Duck Off

Northwestern looked so lousy in the opening game of the season against Tulane that it seemed that the ‘Cats could struggle against FCS jobber Western Illinois in the home opener on The Lake. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that they could even lose, although you would like to think that even the lowest tier of Big Ten team could easily handle Western Illinois in front of a home crowd of several dozen Northwestern fans and the occasional windsurfer jauntily passing by the stadium. And they did. Northwestern bulldozed their less north and further western neighbors to a 42-7 drubbing and while I am skeptical that this tells us anything other than the difference in the type of athlete that even Northwestern can recruit over their FCS counterparts, I am also making the extremely brave and controversial assertion that it still fun to see them get a buttkicking win before getting fed into the Big Ten woodchipper.

Quarterback Preston Stone recovered from his tough first outing with a much better game with no turnovers and three touchdowns as he and receiver Griffin Wilde (pronounced more like Wildebeest than Wild) torched the Western secondary. Stone needed a little luck to avoid some turnovers– his first pass clipped through a defender’s hands like he was a character in a CD ROM football game before settling into Wilde’s mitts, and he also had a fumble bounce directly back into his hands with the practiced precision of an Australian football player– but he looked closer to the player that we saw in highlight reels from his first three years at SMU.

The highlight of the game for me was in the fourth quarter with the ‘Cats already up 35-0 when backup quarterback Ryan Boe ran the ball and stiff-armed a defender into orbit around Pluto en route to a glorious 58-yard touchdown run in garbage time. In a year that certainly looks like tough sledding for the Wildcats, I will take any play that results in a defensive player all but holding up a Wile E. Coyote sign before getting stiff-armed into oblivion.

Boe makes someone yell "B'oh!"

Unfortunately, the game had one disastrous outcome for Northwestern. Cam Porter, the steady sixth-year captain, injured his knee and will miss the rest of the season. Porter already recovered from a devastating knee injury once and has been a reliable presence in the backfield and on the sidelines since he first entered the program in 2020. With all of his accrued seasons, it is possible that Porter is the most Northwestern player, having played an unfathomable amount of Northwestern football. He’s also been a player that every teammate and coach has raved about, and it is crushing that the injury will likely end his tenure-track career in Evanston unless he is able to successfully apply for a medical redshirt and return for a seventh year by convincing the NCAA that it would be “a great bit.” 

I'm glad Northwestern got to wipe out an opponent in the home opener because the schedule makers have decided to make Northwestern go from blowing out an FCS team to having to face a rabid brontosaurus. Number four Oregon shows up as a profoundly unwanted guest this week.

DUCK SEASON 

Oregon comes to The Lake on Saturday after vaporizing both teams on its schedule. Last week they clobbered Oklahoma State and its coach, the physical manifestation of the Wilson volleyball from Castaway, 69-3. No one expects this to be a competitive game even after the Wildcats diced up the Western Illinois Leathernecks. Like every game Northwestern has to play against one of the terrifying title contenders in the conference, the goal here is not necessarily to win but to annoy and disgust the opponent with a display of what can best be described as Northwestern-style football. The 'Cats, for example, held national champion Ohio State to a 7-0 deficit for a decent part of the first half last season and though the game very quickly turned in the way that you would expect it to go, we at least got to luxuriate in 40,000 sour-faced Ohio State fans glowering and looking to comfort from the guy who puts on silver body paint as they furiously turned to their phones to see if it was legal for Northwestern to repeatedly throw complete passes for nearly an entire half hour.  David Braun, the Maestro of Embarrassing Field Goals, is likely itching to send out his kicking unit down 30 points in the fourth quarter.

The thing to me that is most interesting about this game is what the atmosphere will be like. This is the first time one of the new west coast teams will travel to Evanston and I believe that Oregon is one of the only Big Ten teams where there are fewer alumni and fans of a team living in the Chicago area than people affiliated with Northwestern. Because of the novelty of the setting, because Oregon is really good, and because I suspect some season ticket holders are more eager to turn a tidy profit than watch the team picked up and carried back and forth across the field for four hours, I suspect Oregon fans will still have an overwhelming presence at the game, but there will probably be more of them that had to get on an airplane to get here instead of a Metra train.

This is also Fox’s Big Noon Game that will be nationally televised for some reason and involve Fox and its studio crew of noxious, yelping morons posting up at the lakeside stadium.  Gus Johnson is on the call and I presume that he has covered himself in Memento-style tattoos that say “Northwestern is not Wisconsin” after his embarrassing gaffe in the 2018 Big Ten Championship Game that I constantly bring up because it is one of the rare times Northwestern football was nationally prominent for something other than Allegations, Lawsuits, or Uniform Disrespect.  As I am writing this, Urban Meyer is loose and unaccounted for in the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area, and it is possible he has deactivated his tracking device and Fox Sports personnel have been urgently dispatched to the area's most depressing suburban steak houses. 

I still can't get over the scandal that Urban Meyer allegedly kicked the Jaguars' kicker like he is doling out an evil ironic punishment like a direct-to-video horror movie villain.

Oregon apparently has an enormous floating duck that it occasionally deploys, and there have been calls for it to appear on the lake during this game. I think it is a reasonable response that Northwestern fans immediately form into a Waterworld-style jetski gang to take that thing down as a warning to other teams with inflatables and also to P.J. Fleck.

 

September 2025, Oregon is now master of the Big Ten. Only the Northwestern Armada fleet stands before them- Lakes are now battlefields.

College football is goofy and unpredictable, but defeating this Oregon team seems like a nearly impossible task-- a win against Oregon would be the largest upset in the modern history of the program or at least second to the Wildcats' win over Any Football Team in 1982. The Ducks will be competing for the national championship while Northwestern looks like their goal will be winning a Big Ten game. 

Oregon has not been in the Big Ten long enough to annoy me. In fact, Oregon has never beaten Northwestern as the 'Cats hold a 1-0 record over them from a 14-10 road victory in 1974.  While I am sure that I will eventually grow disgusted with the Ducks after being exposed to them long enough, I would rather have them win over any other traditional Big Ten power whose harrumphing, gloating fans have infected Ryan Field since I have been going to games.

If somehow Northwestern by some minor miracle manages to win this game, I will write and release a single called “Body Clocks” on the most appropriate label.

THE CHICAGO BULLS DROP THE GIDDEY BOMB

Tuesday was a rough day for Chicago sports fans who had waited all offseason to watch their supposed offensive genius head coach and highly-touted second year quarterback only to instantly be reminded that they root for the Chicago Bears and will have to endure what looks like another season of grim Bears-style football.  That was the day that, with the sports radio lines clogged with men choking on the wettest beefs legally available while furiously calling for Tyson Bagent, the Chicago Bulls announced to an already deflated and miserable fanbase that they will have to put up with Josh Giddey for four years.

Giddey, a 22 year-old Australian who is already entering his 4th year in the NBA, had been in a standoff with the Bulls all summer.  The Bulls traded for him by sending beloved superstar role player Alex Caruso, a brilliant defensive menace, to the Okalahoma City Thunder straight up without even getting a token draft pick.  Caruso instantly became a key part of the Thunder's championship team while the Bulls were once again 86'd from the play-in tournament the Miami Heat as is their custom, this time by a profoundly crappy and injured Heat team that had not beaten the Bulls all season.  

Giddey reportedly demanded starting point guard money but as a restricted free agent in a league where no one had cap space and also have access to numbers that say that he is not particularly good that apparently elude the Bulls' analytics department that I think is just one guy playing spider solitaire who occasionally sends the front office one of those fake spread sheets generated by the Boss Button on the NCAA tournament streaming website, so he had little leverage. The result was the exact deal that everyone expected the Bulls to give him for months but arrived at only after his team and the Bulls exchanged vaguely hostile emails for three months.

Giddey is a weird player.  He is very big for a point guard at 6'8" and he is an excellent rebounder and passer who routinely flirts with triple doubles and puts up combinations of stats that allow the Bulls broadcast to put up graphics that say things like "the only people who have ever scored 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 16 assists twice in a calendar month under the age of 22 are Earvin 'Magic' Johnson and  Josh Giddey" even if he put up those numbers in a depressing loss to the Charlotte Hornets. He largely steers a fun, uptempo style of play installed by Billy Donovan after the Bulls ran out of NBA-caliber defensive players last season and is responsible for one of the greatest Stacey King calls since Andres Nocioni dunked on a backup center and he started screaming "GET OUT OF THE WAY FAMILY GUY" because of the center's oblong-shaped head reminded him of the baby character.

On the other hand, Giddey despite his size is an abominable defender, a lackluster shooter, and an oafish dribbler who is constantly giving the ball to the opponents. He is also not particularly athletic for an NBA player; he moves like he is a recently-enchanted broom from the movie Fantasia.  His game is pretty much the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art NBA star in 2025, and it's possible that what he can't do is much worse for a team than his box score stuffing contributions.  You can read from actual Basketball Knowers about Giddey rather than taking my word for it; I couldn't even watch Giddey's disastrous first half of the season because the Bulls played on a channel that I needed to buy an antenna to watch and now shows nothing but low-rent MMA events that look like montages in one of the several dozen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies where he enters an underground fighting tournament.

The Bulls had a star for years with obvious shortcomings in his game that fans and the general NBA world fixated on in Zach LaVine, but LaVine was better at the much more important skill of scoring than Giddey is at anything, and the Bulls were barely able to give him away because of his crummy defense and mediocre playmaking.  I don't expect that the Bulls will do much better with Giddey as the focal point.

There are a couple of troublesome aspects of the Giddey contract in the broader strategic sense.  One of them comes from the annoying metagame involving the Bulls salary cap.  Giddey, whose four-year $100 million deal is fairly modest for a starting point guard, is still making a few million dollars more per year than the Bulls could have perhaps gotten away with if they had really pressured him.  I don't want to care about how much money players make nor root for front offices to squeeze them, but in a salary cap league where individual payments are apparently so important that there are very popular and influential podcasts where guys just list off how much money everyone makes for hours every day like a bizarre numbers station, it is true that any dollar Giddey makes theoretically takes away the Bulls' flexibility to bring in better players to put around him-- this is of course assuming that bringing in good players was the goal of the Bulls instead of Arturas Karnisovas doing a weird avant-garde art project with a basketball roster to prove a point that eludes me.

I am also very sorry to bring up Giddey's effect on the the profoundly depressing metagame of tanking.  Giddey and the style the Bulls play with him is probably good enough for them to win enough regular season games to take them out of the running for what analysts say is a draft laden with potential stars near the top.  That doesn't mean they will have no shot at drafting a Rowdy Boozer Son-- assuming the Bulls have another season hovering around the desolate environs of the Eastern Conference play-in tournament race, they could still jump up in the draft order.  The Bulls were apparently a coin flip with the Mavericks away from landing prized Duke freshman Cooper Flagg; the state of the Chicago Bulls is such that they are even getting their asses kicked by coin flips.  I personally hate tanking and find the idea of wasting everyone's time trying to intentionally lose a disgusting pursuit, but it pains me to admit that it is also the most viable way to land a superstar unless you are the fucking Los Angeles Lakers.

The fact that Giddey is merely a flawed basketball player who won't make the Bulls better than mediocre is not something that really bothers me since that is basically every basketball player the Bulls roster. Even as the Bulls have been a largely crummy and enervating to watch the last few years, the players on the team seemed to be good guys who liked each other and had fun playing uninspiring basketball. Giddey, who came to the Bulls under a cloud of gross allegations, is not someone I particularly want to root for, and it's a bummer to have my favorite team chained to him for four years.  Fortunately, the Bulls are going to vanish from my TV unless I pay an exorbitant amount of money to watch Jerry Reinsdorf's horrible sports teams, so perhaps the Josh Giddey Bulls will no longer be my problem.

Worst Dressed

There is not much to say about Northwestern’s opening game against Tulane other than they got their butts kicked very badly and it stunk. The Green Wave won 23-3 and it could have been worse than that. Maybe only General Edward Parkenham can claim to have had more unpleasant days in New Orleans.

The Northwestern offense, which even in good years merely exists to distastefully score points because it is not technically legal to win a college football game by a contest of sprinting into an opposing running back the most, did not impress in the debut of new transfer quarterback Preston Stone. Stone threw four interceptions and lost a ball after getting sacked– the Wildcats were only able to successfully run one of their first three plays without turning the ball over which sounds grim but if you look at the totality of the game the Wildcats managed to run a play without giving up the ball about 92% of the time.

The ‘Cats did manage one decent drive down inside the five yardline, but they elected to kick a field goal. Strategically I suppose there is nothing wrong with getting some points to narrow the score to 7-3 in the first quarter; on the other hand, based on how Northwestern’s offense has performed for the last decade, I would like to see them throw caution to the wind instead of assuming that they will just drive down the field again when most Wildcat possessions resemble a Labor of Hercules. David Braun is the Maestro of Cowardly Field Goal Attempts, and next time they get to a fourth down inside the five the crowd should clap politely as Braun enters the field of play in a tailed tuxedo, takes out a baton, and then cues the field goal unit with the wild élan of the great Leonard Bernstein to rapturous ovations.

Critics say Braun's interpretation of "Sending In the Punt Team" is "too American." 

The game would have been miserable to watch, but fortunately due to the Big Ten’s media deal that scatters games across networks and streaming services with the reckless abandon of an eighteenth century French Marquess tossing coins from his carriage while focusing entirely on how he plans to destroy his rival by making several subtle yet cutting remarks about inability to align his wig correctly, I was unable to get this game on TV. It was just me, WGN Radio's “Mr. Cat” Dave Eanet, and various household tasks punctuated by a regular drumbeat of interceptions.

Tulane is an excellent team with ambitions to claim a playoff spot out of the American Conference and Northwestern is at best the second-worst team in the Big Ten. But the game dealt a dispiriting blow to anyone hoping to see the Wildcats pushing for a bowl berth or even being able to stay on the field against lesser Big Ten opponents. The only heartening thing left to believe is that Northwestern came out similarly flat against Rutgers in the 2023 opener that was scheduled as part of a “You’ll Even Watch This Slop” Opening Weekend. The ‘Cats were towed around the field in that game too, and their performance along with the looming stench of scandal made it seem like the football program would simply be packed up in a truck and left in a warehouse and if anyone showed up to the stadium to watch a game there’d just be a guy there shouting back to some people in the back “Football? Hey anyone remember at football team here? Oh? Those guys? Oh, yeah. He said they left.” Instead, they managed to win seven games, crush the Badgers in Madison, and win a bowl game. 

The game could have been a normal low-key Northwestern butt-stomping, but all of the attention after the game had nothing to do with anything that happened on the field but with the jerseys the teams were wearing. After his Green Wave had finished mopping up the Wildcats, Tulane coach Jon Sumrall said that Northwestern had denied their request to wear white jerseys, which were the jerseys Tulane had worn in their first game after Hurricane Katrina had displaced them from their home stadium 20 years earlier. Northwestern claims they only received the request on August 17th and did not have time to change their uniforms without saying whether or not they were willing to. “When you show disrespect to the city of New Orleans, that’s what’s going to happen to you,” Sumrall said of the sartorial dustup. 

It seems reasonable to ask why Northwestern would not simply do what they could to accommodate this request and why it would even be a question but the I believe that the answer runs into extremely stupid Football Logic about the questionable strategic benefit of wearing white in hot, humid weather. Northwestern likely wanted to aid its plodding, snow-conditioned players any way they can to cope with the Louisiana heat; I have been told it is illegal for linebackers on the field to fan themselves like it is an early twentieth century courtroom drama. Perhaps Northwestern’s coaches felt like Sumrall was himself cynically chasing this advantage with his request; more likely, they underestimated or did not care about the importance of Tulane’s white uniforms as a symbol of New Orleans’s resilience in the aftermath of the hurricane.

What seemed to happen by my own reading of events as some guy who has no inside information or insight into how the team operates is that whoever made the uniform decisions really valued the infinitesimal perceived cooling power of white uniforms over the risk of looking like giant assholes. While I understand why Sumrall was upset about the uniforms, I do think it was unfair of him to not mention that the Wildcats made up for it by charitably handing the ball to Tulane players repeatedly.

Northwestern has upgraded its uniform debacles to Insensitive from Depicting What Appears To Be The Aftermath of a Massacre Perpetrated by a Public Domain Captain America 

After dealing with dozens of lawsuits from players and firing a coach and then getting sued by him and also the offensive coordinator (I am unaware of the results of the Mike Bajakian lawsuit, but if it ends anything like the Fitzgerald suit, the university will be forced to put out a press release with then-athletic director Derrick Gragg officially apologizing for disparaging his "Cats Against The World" t-shirt), it seems like the Northwestern football program is only in the news when doing something dumb or embarrassing. As a fan, I would very much like to support a team that has normal college football scandals and am willing to throw myself at the mercy of the NCAA by illegally buying a football player a burrito. That's the kind of thing Northwestern should be about instead of seeing headlines like "Wildcats Coach: No Disrespect Meant To Tulane."

The Wildcats get a chance to get back on track with their home opener at The Lake against Western Illinois. The Leathernecks are an FCS squad and the hope is that Northwestern will easily defeat them, Stone can gain some confidence, and the team will not get into a feud with them over the jersey selection. I would have thought these teams would have played a bunch of times dating back to the early years of the twentieth century, but they've only played once, a 24-7 Northwestern victory that happened in 2014. That's not the sepia toned history I was hoping for-- in fact I was at that game and have just now remembered that it was the game where Pat Fitzgerald called three successive timeouts at the end of the first half to successfully ice the Western kicker, which I remember that because I know that I badly photoshopped a picture of Fitzgerald's face onto Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Mr. Freeze. I wrote all of that without even looking at the post even though a few weeks ago I went for a bike ride for several hours and left all of my keys just hanging out in the lock on the front door.

These FCS games are never that fun. Even if they win fairly comfortably, there's usually a nagging feeling that they should be winning by more. Only a win so convincing that the Western Illinois coach takes the team and leaves at halftime only leaving a note that this isn't fun anymore is satisfying. There is also the risk that they could actually lose. Northwestern has two losses to FCS teams on its XBOX Achievement page and crazy stuff happens in football-- the 2016 team that went 5-4 in the Big Ten and beat Pittsburgh in a bowl game lost to Illinois State on a last-second field goal after being held to seven points. There is nothing worse than a team losing to a designated jobber opponent after paying them millions just to show up unless this happens to another Big Ten team in which case it is extremely funny.

AT LEAST WE ALL GOT TO SEE BILL BELICHICK EAT SHIT

College football is a huge business and commands tens of millions of eyeballs, but for ESPN and college football media that is not enough and there is nothing more exciting for them than when a famous NFL Guy deigns to return to the college ranks. For many years, that person was Deion Sanders, the brash, larger than life NFL superstar who loves the spotlight and used an entire college football program as a vehicle to launch his sons' NFL careers. Though Deion has somewhat unexpectedly stuck around at Colorado even after his son Shedeur went pro through a process that turned ESPN's draft guru Mel Kiper, Jr. into the Joker on national television, ESPN has been laser focused on a new coach, Patriots mastermind Bill Belichick.

Belichick has the opposite media profile from Sanders. He spent his decades in New England glowering on the sidelines, disdainfully giving curt, contemptuous answers to the press, and acted like he would prefer to call games from a cave where he could be alone with his special teams film from 1971. He has no charisma. And yet, because the Patriots won championships with a joyless factory-like efficiency throughout this 2000s, he has become extremely famous. Belichick could have retreated back to Nantucket to enjoy his riches away from the spotlight but unfortunately his legendary quarterback left, his post-Brady Patriots teams plummeted in the standings, he got essentially fired by the team owner who he was also feuding with, and he could not get another NFL job because the 2020s version of Bill Belichick who has locked himself in a football bubble and will only hire the sycophants and flunkies whose football knowledge is sealed in amber around the year 2008 or his own very upsetting sons is not really up for coaching anymore, and this clearly has made him go insane and desperately try to chase the high of being thought of as a mastermind and genius again. Belichick, out of ideas, went back to school.

Belichick arrived to enormous fanfare at the University of North Carolina over the summer but with an uncharacteristic media circus. That is because Belichick also has new developments in his personal life as he is dating a much younger lady who is also taking a prominent position promoting his personal brand. That relationship came to prominence while Belichik was simultaneously installing himself at the head of UNC Football and promoting one of those bullshit "Winning Winners Who Win The Winning Ways in Football... And In Business" books that old coaches publish and then talk about in depressing mandatory corporate conferences where they are paid more money for a 90 minute talk comparing business-to-business sales to scoring touchdowns than you and I will make for a decade.  His appearances with Jordon Hudson that involved her yelling at a reporter doing a fluff piece for CBS News, a multipart investigation by Pablo Torre about Hudson and her role at UNC that raised questions of whether she was technically banned from the facilities and also for some reason revealed the location of the rental house where Belichick was caught shambling shirtlessly from by a doorbell camera, made this a major sports story over the summer. 

Torre tried to emphasize the less tawdry parts of the story, emphasizing that Belichick is now an employee of the state of North Carolina, but I think most people can admit that Belichick was in the news because of the prurient tabloid interest in the gruffest, most joyless man in the NFL swanning around with a lady young enough to be his granddaughter who is trying to launch a media branding career centering on a miserable sweatshirt-ogre who is only willing to talk publicly about obscure punting rules. I've personally made fun of this whole thing obliquely and directly in a post that contains the two grossest sentences I've ever shared publicly and therefore haven't really posted about much because I am afraid people will yell at me.

But the other dimension of the story that came to a head Monday night was that Belichick, after all of the stories and the attention, would have to coach a football game. Belichick, the great NFL Mastermind was coming to show college teams how the football is played along with his most unemployable henchmen and an unknown number of his grim, post-apocalyptic sons, and when ESPN put UNC on national television on Monday night of a holiday weekend the Tarheels got absolutely smoked by TCU. It was not only very funny but also one of the best online sports events we've had in awhile as the entire internet together to celebrate watching some nasty geriatric dickhead completely annihilated in one of the few endeavors we have left where nasty geriatric dickheads can't simply lie and say "actually we won the game and in fact won it very strongly."  

LOOKING WESTWARD 

The 'Cats will need to get their act together against Western Illinois because #6 Oregon comes to The Lake the next week, and things do not get much easier after that.  While Northwestern has already started off the season on the worst possible footing, the only shred of hope is that there is a whole season still ahead of them with opportunities to improve, to possibly shock an opponent, and to also hastily apologize to someone else.  

Winning the Argument

One of the defining features of the early 2000s that went hand in hand with the increasing spread of the internet was a clear dichotomy between old-fashioned "dumb" and new-fangled, stats-inflected "smart" sports opinions.  This manifested itself most clearly in baseball, where an emerging vanguard of stats-focused fans and analysts got a stronger foothold into the mainstream with game-changing revelations like “it is bad to make outs for no reason.” It helped that the opponents were a true rogue’s gallery of oafs and dunderheads: baseball lifers marinated in a cocoon of tobacco juice, mummified local announcers telling decades-old Mickey Mantle anecdotes, and newspaper columnists (there were still locally well-known newspaper columnists) who were photographed grimacing over typewriters and churning out sentence-paragraphs about how there’s only one stat that matters and it’s Heart. 

Their argument was based on That's How It's Always Been Done, This Smacks of Math That Belongs in a Mother's Basement, and That's Not How The Mick Would Have Done It even though I have conclusively proven in this blog over the years that the existence of a ballplayer named "Mickey Mantle" was invented by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal as a CIA psy-op on Baby Boomers in 1988. Despite the fact that these people controlled 90% of the narrative in the game and had most of the airtime, they were, to anyone remotely capable of listening to reason, buffoons.

Eventually the rational argument won out. Stats guys replaced grizzled former players in front offices. Managers are now jacked 45 year-olds in hoodies, replacing the pot-bellied, hooch-nosed older breed who all regardless of their actual age appeared to be 77 years old after a lifetime of exposure to the sun, liquor, and the fact that 43% of all plate appearances before 1993 involved a guy getting a baseball thrown at his face because he may have smiled at some point. Baseball broadcasts now feature statistics that come from sophisticated cameras measuring every movement that happens on a diamond. All of the Hat Guy sports columnists took buyouts or retired and have been replaced by a bot dispensing gambling advice.  

But what did the baseball fan gain from this? Front offices are obsessed with efficiency meaning they have a justification to avoid signing pricey free agents. The three true outcomes-style of optimized baseball is more boring than the objectively stupider method of having little slap hitters out there running around. Every team is run by a hair gel guy wearing one of those investment vests instead of a crusty baseball creature who makes dumb trades in order to feel alive. Starting pitching is disappearing from the game as dozens of identical guys who throw 98 with nasty movement are beltfed from the bullpen and are constantly bouncing between the majors and minors and subsequently batters just get up there and strike out. It’s enough to make you want to turn on the moneyball movie and hope John Connor has traveled back in time to take out Jonah Hill before he can start replacing production in the aggregate.

Another classic early 2000s "smart guy" sports opinion was to demand a college football playoff.  The concept of a college football championship had been, for most of its history, a process where the most boorish second-generation ski-doo salesmen in each state yell at each other and hire airplane billboards in order to essentially demand their team win a national championship.  Every once in awhile, teams just go back in history and decide they won a championship like they are forging documents to claim a minor principality in the Holy Roman Empire.  The entire sport was based on hollerin’.  To a rational person, this was incredibly stupid. Why not just have the best teams play each other?

Finally, college football acted and arranged for the two best teams to meet in a national championship game. Unfortunately there was rarely a consensus about who the two best teams were, and more often than not the answer was more hollerin’ and also bellyaching by the team or teams left out as expressed by rude airplane banners.  It seemed to make sense to simply do what every other level of football does and simply have a playoff. So they unleashed a playoff that is constantly growing and threatening to swallow the entire sport.

An institution as corrupt and rickety as college football could not elegantly implement a playoff.  They decided to ignore all of the rankings that had traditionally been used and consecrate a conclave of recently retired coaches and athletic directors and the occasional war criminal to disappear themselves into bland executive hotel conference rooms and emerge with their own rankings based on mysterious and whimsical criteria.  Every week the square tie knot ESPN guys have to go on TV and guess at what the Committee was thinking by portentously intoning that "By its new rankings, the Committee has shown that it really values ranked road wins" like they are trying to divine the whims of ancient gods by the arrangements of fish bones on a beach.  

And once ESPN and the conferences got a whiff of playoff money, the question would not be if the playoff expanded but to how many teams.  Last year, the playoffs expanded to twelve teams, including higher seeds getting to play home playoff games.  The atmosphere for those games was incredible, but the conferences are too committed to the big bowl games to move the next rounds off of neutral bowl sites.  But that is not enough. The Big Ten has now proposed a playoff that consists of 28 teams.

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti announces plan for 28 team playoff

The problem is not with the playoff itself, but with the way the playoff has devoured the rest of the college football landscape.  The bigger the playoff gets, the more its shadow covers the rest of the college football landscape.  Unfortunately for ESPN, which along with the Big Ten and SEC is driving the push towards a more NFL-style setup in college football, there are not 32 teams in FBS football but 136.  It is impossible for ESPN and the other TV networks to both focus increasingly on the playoff picture that affects a handful of teams while simultaneously trying to build up their inventory of other games, which they market as narratively meaningless.

The playoff is not the entire problem.  The constant realignments, the merciless pillaging of rival conferences, and even the desperately-needed implementation of player payment under a grungy and haphazard system governed by collectives of alumni determined by who has the stupidest goatees instead of making these players employees with unions and employee protections-- these are all vandalisms against the sport that the conferences and TV networks are trying to paper over with the spectacle of the playoff, the promise that we will eventually have a champion where 40 years from now a university president standing next to the smirking heir to the only plot of fresh water not yet claimed by an LLM data center can decide that they actually won the 2031 title. Unfortunately, while the so-called "smart" sports argument was to beg for a rational answer to the question of awarding a title in college football, it turns out that maybe having people yell at each other on the radio was the best way to do it.

Before the playoff, the best way to ensure your team was in the playoff was by creating BCS acronym themed signs and also hiring airplanes to fly them over your rivals' games; another way would be to hire a fleet of Napoleonic war ships to denounce your team's rival with a series of saucy semaphore codes.

The playoff is a fun and entertaining mechanism for crowning a college football champion.  It also has nothing to do with how college football is experienced on about 100 of the 136 campuses where it is played.  The networks and conferences now has to figure out what to do with all of the excess football that has nothing to do with the playoff that is left around like overstock inventory. Perhaps these games never mattered before either in the grand scheme of the mythical national title chase. But they had weight because the sport seemed at least to acknowledge that the title chase was only part of the picture; college football was a self-justifying enterprise because there were drunk college students willing to yell about it and regional rivalries and dumb trophies that meant as much as turning the World's First Monster Truck Lawnmower Boca Raton Bowl into a playoff game between the 34th and 36th seeded teams.  As the sport gets rationalized into a more and more efficient way of distributing money to the biggest programs in the two big conferences, that seems to be getting lost.

Early 2000s sports arguers got the college football playoff, advanced stats in baseball, optimized shot distribution in the NBA, and even (and I remember this being sort of part of all of this conversation as well) legalized gambling.  But when the optimized and rational idea gets combined with the obsession with chasing efficiency in money, we get obsession with salary cap arcana, bland homogenization of tactics, and idiotic gambling being forced into everything.  I'm sure that people arguing for better baseball strategies or normal ways of crowning a football champion at the time were not aware that their cries for rationalization would get swept up with the ruthless and efficient financialization of everything in sports.  The one silver lining is that I strongly believe that college football is too stupid to ever be fully contained.

NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL 

Whatever they do with the playoff, it is not my problem because I root for Northwestern, a team that will almost certainly not qualify for the playoff no matter how many teams they let in.  Every change in college football bodes terribly for the Wildcats, who feel to me like they are sort of floating in the Big Ten and just waiting for the axe to come down and send them into DIII the second the conference can justify it by adding a lawsuit in university form like Florida State or Miami.  But here we are in 2025, the Big Ten is one of the two pinnacle quasi-major league conferences in college football, and some of these august teams are going to have to waste their time on the 'Cats and their makeshift stadium that holds 25 people or play in a baseball stadium that regularly devolves into a muddy pit.

Last week, the university finally settled its lawsuit against former coach Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired in the wake of a widespread hazing scandal where several former players described ugly incidents, many of which inexplicably mentioned the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek. Fitzgerald sued the university, claiming he was shocked, shocked! to see hazing going on in the Northwestern football program and demanded $130 million for costing him his career coaching at the only school in the country where a guy who goes 1-11 is not even on the hot seat.  

The last game Pat Fitzgerald won involved him somehow squeezing a crystaline football helmet over his head so he could look like a warlord in a movie where the prop budget involved stealing a bowl from the director's mom. 

Fitzgerald seems to have prevailed in his lawsuit.  We have no idea how much money the school ultimately paid to Fitzgerald, but they were forced to put out a humiliating press release claiming that Fitzgerald knew nothing about the hazing, possibly because during the time he was the coach, he was one of those Guillermo Del Toro guys whose eyeballs are on his hands and he was always holding something.  The ruling presumably clears the way for Fitz to get one of those bullshit "analyst" jobs for disgraced coaches and eventually reenter the coaching ranks for any program in the market for a guy who failed to win a single played game in the United States in his last active season and who will denounce NIL and player movement as some sort of new offshoot of communism.

THE 2025 WILDCATS

There have been two recent vintages of Northwestern teams: those where there is a capable veteran transfer quarterback who can at least manage to keep the offense on the field long enough so the defense doesn't keel over from exhaustion in the third quarter that is good enough to get to a bowl game and teams where there is functionally no quarterback and they win one 0-1 Big Ten games.  In David Braun's first year, they had Ben Bryant and a vicious defense, and that was enough to win eight games. Last year, they played offense like they were on the game show Slippery Stairs.  

This year, the 'Cats will have heralded transfer quarterback Preston Stone, who was last seen grimly watching his replacement at SMU self-destruct in a playoff game against Penn State while Stone was functionally en route to Evanston.  There are some questions about who will catch the ball-- Northwestern's receiving corps is most politely described as "untested"-- and some key losses and transfers on defense, most notably with stalwart captain Xavier Mueller's graduation. 

And even is Stone is as good as advertised and the defense is as much of a pain in the ass as it has been in the past, it might not be enough.  Northwestern's veteran-quarterback-and-defense program was optimized for the Big Ten West, where teams would simply bash their heads into the locker room walls for 60 minutes and the winner was the last guy to stagger onto the 50 yard line and vomit.  The Enormous Ten has taken away these comfortable environs and traded them for an absolutely brutal schedule.  Stone will not be hanging out on the sidelines against Penn State this time.  They also have to face Oregon at home and Michigan at Wrigley in what has been described as the most annoying football game ever played.  I would rather lick the L tracks at Addison than sit with 40,000 power-shushing Michigan fans and I am a person who willingly pays money to go to Cubs games and sit next to a group of 48 year old guys wearing backwards hats and loudly having "tell my lawyer she doesn't get the audi."phone calls.

It is possible that Northwestern is both a much better team this year and also has an equally bad or worse record simply because the schedule is marked "thar be dragons."  Even Illinois is good now; the only Big Ten team that anyone has any expectations to beat is Purdue which will either be very bad or can be expected to have the entire roster at one point in the game ensnare itself in a giant net on the sidelines.  Either way, I'm not sure how this bodes for David Braun, who unlike his predecessor cannot rely on a legacy of being one of the greatest players in the history of the program to shield him from criticism.  Braun's success seemed like a minor miracle under the gross circumstances surrounding the team in 2023, but no one is particularly tied to him and they're opening a shiny new stadium next year.  It doesn't help that I have watched a lot of Northwestern football and I could not tell you anything about Braun's personality other than "football coach." Maybe also "regularly photographed with mouth open."  In the end, what may save him if he has another rough season is the classic Northwestern conundrum of who else would even be willing to coach here.

The 'Cats will have to open the season on the road against Tulane, a very good team in out of the American Conference.  The Green Wave face some uncertainty at quarterback, where they are choosing between latecomer Jake Retzlaff from BYU and former Northwestern quarterback Brandon Sullivan who has been hovering around the Wildcats like a specter.  Sullivan, who served as the backup for Bryant, ended up in Iowa last year and came off the bench to lead the Hawkeyes to a dispiriting romp against the 'Cats.  It would be at the very least awkward, in my opinion, to see him getting the better of his former team again and hope he does not have three more years of covid-related eligibility so he can barnstorm around the country every year playing for at least one Northwestern opponent that he gets to by traveling via one of those pump railroad carts with a bindle sporting a Tim Beckman-inspired anti-Northwestern symbol.

The Tulane game is a good measuring stick for Northwestern.  Tulane is favored to win by about as large of a margin as you'll see from a team outside the Power Four against a Big Ten opponent this time of year. A surprising Northwestern win would instill some hope that they could seriously scrap for a bowl this year. A crummy loss does not mean the season is instantly over, but Northwestern desperately needs every win that that it can manage before facing the Big Ten manglers.

Northwestern's first year in the brutal, unforgiving Enormous Ten was discouraging.  And yet, there has been no reason why the Wildcats should have been able to field a competitive program for more or less the entire modern history of the school, and for about 20 years in the new century, they were able to be reliably annoying if not occasionally outright good.  The fact that Northwestern will constantly have to face off against playoff powerhouses in whatever stadium they happen to be playing in that year is a blow to their hopes of making crappy bowl games should they still exist, but on the other hand, each of those games offers a rare but tantalizing opportunity to do something incredibly funny.  

Unfortunately, the playoff means that, should the Wildcats manage to do the impossible and actually knock off a ranked team in front of an overwhelming number of opposing fans at what is supposed to be a Northwestern home game, it does not have the destructive power that a loss to crummy or mediocre Wildcat team could have in the past. Before the playoff, a loss to Northwestern usually meant an absolute annihilation of that big time opponent's dreams of winning anything.  The playoff has meant that teams like Northwestern can't single-handedly derail a opponent's national championship season by punting them into hell but what the playoff can't take away is a bunch of those fans going on the internet demanding that they fire their coach and whining about uncalled holding penalties, which to me is the greatest prize of them all.  Let's hope we get one of those this year.

The Chicago Cubs Have Spiraled Into The Toilet Zone

It is a quirk of American professional sports where many teams are heavily incentivized to be bad, and avaricious owners and their penny-pinching henchmen in the front offices can sell the move as strategic.  For several years, the Cubs pursued an active Being Bad policy, refusing to compete in the open market for superstars, riffling through the bargain bin for washed up veterans, and selling off any useful parts for prospects.  Watching an intentionally bad or even unambitious and mediocre team for a season is mildly infuriating as they putz away another meaningless year that is one of the finite ones you have on this planet but it is at least comforting that the wins and losses don't really matter.  

On the other hand, watching a team that has been very good suddenly and inexplicably nosedive into an active volcano while being hunted for sport by a rival team that is enjoying an endless series of the most sports movie-ass walkoff victories is one of the shittiest sports experiences that exists and one that makes me wish my TV provider had a "you sure about that?" warning every time I try to record another three hour festival of stranded runners, bullpen collapses, and glassy-eyed ballplayers striking out and then staring wistfully into the outfield like they have just sent all of their sons off to fight in the Civil War.  

The once baby-faced Counsell is aging like an American President in his second year with the Cubs 

The Cubs are miserable and frustrated. The best offense in baseball has instantly vanished.  The entire team is on a two-month long slump to the point where the only explanation for what has happened that makes sense is some sort of coordinated industrial action.  They've got Kyle Tucker-- a man who is boring to the point of it being some sort of avant-garde art project, a guy so stoic and devoid of personality and emotion that I am convinced that if he were to undergo questioning by Jack Bauer and his array of rusted implements and car batteries and jumper cables that are just lying around, Bauer would still only manage to get a "we just you know need to keep seeing the ball out there" from him-- throwing his helmet in the dugout and bellowing FUCK after striking out.  It's harder to tell if he's more upset that he can no longer play baseball or that he is costing himself tens of millions of dollars from his free agent contract with the Dodgers next season.

The Cubs' Terminator-style plunge into melted steel has marred what had been the Cubs' most promising season since at least 2018.  Tucker was playing like a star, unheralded free agent lefty Matthew Boyd was mowing people down, Carson Kelly inexplicably became an offensive weapon and, most importantly, Pete Crow-Armstrong turned into a superstar.  Crow-Armstrong is a live wire, the best Cubs center fielder I've ever seen who pairs his speed with a rakish daring on the basepaths, and for most of the season his Baezian swing at everything approach was connecting as he bashed home runs.  He also is 23 years old and clearly having the time of his life being a star for a good cubs team in a rocking Wrigley Field and instantly became every single 10 year-old's favorite player; every time the Cubs have had a walk-off win he starts running on the field from the dugout before the runner has even crossed the plate because he's so happy his teammate did something cool.  If he played in the early 1990s he would already have a Costacos Brothers poster of him casually hovering 45 over a fence robbing a home run dressed in goth makeup and a leather jacket on a shoot with the most amount of smoke machines that can be legally operated in a photography studio with the legend "The Crow Flies." 

By my estimates, PCA has struck out in 95% of his plate appearances in the last six weeks.

Crow-Armstrong has filled the rare Cubs archetype of "infuriating baseball goblin" for opponents

The Cubs went from a comfortable lead in the division to giving up an insurmountable lead to the impossibly annoying Brewers who by now have probably called up a sickly Depression-era child who can barely manage to lift a bat out of the stands to pinch hit who immediately blasts a walkoff home run four times in the past week. They are technically in the Wild Card race but at this point even if they manage to cling on without being overtaken by the Reds their postseason prognosis seems to be two futile, punchless losses before an offseason with the departure of Tucker all but certain. Right now, the state of the Cubs is just Craig Counsell sitting pinch-faced in the dugout making his signature "we're not going to challenge that" gesture that looks like a toddler refusing to eat a single piece of broccoli for three hours every day.

On the other hand, baseball vibes can change quickly.  It wasn't that long ago that the Cubs were having a ball smashing home runs everywhere and winning games and not sweating out 2-0 losses to the Pirates. In 2001, with the Cubs in a similar slump, rookie backup first baseman Julio Zuleta decided to invent some rituals to unlock the bats based on a holy spiritual text, the 1989 movie Major League. According to this wonderful Sports Illustrated story from 2001, Zuleta's ritual sprang from the most perfect use of Ballplayer Brain that I've ever seen:

The next afternoon Zuleta gathered two oranges, an apple, a banana, sunflower seeds and a tube of the analgesic Flexall. He placed the items on a white towel in a sunny spot in the Cubs' dugout. Then he took a bat from each member of that evening's starting lineup and stacked them atop the mishmash. "I can't explain it all," says Zuleta, "but I thought that maybe the bats were hungry, so I gave them some fruit. I put them in the sun so we could get hot."

The Cubs, aided by what they called Zudoo ("I don't practice voodoo," Zuleta said in the SI article. "I am Catholic, and I believe 100 percent in God. But the way we were losing, something had to be done.") had an offensive explosion and a 12-game win streak that briefly catapulted them into first place.  "Look, I don't know what the heck Julio's doing, but as long as he's not killing any chickens in his hotel room, I'm not going to complain. Winning is winning," third baseman at the time and current Cubs radio analyst and Sandwich Uncle Ron Coomer told Sports Illustrated.  I can imagine Coomer telling Pat Hughes that he was rubbing his bats with a gyros spit until an umpire complained about the flies while Zach Zaidman maniacally cackles in the background.  Perhaps it's time for one of the Cubs to try something from Major League II or even Major League: Back to the Minors.   

So it's possible that sometime between now when it's too late, the Cubs will manage to get their shit together and remember how to play baseball again. Or they will continue to spiral into one of the most depressing collapses in recent Cubs history and the ballpark will be so miserable that you can get into Wrigley without having to take on an onerous personal loan and hope to see the token one win they get in each series.

I WILL NEVER STOP BELIEVING THAT THE BEARS ARE WHO I THOUGHT THEY WERE

The motto of this Bears season is not officially This Time It Will Be Different, but that's what it might as well be.  The Bears went out and got the hottest coach on the market in Lions madman offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, they are entering the second year with Caleb Williams under center, and they brought in a tight end and receiver with their first two picks after spending a great deal of free agent money to bring in a new group of offensive linemen who will hopefully prevent Williams from spending the majority of the season buried in the turf. Inept henchman-coach Matt Eberflus and his rotating collective of flunky assistants either in the process of being fired for incompetence or for vague and unspecified acts of "inappropriate behavior" that may or may not have involved an FBI investigation is gone. The Bears are behaving like a serious football team and not the Chicago Bears.

I have never seen a coaching move funnier than Matt Eberflus, asked about how after a disastrous and inept season where no one could figure out why he wasn't fired and why he should be trusted to work with a number one pick quarterback, appeared back at Bears camp with the explanation "I have a beard now." Eberflus is now the defensive coordinator for the Cowboys and his move for this season is "Now I'm wearing glasses. I'm learned. I know about the existence of time outs." 

But you will have to forgive me if I am reluctant to believe that this new Bears regime will bring about the never-seen holy grail of Bears football: a competent, functioning offense.  The Bears have, with the exception of a year under Ron Turner and that one year when Marc Trestman had Josh McCown playing out of his mind for a few games while Jay Cutler was injured, never had anything resembling a passing offense.  For my entire life no matter who is on or running or coaching the Bears there has been one kind of good Bears team, the one where the majority of touchdowns are scored by linebackers.  

Already, there have been some disturbing signs from camp.  Reports from beat writers describe an offense in disarray.  While GM Ryan Poles spent the offseason revamping the interior of the offensive line, the all-important left tackle spot remains up in the air, and a lot of playing time is now going to an undrafted free agent who played Canadian college football.  There was a video of Caleb Williams unable to throw a ball through a net and being mad.  The Bears also face a brutal schedule, not only having to get through their own meat grinder division but also having to play the brass knuckle enthusiasts of the AFC North.

Adding to the unease, ESPN reporter Seth Wickersham's book on quarterbacks includes revelations from Caleb Williams's overbearing Sports Father about how he didn't want his son to go to the Bears because it's "where quarterbacks go to die" as well as claims that the Bears left Williams alone to watch film with no instruction. These reports, excerpted to ESPN, stoked a brief local outrage, although I don't understand it-- I also would not want someone I cared about to become the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears and would have encouraged Caleb Williams to pull an Eli Manning-style power play or play in the Canadian league or fake his own death and change his name, reemerging as a promising Mountain West quarterback named Kraydon Armgun rather than play for the fucking Bears.  

Williams could have hired the people that made this hideous and unconvincing disguise for Eli Manning when he did a stunt try out for Penn State for some dumb marketing purposes that I can't remember 

I like Caleb Williams, enjoyed watching him in college and his rare moments of magic on the Bears last season and don't think he is bad, no matter how much a lot of the national media inexplicably seems to want him to be.  I also, despite a general discomfort with the offensive mastermind guys with Wermacht haircuts who form the current state-of-the-art in NFL coaching, have no reason to think that Ben Johnson doesn't know what he's doing.  I want both of them to succeed.  But I have watched enough Bears football where I need to see them actually throwing the ball like a normal NFL team for a whole season before I can believe it's possible.  

The Bears, as sclerotic and stagnant an organization that exists in sports, have undergone some change. Team matriarch Virginia McCaskey passed away at the age of 102, and her son George who looks like a kindly train conductor on a children's TV show and probably should have been put in charge of do-gooder charity projects so that you could see a few special parking spaces at Soldier Field reserved for EVs and the Virginia could say "oh George did that" to visiting football dignitaries, has been feeling himself a little more; for example the Bears are not wearing their orange uniforms and now the end zones are navy blue for the first time. Reportedly, team president Kevin Warren who you last saw putting 45 new teams in the Big Ten, has taken on a more active role in football operations. The notoriously tight-fisted organization spent an enormous amount of money to get the top coach on the market instead of a cheaper Matt Eberflus type. They will likely soon announce that they are building their dumb, domed Xanadu out in Arlington Heights after years of releasing Hypothetical Stadium Renderings in various Chicagoland locations. George McCaskey would love to not have his usual once every three to four years press conference after firing the head coach and/or front office to say "well everyone involved has made terrible decisions again but this time I swear the exact same people will not make that mistake."

Fortunes change quickly in the NFL. It's not unheard of for a team to go from five wins to vaulting into the playoffs.  But there are some teams for whom this does not happen, the joke meme teams who always suck no matter what they do that can never get their act together-- teams like the Browns and the Jets who are always surrounded by dysfunction led from their idiot owners and their inevitable collection of bumbling, malevolent sons.  The Bears have been living in that territory since they fired Lovie Smith.  It will take more than hiring a coach and drafting a quarterback for me to think they can overcome their tendencies and be a normal football team instead of The Bears. 

The Chicago Bulls Are Still Inept But Are No Longer Doing Funny Espionage Scandals

If you read about or listen to anything involving the broader world of the NBA you will not likely see a lot about the Chicago Bulls.  The Bulls exist in a phantom zone of NBA discourse, seemingly content to win between 35-40 games each season, lose in the Eastern Conference play-in tournament, and endure in a stasis of sub-mediocrity in a league where every other team in their position would be losing games operatically in an attempt to get bailed out by a set of numerical combinations.  

This is nothing new.  The Bulls have been largely bad, incompetently run, and cheap in a nonsensical Reinsdorfian way for most of the twenty-first century,  But under the Arturas Karnisovas/Marc Eversley regime, the Bulls have done something they had never accomplished under their previously bad front office– they are no longer funny.

The John Paxson and Gar Forman Bulls, especially in the years following the dissolution of the Derrick Rose teams, were also bad but at least they were a font of bizarre and stupid scandals.  When they got fired (well technically Paxson was reassigned to an airless tower at the United Center where he is no doubt at work writing a tell-all book excoriating Tom Thibodeau called “Go Ahead and Croak at Me One More Time”), I wrote a post detailing some of the highlights of the never-ending Bulls drama that included accusations of espionage, ("Gar has never come to me and said, 'Hey, Randy, I want you to be a spy in Fred Hoiberg's locker room,'” assistant coach Randy Brown told the Chicago Tribune; Adrian Wojnarowski wrote a column suggesting that Bulls coaches turned on fans because they suspected Forman of listening to their phone conversations and they were forced to work under the John Le Carré Moscow Rules), feuds with star players and coaches, and Paxson allegedly attacking Vinny Del Negro when fighting with him about Joakim Noah’s minutes.

 GarPax, as they became known to angry Bulls fans on the internet, showed a stunning instinct for trying to put together the funniest combination of personalities possible. In 2017, they combined Jimmy Butler, Dwyane Wade, and Rajon Rondo into what the the players called the “Three Alphas,” a name that poetically evoked the exact reason that they would fall apart in the manner of a Greek tragedy.  Their internecine feuds predictably climaxed with Rondo reprimanding his teammates via instagram. Coach Fred Hoiberg, Forman’s hand-picked Thibodeau replacement, attempted to control the situation by making the team watch clips of the Jim Carrey movie “Dumb and Dumber.” 

 

For some reason, I am also under the impression that his motivational tactics also included the Bill Murray vehicle “Meatballs” but can’t find any evidence for it so it is possible that is something I invented to make fun of Fred Hoiberg and now my brain believes it is a fact. For the record, here is a story about Hoiberg making the Bulls watch "Hoosiers"

The Bulls brought in coach Jim Boylen, a man who styled himself after the Aircraft Asshole from Top Gun and so irritated the players that they threatened a wildcat strike and then formed a “leadership council” to deal with him within the first week of his ghastly tenure. He installed a factory-style punch clock in the practice facility.  Within one decade, the Chicago Bulls have installed interim coaches named Jim Boylan and Jim Boylen.

Once or twice a year, Paxson and Forman would deign to meet the media. Paxson, the floppy-haired Finals hero now bald and glowering, Forman bug-eyed with a haircut that resembled the worn down nub of a number two pencil, would give an update on the various feuds and intrigues going on and assure Bulls fans that they knew what they were doing.  Radicalized Bulls fans didn’t buy it. Some of the most deranged and deep-pocketed ones banded together to buy a billboard outside the United Center calling for the duo to be fired; a hometown crowd loudly chanted “Fire Garpax” on a live ESPN set in front of Zach LaVine during the Chicago all-star game that featured zero bulls players.

The Karnisovas/Eversley Bulls have none of that intrigue. They are unbearably boring. The players do not feud publicly.  There have been no accusations of Cold War-style espionage tactics. Neither one has, to my knowledge, attempted to physically assault Billy Donovan or even Billy Donovan III.

The Bulls teams from this era have also been devoid of drama.  The face of the team for many years was Zach LaVine, a person who as far as I can tell has never uttered anything interesting publicly and was only polarizing because of how he plays basketball.  DeMar DeRozan was revered by his teammates for being a good guy.  Even Lonzo Ball, whose entire college and early career was defined by a media circus ringmastered by his insane Basketball Parent father, was a low-key presence even before the injury that kept him out of basketball for years.  Coby White appears to be a ray of sunshine in human form. For a team that has been so consistently bad, the Bulls seemed to be a close-knit group with DeRozan adopting younger players as his “sons” and the jubilant energy of players who knew that only the Chicago Bulls were keeping them from riding busses between Noblesville, Indiana and Oshkosh, Wisconsin or getting road flares fired at them in Macedonia.

For the past several years, the Bulls were defined by their lack of activity.  They simply refused to trade players.  In a league that is now dominated by transactions, this Bartleby-style inertia destroyed the minds of trade-pilled basketbloggers.  They just kept sending the same doomed team out there to die in the play-in at the hands of the Miami Heat. And then, when they finally did start to make some moves, they were all completely out of step with anything any other team was doing.  They refused to deal in the NBA’s preferred currency of draft picks and instead insisted on old-fashioned player-for-player swaps. They handed the Thunder the trophy by giving them defensive superstar Alex Caruso for maddening Australian enigma Josh Giddey and nothing else. They finally traded Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan for a bunch of bench flotsam and unloaded a miraculously resurrected Lonzo Ball for a lesser role player, albeit one whose knees are not yet experimental.

This front office operates with a weird set of fixations.  They love local players, and the bench tends to be filled out with former Illinois residents who might be old enough to remember Derrick Rose.  They prefer to draft long, athletic, teenaged wing players who do not know how to play basketball; when Matas Buzelis, a spindly 6’10” player whose parents are from Karnisvoas’s native Lithuania, grew up in suburban Hinsdale, and who demonstrated a very shaky shooting stroke in the G League fell to them in the draft, it was impossible for them to not pick him.  Unlike most of the players the Bulls have drafted who mainly excel at dribbling the ball off their own feet longly and athletically, it seems like Buzelis might have a shot to be decent.

This year, after trading for their draft pick, the Bulls went back to the well, selecting gangly French teenager Noa Essengue.  Essengue is so young that the sky is the limit with him, but on the other hand it will likely take him several years to be able to play NBA basketball. To me it seems unlikely the Bulls are going to be able to turn him into Giannis Antetokounmpo or Pascal Siakam, and it seems more likely that they have selected someone closer to the Bruno Caboclo side of the spectrum. In a related story, the Bulls have inexplicably fired their player development guru/shooting coach this offseason who seemed to have success helping some players shoot.  Under the previous regime when a someone was fired for reasons that only make sense as spite or personal animus, we’d at least get a sourced up leak about how they had been feuding with the front office for years and that Gar Forman had sent one of his lamplighters disguised as a Geek Squad member to install devices around their house for Forman to listen in on from a Bannockburn safe house, but now we just get a press release.
  
Essengue attracted some minor controversy before the draft by bailing on his German team playing the league’s finals in order to attend the draft.  On the one hand, it is funny that the NBA draft has become a large enough television production that someone would want to be a part of it when the ceremony itself consists of nervously sitting at a banquet table in a suit that will seem either comically large or small to future fashion analysts and an experience that culminates with a dead fish handshake from Adam Silver.  On the other hand, and forgive me if this is a curmudgeon take, it seems like a kind of crummy thing to do to your teammates who are still trying to win a title. Essengue would still get to be in the NBA and make all of that money and only lost the gift of listening to Jay Bilas describe his Elite Motionality or whatever for ten minutes. Someone should have told him that as a Chicago Bull, that Bundesliga Finals will be the closest he will get to playing for a championship until he is mercifully sent to another team.

THEY DRAFTED A NORTHWESTERN GUY

In the weeks leading up to the draft, I began to see a strange and interesting pattern when looking at second-round draft projections: the words “Northwestern University.”  Some draft analysts had become enamored with the Wildcats’ do-it-all stopper Brooks Barnhizer, even after his college career ended sadly in a walking boot and predicted he could get selected in the actual NBA draft.

In my mind, I found it hard to believe he would get drafted.  Northwestern has had a number of very good college players on the team fail to make it to the NBA because of various flaws– too short, not quite athletic enough, extremely effective jump shot in college looks like a malfunctioning oil derrick, etc.-- and making the NBA is extremely difficult even for good players. Anyone who watched Barnhizer knew about his defense, passing, and complete disregard for his own dental integrity when flinging himself around the basketball court, but he is a four-year college player and not the type of gangly, athletic mutant that is the cutting edge for NBA prospects. I was prepared to spend a month furiously demanding that the Bulls put him on their summer league team after they had deeply betrayed me last year by selecting Illinois’s Marcus Domask over Boo Buie as their token Local Summer League Guy.

Official Northwestern graphic after Barnhizer got drafted. They chose to do this.

Barnhizer is the first Northwestern player to get drafted since Evan Eschmeyer was selected in the second round in 1999.  It is no longer rare to see Northwestern players in summer league and in the G League (Barnhizer could end up teaming with former Wildcat-turned-Hoosier Miller Kopp on the ridiculously-named OKC Blue).  But Pat Spencer (who once played lacosse by the way) cracked an NBA playoff rotation.  Veronica Burton, finally given big minutes on an expansion team, is tearing it up for the Valkyries. This could be a golden age of Wildcats in pro basketball.

The path is tough for Barnhizer to make it in the NBA.  He joins the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder, an extremely good and deep team that offers little to no playing time for prospects. On the other hand, the Thunder are also adept at turning second-rounders and undrafted players into cogs in their suffocating defensive machine, and the NBA’s financial environment means that there will be a lot of churn at the bottom and middle of their roster in coming years, so you never know. Perhaps one of these days we will see a toothless Barnhizer bleeding onto the Larry O’Brien trophy.

PLEASE DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT AN “APRON”

One of the major topics of conversation around the finals was the appalling state of mainstream NBA discourse.  This discussion usually coalesced around ESPN’s unbearable playoff coverage, centering a glowering Stephen A. Smith standing on screen and bobbing up and down like a Street Fighter character before telling us that the INDIANA PACERS will REGRET having TYRESE HALLIBURTON turn his achilles tendon into a BOWL OF SPAGHETTI on live television.  In my OPINION he SHOULD NOT. Have DONE THAT. ESPN’s halftime show features Kendrick Perkins whose job is to challenge every NBA player to a fistfight, Bob Meyers who is either wearing the league’s most elaborate hairpiece since the days of Marv Albert or is paying tens of thousands of dollars annually to have his coif styled like an ushanka made out of hair from 1970s game show hosts, and put-upon wrangler Malika Andrews. In the brief sixty to ninety second windows that they are allowed to speak between commercials, they present to NBA fans watching an NBA game, a verbal assault against the NBA.

 

If it were me, I would not have THROWN the SHO-RYUKEN. It is TOO COMPLICATED to be able to hit all of those BUTTONS on the SEGA GENESIS

But for me, there is a far more deranging and annoying mode of NBA discourse and that is the complete collapse of NBA talk into financial terms.  This is not new; any league with a salary cap becomes a Contracts League once salary management becomes integral to team building strategy, but the NBA salary cap is so baroque that its maneuverings have overrun basketball discussion.

The latest NBA collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ union that sets up the league’s transaction rules has made financial talk unavoidable.  It imposes heavy penalties for teams that spend beyond some arbitrary limit that are not just additional taxes but severe restrictions that limit how teams above it can structure deals that make it difficult, if not functionally impossible, to move players.  

These new, stringent penalties have had a disastrous effect for fans who want to know what teams are doing or why good teams are so eager to jettison useful players: they have made salary cap discourse vital to league strategy. If salary cap penalties like those that previously existed in the NBA (more or less) or currently exist in MLB are mostly financial sanctions, it is very easy to dismiss any cap-cutting moves as the owner being a cheap scumbag. I should not have to worry about whether a guy is "overpaid;" if the Bulls want to give 150 million of Jerry Reinsdorf’s American dollars to fucking Josh Giddey of all people, that should be funny and not something I have to worry about because it will make it impossible for the Bulls to be good beyond the tragic state of “being the Chicago Bulls.”  But under this new CBA, owners have created actual consequences for team-building beyond their own pocketbooks so fans are encouraged to root for teams successfully lowballing players or getting mad when good players are paid a lot of money.  When teams cut costs around the cap they are not only being cheap scumbags but are now considered smart in a way that pleases the basketball savverati that I find particularly annoying.

The new cap also has imposed an intolerable rhetorical assault on sports fans by referring to the salary cap penalty thresholds as “aprons.” This is disgusting.  The NBA is a sports league, and there is no reason why they couldn’t use normal sports-inflected terms here: a “penalty zone” or a “salary limit,” which would still be irritating but at least clear.  Instead, any time I want to know why, for example, backup center Jonas Valanciunas has become a league-bearing linchpin controlling the fate of several teams’ offseason deals, I am confronted with the term “second apron,” which no person without an MBA would ever use except in a specific situation involving a neighbor coming over to help cook.  It is part of the increasing intrusion of an off-putting business argot that has crept into the NBA and lingers around transactions along with “trade kicker,” “cap hold,” and the odious but now sadly ubiquitous “asset.”  

I suppose it is my own fault for subjecting myself to this type of talk, but it is more frustrating that a vague understanding of the league’s financial arcana has become more necessary than ever to try to follow the NBA offseason. The league has focused more than ever on transactions and player movement and then has the nerve to spring “apron” on us.  Fortunately, there is one small saving grace for the incursion of Apron Talk into the lexicon of NBA terminology: the Bulls will never be anywhere near it.

The NFL Has Been Very Unfair to Our Beautiful Quarterbacks

The idea of attending an NFL draft seems like one of the most nightmarish sports-associated experiences a person could have. I can’t imagine spending hours on my feet listening to Roger Goodell bleat out 70% of a teleprompted sentence, waiting in a 45 minute line for a porta potty, or weathering the threat of getting accidentally getting bonked in the head by a ferula wielded by someone dressed as the Arizona Cardinals Pope who is in a drunken shoving match with someone dressed as the St. Louis Rams Hulk while a band blasts a saxophone-heavy cover of Lose Yourself. The fact that the draft was held this year at the hellmouth of Lambeau Field only made the entire enterprise seem even more unbearable.

And yet, the NFL draft maintains a mysterious and embarrassing hold over me. Every year I write about how stupid and ridiculous the draft is and every year I let the entire thing wash over me like a Lake Michigan wave on a water quality alert day. I am not a Draft Guy either– I don’t pore over mock drafts or look at highlights or listen to draft podcasts, and I’ve never heard of most of the players even in the first round unless they are Big Ten guys who I watched obliterate hapless Northwestern players. I have absolutely no idea how nor any interest in figuring out whether a good college player will turn out to be as a pro by looking at his Sudden Jumpability or Elite Pad Placement, or any of the other bullshit that NFL draft analysts spend all year inventing to say that a guy is big, strong, or fast except with the stilted argot of a police report. I also have no patience for the manipulation of “draft capital” and “value.”

What I love about the NFL draft and what will keep me watching is that I am addicted to the production. It will never stop being funny to me that the stentorian goofballs who treat the NFL like it is a branch of the United States armed forces and not a sport where enormous people run into each other and then do crotch pumps have been put in charge of putting on an NFL fan convention. Every decision is baffling to me. The new innovation this year was putting players waiting for their names to be called in little patches of fake yard and then having them walk down a hallway that was long enough to be a Get Smart sight gag– I was mildly disappointed that no draftees decided to run down the hallway, fall down, and start clutching their knee as a bit. I also enjoy rubbernecking the crowd who are drunkenly booing the concept of the New York Jets while a person wearing a necklace featuring a New York Jets fan license plate looks on with the pained vaudeville expression of a professional wrestler hearing his rival’s theme song; this is the same way I enjoy the local TV station that for some reason broadcasts the New Year’s Eve celebration at the Rosemont Hilton every year to delight Chicagoland audiences with the swaying grandees of the northwest suburbs. I also really like the ESPN the pick is in noise.

This year’s draft featured a slightly less psychotic presentation than years past: there were no orangutans manipulating ipads or circus performers getting stuffed into a barrel while NFL films music blared over highlights over a linebacker from the University of Utah. The most exciting thing happening other than a band that I would describe as charmingly wedding-adjacent playing the hits of 2003 was that they kept cutting to fans from sites of international games and I got to hear a French person say the word “linebacker.” But they did not need any of that because ESPN and the NFL got handed a Major Draft Narrative.

This year, the entire draft centered on the fall of Colorado quarterback prospect Shedeur Sanders from a consensus that had him getting picked late in the first round in that zone where quarterback-desperate teams eventually lose their minds and trade up for an obvious bust– this time it was the Giants hoisting themselves back into the first to grab Arnold Schwarzenegger Pronunciation Icon Jaxson Dart– to the fifth round, where he was picked by the perennially disastrous Cleveland Browns.

The Sanders fall, which also involved the dullard son of the Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator trying to hoodwink him with a ponderous prank call, became the main topic of the draft as analysts tried to explain why teams continued to pass on Sanders. As this happened, sourced-up reporters began to leak vague details of Sanders’s lousy attitude in interviews, his substandard “board work” whatever that means, and his unwillingness to participate in predraft workouts and bowl games in a way that reminded me of the plot point in the deranged Kevin Kostner movie “Draft Day” where he declines to pick a quarterback because of Character Concerns after learning that his teammates did not go to his birthday party.


One of the funniest examples of Hollywood Ball Knowing Failure is that in the movie draft day the projected number one quarterback is coming from the University of Wisconsin

But the issue that loomed largest for Sanders was his existence within the greater Deion Sanders media ecosystem. Any team that drafted Sanders risked invoking the ire of his father, who has a red hotline-style phone that goes to live on air to every braindead ESPN Yak Show. To NFL teams, Sanders’s “off-field” issues threatened coaches and executives with something much worse than players who have been accused of things far more odious than having a pain-in-the-ass celebrity father– the ability to potentially get them fired from their phoney-baloney jobs.

Mel Kiper, Jr, spent the entire draft in an extended meltdown over the Sanders fall after he had him listed in his top five. Kiper, whose famous hair has been engaging in a years-long retreat to higher ground on his scalp so it now looks like he is wearing a greased Magneto helmet, railed against the NFL as ignorant about the Quarterback Position. He fumed. He ranted. He whined about how the National Football League was being very unfair to Sanders, very unfair and in fact it’s a disgrace in the now-ubiquitous cadence of every aggrieved septuagenarian television creature that is the sole cultural legacy of the president of the United States.

Kiper’s deranged three day long psychotic break on ESPN’s draft presentation raised the question of what he is even doing there. I don’t think anyone even in the very silly world of Draft Knowers takes anything he says seriously and his own jeremiad against the NFL’s ability to evaluate quarterbacks instantly brings reminders of the times he has stuck his neck out for some of the funniest draft busts imaginable. Kiper remains on ESPN television as an NFL Draft mascot, a sort football muppet who can instantly talk about a college player’s Motorability or Jump Rate for five minutes without blinking, so it is very funny when he throws a nuclear tantrum about how the NFL is being very unfair to our beautiful quarterbacks for what is like six cumulative hours or television.

Every year after the draft, Mel Kiper is admitted to a clinic for removing all of the moths and flies that have flown directly into his mouth and are trapped in his body in a painful seven hour procedure

The Chicago Bears used their first three picks on a tight end, a wide receiver, and an offensive lineman. These players will reinforce a coterie of new offensive linemen hired from free agency and the Bears’ new head coach, who has a reputation as an offensive mastermind. The changes from the Bears have led some pundits who think that you can use rational thought to analyze the Chicago Bears to believe that Ben Johnson and these new players along with lauded quarterback Caleb Williams can lead to them having a functional and coherent offense. I disagree.  My contention is that they are the Chicago Bears and are doomed to have a sisyphusian Bears-style offense that depends on fumble returns from linebackers for eternity or at least until the National Football League is banned either for either being a brutal death sport or for not being fascist enough for the United States government in the near future.

I DON’T WANT TO ALARM YOU BUT THERE’S A NORTHWESTERN GUY IN THE LITERAL NBA PLAYOFFS

Something crazy happened when I tuned into the NBA’s All-Star Saturday Night program to watch spindly car wash inflatable Matas Buzelis represent the Bulls in the rookie/sophomore tournament. Former Northwestern guard Pat Spencer, the Man who Once Played Lacrosse himself, showed up in the same tournament as a member of the Santa Cruz Warriors. Northwestern sort of had a player in the NBA.

The Wildcats have not had consistent representation in the NBA since Evan Eschmeyer got drafted by the New Jersey Nets. A few players have appeared here and there: Reggie Hearn got a few minutes for the Pistons, Vic Law played for the Magic in the Disney Bubble, Scottie Lindsay and Chase Audige have been floating around in the G League, and Boo Buie briefly held a two-way contract with the Knicks but has not yet made it to the Association. But there was Spencer in a vaguely All-Star-adjacent event for a national audience.

I am pretty surprised that of all the players to pass through Welsh-Ryan in the decade or so that Northwestern has fielded a few pretty decent teams that the guy I am now watching in the NBA is Pat Spencer. To be honest, I had sort of forgotten about Spencer, who had led Northwestern through a single, forgettable eight-win season. Spencer was a novelty, a guy who was surprisingly good for someone who did not play college basketball at any level before being flung into the Big Ten meat grinder but probably would not start for any Big Ten team other than Northwestern. Spencer’s 2019-20 team features a lot of players who would eventually be pretty good– Boo Buie, Pete Nance, Robbie Beran, and Miller Kopp were all on the team, but they were all freshmen (except sophomore Nance) and needed some time to develop into the bones of the teams that would eventually make the NCAA Tournament. Buie showed some early signs by going off for 26 in a loss to Michigan State; it would not be until the next season when Boo Buie would begin regularly torturing Tom Izzo into a sputtering beet-red reverie.

 

Pat Spencer is the only person in the world who has played with basketball legends Boo Buie and Stephen Curry

Spencer eventually joined the Warriors and I started seeing him in occasional garbage time in actual NBA games. But I had not noticed that he had made the Warriors roster until I started to see him appear in playoff games as part of Steve Kerr’s desperately expanding rotations. Spencer was materializing in competitive minutes. He was on the court with Steph Curry. He was getting screamed at as he was frog-marched by security off the court at the Toyota Center for throwing a light NBA-style headbutt at Rockets center Alperen Sengun.

It has been very funny to see the reaction on the internet to Pat Spencer. Spencer, who now sports a Performance T-shirt under his jersey and for some reason a combination of stubble and bushy mustache that makes him look like a nineteenth-century saloon keeper, has been running around and scoring buckets using a clumsy looking jump hook, leading to a lot of social media comments perplexed by his entire deal and characterizing him as a pickup player. He wears number 61. The announcers have been working overtime talking about his storied lacrosse career every time he is on the court. 

Pat Spencer has shown his barber a picture of a guy ducking under the bar as soon as the piano player starts hitting diminished chords

Northwestern’s NBA footprint remains minimal. The ‘Cats have not had a player drafted in the twenty-first century, and they have not had a player who has been an NBA regular since Billy McKinney in the early 1980s (Rex Walters also had a meaningful NBA career in the 1990s, but he transferred to Kansas for his last two seasons, so I am not sure how he fits as a Canonical Wildcat because I had absolutely no awareness about the existence of Northwestern basketball when he played). I am not sure I would have picked Pat Spencer as the first Northwestern player attracting any sort of attention as an NBA player in 20 years, but perhaps a mustachioed Jud Buechler-style bench guy whose most interesting attribute is the fact that he did not play basketball is the most accurate representation of Wildcat men's basketball to the broader world.

THE CUBS ARE GOOD AND FUN AND ARE DESPERATELY HOPING THAT YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT THE MONEY YET

The Chicago Cubs made a trade in December for the best player they’ve rostered since Kris Bryant won an MVP, and then they went into the season with some of the worst vibes imaginable. This is because every year around the annual Cubs convention Tom Ricketts decides tp put on a barrel with suspenders and go on the radio to lecture fans about how he and his billionaire family are boiling and eating shoelaces in the hopes of affording another 35 year old utility guy on a minor league deal. Ricketts was lambasted by the national media about this– to the extent that the Cubs have come up in conversation at all in the last few years of their metronome-like 83-win finishes it was every media member involved with major league baseball mocking the Cubs for not spending money.

Starting in 2015, after the Cubs finished the teardown that saw them become unbearably bad and cheap as part of Theo Epstein’s rebuilding plan, the Ricketts family started to spend big money. The Cubs took advantage of the fact that their core players were all young and cheap and spent at the top of the free agent market. It seemed for a few years that if the Cubs wanted a guy, they got him, luring top players like Jon Lester, Ben Zobrist, Yu Darvish, and Jason Heyward. They had joined the Red Sox and the Yankees as a Serious Big Market Team. Then, after 2019, they stopped. They traded Yu Darvish for a group of teenagers, let beloved slugger Kyle Schwarber leave, and began unloading the world series players and bringing in unknowns who were distinguished mainly by the paucity of their paychecks. This was during the partial pandemic shutdown, when Ricketts began squawking about “biblical losses” and people started appearing in Cubs uniforms with names like “The Romine Brothers” and “Johneshwy Fargas” like barnstormers from far-flung AAA teams.

The Cubs gave up a lot to get Tucker including phenom Cam Smith, third baseman Isaac Paredes, and Hayden Wesneski who is the best pitcher I have ever seen at bellowing FUUUUUCKKK after giving up a massive dinger, but it has already paid off. Tucker looks like an MVP candidate and gives the Cubs a hitter that teams are afraid of. But the conversation around Tucker in Chicago is dominated by money. He is a free agent after this season, and it looks like he could command nearly a half billion dollars in his next contract. The Cubs under Jed Hoyer, whose own record in free agency is largely throwing up his hands and  saying “too rich for my blood” while loading up on washed up veterans on low-cost contracts who end up getting released three months into the season, have not come close to looking like they are willing to pay it. For some reason, the Cubs had to play the Dodgers seemingly once a week for the first month of the season, and it almost felt like Tucker would at some point in the middle innings start wearing a Dodgers uniform. Almost no one believes the Cubs are willing to pay Tucker whether they work out an extension before the season or if Tucker enters the free agency market. The Cubs seem no longer to be in the superstar business.

It is impossible to tell what Tucker is thinking. I have watched a fair amount of Tucker interviews from the time the Cubs traded for him and even for a baseball player he seems devoid of personality. Tucker insists that behind the scenes he is capable of having a conversation; ESPN had to run an entire article about it where Tucker goes on record to claim that he is "decently outgoing." I don’t blame anyone in the spotlight who chooses to go about their business wearing the armor of cliches and nonanswers, and if Tucker doesn't want to ever say anything interesting into a microphone, that's his prerogative. And in that way, Tucker fits in with the rest of the Cubs, an outfit that seems to prioritize bland players. The team right now has about three guys who seem to have any discernible personality, and two of them speak to the media exclusively through translators. But even in this beige, staid bunch Tucker stands out. I love having Tucker on the Cubs and I will be elated if the Ricketts family somehow decides to dip into their billions to pay him and maybe even the dreaded Luxury Tax. But this dude makes Nico Hoerner look like Rickey Henderson.

Kyle Tucker, pictured having the best time of his entire life

The Cubs have been very fun this season. Tucker has been amazing, Suzuki is knocking the crap out of the ball, Pete Crow-Armstrong looks like a superstar and the most fun Cubs player since prime Javy Baez. They are stealing a million bases. Their veteran backup catcher is inexplicably putting up small sample Barry Bonds numbers. Their bullpen is horrendous, and they have somehow had to comeback from down ten runs repeatedly, the already shallow rotation has lost its two best pitchers, including having ace Justin Steele out for the season, and third base remains a black hole. But for now they are fun and I guess we will have to wait for the offseason to see how content with mediocrity the Ricketts family is willing to remain.