Not Gross Enough

Last week's game against Iowa was the most promising one on Northwestern's remaining schedule not because the 'Cats had any better chance to win than any of their other games but because of the hope that Iowa's offense, which had spent most of the season moving with the efficiency of a person drowning in quicksand, would combine with Northwestern's own struggling unit in a display of football so hideous and offputting that Pat Fitzgerald and all of the available Ferentz in North America would be hauled in front of a congressional panel so that they could be berated by bipartisan lawmakers showing blown up pictures of holding penalties while demanding that they answer to the American people. Alas, that did not happen. Northwestern just got smoked again in a normal bad game.

The Wildcats, with a single win that happened what feels like twelve years ago and absolutely no reason to believe they'll add a second to the tally, are on their way to their worst season since 1989. That year they lost every single game they played. They lost to a then-independent Rutgers. Every game was a double-digit blowout, except the game to Minnesota, which they somehow lost 20-18, a score that to me does not seem possible in 1989. This is not the 1980s, though. Northwestern and its donors have inexplicably poured hundreds of millions of dollars into athletics including a fancy training center, a renovated basketball/volleyball arena, and a proposed new stadium that will cost nearly a billion dollars in its own right, they are paying Pat Fitzgerald a mysterious but presumably hefty salary, and they are getting the same results that they did when the facilities were a strip of grass and a port-a-potty. To be honest this is objectively funny.

To be honest I have not seen a single second of the Iowa game. I was unable to watch the game live and when I saw that the score featured actual numbers and not the primal scream of an undead language, I had absolutely no incentive to watch the specific ways that they had gotten bludgeoned and pinioned all over Kinnick Stadium. Northwestern under Fitzgerald has rarely been a fun team to watch; the entire enterprise, even at its best, often involved grimly clinging to the lead in the second half in a way that resembled watching the second half of Uncut Gems every Saturday. 

This is how I win

Now, Fitzgerald has the Wildcats play the same style of grimy, grinding football, and the results for the past two seasons have not been there. The faint hope of infuriating or at the very least annoying the various teams of the Big Ten has been evaporating.

The Big Ten West this year is a shit show, a maddening collection of mediocrity. This is the type of year where Northwestern has in the past been able to wriggle through the abyss and end up in Indianapolis or at the very least the Eccentric Uncle Mustache Pincher Wax Bowl. Instead, they just keep getting bonked about the helmet. It is normally hard to make the case to anyone why they should watch Northwestern football or that Northwestern has a football team with uniforms and everything; it is impossible to do so now. Time to look at this week's opponent.

A TECHNICAL AND DETAILED ANALYSIS OF NORTHWESTERN'S UPCOMING GAME AGAINST THE OHIO STATE BUCKEYES

THE WORLD SERIES IS AN INSTRUMENT OF MADNESS

Every baseball fan wants to see their team in the World Series, but it is no small comfort that when that doesn't happen the fan is rewarded with the immense luxury of not having to watch her team play in the World Series. Neutral fans get to enjoy the unbearable tension of each pitch, the crowd roaring and retreating like an ocean wave, the catharsis of a timely hit and the crushing misery of an error and the fans of the two teams playing experience the world series by thinking to themselves: aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh aaaaaahhhhh.

Every big game in a sport offers tension and drama, but baseball's pace is best suited to emotional torture. It's already a slow game, but in the playoffs become glacial. No other sport forces spectators to indulge the players in so much housekeeping.  In between each pitch they kick the dirt around, they adjust their gloves and their crotch protecting equipment, they blink and make those weird open-mouthed guppy faces that Dustin Pedroia used to do.  The pitchers stare off meaningfully into the middle distance.  Every pitch for both teams could mean certain doom.

 

Baseball excels at doing this to people for four entire hours

Baseball's general slow and ambient nature-- the game is best enjoyed as a soothing background to something else going on during the summer-- gets weaponized into a terrifying dirge in the postseason as the stakes get higher.  In its ideal summer form, Ron Coomer is talking about the time he got sandwich poisoning on a road trip in 1988 after eating fourteen chicken parms on a dare from Rick Wrona while you chop onions without a care in the world; October finds you watching Jake Arrieta stare at the catcher with pupils the size of pinpricks for 45 seconds while feeling like you are going to vomit.  

But for those of us lucky enough to root for shitty teams, the playoffs offer a delightful voyeur's window into mass nervous breakdowns.  Every cut to a fan shows a group of people on the verge of bursting into tears, every home team setback is met with an eerie, miserable silence.  Baseball is the only major sport that allows fans space to perceverate and to stew, unbothered by anything happening other than players standing around.  Everything about the postseason, from the way that its best teams are promised nothing from a short series to prolonged the way games unfold over a feeling of relentless dread, makes the fans of teams almost rooting for it to end.  It is absolutely wonderful to enjoy without caring who wins and utterly unbearable to endure for fans of teams in it, and I desperately hope the Cubs make it back so I can be miserable again.

THE INDIANAPOLIS EXPRESS

Hugh Millhew was not sure why he stopped the bus for the stooped, bearded man or why he decided to change course and ferry him to Indianapolis. He figured he had a bus now, and when he stopped the man tried to get on, and, after thinking about it for a few minutes he could not come up with a good reason not to go to Indianapolis.

Millhew hadn’t planned on driving a bus on this trip or at any point in his life. His problem was that he liked talking to people and, in this case specifically, people in a bar next to his motel. In this case that was M. Powell Straigthurt, the proprietor of Straithurt Motors on Route 19 who pulled up in a glistening Dodge and told Millhew he could have it for his old Buick plus $180. Millhew said he wasn’t a fool, he wanted to have a look at the thing first. He popped the hood right in the parking lot.

“This thing has a worn alternator, the tires are practically bald, and the radio only gets the bad religious station,” Millhew said, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “Clutch is sticky too.” Millhew also did not have $180 on him either, but he kept that to himself.

“Son, you drive a hard bargain, but I can tell you know your way around an automobile,” Straighthurt said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. How about a straight up swap? I could always use another Buick, even if it’s just for parts.” 

That irked Millhew. Sure, the Buick needed some work, the fuel pump was nearly shot, and every four or five times it needed a kick in exactly the right place on the front fender in order to fully turn over, but he had kept it running all the way from Lubbock. But he couldn’t pass up a swap.

Straigthurt proposed doing the trade tonight. He said that did not want other customers seeing him give Millhew such a good deal and then demanding a nice Dodge for their own hunks of junk. Millhew was a little dubious, but he also noticed a flushed and swaying demeanor in the man and figured the rum cocktails he had seen Straighthurt downing one after the other could be playing a role here and it might be best to act before the man sobered up.

Millhew could tell Straighurt Motors was a major operation based on the billboard he saw with the M. Powell’s grinning face looking like the face of the moon and the fact that roof had an enormous inflatable gorilla ("Get yourself a deal that's INSANE!!!" the sign said, making the gorilla's presence somewhat of an enigma). Straighhurt took him to the business office in a trailer in the back of the lot. Millhew sat filling out dozens of forms. It seemed like every for paper he filled out, Straighthurt produced two more and as he attacked them, Straighthurt pounded addenda and clauses out on his typewriter, squinting through half-glasses. Finally he finished. Straighthurts produced a bottle of something brown and offered it to Millhew, but Millhew did not feel like celebrating. 

“If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Straighthurt, I’d just like the Dodge and I’ll be on my way.” 

“Well, I’ll be,” Straighthurt said. “We have a bit of a complication. You see, the Dodge, I just saw it is not available. Already sold to Mr. Lardner N. Wiltnoy. Taking delivery on the 24th. What a horrible oversight. My deepest apologies.” 

“OK then, I’ll just take the Buick back,” Millhew said

“Well, I'm afraid I can’t do that. You see, you’ve just signed it over to Straighthurt Motors. Here it is, in triplicate. Why, I just saw you fill out the forms yourself.”

Millhew was furious. He cursed. He whirled around to get the police. But then he saw it: a whole wall of photos of Straighthurt grinning that billboard grin of his with every badge in the county. There was one with him and the police department softball team he sponsored. There was one directly behind his head with the sheriff. He was smiling the same smile as in the picture now. 

“You’re welcome to talk to Sheriff Maughton. I’m sure he would be happy to take a look at the paperwork we’ve established here,” Straighthurt said. “Of course, I would never just take a car from someone like you. That would be fraudulent and you don’t get to be the sponsor of the sheriff’s bowling team with those sorts of lax attitudes towards the law and the constitution. I can’t get you the Dodge, but I’ve got just the vehicle for a youngster who knows his way around an engine block.”

Millhew had no choice and he followed him to the back of the lot. That’s where it was: an ancient, rusted bus. It still had “Billy’s Big Billy Boy’s Band, Brownsville” stenciled on the back. It smelled like it was leaking oil like a gutshot gunfighter. 

“Look at this fine automobile. Been all over the country, all over the hemisphere. Still runs like a dream. Seems perfect for an itinerant man such as yourself in his journeys. Maybe meet a nice girl. Maybe meet a few nice girls. You’ve got the room in here.” 

Millhew didn’t want the bus. But he also didn’t want to walk out of there and those were his only choices. He also noticed that Straighthurt had his hand grasping something in his pocket. He sighed and took the keys and the registration.

The plan had been to take the interstate out east and track down his friend Frad Croddle, but Frad had stopped answering the phone and the one time he tried to take the bus on the interstate it had moved so ponderously that multiple drivers threw hamburgers at him and he needed to stop and clean off the windshield. Millhew began meandering through backroads. That’s where he met Professor Huddry.

Millhew had noticed him at the Tri Booth Inn.  An old man bearded man in a rumpled suit with threadbare elbow patches was hunched over a table sniffing the fumes from what looked like a cup of tea or whatever spices they managed to dump in a mug full of hot water for him. The old man was surrounded by decrepit cardboard boxes.  The man looked at Millhew and introduced himself as Professor Huddry of the Huddry-Mantis Institute, but Millhew  simply nodded and went out to the parking lot.  He was done with conversations with eccentrics after the Straighthurt fiasco. But when he went to leave, there was Professor Huddry standing in front of the bus’s door like he was getting on the crosstown express.

“I noticed that were driving alone in this great big bus,” the man said. 

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” said Millhew.

“Well, if you’re heading east, I can use a ride to Indianapolis. My previous travel arrangements fell apart due to a small amount of treachery, leaving me to lug my books and articles and I can't find a single ride that does not appear to be a death trap. This must be the jalopy capital of the United States.  I can contribute some gas money.”

Millhew thought about it. He was down to his last $25 or so, and while he had no intention of ever setting foot in Indianapolis, it was at least vaguely in the right direction. Besides, he figured he could kick this odd little man to the curb if he became too tedious. He told him he’d take him up on his offer and began loading the boxes into the bus. There were dozens of them and they had been water damaged by some rain or a puddle and barely held together. It seemed like they had books in them and it took some time to get everything loaded up.

“You don’t know it now, but you’re taking a step to save amateur athletics in this country,” the Huddry said.

"How about we save that first tank of gas,” Millhew said. 

The first hours started in silence. Millhew blared the radio (it was the bad religious station, the one with a firebreathing preacher shrieking about his audience going to hell for embracing Satan’s radio) until it faded from the dial and that's when Huddry saw his opportunity to start talking.

“Have you heard of NIL?” the professor said.

“NIL? Is that some sort of chemical?” Millhew replied.

“No, it’s an acronym. That’s when you have letters that stand for words,” the professor said.

“I know that.” Millhew hissed.

“Name, image, likeness. Do you know that that means? Of course you don’t,” Hoddry said. “It means that crime is legal. It means that athletes are for sale. It means that a man’s integrity is on the open market like a hog’s carcass. Name, image, likeness. You’ve got college athletes getting paid now. And it’s all legal.”

Millhew was at a loss. “Why do you care if college athletes get paid?”

“That is just what I expect to hear from a nincompoop. It’s classic nincompoopery. Page 14. Habeas nincompooperus. Do you hear yourself? Do you understand integrity? Amateurism? The ideal of the scholar-athlete? Listen to yourself.”

“You better watch that nincompoop stuff or you can walk. Don’t forget this is my bus.”

“Of course. I apologize,” the professor said. “Not everyone has been exposed to the beauty of pure amateur athletics. You don’t strike me as a collegian.”

In fact Millhew had done one semester at State before both he and the administration came to a mutual understanding that he would no longer burden the faculty with his presence.

“This is exactly the type of situation that Duckett discusses in Chapter 15. I take it you have not heard of Buck Duckett?”

“No,” said Millhew. He pawed at the radio dial.

“Duckett is the foremost mind in amateur athletics. A guardian of sorts. An investigator for the NCAA. I assume you’ve never heard of the Tennessee Pants Bust of 1978. The author of In Cold Pants, a methodological guide to investigating illegal payments but, more than that, a metaphysical journey, a meditation on the soul of amateurism. The most profound sports text that has been written or will be written this century.”

The bus shuddered.

“I hope you don’t expect that I pay for repairs for this wretched wreck,” the professor said.

“The bus is fine. Just needs a little transmission fluid in a few miles,” Millhew said.

“The soul of amateurism,” Hoddry continued. “Do you know that Duckett once broke six ribs impersonating a scout team punter while discovering a ring of Tech players receiving free hoagies every single day from a devious sandwiches magnate?”

“I don’t know, those football players must get pretty hungry running around in the sun all day,” Millhew said.

“Of course they do,” said the professor. “But there are legal sandwiches and illegal– anyway the point seems to elude you. But what I hope is that it won’t elude the National Collegiate Athletics Association. As you can see I’ve prepared several proofs, mathematical proofs based on a numerological reading of In Cold Pants that I have written up so elegantly that it could get through to even the most thickheaded bureaucrat. I believe that once they are confronted with the texts from Duckett, Duckett scholars, and my own work showing that Chapter 13, the one where he details how he rigged up a crude funicular in order to sneak into a fraternity house and reconnoiter a set of golf clubs given to a point guard is actually, when run through a crude but effective cipher, a clear rebuke to the exact NIL code governing the NCAA rules, they will have no choice but to revoke the imbecilic law and stop this monstrous professionalization of football, darts, and croquet.”

Millhew finally managed to find a radio station. It was a small station and it was playing something called the Symphony of Discordant Accordions but he would listen to hours of snoring or shrieking babies to avoid having to endure to more speeches about Buck Duckett and the NCAA. Eventually they decided to stop and get something to eat at a roadside diner. Duckett had hoped to sit alone at the counter but Hoddry motioned him into a booth, and Millhew's manners wouldn't allow him to abandon him.

“The key to understanding Buck Duckett is in line and page numbers, which is why you need the third edition. You see, the key does not work in the first or second editions quite well with the roman numeral introduction and the beastly fourth edition, with an entirely superfluous chapter about the various swashbuckling incidents Duckett endured while investigating fencing teams that was probably ghostwritten by some dullard publisher's assistant.”

A strange man sitting at the counter swiveled around his stool and stared at them. He was as tall as Hoddry was stooped, gangly, clean-shaven, with remarkable ears that drooped down across the length of his tiny face. Millhew was embarrassed because Hoddry was talking his nonsense loudly and occasionally gesturing with a fork. The man got up, seemingly unfolding himself from the stool and materialized next to them with impossibly long strides.

“What’s this Buck Duckett nonsense you’re raving about?” he said.

“Well, this is high-level theory and scholarship. I don’t have time to explain it to another thick-headed oaf. I’m a very busy man with business before the NCAA,” the professor replied.

“Buck Duckett is nonsense. That was debunked years ago. All tall tales from a sad man writing stories about busting water polo players. If you had simply read Pack Bracket, you would have no issues defending amateurism,” the man said.

“Pack Bracket? Pack Bracket? I should have been able to tell I was dealing with a Bracket Man by looking at the ridges on your skull. Look at his head,” Hoddry said turning to Millhew. “The classic shape of a cretin. It is a miracle this man is able to feed himself. Pack Bracket.” Now he looked up at the tall man looming over him. “You realize that it was Bracketism that led right to NIL? The Bracket Men’s texts were so harebrained that the NCAA laughed them out of the room. Or did you not see the issue of ‘Amateur Sports Theorems’ about it? Maybe there weren’t enough pictures.”

“That hearing was a damn stitch-up and you know it,” the tall man said. “The whole thing was already a joke when people started reading this fake detective talking about disguising himself as a waiter to catch Moose Caldwell accepting illegal fireworks when everyone knows Caldwell’s own uncle turned him in.”

“Please,” Hoddry said. “The Moose Caldwell Uncle theory is something I’ve easily debunked if you read chapters four and six of my manuscript. All of the evidence shows that Duckett not only intercepted the pants but also left a series of prophesies embedded by analyzing the sentence structure. But I wouldn’t expect a Bracketist to be able to follow such a basic line.”

“Then you haven’t read Nick Nacket. I have it right here.” The tall man ambled over to the corner of the diner where he had his own mess of cardboard boxes that seemed impossibly damp and began rooting through them. 

“Let’s go. We can leave this deluded maniac to his scribblings. We have no time to waste,” the professor said as he gobbled up the remains of his meatloaf and stood up. But he was not fast enough. By the time he finished and paid the bill (the only reason Millhew had not left him at that gas station hours earlier when he got into a thirty minute argument with the attendant about Charleston Chew), the tall man had loped over to the parking lot and was already loading his boxes onto the bus. 

“I ain’t letting you go to Indianapolis without at least reading Nick Nacket,” he said, waving a battered volume at the professor.

“Do you think I haven’t read it? Or at least sampled enough of his incoherent nonsense to understand the futility of this enterprise?” By now both men were on the bus pointing their arms at each other and taking turns rifling through boxes to shove documents at each other while invoking the names of Beckett Heck and Truck Van Truk.

Millhew quietly slipped out of the parking lot and onto the road and stuck out his thumb.

It's Over, We're Cyberpunk Now: A Review of Baseball's Opening Weekend

Heading into Spring Training, baseball had been afflicted by the low-grade malaise that has been seeping into the sport for the past few years: there was the lingering Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, questions about the juiced ball that baseball handled with a series of increasingly half-hearted denials and obfuscations, and an increasingly bold stance by owners that they didn’t get into the baseball business to pay baseball players that signals impending labor strife. But it is also clear that in a year that saw baseball heading into a season that was going to be defined by reporters repeatedly asking Astros players "did you bang the cans," that all of these concerns are muted by the possibility that Major League Baseball will literally kill someone.

Baseball careened into its pandemic restart plan with the panicked disorganization of a retreating army. As labor negotiations roiled into bitterness between players and owners, plans to play in Arizona and Florida fell by the wayside as Covid cases spiked in those states, and the testing regime immediately fell into delays that made it impossible to tell quickly and decisively if anyone was infected before they had the opportunity to spread disease around the stadium, I became increasingly convinced that this was all a giant ass-covering exercise; this way, MLB could claim that they tried before folding the season as the incompetent reset plans continued to lurch forward so haphazardly that it would be impossible to play without marinating the entire league in a virus stew.

But here we are. Baseball has returned, barreling through the clusterfucks and logistical nightmares with the confidence of a person drunk enough to try some amateur bear wrestling in the wild. In this week alone, the Canadian government denied permission for the Blue Jays to play in Toronto leaving them scrambling to secure a home field days before opening day, Nationals superstar Juan Soto tested positive just hours before a game but allowing teammates near him to still play; MLB is still ramming bizarre rule changes into a season that has already seen a universal DH and a mind-meltingly stupid rule to start extra innings with a runner on second-- minutes before the opening pitch, MLB announced an expanded playoff format as part of the sport and America's dominant fuck it we'll do it live ethos.

It is clear that attempting to play organized baseball, with the travel, infrastructure and close contact required by a modern baseball operation is reckless and stupid, and in a functioning country the entire thing would be completely shut down.  Instead, they brought baseball back, crammed the telecasts with triumphant commercials about persevering over a disease that is in fact bat-flipping in triumph at the American medical establishment, and lauded by announcers as something America needs.  It is insane to witness; I do not know why-- possibly because it is bracing to watch professional sports leagues stage grandiose plans for safety theater and execute them as if you or I or your neighbor who has strong opinions about brands of weedwhacking equipment were put in charge of the D-Day invasion-- but watching professional sports leagues attempt to play under these circumstances with increasingly ludicrous fake safety measures makes me feel completely unmoored from reality.  We absolutely do not need any of this.  We don't need Bubbles.  We don't need Alternate Sites.  We do not need to drive a steamroller over people so I can watch Jason Heyward roll over a slow grounder to the second baseman.

I watched like fifteen hours of baseball this weekend.

AN AESTHETIC REVIEW OF PLAGUE ERA BASEBALL

The biggest and most notable thing is the lack of fans, of baseball played in empty stadiums.  The broadcasts tried several ways to get around this.  Teams are blaring low-level crowd noise over the sound system.  Some set up cardboard cutouts of fans as a sort of comforting simulacrum of the televised baseball experience instead of looking at row after row of cold, empty seats and thinking oh shit there's a plague what the hell are we doing.  I like the cardboard fans.  They're goofy and charming.  The Dodgers had them set up for the game I watched late Thursday night, and I was disappointed they did not set up a cardboard Larry King to emulate what I think is one of the greatest camera shots in the history of televised baseball:


On Saturday's Fox telecasts, the production crew decided to go in another direction and remind us that we are all living in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Fox digitally inserted fans into the stadium using computer graphics from an early generation of console video games and taunted viewers with disturbing pixelated blobs waving disconnected limbs around and appearing and disappearing like ghoulish specters.  There were no fans behind the plate in the Cubs game I watched, but a player would hit a foul ball and the camera would pan into a crowd of weightless cub-shirted dolls, their limbs undulating like horror movie versions of inflatable car lot dancers.  It is an abomination.

The aesthetic of pandemic-era television is the grainy, pixelated Zoom quality of video images, and it is precisely the degradation of television from high-definition to blurry glitches that gives everything a feeling of cyberpunk dystopia.  I believe this is because this is how television and communications looked in every 1980s and 1990s cyberpunk dystopia movie.  Every day on our screens we see an entertainment apparatus that will not stop for anything including a pile of bodies continue to go through the motions with the same form and content but now these programs look exactly like how grainy video calls looked in Total Recall.  There is a television on at all times outside of my office, and every morning I see the same chipper morning news people grinning through elaborate haircuts and doing their inane post-human banter no longer in a studio but in their homes, in networks of flickering rumpus rooms, and the idea of someone sitting at home staring into a computer and vacuously chuckle-talking to Keith about his Summer Movie Faves has been consistently making my blood run cold.

Sports television has hewed to this aesthetic.  Networks have added teleconferenced announcers superimposed over game action nervously tripping over each other and disembodied crowd sounds echoing through eerie shots of abandoned stadiums but they have tried to maintain the familiar grammar of a sports broadcast.  It is the psychosis of the NFL draft but now Mel Kiper looks like a 1990s CD Rom Video Game Guy who sells weapon upgrades.  In my head, I hear Joe Buck narrating the fall of the American government from various regional warlord factions in his same lilting down low it's three and two cadence while John Smoltz interrupts to add in that it's also a rough night for Giants hitters as Kershaw's looking sharp. 

The aesthetics of American Cyberpunk as depicted on sports television

And yet, despite all of the harrowing dread, baseball is still baseball.  The pitch still thumps into the catcher's glove.  The ball still cracks off of bats.  Every few minutes, a large person you have never heard of named Tanner Traegarten or Chance Hacklebourg comes in to throw 98.  The umpires still communicate in their indecipherable grunt-argots.  For some reason, everyone is still spitting and grabbing at their extremities at all times, which is comforting in baseball and would give me an anxiety attack if I saw someone do it on a sidewalk. It took about 15 minutes of me settling in to watch my first Cubs game to go from marveling at the ludicrousness and recklessness of the entire enterprise to start worrying about their ramshackle bullpen consisting entirely of fictional guys from the famous Japanese Nintendo game graphic.



In the midst of all of this, the Cubs decided to launch their own television network.  And because the Cubs are owned by the eternally grasping Ricketts family, it naturally involved an important Business Deal that threatened to leave Comcast customers, the main carrier of all Chicago area cable subscribers, unable to watch the game until they came to a last minute agreement on opening day.  The Marquee Network exists to show nothing but Cubs content, and I have occasionally been thinking about what they have been airing for the past several months as the entire reason for its existence has been swallowed up by the pandemic.  For the past few days, since the Marquee Network has loomed large in my brain, I have been unable to stop thinking about them airing a Ryan Dempster talk show that is just a 1990s talk show where Dempster wears an enormous boxy suit and painted tie, talks to Sissy Spacek and Antonio Alfonseca, and everyone involved is constantly housing and spitting sunflower seeds everywhere.  

Baseball has returned with a sense of anxious joy and horror, something that should not be happening at all but is, and since I am powerless to stop it I might as well see if Javy Baez can knock some dingers.  It exists, like the return of all entertainment and amusement parks and throngs of people hosing each other down with particles in bars, an abomination, an indictment of a government and society unwilling to protect itself from annihilation, and it is also the comfort of knowing that on a summer day you can turn on the radio and hear Ron Coomer talking about how Kris Bryant is really looking for something he drive here the same way you always can.  And if this contradictory state of affairs seems untenable, an impossible way to reconcile enjoying something that should not really exist, there is nothing I can tell you that you can't already know from watching college football in normal times.

Week 7: BIG TEN SLOBBERKNOCKIN' and the Laws of the Universe

For the past three years, the Northwestern-Michigan game has ended in a conflagration of unlikely football misfortune robbing the Wildcats of a victory over a depleted, languid Michigan team.  That did not happen this year.  Instead, Northwestern kicked off and then I'm pretty sure the field opened up and swallowed the Wildcats whole for the rest of the game.  I know that people come to this website for detailed play-by-play football expertise, so I've diagnosed some of the key plays in this video below (you might not want to blare this one at work):


The result was a 38-0 debacle that only became watchable once it mysteriously transformed into a festival of improbable Cubs bunts through the magic of television.  Northwestern's football Wildcats were utterly dismantled and are no longer undefeated.  Michigan put up another shutout and remains ascendant, insufferably. 

Losing to Michigan is annoying.  The rebirth of Michigan and the barely-disguised giddiness of national football pundits at the reestablishment of a Football Brand is annoying.  The incredible series of idiotic San Francisco 49ers skulduggery that exiled an excellent NFL coach and brought him to Michigan through a blood-red sky on a war chariot raining a pestilence of nose tackles upon the Big Ten is annoying.  Jim Harbaugh is profoundly annoying.
 
Every week, an assistant coach is tasked with assuring Harbaugh that he 
has not been thrown out of the domed settlement on the surface of Mars 
in Total Recall

Despite the disheartening clobbering, the Wildcats are still 5-1, still close to clinching a bowl berth, and in contention in the Big Ten West.  Their time in the national spotlight has passed; now Northwestern fans can retreat to the shadows comfortably away from college football bloviatrics and enjoy what still has the possibility to be an incredible season.  A repeat of the 2013 season, where a hot Northwestern start devolved into a series of inconceivable late-game meltdowns where the Wildcats found themselves turning into the opposing team on Friday Night Lights every week will hopefully not happen.
 
Listen up, we're gonna run the you scramble around for two minutes 
before heaving the ball up against their entire defense with no time 
remaining and I want you to throw that ball with metaphoric resonance 
about small-town football and triumphs and misery and what it means 
to be a man and I want you to do it while people scream in wide-eyed 
wonder in slow motion in the stands, what are you doing, don't you get
in that huddle without this post rock CD

But Northwestern will not contend for anything if they don't get past an undefeated Iowa team with its own designs on the West in a bloodthirsty Big Ten showdown.


BIG TEN FOOTBALL: THE NATION'S SHOVIEST FOOTBALL

Iowa-Northwestern games are technically football in that there are football teams and balls and crowds and everything.  But the games are also demolition derbies, where dream seasons from teams far removed from Big Ten royalty smash into smoldering piles of ligaments and animus.  Pat Fitzgerald broke his leg in the 1995 Iowa game, preventing him from playing in the Rose Bowl.  A dreadful Iowa team crushed Northwestern's chance at Pasadena in 2000, relegating the 'Cats to a share of the championship and a berth in the Alamo Bowl.  Both teams lost starting quarterbacks in consecutive years in 2009 and 2010. Iowa and Northwestern exist to ruin each other's seasons in complete anonymity because not a single soul outside Iowa City and Evanston is aware that these teams play each other every year on a regulation football field.
 
Artists' rendition: Iowa 12, Northwestern 7

The Hawkeyes are flying high with an undefeated season and the Wildcats are still recovering from the drubbing they received in Ann Arbor.  It would appear that Iowa should cruise to an easy win.  The Hawkeyes, however, have been hammered by injuries.  Star defensive lineman Drew Ott is lost for the season.  The offensive line is so beat up that Kirk Ferentz may suit up; he has spent the week lifting triangular weights, looking for his leather helmet, and practicing hand-to-hand combat against Soviet agents in preparation.  Iowa quarterback C.J. Beathard his also nurturing an injury, but he plans to counter by having the best football name since Army quarterback Trent Steelman managed to tactically subterfuge his way through Northwestern's defense some years back.

Northwestern's miserable outing in Ann Arbor exposed some problems that the defense had covered up.  They still have trouble moving the ball against good defenses.  The defense had trouble stopping Michigan's power running game, and Iowa's Jordan Canzeri has absolutely sliced defenses apart.  Last week against Illinois, the Hawkeyes simply stopped throwing the ball, giving it to Canzeri over and over again as he literally ran over the Illini to seal an Iowa victory.  Add in that Ferentz, long considered an ambassador of Big Ten Fuddy-Duddery has embraced a Cornfield Gambler persona that has the stereotypically staid Hawkeyes going for it on fourth down, embracing the forward pass, and occasionally eschewing a field-goal-and-safety scoring philosophy, and it is not hard to see why they are undefeated and favored.  This time it is the Wildcats who live and die with the defense, run the ball between the tackles, and try to punt other teams into submission in order to win football games while Ferentz mocks Fitz's conservatism from the groovy psychadelic bus where he now lives.

The Wildcats will honor the twentieth anniversary of the Rose Bowl team on Homecoming this Saturday.  They will be wearing throwback 1995 uniforms.  This marks the seventh different uniform combination Northwestern has worn this season: white helmets, white jerseys, Aggressive Wildcat Bite Helmets, Dracula Uniforms, Chicago's Big Ten Municipal Corruption Boodle Bag helmets, Lake helmets, Colbert Eyebrow uniforms, and Fake Opposing Uniforms to Convince an Overwhelming Away Crowd At Ryan Field to Root For Northwestern Uniforms.  Northwestern's marketing partnership with UnderArmour has been vital for building the Northwestern Brand, which is crucial for twenty-first century football programs who plan on using their Solid Brands to stop the option play.

THE CUBS ARE VERY GOOD AND YOU ARE GOING TO READ ABOUT IT IN THIS BLOG

There is a dumb comfort to fatalism.  When the seemingly-insurmountable lead evaporates through a series of miserable Rube Goldberg events, well it could never end well. It's not necessarily a belief in curses or goats or any sort of supernatural malevolence.  It is just the idea, lodged in the Neanderthal Cortex of a primordial human brain that if something happens a few times over the short course of a human lifetime, it is a truth from time immemorial.  The Cubs would never win anything and, if they did, they could never beat the St. Louis Cardinals, as ever-present at the top of the National League Central division as a sun shining the Right Way. 

The Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series.  They beat them and the St. Louis Cardinals are no longer able to play baseball.  They can go out and play some stickball or get together on the diamond to practice calibrating their baseball caps to avoid tilting them at morally unacceptable Strop levels, but these games will not be sanctioned by Major League Baseball and there is nothing anyone can do from disseminating accounts of them all over the Midwest.
 
The bizarre Costas diatribe against Strop after a disastrous outing is one 
of the funniest subplots of the season.  "KNOW THIS, STROP," Costas 
said, puffing out his bulging eye sacs to make him appear larger and more 
menacing. "WHEN YOU ARRIVE IN WHATEVER DAMNED AFTERLIFE 
WILL ACCEPT YOUR SHODDY RELIEF PITCHING SOUL, I HOPE YOU 
FACE AN ETERNITY SERVING UP MEATBALLS THAT WILL SOAR 
ACROSS THE HEAVENS TO DESTROY YOUR MOST CHERISHED 
MEMORIES AND WHILE THAT IS HAPPENING YOU ARE MOCKED 
WITH GRAVITY-DEFYING BAT FLIPS WHICH HANG FOREVER 
TURNING AND ECHOING DEMONIC LAUGHTER AT YOU, HERE I 
SHOULD NOTE I AM PROBABLY ALSO OPPOSED TO BAT FLIPS BECAUSE 
THAT SEEMS LIKE A REALLY BOB COSTAS THING TO GET ANNOYED 
WITH, THIS IS BOB COSTAS SIGNING OFF WITH UNEARTHLY CACKLING." 
 Costas then rode off on his High Horse, which is a normal, regular-sized horse.

The Cubs sent Jason Hammel, a pitcher sponsored by the American Meatball Council for the past several months, against the Cardinals in a potential series-clinching game.  Hammel immediately gave up a hit and home run to put them down 2-0 before fans even had an opportunity to aggressively point to their arms in an effort to remove Hammel from the game in world where it was possible to make citizens' pitching changes.  The move to keep him in seemed even more ludicrous in the second, when Maddon sent Hammel to bat with men on base.  Hammel responded with an RBI single, setting the stage for Javy Baez to homer home the go-ahead runs and for Cardinals pitcher John Lackey to argle-bargle his way back the mound in a delightful display of baseball fury.  A Cardinals rally (started by a scrappy backup catcher who hit .200 this season, whose crucial RBI double against the Cubs was fore-ordained by the Big Bang) was answered by thundering Cubs dingers including a Kyle Schwarber blast that affected the rotation of the Earth.

If the Cubs can defeat the Cardinals, if they can make it to the National League Championship Series, then hell, why can't they make it to the World Series?  If all it takes to break through the playoffs is a team full of young people who do not realize they are Cubs, a manager who manages the team with cuddly zoo animals, and a lumpy, chin-bearded home run machine, then I suppose it is worth unmooring ourselves from an entire baseball cosmology and actually believe.  Or, do what I plan to do and miserably watch every playoff game, spending the most fun Cubs season of all time  in a protective flinch waiting for the other shoe to drop.
 
Playoff baseball makes Larry Kings of us all

IMAGINE DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY SPORTS THIS WEEKEND

Northwestern faces off at 11:00am in Chicago's Big Ten time slot against Iowa at Ryan Field.  Perhaps a return to confines of Ryan Field alongside the '95 team can shake the team from whatever hit them last Saturday at Michigan.  All that's at stake is a bowl berth, contention in the Big Ten West, and avoiding a Ranked Northwestern Death Spiral that has claimed so many other seasons.  The vestigial quasi-rivalry with Iowa, Homecoming,  and a stadium filled with hostile Iowa fans will certainly lend the game an intense atmosphere.

There is no fatalistic doom-and-gloomery that hovers over a Northwestern/Iowa game. Instead, it is a shared horror that both promising seasons can simultaneously implode by slobberknocking so hard that it causes some sort of rift in the slobber/knock continuum, throws the earth off its orbit, and opens the Big Ten West to be claimed by Purdue. After all, we are living in a world where the Chicago Cubs have beaten the indomitable St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series and the Laws of the Universe no longer apply.