansas or even Wyoming vs. something called “Ball State” but my game would not appear.  I logged on the web.  Eventually I learned that the game I wanted to see was on something called ACC Network, which I did not have.  The ACC Network website gave me a list of cable companies but mine was not listed.  They told me to call my cable provider, so I did.  I waited for minutes while getting blasted with hold music and a robot reassuringly telling me my call was important to me while I seethed.  I have never experienced anything as bleak as being told that there was nothing I could do in order to get access to the ACC Network.  

My friend Geir had told me there were certain websites out of Eastern Europe where I could illegally watch this game.  I did not know where to find these websites.  I entered “Duke Northwestern Bulgarian??” into my web browser but nothing useful came up and I also did not want to risk getting a computer virus and wiping out my work.  I had been asked to write a guest issue of the Spider-Man comic for a series pairing comic book characters with international literary sensations for an experimental Marvel imprint and had a freestanding essay on Hitler and the nature of evil that was going to be delivered by the Rhinoceros that I had not yet backed up onto floppy disk.

“I am sorry, but I do not have ACC network and cannot watch this game,” I wrote to the editor, hoping that would be enough to get me out of this, but he simply wrote back “sounds great!” It was like trying to argue with quicksand.  When I was 15 years old my friend Trond took us out on his brother’s boat.  The boat was not much.  It was a rickety rowboat with peeling paint and when the three of us got on with the stash of beer we managed to hoard throughout the summer by carefully grabbing one can at a time wherever we could find one. The boat could barely float, but we felt like kings.  Trond was not supposed to take the boat.  His brother had told him that if he touched his boat while he was away on a monthlong expedition with his beekeeping friends he would lock him in the barn with the apiary and spray him with illegal pheromones that agitated the bees that he had ordered from the back of a catalog if he was lucky, but that did not stop us at all.  The sun washed over us on the lake and the beer was so cold and before long we were singing and taking turns diving off the boat when Gunnar said that we should go to the pier where there were probably some girls and try to get them on the boat with us.  Trond was worried because the only way through was a narrow, rocky passage but our oars were already digging into the lake.  It seems so obvious where this was heading now but at the time, it simply did not occur to me that anything could go wrong.  After all of the subterfuge to get the beer and the boat that we had to clandestinely carry hundreds of meters from the house and even the cooler that I had spirited away from my father, all of that worrying and sneaking and preparation had paid off, and I was enveloped in a drunken happiness.  We didn’t even see the first rock.  It should have been impossible, on such calm water and at such low speed for this to happen, but the boat was already riding low because of all the weight and then we rammed right into it.  Gunnar and I had no idea what we were doing so while Trond frantically tried to tell us which way to paddle, we got confused and went the opposite way and managed to get the boat wedged between rocks; when Gunnar panicked and tried rocking the boat between the rocks to free it we heard the first crack.  “Gunnar you fucking idiot!” Trond yelled but it was too late.  The boat was taking on water.  I futilely tried bailing it out with beer cans but we had to jump out and made our way to the shore ro watch it sink.  Gunnar was talking a mile a minute about salvaging it, and I paced back and forth saying “oh fuck. Oh shit.” to myself and Trond just stared, clinging to a single oar.  It took us nearly an hour to walk back to his house, not because it was far but because we did not want to get there and we were soaked and miserable.  I had lost a shoe in the lake and cut my foot on a sharp pebble.  I didn’t see much of Trond the rest of the summer.  We were not very close to begin with and the only thing we really had in common was Depeche Mode and the boat scheme, and every time I saw him I was overcome with disgust and guilt.  That was now the same feeling I had when I opened my web browser to track what was going on with the Duke and Northwestern football game that I could not see or write about.  Duke was winning by 21 points already, and I had no idea what that meant but it probably was not very good.  One of the players for Duke was named “Jake Bobo.”  

I tried watching one of the other games that was on but frankly it was indecipherable and meaningless.  Every time I thought I had figured out what was going on they would call some sort of penalty and undo it. It was maddening and I understood why everyone was drunk all of the time.  I thought about getting drunk but I had to go to a children’s birthday party later on and glower at all of the adults.   I explained all of this to my editor and he said he would “punch it up.”  I could not imagine anything worse.

NORTHWESTERN VS OHIO

The Wildcats have a chance to get things right again against another struggling team when Ohio comes to town.  The Bobcats are winless this season, including a close loss to FCS Duqesne.  This is Ohio’s fist season after Frank Solich retired and led the team to respectability, including a victory in the Potato Bowl.  Solich left as the winningest coach in MAC history after getting run out of Nebraska so they could hire various charlatans and maniacs.

The biggest question for Northwestern is who will play at quarterback after the Wildcats went through three last week and whether another game against a lackluster opponent will allow the defense to cohere after a strong performance against Indiana State did not carry over to the Duke until the second half during Northwestern’s comeback.  A loss here would be devastating.

Northwestern will have to get right quickly before beginning Big Ten play with upcoming games against Rutgers and Nebraska.  Nebraska has become a laughingstock, and the ‘Cats have never lost to Rutgers even as that program has improved under Rutgers savior Greg Schiano.  What is on the line is far more important than berths in bowl games or Big Ten Championship games, but the ability to laugh at Nebraska and Rutgers, the most important prize in Northwestern football other than the Hat Trophy.