Northwestern Drops A Five-Burger

The beginning of the first quarter in Seattle looked like a quintessential welcome to the Big Ten moment for Washington. The Huskies were at home playing a Northwestern team they expected to beat easily and instead had gotten sucked into an unwatchable vortex of punts, the fate of too many Big Ten teams that had signed up to play Northwestern with the intention of playing a football game.  Then Washington was able to get their offense going and Northwestern was not and the whole thing fell apart for the Wildcats.

It happened late in the third quarter.  Northwestern was down 17-2 after the Wildcat defense scored a safety on a Washington intentional grounding penalty.  The 'Cats had recovered a fumble at Washington's 33 and managed to drive all the way down to the one yardline.  They had barely been able to move the ball into Washington territory all game, so this was a rare scoring opportunity.  After three tries to get into the endzone, David Braun called for one of the most pointless and cowardly field goals I've ever seen to put Northwestern down 17-5, which brought them from down two touchdowns to down two touchdowns.  

Sing us the Song, O Coach, of the Pointless Field Goal 

At some point when a team is getting its ass kicked in a football game, the coaches have to make a decision whether they are going to keep doing risky things to at least make a token effort to get back in it and potentially lose by more points or try to minimize embarrassment.  There is nothing wrong with this; the concept of trying to find a way to lose with some semblance of dignity was the fundamental question occupying Northwestern football for large swathes of its existence.  But when Northwestern kicked a field goal in that exact situation it raised a concern that I was not ready to contemplate: whether the score 24-2 or 24-5 is funnier.

Northwestern's beginning to conference play did not look particularly promising, but they hope a return to The Lake can galvanize the team into a win over holy smokes it's an undefeated, ranked Indiana team.

WHAT THE HECK INDIANA IS A JUGGERNAUT

Well who saw this coming. Indiana fired Tom Allen after several years of listless Indiana-style football and brought in James Madison mastermind Curt Cignetti. Cignetti, who turned JMU into an FCS powerhouse then brought them into the Sun Belt where they went 11-1 and were ranked and overcame a very stupid NCAA rule that would not let them play in a bowl game because they were in their first year in FBS but fortunately there are no so many bowl games that they can't find enough teams to play in them anymore so the Dukes got to lose to Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl as is their right.

Under Cignetti, the Hoosiers are looking downright terrifying.  The team, fortified with an army of hungry transfers, has been demolishing teams, putting up 77 points on Western Illinois and absolutely crushing UCLA and a Maryland team that at the time looked decent.  Indiana is averaging more than two and half times as many points per game as Northwestern's sputtering offense has managed to scrape up. 

Northwestern has had its ups and downs this century, but Indiana served as a rare Big Ten program that was consistently lousy and decent bet for a conference win. The Hoosiers have not won in Evanston since 1993; even though Indiana has an overwhelming fan and alumni presence in the Chicago area, they could not be counted on to consistently outnumber Northwestern fans because they didn't want to come watch their horrible team and sit on cold bleachers and listen to the Wildcat Yowling Sound for three and a half hours.  Instead Indiana fans tended to swarm into Welsh-Ryan arena to watch their basketball team dunk on the 'Cats although now they mainly tend to roam the country like they are discredited doomsday preachers trying to convince people in every town they travel to that Boo Buie pushed off.

You hate to see an entire fanbase turning to Bryon Davis Thought

The last two games will be interesting tests for the temporary lakeside stadium. Northwestern has asked the important question of how small they can make the stadium and how expensive and annoying can they make the ticket purchasing process in order to actually get a Northwestern home crowd at a Big Ten game. I suspect that the current setup still will not work. A fired up group of Indiana fans and the always well-traveling Wisconsin fans will bring their crimson hordes to bear from land and water on the new stadium and taunt Northwestern fans by reminding them that the very small stadium is in fact small like they are a group of Patricks Beverly.  The most important question will be if eight to nine thousand away fans are enough to make Northwestern have to go on a silent count at home again or whether any Indiana fans will try to gain access to the stadium by taking a boat from across the lake and then stealthily swim up to it while trying to assure stadium security guards that they are soaking wet because of a mishap involving the network of toiletmobiles.

Northwestern is coming off a bye week.  Top running back Cam Porter will return after missing the Washington game, and Zach Lujan and his staff have hopefully had an additional week to try to duct tape together something that resembles a functioning passing offense.  Northwestern's schedule already looked grim at the beginning of the season and the introduction of a rampaging Indiana team and what looks like a pretty good Illinois team that is already showing signs of Hat Madness certainly don't help things. But Northwestern can do something that few Wildcat teams have had the opportunity to do this century: get an absolutely enormous, field-rushing upset against the literal Indiana Hoosiers.

MEMORIAL STADIUM, BLOOMINGTON INDIANA

This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up. 

The following is a letter concerning the construction of Indiana's new Memorial Stadium from 1958, and it appears courtesy of the University of Indiana Made Up Archives.

To the Regents of the University of Indiana and The Government,

I am disappointed although admittedly not surprised that the university is preparing to erect a new, larger Memorial stadium without the consent or participation of my family, from whom the Stadium takes its name.  And yet, instead of taking this opportunity to once again revive the thick packet of grievances, insults, rude telegrams, slaps in the face both metaphorical and literal, and times that my father and I have been physically thrown out of meetings by the Board of Regents and their vanguard of square-headed Hench Men, I would like to offer the construction of a new stadium as an opportunity to make things right.  I am extending the proverbial Olive Branch.  All I ask for is that in commemorating the war dead, whose sacrifices I and my family deeply respect and also wish to honor, you also consider the stadium, in a small way, a memorial to the victims of Indiana's various Horror Creatures and Monsters that have been ravaging the good people of this State and for whom my father Vincent Memorial had asked to be included in this name for decades dating back to its original construction.  I have included my father's original letter for your the record:

Gentlemen,

I have seen in the papers that you are going to build a new football stadium called Memorial Stadium to honor the soldiers of the War. But if you are going to be commemorating people, you should also consider the many men and women and children who have been carried off and devoured by the Monsters and Ghouls haunting this particular State.  You probably know some of them like the floating eyeball out in Crawfordsville but there are dozens of known Creatures that go around lurking and haunting in the forests and the lakes and every year more citizens than you think are attacking people and putting them under the control of their Dark Magicks.  I humbly ask that these victims also be included in your your stadium as a Memorial to the brave War Dead and Victims of Indiana Monsters.

Several years ago, I had the misfortune of encountering one of these Creatures outside of Bruceville.  I had taken the cart out to gather some firewood and hunt for rare mushrooms. It was me and the horses and the old hound Spark and I guess we had lost track of the time looking around the creek because it had started to get dark pretty quick. Well we were on our way back because I knew my wife Patunia (it is a nickname I gave her, her real name is Patricia, to be honest she did not care for it) would be mad at me for dawdling again but at this point it was pitch black in the forest and Spark started howling and pointing and his fur was spiking up around his neck. I told him to quiet down but soon I heard some rustling through the leaves. Now I'm not a person who scares easily and I've heard every type of rustling there is in the woods, a deer or a coyote or even a every noisy squirrel so I immediately knew that was a different type of rustling.  We kept moving and the noise kept with us, like it was following us.  Then I heard a chomping noise, it was a loud wet noise, like nothing I've ever heard, a chomping and a slurping noise which was not of the Natural World, so I lit up a torch and then a few hundred feet behind us I saw the Monster. It was big and sort of looked like a person but it had gangly legs and a gigantic head and the largest mouth I've ever seen, the mouth took up most of the head and it was stumbling towards us and chomping and gnashing and drooling as it shambled forward. We high-tailed it out of there real fast and I told everyone about the Monster, I called it the Bruceville Biter, I thought that was a good name for it on account of the mouth.

A few days later my wife Patunia said she was going to go into the woods to get some firewood because she was sick of watching me sit on my behind (she did not understand the various Projects I had undertaken, you might be aware of the letters I had been writing to rename Terry Haute to Pterry Haute in honor of the flying prehistoric beast Pteranodon) and I begged her not to go into the woods because the Biter was in there but she ignored me. Well I waited and waited but she didn't come back so I headed out into those woods with the biggest rifle I had and I went back over to the creek. I heard the rustling and now I was following it and I listened for the chomping and I whipped the lantern around and nothing. It was gone. I even yelled out, come on out Biter. Bring my wife back you tooth monster. I was scared to death but I wandered those woods until sun up and I saw nothing.  I knew Biter had gotten my wife. The sheriff was help at all but I will not waste your time as I have written several letters about this already and it is not university business.

So as you can see there are hundreds of us suffering in silence on account of the government doesn't want to hear about monsters, but this is real. And even worse since these people vanish and the monsters do all sorts of Daemonic tricks for example I keep hearing from people that there's a woman who looks exactly like my Patunia named Patty Schulz married to a man named Frank Schulz up in Indianapolis and I urge you to explain that other than the machinations of a Beast operating with forces that we cannot understand.

Please consider the people lost to Indiana's monsters of the Forests and the Lakes when you are naming a memorial, for their loss hurts as much to us as the brave men who lost their lives in the War and weren't even dealing with mysterious Tooth Creatures who harm innocent people.

Sincerely,

Vincent Kubbnilk

As you know, the university regents have consistently ignored my father's requests.  They never responded to his letters and repeatedly removed the plaques he made and installed at great effort and expense to remember the victims of Crypto-Zooligical Creatures within the Stadium. My father even received no response from the regents when he legally changed the family name to Memorial in order to claim that the stadium was now named after his late wife.  But now, as you seek to build a new stadium bearing the Memorial name, you can undo the harm you have caused to not only my family but the hundreds of persons suffering from effects of attacks from Indiana's various Monsters. 

I look forward to appearing at the ceremonial Ground-Breaking as a representative of the Memorial Family.  As a gesture of good will I have purchased my own Golden Shovel in order to spare the taxpayers of Indiana any further expense. I also ask to be able to discreetly spread a portion of my father's ashes under the stadium, although I will of course carry most of them in a small pouch on my belt, as per his final request, so I can use them to blind any Monstrous Creatures that I may encounter and then make my escape or perform an opportunistic attack to the Monster's weak points including eye-balls, eye stalks, exposed brains or visible reproductive organs.  All we ask for is a small gesture to make up for the decades of insult and ridicule to our family name and to come together with the University to collectively mourn and celebrate our people lost to the horrors of War and Supernatural Monsters that terrorize the countryside.  The people of Indiana deserve that much.

Terrence Memorial

Cooler at The Lake

EVANSTON I have made fun of the Temporary Lakeside Stadium as a desperate gambit after Northwestern failed to find anywhere else in the Chicago area to play and were forced to hastily pile up some bleachers on a soccer field in an attempt to have home games and not wander the country like they were barnstorming against 1920s religious cults focused on beard growth. But all it takes is a perfect late summer night with the golden hour sunshine fading over campus and the Chicago skyline shimmering in the background to realize that it is truly something. I was wrong. The stadium (which I have nicknamed “The Lake”) is an incredible setting for college football. 

Views from The Lake

I remain sentimental about Ryan Field, which had stood for more than 100 years at the same spot and was a very easy and convenient place to watch football, but after drinking a beer sitting on a rock on the shore of Lake Michigan before a game, it is hard to understand why Northwestern insists on playing football in a residential neighborhood that is made up entirely of professional Noise Lawyers. Sure, the tiny lakeside stadium lacks the intense wall of noise atmosphere associated with college football, but it’s not like anyone had anyone described Ryan Field as “rocking” unless it was Northwestern going on a silent count at home because opposing fans were complaining about uncalled holding penalties in a game they were winning by 32 points. I can also imagine that a game in cold, windy, rainy weather could feel like being on the deck of a nineteenth century whaling ship.

And yet while The Lake might be a unique and picturesque place to watch a bunch of teenagers run into each other's torsos, the stadium is also kind of a silly place to watch a football game.  The endzone bleachers, which contain the largest blocks of seating, feature views blocked by a series of gigantic poles, perhaps in tribute to the Wildcats' secondary alternative home at Wrigley Field.  The endzone seats also have no speakers, making it virtually impossible to hear what is going on, the referee warbles incoherently like a Peanuts adult, and I can't remember if I heard them play the annoying Wildcat yowl on an endless loop which is a vital part of Northwestern football's psychological operations.  I assume the experience is better in the sideline seats, although the end zone seats are already far more expensive than any Northwestern ticket I've ever bought; I am pretty sure that most people sitting through an Eastern Illinois-Northwestern game in years past were actually sentenced to be there by a Cook County judge. 

 

As big of a sign that you are in the Chicagoland area than the skyline

Putting a bunch of rickety bleachers on a practice field sitting on a wad of garbage hauled into Lake Michigan in 1960s was a weird and desperate move, but it's impossible to deny that it workd.  The temporary lakeside stadium rules.  The natural beauty of the lakeshore does a lot of heavy lifting here and there's nothing else like it in major college sports.  Perhaps this is appropriate for a sport that seems to be fueled by short-term thinking and last-second gambits and silly accidents that turn into traditions-- there's no better example than some drunken college students stealing a pig or driving a tractor into each other and then making it a rivalry trophy passed down for generations-- so Northwestern can go from trying to not play football on the streets of Sheridan Road to creating a stadium fans will remember long after they put up the new stadium with its Luxury Cabanas and Imagine Dragons concerts and lake of asphalt parking lots.

EASTERN ILLINOIS DOES A JUMP SCARE

Northwestern's heralded switch at quarterback looked like the wrong one.  The first half was winding down to its final minutes, and it appeared that Eastern was about to go up 10-7.  Northwestern had just had a kick blocked and Eastern had managed to nudge the ball downfield to field goal range.The Wildcats had to that point late in the half a total of 16 passing yards, many of which had bounced off the ground as if they had just invented a new variant of Australian rules football.  But then Eastern missed the kick, Lausch found a rhythm, and the Cats got another touchdown.  Then they absolutely torched the Panthers in the second half.  Lausch went 11 for 11 for more than 200 yards in the second half alone and unleashed A.J. Henning who was flying around the field.  The defense remained almost impenetrable on the ground and reduced the Eastern playbook to short passes because their run game was stopped and Northwestern rushers were dragging their quarterback around the field.  It is one of the most beguiling performances we've seen against an FCS team where they didn't lose.

 

Northwestern shoots off celebratory fireworks after the game that make it look like Arnold has just blown up the bad guy on the roof and then said "you-ah going oudt widda bang"

The Eastern game represented a relatively comfortable introduction for a new quarterback, but the Wildcats will get thrown into the fire for their first West Coast road trip in the new Enormous Ten.  Washington, their first conference opponent, represents a rude welcome.  The Huskies are coming off an appearance in the national championship game.  They've lost a large number of key players including star quarterback Michael Penix to the NFL and their coach to Alabama.  They're also coming off a tough home loss to bitter rivals Washington State, a team they abandoned to a dead conference that is currently clinging to the Mountain West before bursting forth from its chest to devour it next season.  The 2024 Washington Huskies do not currently appear to be the terrifying national championship contenders they were last season, but that does not mean that they are still not good enough to throttle Northwestern as the oddsmakers predict.

I suspect there will be a prolonged feeling out process between the new West Coast Big Ten members and the existing members of the conference.  I have no idea what to make of Washington Football other than enjoying watching Penix huck balls up to Rome Odunze last year and hoping they'd beat Michigan.  Washington fans, all of whom I assume have already assumed that this is a win, have not really had the experience of having their superior football team dragged down the Wildcat Toilet as the 'Cats attempt win or lose to subject opposing fans to the shittiest football game they've ever experienced.  This is a very exciting year as the vestigial stink of the Big Ten West still hovers over all of its proud former members who have an opportunity to really make these new teams question their decision to fly into the middle of the country and get rudely punted at for hours at a time.

History favors the Huskies.  Northwestern has never beaten them, although all three of their previous games took place in the Wildcats' early 1980s nadir where they started every football game by digging a giant pit in the middle of the field and refusing to leave until time had expired.  Washington quarterback Will Rogers is one of the most prolific passers in football and will test what has so far looked like a formidable Wildcats defense.  The Northwestern passing game is even more of an enigma than usual.  The Wildcats have also not yet played in a stadium that has a larger attendance than a Monster Jam event at Allstate Arena.  

 

It is very difficult at this point in the season to be able to figure out if a team is any good.  Washington is as good of a test as any.  Even if the 'Cats can't get their first win in this series, I'll be watching to see how competitive they can be against a good conference opponent, how Lausch fares in his second game, and, most importantly, how badly the Wildcats can manage to annoy Washington fans in their Big Ten baptism.

HUSKY STADIUM, SEATTLE WASHINGTON

This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up.

Husky Stadium holds more than 70,000 screaming Washington football fans every week, but has its origins in a bitter dispute over football.  It was, according to my meticulous research, never meant for the sport at all.  Husky Stadium was built to support "Husky" Zeb Middyons's bear-fighting promotion.  Middyons, who claimed to be a mentalist who could control bears with his mind, barnstormed across the Pacific Northwest throughout the the early 1900s.  He set up a stable of bears calmed by salmon doused in vats of laudanum and, along with his accomplice Mars McMaster,* advertised the bear fighting as a demonstration of what he called "Brains-Combat."

*According to H.U.J. Holman's "Woods Men: The Pacific Northwest's Greatest Hucksters, Gamblers, and Shamanic Grafters 1880-1925, McMcaster was also known as "El Picador" and claimed to be from Spain, but was actually born Stan Oldlocz in Lodz.  He spent years using the name Bradley Morton that he stole from an army buddy who was killed in what official Army records described as a "moose taunting incident."  McMcaster was also known to use the names Brode Hohny, Horus Mangaarten, The Rev. Red Rogers, Stan Van Stan, and Hohnus Gravy, which he assumed while selling a canned gravy with "restorative properties for the man's Vigorous Area."

By 1918, Middyons, who had also profited from a wartime black market zinc operation, had enough money to being construction on what he named Husky Stadium, which he had sold as the "Paradise of Brains-Combat."  But, in the middle of construction, disaster struck.  Middyons was in a small town where he had a planned performance but the day before, a group of locals caught a wild grizzly that was rampaging through town and locked it in the courthouse.  The mayor and other town dignitaries begged Middyons to use his mental powers to convince the bear to leave.  For three hours, Middyons stood outside the courthouse touching his head and squinting (this is my interpretation. Other accounts, such as from Tred Millcox in Bear Court, suggest that he was also mumbling and possibly crying.  I have some serious concerns with Millcox's methodology and I want to just state on the record that his last article on bear attacks was held up in peer review because he kept insisting that the Port McNeil Maniac Grizzly had somehow fashioned what he kept referring as a "salmon nunchuk.")  When some angry residents began to question whether Middyons had the ability to manipulate bears with his own mind, Middyons told them that he the shape of the roof created a "mental curtain" that prevented him from achieving full control of the "ursine cortex."

That is when "Two Strap" Knagston, the leader of a strongman outfit coincidentally barnstorming through the same town who was known for his then-unorthodox two strap unitard, picked up Middyons and flung him into the courthouse.  No one knows what happens next, although his hideous screams echoed through the town within minutes.

Middyons's grisly bear death left his financial backers and the city of Seattle in a serious dilemma; they had no major attraction for their expensive new stadium.  Investors brought in all sorts of acts.  They first tried to recruit men from the lumberjack camps for a series of violent games including "trunk jousts," but the authorities shut them down after deciding that a "beard to beard" fighting event was "obscene on a level The Court has never thought possible."

Football fans demanded that they move the team into the new stadium, which abutted the university, but they made a powerful enemy.  Vice Provost E. Emmett Brudge had wormed his way into a powerful position at the right hand of the university president by mesmerizing him with elaborate conspiracies about plots forming against him among the faculty.  For example, the president's private papers contain an elaborate secret memo that Brudge had written suggesting that a geographer popular among the faculty been attempting to control the university president by putting psychedelic powders in his tea that Brudge described as "the dragon's tendrils."  Brudge, for reasons no one ever has confirmed, despised football, referring to it exclusively as "an Oaf's Holiday" or "the Devil's Pork Wrestling" and calling football players "Bovinous Beefs."

Brudge began planting letters and editorials in local papers, but everyone could tell they were by him because they had headlines like "Beware! Bovine Brawls in your Backyard" and "Ban this Farcical Pork Circus from our Beloved Bears-Wrestling Stadium AT ONCE."

Eventually football gained too much popularity for Brudge to hold it off.  The final straw came when Brudge's automobile, a model T that he painted himself a color called "accounting visor green" and called "Mrs. Plimstin" broke down in front of a field where Washington players were practicing.  They lifted the car with Brudge inside screaming "unhand me, you unseemly hippopotami" and carried him to the main administration building while a crowd of thousands gathered before dispersing into a massive riot.

Brudge had long suspected that his arch-rival Quill Quall had arranged the stunt in a series of "invidious machinations" to humiliate him.*  It worked.  Brudge lost the support of the university president and left Seattle.  He formed the anti-football organization "Manful Society Against Oafery" and toured the country convincing towns to ban football and instead engage youths in what he claimed were more wholesome sports such as "brain pushing" where youths stand forehead to forehead and recite useful facts at each other until exhaustion. Often he was chased from town on a railroad pushcart, scattering his pamphlets as a distraction and to deflect pitchfork blows. G.A. Rimsford's "Lumber Laughs: Touring Vaudeville in the Pacific Northwest 1918-1932" suggests that the popular Rolph and Dolph's Head Sport act was essentially a sarcastic performance of brain pushing, but I am sorry to say that his entire article is also based on Jean-Robert Mitaine's philosophy of "word construction" where it presents as instructions to fold a thin sheet of cardboard into various configurations in order to decipher the words in order as part of the School of Touch Scholarship and it is nearly impossible to determine the citation because my cardboard got too bent up.

*It is difficult to take Brudge's accusations seriously, but some university historians, most notably Katthy Cregg, have noted that Quall was an early automobile enthusiast who could have disabled Brudge's car easily.  Quall also benefited from the ascent of Washington football as he was often selected to tackle the opposing team's bursar before the game, which was a popular tradition at the time until a professor of medieval studies showed up in full armor and had to be subdued with a weighted net.

Within a few years, the stadium became the unquestioned home of Washington Huskies football.  Every few years, a small group of Brudge sympathizers emerges to denounce it a series of leaflets as a "Odorous Pig Sport" and prophesying that one day a mentalist will bring a horde of rampaging bears back to the stadium to reclaim it for its rightful purpose, but it has not happened yet.

Heartbreak At The Lake

One of my favorite Northwestern football relics is a poster from the 2005 season that says “Not Afraid to Work Overtime” and shows various Northwestern football players in a construction worksite wielding inexplicably inappropriate tools– the only job I can think of that would require multiple chainsaws and toilet plungers is probably Clue Murderer. The year before they won three out of four overtime games. In 2017, Northwestern set a college football record with three consecutive overtime wins. This is a program that has historically thrived in overtime and sought it out as part of a deranged obsession with subjecting America to additional Northwestern football. But the Wildcats’ occult overtime obsession failed them Saturday night as they collapsed against Duke sometime around midnight as the wind whipped the waves into a frenzy.

 

The business of big time sports has warped and distorted schedules to fill every crevice of the cable television and streaming schedule, and college football has changed from a metronomically regular Saturday product into one where it is impossible to tell when a game is taking place and what network it is on. In most years, a Northwestern and Duke game could be quietly tucked away into 11:00 AM Regional Coverage away from the prying eyes of national media, but now for some reason it was on a Friday night on West Coast hours and on national television, where too many people for my liking were exposed to the grimy punt-and-interception-based football that belongs in the shadows of a rust-covered Ryan Field.

   

Northwestern may have turned over its staff, but they are still playing some Pat Fitzgerald-ass football out there. The defense looks fierce and whatever they are doing different on offense is indistinguishable from previous years' slopfests. It seems like there is some ancestral memory baked into certain football teams. On Sunday, we watched the heralded New Bears Offense revert to the same Bears garbage we have seen from the Litany of Bullshit Quarterbacks and the team had to win in the same grotesque special teams and defense configurations that it was grinding out with Jonathan Quinn out there.

 

  

The Apex of Bears Football

The offense had been shaky all game but fully collapsed in the second overtime.  With Cam Porter cutting swathes through Duke's defense, new offensive coordinator Zach Lujan decided to read from the cursed Bajakian Booke of Doom-ed Trick Plays and sent in a quarterback run on third-and-one that that went backwards for nine yards and basically ended the game.

This made it six consecutive losses against Duke in this quasi-rivalry series.  I don't know how other Northwestern fans feel about Duke other than noting it is another small private school that was historically bad at football and also makes the NCAA basketball tournament, but losing six games to any school is annoying.  Northwestern has not had the luxury of many heartbreaking losses in recent years-- they were so lousy the past few years and started last year from such a horrible place that it was mildly surprising they were able to field a team let alone rattle off eight wins-- but the last truly gutwrenching loss I can think of was to Duke in 2022.  The 'Cats won't have a chance for revenge anytime soon since the Blue Devils vanish from the schedule for the foreseeable future, but I don't think anyone minds taking a break from this series and meeting them again when college football coalesces into a single superconference for the biggest teams and relegates the Dukes, Northwesterns, Stanfords, and Vanderbilts of the world into their own sad conference where squads of rowdy ultras attack each other in pregame brawls wielding copies of US News and World Report. 

 

The loss also strikes a major blow to Northwestern's bowl hopes.  Northwestern's conference schedule, shorn of the bowling bumper comforts of the Big Ten West, is brutal and the 'Cats need every win they can get if they want to be playing in a mid-December bowl game that passively plays out on sports bar televisions at four in the afternoon.  The fact that the game came down to a question of whether a few of a Duke player's shin molecules had grazed the turf after a fumble that would have let Northwestern seal the win is also unfortunate.  But this is what happens in the post-replay sports world where a fumble that looks completely obvious to the fans, players, and officials at the time and has the recovering team doing the excited Fumble Recovery Jump Point goes to an off-site computer lab where it is zoomed and enhanced until the question moves from was this a fumble to what technically constitutes a "ball."  This type of fine-grained analysis is slow, annoying, and robs big game-swinging plays of their immediate excitement as everyone knows we will be staring at replays for five minutes while the referees pause to take the necessary psychadelics for their epistemological inquiries, but as irritating and detrimental and widely loathed as replay is in every sport that uses it I think we can all agree that it is a necessary and useful when the outcome favors Northwestern.

EASTERN PROMISES

Northwestern faces off against Eastern Illinois at another night game on The Lake. I have decided to call the temporary lakeside stadium The Lake, as in "Northwestern suffers devastating loss to Duke at The Lake" or "The Wildcats must defend The Lake from Eastern Illinois."  I also considered "on The Lake" but that is not literally true even though the site of the stadium is technically on a mound of garbage used to expand the amount of land jutting into Lake Michigan because "actually we are on what would have been Lake Michigan in the early 1960s" would be cumbersome to explain every time I say it.

 

David Braun will try to kick start his offense by making a change at quarterback, replacing Mike Wright with Jack Lausch. Lausch made several appearances last season as a change-of-pace running quarterback. You might think it reeks of panic to desperately change quarterbacks after two low-scoring games, but I prefer to see it as an opportunity for the coaching staff to confuse and beguile the opposition. You will often see a two quarterback system where one is a passing specialist and one is a running specialist like Northwestern in the Kolter-Siemian season, but imagine a system where Northwestern deploys a running quarterback and another running quarterback and defensive coordinators are forced to decide which is the true running quarterback and which one is the passing running quarterback as they flip through laminated play sheets in an increasingly frenzied reverie before losing their minds in the third quarter and then spending the rest of the game attempting to write extensive novels that are based entirely on acronyms. I would send this suggestion to Braun’s coaching staff but I don’t know if they are still using the Northwestern football email address Hashtag I Don’t Care.

 

One thing I do know about the quarterback change is that announcers are going to be very excited to call the game because Lausch was a standout baseball player, and announcers love when they can say that a person playing one sport is actually playing a different sport, what is referred to in the business as Greg Paulus Syndrome.  You can imagine a producer's eyes going wide the first time Lausch slides.  Lausch, for his part, is getting in on the action by telling reporters  "The best practice for the fourth quarter of a football game is hitting with two outs in the seventh inning with guys on base."

 

The Wildcats are heavily favored against their FCS opponent.  Northwestern blew out Eastern in their two previous meetings in 2011 and 2015, and this should be a final tuneup before having to face the dragons of the Enormous Ten.  Northwestern's defense has looked stout against two good FBS teams; the hope is that the quarterback shift does not look like a complete disaster.  These types of games have very little upside-- anything other than a very convincing win will feel bad and a loss represent the functional end of the season with the only solace that it is kind of funny when that happens.

CONFERENCE RE-RE-REALIGNMENT

This week, the PAC 12's remaining two members announced that they are bringing back the conference by poaching four members of the Mountain West.  Oregon State and Washington State filled out their schedules with Mountain West games as part of a loose association.  Now they repay that loyalty by stealing four schools, forcing the Mountain West to scramble and letting other conferences know that the PAC 12 is going to start trying to find at least two more members.  This, to me, seems like a rude betrayal by the two schools who immediately backstabbed a friendly quasi-conference.  It reminds me of when the Big Ten and ACC formed The Alliance against the SEC and then the Big Ten immediately forgot about it, raided the PAC 12 for four more schools, and left the ACC as an also-ran power conference with Clemson and Florida State attempting to sue their way out of it except they both kind of stink now.

 

A lot of the story about realignment has been about TV money and geography and tradition and how no one knows what conference any team plays in anymore but I think one thing that requires further elaboration is how all of these people ostensibly in charge of a university are all backstabbing each other.  I would like to read a long feature about how these schools are arranging these moves.  In my imagination, they are happening in torchlit antechambers and the Big Ten is announcing that UCLA has joined by firing a flaming arrow through the offices of the PAC 12 and the provost of Oregon State awakens to see that someone has dropped a poisonous asp into his office and it is writhing and hissing all over his folders full of accounting documents as a warning.

New Arizona State president Armand Jean du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu meets with Big 12 officials

If anyone wants to make a very expensive serial drama about conference realignment that somehow takes place in 17th century Venice and involves British character actors screaming "YOU'LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH THIS" at the cackling President of USC and his scheming athletic director dressed in his signature colorful robes, I would definitely watch it if it wasn't on one of the twelve streaming networks I don't pay for.

Any time I see how quickly and heedlessly these moves happens, I of course get a little nervous because it seems like Northwestern's time in one of the two most important football conferences despite being literally Northwestern football and struggling to fill its 12,000 seat stadium is limited.  But for now, Northwestern somehow remains in the epicenter of college football, playing at The Lake and hopefully crushing the Eastern Illinois Panthers.

Potemkin Stadium

  

At some point they must have played a football game. But at Northwestern’s opener against Miami on Saturday, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the hastily-constructed pop-up stadium built on a soccer field. I have been skeptical about what seemed to be a desperate and hare-brained scheme that had Northwestern scrambling to find somewhere to play the majority of its home games despite the fact that they had been planning to tear down Ryan Field for two years and had been locked in legal combat with a lawn sign army the entire time. And yet, by all accounts, they seemed to have pulled it off. They played a football game there and the bleachers did not collapse, the turf didn’t roll up, and no gangs of bloodthirsty pirates besieged the stadium with cannon fire, boarded the stadium, and menaced David Braun with a cutlass.

The temporary stadium looked spectacular on television. The game kicked off on a picture perfect late summer afternoon with the sun shining, the lake shimmering, and the sky clear enough to see the skyline of Chicago, the city that I would like to remind you that Northwestern is the official Big Ten Team of. It is wild that it sits so close to the lake. Cameras showed boats cruising on by carrying Northwestern and Miami flags. The stadium is close enough to the water that it is possible for a team to literally take a boat to the stadium. I am not sure about the logistics of transporting nearly one hundred of the largest people that we can produce on a fleet of ships, but I think that would be a spectacular entrance, one that would only be matched by running out of a blow-up tunnel that features an annoyed-looking partially deflated panther and some smoke machines.

PJ Fleck learning that he doesn't play Northwestern this season and can't literally row into the stadium

The stadium looked so good that I immediately started to see calls for Northwestern to abandon the ridiculous $800 million sarcophagus that Pat Ryan is building to carry his name and permanently stay on the lake in a cozy little stadium. This would be a disaster. 

 

The fact is that Northwestern is not meant to play in a fun lakeside stadium any more than a brand new palace on the ashes of the old Ryan Field. The school already had its own ideal stadium: a dilapidated shithole. Northwestern is not somewhere fans should be able to go watch football and marvel at the views. It should be a half-filled pit where no one would ever want to set foot. 

Northwestern will never play Big Ten home games– I don’t know how small of a stadium you would have to build to stop Chicagoland’s tens of thousands of Big Ten alumni from flooding every single structure Northwestern could play in but it is certainly less than the 12,000 of the lakeside stadium’s capacity– so the stadium should remain a fortress dedicated to the misery of opposing fans. I don’t want to see people rooting for Wisconsin sitting in sun-kissed bleachers watching a parade of sailboats blooming like flowers on a glittering lake. They should instead be pelted with sleet and spend the entire third quarter waiting in line for a hot dog only to be told they are out of buns and be handed a loose frank in a paper cup. Ideally, Northwestern should play in a stadium that is rigged to explode at the end of every conference game.

OK FINE HERE'S FOOTBALL

 

Last week’s post highlighted the stark changes in Northwestern’s football team, but one thing stayed the same: the Wildcats won yet another punt-driven 13-6 slog marked by dominating defense. The result is very good; Miami is coming off an eleven-win MAC championship season, the game was only as close as it was because of an ill-timed goalline fumble, and Northwestern’s untested secondary largely held up and kept the RedHawks out of the endzone. A team like Miami would have likely defeated many recent vintages of Northwestern Wildcats in the type of game where Pat Fitzgerald would have immediately been loaded onto a barge after the game and sent to Door County after being mistaken as a live mascot for a cherry orchard. At the same time, it would be nice to see a brand new offense headed by a dynamic quarterback who is electric running in the open field manage an offensive opener more exciting than The Mick McCall Gambit.

If Northwestern can't break 20 points Mike Bajakian will have to file another lawsuit against Northwestern, this time for plagiarism

This week, Northwestern will face off against Duke with an absurd eight pm kickoff on a Friday night. This game will be on national cable television for the benefit of the most degenerate college football fans possible and football maniacs who are too cheap to shell out for Peacock to watch the Packers and Eagles play in a venue even more ridiculous than the lakeside stadium. This game will undoubtedly be a blow for Chicago’s restaurants and nightclubs as late night revelers stay home to watch these two teams try to secure a vital win that will make it easier to qualify for the Spirit Halloween Novelty Dracula Fang Bowl.

Duke and Northwestern have been playing an awful lot lately, and Duke has been running away with the series. They’ve beaten the ‘Cats five consecutive times. Despite the fact that these two schools historically operate in the same sad dregs of the power conferences, I don’t think that playing them every year has congealed this series into a rivalry. But I also know that I am sick of watching Northwestern lose to Duke in football. I would like to see the Wildcats get a decisive win and then start a new tradition where they make the opposing mascot walk the plank into the unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan.

 

Northwestern lures the infamous Coach K Sheffsky into the stadium only to march him straight to the plank while he makes those hideous death mask faces that he used to make if the official dared to call a foul on his team

Between staff moves, the transfer portal, and the last of the Covid era players lingering for their ninth-year dissertation defenses, it is incredibly difficult to tell how good a team will be year by year.  Duke has a new staff headed by Florida journeyman Manny Diaz and a new transfer quarterback.  They beat an FCS team called "Elon" handily.  Northwestern is playing at home and will outnumber whatever Duke fans manage to float in.  It is at this point very difficult to figure out how confident I am in a Northwestern win and even whether we should Throw Out The Record Books for this quasi-rivalry that is now being played for The Basketball Legacy of Ryan Young.  Looking at the dragons that lurk on Northwestern's Big Ten schedule, they need this one badly.

CHICAGO BEARS FANS HAVE HOPE AND I'M TERRIFIED

Look, the Chicago Bears don't have quarterbacks.  My entire life they have sent out some new jabroni to throw for 167 yards while the Bears lineback the other team into submission.  For a long time, the Bears didn't seem to even care about the position; their approach to quarterbacks seemed to mirror a gang of street toughs menacing Jean Claude Van Damme in that each of them would do a couple of moves before falling down or getting thrown through a plate glass window.  The Bears now have the most hyped rookie quarterback since Trevor Lawrence, a full complement of competent wide receivers, and an offensive coordinator whose previous experience didn't watching Aaron Rodgers run around for 15 seconds and then heave a perfect pass across his body to a wide open guy and then saying "I told him to do that."  I genuinely don't know what to do.

Bears fans have been through the ringer with their last two great quarterback hopes.  Mitch Trubisky was such a pud that he was booed by fans on draft night and spent the entirety of his career here being reminded that he was drafted over Patrick Mahomes.  Justin Fields, handed a nonexistent offensive line and a cadre of wide receivers that were made up of kick returners and XFL players, produced some of the most incredible highlights I've ever seen from a Bears quarterback, but never found rhythm in the passing game.  I put a lot of hope into Fields, who was an absolute monster in college and a person who seemed to bear the inept management of his career that looked almost like sabotage with an admirable grace.  I still am very defensive about Fields and instinctively lash out at anyone who dares to call him a glorified running back.

The 2024 Bears hype has been fueled by their first appearance on Hard Knocks, the HBO and NFL Films documentary series that follows a team in training camp.  I have no idea if this is how Hard Knocks is or because Bears ownership mandated that they remove all of the swearing, but this TV show was unbearably boring.  The NFL Films crew does a great job filming game and practice action-- a sequence from the final episode that seamlessly stitched together a bunch of Caleb Williams practice throws was delightful-- but there is little the gravelly voiced NFL announcer can do to get you hyped up to watching a bunch of guys in athleisure talking in meetings.  It doesn't help that the Bears management and coaching staff have zero personality.  Matt Eberflus, one of the most baffling and oafish coaches I've seen whose blundering through the first half of last season made me astonished that he had not yet been fired, made a dramatic offseason change by growing a beard and getting a new haircut and apparently in NFL logic this makes him good now.

Eberflus had a dramatic beauty transformation from a "find me the girl" henchman to a "get me the launch codes" henchman

Caleb Williams has an enormous amount of pressure.  Bears fans are not just expecting the first good quarterback they've had in most fan's lifetimes, they are expecting a superstar and fast.  It is unlikely that a rookie, even one as talented and magical as Williams and with his supporting cast of star receivers, will be that good that quickly.  Williams, for his part, seems to welcome the hype.  Fields, cast in a similar role, seemed to bear the psychosis of generations of quarterback-scarred Bears fans belching giardeniera into sports radio call lines with a stoic determination.  Now he's trying to win the grimmest quarterback battle in the league against a chalk outline in the shape of Russell Wilson.  As Fields knows, Williams may never be as popular in the city as he is right now.  A lifetime of experience has hardened me against hope that the Bears will ever have a functioning passing attack. 

 

Chicago is already a rabid Bears town above all other professional sports, but the Bears optimism has reached a deranged pitch because the rest of the city's professional sports scene is dreadful.  The Cubs have been floundering all summer making their last desperate lunge for an unlikely wild card spot.  The Bulls have traded their two best veterans for underwhelming returns including a deeply flawed and unpopular young player and seen their two all-stars turn into untradeable albatrosses that have no interest from the league; they need to desperately lose as many games as they can so they don't lose their 2025 draft pick.  The Chicago Sky are still several players away from building anything around their two exciting rookies.  I have been told we have a hockey team here and it is also bad.

But it is impossible to frame how bad professional sports teams are in Chicago without talking about the White Sox.  The White Sox have already lost 109 games.  They seem to win a game once every two weeks.  They are inept in ways that defy belief-- in a recent game their entire outfield and left side of the infield collided in the shallow left field, allowing two runs to score on a routine popup hit by a guy who started the season playing for them as the DH because he was somehow worse at fielding than that.  The 2024 White Sox will finish the season the worst major league team in modern history.  They are run by a cadre of fools led by Jerry Reinsdorf and somehow immortal croaking corpse Tony La Russa, both of whom seem like they would rather have this team become a national laughingstock than find someone who has a functioning understanding of baseball in 2024.  I understand that Reinsdorf is very old and rich enough that he never has to interact with anyone who isn't going to flatter him, but I do not understand why a person would want to continue owning sports teams in a city where the possibility that you might have some weird emergency that requires you to leave your house without a retinue would instantly result in a mob of sports fans trying to capture you and parade you around the city in the type of restraints made famous by the late, great Hannibal Lecter.  To me, that sounds like a bummer.

This city needs a winner badly and they are counting on a rookie quarterback on the team that destroys quarterbacks for as a reflex.  It is natural to go into this Bears season in a defensive crouch, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But life is hard enough as it is.  If Caleb busts, he busts.  If the Bears stink, they stink.  Why not at least have hope, for both football teams that play on the lake.

What On Earth Is College Football

College football is not exactly built on the sturdiest frame at the best of times, but this season has unleashed the largest amount of organizational chaos in decades. The upheaval left dedicated fans of the sport with questions that are usually answered well in advance of the season such as what teams, exactly, are currently in the Big Ten and how is Northwestern going to play football without a stadium.

The conferences spent last summer engaged in a feeding frenzy as they cannibalized each other for lucrative teams, desperately lunged for unclaimed programs, or were completely ransacked. The continent-spanning Enormous Ten now sports eighteen teams, Texas and Oklahoma are in the SEC, and the PAC 12 is now a rump conference that currently consists of two teams loosely aligned with the Mountain West like Protestant Holy Roman Empire principalities clinging to Prussia at the outset of the Thirty Years War.

The PAC-12 meets with Mountain West members to arrange the 2024 schedule and plan logistics for the Battle of Lützen

It is not as if college football has never desperately rearranged itself for money before. Even by major American sports standards, the powerful people at schools, conferences, and TV networks that can loosely be defined as in charge of college football have always been shameless and grasping. But the 2024 Hungry Hungry Hippoing of college athletics teams seems particularly galling because of its swiftness, its totality, and its bloodlessness. College football operates as much out of grievance as greed, but it is hard to find an idiotic snit behind any of this. It is a massive realignment born in boardrooms that is entirely about television revenues.

The change in college football feels like most things do these days where an enormously rich and unaccountable corporate power has done something no one wants to the benefit of extraordinarily wealthy people who are not even going to go through the motions of selling it to you. There is something about seeing a massive change in college football that results in conference rivalry games between Rutgers and USC that reminds me of suddenly being told you need to buy a monthly subscription to a toaster.

Perhaps I am bitter because college football realignment has robbed me of something precious and dear to me, my beloved Big Ten West. The Big Ten generously put all of its glamor teams into the East division and left the West teams to fight amongst themselves like screeching cannibal rats. Yes, Iowa and Wisconsin were traditionally good, but they were good in the same predictable, lumbering way and steadfastly refused to roster a competent quarterback out of some sort of lunkheaded midwestern spite; every other team in the division was built in their image and so Big Ten West teams tended to violently lineback at each other and dare each other to throw the dreaded forward pass in the hopes that they could score the bare minimum number of points that would allow them to be absolutely annihilated by either Ohio State or Michigan before blissfully heading to the Outback bowl.

The Big Ten West will be memorialized with a large statue of Kirk Ferentz contemplating a punt in front of a Menard's

 

As a fan of a Northwestern team that has excelled for the past decade in producing neck roll linebackers who can rack up more than a hundred tackles per year and a passing game that resembled industrial action by wide receivers, this was an ideal setup. Every Big Ten West fan knew they could win the division. Now they are all fucked. There are no divisions anymore. The west teams are all at least competent and two come in at a playoff level. There’s no comfort in knowing that you could schedule Rutgers, Maryland, and one of the shitty recent-vintage Michigan State teams and punt your way to glory. The Wildcats have to play Michigan and Ohio State in back-to-back weeks.

NORTHWESTERN 2024 OUTLOOK: HOPEFULLY FEWER LAWSUITS
 

Northwestern had been one of college football’s most staid programs with a coach that many assumed would keep grinding out increasingly disgusting wins where the Wildcats somehow gain negative yards on offense yet occasionally qualify for the Operator's Precision Military Grade Nose Trimmers For Men Bowl until he died and had the entire football program was entombed with him in a giant pyramid. Instead, student reporters looking into a lawsuit brought to life the shocking details of an elaborate hazing program in the football team which led to Pat Fitzgerald’s ouster in what has to be the most surprising firing of a guy who won one football game the previous season.

A year later, the football team has undergone massive change. Fitzgerald is gone and is suing the school for more than $100 million for besmirching his good name, and presumably the good name of the Dreamworks motion picture character “Shrek” that played a disturbing and to me entirely inscrutable role in the hazing rituals. Nearly every coordinator has been replaced, most notably offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian, who is now also suing the university partly because he felt that then-Athletic Director Derrick Gragg had betrayed him by saying he did not like his “Cats Against The World" t-shirt. There are still dozens of ongoing lawsuits from former football players. Gragg himself has been promoted to a Director of Not Saying Anything Please position and has been replaced by a person named Mark Jackson who was hired after Northwestern officials thought it would be funny to give a little jump scare to social media users who immediately thought about the Mark Jackson who is known for spending an entire quarter of an NBA finals game complaining about how you’re not even allowed to order soup anymore and for his brief time coaching the Golden State Warriors where he spent a lot of time trying to psychologically intimidate backup center Festus Ezeli. This is a different Mark Jackson.

 

Imagining a situation where Northwestern hires ESPN's Mark Jackson and he derails every meeting by explaining how provosts are not as tough as they were in the 1990s

The team belongs to David Braun now. He brought in new offensive coordinator Zach Lujan from South Dakota State and is turning the defense over to legendary Wildcat linebacker Tim McGarigle, a person who I am trying to singlehandedly associate exclusively with the infamous Not Afraid To Work Overtime poster where he is shown wielding a chainsaw. It is harder to imagine a situation more difficult than the one Braun came into, and the fact that they won a single game, let alone eight, seems like a minor miracle. It will be interesting to see how Braun will manage now that he is no longer attempting to be a first-time head coach on a month’s notice while also coaching the defense and dealing with a program that was the most notorious one in college sports until a Michigan Football Doofus decided to conduct industrial espionages against Central Michigan University. And yet, Braun is also coaching a team that graduated several of its best veteran players and has left the comforting womb of the Big Ten West to face a schedule full of dragons. The team is also losing its powerful “Cats Against The World” motivational rallying cry which seemed to keep the team together as the rest of us tried to ignore what the Cats did to get The World so riled up.

More importantly, the Northwestern Wildcats do not have a stadium, which is one of the things that you would think might be important for a college football team. Ryan Field is a pile of rubble. Amazingly, while Northwestern was busy sending its army of lawyers against Evanston’s various placard-wielding anti-stadium organizations, they did not seem to take advantage of the extra time to think about things such as where they would play football if they won. The logical place is Soldier Field, where they are playing zero games. They are playing two at Wrigley but only in November because the Cubs have to pretend that they are trying to make the playoffs.

Northwestern will play most of its games at a hastily-constructed lakefront practice field that seats 15,000 people and was put together by pulling bleachers out like a gym class that has been turned into an assembly where a D.A.R.E. officer yells at children about the dangers of laudanum. They have been selling this as a “Field of Dreams” because Field of Desperation is not as punchy. It is extremely unlikely, but technically possible, for a football to somehow end up in Lake Michigan. This boondoggle will be Northwestern’s home for the next two seasons while they build profoundly unnecessary stadium. It is tiny and even with ticket prices soaring and concentrated on season-ticket holders, will still be easily overrun by visiting fans. They are advertising "sail gating" as one of the perks although by mid-October someone attempting to sail gate on Lake Michigan will most likely lose an appendage to frostbite. It is one of the most ridiculous things Northwestern has done for a team whose entire identity as a football team is ridiculous. I am currently weighing astronomical (for Northwestern) ticket prices because I need to see this thing for myself.

Northwestern fans are watching an unrecognizable team in an unrecognizable stadium in an unrecognizable conference. And yet, despite the upheaval, college football remains the same chaotic mess. There will still be bands and drunken students and dumb upsets. The method of choosing a champion will remain a travesty because the difference between the twelfth and thirteenth best teams will be even murkier and finer than the difference between the fourth and fifth. A heavily ranked team will hilariously falter against a lesser conference opponent. Message boards will whine about missed holding calls. And I hope that a west coast team will be initiated into the Big Ten in the only way that makes sense: being profoundly annoyed by the Northwetern Wildcats.

BUCK DUCKETT'S FINAL ADVENTURE

In 2022, I ended every blog post with a story about Buck Duckett, NCAA Pants Investigator navigating the uncharted world of NIL. Now, Buck Duckett returns a final time.  It's time to choose your final Buck Duckett adventure.

The sun beats down relentlessly on the field. It’s the last day of practice at camp. You’re exhausted and each one of your limbs feels like it has been replaced with one of the giant sports drink coolers you’re waiting to get to in order to fill up your bottle. Coach Mansz has been remorseless. You made the semis last year, and this is it: it’s your senior year and your last shot at a title, and for Coach, it is his chance to get the boosters and the press off his back after failing to win a championship in any of his first five seasons, something that his predecessor, the legendary A. Morton Lodez, had managed to do fourteen times in his glittering 36-year reign at the top of the sport of Full Contact College Squabbling.

You fill the bottle and start chugging, but as you start to try to catch up to the guys and limp back to the locker room for a plunge in the ice bath, Coach stops you.

“Hey, I know that Chairston was our guy,” he says. “But he’s gone now.” Chairston, who captained the team all three years you had been in the program, had graduated and signed a big contract with the pro leagues. But the wildlife preserve he had chosen to celebrate his hefty contract was the crooked one that had skimped on security measures and he was somehow simultaneously eaten by both a tiger and crocodile. “This is your year now, and I need you to lead this team. Not just on the field, you can do that just fine. I need you to keep these jackheads in line.” As he says that he glances up at your roommate and best friend, Randy Moods.

“OK, skip,” you say. “I won’t let you down.” You know exactly what he means about Moods.

—-----

You get back to your dorm room. Moods is sitting on his bed, idly tossing a ‘quab in the air and catching it. You don’t understand how he manages to have the energy for that since it hurts to move, breathe, and think after Coach made the entire team do 1,500 arm flap drills after Kiggley missed a simple drunkard’s riposte in front of the first mole, but Moods seems geared up.

“Dude,” Moods says. “I’ve got a line on something absolutely nuts.”

You furrow your brow. Moods is a good teammate and a great friend, but he is also the biggest idiot you know who is responsible for almost all the good stories you ever tell and most of the trouble you’ve ever gotten in.

“How can you have a line on anything other than a bed right now?” you ask.

“Dude,” he says. You look at him. “Bro,” he says sheepishly. For the past year, you’ve been making fun of him for saying “dude” all of the time, so he tries to switch it up with “bro” for your benefit. Early experiments in saying “bud” or “amigo” got him jeered by the entire team; an attempt briefly at using “guv’nah” after accidentally showing up to a Victorian novels class was a complete debacle.

“Bro, you’ve got to come with me tonight. It’s senior year, we need to look good. I’ve got this crazy hookup.”

“What are you talking about? I’m beat. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

I met this dude,” Moods says. “Real fancy guy. Actually wearing a top hat, bro. This guy is Reginald “Wump” Marnassasson IV. Loves what we do. Gives a lot of money to the program, in fact he pays a lot of Coach’s salary himself. We got to talking and he owns this whole pants factory. Not just regular pants. Crazy pants. The fanciest stuff, I mean I’m talking about rare pants, bro. And he wants to just give them to us tonight. Because we’re cool.”

You sigh. “First of all, I’m too tired to go chasing after some pants after Coach made us do the puker’s gambit fifteen times. Second, this whole thing sounds sketchy as heck. You know what can happen to us if we get caught with pants? Didn’t Coach talk to us about pants for like three hours?”

“That’s the beauty of it! We won’t get caught! We have a whole system. You see no one is giving us anything. The pants are buried in the woods. We just take this map,” Moods says as he grabs a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, “and we just dig. Who gave us the pants?” Moods makes a puzzled face. “Bro, I don’t know. You don’t know. We just have them.”

“And,” you say, “when we go wear these glittering trousers at all of the finest squabbler parties and someone asks us where we got them, you say…”

He thinks for a second. “We got them at the pants store, dude.”

You think about it. It’s actually not that bad of a plan. There’s no way that Moods came up with this himself, which makes you very suspicious.

“C’mon dude. You in?” He grabs two shovels from under his bed. They’re new. They still have stickers on them from the store. 

 

 Go With Moods

Let Him Go On His Own

Northwestern Turns Unwatchable Slog Into Overtime Thriller

The NCAA tournament does not care how a team wins its game, only that they win.  If they play one of the worst halves of basketball possible or an opposing player temporarily forgets that basketball exists in a limited amount of time and does not extend infinitely past the temporal limits of human experience or if the broadcast is temporarily halted to show us a message from Buckingham Palace but they still win in overtime then they still get to live another day.

Northwestern and FAU played the first half they had been placed in some sort of TruTV prank show where they replaced the baskets with narrower novelty rims from carnival games that made it all but impossible for a ball to successfully pass through the hoop.  Their game kicked off Friday's slate of games, so for several minutes, this was the only thing on TV: Northwestern and FAU players fruitlessly running back and forth across the court shoving each other and then missing layups until the Owls' seven-foot center got to attempt a couple of free throws.  For Northwestern fans, this was normal and something that regularly happens when the football team is accidentally shown on national television and America is forced to bear witness to the team's Iowa cover band aesthetics on their way to a plodding 17-13 win against Nebraska.

When it's 20-19 in the first half

The first half looked alarmingly like it was following the formula for a Northwestern loss, which was for a team to commit all of its resources to stymieing Boo Buie and for the rest of the Northwestern roster to miss open shots.  The Wildcats, though, stayed in the game with some ferocious defense.  I missed the last several minutes of the first half because I realized too late that my television provider's ads about being able to pause live television on their app only work if I am in my house and not trying to watch the game at work with my finger hovering over the delightfully anachronistic "boss button" that still exists on the official NCAA website and has moved from showing a generic pie chart to, I assume for its 2024 edition, a whole bunch of fake AI bullshit.

The NCAA Tournament's 2045 Boss Button

Things looked far better in the second half.  The 'Cats started to cruise, Boo Buie started to take over as the best player on the floor, Ryan Langborg and Brooks Barnhizer began to hit shots even as Bill Raftery slandered Barnhizer's mustache growing ability, and it looked like Northwestern would easily win.  But then the game started to turn towards FAU.  Things fell apart after Nick Martinelli was whistled for a flagrant after Vlad Goldin put his face right where Martinelli's elbow happened to be while he was going for a rebound; after that the 'Cats couldn't get anything to fall and FAU took a late lead before Barnhizer heroically tied the game on a last-second layup.

Something happens to Northwestern's tournament opponents in the last second of close games where they feel compelled to forget everything they've ever known about basketball.  In 2017, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis, who had been unstoppable in the second half of that game, inexplicably fouled Northwestern's free throw expert Bryant McIntosh with his team up one with 14 seconds left.  On Friday, Johnell Davis had the ball with with seven seconds left and the game tied but sort of casually loped up the court and dribbled around before launching a hopeless 27-footer into three Wildcats allowing the game to go to overtime. 

Surely there's room somewhere for Northwestern to create an art installation dedicated to its basketball program's greatest work of art: the Ryan Langborg overtime.  I am very sorry to casual readers who might get a little lost in the technical basketball terminology I am going to use here to describe what happened because it's the only way to convey it, but Langborg went absolutely nutso in overtime on Florida Atlantic.  He didn't miss a shot.  He drained threes as the twenty four second clock was losing it's last tenths of a second.  He outscored the entire Florida Atlantic team singlehandedly.  The 'Cats just kept taking 29.999 seconds to hit shots; the Owls couldn't respond, lost, and then their coach pulled up stakes to the University of Michigan.  I knew it was over as soon as Boo Buie hit one of the most preposterous shots a person could take in a high-level basketball game. 

"BOO BUIE, MAJOR SPLASH" 💦#MarchMadness @NUMensBball pic.twitter.com/VauGhv0iyv

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2024

Northwestern has yet to lose its opening game in its three appearances.  They also have yet to advance past the second and this year face toughest opponent the tournament could offer.

TOURNAMENT VIEWING

The NCAA Tournament is one of the great sports TV events, especially the opening rounds with several games happening at once, the potential for incredible upsets, and introduction of this year's class of Midmajor Oafs and NCAA Tournament Guys.  You can find complaints about the current state of men's college basketball: the combination of one-and-done NBA talents with the chaotic movement of players means that there is almost no continuity among teams although it is very difficult to argue that the reasons this is happening which are to allow players freedom to leave their programs and make money are bad.  Player movement has also led to more upsets and the delightful phenomenon of any player who stays with a program for more than a year seem like tenured faculty or even the relatively new phenomenon of a midmajor Upset Hero resurfacing on another program; the ability to see Max Abmas in a Texas jersey and remember him as an enjoyable NCAA Tournament guy is one example, and I'm sure there were a large number of people who sort-of remember Princeton's Sweet 16 run last year pleasantly startled to see Langborg pop up on Northwestern shooting the flaming He's On Fire basketballs from NBA jam.  

NIL has also brought us the incredible brand-new phenomenon of Round One NCAA Guys immediately filming horribly janky phone-camera commercials in hotel hallways, a sports commercial type that is already creeping up the rankings toward the hallowed ground of car dealership commercial where the athlete says the dealership's slogan in unison with a chorus of local children.

The most important thing that makes the NCAA Tournament elite television, though is the fact that it airs during two work days where the appeal of college basketball games between schools you don't care about and have never heard of goes from compelling to irresistible.  There's absolutely no reason to watch a game between like Louisville and Oral Roberts on a beautiful spring weekend but if that is what is happening instead of looking at TPS Reports or whatever it is the most important thing going on in the entire world.

This is why it is crushing to see every close tournament game devolve into unwatchable bullshit.  I know this is not a novel complaint, but the introduction of the referee review is in my opinion a catastrophe.  There is nothing less interesting than watching a bunch of people in stupid-looking shirts squinting at a little television monitor for five minutes while you see the same replay of a ball maybe glancing off some pixels that might be a guy's pinkie 45 times in a row.  There is no reason to ever hear the most unwelcome sound in all of sports: the voice of Gene Steratore.  I have nothing against Steratore himself, but the only you ever hear from him is when the game has gone to the Referee Shadow Zone, the announcers are trying to parse Basketball Molecules, and you are about to see the same insurance commercial for the exact number of times where your brain is no longer able to process the Insurance Iguana without turning you into a werewolf.  

As we've seen across sports, the lie that video replay can actually reveal objective truth instead of revealing a series of finer parsable concepts of truth based on the interaction of pixels at split-second increments beyond any human being's ability to perceive them is one that has turned referee decisions into the boring version of forensic analysis done on those CBS procedurals about crimes people do in the Coast Guard and turns a series of basketball games into a Pentagon briefing.  Also it hurts the viewing experience that basketball coaches no longer have to wear ridiculous formalwear because it is much funnier watching people have tantrums while wearing ill-fitting, sweated-through suits than in athleisure.

The cutting edge of Coach Fashion is a television detective who is being shoved out of an interrogation room

NORTHWESTERN STILL HOPING FOR "THE UPSET"

Northwestern's reward for winning this game is a matchup with UConn, last year's champions and this year's overall top seed that is coming off a 39 point evisceration of the Cowboy Hat School.  The Huskies have only lost three games this entire season and, at a time when basketball rosters are as fluid as they have ever been, emerged as one of the most dangerous threats to repeat as champions since Joakim Noah's Florida teams managed to do it seventeen years ago.  It is hard to imagine there are too many people outside of Northwestern sickos who have picked Northwestern to advance on their brackets.

If your historically shitty basketball team makes the tournament and you care more about winning your bracket than picking your team to win it all, then I am sorry that is the acme of cowardice.  Also, if Northwestern makes some sort of miracle run then you have an enormous chance of winning the online bracket as all of the other brackets having Northwestern advancing far will be disqualified since 90% of them are from sportswriters legally prohibited from collecting prizes

The Wildcats have what appears to be an impossible situation in front of them against an unstoppable basketball machine.  But the appeal of the tournament is that on any given day, these are still college basketball teams and capable of playing an absolute stinker at the worst time.  There's one person in Brooklyn who knows Northwestern can win this one and it's Boo Buie.