The Lake Takes a Final Encore/Reviewing the Insane Joe Maddon Book

Northwestern's Temporary Lakeside Stadium has been temporary for a long time. Hastily put together after whatever other stadium measures the athletic department were looking into fell apart, the stadium on the lake is a gorgeous gem of college football located literally a few yards from Lake Michigan as boats sail by with plenty of areas for hanging out if you don't want to watch Northwestern football and clear views of Chicago's Big Ten Skyline from the north endzone. It's also kind of a weird place to try to watch football with poles obstructing the endzone seats, a seating capacity below most Big Ten basketball arenas, and a rickety set of bleachers. After Saturday night, it is supposed to be retired and returned to its natural function as the best lacrosse stadium in the country.

And what a finale. As Chicago's climate has turned early fall into a late extended summer, Northwestern games at the the Lake have usually had beautiful weather made for television with the sun shimmering off the waves and sailboats photogenically gliding into frame. Saturday's forecast, though, calls for nasty cascades of rain and potential thunderstorms. I have no idea what will happen if there is lightning in the vicinity-- there is nowhere to go, and the endzone stands look like a lightning catching contraption designed by Victor Frankenstein. The 'Cats also face a critical early season test.

 

Walking under the bleachers at The Lake which looks like you are seeing a commercial for word processing software in the 1980s 

Colorado comes to town after a narrow opening win over Georgia Tech and a clobbering of FCS Wildcats Weber State. The Colorado program has faded back onto the periphery of relevance after they shocked the sports world by bringing in NFL superstar "Neon" Deion Sanders. Sanders was loud and flashy and resplendent with sons, dubbing himself "Coach Neon" and coming off a bizarre and scandal-plagued charter high school system named "Neon Nighschool." He became one of the most prominent coaches to make bulk use of the transfer portal, essentially telling the entire dreadful Colorado team that he inherited that they would be replaced, likely by his offspring. 

Sanders made a lot of noise, got a lot of attention, and brought Colorado from one of the worst teams in FBS to being just sort of crappy. Then the next year, with superstar two-way dynamo Travis Hunter, he managed to go 9-3 and make Colorado seem like a phenomenon. They were on ESPN all of the time and were the toast of the college football world. It didn't last. Sanders's quarterback son left to enter the NFL draft and drive Mel Kiper, Jr. into the throes of a three-day on-air meltdown. The Buffaloes stunk last year, and after the initial fanfare and some serious health issues for Sanders, the Colorado hype machine is pretty much dead. They have settled back into a sub-mediocre Big Twelve program regardless of how many MC Hammer videos their coach starred in in 1994.

But there is a very funny clash happening here between the glamor and braggadocio of Coach Neon and the rough, slapdash Temporary Lake Stadium. I have been wondering for the last couple of weeks if Deion Sanders is the most famous person to ever set foot at The Lake. I don't think that when Sanders decided to coach college football he ever imagined himself on the sidelines in front of probably like 8,000 people in a potential squall facing a slightly favored Northwestern team on national television.

The 'Cats are coming off their precariously early bye week after a narrow until the final minutes victory over a very good FCS team. Colorado might not be great, but it is probably not much worse than some of the lower level Big Ten peer teams the 'Cats will have to beat in order to have a shot at going to a bowl game except for the benighted Rutgers. Hopefully, the early bye will allow the 'Cats to get defensive stalwarts Michael Kilbane and Migo Jackson back on the field after they missed the first week and iron out whatever issues were causing the incessant penalties that plagued them in week one. The Wildcats' brutal schedule means they need to win every game they can before getting thrown into the Big Ten meat grinder. After this game, they head to Bloomington to the most unexpected abattoir in the history of college football.

Whatever the outcome, one thing isn't changing: Northwestern is committed to David Braun. Northwestern reportedly extended its coach until 2031. These extensions, I understand, are important for recruiting in the three dimensional portal era and also to prevent another program from poaching him, provided they can do the impossible and name the coach of the Northwestern Wildcats.

 

The one thing about David Braun that I can note is that this guy can really open his mouth wide while yelling

David Braun is in his fourth year with Northwestern. After starting under the craziest circumstances possible, he has stabilized into a coach that pretty much delivers what Northwestern fans can hope for since the Big Ten expanded, got rid of the cozy west division, and regularly serves Northwestern up on a platter for the conference juggernauts. In his time here, Braun has never said or done anything memorable and looks like an NCAA video game create-a-coach. He doesn't seem to have any sort of public personality. I'm fine with this. David Braun can keep Northwestern in Detroit bowl berths and not super embarrassing losses to the galactico programs as long as he wants, assuming we never hear about him claiming to be unaware of decades of bizarre hazing rituals inexplicably centered on the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek.

THE BOOK OF JOE IS SOMEHOW THE FIRST COACH WINNER'S WIN THE WINNER'S WAY IN THE BOARDROOM NOIR

The Book of Joe came out in October 2022, and I got my copy from the library in December. The vast majority of this was written in early 2023 with the intention of pitching it elsewhere. But after the brief Joe Maddon interview cycle, any interest in this book died out and I never finished the review. Most of the attention came from Maddon's interviews where he bitterly railed against front offices. This is a shame because the writing in this book is incredibly insane and funny and needs to be seen to be believed. I've been thinking about Joe Maddon again with the Cubs 10th reunion and me listening to every episode of the oafish Anthony Rizzo/David Ross Cubs reunion podcast which naturally included a very Joe Maddonish interview with the old skipper. Here, completed and revised, is what I thought about the extremely weird Book of Joe.

It seems to me that the Book of Joe was trying to be one thing, which is a boilerplate airport book biography of self-styled quirky baseball genius Joe Maddon about his slogans and his philosophies about baseball and also Important Lessons For Business and Life and then in the middle of writing it he got shitcanned from the Angels and it became a bitter jeremiad about how the pointy heads in the front office don’t let you manage anymore.

The book is credited to both Joe Maddon and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, but it’s written in the third person about Joe Maddon while being entirely from his perspective. The effect is sort of strange, a melding of Maddon biography as-told-by-Maddon as well as extended quotes from Maddon about Joe Maddon and the Joe Maddon Way; it’s a profile written by the subject. There’s an entire chapter that consists solely of listing cars that Joe Maddon owns or has owned in the past.

 

A lot of the Book of Joe seems repurposed from Verducci’s The Cubs Way written to cash in on the 2016 World Series where Verducci established Maddon as a brilliant manager and an innovative thinker who marries an open mind for analytics with a vaguely affected sort of Time/Life Magazine 1960s counterculture flavoring. This book, though, gives Maddon more room to pontificate:

“I still believe I could have been a football coach, a very high-level one, too. I mean a head coach. I think what I believe and how I do it could have worked there, too. No doubt in my mind. Zero doubt. Just teaching different things. Mechanics, fundamentals, but teaching the same mindset. No doubt.

I do believe I could run a large company. I still believe I could, based again on the same principles I’ve utilized. Building relationships. Creating trust. Exchanging ideas. And being able to be constructively critical. Hell, I believe I can do that with any company right now. And I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious in any way, but I just feel that. I do.”

The book is structured like a motivational speech with each chapter named after a Joe Maddon saying such as “Do Simple Better,” “The Process Is Fearless,” and “Embrace the Target.” Each one presents a biographical anecdote of how Joe learned that lesson and coined that phrase either through a revelation (“The Five Levels of Being a Professional” comes to him in a Moses-like flash after he had been drinking with his uncle) or as something he read in a book of motivational quotes that I think you can send away for that is advertised on the back of a coaching whistle catalog. 

Maddon imparts what he learned to do and not to do in his early life phase of coaching and then he explains how he has applied it in certain baseball scenarios. The whole thing is jumbled together, and the ideas themselves are often not coherent enough to sustain an entire chapter, but each chapter does seem to evoke what it would be like to be lectured by Joe Maddon at a corporate function where the company has paid him like 75 grand to give employees an hourlong presentation about Winning the Way Winners Win.

The whole thing reads like a fairly boilerplate coach-to-Hilton-Garden-Inn lecture circuit book, except for some reason Verducci has decided to indulge his literary impulses and make choices that seem completely insane to me. One of the things he does is start chapters with disconnected stories that then whiplash the readers directly to a motivational Joe Maddon story. Here, and please forgive the enormous block quote but I think once you read it you will understand why it needed to be there, is how he begins Chapter 2 (“Be Uncomfortable”):

One day in 1871 in the snowbound Swiss Alps a twenty-three-year-old doctoral geology student lost his footing and fell off a steep cliff. He went hurtling toward his death. In the handful of seconds between going airborne and meeting his expected fate, something very strange happened. Time stretched like an accordion. The student, Albert Heim, had time to think about how he would never get to deliver his scheduled university lecture in five days. He thought about how news of his death would reach his loved ones. In his mind he consoled them…Then his entire life played out before him in a series of images. It was like watching a stage production in which he was the main character.

…

At 12:47 p.m. [sic– it was 12:47 a.m.] on November 3, 2016, Joe Maddon experienced one of those moments when time slows and a lifetime plays out in the mind. As the throw from Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant perfectly landed hat-high in the first baseman’s mitt of Anthony Rizzo on an unusually warm night in Cleveland, ending the longest and most famous championship drought in North American sports, Maddon saw with absolutely clarity the people and lessons from his sixty-two-year-old life that had made the World Series-clinching moment possible.”

Tom Verducci has also made a bold choice where he appears to have wanted to write a hardboiled detective novel from the 1940s but also about Joe Maddon. Here is the opening to Chapter 8 (“The Five Levels of Being a Professional”):

“Joe Maddon pulled into the parking lot of the Under Armour Performance Center at Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona, on the dank morning of February 18, 2019. His windshield wipers strained to keep up with the cold, hard rain, and his headlights illuminated the sheaths of gray gloom. He looked at the outside temperature on the car’s thermometer: forty-five degrees. An ominous chill was in the air around the Chicago Cubs, a chill that would prove prescient. As was his wont, Maddon chose to interpret the digital readout optimistically.”

Joe didn’t see the first goon in the dank alley behind the Under Armour Performance Center but he certainly felt him. More specifically, his fists. It seems that the General Manager had not liked what he had to say about the Nine Levels of Winning, and he’d sent his friends to give him a few rebuttals. A couple of other toughs added some addenda with kicks to the midsection. But Joe had a few ripostes planned with his fungo bat. “Attitude is a skill,” Joe said as he made his point directly to the biggest one’s skull. “That’s a lesson you can learn on the field…or in the boardroom.”

Sometimes Verducci combines these tendencies towards weird, tangential anecdotes and overheated detective narration, as he does in Chapter 11 (“Never Forget the Heartbeat”):

“Fog crept over Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife like the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Fate Symphony. Portent, allegro con brio, hung in the air on the afternoon of March 27, 1977. It had already been a very bad day.”

This anecdote is about a massive plane crash that killed 583 people that Verducci uses to segue into a chapter about making decisions about Bullpen Usage.

The main reason why I was interested in The Book of Joe was that in the midst of doling out lessons on How to Win at Baseball and at Life, Joe Maddon was fired in the middle of a twelve game losing streak just after having shaved his hair into a Rally Mohawk. Maddon then appeared in the media railing against the encroachment of front offices on the manager’s role and came across as the classic guy who thought he was the smartest guy in the room supporting innovation until another innovator sweeps him aside and then innovation is bad and a manager should be allowed to trust his gut. I was curious how far down this path the book went.

It turns out, Joe Maddon’s attacks on modern front office practices form a relatively small part of the book, mainly the final chapters. They focus on his growing list of grievances with front offices starting with his sour 2019 with the Cubs. Among the indignities suffered, Maddon was told he had to be more hands-on with players and that some players thought his t-shirts and slogan shtick had become self-promotional. At his nadir with the Cubs, team president Theo Epstein forced him to read a Managing Millenials for Dummies book, which is one of the funniest things I can imagine doing to Joe Maddon.

Maddon argues that the front offices have numbers and algorithms about platoon splits and pitcher fatigue that override the manager’s feeling and relationship with the player and that teams just want to hire puppets that will do what the front office wants. On the one hand, this is a ridiculous argument coming from Joe Maddon who marketed himself as a guy who could play ball with the new model front office and didn’t reflexively react to the concept of on-base percentage by stabbing it with a broken beer bottle. 

On the other hand, though, he has a point: who wants to leave baseball increasingly in the hands of these front office dweebs? You may find Joe Maddon relentlessly annoying and his entire position to be the traditional tantrum of a powerful old man who has suddenly lost power and immediately pivots to yelling You Can’t Even Bunt Anymore, but as a baseball fan, it’s hard to not see something sinister undulating under a business guy’s Investment Vest.

In the early 2000s, it was very easy to support the new-look data driven front-offices because the people railing against them were deliberately and ostentatiously stupid, an army of potbellied wheezing 57-year-old baseball lifers and local columnists photographed using typewriters in 2002 screaming about mother’s basements. But the last twenty years have seen an explosion of data from more sophisticated formulas and cameras tracking every move a player makes on the field including their spit trajectory and standard deviations of crotch-adjustments, and we’re now in a period where the sport is so awash in data that is so abstract and kept secret by teams that it seems to have crossed a threshold where it can be used by front offices as a bullshit misting tool.

The advances in baseball during the first Moneyball stats revolution of the early 2000s were devastating in their simplicity. Baseball teams had been relying on statistics originally derived arbitrarily in the nineteenth century, which had missed an obvious and understandable point that players that did not hit well but walked a lot and smacked dingers were far more valuable than batting average would indicate. Baseball is not the only sport plagued by this type of thinking; the NBA appears in its second decade of understanding how much more valuable a three point shot is than a two point shot. But as teams have assimilated and copied these enormous insights, the margins of the information advantage have gotten slimmer and slimmer. It is obvious that there is still a cutting edge in Major League Baseball in that some teams such as the Rays and the Dodgers continue to excel with an unending army of unstoppable relief pitchers and some clueless teams like the Rockies that refuse to even approach the basics of modern practices that keep the team mired in doofus hell. But at the same time, the arrival of Big Data in baseball makes me suspicious because the concept of Big Data almost everywhere you look in society has served as a convenient mask for bullshit.

One of the benefits of Big Data in sports for teams is that these numbers are always presented as Advanced Analytics beyond the comprehension or interest of the vast majority of fans, presenting teams with a black box they can use to justify weird decisions. Just imagine an incredulous Troy Aikman saying “well the analytics say to go for it there, Joe” with The Analytics invoked like a mysterious mountain sage when a team tries a daring but failed fourth-down conversion, or the Cubs explaining what will happen when they get this guy in the Pitch Lab when they acquire a reliever with a 5.43 ERA because ownership no longer wants to spend money. Once teams claim to be wielding highly complex proprietary data beyond the grasp of the few weird fans who really get into the weeds on this stuff, they can use Data and Numbers as an argument ender. Most baseball fans see things like that the same way computers are portrayed on those NCIS shows beloved by septuagenarians where a hacker is able to type fast enough to make sparks come out of a server rack and blow up a hospital.

The issue I have with Big Data is that when so much of it becomes complex, abstracted, and proprietary, it is very difficult to tell what is actually information and what is bullshit that is being used as a disguise to do what companies want it to do. I can’t help but think of the time that the Facebook algorithm forced every online publication to make us stare at terrified bloggers talking into webcams in washed out rumpus rooms for a couple of years and then the entire thing was based on a single fake metric whenever a team decides to go all in on the nebulous concept of pitch framing. Most of what baseball front offices and ownership want to do is cut payroll and save money, and I believe that “advanced analytics” has appeared as a handy smokescreen for that tactic. 

Outside of sports, whenever you see management spouting about analytics and efficiency that is almost always code for the single idea of management consultants which is layoffs. In 2026, the part of the appeal of LLM "AI" for business guys is having an anonymous and non-corporeal oracle that they can fob decisions and blame onto-- we've already seen this creep into sports front offices where "what can we say, the complex data model AI said that we should do this" is being trialed as an excuse for executives to try to save their jobs.

When Joe Maddon rails against the encroachment of spreadsheet-wielding front offices, he is not upset about these things. He is simply mad. In the very specific case of Joe Maddon, I don't blame him because the front office imposing Data and Analytics upon him was the brains-trust of the Los Angeles Angels and frankly I'd rather let washed up egomaniac Joe Maddon cook in terms of his bullpen usage than Perry Minasian even if I believe that Joe Maddon personally shortened my life with his pitching decisions in game seven of the 2016 World Series.

The fact of the matter is that as insane and pointless as this book is and as annoying as Joe Maddon can be, I am still happy to let Joe Maddon talk Joe Maddonishly about Joe Maddon things. Maddon got my favorite baseball team that was so historically bad at baseball that every time they made the playoffs there would be b-roll of graveyards showing the generations of Cubs fans that literally died waiting for them to win anything a World Series Championship. He did a bunch of dumb, goofy shit that took baseball precisely as seriously as it should be treated. And so I think that Joe Maddon is entitled to release as many disposable As Told To books about Management Success that he wants to. It’s been ten years and no other Cubs manager has been even close to the World Series. For a brief time, whatever the fuck Joe Maddon was talking about in the Book of Joe worked.

Northwestern Triumphs over 2025 Playoff Team

There is not really an upside for Northwestern playing an FCS team. A Big Ten program should be expected to clobber FCS opponents, and anything less than that sends out alarm bells. Anything good the team does can be dismissed as facing a lesser level of competition, and anything bad looks magnified, even when the team in question is South Dakota State, a perennial FCS powerhouse led by a veteran, star quarterback and a roster that is more imposing than the average FCS team. And the Big Ten team in question is Northwestern, a team that should never be expected to blow anyone out and a program that has repeatedly paid FCS teams to come to Evanston and beat them-- a 2006 loss to Chip Kelly's University of New Hampshire, a ludicrous 7-6 loss to Illinois State, and an embarrassing loss 31-24  to to Southern Illinois in 2022 as part of Pat Fitzgerald's winless in the continent of North America campaign. 

The opener was also the unveiling of the new Northwestern offense helmed by Chip Kelly and transfer quarterback Aidan Chiles. It seemed to immediately pay off. Northwestern's first offensive play was a 71 yard bomb to former Jackrabbit Griffin Wilde and the second was a touchdown pass to enormous transfer tight end Alex Honig. But the offense stalled for the rest of the half, with the Wildcats constantly committing drive-killing penalties and (this is an almost unthinkable horror for a Northwestern team) shanking punts. The Big Ten Network sent out former Gopher quarterback Tanner Morgan who you may remember from his fourteen year college career as an analyst and every single time Northwestern committed a penalty he would say "wow that's uncharacteristic from one of the least penalized teams in college football last year" like a malfunctioning speak-and-spell. 

Morgan was also enamored with Kelly's comically enormous sideline playbook, we are going to get Chip Kelly reveries all season, which will either mean Northwestern has a good offense or it has a crappy Northwestern-style offense and we will all get a chuckle out of that playbook

Northwestern's defense, down two linemen, allowed South Dakota State to march up and down the field with impunity but refused to let them score a touchdown until late in the fourth quarter. The game stayed close with South Dakota State within two with less than five minutes remaining, but a wide receiver let a sure touchdown bounce off his hands, they missed a field goal, and Joseph Himon scored with seconds remaining to ice the game and make the score look less close. 

I'm not going to nitpick the 'Cats in this one. South Dakota State is just about the worst type of FCS team to face in week one. Chiles looked a little choppy but still passed for 273 yards and didn't turn it over, and while the defensive line definitely missed key end Michael Kilbane, the secondary looked strong, Oklahoma transfer Kobie McKenzie was a menace at middle linebacker, and the trio of Himon, Caleb Komolafe, and newcomer Gavin Sawchuk ran all over the place. Northwestern also got good news after a very scary-looking hit on Jackson Carsello saw him stretchered off the field. 

Northwestern will have some time to figure out some of the problems as it enjoys an insanely early bye week like they just played an international opening game in Munich. The combination of Northwestern's hell schedule with no bye week in October or November makes it even harder to imagine the 'Cats being able to get into a bowl game this year. They are going to come out of that late stretch of playing Oregon, Iowa, and Ohio State like they had just been in one of those Marvel movies that all end with 35 minutes of weightless CGI guys getting thrown into buildings.

There's much to be made about the differences between FCS football and Power Four football in 2026. The Big Ten commands a ludicrous financial advantage over any FCS school. But Northwestern is oddly situated in the Big Ten. Would anyone have been surprised if the 'Cats fell to South Dakota State? When one thinks of the Big Ten as one of the two agenda-setting powerhouse football conferences, does Northwestern feel like a real member wielding its might against teams from less rich conferences? How many power conference buy games does South Dakota State play against a team that plays in a smaller (albeit temporary) stadium? And the most important question: would the Big Ten replay review team find an extra second for Northwestern if they weren't able to pull away from Sacramento State?

PHANTOM SECONDS

Northwestern's important and gutty win over South Dakota State was overshadowed by a disaster occurring in the same time slot. Michigan was getting bulldozed by last year's MAC champion Western Michigan. This was the debut of new coach Kyle Whittingham who was here to try to win at Michigan without becoming engulfed in scandal. But with the clock seemingly down to zero, Michigan's hail mary attempt floated out the back of the endzone with time expired. Or had it?

The Big Ten replay officials, after a long review that consulted the broadcast video, the stadium clocks, and post-structuralist faculty members who were able to confirm that the notion of linear time is in fact an imperialist construct while Marxist faculty added that it was invented by railroad companies in order to hasten the domination of capitalism, decided that the broadcast had deceived viewers. There was, in fact, a more official clock, unseen to anyone watching the game, that still had additional tenths of seconds on it, enough to give Michigan one more shot at the endzone. They converted and won another bizarre and tainted victory.

 

I think we've all been too hard on James Franklin now that we know the Big Ten operates with an additional secret clock invisible to television viewers

The fact of the matter is that Michigan did absolutely nothing wrong. The Big Ten replay crew initiated the review on its own. Michigan did not cast some sort of Rune of The Extra Second or have some weird manifesto flunky infiltrate the booth in an unconvincing fake mustache. The team was granted an extra shot at a miracle play and somehow got it. The conspiracy theorizing that the Big Ten used a heretofore unknown "secret clock" to give one of its marquee programs an extra chance does not really have anything to do with anything the Michigan football team or coaching staff did.

But Michigan fans, perhaps scarred by years of being made fun of for sideline espionage and illegal hamburger recruiting do not know how to simply let something like this go and enjoy benefiting from a world-historical replay clusterfuck. Instead, we are treated to slow motion video of various clocks showing that the clock was actually correct and the replay review made sense. At any moment, the Michigan internet can be activated to show that any weird football play that goes for them proves that the decision was in fact the greatest kind of victory for a Michigan fan: technically correct. 

One of the strangest Big Ten stories of the last few years other than Indiana becoming a national powerhouse in football (while their beloved men's basketball team has not beaten Northwestern since 2021 by the way) is Michigan becoming the conference's outlaw program. Part of the reason why the extremely stupid and fake Jim Harbaugh espionage scandal was so funny was because it happened to Michigan, the fanbase where you are most likely to hear someone say the phrase "rules-based international order" in the stands. The fact that they are now accused of leveraging secret clock replay rules to narrowly avoid losing to a local MAC team to which they reportedly paid a $1.5 million jobber bonus is extremely funny. 

I don't believe that Michigan could have possibly engineered this or that the Big Ten deliberately found an extra second; the real scandal here is the intrusion of technology-fueled instant replay technology that pedantically finds miniature infractions beyond the limits of human senses that warps the way that sports are officiated beyond the intentions of any rule set in a way that has been confounding spectators in every sports in which it has been let loose in the past two decades. At the same time, this will not stop me from accusing Michigan of using illegal Time Manipulation Techniques and Trick Clocks for the rest of the season.

THE CHICAGO CUBS WENT FOR IT AT THE TRADE DEADLINE BUT STILL CAN'T PITCH

Every year at the trade deadline, Cubs president of baseball Jed Hoyer would put on his investment vest or his quarter zip and explain to reporters that starting pitching was too expensive in order to justify why his biggest trades were for two 35 year-old relievers. Hoyer is cautious and many Cubs fans including me, thought it was to a fault. This tendency, along with the fact that the Cubs have recused themselves from the top end of the free agent market and kept repeatedly winning exactly 83 games, made Hoyer seem like he was terrified to make a major deal and hamstrung by orders from an ownership group that had become notorious for winning a World Series and then giving up as a big market team not to go into the luxury tax.

It is generally a good idea for good teams to trade prospects for proven MLB veterans. Most prospects don’t pan out or won’t really have a place to play on the big league squad. On the other hand, when a team does spin that wheel and ends up giving a very good player, it stings; a team trading a superstar for a rental is the most catastrophic transaction possible. Mets fans, for example, would probably like to have not traded Pete Crow-Armstrong, who has broken out as a superstar for the Cubs and is currently the frontrunner for National League MVP, over two months of Javy Baez playing very well for them but also being part of a team that collapsed so rancidly that he and Francisco Lindor started using a thumbs down as a getting on base gesture as a response to New Yorkers booing the team’s lackluster Mets-style baseball.

In 47 games for the Mets, Javy hit .299/.371/.515 with 9 home runs and 5 stolen bases and the Mets still went 29-45, the PCA trade is like a once in a generation natural disaster trade for them  

Instead, after last year’s encouraging run to the playoffs and a splashy signing of Alex Bregman, Hoyer decided to go for it for the first time in his tenure. The Cubs sent out big name prospects including Jefferson Rojas and the delightful baseball sphere Moises Ballesteros for playoff starters Clay Holmes, Kevin Gausman, and theoretically good reliever and guy whose last name is a phonetic spelling of how it’s pronounced in Chicago Ryan Zeferjahn. The Cubs needed pitching because almost every key pitcher for the Cubs has exploded into a pile of loose tendons. The injuries have ranged from been predictable– Cade Horton and Justin Steele with the Tommy John-style ligament injuries now de rigeur for every pitcher and the oft-injured Edward Cabrera demonstrating his most repeatable skill– to the ridiculous such as Hoby Milner going out with appendicitis or Matthew Boyd injuring his knee in a horseplay incident with one of his kids. Ben Brown, who stepped into this depleted rotation, looked like a potential star until he fell to the same neck injury that ended his season last year; perhaps he should be training violent neck motions with former spherical Diamondback Mike Fetters, known for snapping his and glaring at hitters before every pitch like a lizard doing one of those dominance displays where it inflates its neck. The Cubs, more than anything, just needed people with functioning body parts.

I once had an opportunity to throw a pre-game first pitch at a baseball game and bounced it because I was overcommitted to doing a Mike Fetters impression on the mound 

The Cubs will not win the central again because the Brewers have assembled a perfect regular-season baseball machine that simply never loses games, but they could be a dangerous team in the playoffs mainly because of Crow-Armstrong. PCA, who announced himself as more than just the best center fielder in the game last year by having an absurd first half propel him to a 30-30 season, was bad enough in the second half where he looked like a defined baseball archetype. He was a Javy Baez-style free swinger who was good enough to have insane stretches but would never be able to stop swinging at pitches that were being thrown at neighboring ballparks. He was a menace on the basepaths but didn’t get on base enough. Then, after a miserable opening month hangover from the world-historically dour American WBC team, Crow-Armstrong did something I’ve never seen a baseball player do in my life and just stopped swinging at crappy pitches. He started walking a lot, and once pitchers had to actually throw strikes to him began clobbering the ball. I have never seen a free swinger like PCA just decide one day to have plate discipline. He is having one of the greatest Cubs seasons I’ve ever seen.

At the outset of September, the Cubs have one of the funniest and most frustrating teams in baseball. They are hands down the best defensive team in baseball with gold glovers all over the field and Crow-Armstrong as the best defensive player in baseball making at least one insane, impossible catch every week. The Cubs also boast one of the top offenses in baseball led by Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki, and Bregman, who has started hitting like he is in his trashcan-fueled heyday. And their pitching remains some of the worst in baseball. The bullpen is decimated by injuries and the major free agents Hoyer brought in are injured or ineffective. Star closer Daniel Palencia has been useless on the mound since recovering from an injury, and the 35 year-old reclamation guys Hoyer brought in are turning back into pumpkins. The Cubs are on the verge of setting a record for home runs given up. Now that the playoffs are now decided almost entirely by teams’ stable of flamethrowing bullpen guys coming in in the fourth inning, the Cubs look like they have no chance at a deep run unless they can somehow score eight runs a game. 

THE DODGERS GALACTICOS MOVES MADE EVERYONE FREAK OUT BUT THEN THEY STARTED TO STINK AND THEIR OWNER MIGHT BE ARRESTED 

The Cubs’ active deadline, though, was overshadowed by the Dodgers making a move by trading for superstar pitcher Tarik Skubal. Skubal, available because the Tigers made it very clear they would not pay him and because no other team was willing to give up serious prospects to rent him because only the Dodgers, it appears, are willing to offer him the money it would take to sign him, and because the Dodgers are a factory that just acquires and churns out prospects (the major prospect in the deal originally came from the Cubs, who dealt him for very good everyday first baseman Michael Busch).

There was a hysterical reaction to the Dodgers increasing its stable of galacticos by trading for Skubal. The discourse around the Dodgers is more salient than ever with owners expected to impose a lockout at the end of this season as they make what seems to be their most determined push for a salary cap since the disastrous 1994 strike. The league itself is pushing this narrative by subjecting MLB.TV viewers to commercials emphasizing that a cap would bring fairness to a sport with an enormous payroll disparity. The fact that the Dodgers have been gobbling up nearly every superstar on the free agent market and with trades and that it seems like a fait accompli to get the next ones are all working for this owner narrative from fans of other teams who are sick of seeing a parade of superstars going Los Angeles and want someone to do something to make the situation fair.

One of the stars moving in the offseason was Kyle Tucker. Tucker got viciously booed in his return to Wrigley Field even though his second-half collapse was marred by injury and the Cubs at no point seemed to make a serious attempt to sign him long term and he took an unprecedented contract with the Dodgers that no one else was offering. Tucker seemed wounded by the booing, which was completely unfair for all of the reasons I just stated except for the fact that Tucker is the only player I have ever seen who has become disliked and polarizing just by being so extraordinarily boring and robotic that it seems actually unhinged. Things are not easy at the home park for him either, as he is posting a catastrophically bad season where the combination of his contract and underperformance would doom every single team in MLB except for the Dodgers

It does not seem a reach to assume that the owners and Rob Manfred are cynically exploiting fans’ exasperation with the Dodgers to push for the cap. The owners of baseball teams are not exercised about competitive balance in the league because many of them are not even trying to win games and exist in a perpetual state of rebuilding and selling whichever players manage to emerge from their rotten organizations into functioning baseball players for more exciting prospects when it is time to pay them. It is hard to take the owners’ concern about the Dodgers seriously when they keep trading superstar players to them.

Anyone who is so angry at the Dodgers that they are rooting for the grizzled vultures in MLB ownership is also missing a catastrophic result of a cap in baseball: it would make following baseball almost impossibly annoying. Every other major men’s league in the US runs on various cap structures, all of which are equally confounding. The NBA’s salary cap is so arcane that it requires using a special website just to see if trades are legal, and the entire discourse surrounding the league is less about players than about contracts and salaries to the point where any NBA podcast resembles arcane numbers stations where a nasal guy reads off every single player’s salary in an unending loop and another guy says “that puts them a tick under the second apron.”

The NFL cap currently involves agents reporting fake contract numbers that are inflated by nonexistent “void years” years like they are reporting industrial outputs in Smolensk to a Soviet commissar. Every season, teams and agents change a word on a contract and somehow a players’ contract doesn’t count on the cap anymore except it might impose draconian “dead money” penalties if they cut a player early. I apologize if someone reading this is an NFL Salary Cap expert and I am not describing the situation entirely accurately but I would also rather sit in a Houdini-style underwater device where I can only be freed by a mechanism where a Bears quarterback accurately throws a football at a lever than know anything about the NFL salary cap.

The situation with the Dodgers has changed significantly since the initial outrage. For one, the Dodgers have been in a tailspin and looked crappy. Skubal has been good but not the world-ending final boss he looked like last year, and the rest of their rotation is, as is tradition, injured. The Dodgers are hoping that the guys they pay handsomely to sit out the regular season and come back for the playoffs will make their late-season swoon (which included a sweep by the Cubs) irrelevant, but it is almost unprecedented for a team to simply activate a roster of Cy Young candidates in October that has been laying dormant or on a training table for months on end.

The other factor is whatever is going on with their owner Mark Walter. Walter is under investigation for insurance fraud and, after only a year, sold the Lakers to a group headed by former Disney head Bob Iger, the other Kushner brother, and whatever sinister vat of money that is also involved. It is too early to understand what is going to happen with Walter given that these things take years in court to tease out and the fact that white collar crime is no longer illegal, but it is possible that the fearmongering that the Dodgers will end competitive baseball will no longer apply. Perhaps, if Walter is indeed guilty of wrongdoing, smarmy Dodgers fans will simply pivot to explaining that other owners are not willing to compete by committing insurance fraud.

The rhetoric around the Dodgers is unfair and cynical, but I also find that it is annoying to dismiss it as sour grapes from uninformed fans. What the Dodgers might be doing (or had been doing, pending the fallout from the Walter investigation) is not illegal or wrong or "bad for baseball." However, it is annoying. It is OK to admit that a team leveraging its advantages to build a baseball death machine is irritating if you root for a team that may have to actually compete against them, and it is possible to be mad at the team you root for for not going toe to toe with the Dodgers in the expensive superstar space, it is still irritating. 

But when the Cubs have the worst pitching in baseball and the Brewers are able to send out a team that bleeps and blorps perfect hits while sending out an unstoppable army of guys who throw 102, the Dodgers might not be the problem. Baseball must investigate the Brewers for being too good at developing baseball players.

College Football 2026: I Will Sue Your Ass

If you are a fan of college football in 2026, then you have to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time: the sport has resolved its original sin by allowing players to get paid and ending the fiction of amateurism and the ridiculous facade of rules and investigations that went into maintaining it and the sport feels like it is transforming into something grim and unrecognizable. In the muck and confusion, among the smoking ruins of conferences and the creation of a new class of grizzled 25-year-old ronin who have played for six different teams, and the curtain being pulled back on the NCAA revealing that the hulking dealer of tattoo and hamburger-based retribution is in fact a timid mall cop who is not allowed to pursue anyone into the parking lot, no one at any level of this mess can resolve basic questions such as who is allowed to play college football. As a result, a sport funded and propped up almost entirely by local car magnates and scions of third-generation hot tub fortunes has reached its apotheosis: everyone is just suing everyone else’s ass all of the time.

It would be easy to blame college football’s spiral into more and more chaos on the crumbling of amateurism. Had the NCAA decided to allow schools to pay players and allowed them to create a union to represent players’ collective interests, they could have figured this out decades ago. Instead, the NCAA fought tooth and nail to protect its sham amateurism structure and had nothing in place when the courts including judges named The Honorable R. Grim Deathstriker who exist only to rule that it is legal and constitutional for corporations to force employees to be grafted into robot exoskeletons that make them better at doing spreadsheets universally ruled against the NCAA and created an insane gray market for college athletes that has entirely outsourced the payment of players to local millionaires who send emails that say “ten yrds a carry i tell you whut we ned to fire the CORDINATORS ASS sent from my Microsoft Surface the official tablet of the NFL.” The schools were happy with this arrangement because it put all of the pressure on boosters and fans to fund their rosters and allows a coach who just lost to a MAC team in a buy game to tell disappointed fans that “we’re not just not getting the support we need” and that if they don’t want to get rolled up by Bowling Green maybe they should stop eating that avocado toast and go out and pay for a tight end who can catch the goddamn ball before driving away in a six ton civilian anti-lollygagging assault vehicle with turrets that shoot footballs. 

But it wasn’t the fact that it is now legal to pay players that made schools and conferences start gobbling each other in a cannibalistic frenzy led by the Big Ten and SEC. Player payment was not the catalyst for endless rounds of playoff expansion culminating in a twelve-team system specifically designed to make fans of good but not great teams insane and their boosters to spend billions of dollars hiring and firing the same 25 coaches every three months. 

My theory about why college football has been changing so rapidly is that for most of its existence the most amount of energy that the component parts that form the loose conglomeration that governs college football was spent preserving the tenet of amateurism and attempting to police money going to athletes or trying to secretly subvert this to pay players. Once the fig leaf of amateurism fell away and you could just give a wide receiver a couple million dollars instead of having to create a rube goldberg mechanism consisting of uncles and no-show jobs at car dealerships and an influx of ferrari purchasing among the community of football grandmothers, college football officials had nowhere else to put this energy and decided they had to eat the PAC 12. 

While the NCAA once liked to present itself as the domain of square-jawed investigators that would pose with burritos a booster paid for on the table like they’re a mound of cocaine seized by the sheriff’s department, the organization and the conferences and the schools are now determining who is allowed to play college sports by waiting for a player to sue them and then having several courts rule on it. College eligibility is now partly determined by a series of injunctions. Everyone is suing each other all of the time to the point where I expect to see a fake play where a punter kicks a subpoena directly at an opposing coach.

This is what I assume it would look like for a college football coach to receive a sideline subpoena and look at the scoreboard informing him he has been served. 

The most prominent story of the offseason involved the discovery that top quarterback transfer Brendan Sorsby had repeatedly bet on sports including his own team’s games. Normally, that would be an obvious and instantaneous end to a career, but he transferred to Texas Tech, which is backed by oil billionaire Cody Campbell, a super-booster who has bought himself a position as the school’s de facto athletic director and looks like a guy who menaces Walker Texas Ranger before being unconvincingly spin kicked in slow motion through a plate glass window. Campbell and his army of Texas lawyers who I assume when not in court are kept in a terrarium where they cluck “now see here” at each other while tussling for dry-aged steaks thrown into the enclosure, went on a quixotic journey through the American court system that eventually ruled that no you can’t play college football if you have been caught actively betting on it.

As we speak, the courts are determining whether players who have left college football and spent the summer in NFL training camps can just say the hell with this shit and play college football. This is an echo of earlier cases where basketball players who had played actual NBA games attempted to quit the league and return to college where they will ostensibly make more money. 

In this case, the scheme to pluck players from NFL practice squads is being masterminded by LSU head coach and boat-tan hamburglar Lane Kiffin. Kiffin’s team already boasts a roster glittering with expensive talent; it is unclear what roles the players he has targeted just weeks before the opening of the season will play on LSU. But Kiffin, who maintains a compulsive desire to be the main character of college football after abandoning his Ole Miss team right before a playoff game to take the LSU job and then acting wounded and persecuted about it, seemed to recruit these players mainly out of a solemn duty to be a little stinker.

The SEC and Big Ten came down hard on this plan and quickly drafted rules banning NFL players from playing college football. The SEC schools seemed particularly upset about this, I suspect because every single one of them is both upset they did not think of it first and also because Kiffin is extremely annoying. Late this week, a court said those players can play. They are the first players with Schroedinger’s Eligibility.

While the court battles rage on and the government meets every few months to “save college football” by having a bunch of congressmen and administration officials whose policy on labor is to post AI memes about bringing back the good old days of Victorian child mangling equipment, it is unclear what to even think about what college football is and where it’s going. College football has always been a sport that leans hard into tradition while maintaining a roiling simmer of chaos and rapscallionship underneath, which is part of its charm.

College football in 2026 is in a weird place where it is hard to argue with many of the changes and yet these changes seem weird and sour. It is an unalloyed good that the players are getting paid. It is also good for the players that they no longer are bound to bad programs and tyrannical coaches and can offer their skills on an open market– as strange as the robust transfer market is for college football, it seems to have instantly settled into the rhythms of the Sports Transaction News Cycle with lists of the top transfer players available and radio callers hollering about whether the backup guard from Northern Illinois fits the system. Fans of middling teams now understand that their teams’ best players are likely to bolt for better programs in the offseason while also celebrating that they can pick the bones of mid-majors for a grizzled offensive lineman instead of hoping a nineteen-year-old walkon knows how to pass block.

Is it good or bad for college football that players can just move en masse when a new coach is named or that it is now normal for a coach to functionally dismiss his entire team and replace it? Is it good or bad for college football that a coach can bring in a set of loyal players from one school to the next like a sort of elite retinue following a medieval warlord? Is it good when Curt Cignetti uses this strategy to win a national championship for Indiana, an event that seemed so unlikely that if you won a national championship with Indiana in an NCAA video game it would have a post-credits scene where you woke up from a dream to see a low-polygon Nick Saban getting doused in gatorade?

I forgot that coaches were not actually in this game, you would have to figure out if Generic Coach Glasses Three looked the most like Randy Walker 

Is it bad for college football if players swept into the dustbin of NFL practice squads can instead earn a lot more money going back to school? For my entire life, the entire premise of college sports has been a strict line drawn between college and pro leagues and the idea of a hardened pro playing in college seemed insane. But does it really make a difference if a marginal NFL player who got fifteen snaps in a preseason game gets to go back and hang out on campus for an extra year? Is there a better way to be in graduate school than make possibly several million dollars and be able to shoulder tackle your peers in a way that would otherwise be frowned upon at conferences where someone has more of a comment than a question

It is hard to determine at what point the queasy feeling watching college football streamline and professionalize comes from watching something you care about change into something else without feeling like an aging fuddy-duddy pining for a sport that was most recognizable as an exploitative ligament destruction factory because that is how it was when you got really into it.

To me, the seismic changes to the conferences and emphasis on the playoff are where the seams in college football start to show. The build up of geographically incoherent superconferences and growth of a playoff that will never be large enough for a team left out to huffily refuse to play in the Pop Tarts Bowl are where the conferences and schools demonstrate a misunderstanding of why people like college football. The people in charge in this multifarious conglomeration of school administrators, conferences, and television executives want to forge a miniature NFL and they will probably make a lot of money doing it as they try to centralize and consolidate. But for me, and I suspect a lot of fans who get up every week and watch their team knowing it will likely never win a championship, the appeal of college football is that it is sprawling, wild, and stupid. Despite all of these changes, it still is. The hope is that college football will remain too ridiculous to contain.

GOVERNMENT ISSUES UPGRADED NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL THREAT LEVEL

On the one hand, it seems to me that the way college football is moving does not bode well for Northwestern. The roster apparently remains at the low end of the football payroll, it maintains admissions and transfer hurdles, and it is a small private school with a football program that absolutely no one cares about in a conference that seems to have less and less of a reason to split its gazillion dollars in TV revenue with a team that no one will ever turn on a TV for. Northwestern is not a destination school for recruits or transfers, and other schools will attempt to pry away its best players every year. Every major change seems destined to crush everything Northwestern had been doing to maintain its improbable place as a satisfyingly mediocre team that punches above its weight.

On the other hand, there is no reason why the new college environment can’t help the ‘Cats. Northwestern does not have recognition, prestige, or a promise to play in anything but the lowest tier bowl games that could be used to recruit players but what they do have is a lot of money. Northwestern has relied on one megadonor but this guy has been building things to slap his name on, including the impossibly expensive new stadium scheduled to open in the middle of this season. But fancy athletic facilities and buildings were for the prior version of college football where you couldn't just go out and pay players with money. For the first time, it is theoretically possible for Northwestern to overcome the stigma of “being Northwestern” to recruits and transfers by spending money.

To that end, Northwestern is tapping another family for football money. They are reportedly accepting $35 million from the Uilhein family. Mac Uihlein served as a solid middle linebacker for the ‘Cats before graduating this spring. The Uihlein family writ large, of the U-Line industrial supply fortune, are also reliable funders of any ghoulish right wing political project you can imagine and likely others that are impossible to fathom. I suspect most major donors to college football programs are more likely than not to be closer to the Uihlein side politically, but Northwestern fans have been shielded from having to worry too much about that by its greatest power, absolutely no one giving a shit about Wildcat football.

Northwestern has been trying to become more relevant in the Big Ten by bringing in a nationally known coaching personality in offensive coordinator Chip Kelly. The stark difference between Chip Kelly’s reception from the broader college football internet when he debuted looking like a crumpled flesh raisin crammed into a spirit halloween Mr. Construction costume at the New Ryan Field site and Northwestern fans is stark. The broad consensus I saw is that Kelly is washed up and bad coming off a disastrous partial season as offensive coordinator for the Raiders before getting unceremoniously fired and a guy who has been a joke since flaming out of the NFL and settling into a few years of mediocrity at UCLA. Northwestern fans see him as a potential savior. 

Kelly fit into the program's proud tradition of pretending to be construction guys 

The reason for this disparity is because even if Chip Kelly is washed up, bad, and at his last stop was unwilling or unable to engage in a job that involved navigating multiple Pete Carroll sons, he is still a guy who has in the past coached functioning offenses. I would guess few of the people laughing at the ‘Cats hiring Kelly have watched any Northwestern football games for the past 15 years of constipated Pat Fitzgerald toilet football. This is a program that could in spirit and execution be described as “aspirational Iowa.” If Chip Kelly is merely able to design an offense that transforms from consistently one of the worst in FBS to one that is on the lower edges of mediocre, it would be the most important offensive evolution of the Wildcat football since Northwestern started doing power runs out of spread formations against fuming opponents who lodged complaints with the league offense about it not being plodding enough.

Kelly has some exciting skill position players to work with. Northwestern’s offense starts with star running back Caleb Komolafe, who broke out after stalwart Cam Porter’s gruesome early season injury and basically became the entire offense as the ‘Cats stopped even trying to pass the ball. Griffin Wilde, the Wildcats’ best receiver, returns. And Michigan State transfer Aidan Chiles offers a tantalizing run/pass skill set that was enough to drive Spartan fans crazy for the past couple of years. Part of that, I understand, was that Chiles got absolutely annihilated behind a porous offensive line, and part of it were the things Chiles did that made him available to Northwestern. No sure thing at quarterback is transferring here, which is why the gold standard of Northwestern transfer quarterbacking has for the past several seasons has been guys who have been able to move the ball exactly enough for the linebackers to catch their breath and to throw exactly enough disastrous interceptions that still allow the ‘Cats to win.

And yet even if Northwestern as a team is good or even better than last year, it might not matter. Northwestern has drawn a Big Ten Death Schedule this season. The ‘Cats have to play juggernauts Ohio State, Indiana, and Oregon on the road. They are scheduled to open the new stadium against a Penn State team ready to avenge last year’s humiliating homecoming coach-toppler. They also get Big Ten West legacy nemesis Iowa back on the docket along with the annual hat game against Bret Bielema’s irritatingly competent Illinois team. If the ‘Cats want any shot at a bowl game they will have to win every non-conference game and take care of the very few other mid-tier Big Ten teams on the schedule. If Braun can get the team to a bowl game this season against this schedule without one of the superteams suffering a Penn State-style collapse into airplane banner mutiny, it would be a major achievement.

The non-conference doesn’t start out easy. They face South Dakota State. In theory, a Power Four team should have enough talent to stand up to even the best FCS teams. But as a person who watched low-tier and even respectable Big Ten teams get ambushed by Dakota teams in the early weeks of the season, I am worried. The Jackrabbits put up more than 70 on Stetson last week. They’ll be in the sedate atmosphere at the unkillable Temporary Lakeside Stadium on a humid evening. Northwestern under Braun has not looked particularly impressive in season openers, and given the dragons lurking on the Big Ten schedule, this is already a vital game for Northwestern’s bowl hopes. The ‘Cats are favored by the gambling people, but no one has any information yet on how this team actually plays. This is a dangerous game. 

I’m excited to see how Chiles looks and what the concept of a Chip Kelly Northwestern attack looks like. If Northwestern looks like a normal Northwestern-style offense, that would be disappointing. And if Northwestern gets rolled by an FCS team in a home opener, that would be pretty bad for the ambitions of the season, but it would offer proof that perhaps college football hasn’t changed as much as it has seemed.