Northwestern's Temporary Lakeside Stadium has been temporary for a long time. Hastily put together after whatever other stadium measures the athletic department were looking into fell apart, the stadium on the lake is a gorgeous gem of college football located literally a few yards from Lake Michigan as boats sail by with plenty of areas for hanging out if you don't want to watch Northwestern football and clear views of Chicago's Big Ten Skyline from the north endzone. It's also kind of a weird place to try to watch football with poles obstructing the endzone seats, a seating capacity below most Big Ten basketball arenas, and a rickety set of bleachers. After Saturday night, it is supposed to be retired and returned to its natural function as the best lacrosse stadium in the country.
And what a finale. As Chicago's climate has turned early fall into a late extended summer, Northwestern games at the the Lake have usually had beautiful weather made for television with the sun shimmering off the waves and sailboats photogenically gliding into frame. Saturday's forecast, though, calls for nasty cascades of rain and potential thunderstorms. I have no idea what will happen if there is lightning in the vicinity-- there is nowhere to go, and the endzone stands look like a lightning catching contraption designed by Victor Frankenstein. The 'Cats also face a critical early season test.
Walking under the bleachers at The Lake which looks like you are seeing a commercial for word processing software in the 1980s
Colorado comes to town after a narrow opening win over Georgia Tech and a clobbering of FCS Wildcats Weber State. The Colorado program has faded back onto the periphery of relevance after they shocked the sports world by bringing in NFL superstar "Neon" Deion Sanders. Sanders was loud and flashy and resplendent with sons, dubbing himself "Coach Neon" and coming off a bizarre and scandal-plagued charter high school system named "Neon Nighschool." He became one of the most prominent coaches to make bulk use of the transfer portal, essentially telling the entire dreadful Colorado team that he inherited that they would be replaced, likely by his offspring.
Sanders made a lot of noise, got a lot of attention, and brought Colorado from one of the worst teams in FBS to being just sort of crappy. Then the next year, with superstar two-way dynamo Travis Hunter, he managed to go 9-3 and make Colorado seem like a phenomenon. They were on ESPN all of the time and were the toast of the college football world. It didn't last. Sanders's quarterback son left to enter the NFL draft and drive Mel Kiper, Jr. into the throes of a three-day on-air meltdown. The Buffaloes stunk last year, and after the initial fanfare and some serious health issues for Sanders, the Colorado hype machine is pretty much dead. They have settled back into a sub-mediocre Big Twelve program regardless of how many MC Hammer videos their coach starred in in 1994.
But there is a very funny clash happening here between the glamor and braggadocio of Coach Neon and the rough, slapdash Temporary Lake Stadium. I have been wondering for the last couple of weeks if Deion Sanders is the most famous person to ever set foot at The Lake. I don't think that when Sanders decided to coach college football he ever imagined himself on the sidelines in front of probably like 8,000 people in a potential squall facing a slightly favored Northwestern team on national television.
The 'Cats are coming off their precariously early bye week after a narrow until the final minutes victory over a very good FCS team. Colorado might not be great, but it is probably not much worse than some of the lower level Big Ten peer teams the 'Cats will have to beat in order to have a shot at going to a bowl game except for the benighted Rutgers. Hopefully, the early bye will allow the 'Cats to get defensive stalwarts Michael Kilbane and Migo Jackson back on the field after they missed the first week and iron out whatever issues were causing the incessant penalties that plagued them in week one. The Wildcats' brutal schedule means they need to win every game they can before getting thrown into the Big Ten meat grinder. After this game, they head to Bloomington to the most unexpected abattoir in the history of college football.
Whatever the outcome, one thing isn't changing: Northwestern is committed to David Braun. Northwestern reportedly extended its coach until 2031. These extensions, I understand, are important for recruiting in the three dimensional portal era and also to prevent another program from poaching him, provided they can do the impossible and name the coach of the Northwestern Wildcats.
The one thing about David Braun that I can note is that this guy can really open his mouth wide while yelling
David Braun is in his fourth year with Northwestern. After starting under the craziest circumstances possible, he has stabilized into a coach that pretty much delivers what Northwestern fans can hope for since the Big Ten expanded, got rid of the cozy west division, and regularly serves Northwestern up on a platter for the conference juggernauts. In his time here, Braun has never said or done anything memorable and looks like an NCAA video game create-a-coach. He doesn't seem to have any sort of public personality. I'm fine with this. David Braun can keep Northwestern in Detroit bowl berths and not super embarrassing losses to the galactico programs as long as he wants, assuming we never hear about him claiming to be unaware of decades of bizarre hazing rituals inexplicably centered on the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek.
THE BOOK OF JOE IS SOMEHOW THE FIRST COACH WINNER'S WIN THE WINNER'S WAY IN THE BOARDROOM NOIR
The Book of Joe came out in October 2022, and I got my copy from the library in December. The vast majority of this was written in early 2023 with the intention of pitching it elsewhere. But after the brief Joe Maddon interview cycle, any interest in this book died out and I never finished the review. Most of the attention came from Maddon's interviews where he bitterly railed against front offices. This is a shame because the writing in this book is incredibly insane and funny and needs to be seen to be believed. I've been thinking about Joe Maddon again with the Cubs 10th reunion and me listening to every episode of the oafish Anthony Rizzo/David Ross Cubs reunion podcast which naturally included a very Joe Maddonish interview with the old skipper. Here, completed and revised, is what I thought about the extremely weird Book of Joe.
It seems to me that the Book of Joe was trying to be one thing, which is a boilerplate airport book biography of self-styled quirky baseball genius Joe Maddon about his slogans and his philosophies about baseball and also Important Lessons For Business and Life and then in the middle of writing it he got shitcanned from the Angels and it became a bitter jeremiad about how the pointy heads in the front office don’t let you manage anymore.
The book is credited to both Joe Maddon and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, but it’s written in the third person about Joe Maddon while being entirely from his perspective. The effect is sort of strange, a melding of Maddon biography as-told-by-Maddon as well as extended quotes from Maddon about Joe Maddon and the Joe Maddon Way; it’s a profile written by the subject. There’s an entire chapter that consists solely of listing cars that Joe Maddon owns or has owned in the past.
A lot of the Book of Joe seems repurposed from Verducci’s The Cubs Way written to cash in on the 2016 World Series where Verducci established Maddon as a brilliant manager and an innovative thinker who marries an open mind for analytics with a vaguely affected sort of Time/Life Magazine 1960s counterculture flavoring. This book, though, gives Maddon more room to pontificate:
“I still believe I could have been a football coach, a very high-level one, too. I mean a head coach. I think what I believe and how I do it could have worked there, too. No doubt in my mind. Zero doubt. Just teaching different things. Mechanics, fundamentals, but teaching the same mindset. No doubt.
I do believe I could run a large company. I still believe I could, based again on the same principles I’ve utilized. Building relationships. Creating trust. Exchanging ideas. And being able to be constructively critical. Hell, I believe I can do that with any company right now. And I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious in any way, but I just feel that. I do.”
The book is structured like a motivational speech with each chapter named after a Joe Maddon saying such as “Do Simple Better,” “The Process Is Fearless,” and “Embrace the Target.” Each one presents a biographical anecdote of how Joe learned that lesson and coined that phrase either through a revelation (“The Five Levels of Being a Professional” comes to him in a Moses-like flash after he had been drinking with his uncle) or as something he read in a book of motivational quotes that I think you can send away for that is advertised on the back of a coaching whistle catalog.
Maddon imparts what he learned to do and not to do in his early life phase of coaching and then he explains how he has applied it in certain baseball scenarios. The whole thing is jumbled together, and the ideas themselves are often not coherent enough to sustain an entire chapter, but each chapter does seem to evoke what it would be like to be lectured by Joe Maddon at a corporate function where the company has paid him like 75 grand to give employees an hourlong presentation about Winning the Way Winners Win.
The whole thing reads like a fairly boilerplate coach-to-Hilton-Garden-Inn lecture circuit book, except for some reason Verducci has decided to indulge his literary impulses and make choices that seem completely insane to me. One of the things he does is start chapters with disconnected stories that then whiplash the readers directly to a motivational Joe Maddon story. Here, and please forgive the enormous block quote but I think once you read it you will understand why it needed to be there, is how he begins Chapter 2 (“Be Uncomfortable”):
One day in 1871 in the snowbound Swiss Alps a twenty-three-year-old doctoral geology student lost his footing and fell off a steep cliff. He went hurtling toward his death. In the handful of seconds between going airborne and meeting his expected fate, something very strange happened. Time stretched like an accordion. The student, Albert Heim, had time to think about how he would never get to deliver his scheduled university lecture in five days. He thought about how news of his death would reach his loved ones. In his mind he consoled them…Then his entire life played out before him in a series of images. It was like watching a stage production in which he was the main character.
…
At 12:47 p.m. [sic– it was 12:47 a.m.] on November 3, 2016, Joe Maddon experienced one of those moments when time slows and a lifetime plays out in the mind. As the throw from Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant perfectly landed hat-high in the first baseman’s mitt of Anthony Rizzo on an unusually warm night in Cleveland, ending the longest and most famous championship drought in North American sports, Maddon saw with absolutely clarity the people and lessons from his sixty-two-year-old life that had made the World Series-clinching moment possible.”
Tom Verducci has also made a bold choice where he appears to have wanted to write a hardboiled detective novel from the 1940s but also about Joe Maddon. Here is the opening to Chapter 8 (“The Five Levels of Being a Professional”):
“Joe Maddon pulled into the parking lot of the Under Armour Performance Center at Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona, on the dank morning of February 18, 2019. His windshield wipers strained to keep up with the cold, hard rain, and his headlights illuminated the sheaths of gray gloom. He looked at the outside temperature on the car’s thermometer: forty-five degrees. An ominous chill was in the air around the Chicago Cubs, a chill that would prove prescient. As was his wont, Maddon chose to interpret the digital readout optimistically.”
Joe didn’t see the first goon in the dank alley behind the Under Armour Performance Center but he certainly felt him. More specifically, his fists. It seems that the General Manager had not liked what he had to say about the Nine Levels of Winning, and he’d sent his friends to give him a few rebuttals. A couple of other toughs added some addenda with kicks to the midsection. But Joe had a few ripostes planned with his fungo bat. “Attitude is a skill,” Joe said as he made his point directly to the biggest one’s skull. “That’s a lesson you can learn on the field…or in the boardroom.”
Sometimes Verducci combines these tendencies towards weird, tangential anecdotes and overheated detective narration, as he does in Chapter 11 (“Never Forget the Heartbeat”):
“Fog crept over Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife like the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Fate Symphony. Portent, allegro con brio, hung in the air on the afternoon of March 27, 1977. It had already been a very bad day.”
This anecdote is about a massive plane crash that killed 583 people that Verducci uses to segue into a chapter about making decisions about Bullpen Usage.
The main reason why I was interested in The Book of Joe was that in the midst of doling out lessons on How to Win at Baseball and at Life, Joe Maddon was fired in the middle of a twelve game losing streak just after having shaved his hair into a Rally Mohawk. Maddon then appeared in the media railing against the encroachment of front offices on the manager’s role and came across as the classic guy who thought he was the smartest guy in the room supporting innovation until another innovator sweeps him aside and then innovation is bad and a manager should be allowed to trust his gut. I was curious how far down this path the book went.
It turns out, Joe Maddon’s attacks on modern front office practices form a relatively small part of the book, mainly the final chapters. They focus on his growing list of grievances with front offices starting with his sour 2019 with the Cubs. Among the indignities suffered, Maddon was told he had to be more hands-on with players and that some players thought his t-shirts and slogan shtick had become self-promotional. At his nadir with the Cubs, team president Theo Epstein forced him to read a Managing Millenials for Dummies book, which is one of the funniest things I can imagine doing to Joe Maddon.
Maddon argues that the front offices have numbers and algorithms about platoon splits and pitcher fatigue that override the manager’s feeling and relationship with the player and that teams just want to hire puppets that will do what the front office wants. On the one hand, this is a ridiculous argument coming from Joe Maddon who marketed himself as a guy who could play ball with the new model front office and didn’t reflexively react to the concept of on-base percentage by stabbing it with a broken beer bottle.
On the other hand, though, he has a point: who wants to leave baseball increasingly in the hands of these front office dweebs? You may find Joe Maddon relentlessly annoying and his entire position to be the traditional tantrum of a powerful old man who has suddenly lost power and immediately pivots to yelling You Can’t Even Bunt Anymore, but as a baseball fan, it’s hard to not see something sinister undulating under a business guy’s Investment Vest.
In the early 2000s, it was very easy to support the new-look data driven front-offices because the people railing against them were deliberately and ostentatiously stupid, an army of potbellied wheezing 57-year-old baseball lifers and local columnists photographed using typewriters in 2002 screaming about mother’s basements. But the last twenty years have seen an explosion of data from more sophisticated formulas and cameras tracking every move a player makes on the field including their spit trajectory and standard deviations of crotch-adjustments, and we’re now in a period where the sport is so awash in data that is so abstract and kept secret by teams that it seems to have crossed a threshold where it can be used by front offices as a bullshit misting tool.
The advances in baseball during the first Moneyball stats revolution of the early 2000s were devastating in their simplicity. Baseball teams had been relying on statistics originally derived arbitrarily in the nineteenth century, which had missed an obvious and understandable point that players that did not hit well but walked a lot and smacked dingers were far more valuable than batting average would indicate. Baseball is not the only sport plagued by this type of thinking; the NBA appears in its second decade of understanding how much more valuable a three point shot is than a two point shot. But as teams have assimilated and copied these enormous insights, the margins of the information advantage have gotten slimmer and slimmer. It is obvious that there is still a cutting edge in Major League Baseball in that some teams such as the Rays and the Dodgers continue to excel with an unending army of unstoppable relief pitchers and some clueless teams like the Rockies that refuse to even approach the basics of modern practices that keep the team mired in doofus hell. But at the same time, the arrival of Big Data in baseball makes me suspicious because the concept of Big Data almost everywhere you look in society has served as a convenient mask for bullshit.
One of the benefits of Big Data in sports for teams is that these numbers are always presented as Advanced Analytics beyond the comprehension or interest of the vast majority of fans, presenting teams with a black box they can use to justify weird decisions. Just imagine an incredulous Troy Aikman saying “well the analytics say to go for it there, Joe” with The Analytics invoked like a mysterious mountain sage when a team tries a daring but failed fourth-down conversion, or the Cubs explaining what will happen when they get this guy in the Pitch Lab when they acquire a reliever with a 5.43 ERA because ownership no longer wants to spend money. Once teams claim to be wielding highly complex proprietary data beyond the grasp of the few weird fans who really get into the weeds on this stuff, they can use Data and Numbers as an argument ender. Most baseball fans see things like that the same way computers are portrayed on those NCIS shows beloved by septuagenarians where a hacker is able to type fast enough to make sparks come out of a server rack and blow up a hospital.
The issue I have with Big Data is that when so much of it becomes complex, abstracted, and proprietary, it is very difficult to tell what is actually information and what is bullshit that is being used as a disguise to do what companies want it to do. I can’t help but think of the time that the Facebook algorithm forced every online publication to make us stare at terrified bloggers talking into webcams in washed out rumpus rooms for a couple of years and then the entire thing was based on a single fake metric whenever a team decides to go all in on the nebulous concept of pitch framing. Most of what baseball front offices and ownership want to do is cut payroll and save money, and I believe that “advanced analytics” has appeared as a handy smokescreen for that tactic.
Outside of sports, whenever you see management spouting about analytics and efficiency that is almost always code for the single idea of management consultants which is layoffs. In 2026, the part of the appeal of LLM "AI" for business guys is having an anonymous and non-corporeal oracle that they can fob decisions and blame onto-- we've already seen this creep into sports front offices where "what can we say, the complex data model AI said that we should do this" is being trialed as an excuse for executives to try to save their jobs.
When Joe Maddon rails against the encroachment of spreadsheet-wielding front offices, he is not upset about these things. He is simply mad. In the very specific case of Joe Maddon, I don't blame him because the front office imposing Data and Analytics upon him was the brains-trust of the Los Angeles Angels and frankly I'd rather let washed up egomaniac Joe Maddon cook in terms of his bullpen usage than Perry Minasian even if I believe that Joe Maddon personally shortened my life with his pitching decisions in game seven of the 2016 World Series.
The fact of the matter is that as insane and pointless as this book is and as annoying as Joe Maddon can be, I am still happy to let Joe Maddon talk Joe Maddonishly about Joe Maddon things. Maddon got my favorite baseball team that was so historically bad at baseball that every time they made the playoffs there would be b-roll of graveyards showing the generations of Cubs fans that literally died waiting for them to win anything a World Series Championship. He did a bunch of dumb, goofy shit that took baseball precisely as seriously as it should be treated. And so I think that Joe Maddon is entitled to release as many disposable As Told To books about Management Success that he wants to. It’s been ten years and no other Cubs manager has been even close to the World Series. For a brief time, whatever the fuck Joe Maddon was talking about in the Book of Joe worked.
