LET 'EM OFF THE HOOK

No person has ever better explained the feeling of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory better than former Northwestern head coach Dennis Green when he screamed “they are who we thought they were, and we let ‘em off the hook!” before slapping a microphone stand and stomping away after his Arizona Cardinals blew a Monday night game to the Bears. Northwestern had Michigan down one with a couple minutes left and everything on the line: a bowl berth, a win in the cursed confines of Wrigley Field, a win against the eternally annoying Michigan Wolverines, a win against Michigan in a Wrigley Field completely full of Michigan fans none of whom woke up that day with the thought of losing to Northwestern even occurring to them; and they let ‘em off the goddamn hook. 

In Green's rant he also managed to make the single most accurate and existentially true statement about the Chicago Bears ever recorded. "The Bears are what we thought they were" should be inscribed at Halas Hall.

Perhaps it is not surprising that they lost. Michigan outplayed Northwestern in this game. They successfully bottled up Caleb Komolafe, which is a problem because the Wildcats’ offensive gameplan is a BASIC computer program that says “<10> give ball to Komolafe” and GOTO <10>. On defense, Michigan just kept running the same RPO play where Bryce Underwood would throw to a wide open Andrew Marsh for the best day in their young careers; you can understand why Pat Fitzgerald once got so mad at that play after getting torched by Daniel Jones that he described it tn the most damning phrase a meathead who grew up in the 1980s could muster, calling it “pure communism.” 

Fitzgerald, a well-known amateur scholar of Marx, was of course referring to Marx's lesser-known follow up to Kapital Das LaufenOderPassenOption

But Michigan’s offense made enough silly mistakes to keep the ‘Cats in it. The Wolverines' offense either resembled a smooth yards-chewing machine or a sputtering turnover factory. Northwestern recovered five of them in this game and these takeaways, along with a desperate switch from the oozing across the ground offense to one where Preston Stone just started hucking balls to receivers making insane catches after three quarters of passes getting repeatedly battered down at the line of scrimmage or skipping across the field like a fucking baseball as the announcers constantly reminded us because this football game was actually being played at a stadium where they usually play baseball got Northwestern back into the game and clinging to the smallest lead you're allowed to have.

But when Northwestern just needed one more stop to ice the game and revel in glory, they couldn’t do it. Despite a heroic effort from the defense all game long, Michigan marched down the field one third down at a time, set up a field goal with no time remaining, and blasted it through. Fine. Crown their ass.

I watched the final drive in fast forward, knowing what was coming. It was an obscene and frankly alarmingly beautiful day on Saturday and instead of sitting at the TV getting mad, I chose to spend the time outside and only watched the game after the sun had set. In the third quarter, with Northwestern looking hapless and down 21-9, I decided I had enough and looked up the score and was startled to see that they had come all the way back but fell short. I still didn’t know what happened, but as the game clock ticked down and I saw that it was going to be a walkoff field goal I somehow got mad at something I already knew was going to happen in a strange temporal distortion. A gut punch doesn’t hurt less when you see it coming.

A win on Saturday could have exorcised the demons at Wrigley, ended their losing streak, and stuck it to Michigan, but they lost in heartbreaking fashion. Now they are clinging to a bowl berth with the tips of their fingernails. They need to figure out how to win at this ballpark.

PLEASE STOP RUINING THE CONCEPT OF "WRIGLEY FIELD" FOR ME

Wrigley Field in the summer is one of the country’s great ballparks built for long summer days watching a ballgame slowly unfurl itself over the course of a lazy afternoon. But in the fall, the ivy turns into sticks, the clouds form a gray ceiling over the park, and Northwestern loses a football game. As much as I enjoy watching baseball there, I have come to dread Northwestern games at Wrigley ever since Mikel Leshoure put 350 rushing yards on them while players were barred from using one of the endzones because it was a brick wall. Northwestern has never won a game here. It is the graveyard of Wildcat football.

This is a problem because if the ‘Cats want to achieve their most important goal imaginable and qualify for a crummy-ass bowl game they are going to need a win against Minnesota in this cursed stadium or have to beat a very good Illinois team in Champaign. In my expert football opinion, they probably should have considered simply winning the Michigan game.

Minnesota is in theory a less daunting opponent than the last two ranked behemoths on the schedule and even Nebraska. They are 6-4, but winless on the road, and, with the exception of a 24-6 beatdown of the Huskers, have gotten walloped by good teams and squeaked by the sagging lower middle of the Big Ten. I was very surprised to see that the oddsmakers have Northwestern favored in this game, which might be the first time that’s ever happened at Wrigley.

How much of a “road game” will this be for a Minnesota team that is inept outside of the Twin Cities? I expect Minnesota fans to flood Wrigley like all Big Ten opponents, but the fact that Northwestern has sent me several emails offering discounted tickets to this game and the fact that the vibes for Minnesota seem kind of lousy this year– their fans have become grimly resigned to the sobering reality that other than beating a hobbling Wisconsin team that is playing like they just got caught in a bear trap and are waiting for Walker Texas Ranger to punch them in the face, a win against the ‘Cats would be their biggest and most impressive of the season– means that it is possible that Wrigley looks less like its festooned in maroon wallpaper and more like a post-Labor Day afternoon crowd when a 75-win Cubs team is playing the Reds for fourth place in the NL Central.

When you're going to see some green seats in the upper deck 

Regardless of what happens on the field, another Wrigley game has guaranteed more tortured baseball references from announcers. I would hope that someone has told the announcing crew that this is the fifth Northwestern Wrigley game in three years and Wildcat fans simply cannot listen to a guy say “he threw that like a dang shortstop” one more time. I just looked up who the announcers were to see if maybe there was a repeat crew that had used up all of their baseball material but this game has been swept to the dregs of the Big Ten Network and, while I do not want to alarm readers, if you are watching this on television you are inviting Matt Millen to be a part of your Saturday. Maybe that announcer choice, along with the offer of low-priced ticket-and-hotdog combos are part of the effort to get people to this game and not watching on TV.

I would like to think that the fact that Northwestern hasn’t really been blown out except against Oregon and in the second half against USC only after blowing a touchdown and being victimized by some of the most shameful punt-chicaneries ever inflicted on an honorable football team means that they will easily bulldoze an equally mediocre Minnesota team, but of course that is wishful thinking. This is a Big Ten West Legacy Game in a very silly place to play football and Minnesota and Northwestern are evenly matched. Northwestern needs this win like water for a realistic shot at a bowl game capping off a vastly more successful season than anyone imagined, but Minnesota needs this one only slightly less.

The formula for the Northwestern this year is simple. They need to run the ball on long, agonizing drives that speed up the game on offense and avoid big plays on defense. They will give up that same goddamn sideline route on third down constantly and if the opposing quarterback can hit that pass, the ‘Cats will be in big trouble. It’s the same Hope A Big Ten West Quarterback Is A Big Ten West-Style Lummox strategy that got them to so many Ticket City-style bowl games in the 2010s. 

Being a football fan is a goofy enterprise even if you are rooting for a big time team with real ambitions. It is much harder to explain the concept of getting insanely mad that a team that will never actually win anything could miss an opportunity to play in the America’s Gizzard Producers’ Innards Bowl in front of 3,900 people against a team that is somehow simultaneously in two conferences because of an administrative error. Please let them just get this out of the way before they get down to the much more serious and important Hat Business.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

The Great Commissioner brought his foreign envoy Marco Polo to the seat of his empire’s greatest crown jewel. It sits at the nexus of all known types of transportation with rail lines and great highways and even airplanes landing majestically overhead. He takes them through a complex of inns and sites of great exhibitions of goods from lands that even Marco Polo has never heard of. It is ringed by portraits of an unsettling man with an uncanny head of hair impossible to exist in nature. 

The Great Commissioner takes Marco Polo to the seat of his empire, an ornate palace that shares a parking lot with a meat restaurant. It is across the highway from a minor league baseball stadium named for a hot dog where the ketchup mascot is regularly imprisoned and humiliated to reflect the tastes of the populace who abhor that condiment. 

“Tell me, Marco Polo,” the Commissioner says. “In all of your travels and all of the cities you have told me about, could you ever envision a city like this?”

“No,” Marco Polo said. 

Cities and Language V: Minna 

One arrives in the great city of Minna by road or perhaps even by the river through the gates and marvels at the enormous inflatable buildings and structures ingeniously designed to shield its residents from the harshest of the elements. The city is prosperous and tidy as residents bustle around conducting their business. It is only when a visitor attempts to speak to a Minnan that they will be utterly befuddled by how they communicate in this city.

The residents here speak in an almost impenetrable argot of slogans and acronyms. For example, a visitor simply attempting to greet a stranger and perhaps ask for directions will be told “Board the Train!” and when they ask for further clarification being told that “train” is an acronym that stands for “take risks and invalidate naysayers” before the person will chestbump the visitor. 

Even those practiced in Minna-speak can get tripped up. An experienced guide who spent a happy childhood in Minna and then left to pursue studies in other parts of the Commissioner’s vast kingdom before returning to serve as an interpreter for visiting dignitaries suffered a humiliating breakdown while trying to convey the meaning of G.A.R.G.A.N.T.U.A.N. somewhere around the second G. Even years later he could barely get through the story without holding back tears. “That is too many letters for a motivational acronym,” he said. “A child could see that.”

Despite the bizarre and oblique methods of speaking by telling each other to “readying hard means going hard” when “h.a.r.d.” is an acronym that in some tortured way ends up meaning trying hard, the people of Minna understand each other. There is a sort of labored poetry to their words. Unfortunately, this type of speech can lead to problems. I once witnessed a man greet a friend with “maximum drive means driving your max” and the two men disagreed with whether the V in drive stood for Velocity or Vicissitude. The two men came to blows on a sidewalk, pulling each other’s dri-fit quarter-zips over their heads exposing the shirt and tie they wear underneath and pummeling each other until passersby urged them to be K.I.N.D. (kindness is never donnybrooking).

The residents are kind and welcoming, largely because they are happy to sit down for hours and explain what their various sayings and acronyms mean. They are excited because it has taken their ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years to compile such a beguiling and twisting language that follows its own logic, even if it is kind of silly. But because they cannot speak without their comforting store of aphorisms and sayings, every conversation mushrooms into an even more impenetrable nest of references. I recommend staying away from Minna at all costs.

Soaked

There is a small but extremely twisted slice of football fans in the United States who, like me, follow both the Northwestern Wildcats and the Chicago Bears, and since Pat Fitzgerald has taken over it has been like watching these two football entities merge into a hideous team like how Jeff Goldblum turned into the fly except instead of turning into a disgusting and vomitous mélange of insect and man who says ah a lot they are turning into a single football entity that runs doomed inside draws on 3rd and 5.  

There is a term called carcinization that is a process I know about only from this Wikipedia page I have just read that is the odd tendency for multiple unrelated creatures over billions of years to evolve into crabs, and this is how the Chicago Bears work: no matter how many new general managers and coaches they bring to install new offensive systems that they promise will bring about an exciting era of Bears football no matter who is in charge they keep defaulting into offenses where the quarterback throws for exactly 168 yards and they only win the game if their linebackers score two touchdowns.  Under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern has changed from a fun offense led by scrappy, tiny quarterbacks that desperately tried to outscore teams 48-45 to a defense and punts outfit that has until recently managed a shocking amount of success by trying to win games by going up by exactly three points in the second quarter and then switching to an offensive gameplan that involves getting the ball at their own 35 and attempting to dig a hole.

The Bears opened the season in a horrifying "supercell" storm that soaked the field and was watched by the few people in the area that were not bailing out their basements, and in this maelstrom the Bears' objectively hideous Mess Football managed to stymie a vastly superior San Francisco 49ers team that was also helpfully starting a person who appeared to have learned how to play quarterback by sending away for an instruction manual from the Sears catalog.  Last Saturday, Northwestern traveled to Penn State and played in what appeared to be a miserable constant downpour.  Penn State had trouble holding onto the ball in those conditions and it seemed like every five minutes one of their running backs would fumble the ball in a hilarious and exaggerated manner like an exasperated Daffy Duck flinging a tray of food 35 feet backwards after slipping on a banana peel and then having a safe land on him before his hands come out from under it and do the combination and open the door to reveal his lump-ridden head.  Unfortunately, Northwestern could not take advantage of these turnovers and pretty much immediately punted every time.  They scored zero points off the turnovers.  They ran for something like 6 yards.  The Penn State Nittany Lions playing in a tempest who were they thought they were and they let 'em off the hook.

Dennis Green's pronouncement that "The Bears Are Who We Thought They Were" is the most profound and accurate thing anyone has ever said about the Chicago Bears

No one was expecting Northwestern to upset undefeated eleventh-ranked Penn State on the road, but a sloppy shit game in horrible weather presented the ideal conditions for Northwestern football and they just could not manage to capitalize on it.  In what is looking like three out of four years of absolute football disaster, I am starting to question Northwestern's previous ability to look bad in one game and still manage to win several games it should not out of what appears to be pure stubbornness and spite.  And yet, despite myself, I still think they might have a shot at the Dreaded Wisconsin Badgers in what promises to the Big Ten's most miserable homecoming.

COACH CYCLE

If there is one time to face the Wisconsin Badgers it is this week when they are reeling.  They just got hammered by Illinois (a team that I think, unfortunately for fans of HAT trophies, is going to be pretty decent under Bielema, who has a proven formula to win the Big Ten West).  They have unceremoniously fired their head coach Paul Chryst.  Wisconsin dumped his ass.  Jettisoned him right in the middle of the season.  Put him on the cheese truck to Kenosha.  I can't remember the Badgers ever firing anyone in the middle of a season before because their coaches tend to just sort of bud off of Barry Alvarez like appendages until they grow the requisite number of chins and fall off.  He's the second Big Ten coach to get canned before the teeth of the season, joining Scott Frost whom I assume was dropped out of an airplane cargo hold somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean after screaming at the the athletic director "you don't have the balls to drop me from 30,000 feet into the aaaaaah."

Chryst could not be reached for comment because he vanished into a massive crowd of identical looking Pauls Chryst with the real one only identifiable because he was missing a single shoe.
 

There are a few things going for the 'Cats here.  For one, no team that has its coach unceremoniously eating a buyout in early October can be classified as doing well.  The Badgers are 2-3 after losing to an unheralded Washington State team and Illinois and getting completely dismantled by an Ohio State team that is for all intents and purposes a professional team that will never lose to a Big Ten West squad unless they are playing in Ross Ade stadium at night where the rules of football and thermodynamics are temporarily suspended.  There is also the Mystique of Ryan Field, one of the funniest phenomena in college football where the Badgers, no matter how immense their offensive line and how good their running back is and how much their perennial sort-of-ok quarterback manages to stay out of the way can't help but eat shit in Evanston despite their absolutely overwhelming fan advantage.  It is hilarious.  Even playing a de facto home game with their tens of thousands of Chicago-area alums and fans making the short drive down I-94 to flood Ryan Field's collapsing rusted guts with an arterial spray of red and making Northwestern go on a silent count in their own stadium, there was a period of time when the Badgers just could not win in Evanston and it would be a great college football story except it involved Northwestern and no one cared.

There are a few snags here when it comes to predicting a Northwestern Chaos Victory.  Two are practical: For one, Wisconsin's interim coach is the formerly extremely annoying Badgers safety and now defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard who is by all accounts a good and sought-after coach, and the firing of Chryst may be more a move to secure his services before he is poached by another program in college football's amusingly medieval succession system.  Another issue is the current state of Northwestern football.  Finally, there is a mystical problem here, where Wisconsin fans are pretty down about their season.  They are not "considering it possible to lose to 2022 Northwestern" down, but I maintain that the Ryan Field Chaos Engine cannot activate unless there is a scrappy Wildcat team and a preposterously overconfident Badgers team that has a Heisman-caliber running back and world-ending defense and ordinary quarterback that will prevent them from doing anything other than getting bulldozed by Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game. 

Without those conditions, I fear that the dreaded Wisconsin at Ryan Field Experience which ideally leaves the 75% of the stadium that is rooting for Wisconsin even though it is ostensibly Northwestern's homecoming game making the Producers Face as they somehow lose 13-11 in a game that somehow involves a one-point special teams safety may not come into play.  But goddamn I'm rooting for it.

BUCK DUCKETT IN DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PANTS

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea. I did not do any research about this. But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vignettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

Duckett was not sure if the three-eyed mutants in the mall stalls of New Indianapolis could tell the future when they went into their trance or if they were just bilking tourists but he had no interest in either outcome.  He usually just hurried by them as quickly on the way to NCAA headquarters, coat buttoned up against the elements and against the crowds of hustlers, unlicensed augmentors, and thieves.  He knew these alleys, and he knew what was waiting for him.  "It's Duckett," he said to the NCAA guards who never remembered who he was and how many pairs of pants he had confiscated in one legendary raid.  He even forgot, sometimes.

"Hell, it's cold out there," Duckett said, settling into the dingy basement office he shared with Crandall.  To get there, he had to go through three checkpoints across rows of auditing machines and past the authenticators that now took up most of the investigations department and down four flights of stairs to a subbasement now mainly used for storage.

"What's going on up there, three ring circus?" Crandall said.  Duckett hadn't noticed anything.  He generally kept his head down these days.  There was very little pants-related activity, and no one up there wanted to hear from him.  

"No, what's going on?" Duckett said.

"You didn't see the decks last night?  They got 'em.  They say they do.  Brutal Bolus.  All hell's breaking loose."

"Damn."

Brutal Bolus.  The top basketball player in the country, and he was augmented to hell and back.  At least, that was what the NCAA thought, although Bolus had passed every test they made him take for three years, even when he blasted Laser State's entire roster of forwards with his forehead cannon.

"And no one bothered to ask me about his socks," Duckett said. Crandall couldn't smile, but he managed a jocular grimace.

 Duckett was not sure why the NCAA kept him around.  He was their most senior investigator but that had happened largely by default after the Meltdowns.  He served at first largely as a symbol that the NCAA still had a mission and still cared about amateurism even after basketball stopped becoming recognizable and became a violent basketball-related spectacle that evolved from a four-volume Codex of Futuristic Violent Basketball Rules invented by Bill Laimbeer that also had full color illustrations about speculative haircuts. 

The NCAA was not interested in pants anymore.  Nor was it interested in shoes, cars, or even cash.  The NCAA was now issued in augmentors.  Every college basketball player these days was augmented somehow.  In the early days, they had their arms replaced with cannons or grappling hooks fused to their backs.  But soon players began to show up with strange abilities, eerie abilities to float slightly longer in the air than they should, abilities to move the ball around without touching it, slightly different cannons grafted onto their arms that the NCAA didn't like.  These augments were sophisticated and increasingly undetectable.  The players were rumored to come from vats and then show up at AAU tournaments with unconvincing backstories and the same few dozen memories.  The NCAA's investigations department shifted to unearth these illegal augmentors and ban them from college basketball.  

Duckett used to sleep in cars and in fetid piles of laundry in frat houses to catch an illegal pants transaction, but that was not how the NCAA worked anymore.  Its analysts monitored patterns: patterns of how players moved, how they bludgeoned, how they spoke in interviews.  Players suspected of illegal augments could be seized, and investigators subjected them to a series of cognitive tests.  Even the augments from big time programs who had been coached to pass would eventually crack, except for one.  For three years, Brutal Bolus had been called in multiple times a season.  They gave him the Ramper test.  They subjected him to Graschman's Paradox.  It did not matter.  He passed with ease, he smiled, and then he went out and put his forehead through a point guard ineffectively menacing him with a chainsaw.  The NCAA made him his top target.  

"How did they finally get him?" Duckett said.  He didn't really understand the new methods and did not particularly want to.  The whole enterprise seemed sort of grotesque to him, and the new analysts were blank and busy in a way he did not understand.

"Don't know yet," Crandall said.  

"Duckett up here. Now." The call on the old deck in the office startled him.  No one had called down here before.  He did not even realize it was connected to anything and thought it was a piece of junk like everything else.  But there was no mistaking that voice.  It was Lauck, the Subdirector.  Until that second, he would have bet that Lauck had no idea he was still here or even alive, but now he was summoned upstairs.  "On my way," Duckett said.

The NCAA offices were in chaos.  Chairs were strewn everywhere.  Analysis stations had dent in them.  It was eerily empty, and he had no idea where everyone was until he found them.  The hallway to Lauck's office looked like a field hospital, and analysts and other NCAA personnel lay around.  The lucky ones were getting bandages.  The unlucky ones were getting sheets.  It looked like when they tried to bring Bolus in, he had other ideas.

Lauck looked banged up.  He had blood on his sleeve, but it wasn't his.  You could fit a change of socks into the bags under his eyes.  

"Duckett, how familiar are you with the Bolus case?" Lauck said.

"Just what's on the deck," said Duckett.  "Crandall told me you got him?"

"Got him is one way to put it," Lauck said.  Duckett realized now that they had a much bigger problem than eligibility on their hands.  Bolus was dead.  Bolus was dead and Duckett was up here.  The mercury drained from his spine.  

"You're probably wondering why I asked for you," Lauck said.  "Bolus is in there, what's left of him.  Whatever augments he had are now gone.  No one we know about is capable of anything like his.  But when we got him we did manage to salvage these."  He opened a biohazard crate and steam hissed out.  Duckett leaned over.  It was a pair of pants.  Pretty standard model, decent stitching, athletic cut.  He reached out to feel them but Lauck grabbed his arm.  

"Look closer, Duckett."  Duckett leaned in.  The pants were moving.  It was subtle, small undulation, almost impossible to spot without staring at it.  It was like a breathing motion.  Duckett looked at Lauck.

"Is that a living tissue?  You found these on Bolus?  What's going on here, Lauck?  What the hell kind of pants are those?" Duckett said.

"That's what I want you to find out," Lauck said.