Boo Buie Makes It Happen

The last time Northwestern’s men’s basketball team tried to follow up its greatest season of all time, they were not able to get back into the tournament. They weren’t able to conjure up the small miracles they needed year before to get them to the school’s first NCAA Tournament and they were unable to call upon the crowd that had materialized out of nowhere to turn Welsh-Ryan into an actual home court for the first time in recent memory while trying to do so in a windswept 20,000 seat stadium they had to share with the monster truck Grave Digger. They also did not have Boo Buie.

Boo Buie will play the last college basketball games of his life in this tournament. Although the NCAA has relinquished virtually all of its ability to regulate anything in college sports, the one rule they seem to agree on is that Boo Buie cannot stay at Northwestern pursuing multiple PhD degrees and publishing several insightful monographs that are critiqued only by his academic rival, a fifteenth-year senior at Michigan State whom he both crossed up and also neglected to cite in a paper presented on a panel where the Spartan served as the chair. He’s out of senior years. 

In the last two years, Boo Buie has emerged as Northwestern's greatest player. He is not the first player to take the program to the tournament, but he has done something far more impressive at Northwestern which is to make playing in the tournament seem almost normal.

Northwestern has had some excellent players come through, but they always seemed like heroic Sisyphus disciples. During the Bill Carmody era, Northwestern appeared to be playing a different sport from the rest of the Big Ten as he shifted recruiting efforts to overseas and sent the Wildcats out there in novel offensive and defensive configurations as a concession that he would not beat conference teams playing normal basketball and instead had lured them into a diabolical house of mirrors where they would have to watch a bunch of goggle guys gradually back cut them after 33 seconds. Personally, I loved that.  Northwestern basketball was at its nadir and the only rational solution was to play some exotic, janky, rec-spec basketball. I was crushed that America never got an opportunity to fall in love with John Shurna's deadly but goofy-ass jumper for a few hours in March and disappointed that Northwestern's administration never took my advice to simply claim an NIT title like a False Dmitri because no one would ever both to check.

A portrait of the False Dmitri, a man who claimed to be the son of Ivan The Terrible in the early seventeenth century and succeeded in briefly becoming Tsar, which led to a succession of other people also claiming to be Dmitri with decreasingly successful results.  The fourth False Dmitri does not have a Wikipedia page; "some argue that False Dmitry IV is just False Dmitry III due to bad record keeping," Wikipedia says.

It probably would be surprising even two years ago for a Northwestern fan to predict the growing Cult of Boo Buie. Buie arrived as a fascinating but flawed player, one capable of scoring outbursts used mainly to turn Tom Izzo the color of a chuck roast once or twice a year, but also by throwing ill-considered passes or dribbling into situations where he would find himself hopelessly in over his head like the basketball equivalent of a Coen Brothers guy. He was the type of basketball player that probably would be infuriating except in the zero-stakes world of Northwestern basketball it was endearing just because he was willing to just go out there and try shit.  I have absolutely no idea what happened last season, but all of a sudden he kept doing spectacular things. stopped making mistakes, and became one of college basketball’s most reliable floor generals.

Buie has done things I’ve never seen a Northwestern player do before. For the first time I can remember, Northwestern has a player that scares opposing fanbases. It is very rare that other teams’ fans can even name a Northwestern player, but anyone who shares my twisted curiosity for reading the most bottom of the barrel drivel a person can find from opponents’ most deranged and borderline dark web message boards knows that they know who Buie is, they do not like him, and they are wondering why he has been in college for what they estimate as 17 consecutive years. 

Buie has been a key part of making basketball games an event. Welsh-Ryan has become a home court.  Anyone who has ever attended or even watched a game on TV knows that since time immemorial, opposing fans would swarm the arena and make a big ruckus and the only consolation was that the old Welsh-Ryan was such a dilapidated barn that they would have to go home aching with bleacher back and scoreboard dot eyes. The arena largely existed as a place for Indiana fans living in the Chicago area to leave angry Yelp reviews.  

While it has always been a tall task to find more than 30,000 people willing to cheer for Northwestern's football team in its home stadium regardless of its success, it is considerably easier to find 5,000 people who have emerged like 75-year cicadas to root for a team that is actually winning games. Northwestern only lost one Big Ten game at Welsh-Ryan all season. They beat a top-ten rated Illinois team at home, and no one even rushed the court.  Pat Ryan may have paid for the lavishly renovated new arena but Boo Buie owns it.

It might not be fair to his teammates to ascribe Northwestern’s success to Buie alone, but it’s impossible to ignore his presence. He almost never leaves the court. He orchestrates nearly every possession. Every Northwestern set starts with Buie at the top of the key scanning the defense as the rest of the team offers him a menu of picks that he can use to find an open teammate or get a weaker defender switched on him so he can barbecue him with a crossover and his signature floater or casually launch a 27 foot jumper. He is constantly directing other players on offense and defense; in situations when an opposing player has a trademark shot celebration where he acts like he is a delighted Price is Right audience member whose name has been called by Rod Roddy, he is apparently in charge of leading his teammates to make fun of that. When the game is on the line, everyone watching the game knows the ball is going to Buie, and he’s made a shocking number of do-or-die shots against top teams in the biggest games. 

It's almost March! Boo Buie’s game winner lifted Northwestern over No. 14 Indiana 64-62. “More people need to wake up. This isn’t luck. It can’t be luck at this point,” said Buie after the win. Wildcats have sole posession of second place in the Big Ten standings behind Purdue pic.twitter.com/jna9qSc2NO

— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) February 16, 2023

Indiana fans were apparently whining that this move was a push-off to which I tell them to call Bryon Russell about it. Crying about uncalled fouls is ridiculous unless of course the referees ignore an egregious goaltending situation in which case you are not complaining about basketball on the internet but rectifying a Grave Injustice

Buie and the Wildcats have a difficult task ahead of them. They are matched up against Florida Atlantic, which is also a tough, veteran team that returns largely intact from a miracle run to last year’s final four. At the same time, the FAU team seems to be a little bit more inconsistent this season, and I have heard grumblings about their seeding, which is still a very funny bit to a person who has almost no experience rooting for a team in the tournament-- it is impossible for me to see someone complaining about seeding and not hear them yelling "my seeds!" in the same voice Tom Hardy uses The Revenant to talk about his pelts. The Wildcats have been playing some strong defense and if the officials let them do a little bit of shoving and if Brooks Barnhizer and Ryan Langborg get hot from three, they can give anyone an unpleasant afternoon.

Unfortunately, Northwestern is not sending the best version of its team against FAU. The Wildcats literally limped to the end of the season. Two senior starters went down with injuries on a squad that already leaned heavily on its upperclassman-heavy starting lineup. With a fully healthy team, Northwestern looked dangerous enough to me that I could envision a Sweet 16 run. Instead, players in various configurations of casts and scooters were forced to spend the last few weeks of the season watching the Wildcats drop a Big Ten home game, lose on the road to a Michigan State team that they had beaten so badly at Welsh-Ryan that it caused Tom Izzo to uncork an embarrassing podium-thumping jeremiad against whatever he thinks analytics is, and make a quick exit from the Big Ten Tournament.

Izzo, posed like an elderly relative forced into having a pandemic-era zoom birthday party, unleashes his screed about analytics.  One example of an analytic is that at that point, Izzo had lost four out of five of his last games against Northwestern

If the Wildcats manage to beat FAU, they will have their work cut out for them. For some reason, Northwestern was drawn into what I’ve seen described as a very difficult bracket quadrant; if it’s not a Region of Death, it’s at the very least a Region of Gastric Distress. The defending-champion UConn Huskies are lurking for whoever manages to win on Friday; last year’s runner-up San Diego State is also in the bracket and so is an Illinois team desperate to avoid another early tournament exit which always feature slow motion shots of a spittle-flecked Brad Underwood damply screaming like he is engaged in some sort of molting phase and will emerge in the second half with wings, extra legs, and an even stupider haircut.

The expectations for Northwestern in this tournament remain low. No one expects them to win more than one game. But the Wildcats have a purpose beyond basketball: for Boo Buie to keep playing one more game in a Northwestern uniform.