World Cup Review: The Guys, The Main Guys, and The Big Guy

I do not regularly follow any soccer league, not because I have any issue with the sport but simply because I believe that I have reached my personal limit of how much of my brain can be personally hijacked by sports guys. The soccer universe is huge; there are entire continents of Soccer Guys out there floating from Edinburgh to Azerbaijan in deals for millions of Euros, all of whom I believe spend every second off the pitch moving in the liminal space between sports car and night club. The human mind is not designed to be able to simultaneously behold the entire deals of Mario Balotelli, Jordan Poole, and Dabo Swinney simultaneously, or at least my mind is not.  

This is why the World Cup is the perfect soccer competition for me to get into. I understand that national team soccer is, for the aficionados, a hodgepodge of whatever soccer players happen to be allowed to play for a certain country and not a fine-tuned mechanism built with certain players brought over in specific roles at great expense; the top teams in the world can simply go out and get the best center back on the market instead of realizing that their key defensive player is a 38-year-old who looks like a muscled up Thom Yorke. The people who sneer at World Cup play also overlap dangerously with the species of American soccer fan who yells things like "catch the fuckin' ball, dipshit!" on weeknights at football guys but for several hours on early weekend mornings start saying things like "the defence are a bloody shambles!" and "my mum is in hospital" and can be safely ignored.

 

It's possible there are guys like this at 6am Pacific time singing to the tune of Champagne Supernova "Arsenal are wankers eating pies!" and saying oh by the way did you get the despatch in the post about the by-election?

Four years is a perfect amount of time for someone who follows a sport casually when it comes to the careers of soccer guys. It is a significant amount of time in a human lifespan where a soccer player arrives as an exciting young phenom and then returns as an established superstar and then spends the next few cycles as either a stalwart or a disappointment that has flamed out of a European superteam in the throes of what British tabloids are referring to as an "Instagram Horror Divorce" with all of the attendant soccer-related hairstyles implied by these lifestyle changes. There are times you remember a guy from a cup or two ago as an aged captain desperately rallying his team in one last charge and then you see him again in a box and he is 51 years old, potbellied, and has those gleaming cartoon John Lackey teeth. There are times when that guy is still somehow on the team as a third goalkeeper.

The expanded World Cup has, despite fears of watering down the early rounds, succeeded wildly. Many teams that had rarely or never qualified got an opportunity to play with ecstatic fans happy to be there. The story of the Cup group stages was Cape Verde, a team that drew European giant Spain and gave everything they had to Argentina in a wild game featuring two late goals dragging the defending champions to extra time and nearly to penalties with an incredible game-tying goal before succumbing to a late Argentina goal in what was one of the best sporting events of the year. An unknown Cape Verdean 40 year-old goalkeeper nicknamed Vozhina became a global star with his performance throughout the tournament; the World Cup might be the only competition outside of the Olympics that can take an obscure guy playing in the Portuguese second division to a person known by billions in the course of three weeks. I look forward to saying "does anyone remember how cool Vozhina was" in ten years.

The World Cup has had some controversies. One is the application of video review (VAR), which is not new but has created the same epistemic challenges as every other video review process in every sport where the granular technicality of video meets a rule book designed for human beings to judge with human eyeballs. But while I find the VAR process as annoying in international soccer as I do when the last 38 seconds of an NCAA Tournament Game take 15 minutes as a group of officials decide whether a basketball grazed the outermost molecules of a pinky, a video review is responsible for one of my favorite moments of the tournament: when a Paraguayan player was caught illegally covering his mouth (this was banned for the depressing reason that players were allegedly doing this to shield their lips from being read while they uttered slurs) and the referee disgustedly yelled "After review, number ten Paraguay cover his mouth. The decision is... RED CARD!" It is impossible to convey in text the dramatic weight of the referee's announcement. He seems personally disgusted. He yells out "decision is RED CARD" like he has just sentenced him to Mortal Kombat. I have been unable to stop thinking about number ten and how he cover his mouth for weeks.  

 

Video review has given referees a voice because otherwise silent officials now have to explain what the heck they were doing when they were squinting at a television monitor for five minutes while the TV audience sees 500 replays slowed down to the atomic level. Before, the only refs I was used to hearing were in football where you'd be subjected to minutes of Ed Houchuli monologues or a ref speak in one of the two acceptable accents in college football which are Southern and Jon Gruden. Replay review and now automated ball-strike challenges have ruined a magical element of baseball by revealing that umpires just sound like guys instead of imagining that they are only capable of communicating with their Individual Strike Bellow that are assigned in umpire school (Arise! Your Strike Call is now HRRRRNNNNKKK").

The other major controversy at the World Cup of course involves the president of the United States. 

THE BIG GUY WEIGHTS IN 

There is a certain type of person who has understandably had their mind completely fried by the existence of Donald Trump. It has been admittedly impossible for normal person to operate at maximum sanity when someone like this has somehow become the main character of American life for more than a decade. But some people, and-- based on how it appears you can get published in a major magazine as a Serious Political Thinker writing solely on this premise-- particularly people who I see posting online, have had their brains completely colonized by the activities and utterances of the 45th and 47th president. They still can't believe anyone won't stop him other than the one thing that I think even he can't get out of. He, and I can't believe I am the first person to point this out, uses a lot of self-tanner that makes him look in a certain light look kind of orange.

These people are no longer capable of having a thought that does not eventually resolve itself to Donald John Trump, and they want you to know about it in internet posts. They seem to spend all of their time imagining scenarios where something completely unrelated to politics could somehow make him upset-- if you spend time reading about sports, you see these people pop out of discussion threads or their native habitat of bluesky replies like that part in Rambo II when Rambo has disguised himself as a giant pile of mud on a tree and then you just see his eyes open up in order to turn every sports contest into a referendum on what result would be better or worse for Trump. 

The practice of trying to figure out what this guy is thinking by weighing various imagined pro- or anti-MAGA elements of every single person involved in a sporting event is far more effort than he has ever put into thinking about anything. It is 2026 and the fact that mainstream media is still devoting any resources to what this guy is thinking is baffling; the only thing going on up there I believe is his personal version of the scene from Being John Malkovich where John Malkovich enters the portal to his own brain and only sees Malkoviches saying "Malkovich."

Unfortunately for the sports world, the Big Guy had to go ahead and directly plug himself into an American soccer match and unleash some of the worst sports discourse I have ever seen. If you are alive, then you already know what happened: American striker Folarin Balogun, who had been playing with unusual verve and skill for this team-- a normal American striker is a large immobile guy who can't really dribble and is deployed like one of those battering rams that have a face of a scary goat on the end of it-- picked up a sort of dubious-looking VAR-induced red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina that led to an automatic suspension for the next game. The day before the next game, FIFA made the unprecedented decision to reverse the red card suspension and rule him eligible for the Belgium game under some sort of double secret probation arrangement.

The entire process seemed corrupt. FIFA, a money-laundering organization that has somehow tied itself to international soccer, released a statement citing irregularities in the application of the hated video review process. No one really bought that. The head of FIFA is Gianni Infantino, a sentient pair of eyebrows who loves nothing more than cozying up to the most disgusting autocrats in the world. He has almost perfect corrupt bureaucrat physiognomy. He seems like he would have no problem shamelessly asking for a "bribeissimo." Somehow this guy seems to be at every single World Cup game at once, and the FIFA broadcast is constantly cutting to him in the booth looking vaguely annoyed that no one is currently bringing him a canvas sack full of bearer bonds. 

The main thing you want in the president of FIFA is a guy who looks like he is sitting in the backseat of a European sports car handcuffed to the World Cup trophy as his driver attempts to evade every character in the John Frankenheimer classic Ronin

Trump claimed to have called FIFA officials to complain about the Balogun card. I am not sure what the exact sequence of events was. It seems possible that a FIFA review independently came to this conclusion. It seems possible that FIFA officials reversed Balogun's suspension in a sort of "working towards the fuhrer" situation. It seems likely to me that Trump simply did the patented Donald Trump move of claiming credit for it after the fact to make him seem powerful and important and somehow make the news talk about him even more. Either way, the narrative quickly became that Trump made FIFA cheat to give the United States an advantage and this swallowed up everything about the game.

The funny thing about this entire debacle, to me, is that everyone was acting as if an American soccer player was actually important enough to warrant this amount of discourse. Imagine this all playing out if a referee had made it so the USMNT was unable to play some Graham Zusi-type guy.

The reversed Balogun suspension did the absolute worst thing possible: it directly inserted Donald Trump into the World Cup. The tedious, insane people of the internet no longer had to concoct elaborate scenarios to imagine which countries or personalities winning the Cup would annoy him; the entire World Cup was now about him. Perhaps it always had been. The cheeto was calling from inside the house.

Trump had already managed to put his glowering imprint on the Cup as the head of a host nation. The government denied entry visas to fans from Middle Eastern and African fans including the Congolese Patrick Lumumba Statue Guy. American officials denied a visa to a Somali referee, preventing him from being the first Somali referee to ever work a World Cup (a FIFA rule apparently required all of the referees to report to a base camp in Florida, which made it impossible for him to referee matches in Mexico and Canada). The government subjected the Iranian team to draconian travel restrictions that made them fly in and out of the United States on match days that no other team had to deal with. There are, I am sure, a large number of other examples of hapless soccer fans being pointlessly subjected to racist bullshit from the government since racist violence and harassment seems to be the only function the government is capable of. As much as Americans have enjoyed watching soccer fans come over here and marvel at our fast food and gas stations and take over baseball games despite having no idea what is going on, it is impossible to ignore that Trump is unfortunately our Main Guy.

There is one thing the president is good at and it is getting the media to lock onto him like the Eye of Sauron any time he wants, and he hijacked everything about the American team. The World Cup is one of the great causal sports events, the biggest tent sporting event in the world bringing in people who would ordinarily not care about soccer or sports out of sheer joy or just wanting to be a part of the spectacle; when the Big Guy decided to Kool-Aid Man his way into it, he brought in the people who actively hate sports, who call it "sports ball" and "bread and circuses" because he was now involved. A Trumpball was happening. 

Just weeks ago, Trump did the same thing with the Knicks by appearing in Madison Square Garden for a finals game, seizing the narrative of that game and somehow doing the impossible by making a Knicks finals run more annoying. His presence brought out tedious politics dweebs who spent the entire playoffs inexplicably claiming that New York City had invented the concept of sports fandom. They condemned Trump's appearance and claimed that it messed with the "vibes," the most tiresome, meaningless word of the twenty-first century. The Knicks lost that game before rallying to win the rest of the Trumpless games and have a big parade and rally for what certain parts internet have assured me was the first time in the history of sports. Now, these people, people with screen names like HE IS A TRAITOR who post AI text memes, and an army of humorless European scolds had come together to condemn the American team and demand they bench Balogun out of a sense of honor, and make a bunch of Pronouncements and possibly cut off their own fingers at midfield.

I do not blame anyone for rooting against the USMNT; I am a Northwestern football fan and I am used to rooting for a historically crappy team that people hate for understandable reasons that have nothing to do with sports. You can understand why people around the world see a country that has invaded or threatened to invade a not insignificant percentage of the nations playing to root against its soccer guys and desire to see its legions of fans with giant eagle masks or dressed like a colonial musket guy to be on TV looking sad and bereft even if demographically the average American soccer fan is among the most likely species of American sports fan to have typed the word "drumpf" within the last six months. But the point I want to make is that the whole thing was an unbearably annoying monkey wrench in the spectacle of the Cup, and one that seemed even more unnecessary when the American team got absolutely torched by an incensed Belgium squad and did things like have the goalkeeper make one of the silliest mistakes of the entire cup by inexplicably running way out in front of the goal and then getting easily beaten to the ball and then when he tried to kick it, miss the ball entirely and hold up a tiny sign that says oh no before a boulder fell out of the sky and crushed him into an accordion. 

Before the game, The Royal Belgian Football Association sent out a disgusted letter about the Balogun situation and afterwards, video circulated of the team doing a sarcastic "Trump dance" in their locker room. I am not sure if Belgium crushed the United States because they were galvanized by the suspension reversal or because even a team of aging European stars on their last legs of a "golden generation" are much better at soccer than the most promising American team we had seen. But this team of Americans who played for European teams that even people like me have heard of certainly looked much worse than the 2014 team that took Belgium to extra time by letting them take 750 uncontested shots assuming Tim Howard would stop them. 

Fortunately the World Cup recovered. Argentina has played a classic in every game by going down early and then mounting an impossible Dillon Panthers-style comeback in every elimination game. The big Norwegian guy kept blasting goals and then kept getting photographed wearing a cowboy hat or driving a monster truck or doing mutton busting. And we all got to enjoy seeing pictures of English fans who have styled themselves aspirationally as Guy Ritchie henchmen lying drunk in a giant mud puddle in a place called like Twickenham-Upon-Pudding after their team was eliminated. Not even Trump or FIFA or the gazillion other corruptions that you can expect by combining FIFA and the United States in 2026 could stop it. 

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT SUMMER BASKETBALL UPDATE

Here is a picture of Boo Buie wearing a Bulls jersey while practicing with the summer league team.

 

The NBA Draft Culminates With The Historic Selection of Another Northwestern Guy

When anyone talks about the NBA draft in 2026 as historical, you should assume they are talking about it as the second consecutive year a team selected a Northwestern player. Last year, the Thunder sent an earthquake through the NBA when they selected Brooks Barnhizer at 44, a selection so unexpectedly early that I missed it on the broadcast while eating dinner, intending to white knuckle through the last dozen picks while hoping to hear his name. And when the entire Oklahoma City roster was hit by waves of injuries the year after a punishing grind through the Finals, Barnhizer was on the court in actual NBA games.

The number of players drafted out of Northwestern in the last two years

I was more skeptical about Martinelli's chances to get drafted. While Barnhizer fits in a recognizable NBA archetype as a rugged defender, ball-handler, and tough guy taking full advantage of an NBA dental plan, Martinelli destroyed the Big Ten with an unorthodox throwback game. I am not an NBA Draft Guy, but through years of watching the draft and absorbing the bloviation surrounding it, I have developed at least a vague sense of what NBA teams are looking for in 2026, and it generally is not a brawny fifth-year senior left-handed hook shot specialist who jumps when he shoots free throws.

A few things went Martinelli's way. One is that he was undeniable: two years of scoring dominance in one of the best college conferences that boasts scads of those rocket-legged nineteen-year-olds that NBA teams covet while he toiled on mediocre teams that were ravaged by injuries in one year and then just full of new or inexperienced players that all immediately left Evanston after the season like a carnival pulling up stakes in the middle of the night. 

The other is that it is now legal to pay college basketball players and while being a skilled, battle-tested college basketball veteran is a good way to get picked in the second round, it is now far more lucrative for those players to enter the transfer portal and help a team win a championship. There is now a class of wizened Perry Ellis-aged college basketball mercenaries flowing from mid-majors and lesser power conference programs into the top teams where they are clinging to well-deserved NIL millions and forestalling having to ride a bus in the G-League or learn the conversion rate from drachmas. A lot of those players went back to college, leaving more room for Martinelli, who had exhausted every possible avenue to continue to play for Northwestern, to get drafted and earn the opportunity to shove around some hapless summer league jabronis.

The fact that two players have gone in the draft in two consecutive years and that the Wildcats have made recent repeat appearances in the NCAA Tournament would make it look like Northwestern is on the rise, but I can't think of a time when the men's basketball team was in a stranger place. Last year's team, while not particularly good, was at least interesting because of Martinelli's heroics filling in around a group of freshmen learning the game. It seemed like Martinelli would leave and the program would turn over to promising first-years Jake West and Tre Singleton. Instead, Singleton transferred along with virtually every other player on the team except for West and south side forearm enthusiast Angelo Ciaravino. Teams like to set highlights to musical montages, but Northwestern had an offseason that could only be scored to the piano outro from Layla. For a week or two, it looked like Northwestern simply no longer had a men's basketball team.

Chris Collins and his staff have since filled the team with transfers from smaller conferences and and a few recruits, but it's pretty clear that Northwestern's model of having players stick around and come into their own their junior and senior year no longer works, and they're now slopping around in the transfer market scrum with everyone else promising nothing more than an opportunity to haughtily refuse to play in The Crown for the next two to three seasons that tournament exists. The Boo Buie-era tournament teams from three years ago already seem like relics from a bygone era of college basketball.

It was still a long wait for Martinelli to get his name called. He went at pick 55 to the Clippers after a series of trades. Players in the second round are not valued particularly highly, but the picks for some reason remain a functional NBA currency, so they fly around in byzantine trades and arbitrage moves, flummoxing the television analysts.

The pick was originally made by the Houston Rockets, who got it in a swap getting the best pick between Phoenix, Houston, and Brooklyn, which of course means that this pick belongs to Los Angeles. LOOK!!!!! 

I'm not sure what to make of a bizarre Clippers team that has gone from all in on elderly veterans centered on Kawhi Leonard to a team with Leonard in trade rumors while he and the team remain caught up in allegations that, to my understanding, the team used its connections to a fraudulent tree-planting concern vaguely associated with the carbon credit market to make enormous payments to Leonard in order to circumvent the salary cap in a high-level twenty-first century Illegal Business Move masterminded by billionaire Clippers owner and armpit-stained Microsoft bellower Steve Ballmer. I assume Martinelli will mostly play in the G League this season, but the Clippers are in a strange enough spot that they might give him a shot.

OH YEAH THE BULLS ALSO DRAFTED SOME GUYS 

Another reason I was locked in on the draft was because the Bulls had somehow lucked into the fourth pick in what has been described as an unusually talent-rich pool and had another at fifteen. More importantly, the Bulls had kicked avant-garde basketball executive Arturas Karnisovas to the curb and hired Bryson Graham, a young draft guru who at least seemed like he was interested in building a normal NBA team and not whatever bizarre version of the NBA existed in Karnisovas's brain. For the last decade or so, the only comment you could hear on the Bulls from national NBA media was "I don't know what the Bulls are doing." Now there's at least a chance that they can be understandably bad.

My major concern with Graham is that he has one of those Sports Philosophy Acronyms that describes something obvious that most people want (SLAP: Size, Length, Athleticism, Physicality). That's fine for him, but it immediately reminds me of Matt Eberflus constantly referring to the HITS principle where the T that stood Takeaways somehow changed into The Ball, making this one of the funniest stupid acronyms I've ever seen. Seeing "The Ball" up there next to "Smart" (just throwing in an adjective in there) will never not crack me up. Even PJ Fleck is shaking his head on that one. Or S.H.O.T. (Shaking Head on That)

The Bulls picked up human pogo stick Caleb Wilson frrrrrommmmm NORTH CARoLINa, who is doomed to being called "Caleb Williams" by every single sports radio caller and sports radio caller-type guy in the entire Chicagoland area, and ultra athletic wing Dailyn Swain from Texas. Wilson was seen as the fourth-best player in a draft that had three players touted as potential top picks in any other year. He is thought of as much better coming out of college than the Bulls' previous number four pick Patrick Williams, a relative enigma who after years in the depressing miasma of Chicago Bulls basketball has turned into one of the worst players in the NBA. Swain is someone I haven't really heard much about, but was apparently a scoring engine for the Longhorns after spending a year as a defensive stopper at Xavier. Both players feature highlight reels featuring slam dunks powerful enough to have their own blast radius; neither appears to have a functional jump shot, which is the important through line they share with pretty much every Bulls draft pick in recent memory.

The Bulls have not had much luck getting anything out of draft picks, but they have a new coach after Billy Donovan decided he has enough Bulls basketball for a lifetime. Graham hired former Spurs center Tiago Splitter who took over the Portland job because Chauncey Billups was arrested in connection with a gambling ring by the FBI after the first game of the season. Billups and Damon Jones were accused of working with the mafia to rig a series of poker games designed to take in the type of sucker that would be wowed to play poker with Chauncey Billups; Jones has now been targeted by the FBI for illegal gambling and JR Smith who reportedly threw a bowl of soup at him when he was an assistant coach with the Cavs. Splitter emerged from that Oliver Stone sports movie scenario and guided a young, incomplete Blazers through the play-in, a season that inadvertently helped the Bulls by giving them a Blazers draft pick left over from a complex 2021 trade involving Lauri Markkanen that Portland had avoided having to convey by playing like absolute garbage year after year.

Splitter was only available because sleazy new Blazers owner Tom Dundon lowballed him badly before signing former Timberwolves assistant Micah Nori to a contract where I believe he places an enormous pile of dollar bills on the scorer's table and removes them one by one every time Nori makes a substitution or runs a play he doesn't like-- until the Splitter hiring it was almost impossible to imagine a situation where the Bulls take advantage of an owner being cheaper than the Reisndorfs. 

I have one problem with Splitter and that is that he breaks the crucial pattern of Hair Guys and Bald Assholes the Bulls have been cycling through the twenty-first century. By this pattern, the Bulls would have needed to hire a bald guy who already has levied fines against players for loafing because he has seen instagram photos of them lounging by a luxurious pool over the summer, one who not only installs a factory punch card in the practice facility but an actual assembly line where players have to put together transmissions on their off-hours, a guy who has to have an assistant whose job is to prize his bulbous bald head out of drywall that he has headbutted in rage after seeing a player miss a defensive assignment. By the pattern, the Bulls should have hired Jason Kidd. Instead, they are going right from Billy Donovan to another man with hair and apparently an ability to regulate his own emotions as much as an NBA coach is capable.

One shadow over the season is the loss of Stacey King. King, who died at the age of 59 from a reported fall in his home, was for many seasons the only reason to turn into the Bulls' miserable, mediocre teams. After the Bulls sold off their remaining good players for an array of crappy draft picks and guys who would briefly be on the Bulls solely for immaculate grid purposes this winter, I tuned in just to see what nicknames King would come up with-- the predictable "Poison Ivey" for the few games Jaden Ivey played for the team before being dismissed for making troubling, hateful instagram videos, and the inspired "Yabu Be There" for ephemeral power forward Guershon Yabusele.  

Many people will rightfully remember King as an entertaining backup for the early Dynasty Bulls and for his calls of Derrick Rose highlights or even the Red Foxx symphony he uncorked while calling the Josh Giddey halfcourt shot to beat the Lakers. One of my favorite highlight of his remains when he decided that some Washington Wizard cannon fodder named Oleksiy Pecherov's oblong head reminded King of the baby from Family Guy, which led to him screaming things like HE PUT STEWIE IN THE BASKET and GET OUT THE WAY, FAMILY GUY after Andres Nocioni threw down a truly sick dunk where he appeared to be levitating on a beach chair on him. Stacey King is the only person in the world who would nickname the dour Nikola Vucevic "Voochi Mane."

 

But this is a post about the second round of the NBA Draft, and the hope that the regime change meant the Reinsdorfs would reconsider doing Reinsdorf things evaporated when the Bulls announced they had sold one of their second round picks for cash. That was a low pick, (albeit one directly after Martinelli was taken-- if the Bulls had sold the Martinelli pick this post would just be a series of increasingly arcane swear words), but then the Bulls traded their much higher second rounder to the Pacers for some obscure pick swaps and a player who underwhelmed in his rookie year after getting arrested for leading police on a high-speed four mile chase. That was almost a relief after I was temporarily flabbergasted that the Bulls had picked Purdue's Braden Smith, who had annoyed me for seemingly all fifteen years of his college career. 

It is the sad fate of a fan of a salary cap league to have to be concerned with how much money players are making. This should be none of our business; I should have no opinion about Patrick Williams making $90 million dollars beyond "I hope Patrick Williams has a wonderful and fulfilling life off the basketball court." There should be no sports league where a fan should be confronted with the term "apron." But even in the spreadsheet and financial instrument version of professional basketball we get in 2026, selling draft picks does absolutely nothing for the team. It doesn't provide cap relief or allow the team to reinvest in other players. It just takes money that would be spent on a young, unproven player who has a small but not impossible chance of contributing and sticks it directly in the owners' pocket. It is crazy that it's a transaction that teams can still do.

Despite the online tsuris about selling picks, the Bulls have hope for the first time in years. Caleb Wilson looks like the best chance the Bulls have at getting a star player since Jimmy Butler. This battered, cynical fanbase does not yet know enough about Bryson Graham to turn on him and put up billboards demanding he get fired for being terrible at his job yet.

Of course, the Bulls will be terrible next year. Wilson and Swain for all their promise, are still rookies. Wilson also plays pretty much the same position as top player Matas Buzelis and Noa Essengue, last year's top pick who missed pretty much the whole season with an injury but is still younger than Wilson and most of the players in this year's draft. Josh Giddey is still here dribbling like one of the enchanted brooms from Fantasia. The Bulls will likely spend most of the season chasing mediocrity because of new draft lottery rules, an irony since this was Karnisovas's specialty. At some point, Wilson is going to throw down an insane dunk on someone and Stacey King won't be there to admonish that player for being dumb enough to get in his way.  And if that player is Nick Martinelli, at least it would be very cool to see him get the opportunity to get dunked on in the NBA.   

Chicago Bulls at the Trade Deadline: Guards! Guards!

Anyone who is a fan of the NBA needs to hold two rotten truths in their head at the same time: that about a third of the teams in the league are desperately trying to lose, and that intentional losing for the sake of draft position is an effective strategy that teams need to embrace to their own detriment. This stinks! It is not uncommon for rules structures in professional sports allow for optimized strategies that make it crappy to watch or follow a league. Anyway, the Bulls have decided after several years of mediocrity that they are going to be intentionally very crappy by trading away their best players and getting a ton of guards on the team and marginal draft picks, and everyone is mad about it.

Arturas Karnosivas with a classic "actually we did not make mistakes" post-deadline zoom press conference. There needs to be a service that trains people who have to appear on televised broadcast calls how not to look like they are scolding John Hammond for not having dinosaurs on their dinosaur tour.

I am going to take out an extremely unorthodox and contrarian position here and say that it would have been sort of cool for the Bulls to succeed at whatever they were doing. Whatever the manifold flaws of their roster and their repeated commitment of the cardinal sin of the savvy NBA Watcher by paying good players too much money, they were trying very hard to win. They would not trade away players for draft picks or intentionally try to lose games, or take on bad contracts. In fact, for several years, they barely did any transactions at all, which infuriated the trade-mongering NBA podcast people who hunger for "smart pieces of business" to "get under the second apron."  Man, these are not phrases I want to hear in any part of sports. 

Instead, the Bulls were run as a complete repudiation of the podcasteratti who live to denigrate the "treadmill of mediocrity" and call for every team that is going to win fewer than 55 games to "blow it up." Nothing for them is smarter than making a team intentionally worse so it can collect "assets." I would like to find the person who is responsible for introducing the word "assets" into American sports lexicon and banish them to some sort of minimum security business school.  The Bulls refused to do any of that shit and just tried to win with the same kind of mediocre players every year and were rewarded for this heroic stance against annoying Sloan-style groupthink by getting whomped by the fucking Heat every year in the play-in tournament and being the laughingstock of the league.

Of course, this could not work for the Bulls because they are owned by a cheap gremlin who has a large chunk of the city's sports fans in an anguished headlock and are run by fools and sycophants. The Bulls stink. It of course would have probably been better to get rid of Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso and Nikola Vucevic and anyone else who any other team was willing to take as soon as possible for the best picks and also traded for bad basketball players on bad longterm conracts for more picks and tried to lose as many games as possible in the hopes that the draft lottery (which has repeatedly rewarded "Bulls-style" teams with top picks by the way) would give them a superstar. One of the many indignities about being a fan of the Bulls is having to admit that the podcast dorks are right.

So instead of drifting through another trade deadline and then holding a somnambulent press conference where reporters delicately ask him "Arturas, everyone says everything you are doing is stupid. Can you talk about that?" and responding "Actually I think we are not stupid" Karnisovas held a manic 72-hour tradeathon.

His first move was the type of financial bullshit transaction that have become de rigeur in the NBA. He took on Dario Saric, an unplayable oaf who is on his way back to Eurobasket, for some second-round picks. He also took on second round picks for Ayo Dosunmu, Coby White, and Nikola Vucevic. The Bulls acquired eight second round picks at the deadline (it was originally nine but they lost one because of a Coby White injury; the Bulls had him play 30 minutes on an injured calf the night before they traded him because they had like six other players available). 

Second round draft picks are largely worthless. The odds of finding a star in the second round are tiny; it is somewhat possible to find a contributor there because this is the place where older college players who know how to play basketball but are smaller or slower than the NBA ideal have been banished in recent years, but still rare. For some reason, though, slews of second round picks have become currency in the NBA, I suspect, because most of the good teams have already used up all of their first round picks and teams need to trade something. Second round picks are a sort of bizarre NBA fiat currency. These trades, along with teams maneuvering contracts around to get under various "aprons" (disgusting term) have made following the NBA more like analyzing complex financial markets instead of a sport where a guy at the bleeding edge of human physical ability jumps over another guy and throws a basketball at his face through a hoop and then yells "AAAHHHH."

Here's the ledger for the Bulls: Out is Coby White, a human ray of sunshine who is one of the few recent Bulls draft picks to turn into a capable NBA player; Ayo Dosunmu, the Chicago native and Illinois (that's ok he's forgiven) star who is the type of defensive player and shooter every team wants; Nikola Vucevic, the double-double machine with the imperiously rectangular head; Dalen Terry, a delightful bench celebrator who never really figured out how to play basketball; and Julian Phillips who was pretty much the exact same guy as Terry but more serious. In is guard Jaden Ivey, guard Rob Dillingham, guard Anfernee Simons, guard Colin Sexton, forward Gershon Yabusele, forward Leonard Miller, and center Nick Richards. 

Ivey is the most intriguing prospect, a superstar at Purdue who is coming off a gruesome leg injury and couldn't find a role with the ascendant Pistons who do not have the luxury of letting him find his footing. It is possible that Ivey, whose entire calling card was his athleticism, will not be able to recover it and joins the pantheon of Bulls guards with catastrophic leg issues. Dillingham is small and slight, a speedy shooter who the Minnesota Timberwolves have had no use for despite desperately coveting him in the draft. Simons and Sexton are competent NBA run 'n gun guards who are playing out the string with the Bulls and are now in a guard rotation that will also include Josh Giddey and Tre Jones, who are both out with hamstring injuries. The question will be whether Billy Donovan can resist playing Sexton and Simons, who can help the Bulls win games, at the expense of Ivey and Dillingham, who will presumably be on the team next year (Ivey is a restricted free agent). If the Bulls are indeed tanking the rest of the season, it does not really makes sense to play veterans who will be free agents and have every incentive to get their numbers up at every opportunity. On the other hand, if he wanted to Donovan could do a bit where he keeps replacing a guard with another guard who is like an inch shorter for an entire half.

Did you know that Pete Nance is getting minutes for the moribund Milwaukee Bucks this season?

Yabusele, the Frenchman known for dunking LeBron James into an underground crypt in the Olympics, and Richards are here because you do need big people people, to play basketball.  

Will this new Bulls strategy (a "pivot," perhaps in the nauseatingly pervasive American business-argot) lead the Bulls back to glory? It seems unlikely. The Bulls, in their new attempt to be really bad on purpose, have already won too many games to "catch" the teams who have been either intentionally bad or the Sacramento Kings all year, and will likely miss out on a top pick in a draft the analysts have been salivating over. Carlos Boozer has two sons in this draft, and it would be nice to see them in Bulls red following in the footsteps of the teams' loudest player. It is also unlikely this will work out for the Bulls because they are owned by people who are only interested in making money and run by incompetents baffling the league. Or the right combination of numbers will come up and they'll get Darryn Peterson (another guard btw) and return to glory.

I have to admit, I have been more interested than usual in the Bulls since the deadline, since I can't help but want to see what the new guys look like in Bulls uniforms, how they play, what nicknames Stacey King has come up with for them (I have so far heard "Poison Ivey" and both "Yabu Be There" and "Yabu Daba Doo;" at least Karnisovas is looking out for Stacey King with his player acquisitions). In highlights, of course. My TV provider no longer provides Bulls games, so I no longer watch them on TV. Maybe that is more of a problem with the NBA right now than tanking.

Northwestern Finally Conquers Pizza City

As a football expert, if you were to ask me what the turning point of the 2025 Game Above Sports Bowl was, I would point out that it was when Central Michigan turned the ball over on three consecutive plays on their own 30 yardline and allowed Northwestern to score on all of them, going up 21 points in a matter of like 4 minutes of game time. As someone who watches a lot of football, I can tell you that instantly losing 21-0 is something that most teams try to avoid.  That is just my learned opinion.

 

This one's for all the Games Above Sports 

But that run didn't happen until late in the second quarter.  Until then, both teams were playing to a hideous draw.  Northwestern was unable to get its gameplan going, which was to have its offensive line sit on the Chippewa defenders so Caleb Komolafe could run through them, and Central Michigan, which features a similar run-heavy game, kept stalling out as well, treating the crowd to some classic midwestern unwatchable garbage football.  Midway through the second quarter, Central Michigan fell apart into a turnover bonanza, which included an incredible one-handed diving interception from Braden Turner off the Chips' "running quarterback" (one of the three quarterbacks they deployed in this game), a strip sack on Central's "passing quarterback," and a fumbled handoff on their next offensive snap.  Turner also scored on a fumble recovery in the second half.  

With Central Michigan running the all Oh No Disaster What A Bad Idea offense, the Wildcat offense was put in an easy position to score.  Preston Stone once again locked on his top target Griffin Wilde, but even though Central Michigan knew where the ball was going, they could not cover him on the way to 98 receiving yards, two touchdowns, and a game MVP trophy.

Northwestern was heavily favored in this game and delivered. They have now won six bowl games in a row. For a team that spent more than sixty years just trying to win a bowl game, it is a remarkable achievement, even if it is only in the last 25 years or so that bowl games have expanded to the point that they can reasonably expect to be in one.   

The Game Above Sports Bowl does not enjoy the gimmicks from other teams because its sponsor is a vague and, in my opinion, suspect investing operation shrouded in mystery; David Braun did not get a giant jug of investment opportunities dumped on him at the end of the game.* It is a shame that this is allowed to happen. Bowl games, led by the deranged cannibal rites from the Pop Tarts bowl and the Duke's Mayo Bowl's promise to cover the winning coach with a viscous goo, have been leaning more into goofy gimmicks. Even the Pinstripe Bowl connected to the stentorian New York Yankees, the least fun organization in the history of professional sports that only last year allowed players to have beards subject to team review, ended with a barrel of grass clippings thrown over the winning coach at the behest of sponsor Bad Bow Mowers. 

It is time to put the Detroit bowl game back in the rightful hands of Little Caesar's and allow the Little Caesar Guy to announce any replay challenge reviews by displaying a dramatic thumbs down or say "overturned! overturned!" in the Pizza Pizza voice.  If the greater college football world is trying to tell us that these games don't matter in the shadow of the expanding playoff, they should be as silly as possible.

Imagine if David Braun got hit by a barrel of lukewarm pepperoni, that's what we're fighting for 

*Looking through the Daily Northwestern's photo archive from this game, it also appears that Northwestern players were handed fake newspapers printed on like large sheets of printer paper from the "Ford Field News" whose headlines tout them as Game Above Sports Champions, which is one of the funniest bowl game things I've ever seen. 

Northwestern finished with a winning record after surviving a tough schedule in the new Big Ten. They will abandon The Lake to play at their new gazillion dollar stadium. The 'Cats showed that, for now, their unwatchable defense-forward football can keep them afloat in the Enormous Ten.  David Braun is not going anywhere. And now they're going to try something they hadn't tried since the early 2000s and do offense, or at least try to do it with the most famous guy they could get.

THE MOST PROMINENT CHIP OR BOBBY AVAILABLE

On December 30th, news broke that Northwestern was hiring offensive mastermind Chip Kelly.  It came out of nowhere. ESPN's Big Ten reporter Adam Rittenberg wrote that Northwestern was looking for an "offensive reset" after the bowl game, which in cryptic football newsbreaker argot hinted that they were planning to move on from Zach Lujan, but moving on so quickly with one of the most well-known coaches in football was a shock. 

Chip Kelly first came on my radar in 2006 when he was offensive coordinator of FCS New Hampshire, which came into Ryan Field and absolutely embarrassed the 'Cats 34-17.  The next year, he became the offensive coordinator at Oregon and ushered in the Ducks' lightning-fast attack as the program ascended into a national championship contender and standard bearer for Nike's Garish Uniforms Department where I assume a group of 14 year-olds were given unlimited supplies of Surge and a selection of neon highlighters.  Kelly took over Oregon and then parlayed his success into a disastrous run with the Philadelphia Eagles, whose deranged fans are still mad at him; I imagine any Northwestern fans who are also psychotic Eagles fans have mixed feelings about the hiring, but I will note that since the sports intrnet has essentially become a conduit for the psychedelic mutterings of the greater Philadelphia metro area, I do not need to hear them. Kelly then floated west to UCLA to middling UCLA-style results, then inexplicably quit his job as head coach to move to offensive coordinator at Ohio State where he helped win a national championship. He then jaunted off to a miserable vacation with the Las Vegas Raiders, where he was fired eleven games into the season as the Raiders' offensive gamete was essentially the video from The Ring.

On the one hand, Kelly's work has not been spectacular the last few years.  How you feel about this depends on how much weight you give to his schemes at Ohio State, which boasts an overwhelming talent advantage over almost every opponent it faces, and his disastrous time in Vegas, which can be dismissed as an omni-dysfunctional mess where Pete Carroll was running a Belichikian Sons-Based Coaching Staff that is not the type of thing you want to see-- there are few more ominous signs for a football team than the activation of multiple sons (that may have shaped Kelly's move to Evanston-- according to reports, Kelly interviewed with North Carolina before Belichick decided to hire fellow geriatric sex guy Bobby Petrino).  As a Northwestern fan, I also can't shake the Groucho Marx-style feeling that any big name person who wants to be associated with the program is only coming here because he is so tarnished and bereft of opportunities to work at a school where you don't have to use a silent count at home games. Maybe Chip Kelly is simply not good at coordinating offenses anymore.

 

Chip Kelly's wikipedia photo looks like the photo on the classic "Whaler Sandwich 'Not Sitting Too Good' With Area Man" Onion article 

On the other hand, have you watched Northwestern football for the past 15 years?  This has consistently been one of the worst, most unwatchable offenses in the sport. Under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern leaned into Iowa-style toilet football, with an emphasis on punting and doing neck-roll linebacking to opponents on the way try to win games 17-13. Chip Kelly does not have to be an Oregon-style offensive mastermind to be successful at Northwestern; even just getting this offense to be like in the top 75 would be a triumph. It would be something Mick McCall, Mike Bajakian (who will join Pat Fitzgerald at Michigan State as quarterback coach despite being in charge of one of the worst offenses in FBS at UMass as a reward for standing tall against the Northwestern administration in support of his pro-Fitzgerald wardrobe) and Zach Lujan were unable to do.

 

Mike Bajakian looking exactly like he is a vampire that is reclining in a coffin only able to wake up when it's time to run the absolute shittiest screen pass you've ever seen that's called Right 27 Bleh Bleh Bleh 

If anything, Chip Kelly adds a new wrinkle to Northwestern football: a Known Football Guy. Chip Kelly has been around forever, he has been riding the coaching carousel like a 1930s hobo traveling the rails, and he is a person that football fans have an opinion about. It is fun to have that kind of guy around and makes Northwestern feel like a part of the teeming universe of college football, which is rich in larger-than-life personalities. Northwestern has not participated in the bizarre intrigue and and rosters of itinerant goatee guys who travel the country screaming at different groups of young people that comes with hiring a head coach in the twenty-first century; the last coach hired through a normal process was Randy Walker in 1999 when you couldn't even track flights on the internet. Granted, you usually don't want to be in business with one of these Famous Football People because they are hucksters, maniacs, weirdos, and unpleasant dipshits, but it certainly expands the horizons of what is possible here if they are hiring Chip Kelly even if he is at the nadir of his career.

The Kelly hiring also signals that Northwestern seems to at least realize that if it wants to stay a part of big-time college football it can't rely on the fact that it happened to be in the right conference in the late nineteenth century. College football right now is ruthless and immune to its own history in a relentless pursuit of every last dollar possible. Northwestern is in one of the two most powerful conferences by dint of historical accident, and to me it does not feel like the Big Ten will necessarily want to be in the Northwestern football business as it consolidates its power with the SEC and continues to hunt the big game of power programs. The Big Ten just destroyed the Pac Ten without hesitation. Northwestern is at least acting like they need to start throwing around some money and not just at buildings if they want to keep sucking on that TV money teat.  Whether this will be successful or is even a plausible or worthwhile goal for a program that, no matter how many Motor City Bowls it dominates, remains virtually irrelevant to the college football landscape, is a question for another day.

Kelly will ultimately be successful if Northwestern is able to attract and retain good players. The 'Cats have had mixed results with portal quarterbacks and have not had a consistent year-to-year starter since Clayton Thorson.  Otherwise all of the Chips Kelly you can throw at the program won't be enough.

QUICK MEN'S BASKETBALL NOTES

Northwestern basketball is in a period of transition right now. Boo Buie is gone. Brooks Barnhizer is in the literal National Basketball Association. Matthew Nicholson is throwing elbows in the British Superleague, a league where teams have names like the "London Lions," and "Caledonia Gladiators," but he plays for a team called simply "Manchester Basketball." That's what you're getting. Manchester basketball, that.

Would it surprise you to learn that the logo for Manchester Basketball is in fact a basketball? Incidentally, I went to a British basketball game in London many years ago when it was called the British Basketball League during a period listed in its Wikipedia Page under the heading "Tougher Times 2002-2012" when the venue was a high school gym. The London Lions (not sure if it was the same team I saw) now play in an actual arena built for the Olympics, so hopefully things are looking up

The team still revolves around Nick Martinelli's herky-jerky throwback game. Martinelli seems to be leaning into this, styling himself like a guy who has installed a flux capacitor in a trans-am and arrived at Welsh-Ryan arena ready to terrify players with an array of scoop shots, jump hooks, and post moves that none of his peers can prepare for except for getting hushed warnings from their grandparents. He remains one of the top scorers in the Big Ten.

If you see Martinelli doing this, it's already too late 

Outside of Martinelli, though, this is a new group. There are so many new and young players especially at the guard position that it seems like Chris Collins has trouble keeping track of all of them. There's transfers Jayden Reid, the Wildcats' smallest player since the days of buzzer-beating hero Michael Jenkins, and Arrinten Page, a well-traveled center who is the most dynamic big man I can remember the 'Cats putting on the floor. And then there's a constellation of others including a tik tok star, a highly-rated freshman forward with a deadly baseline game, and a guy I watched in a blowout against Cleveland State just start taking the most preposterous three point shots I've ever seen and run to go high five the student section in the middle of the game before pulling up his shirt and yelling. 

This team does not seem particularly good right now. While it is fun to watch Martinelli ply his dark arts around the basket and Reid throw it up to Page for dunks, the team is really struggling to rebound and play defense. They miss Nicholson's imperious size (this is a very small group outside of Page) and Barnhizer throwing himself around with reckless abandon and never leaving the court unless he needed to get opened up by his cut man on the bench.  The Big Ten remains a remorseless meat grinder of a conference. 

But I've been enjoying watching Collins try to piece together rotations that fit and see if they can frustrate some Big Ten teams.  Eventually, I think this group can grow into the shove-based basketball Northwestern specializes in, and I'm enjoying trying to pinpoint which of the new players will eventually bloom into someone who will really annoy Big Ten opponents. If anything, it is fun to watch Nick Martinelli put players into the blender under the basket before he is selected in the 1977 ABA draft.

What I Told You There Was A Game... Above Sports?

Well, they didn’t win the Hat. They played in a the middle of a snowstorm that required the grounds crew to replow the field at halftime like they were zamboniying an ice rink and they had to do the thing where they plow the yardlines into the field and Illinois was only able to clear off half the stands which were not the side where the cameras were pointing so the announcers had to reassure the television audience that there actually people in the stadium, which to be honest is something Northwestern fans are used to hearing.

 

A furious blizzard and hazardous stands conditions results in Memorial Stadium hosting a Normal Northwestern Home Game Crowd 

You would think that playing in a miserable snowy maelstrom would be optimal for Northwestern’s offense, which is designed to inch the ball across the field of play while the offensive line whales on people. Unfortunately, the Give The Ball To Caleb Komolafe Offense does not work as well without Caleb Komolafe, who was out with an injury. Speedy backup Joseph Himon went down clutching at his foot two plays into the game, and DaShun Reeder was unavailable. The offense turned to freshman converted tight end/battering ram Robbie Preckel who filled in admirably with 82 yards of executing the advanced football technique “running into guys.” 

The game was, as expected, a low-scoring slugfest. The ‘Cats had an opportunity to win this, but could not score a touchdown after a fumble recovery on the Illinois four yardline. They also couldn’t take advantage of a very funny failed Illinois challenge that also added like 90 seconds to the game clock late in the fourth quarter, which was triggered after Bret Bielema used his typewriter chest holster to compose a strongly-worded letter to the referees about certain Illegalities in the Officiating and got a reversal of fortune that will have him studying the ancient texts of the NCAA rulebook by candlelight for the entire offseason. Preston Stone had his worst day turnover-wise since the disastrous opener at Tulane that scuppered the chances for a Northwestern comeback, and Illinois got to parade the Hat through the snow.

This was a rare opportunity for a Hat Game between Illinois and Northwestern when they are both simultaneously competent. At least one of these teams is usually scraping the bottom of the barrel every season, and the Hat Game is either a one-sided whomping from the team that is going to a bowl game or a sad scrap at the ass end of the Big Ten West. As far as I can tell, this is the first game between Illinois and Northwestern teams that were both bowl eligible since 2011. That was a weird year though; for some reason, they played the Hat game as an Illinois homecoming game in early October, so at that point no one knew both teams would be bowl eligible. The Illini went on to victory against UCLA in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the ‘Cats sadly lost to a Texas A&M team with an interim coach in the Meineke Car Care Bowl in Houston that if I remember correctly was played in a dense fog. 

I am not counting what I would consider the most important Northwestern-Illinois game of the twenty-first century in 2014 when both teams had five wins and needed one more for bowl eligibility that was played with zero starting quarterbacks and two coaches that would eventually be fired in disgrace. Illinois won that game and then Tim Beckman immediately disintegrated into what contemporary newspaper reports describe as a type of “viscous goo.”

There are currently two coordinators up for jobs named Tim Beck and I would like to think that Beckman is watching the news getting excited whenever one of those guys gets hired his ears perk up a little but they never say the "man" part. They just don't say the "man."

It is disappointing to lose The Hat again and something that the ‘Cats need to figure out, but it’s not a crushing loss. I don’t think there are many people who thought Northwestern would be here at the end of the season; I have not deleted any posts, so you can go back to anything I wrote in the early season and see that I thought they might win three or four games this season tops and battle with UCLA for the worst record in the Big Ten. Instead, they beat Penn State on the road, fired James Franklin out of an airlock, shut out Purdue, and finally won at Wrigley to qualify for a bowl game. The season ended on a down note, but for the first time in a long time it feels like Northwestern is building something– by playing the exact same annoying, unwatchable, pain-in-the-ass football that kept them in bowls and in the Big Ten West race for years.

IN WORLD WITH A GAME… ABOVE SPORTS

The loss to Illinois took away the Hat and also knocked the ‘Cats down a level or two in the Great Hierarchy of Nebulous Bowl Prestige. Instead of going back to Las Vegas or New York or even to the ballpark in Phoenix in what is now known as the Rate Bowl, which is a combination of two words that was designed by the CIA to induce insanity, the Wildcats are making their return to Detroit. 

Last time they played there in 2003, it was called the Motor City Bowl. The sponsor eventually changed over to Little Caesar's who rechristened it the Pizza Bowl; the most deranged Northwestern fans might remember Pat Fitzgerald using the phrase “Pizza City” as a damning epithet (Northwestern did not play in any more Detroit bowl games during his tenure). Then, the bowl game was dissolved. A coup in Pizza City. Tanks rolling down the street. Official proclamations. Little Caesar setting up a government in exile! exile! across the bridge in Windsor where for decades he follows the Moscow Rules in his communications with his sad little fake cabinet that no one is interested in stealing. 

The Lions introduced a new bowl game played in the same venue and at the exact same time that became the Quick Lane Bowl, opening an existential question about what was new about this bowl game other than the variety of shady movers and shakers operating in the bowl game gutters who were grifting money off the enterprise of getting a MAC team and a broadly disappointed Big Ten team to grimly play a bowl game that otherwise exists only on televisions at auto repair waiting rooms. 

Now, the game is called the grammatically brain-melting Game Above Sports Bowl. There are three people who know to correctly parse this collection of words: a bowl executive, who is dead, a Big Ten athletic director who has gone mad, and me, who has forgotten it. The way I have been choosing to think about it is hearing the voice of the late movie trailer guy Don LaFontaine sonorously baritoning “in a world... with a game… above sports.”

It turns out that the bowl is sponsored by Game Above, which appears to be a company that, after parsing their website, I believe is in the business of Possibly Finance Things. It is almost impossible to determine what Game Above is up to other than vaguely investing in sports facilities and nebulous entertainment concerns. The company does not have a wikipedia page. It seems like the type of venture that is threatening to “pivot” to “AI- powered investment solutions” (I imagine this is literal, and every time the CEO gets gets a bad earnings report, they bellow out “so help me I will pivot this company into AI investment solutions so fast it will make your head spin”). I think anyone wanting an understanding for what Game Above is will be best served by waiting for the inevitable congressional hearing.

Northwestern is looking for vengeance against the Mid American Conference after the 2003 Motor City Bowl, where Northwestern lost to Bowling Green despite Jason Wright’s heroic 237-yard rushing effort and also wearing the early 2000s uniforms that looked like they used the Comic Sans font. Central Michigan is looking to settle the score after a 2010 loss, the only game these programs have played

Jason Wright in the 2003 Motor City Bowl wearing uniforms that look like a strongly-worded letter to LeBron James

I am not going to pretend to anyone reading this that I have spent a single second of my life this season thinking about Central Michigan football. I have no idea if they are any good or the way they play football or anything other than trying to remember if they are the Michigan team that plays in Waldo or Kelly Shorts Stadium. 

The key to the Northwestern victory is the hope that the Wildcats’ offensive line is simply larger than the Central Michigan guys and will lean on them enough for the running game to let them have ten minute drives that end in a field goal after failing to punch it in from the five yard line. They will also need to hope Central Michigan’s offense does not figure out how to throw the ball to a wide open guy at the sidelines with a Northwestern defender invariably told to play ten yards off of him. That depends on who is available; bowl season now overlaps with the transfer portal, and NFL hopefuls increasingly sit out. I haven’t seen anything yet from Northwestern about who may or may not be available, but I would expect to see a pretty full roster; there is no scoffing at Pizza City this year.

Northwestern also has a bowl win streak on the line. They’ve won their last five in a row; many of these were pretty memorable including a crazy comeback victory against Utah during a San Diego downpour, the Justin Jackson game against Pittsburgh in Yankee Stadium, and the absolutely bananas 2017 Music City Bowl featuring a questionable ejection of Kentucky’s best player, longtime backup stalwart Matt Alviti coming off the bench after a gruesome Clayton Thorson knee injury, and Mark Stoops putting it all on the line for a two point conversion at the end of the game. Northwestern’s bowl games have rarely been boring and rarely been blowouts.

But while I and the vanishingly small group of Northwestern and Central Michigan fans are looking forward to watching some Friday afternoon postseason football, the discourse around low-level bowl games this season is increasingly dire. These bowl games, long dismissed as pointless for as long as I have been watching bowl games, are under increasing pressure from the ever-expanding Playoff and the pressure of the transfer portal. Nine teams have opted out of bowl games this year. At some point, there may no longer be enough teams to fill them. 

IN DEFENSE OF SHITTY BOWL GAMES

The main issue with bowl game participation is that bowl season coincides with the transfer portal and the type of wholesale program turnover that comes when teams change coaches. Coaches have become more expendable as the playoff has made the traditional power programs even more insane and profligate with buyouts. The incredible carousel this year, where it seemed like every week several prominent coaches were fired by the coterie of school administrators and ridiculous rich people who apparently do nothing other than hang out insane group chats where they type “timme,,,, to frire…...his ASS” to each other every time an opponent gains more than five yards, sets off a chain reaction of movement where coaches and coordinators are plucked from other programs after paying a rich ransom. 

Coach buyout clauses are the funniest thing in the sport right now– it is incredible that programs have to collect enormous sums of money before they can fire a guy. This practice culminated in LSU’s dismissal of human dog penis Brian Kelly in a process where they tried to fire him for cause by claiming they never fired him in the first place, then tried to negotiate a buyout, then essentially fired him again. This whole series of events happened because Louisiana’s governor, an extra from the Adam Sandler film The Waterboy, gave an angry speech about how they wouldn’t pay a buyout; that didn’t work because Kelly’s legal team was able to shrewdly point out at that Brian Kelly actually had a contract to coach football at LSU. On the other hand, perhaps LSU can take satisfaction that for the reported $50 million or so they paid Kelly plus untold billable hours to lawyers they got to fire Kelly more than once.

 

Fired coaches could make millions of dollars by starting a Cameo-style video service called SCRAMEO where for a few hundred dollars enraged football fans can pretend to fire them over a video call

But in 2025, firing a coach does not just mean that a new goatee guy comes in to yell at the team. It can invite a mass exodus of players who either want to get out of a bad situation or have been essentially fired by a new coach who wants to bring in his own guys. It’s a total change in regime. So, it is understandable that some programs have dozens of players in flux and are unable or unwilling to test themselves in the AI Powered Chat Blowl Grame. 

It is no longer even controversial for players with NFL ambitions to skip non-playoff bowl games, and now players exploring more lucrative transfer opportunities are less inclined to play. If these non-playoff bowl games want to continue to have players in them is for them to pay the athletes enough to make it worth their while. In an increasingly professionalized sport, these bowl games and ESPN, which owns many of them, can’t simply expect players to pad their programming for free.

But the funniest opt-out this season did not come from a program that is in disarray or rotted out by transfers, it came because Notre Dame missed the playoff and had a week-long tantrum about it. I am not going to recap what happened because as a Northwestern fan, I have no interest in or understanding of anything the Playoff Committee does. All I know is that if this is what the Playoff is, as a mechanism for getting Notre Dame publicly upset, it has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua called a press conference announcing major news and then said here’s the news: I’m mad. He started a feud with the ACC, which Notre Dame sort of floats in and out of at their convenience. “They [the ACC] have done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame,” Bevacqua said like he is dissolving a strategic alliance among principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. The idea of a program declaring war on the ACC right now is pretty funny since the conference that just desperately added Cal and Stanford and is constantly either being sued or about to be sued by Florida State is essentially flashing red like a depleted video game boss; the ACC barely had enough clout to even sneak a single team into the playoff. 

The other part of the Notre Dame story is that the program huffily refused to lower itself to participating in a non-playoff bowl game. The bowl game they would have gone to is the Pop Tarts Bowl, a game that is distinguished by an increasingly deranged pageantry in which a series of pop tarts mascots offer themselves up to be consumed by the winning team by dancing on top of a giant prop toaster and flinging themselves into the slot and then a gigantic sheet of pop tart with googly eyes comes out of the bottom and the victorious team grabs hunks of it with their bare hands spraying goopy pop tart viscera all over the field. It is a valid question for me whether this insane ritual is still amusing or has crossed the barrier to being annoying, but regardless of how I feel, Pop Tarts has managed to capitalize on Americans’ latent appetite to see a mascot torn to pieces and devoured on basic cable television; the Pop Tarts Bowl is pretty much the only non-playoff game that gets any traction with casual fans.

I don’t know what will happen with these non-playoff bowl games, even the ones that don’t involve mascot consumption. But I am baffled by the discourse around these games as stupid and pointless. I agree that they are, in that the entire enterprise of college football is generally stupid and pointless, but I think they still have meaning within the sport. 

It is very clear that the direction that the FBS is moving is towards a superleague revolving around the Big Ten and SEC and an expanded playoff. As someone who roots for a team that seems much closer to being politely redacted from the Big Ten than ever making the playoff unless it expands to impossibly unwieldy levels, this is maddening. The conferences and TV networks are trying to convince us that the playoff and hunt for the championship are the only things that matter. But the college football national championship is completely alien to any experience I have with college football; at no point does anyone involved with Northwestern football who isn’t David Braun look at the ‘Cats before the seasons and say The Quest For The National Championship Starts Now. 

If you want a variant of football where there are 32 teams and nearly half of them make the playoffs to play for a championship, that already exists. It is called the NFL. I like the NFL and even the cursed Chicago Bears who are enjoying one of the most ridiculously charmed seasons where they keep winning games after their opponent somehow loses the keys to the lockers where they keep all of the footballs with two minutes left and when the ref asks them where is their football they sheepishly say they can't get to it and the game is declared over and the Bears have won and then Ben Johnson goes in the locker room and he gets those Rob Liefeld neck veins and starts screaming THAT'S HOW YOU WIN A FUCKIN' GAME IN THIS LEAGUE.

Last Saturday, the Bears beat their arch-rival Packers in a meaningful game for the first time in decades after getting absolutely dominated by the Packers for my entire adult life because the Packers have always had a Hall-of-Fame quarterback and the Bears have always had a training camp battle between the two most incompetent oafs you've ever seen, and watching the Bears win this game felt like the football equivalent of tearing down a statue of a dictator 

But college football is not the NFL. There’s 136 teams, most of whom know they will never compete for a championship. The obsession with the playoff and Crowning a Champion through a series of playoffs even though we had a perfectly good system (yelling at newspaper reporters) means that the establishment of college football that currently rests with the conferences and the television networks telling the vast majority of college football fans that what they’re doing on Saturday morning is pointless. Fans of teams outside the few dozen elite programs are, in the eyes of the college football establishment, a vast undercard for the playoff. This attitude represents a complete misunderstanding of the sport. College football is not about crowning a champion; it is about annoying people at the school four hours away. 

The fate of non-playoff bowl games, or what would be styled in the nineteenth century as The Bowl Games Question, is I believe part of the desire by this loose conglomeration of college football decision-makers to obliterate everything about the sport that is not about the playoff chase. Bowl games do not decide anything. Many of them are low-attended, barely-viewed games between programs no one thinks about, even in power conferences. They have no stakes or consequences; the only ones people care about are those drifting on some vague tradition that were not yet prestigious enough to be swallowed by the playoff apparatus or those that are attempting to becoming memes by dumping mayonnaise on coaches or promising that the entire game will be played with a simmering cauldron of beans on the sideline in an attempt to win over the 1930s hobo demographic. 

At the same time, qualifying for bowl games means something to a lot of teams. Yes, Notre Dame will refuse to eat the pop tart because it does not fit the dignity of their program which is represented by an angry leprechaun squaring up to fight a person using nineteenth century boxing techniques. But for Northwestern and many other programs, qualifying for a bowl game even if it is a “low-tier” bowl that is sponsored by an inscrutable money laundering scheme represents a successful season. 

There is an unhinged combination of money and desperation surrounding the playoff. The playoff is twelve teams, and there are about 25-30 who think they should be in every year. Boosters who see their power programs miss the playoff are melting down and spending entire municipal budgets on firing coaches and demanding more playoff slots and getting angry at deserving G5 teams and then huffily refusing to play in bowl games because in two years the playoff has completely changed the understanding of an acceptable season. Teams used to be happy to go to the dang Outback Bowl. Now, unless your good but not great team is in the playoff and has the opportunity to suffer a traumatic loss in your own stadium, the whole season is worthless, and your university must debase itself by attempting to hire Lane Kiffin. This entire attitude is diseased.

As long as these crappy bowl games are here in all of their embarrassing pageantry and unsold television inventory glory, I will want Northwestern to go to one. For me, the possibility of lowering David Braun into a pot of lukewarm beans while the team chants “Beans! Beans! Beans!” in triumph is something worth playing for.

SOMEHOW PAT FITZGERALD HAS RETURNED

Few things in college football were as flabbergasting as getting the news that Pat Fitzgerald is not only returning to coaching, but making his comeback in the Big Ten at Michigan State. I was not sure what would happen to Fitz after he finagled a settlement where Northwestern had to admit that he Officially Did Not Know about that hazing going on in the program. It seemed likely to me that he would catch on somewhere in one of those bullshit no-show “analyst” jobs for rehabilitation, maybe with his old buddy Kirk Ferentz, before testing the waters at a smaller program. But instead, there he was at a press conference holding up a green jersey and his own bulbous, crimson head.

I am unable to confirm whether Michigan State made attendees put their phones in one of those lockup bags they use for concerts in order to stop him from going on an enraged rampage 

From a pure football perspective, the move seems insane. Pat Fitzgerald went 1-11 in his last season before getting fired. He failed to win a game on the continent of North America. He only won three the year before, and the 2019 season was another three-win disaster; the fact that it took a grotesque scandal reported out by student journalists after the administration tried to cover it up to dislodge the architect of that much losing football is the story of Northwestern’s historical ineptitude and fear of firing a legendary figure who had managed a long run of sustained success at a place where it is very difficult to do so.

By the early 2020s, the Fitz era seemed to be running on fumes. His offense, feeble even by Big Ten West standards, was doomed by an inability to find a stable quarterback after Clayton Thorson. The defense, which kept Northwestern in bowl games, fell apart under new defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil. And Fitzgerald seemed completely unwilling to adapt to the massive changes coming in college football’s burgeoning NIL system, where his entire position was to stand athwart history yelling “our young men.”

At the same time, you can squint and see Michigan State’s reasoning. The pro-Fitzgerald case is the “look what he did with those puds” argument that if he got Northwestern players to win eight games in the Big Ten, imagine what he can do without arbitrary restrictions on his pool of players. You can look at his relative down period and blame it on a bad coordinator; it is possible to see the 2023 team, which was a pure Fitzgerald Team except with a functioning defensive coordinator and veteran portal quarterback and believe the results would have been the same with Fitz. If Michigan State has a management system in place to run the NIL operation and he doesn’t hire absolute dud coordinators and they somehow run a functioning offense for the first time in his career, it is possible that he could succeed.

This case, however, completely ignores the hazing. It is true that in his lawsuit Northwestern apparently did not come up with compelling evidence that he knew what was going on by getting emails or texts saying “re: re: RE: re: re: Hazing Plan.final.absolutelylastversion.doc.” But even taking the settlement at face value means that Michigan State is hiring someone who was either blind to what was going on in his program that he likened to a family or that athletes getting hazed did not feel comfortable going to him. I suppose that is better than finding clear evidence that Pat Fitzgerald was ordering the Code Shreks himself, but I would not be comfortable putting him back in charge of anything. 

Days after the college football world reacted with befuddlement at Michigan State hiring another scandal-plagued coach, Northwestern decided to leap back into the mud, paying a $75 million extortion premium to the administration to unfreeze federal funding by caving to demands to end diversity efforts and signal a willingness to collaborate with a government declaring war on colleges and universities. Instead of fighting, Northwestern decided to just pay off a federal government that had spent the two months before the settlement sending masked terror squads into Evanston to kidnap and brutalize people while farting tear gas all over Chicagoland, and even though these things are not directly related, the contrast between how ordinary people fought and organized against this risking getting gassed and beaten up and arrested and how a wealthy university instantly surrendered are pretty stark and embarrassing. 

If you were hoping to avoid the weird feelings of dealing with Pat Fitzgerald in the Big Ten, I have bad news: the ‘Cats go on the road to Michigan State next year. Both teams will play for a new trophy, the Golden Subpoena.

INVISIBLE CITIES

The Great Big Ten Commissioner has an atlas of all of the cities in his empire. “Sometimes,” the Commissioner says to Marco Polo, “it seems that it is easier for you to describe cities from this atlas than the ones you have actually been to.”

“For these cities, I just need a glimpse,” Marco Polo says. “I just need to see how the light looks when the sun sets over their jumbotron. To smell a single bratwurst wafting from a tailgate. To know how close I am to a Culvers. From there I will put together the perfect Big Ten city, one made from fragments, from the combination of space and time, from the collision between memory and plans for the future, from the people who have dwelled in a city from time immemorial and the people who will arrive and make it their home, buildings reassembled from ruins only to be razed again and cultures rising and collapsing the same way.

In this way, I can see infinite Big Ten cities. These elements already exist in some city in the world and they will be put into infinite combinations in cities that have existed or will exist somewhere on earth or within your Conference. Once you see their forms, you only need to be able to put them together in different ways to see cities that do not yet exist but yet already exist somewhere. The landscape of cities is flattened across time all being built, existing, and being destroyed simultaneously within the Big Ten into bigger tens, tens not even yet in your empire.”

The Great Commissioner paused and took a puff off his pipe. “How many of these infinite cities do you think we can get into the Playoff?” he said.