COLD COPY: Bill Carmody, Basketball Zealot

Bill Carmody retired on June 18. Here is a brief appreciation of that I wrote and half-heartedly and unsuccessfully attempted to get published elsewhere. Readers of this blog will note that there is not much that is new here as I've rhapsodized about Carmody in previous articles on Northwestern's sports gimmicks and the strange sensation of watching Carmody take Holy Cross to the NCAA Tournament, but I am posting this here because I remembered that it exists.

Chicago Tribune reporter Teddy Greenstein wrote that at a Northwestern basketball event, one fan asked head coach Bill Carmody a “long-winded and ill-informed” question about changing his Princeton offense to fit his star players.  “No,” said Bill Carmody.

The thing to know about Bill Carmody is that he is a basketball zealot.  Carmody, who retired in June from coaching after stints at Princeton, Northwestern, and Holy Cross, believes wholly and truly in the Princeton offense.  There is nothing that basketball has thrown at Carmody in nearly a quarter century of head coaching jobs-- not rule changes, stylistic revolutions, NBA players, the bludgeoning crew cuts of the Big Ten-- that Carmody has not tried to solve with a series of slowly-developing back cuts.  “The only active coach who has been loyal to an offensive system for longer than Bill Carmody,” basketball analyst Ken Pomeroy tweeted, “is Roy Williams.”

Carmody won but not a lot, appeared occasionally in the postseason but never led a team past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, made a few quips at press conferences but never made waves as the type of larger-than-life character bred by college basketball.  His greatest achievement was to take his slow, methodical, and grinding offense, fuse it with some disconcerting and undulating zone defenses, and stock his teams with strange beanpole physiques and odd, catapult jumpshooters and players with a general rec-spec handball aesthetic-- and to bring all of this into storied basketball arenas and sometimes win.

Carmody learned the Princeton offense at the hands of its inventor Pete Carrill.  He worked as Carrill’s assistant for fourteen years and then took over the program in 1996.  His Tigers made the tournament two years in a row; in the 1997-1998 season, they were ranked as highly as seventh in the nation.

But it was Carmody’s stint with Northwestern that allowed him to push his system to its absolute limit.  Here, in the Big Ten, he would face name brand programs, legendary coaches, NBA players, and raucous, hostile arenas on the road and at home, where visiting fans regularly overwhelmed the few Northwestern fans who could still stomach turning out to watch their historically moribund team get clobbered twice a week.  

The Big Ten in the early 2000s was, with few exceptions, not a home for fleet, exciting basketball.  It appealed to fans of violent, fundamental defense and lumbering. Carmody surveyed this situation and decided, as he always did, that he would slow it down.  Northwestern teams passed the ball around the perimeter and looked to find a lane for a cutter or an open jump shot for all 35 seconds if necessary; they’d wait for a sliver of daylight or missed rotation or for defenders to just get bored and walk off the court to try to find a game of basketball somewhere.  Then Northwestern would shoot, run to the other end, get violently dunked on, and start it up again.

Carmody had little time for any gladhanding niceties foisted on a college head coach, things that cut into his true love which was standing around a practice gym with arms folded muttering “aw, c’mon.”  He seemed ill-disposed to the slick salesmanship involved with recruiting and he did not have much to sell-- Northwestern had never qualified for the NCAA Tournament, and a spot on the team before Carmody offered only the opportunity to get glared at by Gene Keady or heckled by a visiting fan at close range because the only way for players to get to the court at Welsh-Ryan arena was to shoulder past the hot dog line.  Carmody and his staff convinced some talented local players like Jitim Young (a 6’2” guard who somehow led the team in rebounding) to join, but also began recruiting heavily overseas where Northwestern’s reputation as a basketball wasteland had less resonance. This international backcutting unit managed to pull off heretofore unimagined feats: in 2004, they managed to win as many Big Ten games as they lost for the first time since 1968; several years later, they made the N.I.T. 

Under Carmody, Northwestern did the unthinkable and became decent.  He found his greatest player, John Shurna, a spindly forward with a hideous but unstoppable jump shot that came from his chest and fired like the spring-loaded projectile from an action figure.  Those teams found themselves knocking on the door of the NCAA Tournament. During the 2011-2 season, they came as agonizingly close to making the tournament as possible. The Wildcats took nearly every high-ranked team they needed to beat to overtime or the very last second and then someone would push a button for the buzzer and send them back to the N.I.T.  Shuna graduated, went on to play in Spain, and appeared in a New York Times article because he grew an enormous and ungainly beard.  They never made the tournament, and Northwestern fired Carmody after thirteen seasons.

Holy Cross hired Carmody in 2015, and something magical happened.  The Crusaders won ten games in the regular season. They lost all of their Patriot League road games and finished the regular season on a five-game losing streak.  Then, they somehow swept the conference tournament and cut down the nets. Bill Carmody was finally back in the NCAA Tournament with one of the strangest and least likely runs in the history of the sport.  And it was all there: the back cuts, the 1-3-1 zone lunging across the key, the one guy who could shoot threes, the offense grinding with the smoke and squeak of Victorian machinery designed to frustrate an opponent into just wanting to get this shit over with already-- this could have been any Bill Carmody team at any point playing the only type of basketball that he would ever allow himself to play.

Requiem For The NIT Berth: An Extremely Northwestern Blog Post

There is no more Northwestern basketball.  The Wildcats compiled their greatest regular-season record in school history with twenty wins.  That record, bolstered by a string of non-conference victories against school with programs so woeful that they host workshops on getting dunked on and attempting to stay in a defensive stance while being showered in buckets of glitter, combined with an inability to score major upsets in Big Ten play has left Northwestern out of the NCAA tournament and the NIT.

While watching Northwestern in action on television this year, you may have heard announcers mention that the Wildcat men's team has never appeared in the NCAA tournament.  I've spent many long hours at the university archives researching this and it turns out to be true.  We can look forward to reading the "Northwestern Continues to Have Not Made Tournament" articles in local publications originally written in 1955 by a person who is no longer alive.
 
The original Northwestern has not qualified for the NCAA Tournament 
article was originally printed next to an ad for teething cigarettes

Northwestern's season has ended.  The school will not play in the CBI, the Vegas 16, nor any other downmarket basketball tournament taking place in a ship's hull or in the background of a Street Fighter video game.  Northwestern will also not form a swing band called Mr. Cat and the Vegas Sixteen to barnstorm across the county fairs and pomade sales conventions.

MICHIGAN, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THESE GUYS

NIT bracketologists are like hazmat suits or Jeff Goldblum characters in a science fiction movie: you only need them when things have already gone disastrously wrong.  After a tough loss to Michigan on February 24 after leading for most of the game, the path to the NIT was clear: win out and steal a Big Ten tournament game or spend Selection Sunday researching the various Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Dune Buggy Decathlon and College Basketball Tournaments.  Northwestern obliged.  They obliterated Rutgers in front of a packed Welsh-Ryan arena filled with Wildcat fans braying for blood against a team so profoundly hopeless that it was possible for Northwestern fans to bray for blood against them.  They dispatched Penn State and Nebraska.  And they set themselves up against Michigan in a do-or-die struggle for an NIT tournament berth, this is a sentence that can only exist on a Northwestern basketball blog.

The Big Ten Tournament crushes Northwestern.  Northwestern has never won more than one game.  In 2012, when the 'Cats were about as close as they have been to tourney qualification in recent memory, they fell in overtime to Minnesota as a trap door opened in the Bankers Life Fieldhouse and immediately deposited them in the NIT.  This year, an NIT berth itself was potentially on the line; it was not for a chance to shed the weight of an eternity of basketball ineptitude but would at least ease the pain of putting up the school's best record in history only to fail to qualify for the postseason.

They came so close.  Michigan pummeled the Wildcats in the opening minutes, seemingly unable to miss.  But, Northwestern hung around within striking distance.  In the second half, Northwestern came back.  Alex Olah and Tre Demps, playing in what we now know was their final game, bravely battled to subject America to more Northwestern basketball.  Olah drilled a three with 17 seconds left.  Then, with Michigan ahead two in the final seconds, he put up the most memorable shot in his career.

Clutch. Putback. @NUMensBball & @umichbball go to OT. #MarchOnBTN https://t.co/aMC9vEue7F

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) March 10, 2016

It was not quite enough.  With six-tenths of a second left in overtime, Nathan Taphorn's shot fell short and the Wildcats went home, dejected.  Collins spent much of the end of the game apoplectic at a blatant missed travel.  He accused the officials of favoring Michigan as a sports brand.  Tre Demps fit officiating into the broader spectrum of American injustice:

Tre Demps, who scored 21 points on 8-for-21 shooting and played all 45 minutes, put it more boldly.
Speaking to the Tribune and one other reporter, the fifth-year senior said: "There's this thing called politics. They want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. That's just the reality. You have to stand up and keep fighting. Eventually this program will get to a place where we get those benefit calls.

"That's the reality of the world we live in, in all aspects ... basketball, economics, race. You can't blame the basketball world because that's the way the world works, period."

I am hesitant to dismiss Collins's insinuations of a vast officiating conspiracy against Northwestern because it is incredibly funny; imagine Jim Delany meeting with a cabal of Big Ten referees in the ancient Society of the Inconsistent Whistle.  It is far more likely that the Wildcats, like all college sports teams, are subject to universally crappy college sports officiating. Northwestern like a target because any win against a decent team involves a tense, close game where missed calls are brought into sharp relief during the games' traditional 35 minute foul and timeout-riddled denouement.  

But let's not delude ourselves, that Michigan guy took like 45 steps are you 
kidding me

AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE UNFOLDS IN WORCESTER

Northwestern's big game against Michigan took place in the shadow of Holy Cross's triumph.  The Crusaders, who managed only ten wins the entire season, qualified for the NCAA Tournament with a miracle run through the Patriot League Tournament.  Holy Cross is led by Bill Carmody, fired by Northwestern for failing to bring Northwestern to the Dance.  Carmody had used the Princeton offense and 1-3-1 zone defense to get the 'Cats to four consecutive NIT berths and the edge of the NCAA bubble.  With the same purple and white color scheme, each Holy Cross tournament game is like watching Don Draper's wheel speech, every slide a melancholy backcut or sourfaced Carmody grimace.

It is a small tragedy that Carmody could never get Northwestern into the Tournament because his teams were gleefully odd.  They were, especially in the early years, excruciating to watch, grinding all 35 seconds off the shot clock and scoring fewer points than the football team.  He sent against the Big Ten bizarre squads of mismatched basketball parts: a 6'2" guard that led the team in rebounding, a United Nations of 6'8" guys who could shoot, a lanky scoring machine with a shooting motion modeled on a malfunctioning oil derrick, a guy named "Juice."  Not only did Northwestern often seem like it did not belong in the Big Ten because of a lack of NBA players and behemoth big men, the Carmody teams seemed like they played an entirely different sport, like a handball team that somehow found itself in Assembly Hall.

Moreover, Carmody had the right demeanor.  He coached with the fatalism of a man who, in the back of his mind, realized the Sisyphean futility of Northwestern's quest to qualify for the NCAA tournament.  You half expected him to finish a tirade to a referee by yelling "ah, the hell with it" and then collapse into an easy chair at the end of the bench before realizing it was time to start exhorting the team to backcut again.
 
Carmody triumphantly brings his "will you just ah dammit" coaching 
style to bear against Lehigh in the Patriot League Tournament 
championship game

Holy Cross's unlikely run to the Tournament coincides with the last vestiges of the Carmody era at Northwestern.  Olah and Demps, who played for Carmody, have finished their Northwestern careers (Sanjay Lumpkin, a Carmody recruit, took a medical redshirt during Carmody's final year and remains on the roster).  Since then, Northwestern has new uniforms, a new court (after flirting with a purple court design that would have turned Welsh-Ryan arena into the site of a Willy Wonka factory disaster), and a new offensive scheme.  The only thing that has not changed is the lack of appearances in the NCAA tournament, a fate that dooms every Northwestern basketball team to an endless cycle of heartbreak regardless of player, coach, scheme, or venue as we all rot away on our bodies unable to watch the 'Cats even crack the bullshit play-in games that we are all pretending are part of the tournament.
 This is a Werner Herzog sentence

THE GREATEST RIVALRY IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL

The Greatest Rivalry in College Football is heating up.  New Illinois Athletic Director Josh Whitman wasted no time dispatching Bill Cubit not even a single game into his newly-signed two-year extension.  Cubit never seemed to have the full endorsement of the university; his extension seemed designed to relieve the athletic department of the burden of conducting an actual search.  Interim Athletic Director Paul Kowalczyk described the Cubit contract as unlikely to "put a dagger in the heart of the program," a turn of phrase that sounds like it was crafted in a committee meeting by torchlight in a windswept Champaign-area castle.  It invited intrigue.  Sure enough, the only dagger in Illinois's program was quickly embedded in Cubit's back.

Fittingly, Cubit's last act as Illinois coach was to remove a Hat

Cubit's ouster was not the act of a new athletic director feeling his oats, but a designed coup.  Whitman, quickly enough to suggest behind-the-scenes machinations, replaced him with NFL veteran Lovie Smith, late of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  Smith, whose greatest football accomplishments include taking the Bears to a Super Bowl and unleashing Kyle Orton upon the world, hopes to bring the Illini back to relevance and stem the unrest generated by three years under Tim Beckman's football performance artistry.  More importantly, Smith offers a new chapter in the eternal quest for Lincoln's Hat, the greatest spectacle in amateur athletics.

Josh Whitman heralds Smith as a transformational hire; that is why he broke out the color
printer

Smith will have an enormous impact on the Hat rivalry.  Just think of the three Illini head football coaches from the past nine months on a sliding scale of dignity: Lovie, calmly repeating the "Rex Grossman is our quarterback" mantra in the face of triple-coverage interceptions; Cubit, an avuncular man who probably refers to pancakes as flapjacks; and Tim Beckman, who has spent the last four months trying to get his head freed from a stairway railing.  Smith also represents a direct shot at Northwestern's undisputed claim as Chicago's Big Ten Team by bringing in a successful and respected coach from a team that people in Chicago actually care about.  The last time the Illini hired a former Bears coach, Ron Turner led them to a Big Ten championship. No matter what Illinois does, though, Northwestern has an unstoppable plan to maintain its reign as Chicago's Big Ten team by continuing to buy those billboards.

The Smith signing has redefined the rivalry.  Lovie Smith will never be able to top the operatic heights of the Beck Man era.  I like Smith and enjoyed his time with the Bears.  I want to see the man succeed despite the instinctive need to protect the Hat at all costs.  With Smith in charge, the Beckman era will retreat further into memory.  Though it has somehow been less than a year since the Beck Man stalked the sidelines, he already seems like a surreal collective delusion-- it seems almost impossible that an unhinged, incompetent maniac who dedicated himself to destroying an equally moribund program with the zeal of a parody comic book villain undone by a refusal to believe in hamstring injuries actually existed.  The only threat to Smith is the possibility that the Hat exudes some sort of power over Illinois coaches causing them to go insane like the Treasure of Sierra Madre until he succumbs to his hat-greed and incurs a sideline penalty.

The most indelible image of the Treasure of Sierra Madre is a gold-crazed 
Bogart referring to everyone as "mugs"

Lovie Smith is great coach and an encouraging hire for the embattled Illini.  I hope he can bring Illinois out of program's malaise brought about by turmoil and literally allowing Tim Beckman to be in charge of things for an extended period of time.  But that does not change anything.  The stakes for the Hat remain the highest in college football and Smith will discover that on Big Ten Network regional action.

You Maniacs

How is this possible?

Michigan players dashed into action.  They vaulted over benches and spun around sideline personnel.  The holder came sliding in like a Beastie Boy navigating a car hood in the Sabotage video.  And the kick went up with less than one second preventing a Northwestern Big Ten victory, the longest second that has occurred since human beings invented the idea of measuring time.

Fuck.

Northwestern has had bad seasons.  The entire Northwestern experience is wrapped in those bad experiences.  Even if you were not alive when the Wildcats lost 267 consecutive games by 800 points apiece, were (possibly apocryphally) defeated by Interstate 94, and began each game by hastily reviewing the rules of football that players had put off learning because of the accelerated pace of midterm exams due to the quarter system, the history of crappy Northwestern football is imbued into your brain as a Northwestern fan.  You may not have chanted "we are the worst" or participated in an aquatic grow-a-goalpost experiment, but your collective fan memory has.  Northwestern's historical crappiness is the foundation of the Northwestern football narrative.  The 'Cats were bad.  They were the worst.  Dennis Green.  Then they were surprisingly good and lost the Rose Bowl.  And now they are fine.

But there's a difference between the outright historical futility of Northwestern football and whatever the hell is going on.  You could secure a grant, hire a dozen football chaos theoreticians of both bearded and non-bearded variety, put them into a lab with a simulated Ryan Field and moveable Northwestern figurines, and a Pat Fitzgerald action figure with Kung-Fu Fist Pump Action, and 50,000 simulated Nebraska fans, and I'm not quite sure they could invent the ways that Northwestern has lost so far.
 
Northwestern might win by a field goal or a butterfly flaps its wings on Deering 
Meadow and, ah, the other team runs 45 consecutive laterals with no time
 remaining and are stopped on the one-yard line, but get the chance to sneak it in 
because the referees have discovered a loophole left over from the nineteenth 
century that penalizes Fitzgerald for not having a festive boater hat and insulting 
the game with his bare-headed impudence and then the game ends and Ryan Field 
spontaneously bursts into flames MUST GO FASTER

Northwestern came into this season with so much promise and hype.  Then, the season has been derailed by offensive woes and the disappearance of Venric Mark into the Springfield Mystery Spot.  There is no joy.  There is no hope.  Football is despair, misery, and, to be honest, kind of darkly funny at this point because it should not be possible to keep losing games like this unless they are making weekly appearances in inspirational sports movies as the opponents in the last game of the season.

POTENTIAL ANTI-NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL CONSPIRACIES

Northwestern lost to Michigan in an absurdly heart-breaking manner on Saturday.  It is clear at this point that it is not just bad luck and poor late-game coaching and execution that is dooming the 'Cats.  Instead, it must be all part of some sort of nefarious anti-Northwestern plot concocted by dark forces beyond our comprehension.  A brief survey of potential plotters:

The Soviet Union
Northwestern deployed its America Uniforms in order to America its opponent last Saturday.  The mainstream media wants you to believe that the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991.  But its clear that the Soviet government has remained operating in secret since then, plotting Soviet revenge and churning out Soviet documents in a shadowy reverse samizdat process.  It's also clear that the Northwestern uniforms from last week were a provocation that could no longer be ignored.  Let's be clear: for legal reasons, I am not alleging that the Michigan special teams unit is made up of Soviet sleeper agents who are identified by discreet Ivan Drago tattoos, that they met in secret before the game to sing the Soviet national anthem, and then they unfurled a giant poster of the guy who used to wrestle professionally in Soviet underpants.  I'm just asking questions.

The Bohemian Grove
Long thought by conspiracy theorists to be a gathering by various global elites for secret meetings to consolidate their power and perform bizarre rituals, the Bohemian Grove has recently been revealed to be site where global elites gather to destroy Northwestern football.  Insider sources tell BYCTOM that the Grove visitors enjoy acting out failed Northwestern offensive remade into light operettas, having hundreds of pizzas delivered to the Fitzgerald residence before big games, and somehow manipulate global economic systems and politics to a pinpoint degree to affect football recruiting, weather conditions, officiating, and the rules of football that will somehow end in a Northwestern loss because of a minor fluctuation in the stock price of a Swiss hedge fund.

 Former Head Basketball Coach Bill Carmody
Carmody attempted to take the 'Cats to the dance for more than a decade.  Earlier this year, he saw the football team's ignominious bowl record shattered in a glorious Gator Bowl victory.  A few months later, he was fired.  Shortly after, Carmody disappeared.  Some say he has moved on from Northwestern as a sought-after guru of the Princeton Offense.  Others say he has moved into the tunnel system underneath the university, wearing a mask for some reason, and is determined to never let the football team steal his glory again.  Carmody and his shadowy operatives drawn from the former Yugoslavia have furtively followed the football team, they've divulged the meaning of those weird offense signal signs to opposing defensive coordinators, greased Northwestern footballs, and replaced one of the referees for the Ohio State game with a man named "Milos Fourthdownavic."

Calves' Head Club
A secret society devoted to mocking the death of Charles I through various food items: a cod's head to symbolize the beheaded king, a pike representing tyranny, boars' heads because Charles preyed on his subjects, and calves' heads representing Charles and his supporters.  Maybe it's my twenty-first century manners poking through, but that dinner is really heavy on heads.  The Calves' Head Club was broken up by an angry mob in 1734.  Now, they meet to make fun of Northwestern's terrible season.  They eat tiny frankfurters cut into four by one inch pieces to commemorate the Ohio State game, a bowl of corn flakes to celebrate the hail mary by Ron Kellogg III, and then they rub themselves in pig entrails to represent the Michigan game. 

Tim Beck Man, Head Coach, University of Illinois Football
Sometimes, you make an elaborate cork board to trace the various ways that various shadowy organizations have it in for the Wildcats.  And sometimes you think about who benefits the most and all becomes clear.  Tim Beckman is sabotaging Northwestern football because he wants the Hat.  Last year, the 'Cats humiliated his Illini and left him miserable and hatless in the cold.  This year, he has pulled no punches.  I am confident that Beckman has assembled a coterie of the nation's most deranged Lincoln impersonators to help him pull a series of daring wrecking operations to destroy Northwestern's morale before the Hat Game by convincing them that the Hat should be closer to Springfield.  Beckman has stopped at nothing.  He has disguised himself as Northwestern equipment managers and long-snappers, infiltrated the Wildcat video room, and replaced Big Ten chain gangs with clean-shaven Lincoln impersonators whose lack of beard allows them to roam amongst us undetected.  Sure, this has not helped the Illini this season.  They are equally winless in the Big Ten and Beckman nearly attacked his own offensive coordinator last week.  But Tim Beckman doesn't think in terms of wins and losses or titles.  He thinks in terms of hats and no hats, he has no sense of right and wrong, and he is determined to win the hat at all costs.

MICHIGAN STATE IS THIS WEEKEND

The grim season marches on as Northwestern is forced by some arcane, awful rule to play another football game on Saturday.  Sure, it might be wearying to think of insane Rube Goldberg scenarios where Northwestern can let another one slip away.  Instead, though, this is a significant opportunity.  Michigan State are in the driver's seat of the LEGENDS Division, and no one on the planet think Northwestern can come out on top here.  But this is just the opportunity for an improbable and absurd win.  I fully expect Northwestern to hang in there all game and then, on the last possession, throw one victory right pass followed by 15 Reverse Victory Right backward passes and then weave their way to the endzone for America.

Keep the faith, 'Cats fans.  Sometimes you win games, sometimes you lose games, and sometimes you lose games despite the fact that it should be impossible to lose them because of things like the physical laws of the universe.  No matter what, the Wildcats continue to suit up and smash into other teams.  The odds are against Northwestern.  Clearly, unknown shadowy forces are against Northwestern.  The Michigan State Spartans are definitely against Northwestern.  As fans, though, we can do nothing less than support their effort, cheer on the seniors, and possibly die from emotional trauma.

Northwestern Basketball Coaching Search

They're all gathered from 'round the globe, in their purple regalia and their academic hats and their business-casual khakis.  The Northwestern faithful are huddled together at the Rebeca Crown Center waiting for the signs of a decision: black smoke means no decision has been made, purple smoke means a new coach, red smoke means they've found an occasion to use that smoke machine that the University Police seized from the raid on an off-campus Dillo Day party, and white smoke indicates an overextended, overwrought, and clumsy comparison between hiring a new basketball coach and picking a pope.
 
In my defense, how often do you get to make topical Pope Smoke 
references?  Unless we can convince Hollywood to get a lot more 
secretive and ostentatious about how they choose the new host of 
Family Feud.

Bill Carmody, who served for thirteen years as the head coach of Northwestern, was fired after a depleted, injury-riddled squad did what every single Northwestern did in the history of the program and missed the NCAA tournament.  For thirteen years, Carmody's teams have tormented Big Ten opponents with barrages of three pointers, backdoor layups, and relentless Balkan trashtalk.  Now, the 'Cats will have to find a new identity that will hopefully lead them to the promised land, when the name "Northwestern" appears on Selection Sunday without that ugly, disappointing State appendage-- I'm convinced that Northwestern State University is a guy with a telephone in an empty office in Natchitoches, Louisiana that finds a dozen dudes to put into the tournament as an ongoing prank on Northwestern's futile morass of basketball ineptitude.

THE BILL CARMODY ERA

It has been so long between BYCTOM posts that there is an unpublished draft pondering whether or not to fire Carmody.  And I had come down on it as a mistake.  This has nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with a concern about unbalancing the humors in Northwestern's coaching.  Bill Carmody served as a crucial balance to Pat Fitzgerald.  Carmody complemented Fitz's square-jawed,  crew-cut, fist-pump enthusiasm with his dour, sarcastic, miserablist sideline demeanor.  Fitz coaches the football team like it's a violent Boy Scout jamboree; Carmody comported himself like the basketball version of Sisyphus, forever trying to push a rock from the former Yugoslavia up the hill of the Big Ten basketball juggernaut.  What would happen if Northwestern hires another young, enthusiastic coach?  I don't want to alarm anyone, but I've done the research and it's entirely possible that the entire campus can be seized by a rash of spontaneous butt bumps, inability to function at any rate other than one game at a time, and the fist pumps, I can't even imagine the fist pumps.
 
A thoroughly scientific rendering of the Fitz/Carmody dynamic, 
which now may be seriously compromised

As much as Bill Carmody's teams have frustrated NU fans, they also reached unprecedented heights.  Even in dismal years, they provided memorable moments with his motley crew of overlooked locals and international findings.  Who can forget when Northwestern downed Iowa 40-39 in what was later prosecuted in the International Basketball Court as a crime against the sport, or that time the Wildcats trampled upon the hopes and dreams of Rick Rickert in the Big Ten Tournament, which sort of seemed like a big deal at the time for some reason?  Carmody led the 'Cats to numerous wins in dubious preseason tournaments held in unused Kumite arenas and three NITs, the only tournament that pauses for media timeouts and to allow shattered NCAA Tournament bubble teams to weep in the arms  of loved ones.  
 
A college basketball coach accepts an NIT bid

That progress was the essential Bill Carmody conundrum.  Fans braying for his head on a stick could seem unreasonably impatient with a historically woeful program, but it was also possible to wonder whether Carmody could ever get the 'Cats over the hump.  There is no sense in belaboring the debate.  Northwestern's administration has made its decision.  A new coach gets to stride into Welsh-Ryan arena and announce that he will be the one to break through the Tourney barrier, to compete in the Big Ten, and to be astonished that yes, that is actually where Northwestern plays its college basketball games.

NORTHWESTERN IS A FOOTBALL SCHOOL, HERE IS FOOTBALL STUFF

On a less depressing note, the 2013 Gator Bowl Champion Northwestern Wildcats return to the field to prepare for a season with dreams of Indianapolis in their eyes.  They'll be playing in the newly-named "West" division with all of the LEGENDS as well as Tim Beckman's Northwestern-hating Illinois team and one of Indiana or Purdue.  While many people are dancing upon the noble graves of the LEGENDS and LEADERS division names and the return to sane, cardinal direction-based titles, I'm extremely concerned.  Jim Delany has been defeated, which portends a new round of megalomaniacal pronouncements.  I expect that a cape-wearing Delany will mandate that Big Ten coaches stalk the sideline in full academic regalia in order to emphasize the conference's academic credentials, he will start replacing all positive adjectives in official press conferences with the words "legendary" or "leaderous," and he will purchase hour-long blocks of late-night programming on rival conferences' television networks that consist of him cackling on a golden throne and end with ominous threats of Big Ten expansion.
 
Scene from"You're Next, Missouri," set to air from 2-3 
AM on the SEC Network

Northwestern has struck a deal to make a return to Wrigley Field after the Cubs finish renovations.  The future Wrigley games will utterly fail if the renovations allow the full use of all available endzones.  I refuse to count any touchdown that is scored in the designated "bad endzone," and any player who breaks the plane should be followed around by a group of robed malcontents who will pester him constantly with spooky endzone chants for the duration of the season.  I've made my feelings clear to Northwestern and Cubs management by sending a literary letter that metaphorically describes the forbidden endzone as the former Soviet Union and scoring in it as taking my brain waves and using them to power a 30-foot mechanized Bukharin, so I'm sure they are taking the suggestions very seriously.

THIS IS MADNESS

As the nation full of college sports fans watch the empty, hollow, spectacle of March Madness, I'll be defiantly watching my reel-to-reel tapes of Tavaras Hardy, Jitim Young, Vedran Vukusic, Mohammed Hachad, Juice Thompson, John Shurna, and all of the rest of the Carmody-era Wildcats and pondering the future.  Unfortunately, the athletic department has refused to issue vague riddles and rhymes that will gradually reveal the identity of the new basketball coach, so there's nothing to do but sit tight and wait.  I look forward to cheering for Carmody wherever he ends up next, although I'd prefer not to see Northwestern victimized by backdoor cuts and the 1-3-1 zone defense anytime soon.  More importantly, I look forward to a basketball season less marred by suspensions and injuries that will see Northwestern return to the postseason, even if its not the glory of the Dance.  Perhaps we'll all meet back here next march, filled with insincere NIT braggadocio, ill thoughts about the Tulsa Golden Hurricane, and a new coach ready to launch Northwestern to the stratosphere of being the 68th-best basketball team in the nation.