In 2017, Northwestern went to the NCAA tournament and challenged Vanderbilt to a three-hour heart attack. After every play, the camera cut to Doug Collins, who appeared to be suffering the effects of a perilously consumed Wonka raspberry candy, as the score flipped back and forth. The Wildcats ultimately won when the Commodores' best player temporarily lost his mind and committed a foul so ill-advised that the best explanation for it was that he was hypnotized and activated by a rogue Northwestern basketball sabotage team.
On Thursday, the Wildcats played a Boise State team that emerged through the week as a trendy upset pick, and they calmly dismantled them. The Broncos had no answer for Boo Buie, who was clearly the best player on the floor. They never, not even for a split second, took the lead. The game was close enough for Boise State to never really be out of striking range and to even tie it in the second half, but they mostly just sat at a comfortable cruising distance of about six points until it was time to start pointlessly fouling people for 45 minutes, which is the fate for all college basketball games within 15 points. This was an uncomfortable feeling as a Northwestern fan, where any big win usually feels like being hunted for sport or at the very least besieged.
More ball.#GoCats | #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/T9QitwwxiZ
— Northwestern Basketball (@NUMensBball) March 17, 2023
One unique thing Northwestern is doing is attempting to steal Beam Valor. I hope an angry Kings fan runs up to a Northwestern fan screaming LIGHT THE BEAM and yells "Excuse me, how many rebounds did Chimezie Metu have last night? What capacity does Leandro Barbosa serve in the Organization????"
Northwestern's reward for their victory is a matchup against powerhouse UCLA on Saturday night. The Bruins have some key players injured but that did not matter in their game against UNC-Asheville that looked like a contest between the monster truck Grave Digger and several dozen 1980s sedans. There is no rogue Bracketologist favoring Northwestern over UCLA and no secret advanced metric that the numbers-mongers can point to that show a hidden Northwestern advantage somewhere. The only people who have the Wildcats penciled into the Sweet Sixteen in their bracket are me, a deranged person who has picked Northwestern to win the entire tournament because what is the point of living if you don't pick your team to win it all, and people filling out brackets based on late night network TV talk show hosts.
But that's the magic of the tournament. No one had Northwestern worthy as playing in the same building as Gonzaga in 2017 and they very well might have won if Zach Collins had not been allowed to nail an old wooden board to the bottom of the basket which caused Chris Collins (no relation) to earn a crushing technical foul after illegally turning into an anthropomorphic bagpipe. Just before I started writing this, Purdue was eliminated by a school called Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey, which I learned was founded by and named after a guy who made his fortune manufacturing grisly early twentieth-century surgical implements. Every year, Matt Painter shows up with the largest person on the face of the Earth who is capable of dribbling and every year they get tripped up in the tournament as they reach the outer limits what humans can achieve by lumbering until they seemed to reach their apotheosis by playing through a player so immense and so skilled that they seemed nearly unstoppable outside of Evanston.
Illustration of Purdue playing a double-digit seed in the NCAA Tournament
It has not been a very good tournament for the Big Ten. On the one hand, I suppose I should be concerned because if the conference continues to perform in every tournament like the Indiana Jones Sword Man, it will result in fewer bids awarded to Big Ten teams and therefore a more difficult path for Northwestern to the Dance. But on the other hand, that's not my problem. It is much more fun to delight in watching conference foes and rivals eat shit on a national stage, especially if it involves the humiliation of an unhinged monster-coach like Iowa's Fran McCaffery or Illinois's Brad Underwood, both of whom reach flights of anger so impossible by the standards of normal human behavior that they can be only described as operatic, spending three and a half hours bellowing their arias about how that's a moving screen there, that's a goddamn moving screen, how did you not fuckin' see that, all goddamn day with these screens SHIT! MOVING SCREEN FUCK! There are few sights in college basketball more satisfying than watching Tom Izzo eliminated and sputtering like a malfunctioning lawnmower.
Underwood brings down the house in his showstopping number Jesus Christ Will You Fuckin Box Out
I am not going to pretend that I have any expertise on UCLA. I tried watching their tournament game to prepare some detailed scouting notes such as seeing the names of the players, but the game was so out of hand and boring that I quickly turned it off in favor of closer contests, so my knowledge of UCLA is that their head coach bears an eerie resemblance to the angry vice principal from the Back to the Future movies. But I do know that the Wildcats will not be fazed by the overwhelming odds. There's no reason to think Northwestern can win this other than every single thing that this team has done this entire season.
BASEBALLS OF THE WORLD
I am disappointed that the World Baseball Classic, which has been a perfect late-night sports option for the past couple of weeks, has now run into the most chaotic parts of March Madness. Memphis was desperately attempting to fend off an upset from Florida Atlantic in the second half as Mexico tried to rally against Puerto Rico in front of a delightfully insane crowd in Miami. Tonight, the United States will try to solve unexpected tournament juggernaut Venezuela during the Northwestern-UCLA game. It's a shame that these two tournaments have crashed together this weekend in a ports conflagration; it is hard to focus on baseball, particularly the painstaking version of high-intensity elimination game baseball, while a college basketball team filled with guys with orthopedic accessories is nipping at the heels of a two-seed.
The World Baseball Classic is a tremendous sporting event because of the enormous disparity of talent on display. On the one hand, several teams are awe-inspiring collections of galacticos; the Dominican team alone could function as a pretty good all-star squad, and the American team's lineup features multiple MVPs. At the same time, most of the other teams are collections of amateurs, minor-leaguers, marginal major league players, and, most enjoyably, former marginal major leaguers-- there are few things better than looking at a WBC roster and seeing a guy you vaguely remember from ten years ago is still pitching in Curacao.. The tournament's darlings were the Czech team made of up players who actually live in the Czech Republic and work day jobs except Eric Sogard and watching them in awe that they get to play in the same game as Shohei Ohtani.
While the collisions of the heavyweights have been enjoyable (the pool elimination game between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico was a like a playoff Game 7 atmosphere that also seemed like a party), I've really been enjoying the games between teams with players I've never heard of. The feeling of turning on high-stakes baseball game at 10 pm contested by teams filled with players you don't see often in MLB-- squat, spherical outfielders, 45 year-old pitchers who look like they might need to take an urgent business call in the dugout, excited teenagers-- while an announcer desperately is searching for things to say like "Donovan Bluddle made it to Double A with the Brewers in 2013 and now plays for the Brisbane Gobblers" is powerful enough to require a prescription.
The World Baseball Classic is also an enjoyable tour of international baseball cultures. Watching always provides a depressing reminder that the dour American unwritten rules are perhaps the least fun way to watch and play baseball that exists on the planet. For a brief moment, Miami becomes the most joyful baseball venue imaginable before it once again becomes infected by the Marlins. The atmosphere at the games in Taiwan during home games looked incredible. I also appreciate the teams largely made up of North American players attempting to come up with stereotypical on-base celebrations. The British team decided to mime sipping tea with their pinkies extended when they got on base and let Trayce Thompson strut around the dugout with what appeared to be a Burger King-quality crown after hitting a home run off Adam Wainwright; the Italian team, made up almost exclusively of Americans, decided to celebrate with a suite of Vaguely Italian Gestures.
The WBC's elimination phase is, like the latter stages of the NCAA Tournament, less compelling to me than pool play. By now, the teams filled with hopefuls, amateurs, and waddling sports geriatrics have all been eliminated and either dispersed back to the American minors or their own domestic leagues struggling to grab a foothold on dusty fields in places where people generally don't like baseball. The rest of the tournament is mainly filled with different configurations of players we generally will be watching the rest of the summer. The exception is Japan, which is largely made up of excellent players in NPB that I never see and several phenoms that will eventually make their way to the United States, and Shohei Ohtani, who is worth watching in any context.
The magic of the WBC and NCAA Tournament is not only the delight of upsets but the peek beyond the highest-profile teams that reveal the more distant horizons of a sport, that once you get past the teams and players you see on TV all the time there is a vast array of people still playing at a relatively high level but who also have been sifted out of the highest levels because they are too small or too rotund or a little too slow or they look ridiculous in rec specs, and the joy that they get from being in the spotlight for awhile even if its just to get shunted out of the tournament by a much better team. But sometimes they don't and they continue to win beyond all expectation, and I hope to see one more colossal upset Saturday night.
