At the beginning of this basketball season, Northwestern sent out an email with a video of a bearded Chris Collins in a windowless office imploring fans to come out and support the team that looked like a deposed head of state in exile calling for weapons and reinforcements. Northwestern's previous lackluster season finished with Iowa scoring 455 points on them in the Big Ten Tournament, and it seemed like more disappointment was on the way. For the second year in a row, its top players had left the program. Collins had found himself in the crosshairs of Northwestern's several dozen fans, and the new athletic director had ended last season with a cryptically worded statement that seemed to indicate that Collins would likely be fired at the end of another crummy campaign. The program seemed to be in a death spiral or what would be a death spiral at other schools and was just sort of the baseline state of Northwestern men’s basketball. Four months later, a wave of students enveloped the court in ecstasy as the Wildcats beat number-one Purdue and secured their second-ever berth in the NCAA Tournament, and I am still trying to process that this has actually happened and I am not trapped in some bizarre fever dream and am going to wake up in September after getting hit in the head by a foul ball hit by a Cubs callup named Trant Manstadan.
Collins reassures supporters that Northwestern basketball still holds key fortifications near a Walgreens at the Wilmette border
College sports have matched the pros in delivering a flurry of player movement, and it seems to me that fans have increasingly thought about their teams’ prospects in terms of getting players on or off the roster. This mindset makes it easy to forget that, especially in college sports, players can sometimes just get much better. Boo Buie, for example, spent three years as an exciting scorer whose outbursts could only reliably occur against Michigan State and then this season seemed to have had received a Promethean gift of basketball heroics and began playing as if every opponent had become a shrieking Tom Izzo whose head glistens red like a defrosting steak with every Buie dagger.
Northwestern's shocking improvement also comes from its transformation into a brutal, pain-in-the-ass defense. The turnaround is largely attributed to schematic changes overseen by new assistant coach Chris Lowery, but also from the players deciding to make every opponent half-court possession a nightmare. Chase Audige has emerged as a particular menace, cutting off passing lanes or suddenly materializing on the court to snag a pass he was nowhere near. The result of this makes Northwestern games delightfully miserable to watch. Their aesthetic is disgusting. Northwestern is not exactly a smooth offensive machine, so every Big Ten game they play is rife with endless scoring droughts. Their last game against Penn State in the Big Ten tournament appeared to take place in an arena testing out experimental rims smaller than the basketball as both teams ran intricate halfcourt shoving-based offenses that ended up with a ball bouncing dispiritingly off the hoop before they trudged to the other side and started doing it again.
The result of Northwestern's transformation into a defensive juggernaut and vehicle for Boo Buie theatrics is the greatest season in school history. They won the program's most conference games. They went undefeated against the state of Indiana. They beat Illinois wearing provocative Chicago-themed jerseys and Indiana with a last-second Buie floater that had Hoosiers whining about a push-off like a chorus of Bryons Rusell. The Wildcats crushed Iowa so badly that Fran McCaffrey, who already looks like the villain in a Pixar movie except with less realistic hair, got insanely mad and had to be thrown out of the game, in front of all of his sons. The Associated Press was still unable to locate a Northwestern logo when Northwestern briefly made the top 25. Chris Collins won the Big Ten coach of the year award in a year where he was supposed to be fired and I remain both unsure whether he is actually a good basketball coach and positive that he is the greatest coach in program history.
In 2017, it took a series of terrifying, nervy games that climaxed with a last-second win on a full court heave of a pass in order to qualify for the tournament. This year, a team that everyone picked to be last or second-to-last in the conference just whupped so many teams that they were jockeying for seeding in February. It was a new experience for fans who are used to seeing the team clinging desperately to the bubble before waiting for a series of seemingly impossible misfortunes to catapult them into the NIT or the realm of other postseason tournaments that only make sense as vast money laundering operations.
It has been genuinely confusing to watch Northwestern's last few games without panicking about them running afoul of some arcane bracket math. The only thing at stake was the school's conference wins record and NCAA seeding, which as a Northwestern fan is a process I have never understood despite observing it for decades, much like how the family dog understands the rustle of the treat bag but is entirely ignorant about the concept of shopping. And now here they are in the NCAA Tournament, poised to go further than any Northwestern team before them.
BRONCO BUSTING
Northwestern is once again shunted off to the most remote region possible, playing Boise State in Sacramento. It looks to me like Boise State is a popular upset pick against Northwestern, featuring three point shooters that may frustrate the Wildcat defense, which is designed to let teams bomb away from three and probably miss a lot because they are college students. But I am not going to pretend like I any insight into Boise State. I have not watched a single second of Boise State basketball this season or frankly any non-Northwestern college basketball. I watched Northwestern and Rutgers play a game where they appeared to be trying to shoot with weighted medicine balls and then take approximately 85 minutes to complete the final moments of a game that was not really that close. I do not have any spare time to watch Mountain West basketball even if I was spending that time searching out streaming services to see if I have to pay to watch the Arnold clone movie where the writers cruelly made him introduce himself as "Gordy Brewer."
A Boise State-Northwestern game is apparently not a major draw. They will play an evening game on TruTV, a forgotten Warner Brothers network that materializes annually for the NCAA tournament and exists at all other times to show endless reruns of shows like You Didn't Think I'd Shove You and Ryan Wears a Cape. Northwestern's best chance to win involves playing the worst 56-52 grindfest you've ever seen that involves multiple invocations of the dreaded Time Without a Field Goal Clock. Much like the apotheosis of Wildcat football under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern's basketball team this season exists to frighten and disgust otherwise unsuspecting bracket-wavers who do not know what they signed up for when they idly flipped over to the game.
The rest of the region is brutal. Should Northwestern manage to survive Boise State, they can look forward to a likely matchup with powerhouse UCLA. If they were to somehow win that game, they would face what would probably be a rematch with that notorious goal-tending outfit Gonzaga, which knocked the Wildcats out of the 2017 tournament and caused Chris Collins to make the second most insane series of faces he has made in his career.
And if you were to stare at the bracket long enough while enjoying a hallucinogenic journey you might observe there is a possibility no matter how remote that Northwestern could play Illinois in the Elite Eight, a cataclysm that would require the NCAA to create a rule specifically banning impersonations of Abraham Lincoln after dozens of brawling spectators would be injured attempting nineteenth-century wrestling moves.
I have no idea what the the rest of this comic is other than this panel was placed without context in a WGN story about Lincoln's wrestling exploits that relates a wrestling match between Lincoln and Jack Armstrong, the toughest member of the Clary Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois and ends with a quote from Northwestern wrestling coach Matt Storniolo who said “I think you can see a lot of ways that wrestling could have influenced Abraham Lincoln.”
Regardless of what happens in the tournament, it is impossible to not be thrilled for Northwestern's players. I will never hold any college player's decision to move on against him-- it is ludicrous to hold a grudge against any athlete choosing to exercise agency in this exploitative sport, and it is hardly ridiculous to want to go to a team that seemed more likely to make the tournament and play in bigger games and get more exposure. Nevertheless, Buie, Audige, and Robbie Beran stuck around and they managed to get to the Dance. It is incredibly gratifying to see them getting to play in big games in a packed Welsh-Ryan arena which actually seems like a home arena for the first time since the renovation. I am giddy that with maybe one victory and a massive upset Boo Buie may transcend the miserable history of this program and become not just a Northwestern basketball legend, which he already is, but the program's first genuine March Madness Guy.
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