NIT Bound

Somehow it all came together. It may have taken a train full of spices from the Orient or an incriminating photo of a selection committee member performing deviant sexual acts on illegally harvested organs filled with narcotics and pirated intellectual property or the use of psychotropic drugs and Air Willie or maybe even a combination of all three involving Air Willie illegally harvesting organs while secreting illegal narcotics through its porous plastic tongue and blaring a bootleg Time records-- regardless of how it happened, the Wildcats are in the NIT.

A look at Northwestern's NIT credentials

They face off Wednesday against Rhode Island in their second consecutive NIT road game after last year's dispiriting loss to Tulsa. Northwestern joins fellow Big Tenners the Illinois in the tournament; it also has a chance to potentially avenge itself in Madison Square Garden against the Golden Hurricane and jump-start a rivalry (the only thing more satisfying than a trip to the NCAAA Tournament is surely a fierce annual showdown with Tulsa in the NIT) and is set up for a potential Northwestern-Northeastern game that has fans ordinal directions leaping out of their prescription loafers. Despite disappointment at coming up short of that elusive NCAA bid, Northwestern fans can savor at least one more opportunity to celebrate an improbably exciting season in a tournament where the teams are not expected to show up with their own basketballs, sweat mops, and 24 second clocks, officials, and 2 Unlimited CDs.

MAKING AN IMPRESSION

No matter how a president is captured, be it a candid photograph, heroic oil painting, or lithographed into a terrifying bejowelled lion/president hybrid that would haunt the nightmares of Skip Myslenski, each only gets one chance to have an official portrait. By custom, presidential portraits are presented after a president gets to leave an imprint on the country, ideally leaving a sort of idiosyncratic footnote to his administration.

For such a tradition, the presidential portraits showcase a surprising amount of variety of poses, props, expressions, and styles. More importantly, they force a decision about which president looks like your favorite Dracula.

Official BYCTOM president to Dracula conversion chart

A common early style focused more on the president's head before shifting to more dynamic scenes that could show the president interacting with bundles of paper or in the vicinity of a globe.

Early portraits focused on the president's expression. To the left, James
Madison gives his best "how are you gentleman" face most commonly
used to demand from some defunct international body like the League
of Augsberg a sum of silver ducats and the Duchy of Warsaw
lest he destroy Europe with the early moderm equivalent of a space
laser which I guess would be a giant wooden rod painted red, whereas
James Monroe demonstrates the sonic power of his stereo equipment

Of all of the many showcasing the standing around with bits of paper motif, none is better than John Tyler, who decided that his legacy is best described as distraught newspaper crumpling.

Tyler looks like he just saw William
Henry Harrison drift ghoulishly into
the Oval Office to punish Tyler for his
coat-disparaging taunts

Washington and Taylor are the only armed presidents, although Washington looks far more prepared to use his sword as he gestures peevishly at some unseen man from Porlock. Other presidents chose to go outside, such as Truman enjoying some sort of veranda and McKinley, demonstrating a high-pressure front moving in on Receda and urging citizens to get out their galoshes in this time of national crisis.

Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur demonstrate the importance of
a dramatic setting, whether it is the middle of the apocalypse or in a
Scarface mansion filled built on a sound combination of pimping and
bear-baiting

The whole spread of portraits are available here, along with some helpful anecdotes about why Theodore Roosevelt seems even more pugilistic than normal, although it leaves as a riddle why Buchanan has the only round portrait, why Grover Cleveland did not get two non-consecutive portraits done, and how Taft's portrait artist was left with no choice but to lapse into Impressionism.

THIS IS ALL RELEVANT SOMEHOW

Although the NIT is not necessarily a springboard to Big Ten domination in the next season, it is hard to imagine that the success in this tournament will not help build confidence for next year. Though the Wildcats lose Nash, the heart and soul of the Northwestern defense, the experience gained by "Juice" Thompson, Drew Crawford, and the inevitable merging of Shurna and Coble into a spindly mass of limbs that will act as some sort of Vishnu of offensive production builds up expectations for next year. But with the unpredictability of injuries, the grind of a tough Big Ten season, and the fact that Northwestern's basketball team plays for Northwestern, it is best to enjoy the fact that, like the football team, Northwestern is establishing the post-season of any sort as an attainable goal and something to build on for the endless array of next years in the program's future until the Rutherford B. Hayes Apocalypse.

Forgetting the Alamo

San Antonio has not been kind to Northwestern this decade. You may recall the 2000 Alamo Bowl, where future NFL Europa superstar safety Eric Crouch led Nebraska to a 66-17 husking of Northwestern. Even worse, I remain convinced that Nebraska's mascot, which resembles nothing less than a bouncing, inflatable Big Boy sign, was a crucial step that led to the creation of Air Willie.


The tragic result of a Pygmalion-style
wager in the Athletic Department: "I'll
bet I can make this mascot more inbred
and shambling"

The 2000 Alamo Bowl was played as an ode to the Battle of the Alamo itself, with Northwestern in the role of Davy Crockett, Sam Bowie, and Dwayne Missouri hurling themselves against the invincible legions of Santa Anna.


Perpetrators of unsporting massacres at the Alamo

Incidentally, my favorite Davy Crockett story has nothing to do with frontiersmanship, or mountains, or dead animal hats, but the U.S. presidency. It all started when Richard Lawrence, a house painter in the D.C. area, became convinced that he was King Richard III of England. He also somehow decided that it was the treacherous hand of Andrew Jackson that prevented him from staking his claim as the rightful heir to the British throne. Obviously, Lawrence had only one way to rectify the situation and that was to kill Andrew Jackson, which would grant him the Crown and transport him to the fifteenth century. So on January 30, 1835, he followed Jackson to a funeral and attempted the first assassination of president in U.S. history. As Jackson passed by the pillar where Lawrence was skulking, he fired at the president point-blank, but the pistol misfired. He then produced a second pistol, which also misfired, although I choose to believe that he fired them both at Jackson simultaneously while flying out of a mortuary drawer under the cover of a flock of doves. Jackson's entourage, including Davy Crockett, subdued Lawrence before Jackson thrashed him with the business end of his cane.


According to Lawrence's Wikipedia entry, "Lawrence worked as a painter and
there is speculation that exposure to the chemicals in his paints may have
contributed to his derangements...His personality changed dramatically around
this point. He was previously conservatively dressed, but now he dressed
flamboyantly, and grew a moustache."

This time, the experience was far different. For starters, the Alamo Bowl changed sponsors from Sylvania to Valero, which meant that an entirely different team of corporate stiffs got to gladhandle each other in luxury boxes and be greeted indifferently at halftime at a half-full game.

The Alamodome is a fairly crappy venue largely because it is a dome, which completely negates the point of having a bowl game in a warm weather city. The game might as well be held in Detroit which boasts the possibility of legal carousing for the underage in nearby Windsor, Ontario and a festive display of trashcan fires along the way to Ford Field.

CROWN THEIR ASS

Northwestern entered the game as 13-point underdogs, essentially the largest underdogs in the entire bowl series. Pundits expected Northwestern to be unable to contain Missouri's insane offense featuring Chase Daniel, Chase Coffin, Chase Patton, Jeremy "Chase" Maclin, and Holts Scoven. In fact, several predicted a shootout because they hadn't watched a single Northwestern game this season where a resurgent defense carried an offense that had departed from its prodigious output in past years. These are the same people who continually assume that the Bears' defense kept them in games this year and that Napoleon III would march triumphantly through Berlin, scattering Germany back into its atomistic Dukedoms, Duchys, and components of the Holy Roman Empire.


Napoleon I is not walking through that door

Missouri played like the Alamo Bowl was a booby-prize after starting the year with BCS ambitions, although the Tigers lost to pretty much every legitimate team they faced. Northwestern picked off three errant Daniel passes, including a spectacular diving grab by inhuman defense machine Corey Wootton, and largely kept Maclin in check for the first half, until he inevitable burst through for a punt return touchdown. Northwestern played well on offense, although they failed to capitalize on several possessions, which would have given them the win, and Missouri figured out how to get to C.J. Bachér in the second half, leading to several blindside hits where the only way the defense could have hit him harder is if they were bearded Norsemen who had one of those battering rams with a ram skull carved into the end presumably to give it more rampower. Even so, Northwestern was in position to win for most of the game, even benefiting from the Curse of Mike Nugent when the oppositions' automatic kicker misses an important late-game field goal. The only thing the game lacked was an attempt at the unstoppable Victory Right play on the last hail mary attempt.

Northwestern does not often lose in overtime, which made the loss even more crushing. The Wildcats squandered plenty of opportunities to get the upset and generally looked like the better team out there. Nevertheless, the loss demonstrated that Northwestern's defense is for real and will retain most of the starters for next year. Northwestern is going to win one of these bowl games one of these days.

INEVITABLE BLOG POSTGAME WRAP-UP GIMMICK

For this game, BYCTOM is debuting the Charlton Heston Damn You list, for those who deserve to be the recipient of our fist-shaking incredulity.

Damn you:
-Jeremy Maclin, 2 TDs, ran reverses with rank impunity
-Sean Weatherspoon, bone rattling forced fumble basically ended the game
-Horrifying random knee injuries, forcing Wootton from the game
-Chase Daniel's Family, being on TV constantly, distracting from Henry Bienen sightings with his colorful Swiss Guard
-Frank Solich, running up the score in the 2000 Alamo Bowl with unnecessary halfback option passes
-The invincible legions of Santa Anna
-The brutal continued U.S. occupation of the Republic of Texas
-The Riverwalk and its tourist-trap mayhem with the exception of one time when I was there and a guy in a Luchador mask was just skulking around, Richard Lawrence-like, presumably waiting for a hapless passerby to be the victim of an unexpected flying elbow drop or a cleverly-hidden steel chair
-Dr. Zaius, this is a madhouse
-Kaiser Wilhelm II, treachery, mustache