Bielem It! The Bret Bielema Motivational System

EVANSTON-- Throughout the game, the scoreboard flashed ominous warnings about how anyone who entered the field of play would be captured and thrown into an oubilette, but when the clock hit zero, Northwestern fans were on Ryan Field celebrating a victory over three-win Purdue, a possible Quick Lane Bowl berth, and the imminent destruction of their own stadium.  It was the greatest moment in a populated Ryan Field in five years.

The actual game itself was a festival of Big Ten West football.  Northwestern missed an extra point.  Purdue ran the ball at will until they got close to the endzone and then immediately turned the ball over; Purdue also kept going for it on fourth down and failing including one sequence that gave them multiple tries from within the one yardline.  Neither team made a single kick in the first half.

 

Another disturbing turn of events is that it appears that Willie Wildcat has joined a militia

The overall disgust and misery that the Big Ten West has brought to college football in this, its last glorious season, has been one of the highlights of the year.  In recent weeks, I have been trying to think of reasons why the division is the way it is and why every big ten west game seems like a four-hour presentation on why football should be illegal.  It is not accurate to say that the Big Ten West uniformly plays an outmoded version of football that existed before the invention of the forward pass; the play is more like a collection of teams that have all been told that the forward pass was legal exactly four weeks ago.  It seems like it should be possible that even a single team has discovered a dynamic and exciting way to play but there is only one program trying to change to a forward-thinking pass-wacky style and it is a Wisconsin team that is still mainly made up of rowdy Wisconsinites who all won state championships in shoving, and they are operating the air raid with a bunch of fullbacks who are having trouble learning the nuances of the system because they need to spend each week between games getting extracted from walls they have headbutted too hard.

The Big Ten West has never been good.  The division's representative has lost every single championship game in its history although this is misleading-- it is more accurate to say that no West team has ever been better than Ohio State or Michigan, which are the only two teams to represent the east, although that is something that can be said about the East division as well.  But the Big Ten West's outstanding oafishiness this year is remarkable.  I think that part of it comes down to a down year for Wisconsin, which is usually the default West favorite.  Part of it comes down to the West being dominated this year by Iowa, the most ridiculous team in college football.  Iowa is a bizarre meme team with weird dynastic politics that have left the offense in the hands of an inept princeling like they are a Crusader Kings game where the heir to the throne has rolled perilously low skill in football coaching and has developed the trait "disturbing punt fetish."  Every week, this team goes out with a dominant defense and the most diabolically wretched offense I have ever seen and I am speaking as someone who has grown up watching the Chicago Bears, and you see all of the japes and jokes online and think to yourself they can't possibly be this horrible to watch, they've got to at least be able to run the ball a little, and then you turn on the game and they are just falling down behind the line of scrimmage and the quarterback is spinning around and passing the ball like a discus thrower and two wide receivers have gotten their facemasks stuck together and are desperately trying to pry themselves away from each other while the ref throws the flag for "aesthetically disgusting" and still they are dominating the division by winning every game like 8-6 on a walkoff safety, and despite my natural enmity for the Iowa Hawkeyes I have to admit this is one of the greatest bits I have ever seen a football team pull off.

I also think that some of the reason for the Big Ten West's transcendent putridness comes from a process that is not identical but adjacent to the tech process known as "enshittification."  There, once a tech platform has gotten users and vendors locked into its services, it no longer has any incentive to improve and exists to extract money form both users and suppliers.  In the Big Ten West, none of these teams can ever compete with Michigan or Ohio State, so there is really no incentive to actually try to not play functional toilet football.  They just have to be slightly better than the other Big Ten West teams and become comically more inept and disgusting for their fans and for Big Ten advertisers who are trying to sell extra-large men's pants to people who are lapsing into punt-induced comas.

Or maybe it's because the midwest just doesn't really produce anyone who can throw the ball good.

NORTHWESTERN IS GOING TO A BOWL GAME

There were many ways I could see this season going, but I didn't see it ending in December.  It looked to me like the hazing scandal would destroy the program and lead Northwestern back into its 1980s nadir.  Instead, the team started winning games, first miraculously and then methodically.  

I have absolutely no idea if David Braun will be an effective coach going forward, but it's impressive that he managed to keep the team together, win football game, and not do anything obviously embarrassing during this bizarre and turbulent season. It also has helped him that college football media has turned its focus entirely on a very stupid and harmless scandal where an array of the Upper Midwest's goofiest motherfuckers have been running a Coen Brothers sign-stealing operation while Michigan's most litigious alumni have been preparing legal briefs on their message boards and Jim Harbaugh shows up every week in a wrestling singlet saying he is training to wrestle on the moon's gravity, which has overshadowed Northwestern's very real and awful hazing scandal.  I suspect that once college football re-enters its summer doldrums and the lawsuits begin in earnest, the grotesque practices of Northwestern's football  program will reappear in the news, but Braun got the luxury of operating in the shadow of national indifference to Wildcat Football.

 Of course, the university has imposed another challenge on Braun for year 2: wander the earth.  The Evanston City Council ruled this week that Northwestern can build its fancy new stadium and hold additional events and concerts there over the stringent objections of neighborhood groups.  Demolition of Ryan Field will begin very soon.  Northwestern football will not have a home for two full seasons.  I have no idea where they will play, although I guess it will be some combination of Wrigley Field and Soldier Field.  It is possible they will play somewhere funnier, like a local high school or the parking lot for the disused suburban Kmart where the National Guard gave me a Covid vaccine.  The single season that Northwestern basketball played at the All State Arena while they renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena was a complete disaster-- it is kind of absurd that the small amount of momentum the program has gained to keep it away from the permanent bottom of the Big Ten might be easily destroyed by an obsession with putting Pat Ryan's name on another building that is already named after him.

I have written before about my bewilderment and sadness that Northwestern wants to build a fancy new stadium, but it hits harder now that Ryan Field is being advanced upon by bulldozers.  Let's not mince words: Ryan Field is a shithole.  

At the very least, Northwestern could have the barnacles scraped off the hull once in awhile

It is a ridiculous place to watch a Big Ten football game.  It is small and simultaneously cramped and empty.  It does not have lights.  The grass turf is lousy.  But it was also very accessible and easy.  It doesn't feel like a Big Ten stadium, but it feels like some field they're playing football on in the middle of a neighborhood.  It doesn't feel like some sort of Cathedral of Football but just a sort of run-down place where a game is going on, which really matched the vibe of Northwestern football for a long time.  Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a stadium for this program that will still never have more fans than an opponent in its own building no matter how many times they decrease the seating capacity is so ridiculous to me that I can barely fathom it. I am really disappointed that no one triumphantly tore out the tarp and threw it into Lake Michigan.

GIVE ME THE DAMN HAT

Northwestern's unreal season can be capped with one more improbable feat: to go into Memorial Stadium and reclaim the hat from the Illini.  There was a stretch when Northwestern won The Hat six years in a row and came close to evening the all-time record between these teams.  It took three more Illinois coaches to pry The Hat from Northwestern heads between Tim Beckman, unleashing an unholy cackle as he rode an unending tide of anti-Northwestern propaganda to victory in the greatest Hat Game of all time which was also a battle for bowl eligibility, and Brett Bielema stretching the trophy on his gigantic noggin unceasingly since 2021.  But enough is enough.  The Hat must come home.

Illinois has a lot to play for.  Their eight-win season last year was followed up with a sour sequel, and the Illini must win this game in order to qualify for a bowl.  Northwestern can qualify for a "better" bowl game whatever that means with an additional win and rise in the Big Ten West standings.  There is also the matter of the Hat itself, which has never been worn by many of Northwestern's players.  Here's Braun on his indoctrination in to the Hat Cult:

“It’s been a great learning opportunity for me to ask the staff, to ask our Leadership Council this morning, what this rivalry means to them. The consistent message is ‘Coach, we want the HAT back. It’s time to bring the HAT back.'"

Hopefully Braun has spent the week staring at pictures of the Hat and becoming hypnotized by its power and the prestige that it conveys in this rivalry and in the North American sports landscape.  

BIELEM IT! THE BRETT BIELEMA MOTIVATIONAL SYSTEM

I did not expect to be shivering at Willard Airport and waiting for a someone to take me to the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center where I was supposed to meet Bret Bielema, the head of coach of the Illinois Fighting Illini to talk about his book.  I was out of my element here in the midwest-- my life was on set or in writer's rooms punching up scripts and sampling a blend of exotic cocaines.  For thirty-five years, I've been saving shitty writers and producers from themselves in Hollywood, and I was the best.  They called me Doc Frankenstein for a long time because I'd drive up and dig up some parts of some other failed projects and then use some unholy magic to get the whole thing to work, at least they did until some jagoff executive producer didn't understand that Frankenstein referred to the scientist and not the monster and after he said "hey someone tighten the neck bolts on Frankenstein over there" I tried to run him over with the Batmobile (I was responsible for about 85% percent of Arnold Schwarzneegger's Mr. Freeze cold puns and I am specifically the person who came up with "stay cool bird boy" after which Arnold personally sent me a reproduction of his grotesquely red and swollen head from Total Recall from his own collection in gratitude).  

Every day producers would line up outside my office and beg me to rescue their crummy shows and save their asses.  I started from the absolute bottom of the industry.  We were filming on a set on Eraser and production had halted because Arnold just shot an alligator in the face and no one had any idea what he says (the dummy who wrote the script didn't have anything, like Arnold was just going to shoot and alligator in the snout and then just stand there like a fuckin' idiot) and I, a lowly PA who was already nearly fired for telling James Caan to get his own fucking walnuts and was saved only because Caan said he "liked the balls on this kid" just stood up and said "now you're luggage" and everyone was really pissed but it worked (the writer cut out "now" because he felt he had to do something).  Before long, I was Arnold's top emergency murder pun call.  I was also the person responsible for saving the movie Lake Placid by telling Betty White to say "fuckin" and "shit" and also rescued the dying Texas football soap opera by writing the part where that moon-faced kid kills the guy with a shovel, you're welcome.

I made a crucial mistake, though.  I wanted to finally make something on my own.  For years, I had secretly been working on a treatment of the classic Chekhov story "The Nose" that I had never really read except for instead of a Russian bureaucrat, the titular Nose came from a tough-as-nails Chicago cop named Eddie Noczinsky who just beats the hell out of people for 90 minutes and whose tagline is "I smell crime."  None of the big studios would finance it, not even after I selflessly saved their shitty movies for three decades, so I decided to sink all of my own money into it.  We ran into problems immediately.  No one could get the nose suit right, and none of the top costumers would work with me after I threatened them with one of Christopher Lambert's swords from Highlander III: Sorceror which he gave me after I told them to forget about the goddamn aliens and put the bad guy in a cave.  Also, I had already given millions of dollars to the great Dennis Farina to voice the Nose before he passed.  Unfortunately, I had burned a lot of bridges while desperately trying to raise money for the movie by threatening, attacking, or pissing in the offices of many of Hollywood's top executives, so I started to take whatever bullshit writing jobs they could cobble together.  I don't think that anyone even knew who I was when I was sent over to meet Bielema.

The large, jolly man who picked me up from the airport was Bielema himself.  "Hey man, how the hell are ya?" he asked me as I tried to climb into the truck.  It was covered in cameras and camera equipment for a TV show he was pitching called "Live from Bret Bielema's Car" where he would interview people from the sports and entertainment world with a variety of  ridiculous questions.  "Quick, top Thanksgiving foods," he asked me while practicing staring into a camera while switching lanes.  "I don't know.  I haven't had Thanksgiving since 2002, when Dino De Laurentiis threw me out of his house for trying to slap Bill Paxton with a fist full of cranberry sauce while I was out of my mind on a designer drug called "The Gobbler."  "Whoa, look at this fuckin' guy," Bielema said chuckling as we pulled into his office.

Bielema had a little shtick for everyone we met on the way in.  He shadowboxed a security guard.  He had a complicated handshake for one of the assistants.  He did an elaborate gun finger point at a walk-on which involved him feigning being gut-shot and staggering around a lot before collapsing to his knees and vowing revenge.  It was spellbinding.

When we got into his office, he told me that his publisher explained to him him that they liked to take some life lessons from football and put them into business situations.  They'd sell books, but more importantly they were selling the lecture circuit, boardrooms and hotel banquet halls, a money printing machine.  I asked him if he ever said anything cool after beating someone like "eat some turf" or "touch down to hell."  "One time I called a guy a prick and the university had to send an official apology," he said.  "Hell yeah," I said.

As we talked, I realized that writing this bullshit coach book was a waste of both of our time.  Bret Bielema was a dynamo, a star.  And he had a TV show.  Sure it was just a goofy little web series he was trying to sell to Big Ten Network Omega that would also air a select gas stations and interstate rest stops, but I saw something bigger here.  I saw a big, lovable tough guy who would have everyone in the palm of their hand.  I saw Bielema transcending midwestern football and me getting out of the Hollywood gutter.  I saw Eddie "Da Nose" Noscinsky.  

"Forget about the fuckin' book," I said.  "Everyone's got a motivational book.  Dick Wolf's assistant has a book." He looked at me blankly.  "P.J. Fleck's got a book," I said quickly remembering the name of a football coach I had seen on TV one time looking really weird.  His brow furrowed.  "Really?"  "We can do better than that," I said.  We need to go big.  We need to go to TV.  We need to get into Bret Bielema's car."

I thought I'd collect a few bucks to meet with Bielema, get his pitch and then go back home and buy some illegal lizard gland stimulants and just write the whole thing in a week, but I couldn't go back.  I hauled out my original screenplay for The Nose.  I would have to make some serious changes in order to accommodate most of the action taking place in an SUV instead of on city streets.  We also would have to accommodate Bielema by filming mostly in Champaign-Urbana and make make The Nose an expert on football crimes where he spent a lot of his time hanging around football fields and film sessions.  In this version, the Nose would smell out a guy stealing signs and then throw him from the top of the stadium into an active volcano.  But I knew I could make it work.  We just had to cobble together this first season secretly by stringing along the publisher and then we'd get our sets and our actors and our feature budget.

It took about a week to convince Bielema to come onboard.  I spent every day in his office or hounding him on the practice field, showing him pages of the script and telling him how much easier it would be to get great football players to come to the university if he was an international acting superstar.  He finally one day just said, "ah what the hell, I always wanted to be a detective.  Let's do it."  It felt amazing, like the first time I convinced a producer to spent an extra million on a helicopter because how fucking cool would it be to have a helicopter here.  

I did have one major problem.  There was no nose costume.  I didn't have the money to fly anyone out or even hire someone locally.  The whole thing didn't work without a giant nose walking around dispensing nostril justice and giving scumbags the Big Sneeze.  In desperation, I decided to make the nose myself.  I have no idea how to even go about doing something like that.  I always just wrote something and it appeared.  But now I was absolutely fucked.  I walked into a Michael's and told them I needed to make a giant nose, but no one was that helpful.  Eventually, I found an old mattress next to a dumpster.  I figured I could get something vaguely nose-shaped out of that, get it on Bielema for a fitting and then make some adjustments.  I worked for days not sleeping, measuring, cutting, duct taping, and spray painting until I felt I had a nose good enough for a test pilot.  The nose was too big and unwieldy for me to carry so I found an old wheelbarrow and bedsheet to cover it and pushed it for miles to the Illinois football offices.  The guard stopped me.  "Cool it, buddy, I've got a nose here for Coach Bielema," I said.  He told me to get lost. It took a lot of pleading, begging and even tears until they finally called Bielema and he came down.  He pulled the sheet off and took a look at the nose, which after the end of my nose-obsessed reverie I now saw was just a dirty, mangled mattress with uneven nostril holes and a deviated septum.  "Why don't you put that away and we can talk later," he said.

It took a few days, but Bielema finally told me to come by his office.  I appreciated that about him.  No bullshit, a straight shooter.  "I'm not going to bullshit you," he said to me.  Bielema finally talked to his agents about the Nose and they told him the whole project was insane and in fact really stupid.  He told me they didn't want him working with me on the book either because I clearly was a "crackpot."  I wasn't that upset.  I had been thrown out of fancier offices than the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center.  One time, Michael Ovitz had a dumpster flown in from an especially disgusting Chipotle parking lot for his goons to throw me in after I told him that First Kid should have been called First Shit.  But this one stung.  "Look, for the record, I really liked the part where the Nose drove my car into a guy so hard that he landed in a paint manufacturing plant and then I said to him 'let's paint the town red,'" Bielema told me.

I was waiting to get a plane back to Chicago and eventually Los Angeles when I got a message on my phone from a number I had never seen.  It was from James Franklin, the coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions.  The college football world is small and talks a lot.  "First of all, does the Nose drive an ATV?" he asked.  "Consider that my first note."

The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life

Northwestern emerges from its bye week looking like something nearly impossible to imagine at the beginning of the season: a normal sort of crummy Big Ten West team. The last two games were about sweat. They managed to possibly hospitalize several Penn State fans by taking a 10-10 tie to halftime before the Nittany Lions decided they actually needed to play football in the second half and easily finish the game. Then they made their own fans sweat a fourth quarter comeback in a game against Howard that they controlled for most of the proceedings before managing to hold on to a 23-20 victory.

The Wildcats are 3-3 and the Big Ten West is putrid. In its final year, the greatest division in the history of college football is going out in a blaze of glory with its teams all playing disgusting toilet football distilling a decade of Big Ten West play to its appalling essence. The division's standard-bearer is Iowa, a team whose unwillingness to score points or even move the ball has gone from mere circumstance to a program-wide contempt. Kirk Ferentz has ascended to his obsidian throne over Iowa City throwing out anyone who even dares to suggest they attempt flashy plays like running up the middle or falling forward. Anyone who suggests throwing a ball is immediately thrown in his pit where they can only hold off ravenous jackals by throwing loose stones at them. "If they love passing so much, let them pass," Ferentz says as another graduate assistant is dragged away into the Passing Pit when the Ferentz private guard discovers that he has secreted a play sheet containing a simple five yard out in his quarters.

Someone has called a play that gains more than four yards

It has taken the fall of the Big Ten West from mild joke to national disgrace to open up a possibility I had thought impossible. In a division this bad, Northwestern could possibly make a bowl game. It will not be easy-- as gnarly as the Big Ten West is, the Wildcats will remain heavy underdogs in every game they play this season. But, while it might be at the fanciful end of things, it is no longer impossible to imagine them somehow beating teams like Nebraska, Illinois, and Purdue because those teams are also shitty. It is equally likely that they end the season stuck on three wins. But at the very least they are likely to scare one of these other crappy, flawed outfits and terrify their fans into at least temporary belief that they can lose to this disgraced wreck of a program.

This week, Northwestern travels to Lincoln on American Soil to take on a mediocre Nebraska team. Nebraska seeks revenge after Northwestern defeated them in Ireland to tally the team's sole win in 2022 in a bacchanal of touchdowns and free beer. Things are different now. The Huskers are no longer under Scott Vomit and his disastrous puke-forward regime. Instead, they hired recent NFL washout Matt Rhule to try to once again salvage a Nebraska program that has been fatally infected with Big Ten West and will never rise to its once-great heights. On paper, the Huskers are a much better team and are heavily favored. But somehow, this game tends to sink to its own level; the Northwestern-Nebraska game usually turns into a weirdly close game designed to infuriate Nebraska fans.

One thing the Wildcats bring into the game is quarterback uncertainty. Ben Bryant, who engineered Northwestern's brilliant comeback against Minnesota, got injured in the Penn State game and will not play today. The 'Cats will turn to Brendan Sullivan, who started the Howard game, but also have Ryan Hilinksy, who threw for 314 yards against the Huskers last year and Jack Lausch, a quarterback that Mike Bajakian likes to put in for obvious running situations and Bajakian's beloved gadget plays that instantly fail like when the defense calls the right play in Tecmo Bowl. Perhaps they can confuse the Huskers by putting them all on the field at the same time in a beguiling intrigue.

BEGUILING INTRIGUE

This week in football tradecraft news, it appears that the NCAA is after Jim Harbaugh again. Harbaugh, who already served a suspension this season for Hamburger Crimes is now being accused by the NCAA of running an "elaborate" sign stealing operation where one of his assistants allegedly deciphered all of those dumb looking dorm room posters of Tyler Durden or whatever and walk-on quarterbacks on the sidelines making the Mr. Burns Baseball Signs in order to figure out opponents' plays.

The current state of the art NCAA play relay system

Like all NCAA crimes, this is an obviously stupid thing to investigate and seems like death throes of an organization that no longer has any power now that it is legal for car dealers to give burlap sacks full of cash to football players in the light of day, but it is also true that it is funny that it is happening to Jim Harbaugh because I find him personally very annoying.

Now that I know that Jim Harbaugh was doing Illegal Cheating, I have a satisfying explanation on how he was able to defeat the 2021 Northwestern Wildcats.

The most relevant fact for readers of this blog is that the alleged sign-stealing perpetrator is a Military Man named Connor Stalions. As this blog devolves into an outlet for forcing readers interested in Northwestern football to indulge in my obsession with writing terrible airport thrillers, I should note that the only thing I have been thinking about in college football all day has been the concept of "A Connor Stalions Novel."

Connor Stalions was a man of few words. He only let two things do his talking-- his satellite images of Rutgers's third down packages, and his fists.

The Rutgers secret play vault was big, several feet thick containing big plans and big ideas. But Michigan had something bigger: Connor Stalions.

I can only think of one thing to do with this: The Connor Stalions Airport Thriller Paragraph Challenge. Please drop your paragraph of Operation Disguised Coverage: A Connor Stalions Novel in the comments below or email it to me (no more than 150 words) with your name or handle or however you want to be identified, and I'll put my favorites in a future post. Now here's a 2,500 story about Matt Rhule.

THE MATT RHULES: A GUIDE TO SUCCESS ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD AND IN LIFE

Nobody who leaves wants to return to sportswriting, but the profession has a way of grabbing you and never letting you escape. I had never been particularly interested in the genre, but after one of my freelance pieces entitled “John Daly Has Gout” gained traction, I found myself on the sports interview circuit. “Rod Beck picks baked beans out of his mustache,” I wrote in my lede about sitting with the reliever in his trailer outside the Iowa Cubs ballpark. “Jeff George slices up a steak the same way he slices a defense.” That sort of thing. I signed up for the pro bocce ball circuit. I tried to stop a Greg Ostertag slap shot. In one terrifying evening, I gambled on demolition derby at the Grenlee County Fair with Phil Mickelson and we ended up fleeing for our lives from a father and son team driving a half-totaled Chrysler Imperial that attempted to ram us because Michelson owed them forty grand that he didn’t have because he lost it all on the horse game. And then I stopped.

After a few decades, I lost my interest in sports personalities. Sure, every once in awhile I would get kicked in the genitals by a UFC fighter or get bitten by a professional biting coach that in order to critique Mike Tyson’s technique, but for the most part it was boring dinners with boring people. “Troy Aikman orders the Chicken Kiev.” “Bill Wennington buys his own McDonald's sandwich.” Etc. So I left the magazine and transitioned to novels. Here, I was not bound to what athletes said and did but could finally play in the greatest and most exhilarating literary space imaginable– my own imagination.

It took months of research and exploring my own psyche– I abandoned my family for six months to take a bevy of mind-expanding psychedelics derived from wildflowers and cacti– and fits and starts of experimentation before finally releasing my masterpiece called Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel. The book was a mixture of roman á clef, autofiction, magical realism, and thriller about how distinguished sportswriter Clark Craggler, who is also secretly an operative with an élite government intelligence unit where its members are deployed as civilians until “activated” by their mysterious boss known only as “Magma” in dire national emergency situations. Craggler goes from writing a tiresome feature on a star quarterback’s dreadful diet regimen to stop a catastrophe: catching the sitting president repeatedly cheating at golf. His job is to write an exposé of the president taking too many mulligans and generously giving himself lays and even altering the scorecard, which would be designed to trigger a congressional investigation, but while investigating him, he gets tied up in a sinister presidential plot to destroy the country’s golf courses with a piece of secret military technology that instantly divots acres of pristine greens from low-earth orbit.

Unfortunately, Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel was not the critical and commercial darling I hoped it would be. Reviewers savaged it. One called it a “masturbatory doofus fantasia.” Another had the headline “Hole In One” but the art on the article was a picture of a toilet. The New York Times didn’t even review it, not even a capsule. It was my first book not to make it onto the bestseller list after I had easily done it with Speaking Franch: Dennis Franchione In His Own Words and even Of Weis and Men: Charlie Weis on Leadership on the Gridiron and the Boardroom. My publishers told me in no uncertain terms that Clark Craggler would not return for the sequel Charlatan-in-Jail. If I ever wanted to make money writing again, I’d have to start interviewing sports people again.

It was a soggy, muggy summer day in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pulled up to the elaborate practice facility and a public relations person took me over to Matt Rhule’s office. When I walked in, there was no one in his chair, so I said “Coach Rhule?” He popped up from behind a massive desk and whipped a little foam football-shaped stress ball at my face.

“Think fast!” Rhule yelled as it knocked my glasses askew and nearly made me drop my pen. I looked up, confused and vaguely dazed.

“That’s a Matt Rule,” the coach said. “Number thirteen. If you can’t think fast, you’ll be slow, in life.” He sat down and put his hands behind his head. “That’s the book right there. Matt Rhules. Branding. Writes itself. Have a seat.”

The PR assistant pulled down a screen and started fussing with a computer and then I saw the presentation come up: The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life.

“The Matt Rhules System. We provide these rules and then some examples from my life or from Nebraska football and how they apply to people’s lives. For example, Matt Rhule: Protect Your Quarterback.” The presentation showed a picture of an offensive tackle pancaking a blitzing linebacker. “In football terms, it’s the most important part of the passing game. But people have people in their lives around them that are important. Their 'quarterbacks' if you will.  And you need to stop them from getting blitzed by Issues.”

The next slide clicked over to a black and white picture of Coach Rhule pointing aggressively. “Matt Rhule: Don’t let your mouth cash checks your body can’t cash.”

“You get it, right? We’re going to do a whole book with these Matt Rhules. It’s branded content. That's where the money is.” He handed me a tote bag that has “Matt Rhules” spelled out in training tape stuck to it. “These are just a prototype. Once we get published and up and running, we’ll have it all: shirts, bags, fuck even diapers. Matt Rhule: Don’t shit on me.” He looked at me as I stared at him, bewildered. “That’s a joke. That’s a fake Matt Rhule.”

“Well, that's the pitch,” he said. “I’ve got some rules. You’ve got to tie them together. Get them from football to apply to people’s lives or whatever. Publisher said you do this stuff all the time.”

I tried hard to hide how aghast I was at this comparison. Sure there were some superficial similarities to this and James Dolan: Six Chords to Success but those ignored the obvious literary merit of that project where I explored the craft of songwriting and owning one's one fleet of helicopters. But then I remembered that I had a time share payment and a lease on a Sea-Doo that I purchased from David Cone, so I swallowed my pride. “Yes. I work with famous sports personalities and help put their vision on the page.”

“Perfect,” he said, clapping his hands. “We all have our talents. Here’s a Matt Rhule: From Each According to His Ability, To Each According To His Means.”

“Isn’t that Karl Marx?” I said.

“Then fix it up and make it a Matt Rhule. It's not that hard.” He handed me a thumb drive. "Get started and I’ll see you in a week.”

I drove off into the rain to my Lincoln hotel. It looked like I would be here for awhile.

The thumb drive contained the presentation I just saw (Rhule referred to it as a “deck” for some reason) and a nearly inscrutable word document containing various Matt Rhules or at least jumbles of phrases that I was supposed to shape into coherent Matt Rhules. The rest of the files were various samples of logos and an MP3 of a Matt Rhule theme song that he had made himself, affecting a sort of James Dolanish growl-croon.

Several of the files contained short videos of Rhule whipping his head around to stare at the camera. “Matt Rhule,” he says in one of them. “Give it your all or give it up.” Then there is a short guitar riff as he nods at the camera. That one was not included in the text list. I start to divide them between Canonical Matt Rhules and Supplemental Matt Rhules.

Day two. I woke up in my Lincoln hotel and for several brief seconds I had no idea what I was doing there (I had dreamed that was giving a talk about my new novel to a large panel except in the dream it was called Air Fraud One: A Harold Chuck Novel and it was about how the president was somehow concealing being a bear from the public and was going to eat too many salmon. I was laying into a person who I immediately understood as being my sworn literary nemesis by I think also accusing him of being secretly a bear when the nature of my trip to Lincoln came into depressing focus.

For hours I stared at the Matt Rhules until the bleakness of my job overwhelmed me. I could not for the life of me come up with new Matt Rules, and it was nearly impossible to write stories based on the ones he had. “Matt Rhule: Always try to win, in football and in business.” Instead, I started daydreaming where instead of Matt Rhule winning on the football field, it was Clark Craggler defiantly laying out the president’s Golf Crimes to a congressional subcommittee. That was what winning looked like in life and in literature. But Craggler had been crushed, much like how the Carolina Panthers were crushed by the San Francisco 49ers resulting in Rhule’s ouster from the NFL.

I could not sleep at night and I decided to find something to eat. I got in my car and began aimlessly driving around. Soon, I had left Lincoln altogether. Something compelled me to keep moving. I drove for hours and hours. There was no radio, no music, nothing but the sound of the car and the road and the sight of my haunted eyes in the reflection of the windows,

The sun rose. I found myself at the outskirts of a park, a federal wilderness area. I left my car and hiked for hours, deeper and deeper into an unmarked wilderness. Finally, exhausted, I stopped and opened my backpack. There it was. Wrapped in some foil, the last of my iboga root that I had bought on a retreat from what I was told would be a shaman but turned out to be a man named Daryl who I later learned was on the run from the FBI for a crime described to me as “dojo fraud.” I prepared the powder and ate a few starburst that were in there as well.

The forest floor dropped from under me and I began to float through a miasma of consciousness, not just mine but the very concept of human consciousness. It is very difficult for me to describe in words what happened to me on this journey but I entered a mental plane beyond sanity and beyond the bonds of this physical world and, just as I thought I would never return and be forced to float forever in a cosmic goo, I remembered the Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: I am bound by the laws of the corporeal. I awoke days later from my psychadelic odyssey. My legs ached as if I had walked for miles, but I had not moved from that spot. I gingerly made my way back to the car and drove back toward Lincoln, stopping only to record any  thoughts on the Matt Rhules that materialized in the shimmers of empty highway. It had come to me out there in the wilderness– the Matt Rhules were not a simple marketing gimmick for a football coach, but this goateed oaf had somehow stumbled onto the central organizing principle of life itself.

I arrived back at the hotel. It was no longer enough to think of myself as a literary superstar, but I was now a sort of holy man, a person put on earth to explain the precepts of the Matt Rhules. For the rest of the week, I fell into a feverish trance as I made elaborate notes, wrote hundreds of pages, and added compendia and appendices to the original Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: Do not try to “fold” space time into a single locus, instead try to “layer” it. Matt Rhule: My brain is merely a vessel for cosmic static. Matt Rhule: Organization and preparation will score a “touchdown” for the football team or for your small business.

At last, I felt I had something to present to the Coach. I piled up my manuscript, which I had moved from the computer to a series of coffee filters loosely stapled to together in pleasing geometric patterns and put on my “Rhunic,” a tunic fashioned from hotel bedsheets and left for the practice facility. No one wanted to let me in when I told them I had urgent business to disseminate the teachings of Coach Rhule to the wider cosmos but then when I reminded them I was the book guy they finally let me in.

“Coach,” I said. “I have sat in the forest. I have opened my forehead. I have let the Rhules seep into my primary consciousness and beyond-thought. I am ready to accept them. I am ready to adopt them. I am ready to show people how to apply them on the football field and in the boardroom.” I dropped my coffee filter manifesto on his desk.

“What the heck are you talking about?” Rhule said as he turned to me (he was looking at emails during most of my speech). “Oh that Matt Rhules thing. Yeah, I thought about it and it seems kind of cheesy. Kind of obvious, you know?”

“Hey, you know what I was thinking now would be really cool? Instead of a book telling people what to do, what if it was a novel where I caught the commissioner of the NFL cheating at golf? The Commissioner of Lies, how about that? A Mack Racker novel. You ever think about writing something like that?”

A Hat? In This Economy?

If you can say one positive thing about the 2022 Northwestern football season is that it is mercifully over.  The Wildcats are nursing a single win over Nebraska, they will have their worst season since 1989, and the program seems to have plummeted from the highs of a Big Ten West championship back to its miserable historical depths in only two years.  On Saturday, they will have one more desperate attempt to salvage something from the season by prying the Hat from atop the bulbous, far side caricature skull of Bret Bielema and then retreat to whatever lair Pat Fitzgerald crawls into the offseason as he tries to figure out how much longer he can retain his imperial control over the football program while actively in the Rick Venturi Zone.

The last two losses summarized the season so far.  The first turned into a miserable blowout in Minnesota, where they only interesting wrinkle was the Gophers tearing through every available quarterback; there was a point in the fourth quarter when it seemed like the Wildcats were one quarterback injury away from the impressment of anyone large and wearing a purple sweatshirt.  

Beer is served in clear, plastic cups at TCF Bank Stadium in case a fan finds Fitzgerald's Shilling and is forced to play quarterback for the Northwestern Wildcats 

The second game was close enough to imagine Northwestern winning.  Then again, the game was only so close because of an incredible turn of events where a Purdue pick-six was called back because the officials found the cornerback guilty of Illegal Hurrahsman-ship for high stepping for 30 yards and made them take the ball back at the 30, which resulted in a three and out and a missed field goal.  

I am sorry for even putting such offensive and disgusting content on this website.

As a college football fan, the officiating on this play was a travesty, an insanely draconian outcome for overly festive running that serves as a reminder that the NCAA's ruling cabal of severe, frown-lined bureaucrats seem to have a bizarre vision of college football where the thousands of drunk people at games many of whom were dressed inexplicably in shark costumes would see a guy lifting his legs a few extra inches off the ground on a game-securing touchdown and say "that simply will not do."  On the other hand, as a fan of a team who benefited from the call, I can say that, as a turn of events, it was extremely funny.

(SIGH) HAT HAT HAT HAT

Northwestern has an opportunity to salvage their season by doing the seemingly impossible and prising the Hat from the prodigious skull of Bret Bielema.  That will be a difficult task.  The Illini are finishing an excellent season; last week they nearly took out Michigan on the road.  They have an impregnable defense and their running game will test a Wildcat defense that has struggled all season stopping opponents' ground games.  Illinois will be heavily favored and the Ryan Field stands will be glowing orange. But in this game, North America's greatest sports rivalry, one can only hope that it is an indescribable and possibly deranged urged for the Hat can drive Northwestern to an inexplicable victory.

 

If The Hat is not won during the game, I will assemble a Heist Crew to steal it from the Illinois Athletic Facility where we are call caught 35 seconds after entering the building.

Illinois has more than just Hat Lust on the line; a win and Purdue loss against Indiana that could happen if for example they have multiple touchdowns called back for Too Many High Fives or Excessive Smiling would thrust the Illini into a potential Big Ten West championship clusterfuck. After Iowa's very funny loss to Nebraska, there is the possibility that four teams could finish 5-4 in Big Ten play, which would require cracking open the dusty books of Legends and Leaders to determine the ancient Tie-Breaking Scenarios with one team headed to certain slaughter in Indianapolis and the rest somehow all heading simultaneously to the Music City Bowl.

Breaking down the potential Big Ten West Tie-Breaking scenarios if Purdue chokes.
 

This season, I have been seeing a lot of discussion online about how the Big Ten West is a flaming garbage scow and the federal government should intervene specifically to stop the Big Ten West teams from playing unwatchable lummoxing football at each other every week and I'm incensed.  Anytime there is grousing about how breathtakingly mediocre and hideous the division is, Northwestern should be contending in it.  Northwestern football is like one of those single-celled organisms that live in volcanoes and hydrothermal vents that are viable in environments where no one wants to be, and when the Big Ten west is essentially a giant pile of toxic waste, the Wildcats should be thriving.  Unfortunately they have one year to get their act together before the California teams force some sort of grand realignment and the conference is forced to create new divisions such as maybe "legends" or "leaders" that could destroy the magic of the Big Ten West.  I hope that Kevin Warren and his henchmen think long and hard about the effect on Northwestern and all of the other grasping oaf programs in college football's greatest division before acting too quickly.

One innovation I think could help the Big Ten West become even more annoying would be to bring back ties.  I was inspired by USA manager Gregg Berhalter's heroic decision to have Christian Pulisic simply kick a ball to nowhere in order to seal a tie at the end of the USA-England game when it occurred to me what Pat Fitzgerald would do offensively if the Wildcats were able to weaponize a draw to drive opponents completely insane.  Imagine a scenario where it would benefit both Northwestern and Iowa to tie instead of trying risky forward passes and they just alternately kneeled for the entire game.  Imagine a scenario where every Big Ten West team has like four ties during a season because no one is letting their extremely Big Ten West quarterbacks dare to throw the ball for the entire second half while fans throw garbage on the field.  Imagine the Playoff Committee having to sort through the concept of a one-tie Conference Champion while sports radio callers besiege their headquarters with towers and sappers.

Unfortunately there is no tie scenario today.  The stakes are binary: you either have the Hat or you slink away from the stadium, crushed and bare-headed.  This season has been such a disaster that no amount of Hats can salvage it, but it would sure feel better to go into an offseason with a heroic Hat victory than the same thing that's happened every other week.

BUCK DUCKETT IN THE PANTS FROM BEYOND

"Why does he want to meet us in the middle of the woods?" Crodway asked, brushing back a branch in the dark.

"Obviously, there are a lot of eyes around. Once we get the pants, we just bring them home. No one can prove where we got them. No one can say shit," Laslow said.  

Crodway was not assuaged.  The forest was impenetrably dark save for the beams of their flashlights, and he suspected that Laslow didn't know where he was going.  

"You'd better not get us lost in here. Coach has got Madford looking for us making sure we're not getting in trouble.  This is definitely trouble."

"Relax," Laslow said.  "We're almost at the clearing."

Crodway didn't answer.  This whole thing was Laslow's idea.  Sure, he could use some new pants.  Laslow said they were rare and had never been seen in the United States before.  That's what Mr. Gludcrul had told him.  But he was out here mainly because Laslow would otherwise be out in the woods alone, and he was already dangerously close to the bench after throwing three picks in last week's game.  Crodway, who already spent his Saturdays desperately trying to prevent opponents from hitting his quarterback, figured that he might as well try to stop him from getting completely lost in the woods.

"I don't see his car yet," Laslow said.  "Dude, you should see this car," Laslow said.  "Rolls.  Phantom.  He said he'd maybe let me take it for a spin if we get the win." 

But they were at the clearing and there was no one there.  It was eerily still, like the trees themselves were trying desperately to avoid detection.  There was silence.  Then a rustling.  The sound seemed to come from behind them then from the left.  But when they aimed their flashlights into the forest surrounding them, they saw nothing.

"Five minutes, Laslow, then we have to go," Crodway said.  

There was nothing.  And then there was something.  Some formless shape seeming like it had materialized from the trees, something almost imperceptible but definitively there and something that was definitely moving towards them.  They turned to run but no matter what direction they turned it was in front of them moving closer and closer.

-----------

Detective Carl Tratt was five minutes from the end of his shift when the call came in, five minutes from a warm house with a warm, brown bottle and instead he was squatting in the frost in a forest clearing looking at two bodies.  A professor found them on what he told the officer was his "morning constitutional," which made Tratt dread having to the professor later on.  He was told what he'd find when he'd come in but he was still not prepared for this.  The bodies were desiccated, almost shriveled.  Neither seemed to have much blood in them, but there was none at the scene.  

"Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to them?" he asked the Paul Quatch, the medical examiner.

"I've never seen anything like it.  No blood.  No wounds.  No trauma.  I have no idea what the hell could have done this."

Tratt's phone rang.  He listened for a few minutes and frowned, then hung up and paced around.

"Quatch, that was the office.  Coach called in this morning.  They've got two football players missing.  One of the roommates saw them grab some flashlights on the way out.  Says they were on the way to get some pants."

"Oh no," Quatch said.

"That's right," Tratt said, sighing. "They've already called in Duckett.  He's on the train from Indianapolis."

"Well better get your cloak cleaned and your amulets shiny," Quatch said.

Tratt had never met the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett, but he heard about him.  It was bound to happen when you worked in a college town.  Most of the time, you would just hear about Duckett poking around in a trash can outside an athletic facility or harassing some big time booster at a country club.  But Duckett was also an encyclopedia of college football's dark underbelly.  He knew all of the secret deals, he knew the networks of people funneling money into the sport.  It was rare that any of that dealing crossed from an NCAA infraction into the realm of an actual crime, but when it did he was a useful person to talk to.  But no one on the force wanted to.

The fact is that any conversation with Buck Duckett could swerve in bizarre directions.  The rumors were that Duckett believed in all sorts of strange, spooky stuff: monsters, spirits, demon cults, that sort of thing, and word spread among campus police that he could be found doing incantations or reading from scrolls.  He creeped everyone out.  Now, because some kid had mentioned pants to a detective, he was rolling up on Duckett's doorstep.  

------------

"Chief, this is ridiculous.  The guy's not even law enforcement.  He gets people suspended for eating a burrito that someone else paid for," Tratt said.  They were in the office, and the blinds were drawn.

"Tratt, my hands are tied.  This is the only thread we have, and we're pulling on it," Chief Stunch said.  "You know if these kids were looking for pants, he's the best shot at finding out who they were getting from and why they were in that clearing.  If you have any better ideas, let me know."

Tratt fumed.  He had nothing else.  "Fine, I'll talk to him.  But I can't investigate a murder and keep an eye on this guy.  You know what he does.  He slinks around.  He talks to people.  He hides in dumpsters and he has false mustaches.  I can't watch him constantly," Tratt said.

"Well you'll have to keep him close to you, then.  He's here," the Chief said.  He picked up his phone.  "Bring him in."

Duckett glided through the door.  He was not what Tratt was expecting.  He thought that Duckett would be wearing a cloak or at least some sort of skull necklace.  He was expecting him to have a sack of poultices or amulets.  But the man who walked in was dressed in a crisp suit with a tie and an anachronistic men's hat and carried a briefcase.  If anything, this was more disconcerting.  He looked like an FBI agent from the 1950s.

"Buck Duckett, NCAA," Duckett said.

"Carl Tratt," Tratt said.  "We found two bodies in a clearing.  Likely football players.  Quarterback and a center.  Seemed one of them might have had a line on some pants." 

"Thanks for coming, Duckett," Chief Stunch said.  "I'll leave you two to it.  Tratt should have everything you need."  He left the room.

"You know of anyone throwing money around who likes to do pants drops in the forest?" Tratt said.  "Is that the MO of any operators?"

Duckett opened his briefcase and picked up a file folder and slapped it on the table. "Errol 'Jimmy' Budesnon III."  He grabbed another one.  "Bud 'Poke' Hanragason.  Tad Hadley.  Hudd 'Scrote' Thomas."  

"That's a lot of pants guys," Tratt said.

"No, it's just one.  I haven't figured out what his name is here yet."

"You're telling me there's a booster doling out pants and changing his name and no one has caught on yet?" 

Duckett just stared at him.  He closed the briefcase and removed his hat.  A deep scar ran down his head parallel to the his scalp on the left side leaving a trench in a square buzzcut.

"You know who I am and what I do," Duckett said.  "I know you don't want me here.  I know you all think I'm a kook.  I understand that.  But I also know that this is the first time he's ever left the bodies like deflated sacks in the woods."

Tratt paused.  He hadn't mentioned the state of the bodies or that the baffled medical examiner's office was already on the phone with some out-of-state experts.

"This booster is not just changing his name.  When he leaves, it's as if he never existed.  Just a disappeared athlete and what appears to be no memory.  Holding galas for the coach and showering them with money and then he's gone.  The locker room is renamed.  You see that enough times and you start to believe there's something more sinister going on here than pants," Duckett said. 

He took a large dusty book out of his briefcase.  It took me sixteen years to find this thing and it damn near cost me my skull.  I've been tracking this thing since those fullbacks disappeared.  I think I know what we're dealing with.  But I'm going to need your help.  He opened the book.  Lesser Pants Daemons.