Boo Buie Makes It Happen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

College Football's Impossible Task

As college football kicks off in all of its maniacal indecency, an enormous number of fans, pundits, and college students hopped up on memes are going to attempt to do one of the funniest things that anyone does in American sports and try to explain which college football teams are better than other ones.

This futile task consumes sophisticated numbers nerds with homebrew formulas and men on television with necktie knots so large that they affect the positioning of their cohosts’ neckties, all of whom can be shaken awake in the middle of the night during a natural disaster and still manage to sternly turn to anyone in the vicinity and say “I gotta say, I like that defense but they’re not gonna win if they don’t hold onta that ball;” the burden also falls on people who are drunkenly yelling at each other in parking lots.

College football’s innovators have come up with several key methods to examine whether a team is better than another one such as having them play games against each other. This method, though, remains fraught with uncertainty. The vagaries of a single game resolve little. After all, football analytics specialists tell us that games decided by seven points or fewer are basically random tossups. And even more decisive victories can be explained away by other issues—in 2015, for example, Stanford lost to Northwestern in the opening game and spent the rest of the season claiming that it should not count because the effect of flying to Evanston for an 11:00AM kickoff had so disrupted their Body Clocks that only an uncaring philistine ignorant in the basics of human physiology would expect them to have been able to win. Other hazards of games include poorly-timed injuries and athletics scandals, and, most importantly, uncalled holding penalties, a particular malady that aggrieves internet message board commenters.

But far thornier is the problem of the teams that do not play each other, which is the vast majority of football games. In order to deal with this issue, anyone attempting to rate football teams must take into account conferences, opponents, how badly they trounced other teams or found themselves the victims of Body Clocks, etc. In a normal sport, there would be a manageable number of teams to allow them to all play each other. But the college football universe is vast and unfathomable, and at some point the only way to divine true football ratings is to imagine an entire architecture of hypothetical football outcomes through computer models or by taking a vision quest aided by psychotropic drugs. 

Every year, this issue culminates in the controversy over the Playoff and the Championship.  College football has no idea how to handle this and keeps handing the job over to various cabals of bureaucrats and groups of people who attempt to persuade them by flying airplanes with banners over stadiums or by cutting wrestling promos on Paul Finebaum who has become the Mean Gene Okerlund of college football.  The whole enterprise continually reeks of conspiracy theories about preferential conference treatment and baroque Pynchonesque societies of mascot syndicates going back to the middle ages.  College football is the only sport where it is routine for teams to claim national championships like they are pretenders to a throne, their armies of fans surrounding NCAA headquarters under the banner of an AAC False Dmitry.

The forces of the University of Central Florida besieging a castle under the false flag of the Colley Matrix
Despite this grumbling, the playoff picture presents the most sane way of judging college football teams.  Those are where the very few colossus teams play-- the Clemsons and Alabamas, and handful of other teams steamrolling their way across hapless opponents in a grotesque spectacle.  Those teams are unmistakably good by any metric whether it is by S&P+ or press rankings or the trail of limbs and helmets strewn over the field by any team unfortunate enough to line up against them and spend the next several hours exploring the chemical composition of their soil or field turf from millimeters away.  There are also the unmistakably shitty teams too-- UCONN and whatever sorry squad has emanated from Lovie Smith's beard in any given season who spend most of their time advancing on ball carriers as effectively as a group of henchmen menacing Jason Statham.

But in college football's Roiling Middle, there is no way to weigh the performance of teams.  They play with an oblong ball in conditions raging from feverish swamp to blizzard, they are made up of teenagers, and everyone in charge is a red-faced maniac named "Chip" or "Bobby" who manages to ascend to histrionic heights not experienced by normal human beings-- imagine the angriest you have ever been in your life, so livid that no circumstance whether being in public or running short on time to evacuate before a volcano erupts can stop you from hollering as loud as you can at the target of your wrath and doing it for four hours at a time and that is how the persons in charge of football comport themselves on a normal Saturday.  An analyst can devise the most sophisticated model in the world that takes into consideration wind conditions and how players did on their midterm examinations or whether or not the coach is wearing shorts and still somehow a team will absolutely annihilate a good team standing in their way and then go out the next week and lose to Rutgers.

The combination of certainty and chaos makes college football so compelling.  In the macro sense, college football is dull-- the same cluster of teams get the best players, build the most ludicrous Harold J. "Zip" Clobbsmann Football Performance Centers With Waterslides, and ultimately win the trophy; most teams enter the season knowing they do not and will never have a chance for a championship short of simply claiming one.  But week to week, some team with a number in front of their name will get obliterated, embarrassed, field-charged and forced out of the playoff picture or even knocked down in the Great Hierarchy of Bowl Prestige and even the staunchest green-visored number zealots will rejoice while fans of the losing team get performatively angry online and demand that the offensive coordinator be fired.

NORTHWESTERN PREVIEW

We're not sure how, but the Northwestern Wildcats will play football again, even after scathing reviews.  The 'Cats lost every single out of conference game including one to Akron, a team that hadn't beaten a Big Ten team ever in more than 100 years of trying. They also won the Big Ten West and played in the Conference Championship Game then won a bowl game after going down 28-3.  They played hideous football, had no functioning running game for large chunks of the season, rotated quarterbacks with the capricious whims of a Football Caligula, and still won the Big Ten West with three weeks to spare.  They played 14 games, more than any other Northwestern team in history, inflicting themselves on the entire country.  It was one of the most confounding, silly, and greatest seasons in school history.

Pat Fitzgerald has put together his program, and that involves grinding the clock down to nothing and waiting for a Northwestern player to perform a miracle or for an opponent to do something transcendently, operatically stupid at the worst possible time and it's happened more often than not.  Fitzgerald is the only coach who watches Friday Night Lights for the gameplans.  But whatever it is that is happening, it is working, and Fitzgerald has grown more prominent in the coaching ranks, getting more resplendently red and coming up with increasingly weird grumpy takes.  So far, Fitzgerald has inveighed against communism and cell phones; this season, expect him to take aim at reckless Auto-Mobilesmanship and the designs of the Kaiser in the Ottoman Balkans.

The big story for Northwestern is a changing of guard at quarterback.  Clayton Thorson has graduated and gone to the NFL where Philadelphia's fans have greeted him with shoulder-mounted bazookas.  Fitzgerald has been coy about his replacement.  It will be either Hunter Johnson, the heralded transfer from Clemson or stalwart T.J. Green.  Most expect Johnson to play, but football coaches love not saying who the quarterback is because they enjoy pretending they are stentorian generals controlling Sensitive Classified (Eyes Only) information, and they will not compromise the integrity of the mission.

The 'Cats will face off against Stanford in a sequel to the 2015 contest.  That game was a stunning upset and, as always mentioned, a catalyst for the hundreds of Body Clock jokes I have made for the last four years.  Say "The Big Game" to most people in the context of Stanford football and they will conjure images of John Elway and players wending their way through the marching band before arriving in the endzone and obliterating a hapless trombone player who was riveted to the spot like a Godzilla victim, but for me it was the time that Stanford lost a game and then mentioned Body Clocks and then me never shutting up about it.  False start? Oh, that's a body clock. Incomplete pass? Better check on your precious bodily fluids.  Honestly, there's fairly compelling evidence that West Coast teams having to play early games further east are badly affected by this, but latching onto incredibly dumb shit is a time-honored and essential element of college football discourse and I will never stop.  I probably won't even know what the score to this game is other than body clock to non-body clock.
Precious Bodily Clocks

If it is, as I have argued, nearly impossible to tell what football teams will do this season, it is completely impossible to predict what will happen in a Northwestern football season.  They will beat teams they should not, they will probably lose inexplicably to a bad team, they will attempt to send every game into overtime whether they are winning or losing, and they will confound anyone insane enough to get into the football predictions business.  No analyst can pin them down, no formula can constrain them.  They are strange and infuriating and they are defending the Big Ten West crown.       

This Website is Surprisingly Funct

BYCTOM may have missed all of the exciting sports action, hurriedly-researched history, and of course gratuitous mustaches from the past several months. Nevertheless, sports certainly don't lend themselves to immediacy; it's far better to experience sporting events through the magic of hindsight after they are no longer so boringly relevant, so please join me for a new BYCTOM feature entitled:

THOSE WERE THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED THEN: PART I

Northwestern managed its most successful post-season run in the history of Wildcat basketball by making it within one overtime period of the vaunted NIT Final Four at Madison Square Garden (I'm going to exclude the Big Ten champion teams from the 1930s because, while I recognize that team's accomplishment, I also am pretty sure that basketball in the 1930s did not involve recognizable aspects of the game such as the 24 second clock, leaping, and passing-- ball movement at that time primarily revolved around encouraging a teammate to give up the ball through cogent argument and rhetorical flourishes).

Modern basketball players are more quick to dismiss claims for
the ball as spurious without strong enough evidence. Here Aaron
Gray is shocked by a teammate admitting to the irresponsible
use of hearsay and anecdote

The quarter-final game against Washington State was a heartening comeback led by Northwestern basketball legend Juice Thompson, with the last minute being one of the most astounding endings to a basketball game that I've ever witnessed, in which the following occurred:
1. Northwestern ties the game on a Washington State goal-tend
2. With no time remaining on the clock, Northwestern is called for a foul giving Washington State a rare opportunity for a walk-off free throw.
3. The Washington State player improbably bricks both free throws, sending the game into OT.

The last minute of this game therefore featured two of the three worst ways to possibly end a basketball game-- on a goaltend or foul with no time left (the third worst way is of course to have one or several players wade into the stands and begin pummeling spectators. I suppose the absolute worst way to end a game would be to have the basketball court annexed by a hostile nation that does not play basketball and immediately have the players replaced by a team handball squad or a triumphant troupe of net-ball all-stars, but that's unreasonably hypothetical).

An illustration of a problematic end to a basketball game also doubles as a tribute to
the world's most placid cameraman. Nenad Krsitc would probably have benefited
from Troy Hurtubise's Project Troy armor, a suit that came initially from his
never-ending quest to stave off rampaging bears, but, as his Wikipedia page
succinctly put it, "the process has developed ideas and technologies whose purposes
go beyond simple bear attack protection"

Unfortunately, the Wildcats faltered in overtime, disappointing Northwestern fans, but relieving the Evanston Police Department from having to plan for quelling an NIT victory riot that would grind the city to a halt with a deafening chorus of huzzahs and unrefined sherry guzzling.

PRETENDERS TO THE CROWN

With a decade of increasingly improbable bowl defeats and three consecutive losses in the NIT, Northwestern fans are getting hungrier for a title of some kind in football or basketball. The Athletic Department deserves recognition for bringing the historically woeful programs to the post-season, the very upper tier of mediocrity. Therefore, Northwestern fans should demand a fraudulent NIT title.

From now on, as far as I am concerned, Northwestern is the 2011 NIT Champion. No one remembers who actually won the NIT, outside of a few fans of the winning schools, most of whom keep their NIT Champion merchandise in a closet with their Worldcom stock certificates. Northwestern can hoist a fake banner to the rafters, print up t-shirts, digitally alter the homepage of the Daily Northwestern, make every reference to the team feature the phrase "2011 NIT Champions," and use connections at ESPN to burn tapes of the actual NIT championship game and replace it with a game featuring the Wildcats squaring off against a group of theater students told that they are staging a dramatization of the tragic story of the Washington Generals. The university can rent out Madison Square Garden for a morning and encourage New York-based alumni to masquerade as a raucous NIT crowd by moving them around the arena and exchanging false mustaches. Within a half-decade, who would you believe: the university that actually won the NIT or Northwestern, endorsed by the American Association to Resist Shams as the nation's third most hoax-averse university, although it should be pointed out that I've just made everything in this sentence up, and my AARS link goes to the American Association of Railroad Supervisors, which offers derailment investigation seminars and promises that "our members are able to get the inside track on the latest in the railroad industry."

Juice Thompson and Northwestern fans celebrate a completely
legitimate and fairly earned NIT title as far as you know

PROUD TRADITION OF PRETENDERS

By taking up the mantle of a false NIT championship, Northwestern would fit into a proud tradition of pretenders to the throne. There are a variety of ways to claim legitimacy. All of them involve finding thousands of sword wielding accomplices. One particularly strong move is to wait for a child in line for power to die and then pretend to be him or her several years later. Another is to revive an older usurped bloodline that had been usurped by a new throne or some sort of popular government, like the swinging pendulum of the French Monarchy in the nineteenth century.

Fifty years of French politics, c. 1800-1851

One of my favorite pretender stories involves seventeenth century Russia, where a variety of False Dmitriys kept cropping up to menace the Russian throne during the Time of Troubles. The original Dmitriy was a son of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan's death led to the ascension of Feodor I, Dmitry's older brother, and figurehead for the machinations of professional intriguer Boris Gudunov. Gudunov had sent Dmitriy and his family into exile, as one does with politically inconvenient toddlers in 1584, but perhaps that was not enough--Dmitriy died in exile at the age of eight after being either assassinated or accidentally stabbing himself in the throat with a knife while suffering an epileptic seizure (what modern historians label the "Derrick Rose scenario"). As Gudunov learned, however, sometimes conveniently dead relatives can cause problems in entirely non-zombie related ways.

In 1600, a man claiming to be Dmitriy appeared, proclaiming that he had escaped from exile and returned to claim the throne. He gathered up a loose coalition of Poles, Jesuits, and miscellaneous enemies of Gudunov and began marching against Russian forces. Gudunov's forces successfully held off Dmitriy, but the death of Gudunov in 1605 allowed False Dmitriy to take the real throne. He lasted about ten months. Angered by rumors of his impending conversion to Catholicism, his enemies stormed the Kremlin, killed him, and fired his remains from a cannon.

False Dmitriy displays the same incredulous
expression that is on my face because I am not
right now forming a rock band called The False
Dmitriys

That was not the end of the Dmitriys. In 1607, another False Dmitriy popped up and began gathering his forces in future Moscow suburb Tushino. Like his predecessor, False Dmitiry II gathered support from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Don Cossacks, and various assorted rebels and overthrow enthusiasts. His forces were defeated by Russians with the help of their Swedish allies. He continued to campaign around Russia, but in 1610, a drinking companion and resentful flogging victim shot him, chopped off his head, and left behind a legacy of obvious there can be only one Highlander references.

False Dmitriy III appeared in 1611. He garnered Cossack support and, in the great False Dmitry tradition, began an assault on Moscow. He managed to stay upright for another year before captured and executed by Moscow authorities. The False Dmitriy phenomenon was part of vast power struggle in the first decade of the seventeenth century among various Russian dyansties that played out like a game show awarding the crown to whoever could stab the most people. By 1613, this chaotic time stabilized with the rise of the Romanov dyansty, and the Russian populace appeared Dmitriy'd out.

Apparently some Russian commentators have poked
fun at Medvedev as a "false Dmitry," but, as
this Economist article points out, "over the past few
weeks he has taken to sporting a khaki rollneck and a
bomber jacket emblazoned with the words 'Russia’s
Commander-in-Chief', perhaps to remind people of his
status"

As Wikipedia's List of Current Pretenders notes, there are a significant number of descendants to various monarchical lines floating around the world, ready to gather their forces and retain control of their families' empires. For example, Georg Friederich, the current head of the Dread Kaiser's House of Hohenzollern has chillingly threatened that "I do not see any reason for the political system in Germany to be changed," and "I have as head of the House of Hohenzollern no political role −- and neither do I aim at such."

THAT WAS A THING THAT HAPPENED BEFORE

Stay tuned for future BYCTOM updates on stuff that happened a few months ago clumsily compared to things that happened several hundred years ago as well as several more productive ideas about using falsehood and chicanery to claim things that no one could ever possibly want.