Week 14: Who Cares About the Playoff, They Got the Hat

High noon eastern time and the whole country is simultaneously tuned to Big Ten Country for the nation's greatest rivalry spectacle in college sports.  It has been impossible to find anyone with the remotest interest in college football who does not have an opinion on the titanic showdown between the Illinois Fighting Illini and their arch-nemesis Northwestern Wildcats with every snap watched by the selection committees for the Foster Farms, Pinstripe, and possibly Heart of Dallas bowls.

The bowl panels meet to decide the fate of Northwestern

I can't imagine a football game with more at stake: for Northwestern, a chance to secure bowl eligibility for real although they probably would be able to sneak in as a 5-7 team because there are now so many bowl games that teams will be forced to play themselves in brutal scrimmages while executives from Zaxby's bray for blood by waving chicken pieces at the players gang tackling their roommates.  For Illinois, all they had was the opportunity to diminish Northwestern's bowl chances and cackle as the Hat blotted out the sun and winds blew in from the Lake and shrouded Evanston in a year of hatless darkness.

In the end, the Wildcats triumphed.  Illinois, feeble against the run all season, had no answer for Justin Jackson and John Moten IV, who scored his first two touchdowns by flying past Illinois defenders.  The game was much closer than it appeared.  The Illini rallied from 21 down to within a touchdown thanks mainly to Wes Lunt's best game.  Lunt took advantage of Northwestern's soft coverage on the edges to complete the same eight-yard out route approximately 35 times.  The Illini also got a heroic performance from an injured Malik Turner who would come into the game, make some insane diving catch, roll around in agony, and then come back in to make another great play.

Illinois outplayed Northwestern for several stretches in the second and third quarters.  But every time they threatened, something went haywire.  The Illini fumbled the ball away three times, including one on the Northwestern eight yardline with a chance to tie and once on a punt return down only seven.  The most egregiously awful reversal of fortune involved an interception deep in Northwestern territory early in the game negated by a twelve men on the field penalty, an event whose cruelty was mollified only by the fact that it was extremely funny.

Bells rang out in celebration, ceremonial Hats were put onto every statue, and people poured into the streets to celebrate this incredible sporting event.  Lovie Smith and Pat Fitzgerald, old friends as Chicago Sports Icons, embraced on the fifty yard line while Smith waited. He'd have the opportunity to prise the Hat from the collective head of Wildcats next year in Champaign-Urbana, where he would now return and use the ceremonial key to the Illini's Hat Loss Brooding room with a full year to plan his revenge.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WEARABILITY OF THE HAT TROPHY

If there is one thing you can take away from your visit to this web log, I hope it is the insane and arbitrary decision to mount the Hat trophy on a base instead of allowing it to be worn by victorious players in triumph.  A recent tweet by Northwestern's athletic department caused some confusion on this position:

It's a #HAT. Of course you're supposed to wear it. #B1GCats pic.twitter.com/XzbWBI9vex

— #B1GCats Football🎩 (@NUFBFamily) November 27, 2016

How is this possible?  Has there been some sort of trap door allowing the base to be crudely worn in hat-like fashion?  Was I succumbing to Hat madness?

For hours, I poured over BYCTOM's detailed Hat Archive for any sort of schematics.  I interviewed top statuary haberdashers and scoured the most recent academic journals of hat science, including "(Base) Jumping to Conclusions" in Brims: The Journal of Hat Trophies and Hamburger Restaurant Advertisements and "That's All Pretty Convenient" in The Journal of Implausible Hat Conspiracies, but could not make any headway.

Eventually, with the help of digital photography from years of Hat Trophy photos, including several obscene ones involving Tim Beckman, I began to slowly chip away at the greatest Hat trophy mystery of our time.  You can see the shocking conclusion below:

Proprietary BYCTOM schematic

It appears the hat can, in a fashion, be worn by a player as long as his head is not so grotesquely bulbous that it envelops the entire hollow base area.  But that only raises a larger question and that is this: why?  Why create a trophy of a hat that requires some diabolical secret head chamber in order to fit on a standard-sized head so the only way it can be worn is approximately?  Was the base in mind initially to prevent players from corroding the trophy with their sweat-drenched noggins only to be foiled by the statue's only weakness, a base soaked in the head sweat of dozens of Illinois-based Big Ten football players?  Is there a heretofore unknown Lincoln habit of wearing a stovepipe hat attached to an unwieldy base, his spindly neck straining to keep the whole apparatus on his head while Stephen Douglas made rhetorical mincemeat of him?  I demand answers from government officials immediately on this matter.

Lincoln discovered in a rare photo wearing a gigantic wooden recessed box underneath his 
trademark stovepipe hat while guys with standard non-base hats look on sullenly, reaching 
into their pockets for a notebook so they can write down reminders to buy bulky wooden hat bases

COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IS A LUDICROUS CIRCUS

While Illinois and Northwestern waged their titanic struggle in front of dozens of tarps at Ryan Field, a minor Big Ten squabble took place in Columbus.  There, Ohio State managed to prevail in an overtime game filled with controversy, the best possible result that throws the playoff rankings into chaos and has prompted a Million Michigan Man march on the Capitol where they will read their manifesto entitled "This Manifesto Uses The Phrase Dereliction of Officiating Duties" from You Sir, the News Letter of Michigan Football Harrumphsmanship.  

The playoff picture remains in disarray.  The Committee will have to figure out how to justify including an Ohio State team that did not even qualify for the Big Ten Championship Game over a Penn State team that has a chance to win the conference and already beat the Buckeyes head-to-head; an undefeated MAC team; and potentially a Big 12 champion with a loss that hinged completely on an erroneous referee decision and a minor miracle.

The task of naming a college football national champion remains the most delightfully arbitrary and absurd ritual in sports.  They have tried to do so through polls run by disparate media organizations which means that a large amount of college football history involves a process of claiming championships and defending them through postmodern deconstructionism.  They have tried to do so with computers, which is a sound attack on the narrative-driven insanity of college football.  And now, they try to fit exactly four teams into a playoff, but do so with an unaccountable committee that meets with the solemnity of a papal conclave.  

White smoke by the Playoff Committee signals a triumphant De-emphasis 

of Conference Championships

All this week, people have been attempting to make logical arguments to fill the three non-Alabama playoff spots.  Conference championship upsets this weekend can occlude the picture even further. But logical arguments and opponent defeat flowcharts have no place in this process.  The Playoff is set by the Committee that has its own gonzo decision-making processes that have previously involved things like Body Clocks.  There is no way to know what they value or what sorts of formulae they use.  They could, for all we know, pick teams by throwing knives at walls or basing their selections entirely on the result of human hungry hippos while they hurl goblets of wine and hoot things like "you call that gobbling, you inadequate artiodactyl."

This twisted spectacle is how your college football playoff field is chosen, probably

College football sells itself as a mythological journey where teams rise up and meet challenges by upsetting high-ranked rivals or winning conference championships or even going undefeated in a minor conference and hope that their deeds prove them worthy of inclusion in the Playoff.  Instead, the only mythological elements are a class of powerful, capricious individuals with their own conflicts and agendas that can wipe all that out at a single stroke.  If you are lucky enough to follow a team good enough to aspire to playoff contention, all the college football season does it add increasing opportunities for you to get mad.  And, as fans of college football fans melting down on the internet, we could not have asked for a better system.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

Northwestern finds itself at the mercy of unaccountable committees when they meet to decide which bowl game they will be inflicted upon.  The two main possibilities are the San Francisco bowl, which has has turned over sponsors as often as a postwar Italian government and is now played at the Niners stadium located 2,000 miles outside San Francisco and the Yankee Stadium Hey I'm Playin' Football Here Bowl, which offers Northwestern fans the opportunity to see football played in a baseball stadium with more than one operational endzone.  

The game and the opponent do not matter.  The Wildcats clawed back from the portents of a miserable year to enter the postseason.  They boast the Big Ten leader in rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks.  Austin Carr will have one more opportunity to bamboozle defensive backs. Northwestern has a chance to end the season with a winning record.  This will all be clearer when the bowl fatcats have emerged from their estates with their scrolls.  Until then, we can all luxuriate in the retention of the Hat in all of its mysterious, semi-wearable glory.

Week 11: Clocks

This week, the Playoff Committee released its newest rankings which, we should all remember, remain entirely meaningless at this stage. For example, the Playoff Committee could rank Purdue at #2, just ahead of Faber College and Texas State (not the Texas State in San Marcos, but the one carried to glory by a chemistry graduate student with NCAA eligibility played by Sinbad in Necessary Roughness) and it would not matter one bit until the Playoff Selection Committee selects the actual playoff teams.There is still no explanation as to why the Playoff Committee spends much of the season as the Sure, These Teams Might Make The Playoffs Committee.

The current Texas State had previously been Southwest 
 Texas State and originated as Southwest Texas State 
 Normal School. Lyndon Johnson attended and, 
according to Robert Caro, immediately turned the 
student government into a polarized hotbed of political 
intrigue before he went on to the White House to deploy 
the the Great Society and perfect a 
bunghole-sensitive pants ordering procedure 

The playoff picture once again revolves around Northwestern. The Wildcats own the only defeat against #7 Stanford, while they were obliterated by the undefeated fifth-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes. The Cardinal, however, remain in the playoff hunt. Playoff Committee Chairman Jeff Long explained that Stanford's loss to Northwestern counts less than other losses because the arduous journey from the California Bay Area to Evanston wreaked havoc on the players' body clocks. 

I think we would not be doing our due diligence if we didn't recognize that a team was playing at 9 a.m. Pacific Time, and I recall last year we had a game, I believe UCLA traveled to Virginia. So we look at those things. They're a factor. How big of a factor? I can't quantify that for you, but I know it was discussed by the committee members and probably should have been. 

There is no other satisfying explanation for a loss to Northwestern. It was the beguiling Central Time Zone, conceived of by midwestern railroad barons specifically for football purposes, that made Stanford players incapable of tackling Clayton Thorson or stopping Kevin Hogan from lofting a passes to Kyle Queiro in the endzone.

Ryan Field's dozens of home fans and aggressive tarp arrays already bring the Big Ten's
fiercest home field advantage, but what can teams do when the very laws of time and space
are brought to bear on their helpless players?

It is a good thing that the Playoff Committee is here to sift through the unpredictable and impossible riddle of college football and come up with rankings that factor in time zones, humors, and phrenological analyses of quarterback skull shapes to throw into chaotic mix.

"I think we would not be doing our due diligence
if we didn't recognize that the quarterback's
forehead indicated docility and inability to diagnose
defenses at the point of the snap is a factor when
arbitrarily determining a list of good football teams
because 45% of power in the Southeastern United
States is generated by people yelling at Paul
Finebaum," Long said

The issue of body clocks has obscured the week's more important clock revelation. The University of Illinois released the full Beckman Report. The report, available in full here, is more than 1,200 pages long. Under the heading "Team Culture and Environment," the Beckman Clock is revealed, an ominous Instrument of Intimidation that counts down to the Hat showdown between the Illini and "The Team Upstate."

Time is a hat circle

Here is the report's sixty-fifth footnote that might be my favorite thing ever written about Tim Beckman:

Some players complained that Coach Beckman’s requirement that injured players wear purple jerseys and placement of an anti-Northwestern sign in the athletic training room improperly communicated to players that being injured or seeking medical treatment was the equivalent of being a hated rival, at least to Coach Beckman. The vast majority of players, coaches, and sports medicine staff interviewed dismissed any such notions and reported no concern or even interest in either issue. Instead, witnesses interpreted these motivational tactics as meaningless.

PENN STATE RAN OUT OF TIME

Penn State faced numerous obstacles coming into Ryan Field. For one, they bravely transitioned from Eastern Time to Central Time. Then, they had to face the Wildcat defense. For most of the first half, Northwestern stymied the Nittany Lion attack. After an injury to Clayton Thorson, Justin Jackson took over, going for 186 yards on the day. Northwestern led 20-7 at the half, with at least one other scoring opportunity sailing past the uprights. But in the second half, Penn State came back. On one drive, the 'Cats got a stop only to give their opponents second life with consecutive roughing calls on a punter and a sliding quarterback. Then, wide receiver Geno Lewis picked up a fumbled reverse like an Australian Rules football player and heaved a perfect pass to his colleague in the endzone.

Jack Mitchell's missed extra point gave Penn State the slimmest lead in the fourth quarter. But when the defense stuffed Saquon Barkley and backup quarterback Zack Oliver managed to complete a long pass on third and the approximate distance between Evanston and Happy Valley, Mitchell got a chance to win the game. Jackson moved the ball effectively into range and Mitchell blasted one through the uprights for a thrilling comeback. Penn State got the ball back with nine seconds, in which they did nothing. This unfortunate turn of events stymied reporters' efforts to call it a walk-off kick because Jack Mitchell plays baseball and the Iron Law of Sports Announcing clearly states that if an athlete plays another sport, it is necessary to shoehorn that into broadcasts as much as humanly possible until viewers want to declare that they play a second sport of kumite fighting and are going to travel to the press box and pummel some godforsaken Joe Buck acolyte.

Sports announcers were probably responsible for Pro
Stars, a cartoon product where Michael Jordan, Bo
Jackson, and Wayne Gretzky used their sports skills to
defeat the forces of evil in lairs that, because of the
participation of Gretzky, always inexplicably contained
at least one large sheet of smooth ice

Clocks once again played a central role in the game. Penn State coach James Franklin deployed an avant-garde use of timeouts during the final minute, inexplicably allowing the 'Cats to run the clock down instead of allowing his offense about 30-40 seconds to get into field goal range on their final possession. Some Penn State fans took exception to his clock management and responded in the best way possible: by flying into an incoherent rage on the internet. Something about college football turns ordinary men and women into capricious space emperors, ready to cast out coaches, athletic directors, and anyone else involved in the football team into the space pits used for henchman and failed head coaches of as-yet-uninvented space sports.


The entire apparatus of a university is not safe from the wrath of football fans. Nebraska supporters, already reeling from a streak of improbably close losses including one at the hands of Northwestern, suffered the ultimate indignity of a loss to Purdue. Purdue fans spent the week confused, like they were henchmen who managed to kill Batman in the first 20 minutes of a movie and then had to figure out with the next two and a half hours. Nebraska's most unhinged fringe sent e-mails to the university chancellor. Every fanbase, including Northwestern I'm sure, has its epistolary football maniacs, but not every fanbase had their letters conveniently loaded onto the Worldwide Web so we can see internet comments brought into the Academy for the first time outside of a seminar entitled UNCALLED HOLDING PENALTIES: Discourses of Internet Football Commentary, this moderator is a joke and MUST BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY by the Department of Internet Football Semiotics.

Purdue faces Northwestern at Ryan Field on Saturday. The Boilermakers suffered a 48-14 shellacking at the hands of the Illini last week. Purdue fans have gone past pessimism and resignation to a rarefied football nihilism, staring stoically at another touchdown drive that means nothing. The Wildcats are heavy favorites in the game. At the same time, the appeal of college football is its unpredictability; it is a sport fueled by improbable upsets, jubilant goalpost-handling, and sour-faced upset victims staring despondently into the unknown. Purdue will rely on its strength: the Big Ten's greatest reserve of really scrappy-sounding quarterback names. Darrell Hazell will has benched Austin Appleby for freshman David Blough, both of whom train by having Purdue Pete burst through the walls in their lecture halls and chase them around campus on one of those old-timey railroad handcars. There are no guarantees in college football except that a Purdue win will result in a liveried footman delivering my angry scroll letter to Northwestern's president demanding he turn in his University President’s Sword.

CLEAN THEIR CLOCK

College football is the story of desperate teams running into each other at the mercy of a callous clock. Teams can stop the clock, they can eat clock, they can kill the clock. In the end, only the clock decides when the game ends, unless the game ends on an insane series of laterals with zero time remaining and then there is no time, everyone is simply floating in an ether beyond the concept of time itself between the fourth quarter and infinity, inscrutable to even our most learned scientists, philosophers, and ACC video replay officials.

Our clocks are oblivion devices, counting down to our inevitable demise one picosecond at a time. There is no way to stop or reverse time; our regrets remain alive and the dinosaurs remain dead. Stanford can do nothing about its loss to Northwestern except complain about body clocks, James Franklin can't get those 30 seconds back, and the Beckman Clock is always counting down to the next Hat Game on the horizon.

Bear Attacks

College football has returned!  The Wildcats will take the field this weekend in a rematch against Cal played at time when events actually start that don’t take place at Studio 54.  Once again, a small number of people roughly comparable to the crowd at a rally for the Divine Right Party will gather at Ryan Field to exorcise last season’s demons and witness the destruction of college football as we know it.

Many aspects of the game are unrecognizable.  Realignment has led to the end of old conferences, the rise of new ones has confused casual fans (the reshuffle involving the Late Big East, Conference USA, and something called the “American Athletic Conference” in particular has the feel of a television show crafting an alternate reality to avoid trademark infractions.  The American Conference is home to schools like State University, Texas and Wasamotta U.

 

The American Conference's Milford School student section unnerves the opposition 
with an eerie silence

This means that Rutgers and Maryland will play in the Big Ten, creating rivalries that will, in the tradition of college football, become ageless bedrocks for fans until teams inevitably move to another conference in two years because a cable network is throwing around ducats like a Dickensian Marquis.

College football is changing as a result of the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit and the Northwestern unionization case.  The impossibility of clinging to amateurism for players in a multi-billion dollar sports entertainment industry is eroding in the court of law and in public opinion.  The results of the O’Bannon lawsuit, however, have shown that the status of college athletes in revenue sports will remain in an ambiguous morass of slow-moving lawsuits about how much lunch meat to give players and selling pants. 

We can’t be sure what college football will look like in the future, except that all future entertainment will turn out to be death sports propping up an authoritarian government envisioned by people in the 1980s.  Litigation, however, will mean that college athletes will eventually be able to be compensated and able to capitalize on their likeness until we can get robots to tackle each other for our amusement and also take over universities and churn out papers with titles like “The Flesh Prince? Discourses of power and bodies: Foucault’s rhetorical ‘pendulum’ ‘swings’ from Bel-aire to TGIF,” in Sensors: A Journal of Robot Humanities, v. 46514836 (May, 2167) pp. 15164-15194.

Dean Vernon is unable to deal with Robot Faculty

THE PLAYOFFS, NORTHWESTERN, AND CHAMPIONSHIP INDIFFERENCE

The most important change to the college football is the addition of a playoff.  The four-team system will replace the hated Bowl Championship Series system, which was designed to combine polls in order to select the best two teams in the country and to enrage the South.  The new system will use a panel of judges to arbitrarily select four teams in a playoff and infuriate the South and potentially the Rust Belt.  We’ve made progress.

For NU fans and, indeed, fans of most of the 120 FBS football teams, the precise method of choosing a national champion, be it a Mythical National Champion, a BCS Champion, or a Piggly Wiggly National Champion, is largely irrelevant.  Schools outside of the newly-christened “Power Five” conferences (excluding Notre Dame, which bums athletic conferences like a drunk ex-smoker) will toil for mid-tier bowl berths.  MAC teams exist mainly to provide weeknight games ending in 75-68 scores and to potentially humiliate Michigan.  And the majority of Power Five teams are only around to upset major teams, charge the field, and play each other to death in Pizza City Bowls across the country.

Most college football fans have no real stake in the annual debate over rankings, Heisman winners, and championship berths that fuel the Twenty-First Century Sports Jabbering Industry.

BYCTOM is a card-carrying member of the Twenty-First
 Century Sports Jabbering Industry, although fewer 
people read this blog than a hastily-xeroxed  fan zine 
about zither player trading cards

As a Northwestern fan, I don't care about the playoff or the National Championship or whatever powerhouse team manages to win.  I don't care about the Big Ten being terrible because there is maybe one team that can win the championship and it no longer has a quarterback and because Michigan is the Sick Man of College Football.  One year, perhaps even this year, the 'Cats may catch fire, catch all the breaks, and reverse 2013 the conference on their way to having a claim on a playoff berth.  One day, perhaps, Illinois will come out of nowhere and win every game except the Hat Game and be denied a playoff spot and Tim Beckman will be caught doing whippets on the sideline.  Until then, though, I'm not going to worry about the ridiculous Kafka-esque process that this dumb sport uses to determine a champion.  I measure victory in bowls and Hats.

The Selection Committee convenes to determine a College Football Champion

DYKES'S REVENGE

College football analysts have analyzed rosters, attended practices, looked at the state of the Big Ten West, and their verdict on Northwestern's season is a resounding Fuck If I Know.  Last year's games ended on a series of impossible calamities which could not possibly be duplicated.  This year's team lost its two best playmakers and plays a tougher nonconference schedule.  Also, the team became the face of college football's labor activism, with the NCAA and the university denouncing it as the ruination of the sport.

 

NCAA-provided informational literature to student-
athletes about unionization

And the 'Cats have to perform against their sworn enemies, the California Golden Bears.  Last year in Berkeley, Northwestern played a close game against first-year head coach Sonny Dykes.  The game ended in recriminations and promises of vengeance.  Dykes accused Fitzgerald of instructing players to fake injuries in order to slow the fast-paced Bear offense.  The Bears' attack was indeed vicious.  Wener Herzog has instructed Northwestern defensive coaches to burn their tapes.  Cal suffered an even more disastrous season than NU. They finished 1-11, beating only Portland State.

The acrimony is supposedly behind both coaches, but Dykes spent the rest of the season fuming.  He has spent weekends rolling around pretending to clutch his hamstrings outside of numerous academic conferences on Northwestern's campus, he has been calling Fitzgerald and pretending to sell motivational haircut equipment then screaming OH MY INTERNAL ORGANS and hanging up, he has been putting hooks on Northwestern players' cars.  Football fans hope the game is as exciting as the last one without being marred by controversy.  Actually, fuck it, I want Northwestern to win and I don't care if they do so by bringing in a mechanized Tyrannosaurus on the sidelines and they pretend to get mauled by it every three minutes because we're going to a bowl game this year even if it means using underhanded tactics like stealing playbooks, impersonating coaches, and fomenting revolution in rival programs by sending Kain Colter to their practices in a sealed train.

RUNNING FOOTMEN, FLYING BUTCHERS

As college football erupts in stadiums across the country and our homes, it carries a long legacy of mass interest in sports.  And with sports came gambling.  In the 17th century, for example, English people took a great interest in foot racing.  The most celebrated runner of the 1690s was known as the Preston, the Flying Butcher of Leeds, who earned his nickname by literally being a butcher.  This demonstrates a true dedication to nicknames that is unmatched in the twenty-first century except by Kobe Bryant who calls himself the Black Mamba and hisses at people on the court like he is Thulsa Doom.  According to Edward Seldon Sears, Preston became too well-known to race and had to disfigure himself in order to get opponents.

Similarly,  aristocrats wagered heavily on races between footmen.  These "running footmen" had to keep up with horse-drawn carriages, carrying light snacks on poles.  I assume that the presence of gambling aristocrats made these races crooked.  I imagine that there were all sorts of ways to gain an advantage such as destroying a competitor's confidence by wearing fancier footman uniforms, poisoning their staff-borne hard-boiled eggs, and falling down to fake injuries in order to slow the opposing offense.  

While aristocrats could compete for the services from 
the hardiest footmen, the shoe buckle companies also 
fought for their endorsement, as seen for this ad for the 
popular 1698 Stride Man buckle with an elaborate air 
pumping system for increased racing and unruly 
dinner guest thrashing performance

By the nineteenth century, long-distance walking events gained traction with the gambling community alongside horse racing, attracting enormous crowds.  Here, according to Wikipedia, is an account of Robert Barclay Allardice's celebrated 1000-hour/1,000 mile walk in 1809:

One hundred to one, and indeed any odds whatever, were offered on Wednesday; but so strong was the confidence in his success, that no bets could be obtained. The multitude of people who resorted to the scene of action, in the course of the concluding days, was unprecedented. Not a bed could be procured on Tuesday night at Newmarket, Cambridge, or any of the towns and villages in the vicinity, and every horse and every species of vehicle was engaged...Capt Barclay had a large sum depending upon his undertaking. The aggregate of the bets is supposed to amount to £100,000.

The image of people frantically shaking money and screaming at Barclay to walk, to walk, to WALK DAMN YOUR BLOOD while he calmly but determinedly ambles through the countryside is irresistible and unrecognizable to modern sports fans unable to process such a feat without the nineteenth-century equivalent of Skip Bayless shrieking about his gentlemanliness.

The nineteenth-century version of ESPN's Embrace Debate format.  
This is actually a depiction of a duel between a journalist named 
Paul Déroulède and Georges Clemenceau from 1892 over a political 
dispute, which means that only eight years before the twentieth
century these two prominent public men literally shot guns at each 
other.  Neither was harmed, and Clemenceau went on to become the 
French Prime Minister in 1917, represent France at the Paris Peace 
Conference, and grow a spectacular mustache

Pedestrianism is the antecedent of race walking and other endurance sports, such as race walking, ultra marathons, and watching Northwestern attempt to hold a lead in the fourth quarter.

FOOTBALL IS HERE

It is college football season!  Head to Ryan Field, turn on your television, fashion your hands into elaborate defense-encouraging claw gestures, and hold onto your butts.  There's no way the 'Cats can lose on eight consecutive hail mary fumble overtimes again.  There's no reason the Wildcats can't beat Cal without allegations of chicanery.  There's no reason they can't keep the The Hat from The Beck Man.  There's no reason why they can't sack, pillage, and salt the fields of South Bend on the way back to where the program belongs-- in a low-prestige bowl game sponsored by an absurd company that I can't possibly want to win any more.  I'll grab my pole and my elaborate footman livery and race you all to the stadium.