Earlier this season, Northwestern played a very good Penn State team in a ceaseless downpour and the conditions got so mucked up and horrible that it caused the Nittany Lions running backs to have the ball constantly squirt out of their hands nearly every time they tried to do anything other than fall down. The conditions allowed Northwestern's Slopsmen to keep the game close enough to disgust the Penn State fans who had chosen to get soaked and voluntarily watch a football game involving Northwestern.
Last Saturday, big, bad Ohio State came into Ryan Field expecting the normal type of disastrous annihilation when the #2 team in the country plays a team that has not currently won a game in the United States in more than a calendar year. Instead, they were greeted with gale force winds and torrential rain that would sort of pop up every once in awhile like Christopher Walken in a late 1990s comedy. The result of this weather on Ohio State's deadly precision offense can be best described as hilarious. Every series, the Buckeyes would send their superstar Heisman finalist quarterback out there to try to throw the ball to a gigantic, blindingly fast receiver that had a step on the Northwestern secondary and every time a gust of wind would turn into a Monty Python foot and slam the ball back into the ground. Meanwhile, Pat Fitzgerald got to dust off the most perverted pre-electricity playbook he could find in some haunted football reliquary and refused to call a single pass. The backs ran it. The quarterback ran it. In fact, for a large amount of time, there was no quarterback on the field and the Northwestern team was somehow using leather helmets and calling each other names like "Sport," or "Walleye."
Some All-22 film of Ohio State's first-half offense
This worked, briefly. The plan to use the miserable conditions as part of a concerted effort to avoid playing football meant that Northwestern held a lead and the Buckeyes to a tie for a large chunk of the game. The weather helped the Wildcats' secret home field advantage that, despite fans being greatly outnumbered by visitors at all Northwestern home games, absolutely no one wants to be at Ryan Field. For approximately two and a half hours, Ohio State fans were cold, wet, miserable, and forced to contemplate the impossible dignity of losing to Northwestern for the first time in 17 years, this time not to a decent team running a then-novel offense while the Buckeyes kept a future Heisman quarterback benched in favor of one of the most Big Ten quarterbacks to ever lumber out of an Ohio subdivision, but to a Northwestern team whose sole win is over a Nebraska squad whose entire strategy consisted of coordinated vomiting.
Did Northwestern win this game? Of course not. But they largely succeeded in the Holy Mission of Northwestern Football, making Ohio State fans mad for a little bit. With every loss, Northwestern gains a more powerful weapon by making the record worse and more radioactive, and every minute they can hold a lead, a tie, or even a sub 10-point deficit against a better team (which is all of them except-- and I cannot emphasize this enough-- the Nebraska Cornhuskers) they are going to annoy, irritate, and horrify opposing fans. It was bad enough when these teams had to lose to Wildcat teams that were objectively good; the 45 real minutes or so when this Northwestern team was leading literally Ohio State because the game was being played in the Magnavox Guy's rumpus room had to be among the funniest 45 minutes of football played this season.
Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that Northwestern will be able to do more than briefly lead for the rest of the season. Saturday they face a very good Minnesota team led by tailback Mohamed Ibrahim who feels like he has been running over the Big Ten West for 25 years. He is joined by a new quarterback who is quickly-- oh wait, I have just been informed that Tanner Morgan is somehow still in Minneapolis and due to Covid-era Time Distortion, I cannot remember Minnesota having a quarterback who is not Tanner Morgan. The Gophers are 6-3 under that moldy acronym-monger P.J. Fleck and his fucking boat. After Minnesota, Northwestern in on the road against a Purdue team that currently has a winning record and then must play a home Hat Game against an Illinois team that has suddenly turned into an unstoppable juggernaut that has Bret Bielema bellowing over the corpses of Big Ten West teams dumb enough to challenge him. The dream of a two-win season feels bleak.
But it is November in the Midwest. Perhaps Northwestern will play one of these games in a blinding blizzard where Northwestern backs are able to slowly sneak past the line of scrimmage. Perhaps they will play in a small tornado where deafening sirens cause opponents to commit false start penalties. Perhaps a godzilla or other kaiju will rise from the lake and immediately attack Evanston's one sort of tall office building and while everyone is pointing at the monster and yelling Evan Hull can get past the Illini defense. Perhaps there will be a minor sharknado. The fact of the matter is, as long as it is so shitty out that it is impossible to actually play football, the 2022 Northwestern Wildcats will have a chance
INDIANA POETRY CORNER
In 1963, the Indiana state legislature selected Arthur Franklin Mapes's "Indiana" as its official state poem. In 2016, I was selected to review the Mapes papers for a forthcoming collection of some of his Hoosier-inspired works, where I was able to view the original manuscript for his poems. I arrived at the State Historical Society of Indiana in Indianapolis, where I quickly fell under the watchful eye of a librarian, whom I immediately understood was reporting directly to my arch-rival in Mapes scholarship, G. Murdiel Klackwell.
For those of you who do not know Klackwell, he is a middling critic who has nevertheless used his powers of bureaucratic maneuvering and sleazy politicking in order to keep Mapes scholarship within his ever-tightening grasp like an academic python. Klackwell's own efforts have kept my own dynamic and boundary-pushing Mapes scholarship out of the main Mapes journals, and Klackwell has refused to let anyone confront him with pointed more-of-a-comment-than-questions in Mapes conferences by recruiting a cadre of unusually burly graduate students. And yet, Professor Klackwell provides nothing but the most wafer-thin bromides while bulldozing over the subtleties and lyricism of Mapes. Instead, my new annotated version of "Indiana" will rescue the poem from Klackwellism and provide what I believe is a fuller and more nuanced explanation of what is going on behind the poem in a crackling counterpoint to Mapes's gorgeous melodies.
-L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis, 2001
INDIANA
by Arthur Franklin Mapes
God crowned her hills with beauty,
Gave her lakes and winding streams,
Then He edged them all with woodlands
As the setting for our dreams.
Lovely are her moonlit rivers,
Shadowed by the sycamores,
Where the fragrant winds of Summer
Play along the willowed shores.
I must roam those wooded hillsides,
I must heed the native call,
For a pagan voice within me
Seems to answer to it all.
I must walk where squirrels scamper
Down a rustic old rail fence,
Where a choir of birds is singing
In the woodland . . . green and dense.
I must learn more of my homeland
For it's paradise to me,
There's no haven quite as peaceful,
There's no place I'd rather be.
Indiana . . . is a garden
Where the seeds of peace have grown,
Where each tree, and vine, and flower
Has a beauty . . . all its own.
Lovely are the fields and meadows,
That reach out to hills that rise
Where the dreamy Wabash River
Wanders on . . . through paradise.
Commentary
"God crowned her hills with beauty...setting for our dreams"
Mapes is clearly describing Indiana as an ideal place. These physical features and the state's crowning natural beauty are integral to his central ideas of the Hoosier state as an Edenic paradise. By looking through the Mapes papers, although he never stated it directly, it seems obvious to me that the emphasis on bucolic nature is used as a contrast to urban areas, particularly other Midwestern cities which were dens of vice, crime, and the illegal pants trade. Describing Indiana as the "setting for our dreams" clearly implies that he has a larger goal in mind for the state beyond just talking about hills and rivers. Of course, if you were to ask the Klackwell set about it, this profound layer of meaning is utterly lost to them, possibly because Klackwell himself was spending his time building up his power in the Mapes Association of the Great Lakes in order to wield it like a cudgel and keep superior scholars out of his fancy black tie Mapes Dinners.
"Lovely are her moonlit rivers...shadowed by the sycamores"
Notice the play of moonlight and shadow. This is a clear allusion to Operation: Sycamore, which would have been all over the news when Mapes was composing this poem. This famous operation involved the NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett disguising himself as "Mr. Pumpkin" in the Sycamore Pumpkin Festival in Sycamore, Illinois, a town close enough to De Kalb that allowed him to find nearly a dozen Northern Illinois football players accepting a cache of stylish pants and jackets that were cleverly conveyed to the school underneath a float for Kornazacki and Sons Hog Stranglers as an elder Kornazacki had lured several linemen to the school by offering free apparel and ham hocks to the twelve squarest-headed lads in the county. There is no doubt that Mapes had seen the plan to do the exchange at midnight, before Duckett intercepted them, as it was in the papers for weeks. Mapes's brilliant way of folding this event into a geographic depiction of Indiana indicates the subtle work of a master, the type of verses that led me to Mapes scholarship in the first place.
"I must roam these wooded hillsides...seems to answer to it all"
Notice the contrast of the "pagan voice" calling with the invocation of God in the first word of the poem, setting up Indiana as a land so holy it answers to multiple sets of divine rulers. This, along with the specific use of "roam" clearly alludes to the impermanent headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It was, at the time, flitting between Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, cities where Buck Duckett's investigations were interfered with and hampered by organized crime, most notoriously the Chicago Pants Outfit led by "Pockets" Mike Popstakl and his enforcers who had the entire Illinois defensive line in customized golf pants and Duckett's most reliable informants shut up or disappeared into various meat lockers and municipal stadiums.
"I must walk where squirrels scamper"
An obvious reference to the time Buck Duckett disguised himself as an enormous squirrel in order to foil the delivery of a crate of custom athletic shorts to the Ohio State wrestling team.
"I must learn more of my homeland...there's no place I'd rather be"
Here Mapes's invocation of Indiana as a paradise clearly mirrors Buck Duckett's calls to move the NCAA headquarters to Indianapolis. Mapes would have certainly been aware of this after the NCCA's well-publicized failed raid on an Ames dockyard on the Skunk River where Duckett and his team had surrounded a riverboat carrying dozens of crates of illegal socks for the Iowa State chess team. What they did not know is that someone at the NCAA had tipped off Eddie Belch, a longtime associate of Pockets Mike (who would later turn on him and erupt in the bloody Chicago Pants War or 1967 which would end in dozens of mobsters strangled with their own pants and kept turning up in haberdasheries and department stores for months). Eddie Belch's men opened fire on the raid, wounding Buck Duckett, and escaping with the socks. While recovering, Duckett began to give interviews to magazines like Indiana Busybody suggesting a new site for the NCAA headquarters where his operations would not moved further away from midwestern pants gangs, and Mapes's language about Indiana clearly mirrors Duckett's invocations of it as a place where he and his teams could more effectively target the proliferation of illicit pants and pants-related activity throughout the region.
"Indiana is a garden...where the seeds of peace have sown"
Unfortunately, as Mapes knew, Buck Duckett was simply an investigator. While he had unparalleled skills tracking down clues and extracting information through pressure and the occasional slap to the head, he was not prepared for the type of bureaucratic infighting that he needed to convince the NCAA heads to move their headquarters. At this time, he was thwarted by his main rival Dreck Teckett, who Duckett suspected but was unable to conclusively prove was the key inside man for the Chicago and later Missouri Pants Outfits' operations within the NCAA. Teckett was only the deputy for the NCAA's physical facilities branch, but his superior Gave Ledbrent was a notorious drunkard, and Teckett ran the department like a warlord extracting tribute for parking passes and access to the facility's "good" cafeteria on brown meat Mondays. Duckett found his memos destroyed in garbage gondolas, his messages intercepted by Teckett's network of lackeys, and even his phone unable to dial internal lines which was a "maintenance problem" for months on end. Anyone who has ever been in a struggle with this sort of rat, like how Klackwell controls access to the unread Mapes papers by requiring you to grovel to him in his palatial office can attest how draining and impossible it is for men of more magisterial talents to waste time with these petty tyrants.
"Lovely are the fields and meadows...through paradise"
It is clear that Mapes has dedicated the final stanza of his poem to the future movement of the NCAA Headquarters to Indianapolis. This interpretation may flow over the head of lunkheads like Klackwell and his coterie of imbeciles but observe how Mapes ends the poem with the slant rhyme of "rise" with "paradise," a clear indication that the importance of conveying this subtle message took overruled his otherwise perfect rhyme scheme. Some scholars might reasonbly question that the invocation of the Wabash River since it does not flow through Indianapolis (that would be the White River), but this is a clear allusion to West Lafeyette, the city on the banks of the Wabash that was the site of Buck Duckett's largest operation. Operation: Wabash nearly shut down the entire Purdue basketball program when Duckett located and eventually destroyed a cache of the longest pants ever seized by the NCAA to accommodate Purdue's massive frontline of "Moose" Burton, "Moose" Jenkins, and "Big Moose" Kraboose, a 7'5" senior who dominated the Big Ten in the 1959 season despite being only able to briskly walk across the court.
It is in the interests of Klackwell and his academic henchmen to preserve the masterpiece "Indiana" as a sentimental poem about a state and cover up Mapes's intention to use the poem to pressure the NCAA to move its headquarters to Indianapolis and away from the influence of the notorious pants-gangs. That is why Klackwell personally intervened to prevent me from publishing a valedictory essay on this subject when the headquarters made its move in 1997 in Mapes Shapes the preeminent Mapes journal. Instead, I was forced to self-publish it and, while the essay itself is, I believe, a persuasive and perhaps even moving testimony to the power of Mapes's works and Buck Duckett's own tireless toil preventing athletes from receiving pants from miscreants, it largely went unread and unremarked upon by both Mapes scholars and the NCAA itself even after I handed it out at the 2000 Final Four held at the RCA Dome until I was bodily ushered off the premises by jackbooted police officers sent there, I presume, by Klackwell.
As I have prepared for this new edition of my commentary on "Indiana," I have grown increasingly alarmed that Klackwell has entrenched himself completely into Mapes papers. In fact, though Klackwell has claimed that he believes the words of Mapes are sacrosanct to the point where he has extensively noted any variations from the manuscript to the published version of his poems, I have come to believe that Klackwell will do anything to suppress the "Indiana" poem's true meaning including altering the manuscript or even have one his graduate students forge an alternate version.
For that reason, I have been forced to, in the dead of night and using a series of keys I have stolen and duplicated, temporarily removed the Mapes papers from the Indiana archives and will keep them with me while I finish off my commentary. It is obvious to me that Klackwell is in the employ of the remnants of the Chicago Pants Outfit and will try to alter or destroy the papers and have me garroted with my own sock garters. Fortunately, I traveled to Indianapolis with my own trunk of wigs, train conductor uniforms, false mustaches, and a giant squirrel costume. I suppose it should be obvious now that I have been using L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis as an assumed name and am the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett whose deeds Mr. Mapes has, for whatever reason, decided to memorialize in his poem. Even as we speak, the agents of Professor Klackwell and whatever so-called "law enforcement" that is in his employ are trying to track me down to allow him access to the papers and block this commentary that will scandalize the entire government of Indiana. But I am not intimidated by him or by the various pants-assassins who have been seeking me out for decades for simply doing the work of keeping college athletics free from the decadent influence of commerce. But there it is, the tell-tale rustling outside the safehouse and I must get my old NCAA service revolver and prepare to defend these papers one last time.
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