Football Leadership Book, by Luke Fickell

Everyone spent all week saying that the Iowa game was going to be repulsive and disgusting and set back the game of football forever etc. and the casinos said I bet you don't think they can score the fewest points we have ever let you gamble on and the TV networks said we will not allow this to be broadcast on the airwaves where it is subject to FCC regulation and instead put it on a streaming service where they can show whatever they want like illegal badger baiting competitions and cooking shows called American Botulist and everyone had a good laugh at Iowa-Northwestern playing their signature brands of shit football at each other in a baseball stadium from the 1910s and then somehow the game was actually worse than that.  

 

Iowa vs Northwestern but it’s a Silent Film pic.twitter.com/tmEGbSMyrY

— Mr Matthew CFB (@MrMatthew_CFB) November 4, 2023

Twitter user Mr Matthew CFB cut the highlights of this deranged contest into a silent film 

It was 0-0 at halftime.  Northwestern managed fewer than 30 passing yards in the first half.  I had thought to myself that there was a possibility that Iowa offensive coordinator and son Brian Ferentz, who had been Future Terminated like he was in a 1980s science fiction movie and therefore had nothing to lose would pull out all the stops and just run the most insane plays possible like double flea flicker reverses and those plays where the quarterback pretends he can't hear understand the call coming in from the sideline and wanders towards the coaches only for them to snap the ball to a running back, or a pass that travels more than 14 yards, but I suppose if Brian Ferentz was capable of doing things like that he would not have been pre-fired.  Instead, the Iowa offense did what everyone expected the Iowa offense to do and fell down a lot and called for the punter and absolutely nothing happened for approximately three excruciating hours.

You said you'd call for the punter.

It's third and three we can get a first down.

It's fourth and two.

I'll call now

The star of the game was the Wrigley Field turf, which continued its mission to maim and devour football players.  Last year, players slipped and slid all over the field like it was a hockey rink.  This year, a few downs of vicious goal-line football produced a gigantic sink hole at the two yardline.  It was if the earth itself had seen and rejected the nauseating attempt at football going on around it and tried to intervene.  The game paused for several moments as the shovel-wielding grounds crew desperately hacked at the hole and did sad little riverdances on it to try to fill the divot.  It was perhaps the most literal interpretation of the Timeout On The Field.   This was the most exciting part of the game.

The game managed to have some juice at the very end, when Northwestern somehow managed to find the endzone and tie the game at 7-7 with fewer than 2 minutes to go.  I thought it would be very improbable that Iowa's towtruck offense could march down the field in time to score, but a few penalties and the one actual pass completion of the game got them in field goal range for a kicker who had already doinked one from similar range earlier.  Instead, Iowa got it through the uprights, won the game, and the kicker made the very rude go to sleep gesture and the Hawkeyes secured their place at the top of the putrid Big Ten West.

Now Northwestern faces Iowa's erstwhile rival for the West crown, a sputtering Wisconsin team.  It's a new era for Wisconsin football under Luke Fickell.  Fickell, who had turned Cincinnati into a powerhouse in the AAC, is trying to do something different at Wisconsin.  The Badgers tended to promote their own and run the same kind of Badger football you remember from time immemorial where the five largest men in Wisconsin are airlifted onto Camp Randall every week and knock over everyone so they can run the ball while three to four times every game a quarterback throws the crummiest pass you've ever seen.  Fickell, though is trying to chanve this.  He brought in Air Raid guru Phil Longo to run the offense and SMU transfer quarterback Tanner Mordecai.  This was a shocking development-- I imagined Wisconsin trying to run the Air Raid like a military trying to form an air force by driving tanks up a ramp.  The results have not been there for Wisconsin this year.

Wisconsin, playing at home, is heavily favored against Northwestern.  But the Wildcats have been managing to hold their own against Big Ten West opponents, and Wisconsin is coming off a loss to an Indiana team whose coaching situation for most of the season could best be described as "death throes."  Both teams face quarterback uncertainty with Mordecai's status in question for Wisconsin and Northwestern potentially bringing back Ben Bryant, who had played under Fickell at Cincinnati.  Once again, the key for Northwestern is to make the game as horrible as possible.  The Wildcats thrive playing in Big Ten West slop conditions much like how the Predator requires a hot and humid climate in order to successfully tear apart Carl Weathers.  If anyone has any fun at all watching this game, it augurs poorly for the 'Cats.

THE NCAA KILLS JIM HARBAUGH WITH DEVASTATING DEATH PENALTY OF NOT BEING ABLE TO COACH THE TEAM FOR THREE HOURS A WEEK

The Michigan sign-stealing scandal continues to take up all of the oxygen in college football media, much to the relief of Derrick Gragg, who is probably sending an edible arrangement to one of Connor Stalions's dead drops.  Last year, my running bit on this blog was a series of short stories about a fictional NCAA investigator named Buck Duckett where the central joke was that the NCAA had no power anymore with NIL and the investigators who spent their time digging in trash cans for P.F. Chang's receipts from illegal recruiting visits or whatever no longer had anything to do.  I did not see the NCAA's investigative wing having a such a major resurgence because a weird guy with a silly name was (allegedly!) doing recon wet work on the Central Michigan sidelines.  

This week, the scandal has escalated on two fronts.  On one, the increasingly Coen Brothers-inflected saga of Connor Stalions took more strange turns when we learned about how his vacuum repair business got him into an argument with his HOA where he legally responded by claiming the entire dispute was a psyop directed by his Michigan State fan neighbor named Jeff who was out to sabotage Michigan's football operations by complaining about the dozens of vacuums Stalions left idling on his porch in a business that also apparently included Michigan's star running back who denies any affiliation with Stalions' vacuum repair operation.

Any Big Ten team that does not use this picture as part of its sideline signals when they play Michigan is not a serious program

The other is that the Big Ten is taking action.  On Friday, the conference swooped in to levy a punishment against Harbaugh by banning him from the team's sidelines during games for three weeks but not suspending him in any other capacity.  The punishment was a masterclass of college football bureaucracy: it did nothing other than inflame Michigan and its fans who claim the conference acted against them without the opportunity to even defend themselves and irritates Michigan's opponents because it's a pointless horseshit penalty that doesn't do anything.  The fact is that Michigan will fight tooth and nail against anything the conference or NCAA will do to it, so they might as well have gone all in and ordered that Harbaugh has to be sent to the international space station or allowed on Michigan sidelines only if he is restrained like Hannibal Lecter.

The Michigan saga unfortunately seems to be turning a corner from a delightful series of increasingly absurd revelations to the tedious arguing in various courts phase.  This certainly pleases Michigan fans who get the benefit of feeling persecuted for being too good, which is the greatest feeling that can ever be accessed by a college football fanbase.  Michigan fans, who fairly or not have the reputation of being pedantic rules-mongers, also now have something even more pleasing to them which is a set of regulations to comb through and the opportunity to compose long-winded briefs about bring wronged.  If this is the trajectory that the scandal is going to move along, which has been dominated for the past 24 hours by an impenetrable argument about the timing of when an injunction can be filed or something, I no longer care at all because that is boring and just need to know whether a Michigan staffer named Jackson Rhinoceros has been spotted hiding under a tarp at Ryan Field.

FOOTBALL LEADERSHIP BOOK BY LUKE FICKELL

Luke Fickell doesn't eat anything.  I'm sitting across from Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell at "Well I Can Eat," one of Madison's trendiest new restaurants and I'm trying to figure out what to do.  I got in the habit of meeting sports people at restaurants when I was profiling them for magazines because it made a great lede: "Marv Albert digs his spoon into the chicken a la king;" "Jeff Van Gundy orders an entire Thanksgiving meal off-menu;" "Buddy Ryan eats a steak with his bare hands;" but if I was profiling Fickell, I'd be at a loss.  He doesn't order anything, not even a glass of water. He is staring at me like he's trying to see through my skin.  "Jeff Van Gundy told me this place has incredible cranberry sauce," I say.  "No thanks," he says.

I wasn't here to profile Fickell.  My magazine writing days hit a speed bump when Man's Man: A Magazine for Men got purchased by thirteen different companies in two years, got spun off into a series of branded bar and grills and a show on the short-lived streaming network "THIS," and then finally got liquidated with the back issues sold to paper magnate Glen Masted, the Pulp King of Michigan City.  After a brief plagiarism scandal (I lifted a chapter from Rick Reilly's Who's Your Caddy* because of a bad reaction to gout treatment) and the recent resurfacing of some profiles of women from the early 2000s I wrote that had these censorious outrage-mavens desperate for an apology even though I have a mother and a step-niece, I was looking for work.  That's how I ended up traveling around the country trying to pitch coaches on leadership books.  They certainly did not exist in the higher literary plane I had lived in when I wrote things like "What's Eating Gordon Ramsay?" and "Rick Fox is Ready for His Closeup" but they were fast and easy and tended to sell well if the person was famous enough.  With enough traction, I could even go around giving lectures in hotel ballrooms.  But I had been having a tough time finding collaborators.  I had already been turned down by Quin Snyder, Dawn Staley, Ben McAdoo, Jim Boylen, and Jim Boylan.   

"So," I say to Fickell.  "If we were to start working on this book, what do you think you'd want to focus on?  "Leadership," Fickell says.  "What elements of leadership? You know you were really thrown into the crucible there with Ohio State, with,  you know the whole Tressell thing."  Fickell got his first head coaching job unexpectedly when his the famed NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett caught numerous Buckeyes players in the grip of a notorious midwestern pants-trafficking ring.  The NCAA moved in to punish Ohio State coach Jim Tressell for the infractions. Tressell wouldn't go quietly-- the result was a thirteen hour siege of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. They took Tressell to a maximum security NCAA facility for three years where he had no access to football or pants.  While locked up, he penned Tressellball: The Art of Integrity- In Conversation with Chad Crad that topped the New York Times bestseller list for 49 consecutive weeks.  In the midst of all of the chaos, Fickell, then serving as the defensive coordinator, got promoted into leading the powerhouse program.  "I don't want to talk about that," Fickell says to me. "That's personal."

Perhaps, I suggest, he could talk about his second stint as defensive coordinator.  After his one season in charge of Ohio State, the university fired him as head coach and brought in the former Florida coach who had retired for health reasons to a TV job but suddenly found himself invigorated by the Ohio State offer.  Fickell stayed on as defensive coordinator under Meyer, which is certainly an unorthodox move in college football coaching. "Maybe you can talk about what you learned about leadership under Urban Meyer." "No," Fickell says. 

(Fair enough.  Last year, I pitched an exposé detailing Meyer's time with the Jacksonville Jaguars as an A Told To with Josh Lambo called Who Kicks The Kicker? He declined.)

"OK, maybe we leave your own personal history out of this and approach things a little more philosophically.  How do you personally prepare a team to win?" I ask, starting to panic a little.  "Winning mentality.  Winning mindset," Fickell says.  "That's perfect," I say.  "How do you instill this winning mindset?"  Fickell's brow wrinkles.  "Winning mindset.  You have to be about winning."  "OK. But how do you become about winning?" I ask.  "Because you want to win. Either you do or you lose," Fickell says, looking as close to incredulous as I can see a person look who does not have facial expressions.  "OK," I say.

I try one last move.  "Look, we can talk about what's in the book later on, but these things really move with good titles.  I was thinking 'A Fickell Twit of Fate.' Or, how about 'Football: Not For The Fickell?'" "No," Fickell said.  "No Fickell puns."  The man had no idea how literature works.  I could have sold a profile on a football coach called "Luke's Not Fickell" to Man's Man sight unseen even though my main sports editor Victor Flugge would have no idea who Luke Fickell is.  He did not even know the basic rules of football and only watched an illegal, combat-oriented version of Jai Alai called "Montserrat."  

"OK then, thanks for your time, Coach," I say.  I pay for my bloody mary that was mainly three full sized sausages and a quirt of tomato juice and start to head for the door.  Thinking I was out of earshot I mutter to myself "Puke Sickell" but I guess I am not.  I don't hear him move.  I don't hear the chair and I don't hear footsteps from anyone coming near me, but before I reach the doorknob someone grabs me.  It is more like being enveloped. My right arm feels like it is being torn from its socket and my left shin seems like it is somehow being thrust upward to stab my own knee.  Fickell, a high school wrestling champion, has me in his legendary trebuchet hold that he had used to subdue 195 consecutive opponents from 1990 to 1992.  Somehow, instead of just screaming out "aaaaahhh and my shin" I manage to blurt out "aaaaaaggghhh trebuchet trebuchet" and Fickell releases me.  

"I see you've done your research," he says.  He's not smiling but he's no longer scowling.  "You know, I like you.  I think we can work together."  He gestures towards the table.  I limp back over there and order another sausage mary.  "It's called Football Leadership Book," he says. 

 --------

*This is a real book

Cubs Baseball Returns to Make You Miserable

It is April and the Chicago Cubs will begin playing baseball in order to cause misery and despair to legions of beer-swilling mustachioed mustard monsters.  For several years, the Cubs have been irrelevant: the team has been stripped of competent baseball players in exchange for prospects and allowed to sink to appropriately Cub-like depths in a shameless tanking exercise. Ticket prices, of course, remained among the highest in baseball even as team president Theo Epstein all but announced OUR STRATEGY IS INTENTIONAL INEPT FLOUNDERING GIVE US YOUR MONEY.

It's equally exciting as a Cubs fan and infuriating as a fan of baseball teams trying to win baseball games and a person who has foolishly given money to a Ricketts that this plan appears to be working. The Return of the Cubs to Contention is a major baseball story this spring.  The team is a trendy pick to contend for a wildcard spot; enough maniacs have descended upon Las Vegas to give them absurdly low odds to win the World Series.
 
That is insane enough to be the plot of one of those 
bachelor parties gone bad movies but instead of 
inadvertently murdering a croupier or getting in 
too deep with an organized crime syndicate or falling 
victim to a crooked casino with complicated gambling 
games that are just made up on the spot but all called 
"baccarat" in order to fool unsophisticated rubes the 
protagonists decide to put actual hard-won dollars, 
AMERICAN dollars for the love of god, on the Cubs to 
win the championship of Major League Baseball

The optimism has come with the development of young players.  Anthony Rizzo had a breakout year by learning to hit left-handed pitching.  Starlin Castro returned to the All-Star game after a year as one of baseball's worst everyday players.  Jorge Soler came up to give major league pitching the battering he once threatened to unleash upon an entire dugout's worth of baseball players.  And Javier Baez, glorious Baez, joined Cubs in August.  Baez, a mercurial baseball maestro whose potential to alter the Earth's tide with his tater-mashing is held in check only by his complete inability to successfully hit a ball with his bat.  Consider this: Baez came to the plate 229 times last season.  Of those, he put the ball in play 36 times.  Nine of those 36 hits left the yard; that's a dinger percentage of 25% and if that isn't a real stat it should be.  He also struck out 95 times, more than 40% of his total plate appearances.  This sample size is so small that baseball stats people would regard it like Vigo the Carpathian regards ghostbusters, but still.
 
A thorough analysis of advanced batting statistics (click to enlarge)

 And, after a couple of weeks superprospect Kris Bryant will appear as soon as he has passed a bizarre and arbitrary deadline that will allow the Cubs to keep him on a rookie payscale for an additional season, which the Cubs have  justified by saying he needs to work on his fielding with the subtlety of a CBS sitcom character ordering a footlong hotdog in mixed company. The Cubs have a number of heralded prospect bats waiting in the wings, but Bryant has eclipsed them all by demolishing minor league pitching last year and going on a spring training rampage that left a trail of baseball carcasses in his wake.

The Cubs were not content to sit around with their exciting young team.  They made additional not fucking around moves.  First they signed America's Favorite Cool Grandpa Joe Maddon to manage the team.  Maddon unexpectedly became available when Tampa GM Andrew Friedman bolted for the sunny skies and infinite money piles of Los Angeles.  The Cubs fired first-year manager Rick Renteria and signed Maddon in a round of baseball skulduggery that has the Rays filing tampering charges and (presumably) Renteria plotting vengeance in smoky tents filled with medieval topographical maps.  The Ricketts brought to the Cubs a healthy dose of intrigue: Theo Epstein's Second Clandestine Voyage from Boston, the Wooing of Joe Maddon, the Betrayal of Renteria, and the War of the Spanish Succession.
 
This time, bereft of gorilla suits, Theo Epstein fled 
Boston in the disguise of Lenin disguised as a 
Guy Who Isn't Lenin

Then the Cubs signed Jon Lester, the first big-time free agent pitcher of the Epstein era (let's forget Edwin Jackson exists).  Lester was brought in as the ace who can one day anchor a champion pitching staff.  Not to be fatalistic, but given the success rate of big time ace pitcher free agent signings and the involvement of the Chicago Cubs, there has never been a larger Sword of Damocles hovering over a baseball pitcher; there is an Aircraft Carrier of Damocles regularly sending squadrons of Damocles bomber jets at Lester's shoulder and cruciate ligaments.  

For several seasons Cubs games were not only meaningless in the existential sense of all sporting events being a trifling distraction from societal problems and I don't even an own a TV, but meaningless even within baseball's limited universe. You could slate the Cubs into last place in April and find them comfortably resting there undisturbed in September.  The only mild pleasure from Cubs games came from the potential of watching Cubs ineptly run into each other.  Now, even if they don't make the playoffs, the Cubs are at last interesting and it is not just because they will be playing their games in a dilapidated hellhole.

WRIGLEY RENOVATIONS

The Cubs' renovations of Wrigley Field are behind schedule.  This makes sense because the Cubs are philosophically behind schedule.  The outfield bleachers will spend this season as pits, barren baseball wastelands filled with dirt, more than a century of stale beer, and, by the end of the season, I assume roaming bands of abandoned prospects attempting to build a civilization out of sunflower seeds and fungo bats.

Theo Epstein, wearing a crown fashioned out of forbidden Old Style cans and Jed Hoyer, wearing pinstriped epaulettes, will begin to use the pits as part of hardline contract negotiations.  Edwin Jackson will be the first to be DFP'd-- designated for pits, forced to rely on his wits, charm, and ineffective fastball to negotiate his way through the numerous pit civilizations.  He will team with a man once known as Brian LaHair but now goes by his pit name Gargantuous The Hair who knows the ways of the pit but may have his own agenda.  But the greatest horror in the Pit does not come from the warring factions of pit dwellers or the pit pits or the festering bites of vienna hotdogs mutated into sentience by decades of proximity to urinal trough organisms.  No, it is the Toweled One, a mysterious man who stalks silently at night.  He wears ragged pants, a tattered jersey with only the letters "ior" visible and a cap pulled low over his face.  Severed elbow ligaments dangle from his belt.  Only one man has escaped and he has been driven mad; he screams about Tommy John surgery and teeth before becoming transfixed with fear and the only words he'll mutter are "in Dusty we trusty."
 
The Cubs' new Special Adviser to the General Manager on Pits, 
Thunderdomes, and Mutant Outlands

The Cubs are also installing a videoboard this year.

SEASON OUTLOOK

The Cubs will be improved this year.  This is because they have decided to use actual major league baseball players.  In addition to the ballyhooed prospects, the Cubs brought in on-base specialist Dexter Fowler, and Miguel Montero, a solid defensive catcher and maker of intense yell-faces.  Montero is also adept at pitch-framing, an art of openly deceiving umpires that is an acceptable part of baseball unlike attempting to steal signs, which is punishable by having a baseball thrown at your face because baseball is a violent murder sport invented in the nineteenth century by train robbery gangs. 
 
Early baseball action: a strikeout

Yet, while it's exciting to have a baseball team that aims for more than a top draft pick, it's probably a bit premature to assume they will make the playoffs.  For one, they play in the same division as the dangerous Pirates and the grimly inevitable St. Louis Cardinals.  Other awful teams, like the Padres and the Marlins will also contend for the Wild Card.  Fortunately, I can't imagine either of those teams ever causing  misery to Cubs fans.

Secondly, the Cubs' prospects, as good has they have been, are still prospects.  Soler probably won't continue his blistering pace.  Baez may never learn to hit major league pitching.  Kris Bryant has played exactly as many big league games as you or me, assuming that Carlos Zambrano did not just google himself for 1,000 pages.  Pitchers Jake Arrieta and Justin Hammel may not replicate last season's breakouts.  Joe Maddon's honeymoon will end under the thunderous echo of 10,000 guys with mustaches and a Chicago sports press manned by lumbering men writing the words "wins=winning games=winners yes?" in their notebooks next to sketches of sausage products.

And yes, the Cubs are still the Cubs.  Stewards of a century-plus World Series drought, compilers of losing seasons, standard-bearers of sporting ineptitude.  Perhaps, the Cubs will win one year, but it is equally possible they continue to lose until baseball transforms into another sport entirely after Wrigley Field is taken over by the pit people and baseball quickly transforms into an inevitable future death sport involving bullpen cars and pitching machines.  The Cubs have gouged fans and reached for taxpayers' wallets.  They have sent forth armies of stonegloved fielders, strikeout mongers, belly itchers, and Junior Lake against professional baseballers, they have intentionally made a mockery of team whose name and everything it stands for is already a mockery and in 2015 they have attacked us with the absolute worst thing with which to afflict a Cubs fan: hope.  You maniacs.