Well This Is Bad

Northwestern football is not particularly fun at the moment.  While the 'Cats managed to hang around in all of their losses to the point where it seemed possible that they could, with some luck, managed to have actually won some of those games, that did not happen against Wisconsin. They got completely blown out.  They got whomped.  The offense faltered.  The defense made Wisconsin's usually plodding and inept passing game look like the Greatest Show on Turf.  At one point, Northwestern was down four touchdowns at the end of the half and Fitzgerald made the ludicrously unserious decision to kick a field goal from the three yardline that missed in every sense other than serving as a metaphor for Northwestern's football season.

A contrite Patrick Fitzgerald was forced to tearfully concede that the team is a playing like "rece davises" (the Northwestern video of him saying this bleeped out the word "rece.")
  

Wildcat football is down in a way that we haven't seen for decades, and I have no idea what the solution is.  They are playing in exactly the same way that they have for the entirety of the Pat Fitzgerald era, but it is no longer working.  The new offensive coordinator somehow has managed to reconstruct from the ground up the rickety, limping offenses of his predecessor; the only observable change is that he is no longer whimsically referring to tight ends as "superbacks."  The defense has cratered under Jim O'Neil and while I have no idea what it is his specific scheme or coaching or just a loss of a generation of good defensive players, he makes for a handy scapegoat because there's only one other person in the crosshairs.

It is virtually impossible to imagine the program moving on from Fitzgerald.  He has been incredibly successful by the generous standards of Northwestern football, and although he has not hit the highs of his predecessors who won the conference and went to the Rose Bowl, his teams have been more consistently good.  He has also made himself synonymous with the program and oversaw an overhaul of the team in his own image while effectively using Pat Ryan as a money piñata that has allowed the school to build fancy new facilities, arenas, and a new stadium which will be the House that Fitz Built.  And yet, it is difficult to imagine him changing, looking for new solutions, or imagining a way to play football that doesn't match the grimy and delightfully disgusting way he has managed to make a career out of clinging to three-point victories.  I have no idea how bad it would have to get before the athletic director and boosters start having The Conversation; I know we are nowhere close to that happening yet, and I don't know that there exists on the face of the earth a more viable alternative. What I do know is that the school's decision to allow Fitzgerald to function essentially as God Emperor of Northwestern Football in perpetuity and then watching as he oversees a bunch of seasons identical to the early 80s misery days while gritting his teeth and claiming that they just need to execute better is, at the very least, incredibly funny.

 MARYLAND PREVIEW

This week the Wildcats travel to Maryland. 

BASEBALL'S PLAYOFF RANDOMNESS IS EXTREMELY ENTERTAINING WHEN IT IS NOT YOUR TEAM

The baseball grumbleratti were out in full force the Dodgers, Braves, and Mets were defeated before reaching the NLCS by some objectively crummier teams. The argument is that the 162-game season provides an endless, grinding crucible that reveals the best teams whereas any team, no matter how lousy, can get hot in a three- or five-game series and therefore the playoffs exist essentially as a random crapshoot where the eventual champion could easily be some also-ran that has materialized in the postseason only because of Rob Manfred’s generously expanding playoff structure. And the rebuttal to that for any team that is not one of those eliminated juggernauts is: hahahahaha.

 

You would think the Dodgers would be used to this. I like this picture because it looks like Clayton Kershaw is mournfully playing a harmonica.

The people whining about how the baseball playoffs have rendered the season meaningless are laboring under the delusion that they exist to determine the best baseball team instead of existing to provide an exciting and colorful tableau to enjoy the game and get manically scolded by Bob Costas.  And, more importantly, it provides the extraordinarily funny and satisfying situation of a superteam that has spent the past six months of a grueling, daily grind proving that it is easily the best team in the entire game go out and just get humiliated by some wildcard team inspired by a terrified goose plopped on the field.  

I have spent the past several days mind-poisoned by Costas's call of the Yankees/Guardians series where I constantly mutter to myself in a Costas voice things like "Another run in and here comes/Francona to the mound/And the pitcher has to be wondering what awaits him in the locker room from his teammates after this/atrocious performance/Blame?/Recriminations?/Perhaps, even death/Which would be a horrible crime but, one that is, under these circumstances/understandable.
 

The past two decades have seen an explosion in knowledge in baseball and a frankly astonishing race among the serious teams to gain an edge through statistical analysis, high speed cameras, and weird Cronenbergian body technology that allows teams to monitor players' performance that was unthinkable fifteen years ago when the biggest debate in the sport involved nerds on the internet getting shouted down by former players and the type of local sports columnist that was still photographed with a conspicuous typewriter about whether getting on base was bad.  This total victory in the field of analytics and investment-style strategies in the game has obscured something that the pointy heads devoted to separating objective knowledge from luck cannot handle: that baseball is incredibly dumb.  

The Baseball Analyst now says that baseball playoffs are tilted too far towards luck.  One study suggests that the minimum amount of games that could meaningfully allow for the superior team to win would be a best-of-75.  And yet, the entire magic of the baseball playoffs is based on the short series, where every pitch looms with unimaginable terror.  What may be luck also translates in the heat of a playoff race to individual acts of skill or valor, of the poetics of clutch and choke.

For fans of teams that win and win all season long, the playoffs loom like a portent of doom.  They have destroyed all comers and their prize is three to five games where they can be crushed at any time by a hot pitching staff or a single bad pitching change.  In this way, the playoffs undermine the excitement of a great season for fans who have nothing but anxiety and misery to look forward to in the playoffs.  But the odds are that you don't root for a team like thatand instead you get to luxuriate in the possibility of a very good team eating shit and watching fans of a team that had no championship aspirations explode in ecstasy while watching a better teams fans sit with sourly clenched jaws for three hours. This makes for spectacular television.

The short series and high stakes give the baseball playoffs its dizzying tension in the way that a team extending its division lead to 15 games by beating the Cincinnati Reds who are starting a 43-year-old part-time shrimp boat captain does not.  I can see the concern that the baseball playoff structure incentivizes teams to forget about the regular season and just aim to sneak into a wild card spot because the playoffs are completely random, but it turns out that teams continue to labor under the impression that having really good players could help in the playoffs even if the Dodgers tend to get bounced every year despite their overwhelming cavalcade of hall of famers.  But for me, I will take the chaos-- that is unless there is somehow a 100-win Cubs team that gets knocked out by a crappy wild card team and then I will probably be very angry and put on a bowtie to write a screed about how they are damaging the Integrity of the Game.

BUCK DUCKETT IN: THE EVENING TREE, BY AN ANONYMOUS AUTHOR

The delivery was not going to be for another hour, but Buck Duckett was already lying in the cold field under a pile of moss.  The grass was chilly and the dew was already soaking into his coat, but he didn't mind; he thought it would hide him better.  There were no voices yet, no lights, no cartons of pants changing hands, and all that existed were the shadows of trees.  Dark forests represent something frightening to us, echoing something buried deep in human psyche.  It might contain wolves or bears or something else-- the fact that our minds are capable of conjuring stories has allowed us to create a foreboding roster of fictitious beasts and monsters lurking there.  There was something primeval about these fears.  Buck Duckett, though, was not thinking about those things.  He was contemplating the trees and the concept of eternity.  It was a comfort for him to think about the almost unimaginably long life span of the trees surrounding him standing as sentinels over this athletic practice field as he waited for the Colonel to arrive with his shipment of trousers, before he would have to stop contemplating and return to the his own mundane business.

This is all I managed to write.  Several weeks ago, I logged onto the web and got an e-mail soliciting a story about a pants detective for a minor college football website and I had declined because I did not know what any of those words meant and I was working on a book of essays about the objects in my bathroom and what they said about my deepest fears and insecurities.  But the e-mails kept coming every day.  They became more insistent, almost hectoring and more and more cryptic.  Why a pants detective?  Apparently, more than a decade ago an athlete got in some sort of trouble for selling autographed football pants and a perverse and psychologically damaged website editor thinks this is still funny.  This assignment was nonsensical and insulting, but I was stuck on an essay about how the rubber ducky represented the unpredictable tyranny from my volatile father that I was desperate to avoid passing onto my own children, and a creditor was calling me every day demanding payment one of the houses I had purchased on a small, bleak island where I could pace and smoke, so eventually I gave in.  I hoped that no one I respected would see it.

Apparently in United States college athletics there are, or were, rigid codes about amateurism policed by a small cadre of investigators that would allow the institution to punish athletes or institutions for paying players.  This system could not be more alien to me.  I am told that college sports there are big businesses, and the teams play in enormous stadiums.  I went on the web and looked at some videos and the spectacle was impossibly lavish.  This is a very different situation then sports here, when my friend Geir got a chance to try out for the Fløy football team at 17 and was sent a bus ticket and paid 3,700 kroner for his trouble before getting unceremoniously cut.  We all got extremely drunk that night and he turned his ankle badly getting chased by a neighbor who had caught us urinating in his garden, and Geir had to write to Gjøvik-Lyn and Tromsdalen telling them he was on crutches and could no longer make their try-outs.

The short story assignment felt like a straight jacket.  No matter how much I walked around the forest path smoking and brooding or drinking fifteen cups of coffee and staring at my computer, I could not even begin to think about how to write about something as profoundly stupid as a man who investigates pants.  When I asked for more details, the editor told me that recently the college athlete association had changed the law making it legal for students to advertise products and get paid and hypothetically could, under certain arrangements, receive an unlimited number of free pants without consequence.  This made the idea not only stupid but impossible.  But in a moment of weakness I had signed a contract, and the threat of entering into international legal conflict over a story about a pants detective became so onerous and miserable that I sat down to write.  Buck Duckett.  What an idiotic name.  

I sent an e-mail to my friend Per, who had experience teaching at an American university in order to see if he could offer some insight into the profound quagmire I had found myself in.  He told me that my assignment had nothing to do with American sports and had been conjured up by a madman. "I do not want to alarm you, but I would check to see if you are the victim of a prank.  Do you remember, for example, when the Paris Review got Coetzee to cover an entire season of arena league football and he embedded himself with the Chicago Bruisers?  When he found out it was a jape, he got so enraged that he tried to fly to New York to bludgeon Plimpton with a dial-a-down but they would not let him on the plane with it." But after checking with my American agents, I sadly found that the Buck Duckett enterprise was too real and evidently inescapable.

I logged onto the web and clicked the link the editor had sent me to look at other Buck Duckett entries.  What I saw was appalling.  It was all third-rate detective nonsense and shoddy, almost illiterate parodies, and the other authors had been able to submit them anonymously to protect their literary reputations, if they had any.  When I was fourteen years old, I was working at my school's literary magazine called Det Alvorlig. I published a poem in nearly every edition, but the editor, a boy a year older named Espen, had clearly set himself up to the be star.  At every one of our parties in the woods while the rest of us would be drinking ourselves into oblivion with the reckless enthusiasm of young people who had just discovered getting drunk, Espen would be lounging on a log issuing his literary pronouncements, damning the literary establishment, and (this infuriated me) surrounded by girls. Espen had always been kind to me, welcoming me to the magazine, publishing my work, and being gently encouraging and because of that I despised him.  In retrospect I wanted him to hate me, to fear me as a rival who would take control of the magazine through the superiority of my work, and I took his kindness as a condescension but at the time I only felt sourness and fury.  I felt that his poems were mediocre and derivative.  We were teenagers, and all of our poems were mediocre and derivative at best; the work we churned out that was wholly original was embarrassing (I published a poem from the point of view of a train engine that had very strong right-wing political convictions and quarreled with his communist caboose).  By the spring, I had decided that I could no longer bear his literary swashbuckling and needed to destroy him.  As a young teenager, it is very difficult to engineer a rival's literary destruction.  I know this from fending off numerous attacks from a Swedish memoirist who published a nine-volume account of observations about his own life cheekily titled "The Little Red Book," and who remains beneath mention.  I had lodged in my brain that Espen's poems were largely derivative of the early twentieth-century poet Olaf Bull.  Not only were they essentially plagiarized, as far as I was concerned, they were also anachronistic, the themes and language plundered and thrust haphazardly into a more contemporary style.  The previous summer, at my summer literary magazine independent from the school magazine, another student had told me that I was badly regurgitating Tarjei Vessas, and the experience had been utterly crushing, a blow that still reverberates in me every time I publish anything, an icy fear in my spine that a critic will rise up and blast me with the Vessas smear.  

I biked to the library and searched and searched until I found a book bearing the logo of the Olaf Bull Society and then I tucked it into my shirt, took out a pair of meat shears that I had found in the kitchen, and neatly removed the logo.  I pasted it to a paper and then used the magazine's mimeograph machine to make it appear like crude letterhead.  Then I began typing.  The letter accused Espen of "gross misappropriation" of Bull's prose and said it was "perverse and disgusting" how he had "warped it and inserted contemporary cultural references like one of those surrealist faeces paintings."  I used the phrase "literary disfigurement."  The letter contained a shockingly long and detailed set of decreasingly plausible thefts that I kept adding because I believed that the letter had to have heft in order to land with the most devastating effect.  It had not occurred to me in the frenzy of my hatred that the idea of a literary society viciously attacking a teenager publishing in a student literary magazine was so implausible and insane that it could not possibly be real; I had instead focused on making my accusations seem more literary and became proud of how incisive my critiques had been.  It did not occur to me, at least, until several seconds after I loosed the letter into the post addressed to the student magazine, when the ridiculousness of the letter, its pettiness, and its obvious path to my hand exploded in my brain like a detective solving a mystery, like perhaps this idiotic Duckett character finding a pair of fucking pants, and it was too late.  I tried using a branch and a piece of chewed gum to try fishing out every letter in the box one by one until I could find mine (surely the fattest envelope) and destroy it, but people kept coming by and I had to pretend that I was not trying to break into a mailbox and was merely loitering near it with a disgusting stick and gum apparatus like it was some sort of new youth trend that I had seen in a magazine.  When the letter arrived, I was ridiculed.  I had tried saying it was just a silly prank, but the savagery of the barbs and self-seriousness of the letter contained no whimsy and just venom.  I was cast out of the magazine and its woods parties.  Three weeks later, Espen was hit by a train and everyone was so wracked with grief that the letter largely went forgotten or unremarked upon.  We all had been so aged by loss and shock that it seemed impossible to remember anything so childish had happened.

I looked over my Buck Duckett paragraph and could not summon the dignity to actually finish it.  The entire episode was too sordid, and I was prepared to endure a lawsuit and sell two or three of my other rustic smoking cabins to compensate.  I invite the editors of this horrible blog to do their worst.