Soaked

There is a small but extremely twisted slice of football fans in the United States who, like me, follow both the Northwestern Wildcats and the Chicago Bears, and since Pat Fitzgerald has taken over it has been like watching these two football entities merge into a hideous team like how Jeff Goldblum turned into the fly except instead of turning into a disgusting and vomitous mélange of insect and man who says ah a lot they are turning into a single football entity that runs doomed inside draws on 3rd and 5.  

There is a term called carcinization that is a process I know about only from this Wikipedia page I have just read that is the odd tendency for multiple unrelated creatures over billions of years to evolve into crabs, and this is how the Chicago Bears work: no matter how many new general managers and coaches they bring to install new offensive systems that they promise will bring about an exciting era of Bears football no matter who is in charge they keep defaulting into offenses where the quarterback throws for exactly 168 yards and they only win the game if their linebackers score two touchdowns.  Under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern has changed from a fun offense led by scrappy, tiny quarterbacks that desperately tried to outscore teams 48-45 to a defense and punts outfit that has until recently managed a shocking amount of success by trying to win games by going up by exactly three points in the second quarter and then switching to an offensive gameplan that involves getting the ball at their own 35 and attempting to dig a hole.

The Bears opened the season in a horrifying "supercell" storm that soaked the field and was watched by the few people in the area that were not bailing out their basements, and in this maelstrom the Bears' objectively hideous Mess Football managed to stymie a vastly superior San Francisco 49ers team that was also helpfully starting a person who appeared to have learned how to play quarterback by sending away for an instruction manual from the Sears catalog.  Last Saturday, Northwestern traveled to Penn State and played in what appeared to be a miserable constant downpour.  Penn State had trouble holding onto the ball in those conditions and it seemed like every five minutes one of their running backs would fumble the ball in a hilarious and exaggerated manner like an exasperated Daffy Duck flinging a tray of food 35 feet backwards after slipping on a banana peel and then having a safe land on him before his hands come out from under it and do the combination and open the door to reveal his lump-ridden head.  Unfortunately, Northwestern could not take advantage of these turnovers and pretty much immediately punted every time.  They scored zero points off the turnovers.  They ran for something like 6 yards.  The Penn State Nittany Lions playing in a tempest who were they thought they were and they let 'em off the hook.

Dennis Green's pronouncement that "The Bears Are Who We Thought They Were" is the most profound and accurate thing anyone has ever said about the Chicago Bears

No one was expecting Northwestern to upset undefeated eleventh-ranked Penn State on the road, but a sloppy shit game in horrible weather presented the ideal conditions for Northwestern football and they just could not manage to capitalize on it.  In what is looking like three out of four years of absolute football disaster, I am starting to question Northwestern's previous ability to look bad in one game and still manage to win several games it should not out of what appears to be pure stubbornness and spite.  And yet, despite myself, I still think they might have a shot at the Dreaded Wisconsin Badgers in what promises to the Big Ten's most miserable homecoming.

COACH CYCLE

If there is one time to face the Wisconsin Badgers it is this week when they are reeling.  They just got hammered by Illinois (a team that I think, unfortunately for fans of HAT trophies, is going to be pretty decent under Bielema, who has a proven formula to win the Big Ten West).  They have unceremoniously fired their head coach Paul Chryst.  Wisconsin dumped his ass.  Jettisoned him right in the middle of the season.  Put him on the cheese truck to Kenosha.  I can't remember the Badgers ever firing anyone in the middle of a season before because their coaches tend to just sort of bud off of Barry Alvarez like appendages until they grow the requisite number of chins and fall off.  He's the second Big Ten coach to get canned before the teeth of the season, joining Scott Frost whom I assume was dropped out of an airplane cargo hold somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean after screaming at the the athletic director "you don't have the balls to drop me from 30,000 feet into the aaaaaah."

Chryst could not be reached for comment because he vanished into a massive crowd of identical looking Pauls Chryst with the real one only identifiable because he was missing a single shoe.
 

There are a few things going for the 'Cats here.  For one, no team that has its coach unceremoniously eating a buyout in early October can be classified as doing well.  The Badgers are 2-3 after losing to an unheralded Washington State team and Illinois and getting completely dismantled by an Ohio State team that is for all intents and purposes a professional team that will never lose to a Big Ten West squad unless they are playing in Ross Ade stadium at night where the rules of football and thermodynamics are temporarily suspended.  There is also the Mystique of Ryan Field, one of the funniest phenomena in college football where the Badgers, no matter how immense their offensive line and how good their running back is and how much their perennial sort-of-ok quarterback manages to stay out of the way can't help but eat shit in Evanston despite their absolutely overwhelming fan advantage.  It is hilarious.  Even playing a de facto home game with their tens of thousands of Chicago-area alums and fans making the short drive down I-94 to flood Ryan Field's collapsing rusted guts with an arterial spray of red and making Northwestern go on a silent count in their own stadium, there was a period of time when the Badgers just could not win in Evanston and it would be a great college football story except it involved Northwestern and no one cared.

There are a few snags here when it comes to predicting a Northwestern Chaos Victory.  Two are practical: For one, Wisconsin's interim coach is the formerly extremely annoying Badgers safety and now defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard who is by all accounts a good and sought-after coach, and the firing of Chryst may be more a move to secure his services before he is poached by another program in college football's amusingly medieval succession system.  Another issue is the current state of Northwestern football.  Finally, there is a mystical problem here, where Wisconsin fans are pretty down about their season.  They are not "considering it possible to lose to 2022 Northwestern" down, but I maintain that the Ryan Field Chaos Engine cannot activate unless there is a scrappy Wildcat team and a preposterously overconfident Badgers team that has a Heisman-caliber running back and world-ending defense and ordinary quarterback that will prevent them from doing anything other than getting bulldozed by Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game. 

Without those conditions, I fear that the dreaded Wisconsin at Ryan Field Experience which ideally leaves the 75% of the stadium that is rooting for Wisconsin even though it is ostensibly Northwestern's homecoming game making the Producers Face as they somehow lose 13-11 in a game that somehow involves a one-point special teams safety may not come into play.  But goddamn I'm rooting for it.

BUCK DUCKETT IN DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PANTS

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea. I did not do any research about this. But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vignettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

Duckett was not sure if the three-eyed mutants in the mall stalls of New Indianapolis could tell the future when they went into their trance or if they were just bilking tourists but he had no interest in either outcome.  He usually just hurried by them as quickly on the way to NCAA headquarters, coat buttoned up against the elements and against the crowds of hustlers, unlicensed augmentors, and thieves.  He knew these alleys, and he knew what was waiting for him.  "It's Duckett," he said to the NCAA guards who never remembered who he was and how many pairs of pants he had confiscated in one legendary raid.  He even forgot, sometimes.

"Hell, it's cold out there," Duckett said, settling into the dingy basement office he shared with Crandall.  To get there, he had to go through three checkpoints across rows of auditing machines and past the authenticators that now took up most of the investigations department and down four flights of stairs to a subbasement now mainly used for storage.

"What's going on up there, three ring circus?" Crandall said.  Duckett hadn't noticed anything.  He generally kept his head down these days.  There was very little pants-related activity, and no one up there wanted to hear from him.  

"No, what's going on?" Duckett said.

"You didn't see the decks last night?  They got 'em.  They say they do.  Brutal Bolus.  All hell's breaking loose."

"Damn."

Brutal Bolus.  The top basketball player in the country, and he was augmented to hell and back.  At least, that was what the NCAA thought, although Bolus had passed every test they made him take for three years, even when he blasted Laser State's entire roster of forwards with his forehead cannon.

"And no one bothered to ask me about his socks," Duckett said. Crandall couldn't smile, but he managed a jocular grimace.

 Duckett was not sure why the NCAA kept him around.  He was their most senior investigator but that had happened largely by default after the Meltdowns.  He served at first largely as a symbol that the NCAA still had a mission and still cared about amateurism even after basketball stopped becoming recognizable and became a violent basketball-related spectacle that evolved from a four-volume Codex of Futuristic Violent Basketball Rules invented by Bill Laimbeer that also had full color illustrations about speculative haircuts. 

The NCAA was not interested in pants anymore.  Nor was it interested in shoes, cars, or even cash.  The NCAA was now issued in augmentors.  Every college basketball player these days was augmented somehow.  In the early days, they had their arms replaced with cannons or grappling hooks fused to their backs.  But soon players began to show up with strange abilities, eerie abilities to float slightly longer in the air than they should, abilities to move the ball around without touching it, slightly different cannons grafted onto their arms that the NCAA didn't like.  These augments were sophisticated and increasingly undetectable.  The players were rumored to come from vats and then show up at AAU tournaments with unconvincing backstories and the same few dozen memories.  The NCAA's investigations department shifted to unearth these illegal augmentors and ban them from college basketball.  

Duckett used to sleep in cars and in fetid piles of laundry in frat houses to catch an illegal pants transaction, but that was not how the NCAA worked anymore.  Its analysts monitored patterns: patterns of how players moved, how they bludgeoned, how they spoke in interviews.  Players suspected of illegal augments could be seized, and investigators subjected them to a series of cognitive tests.  Even the augments from big time programs who had been coached to pass would eventually crack, except for one.  For three years, Brutal Bolus had been called in multiple times a season.  They gave him the Ramper test.  They subjected him to Graschman's Paradox.  It did not matter.  He passed with ease, he smiled, and then he went out and put his forehead through a point guard ineffectively menacing him with a chainsaw.  The NCAA made him his top target.  

"How did they finally get him?" Duckett said.  He didn't really understand the new methods and did not particularly want to.  The whole enterprise seemed sort of grotesque to him, and the new analysts were blank and busy in a way he did not understand.

"Don't know yet," Crandall said.  

"Duckett up here. Now." The call on the old deck in the office startled him.  No one had called down here before.  He did not even realize it was connected to anything and thought it was a piece of junk like everything else.  But there was no mistaking that voice.  It was Lauck, the Subdirector.  Until that second, he would have bet that Lauck had no idea he was still here or even alive, but now he was summoned upstairs.  "On my way," Duckett said.

The NCAA offices were in chaos.  Chairs were strewn everywhere.  Analysis stations had dent in them.  It was eerily empty, and he had no idea where everyone was until he found them.  The hallway to Lauck's office looked like a field hospital, and analysts and other NCAA personnel lay around.  The lucky ones were getting bandages.  The unlucky ones were getting sheets.  It looked like when they tried to bring Bolus in, he had other ideas.

Lauck looked banged up.  He had blood on his sleeve, but it wasn't his.  You could fit a change of socks into the bags under his eyes.  

"Duckett, how familiar are you with the Bolus case?" Lauck said.

"Just what's on the deck," said Duckett.  "Crandall told me you got him?"

"Got him is one way to put it," Lauck said.  Duckett realized now that they had a much bigger problem than eligibility on their hands.  Bolus was dead.  Bolus was dead and Duckett was up here.  The mercury drained from his spine.  

"You're probably wondering why I asked for you," Lauck said.  "Bolus is in there, what's left of him.  Whatever augments he had are now gone.  No one we know about is capable of anything like his.  But when we got him we did manage to salvage these."  He opened a biohazard crate and steam hissed out.  Duckett leaned over.  It was a pair of pants.  Pretty standard model, decent stitching, athletic cut.  He reached out to feel them but Lauck grabbed his arm.  

"Look closer, Duckett."  Duckett leaned in.  The pants were moving.  It was subtle, small undulation, almost impossible to spot without staring at it.  It was like a breathing motion.  Duckett looked at Lauck.

"Is that a living tissue?  You found these on Bolus?  What's going on here, Lauck?  What the hell kind of pants are those?" Duckett said.

"That's what I want you to find out," Lauck said.