Reviewing the Big Ten Bowls

The Big Ten football season has come to a disappointing close, which is bad news for a conference on the ropes in desperate need of some redemption, but good news for those who enjoy watching conference rivals humiliated by vastly superior out of conference competition in the manner of a rakish Duke absconding with the conference's marriageable daughters and spices from the Orient.


This is to therefore give you all notice, reptiles,
scoundrels, ragamuffins, poltroons, lank-jaw'd
herring-gutted plebians, that if you, or any of
you, set foot in my boats, or any part of my
property, I will send my myrmidons, like Tritons,
who shall assail you in the deep or plunge you into
the great abyss known as Aul'shole.


CHAMPS SPORTS BOWL
Wisconsin got the ball rolling particularly poorly with a 42-13 drubbing at the hands of the Florida State Seminoles. The Badgers' play in this game resembled the Bucky Badger kept at Madison zoo: listless, complacent, engorged on ground-dwelling rodents. Incidentally, badger baiting was made illegal in Britain in 1835, although the game of "drawing the badger" became immensely popular, where a dog was unleashed into a simluated badger den and the badger and dog become locked in a festive biting exhibition. The owner of the dog then pulled the dog out of the den, with its jaws hopefully clamped on the badger's tale, and owners attempted to see how many times the dog could draw the badger in a minute. A capital sport for a more civilized age.

According to this drawing, a standard badger-bait included either biting the dog's
tail or inflating it like a kiddie pool while a top-hatted henchman stood in the
corner simulating the illusion of forward movement

VALERO ALAMO BOWL
Thoughts on this game have already been noted at great length, so let's pull an ESPN and show a gratuitous picture of Chase Daniel's family.

Chase Daniel's great-great-great-great-great grandfather
signs a letter of intent to enter His Majesty's Service in the
Hindu Kush.

INSIGHT BOWL
Kansas clobbered Minnesota in the last season of Gopher football in the Metrodome. I'm going to miss the Hubert Horatio Humprey Metrodome for Minnesota football, and I think the Gophers will as well, since it will be difficult for the Brewster-led spread offense to function in November without a full complement of Sherpa guides and because they'll lose the noise advantage of several thousand Minnesotans spelling the state name at the end of the Minnsesota Rouser as the O continues to linger in the dome for weeks at a time. I will miss the Hubert Horatio Humprey Metrodome not only because it was home to two of the greatest plays in Northwestern history (Victory Right and the crazy Brendan Smith interception-touchdown from this year) but also because Humphrey is forever linked in my mind with the 1972 presidential election and Hunter S. Thompson's claim that Edmund Sixtus Muskie was hooked on Ibogaine. Incidentally, googling the terms muskie hunter led to this unexpected result.


Errant google search for the terms Muskie Hunter
inadvertently provides video trolling excitement

CAPITAL ONE BOWL
Michigan State managed to keep Georgia quarterback Matt Stafford in check for the first half, but was unable to contain him in the second half. Georgia also did a pretty good job of bottling up Javon Ringer, who only rushed for 47 yards. This game failed to be a good enough effort to bolster the conference's flagging reputation or a spectacular enough failure to make this guy take to the airwaves in a display of berserker rage. I've always been disappointed that State is in East Lansing rather than Sparta, Michigan, which eschews the ancient city-state's ethos of militarism and helot slavery, instead boasting on its website that "The Village of Sparta is nestled near the big city lights which contain the entertainment districts and shopping venues of Grand Rapids, yet is tucked into the traditional way of life with friendly neighborhoods and traditional community values." This is Sparta.

An East Lancing

OUTBACK BOWL
Laugh it up, Iowa. You're the only Big Ten team to win a bowl game this year, stomping on Steve Spurrier's South Carolina juggernaut 31-10. Iowans also traveled in droves to the game, as their traditional hunting and forage routes took them to Tampa Bay and the Hillsborough County area. The last thing we need is a resurgent Iowa football program, not with Drago's development of the largest corn head in the world. Joe Bollig, the DragoTec director of marketing, claims Iowans "are turning to Drago to reduce ear bounce, butt-shelling and overall shelling loss."


An Iowa fan enjoys the Hawkeyes'
butt-shelling of South Carolina

ROSE BOWL
Another Rose Bowl, another clobbering at the hands of USC. This time, it was Penn State who lost 38-24. Similar one-sided results have resulted in the end of football at the Rose Bowl. In 1902, Michigan beat Stanford 49-0, resulting in the replacement of football with chariot racing. This Sports Illustrated article from 1968 chronicles the development of chariot racing in the Tournament of Roses. My favorite character is the sublimely named Ed Off, whom SI describes as "chariot racing's Man of La Mancha." Of course, any article that has a sentence start with the phrase "When his rampaging horses finally were brought under control" is worth reading. I suggest, therefore, that the Tournment of Roses bring back chariot racing. Since the Big Ten can no longer compete with USC, they should allow two current players to fling themselves around the Rose Bowl with bull penis whips and those spikes that come out of wheels in gladiator movies. This year, for example, it could have been Penn State DE Aaron Maybin versus USC's Rey Maualuga. Or, they could have let JoePa take on Pete Caroll, with JoePa negating Caroll's youth and fully functioning hips with his first-hand knowledge of chariot combat. I would pay to see this, although USC would probably still win every year.


COME TO PENN STATE

TOSTITO'S FIESTA BOWL
Another "moral victory" for the Big Ten as Ohio State hung with the Longhorns until a heartbreaking touchdown with sixteen seconds left sealed the victory. Ohio State could not handle the Horns' hurry-up offense, short passing game, and inspired mullet dancing, and lost their third BCS game in a row. Texas, is, of course, led by Colt McCoy, who has been largely celebrated for his astonishingly Texan name, a name so good that he forced Jevean Snead out of Austin. Yet, in my opinion, Colt's teammate Lamarr Houston has him beat with a name celebrating Republic of Texas presidents Sam Houston and Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar.

Lamar's middle namesake loses at Risk to his
archenemy Bill S. Preston, esq.

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was president of the nascent Republic, which, by 1840, was in dire financial straits. Houston, Lamar's predecessor and rival, pushed for the passage of the Franco-Texian Bill, which would have granted the French rights to colonize and develop parts of Texas while maintaining a military garrison. The problem lay with the self-proclaimed Comte de Saligny, a French diplomat who took up residence in the French Legation in Austin. De Saligny took exception to a neighbor's pigs who ran rampant through the legation grounds, and the legation nearly became the site of a violent altercation between De Saligny's butler and the neighbor. Needless to say, the pig grazing quickly became an international incident. Eventually, de Saligny took his poofy wigs and toher French finery with him and went home, which led to the halting of diplomatic relations between Texas and France for a year as part of the Austin Pig War, one of two Pig Wars in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, proving that pigs cause more wars than Jenkins' body parts.

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

Getting to know Chase Daniel

Missouri's fearsome offense is run through its quarterback Chase Daniel. Daniel is fourth in the country with 4,135 yards passing, sixth in touchdowns with 37, and second only to the mighty Colt McCoy by completing 74% of his passes. And he does this by having a name that could have landed him an honorable mention on the list of this season's best lacrosse names.


Stevenson lacrosse middie
Holts Scoven prepares to
dominate the opposition
on the field of play.
Incidentally, according to
Wikipedia, in early lacrosse
"Passing the ball was thought
of as a trick, and it was seen
as cowardly to dodge an opponent."

The Alamo Bowl will be the senior's last college game. After that, the question becomes whether or not his skills in Missouri's spread offense will translate to the NFL game, or whether he will become just another great college quarterback who cannot make the leap to the next level.


College career passing record holder Timmy Chang
prepares to unleash the fucking fury. Chang never
made it in the NFL, although he apparently is playing
for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Incidentally, Chang
lit up Northwestern and ended their Motor City Bowl
hopes when they played in 2004. The 'Cats were winning
handily when they made the mistake of late-hitting
Chang into a steel bench, after which Chang led his
legion of inspired Polynesians on an aerial rampage
through the Wildcat secondary. The Saskatchewan
Roughriders should take the precaution of removing all
benches from the sidelines and preventing Chang from
exposure to gamma rays or zombie rage viruses.

Macolm Gladwell has an excellent article on Chase Daniel in The New Yorker about the phenomenon of trying to guess how college quarterbacks transition to the pros mixed with an analysis of how to evaluate good teachers. Another article that touches on the theme of college QBs transitioning to the pros is Michael Lewis's piece for the New York Times Magazine on Eli Manning. The Gladwell article confirms what we all know about selecting a quarterback in the draft: GMs and scouts might as well fill a cauldron up with sal mirabilis, regulus martis, purified mercury, distilled rain water, mercurial water, red tincture, potable gold, aurum potabile, red sulphur, rectified spirit, green liquor, sal ammoniac, aqua fortis, distilled vinegar, and red oil in order to predict a quarterback's success. This is a scientifically precise method because all of these words came up as key terms on the Amazon page for the book How To Prepare Alchemical Formulas From The Writings Of Famous Alchemists along with the terms "excellent medicine," "wind furnace," and "glass retort."


A glass retort

The arcane science involved with attempting to select a quarterback seems fairly futile, but I find the search for NFL quarterbacks fascinating for some reason.


Be the first kid on your block to find Moses Moreno

Sports Illustrated this week has an article on the success of rookie quarterbacks Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco, first-round draft picks that apparently have worked out, especially Ryan. Still, the process for finding a quarterback resembles prospecting, and not the industrial kind that likely typified most mining operations, but the type that focuses on panning and the three Bs of grizzledness (Buckskin, Beard, and Blunderbuss), while battling the elements, predatory birds, and industrious Chinese prospectors who had gotten there first. Only instead of fools' gold, you draft a quarterback who inspires films celebrating his astounding combination of incompetence and boorishness.

Chase Daniel is not a Matt Ryan or a Joe Flacco. He will probably not be drafted high, and will have an uphill climb to get a shot at playing time. He may not have the NFL career of a Brett Basanez or even a Zak Kustok (who memorably joined the Bears from the CBOT floor), but he's a great college quarterback, and Northwestern will have a tough time stopping him in San Antonio. The Alamo Bowl may well be Chase Daniel's last big game, although maybe things will work out and there is a Grey Cup in his future if Timmy Chang becomes so infuriated that he goes on a shirt-ripping frenzy that requires an entire team of Winnipeg handlers to subdue him and Henry Burris and Brad Banks are unavailable.


Your move, Chang

Breaking down the bowl scenarios

With the Big Ten season over, it's time to figure out how the bowl scenarios will play out. Northwestern's bowl game will be determined by several factors: their overall record and place in the Big 10 standings, the placement of Ohio State in a BCS bowl game, past attendance at bowl games, likely number of fans drawn, the current astrological status of former planet Pluto, and the Austrian succession.


The machinations of Frederick II are a minor, but important addition to the
byzantine BCS rankings. Here he is playing the flute, an activity that reportedly
enraged Frederick I; the psychological effects would later cause great pain for
residents of Silesia and the University of Texas Longhorns.


How does the bowl picture become so cloudy? A BYCTOM exclusive takes a look in depth.

HOW A BOWL BECOMES A LAW

The bowl selection process involves a shadowy cabal of bowl representatives, titans of industry, deposed heads of states that no longer exist, and underwhelming Batman villain King Tut.


The bowl selection committees
include a Holy Roman Emperor, an
Avignon Pope, a King of Sardinia,
and a White Raja of Sarawak

Bowl selection committee meetings are often rife with treachery, double-dealing, and international intrigue as different schools campaign briskly through mailings, courtiers, assassins, and feminine wiles. For example, the 1999 Independence Bowl selection involved at least three poisonings and retinue of grape-wielding harlots on the part of Ole Miss. Each bowl is tied to a conference pairing, with Notre Dame involved as a wildcard. Notre Dame can go to any bowl it chooses, appearing in 1995 in the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Carquest Bowl, the Copper Bowl, and the not-yet-existent galleryfurniture.com bowl by bending time and space through the use of arcane papal magic. As early as 1875, Notre Dame managed to get their mediocre Strong-Man Decathlon Team through to the post-season despite their underwhelming performance in the events of triangular weight-lifting, single-strap unitard mending, bicyclemanship, and fisticuffs.


Adam Weishaupt, early important figure
in the Sun Bowl selection committee.

After the meetings, bloodshed, and bastard pregnancies are cleared away, the bowl committees reveal their picks on national television, while simultaneously giving instructions to their worldwide operatives. The bowls attempt to find attractive conference match-ups while simultaneously winding their tentacles tighter around world governments and international organizations.


The Motor City Bowl announces its 2006 Central Michigan-
Middle Tennessee State matchup to a jubliant crowd


WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NORTHWESTERN

Because of Oregon's win over Oregon State, Ohio State will likely get an invitation to a BCS game via a complex system of alliances. That means that everyone in the Big 10 moves up a slot, leaving a competition between Northwestern and Iowa for the Outback Bowl, a postapocalyptic death race through the Australian Outback.


Paul Posluszny on the sidelines of the 2007
Outback Bowl

The lobbying between Northwestern and Iowa has been fierce. Northwestern president Henry Bienen sleeps under the watch of his personal guard of crack musket-men. The Iowan leader plans to ward off assaults using a variety of oblong rocks. Northwestern will be touting its superior record, its head-to-head defeat of Iowa at Kinnick, and its clenched-tooth plutocrat alumni base while Iowa will be arguing for its nomadic Winnebago population, superstar running back Shonn Greene, and the fact that some random lineman every year has long, flowing blond hair and then vanishes into some sort of airbrushed van Valhalla (or even a Vanhalla, if you will) before passing the mantle onto some other Norseman.

As a consolation, the other school will end up at the Alamo Bowl, which pays homage to the glorious victories of General Santa Anna and his invincible armies. The Big Ten representative will have to match up against a high flying Big 12 offense. Northwestern's last trip to the Alamo Bowl was similar to the outcome of the actual Battle of the Alamo, as Northwestern was unable to stop Heisman winner and professional gas station attendant Eric Crouch. Iowa was defeated in the Alamo Bowl in 2006 by Texas, a crucial first step in the plan to end the United States's brutal occupation of the Republic, making Texans finally unafraid to fly the Lone Star flag over virtually every structure in the state.

By any external logic, Northwestern should go to the New Year's Day Outback bowl, but in my expert opinion and a thorough examination of the records of past bowl consistories, the 'Cats will end up in the Alamo Bowl. If Northwestern does not end up in either of these bowls and ends up getting completely screwed, I am making a rallying cry to all NU alumni to drop what they are doing, drop their monocles and canes used for the clearing of rabble, and take part in a massive street riot, demanding justice for this outrage through clenched teeth.