The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life

Northwestern emerges from its bye week looking like something nearly impossible to imagine at the beginning of the season: a normal sort of crummy Big Ten West team. The last two games were about sweat. They managed to possibly hospitalize several Penn State fans by taking a 10-10 tie to halftime before the Nittany Lions decided they actually needed to play football in the second half and easily finish the game. Then they made their own fans sweat a fourth quarter comeback in a game against Howard that they controlled for most of the proceedings before managing to hold on to a 23-20 victory.

The Wildcats are 3-3 and the Big Ten West is putrid. In its final year, the greatest division in the history of college football is going out in a blaze of glory with its teams all playing disgusting toilet football distilling a decade of Big Ten West play to its appalling essence. The division's standard-bearer is Iowa, a team whose unwillingness to score points or even move the ball has gone from mere circumstance to a program-wide contempt. Kirk Ferentz has ascended to his obsidian throne over Iowa City throwing out anyone who even dares to suggest they attempt flashy plays like running up the middle or falling forward. Anyone who suggests throwing a ball is immediately thrown in his pit where they can only hold off ravenous jackals by throwing loose stones at them. "If they love passing so much, let them pass," Ferentz says as another graduate assistant is dragged away into the Passing Pit when the Ferentz private guard discovers that he has secreted a play sheet containing a simple five yard out in his quarters.

Someone has called a play that gains more than four yards

It has taken the fall of the Big Ten West from mild joke to national disgrace to open up a possibility I had thought impossible. In a division this bad, Northwestern could possibly make a bowl game. It will not be easy-- as gnarly as the Big Ten West is, the Wildcats will remain heavy underdogs in every game they play this season. But, while it might be at the fanciful end of things, it is no longer impossible to imagine them somehow beating teams like Nebraska, Illinois, and Purdue because those teams are also shitty. It is equally likely that they end the season stuck on three wins. But at the very least they are likely to scare one of these other crappy, flawed outfits and terrify their fans into at least temporary belief that they can lose to this disgraced wreck of a program.

This week, Northwestern travels to Lincoln on American Soil to take on a mediocre Nebraska team. Nebraska seeks revenge after Northwestern defeated them in Ireland to tally the team's sole win in 2022 in a bacchanal of touchdowns and free beer. Things are different now. The Huskers are no longer under Scott Vomit and his disastrous puke-forward regime. Instead, they hired recent NFL washout Matt Rhule to try to once again salvage a Nebraska program that has been fatally infected with Big Ten West and will never rise to its once-great heights. On paper, the Huskers are a much better team and are heavily favored. But somehow, this game tends to sink to its own level; the Northwestern-Nebraska game usually turns into a weirdly close game designed to infuriate Nebraska fans.

One thing the Wildcats bring into the game is quarterback uncertainty. Ben Bryant, who engineered Northwestern's brilliant comeback against Minnesota, got injured in the Penn State game and will not play today. The 'Cats will turn to Brendan Sullivan, who started the Howard game, but also have Ryan Hilinksy, who threw for 314 yards against the Huskers last year and Jack Lausch, a quarterback that Mike Bajakian likes to put in for obvious running situations and Bajakian's beloved gadget plays that instantly fail like when the defense calls the right play in Tecmo Bowl. Perhaps they can confuse the Huskers by putting them all on the field at the same time in a beguiling intrigue.

BEGUILING INTRIGUE

This week in football tradecraft news, it appears that the NCAA is after Jim Harbaugh again. Harbaugh, who already served a suspension this season for Hamburger Crimes is now being accused by the NCAA of running an "elaborate" sign stealing operation where one of his assistants allegedly deciphered all of those dumb looking dorm room posters of Tyler Durden or whatever and walk-on quarterbacks on the sidelines making the Mr. Burns Baseball Signs in order to figure out opponents' plays.

The current state of the art NCAA play relay system

Like all NCAA crimes, this is an obviously stupid thing to investigate and seems like death throes of an organization that no longer has any power now that it is legal for car dealers to give burlap sacks full of cash to football players in the light of day, but it is also true that it is funny that it is happening to Jim Harbaugh because I find him personally very annoying.

Now that I know that Jim Harbaugh was doing Illegal Cheating, I have a satisfying explanation on how he was able to defeat the 2021 Northwestern Wildcats.

The most relevant fact for readers of this blog is that the alleged sign-stealing perpetrator is a Military Man named Connor Stalions. As this blog devolves into an outlet for forcing readers interested in Northwestern football to indulge in my obsession with writing terrible airport thrillers, I should note that the only thing I have been thinking about in college football all day has been the concept of "A Connor Stalions Novel."

Connor Stalions was a man of few words. He only let two things do his talking-- his satellite images of Rutgers's third down packages, and his fists.

The Rutgers secret play vault was big, several feet thick containing big plans and big ideas. But Michigan had something bigger: Connor Stalions.

I can only think of one thing to do with this: The Connor Stalions Airport Thriller Paragraph Challenge. Please drop your paragraph of Operation Disguised Coverage: A Connor Stalions Novel in the comments below or email it to me (no more than 150 words) with your name or handle or however you want to be identified, and I'll put my favorites in a future post. Now here's a 2,500 story about Matt Rhule.

THE MATT RHULES: A GUIDE TO SUCCESS ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD AND IN LIFE

Nobody who leaves wants to return to sportswriting, but the profession has a way of grabbing you and never letting you escape. I had never been particularly interested in the genre, but after one of my freelance pieces entitled “John Daly Has Gout” gained traction, I found myself on the sports interview circuit. “Rod Beck picks baked beans out of his mustache,” I wrote in my lede about sitting with the reliever in his trailer outside the Iowa Cubs ballpark. “Jeff George slices up a steak the same way he slices a defense.” That sort of thing. I signed up for the pro bocce ball circuit. I tried to stop a Greg Ostertag slap shot. In one terrifying evening, I gambled on demolition derby at the Grenlee County Fair with Phil Mickelson and we ended up fleeing for our lives from a father and son team driving a half-totaled Chrysler Imperial that attempted to ram us because Michelson owed them forty grand that he didn’t have because he lost it all on the horse game. And then I stopped.

After a few decades, I lost my interest in sports personalities. Sure, every once in awhile I would get kicked in the genitals by a UFC fighter or get bitten by a professional biting coach that in order to critique Mike Tyson’s technique, but for the most part it was boring dinners with boring people. “Troy Aikman orders the Chicken Kiev.” “Bill Wennington buys his own McDonald's sandwich.” Etc. So I left the magazine and transitioned to novels. Here, I was not bound to what athletes said and did but could finally play in the greatest and most exhilarating literary space imaginable– my own imagination.

It took months of research and exploring my own psyche– I abandoned my family for six months to take a bevy of mind-expanding psychedelics derived from wildflowers and cacti– and fits and starts of experimentation before finally releasing my masterpiece called Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel. The book was a mixture of roman á clef, autofiction, magical realism, and thriller about how distinguished sportswriter Clark Craggler, who is also secretly an operative with an élite government intelligence unit where its members are deployed as civilians until “activated” by their mysterious boss known only as “Magma” in dire national emergency situations. Craggler goes from writing a tiresome feature on a star quarterback’s dreadful diet regimen to stop a catastrophe: catching the sitting president repeatedly cheating at golf. His job is to write an exposé of the president taking too many mulligans and generously giving himself lays and even altering the scorecard, which would be designed to trigger a congressional investigation, but while investigating him, he gets tied up in a sinister presidential plot to destroy the country’s golf courses with a piece of secret military technology that instantly divots acres of pristine greens from low-earth orbit.

Unfortunately, Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel was not the critical and commercial darling I hoped it would be. Reviewers savaged it. One called it a “masturbatory doofus fantasia.” Another had the headline “Hole In One” but the art on the article was a picture of a toilet. The New York Times didn’t even review it, not even a capsule. It was my first book not to make it onto the bestseller list after I had easily done it with Speaking Franch: Dennis Franchione In His Own Words and even Of Weis and Men: Charlie Weis on Leadership on the Gridiron and the Boardroom. My publishers told me in no uncertain terms that Clark Craggler would not return for the sequel Charlatan-in-Jail. If I ever wanted to make money writing again, I’d have to start interviewing sports people again.

It was a soggy, muggy summer day in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pulled up to the elaborate practice facility and a public relations person took me over to Matt Rhule’s office. When I walked in, there was no one in his chair, so I said “Coach Rhule?” He popped up from behind a massive desk and whipped a little foam football-shaped stress ball at my face.

“Think fast!” Rhule yelled as it knocked my glasses askew and nearly made me drop my pen. I looked up, confused and vaguely dazed.

“That’s a Matt Rule,” the coach said. “Number thirteen. If you can’t think fast, you’ll be slow, in life.” He sat down and put his hands behind his head. “That’s the book right there. Matt Rhules. Branding. Writes itself. Have a seat.”

The PR assistant pulled down a screen and started fussing with a computer and then I saw the presentation come up: The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life.

“The Matt Rhules System. We provide these rules and then some examples from my life or from Nebraska football and how they apply to people’s lives. For example, Matt Rhule: Protect Your Quarterback.” The presentation showed a picture of an offensive tackle pancaking a blitzing linebacker. “In football terms, it’s the most important part of the passing game. But people have people in their lives around them that are important. Their 'quarterbacks' if you will.  And you need to stop them from getting blitzed by Issues.”

The next slide clicked over to a black and white picture of Coach Rhule pointing aggressively. “Matt Rhule: Don’t let your mouth cash checks your body can’t cash.”

“You get it, right? We’re going to do a whole book with these Matt Rhules. It’s branded content. That's where the money is.” He handed me a tote bag that has “Matt Rhules” spelled out in training tape stuck to it. “These are just a prototype. Once we get published and up and running, we’ll have it all: shirts, bags, fuck even diapers. Matt Rhule: Don’t shit on me.” He looked at me as I stared at him, bewildered. “That’s a joke. That’s a fake Matt Rhule.”

“Well, that's the pitch,” he said. “I’ve got some rules. You’ve got to tie them together. Get them from football to apply to people’s lives or whatever. Publisher said you do this stuff all the time.”

I tried hard to hide how aghast I was at this comparison. Sure there were some superficial similarities to this and James Dolan: Six Chords to Success but those ignored the obvious literary merit of that project where I explored the craft of songwriting and owning one's one fleet of helicopters. But then I remembered that I had a time share payment and a lease on a Sea-Doo that I purchased from David Cone, so I swallowed my pride. “Yes. I work with famous sports personalities and help put their vision on the page.”

“Perfect,” he said, clapping his hands. “We all have our talents. Here’s a Matt Rhule: From Each According to His Ability, To Each According To His Means.”

“Isn’t that Karl Marx?” I said.

“Then fix it up and make it a Matt Rhule. It's not that hard.” He handed me a thumb drive. "Get started and I’ll see you in a week.”

I drove off into the rain to my Lincoln hotel. It looked like I would be here for awhile.

The thumb drive contained the presentation I just saw (Rhule referred to it as a “deck” for some reason) and a nearly inscrutable word document containing various Matt Rhules or at least jumbles of phrases that I was supposed to shape into coherent Matt Rhules. The rest of the files were various samples of logos and an MP3 of a Matt Rhule theme song that he had made himself, affecting a sort of James Dolanish growl-croon.

Several of the files contained short videos of Rhule whipping his head around to stare at the camera. “Matt Rhule,” he says in one of them. “Give it your all or give it up.” Then there is a short guitar riff as he nods at the camera. That one was not included in the text list. I start to divide them between Canonical Matt Rhules and Supplemental Matt Rhules.

Day two. I woke up in my Lincoln hotel and for several brief seconds I had no idea what I was doing there (I had dreamed that was giving a talk about my new novel to a large panel except in the dream it was called Air Fraud One: A Harold Chuck Novel and it was about how the president was somehow concealing being a bear from the public and was going to eat too many salmon. I was laying into a person who I immediately understood as being my sworn literary nemesis by I think also accusing him of being secretly a bear when the nature of my trip to Lincoln came into depressing focus.

For hours I stared at the Matt Rhules until the bleakness of my job overwhelmed me. I could not for the life of me come up with new Matt Rules, and it was nearly impossible to write stories based on the ones he had. “Matt Rhule: Always try to win, in football and in business.” Instead, I started daydreaming where instead of Matt Rhule winning on the football field, it was Clark Craggler defiantly laying out the president’s Golf Crimes to a congressional subcommittee. That was what winning looked like in life and in literature. But Craggler had been crushed, much like how the Carolina Panthers were crushed by the San Francisco 49ers resulting in Rhule’s ouster from the NFL.

I could not sleep at night and I decided to find something to eat. I got in my car and began aimlessly driving around. Soon, I had left Lincoln altogether. Something compelled me to keep moving. I drove for hours and hours. There was no radio, no music, nothing but the sound of the car and the road and the sight of my haunted eyes in the reflection of the windows,

The sun rose. I found myself at the outskirts of a park, a federal wilderness area. I left my car and hiked for hours, deeper and deeper into an unmarked wilderness. Finally, exhausted, I stopped and opened my backpack. There it was. Wrapped in some foil, the last of my iboga root that I had bought on a retreat from what I was told would be a shaman but turned out to be a man named Daryl who I later learned was on the run from the FBI for a crime described to me as “dojo fraud.” I prepared the powder and ate a few starburst that were in there as well.

The forest floor dropped from under me and I began to float through a miasma of consciousness, not just mine but the very concept of human consciousness. It is very difficult for me to describe in words what happened to me on this journey but I entered a mental plane beyond sanity and beyond the bonds of this physical world and, just as I thought I would never return and be forced to float forever in a cosmic goo, I remembered the Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: I am bound by the laws of the corporeal. I awoke days later from my psychadelic odyssey. My legs ached as if I had walked for miles, but I had not moved from that spot. I gingerly made my way back to the car and drove back toward Lincoln, stopping only to record any  thoughts on the Matt Rhules that materialized in the shimmers of empty highway. It had come to me out there in the wilderness– the Matt Rhules were not a simple marketing gimmick for a football coach, but this goateed oaf had somehow stumbled onto the central organizing principle of life itself.

I arrived back at the hotel. It was no longer enough to think of myself as a literary superstar, but I was now a sort of holy man, a person put on earth to explain the precepts of the Matt Rhules. For the rest of the week, I fell into a feverish trance as I made elaborate notes, wrote hundreds of pages, and added compendia and appendices to the original Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: Do not try to “fold” space time into a single locus, instead try to “layer” it. Matt Rhule: My brain is merely a vessel for cosmic static. Matt Rhule: Organization and preparation will score a “touchdown” for the football team or for your small business.

At last, I felt I had something to present to the Coach. I piled up my manuscript, which I had moved from the computer to a series of coffee filters loosely stapled to together in pleasing geometric patterns and put on my “Rhunic,” a tunic fashioned from hotel bedsheets and left for the practice facility. No one wanted to let me in when I told them I had urgent business to disseminate the teachings of Coach Rhule to the wider cosmos but then when I reminded them I was the book guy they finally let me in.

“Coach,” I said. “I have sat in the forest. I have opened my forehead. I have let the Rhules seep into my primary consciousness and beyond-thought. I am ready to accept them. I am ready to adopt them. I am ready to show people how to apply them on the football field and in the boardroom.” I dropped my coffee filter manifesto on his desk.

“What the heck are you talking about?” Rhule said as he turned to me (he was looking at emails during most of my speech). “Oh that Matt Rhules thing. Yeah, I thought about it and it seems kind of cheesy. Kind of obvious, you know?”

“Hey, you know what I was thinking now would be really cool? Instead of a book telling people what to do, what if it was a novel where I caught the commissioner of the NFL cheating at golf? The Commissioner of Lies, how about that? A Mack Racker novel. You ever think about writing something like that?”