College Football's Spite Season

The big story in college football this offseason has been the rapid rearrangement of conferences.  It looks like a small child has shaken out a bin with action figures and all of a sudden there is an unexpected summit that appears to be happening between go-bots and a few ninja turtle villains.  Ask any random bystander what conference a middling and unexceptional Power Five program is in currently and they will not be able to tell you.  But that would be a fiendish trick! Because the funniest part of the realignment, one marked by rapacious raids by other conferences for plum programs, erstwhile conference-mates stabbing each other in back, hasty midnight meetings involving provosts, and apparently zero consideration whatsoever for non-football athletes who now will spend a large portion of their college experience in various regional airports is that none of that realignment has happened yet.  

 

The Big Ten and SEC carve up the college football landscape

For one glorious year, the programs that have just spent the past several months in a Hobbesian battle over television revenue are all stuck with the other programs they have fucked over, been fucked over by, or attempted to fuck over and failed in the same conferences they have been in more or less for one football season of grinning through gritted teeth and handing over championship trophies to teams that are already on their way out while boosters either jump up and down firing guns in celebration or jump and down firing guns in gutted agony.

College football anger is usually based on normal and understandable things such as the results of a game that was played 45 years before 99% of the undergraduates in either school were born or the way that people from a certain part of the state park like this while people from the other side of the state park like that.  But there is possibility for real animus at a conference game for the first time among high-level university and conference bureaucrats who will have to look each other in the eye after their colleagues had just secretly conspired to cost their athletic departments millions of dollars and even cost some of them their phony-baloney jobs.  Imagine George Kliavkoff, the (extremely) current president of the still for this year extant PAC 12 conference, having to hand over a trophy to USC or Washington or one of the other programs that will leave the conference a smoldering nub.  I am not saying it is likely, but there has to be a small possibility that Kliavkoff shakes Lincoln Riley's hand and then hits him with a folding chair while the president of Oregon State's music hits before she puts a UCLA dean through a table.

Conference realignment is not anything new in college football.  As long as the sport has existed, conferences and schools have contorted themselves into whatever configuration could make them an extra buck or two.  The only reason why this summer's feeding frenzy feels more grotesque and perverse than college football's business as usual is the matter of scale.  

Conference alignments at least before the 2010s seemed to at least attempt to gesture at regionalism, rivalry, and, at least in the case of the Big Ten, some sort of academic credential, which was important to the conference for reasons I have never been able to fathom.  But then the big money started rolling in from proprietary networks and the Big Ten and its constituent university presidents all immediately turned into the first half hour of Requiem for a Dream and before long they added Nebraska, invented something called "Legends and Leaders" and then the second half of Requiem for a Dream kicked in and Rutgers and Maryland were now in the conference.  These Big Ten moves caused the entire college football ecosystem to go insane.  Texas attempted to strongarm its own conference and then ended up creating its own college football cable network, a 24 hour network dedicated to one 12-13 football games and then 20 hours of Mack Brown's Slacks Wardrobe and Do You Remember Vince Young programming.   

 

Classic Longhorn Network programming. Unfortunately, the Longhorn Network is another casualty of realignment, and Texas fans will have to get their Bevo content on the internet.

The Great Realignment of 2023 is an extraordinary accomplishment in our Age of Disruption: it is a massive change that no one wants, done for reasons that no one cares about, and is being celebrated by bureaucrats who made it possible like they have split the atom for the first time by making it harder to know what channel a football game is on.  Fans do not care about whether a game is on the Fox or ESPN suite of networks and increasingly arcane streaming services-- they do care about playing the same teams they have been playing for more than a century.  The concept of "conference identity" is admittedly a very stupid and nebulous idea to attach to an arbitrary grouping of college football programs for purposes of revenue enhancement, but then again attaching empty signifiers to sports teams is pretty much the entire business model of big money college athletics.

I doubt enough many people will be so pissed off about conference realignment that they will stop watching the games.  In the end, the games are what people care about, and next year they will just start happening in odd and unexpected configurations.  By now, most people realize that "tradition" is something for the TV packages and the glossy mailers asking for donations, a phony marketing canard not unlike the infinite number of roadside hamburger stands offering "world famous chili" and not anything that anyone in charge considers real.  Most people consider the Michigan-Ohio State game the most glittering prize in the Big Ten, but quietly take aside one of the conference's head honchos in their meat restaurant-adjacent Rosemont citadel and watch what happens when you tell them you could kill it in the name of an annual Ohio State-Alabama game that only airs on phones with special exclusive Big Ten data plans and they will build a warehouse to house the very strongly-worded "you, sir" letters from Michigan alumni.

And yet in 2023 none of this has happened yet.  Everything is exactly where we left it last year as sour teams attempt to either play out the string in doomed conferences that they have themselves doomed or are on a team that's about to be shunted to some lesser run conference or left completely in limbo.  And I'm not sure how much the players on each team care about it or what effect it will have on the games, but I can't imagine the amount of money that realignment is costing certain programs will not result in something incredibly funny happening.

WELCOME TO THE ENORMOUS TEN

There is usually a process to conference expansion that starts with rumors, innuendo, denials, and eventually leaked negotiations but instead, moving with a speed and coordination unheard of at universities unless it is to quash a graduate student union, the Big Ten suddenly includes UCLA and USC.  A conference so midwestern that its initial network programming was sponsored entirely by extra large men's pants and a can of vegetables to throw in liquid cheese now bestrides both coasts for some reason and is reborn as the Enormous Ten.

There was a time when a move like this would seem like a titanic upheaval but titanic upheaval is now the only register in which big money college sports operates.  The Big Ten's move to gobble up the two California schools echoes the SEC's devouring of Texas and Oklahoma last year, and part of what seems to be an inevitable move towards Superconferences that will continue to pick the bones of the Big 12 and Pac 12 in the interest of consolidating television money.  As we speak, unconfirmed twitter rumors show the SEC is poised over the ACC like a Habsburg squinting at a map of the Ottoman Empire. 

That's it, the Big Ten just got two teams bigger, believe me. Just got two teams bigger. We're gonna make the Big Ten so much bigger, they say already it's too big that we can't make the Big Ten bigger, but we're gonna make the Big Ten so big, so many teams in the Big Ten, you're not going to believe how big this ten is

Over the past several years, the people in charge of college sports, who have been selling the entire enterprise with the concept of tradition, of rituals and rivalries handed down from time immemorial filled with nineteenth-century pomp and stories of fans vomiting on each other for generations, have acted with the subtle grace of Humphrey Bogart in the last third of the Treasure of Sierra Madre.  They have completely abandoned every single one of their decades-old talking points as soon as they glimpsed their first few dimes of television money.  The leagues and universities have acted so greedily and hastily to fill their pockets that they instantly negated college sports' most important commodity which is access to unlimited unpaid labor and quickly (it is almost impossible to believe how quickly this has happened) professionalized the sports through NIL deals although the schools do not seem to be that concerned beyond the usual huffing and puffing about the corrupting influence of sponsorship money because they have managed to offload the expense of paying players to the various oil barons, car dealership emperors, and prominent local Yosemites Sam who have been playing the players surreptitiously since college sports were invented.

The move will have seismic impact on the people actually playing the sports. On the one hand, it is extraordinarily funny to imagine teams that play in gorgeous, mountainous sunsets forced to confront the grim reality of an 11AM November kickoff at Ryan Field in front of 8,000 people while the players are forced to fend of an onslaught of wind-blown hot dog wrappers.  The effect on their Precious Body Clocks, a previous hobgoblin of Pac 12 teams that had dared to venture into the Central Time Zone, can only be imagined.  On the other hand, I suspect that students having to fly across the entire country to play a volleyball game in Piscataway on a Tuesday night might find this all less amusing.

The college football bigwigs at least used to give us a song and dance and a whole story as the various league commissioners and NCAA officials, and athletic directors, in their suits hooking their thumbs through their suspenders would tell us of the extraordinary educational benefits wrought on the Student Athletes, and how it is a little tough on them when it comes to sometimes going to class or eating enough food, but you can't possibly understand what would happen if schools had to pay the players, after all have you seen the skyrocketing cost of pipettes and protractors these days, why you'd be putting the whole thing at terrible risk they would say while standing in front of the $3.8 billion Gertwig "Cud" Broodbatter IV Athletic Performance Center, but now their pitch for college athletics is give us your money, excuse me, give us your fucking money.

The thing that is most shocking about heretofore unthinkable addition of UCLA and USC to the Big Ten is how not shocking it was.  These precision raids by conferences on their rivals' big money programs have become a regular part of the landscape, no matter how strange, incongruous, or pointless they seem.  Rutgers and Maryland fans seem completely miserable in the conference that only wanted the money from regional cable audiences; Nebraska's entry into the Big Ten has been an unmitigated catastrophe for that football program although the fact that its annual game against Northwestern has become such a hideous and preposterous nightmare that it has been banned from taking place in the United States is incredibly funny.  The Big Ten's transition into the Enormous Ten and the accompanying moves no doubt on the way are less shocking for the moves themselves for naked disregard for anything this sport pretends to be.     

College sports seem to fit in a larger trend, and I hate to be too bleak or dark on a blog as stupid as this, but there really does seem to be a shared sense of being at the end of something, and big businesses and industries seem to have jettisoned any obligation to even try to bullshit us as they nakedly grab at everything in a desperate game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, even if it is just to hold everything for a few moments longer than everyone else.

NORTHWESTERN IN THE ENORMOUS TEN

The biggest question on everyone's mind as soon as they announced the Enormous Ten expansion is simple: how will this affect Northwestern?  Last year just before the season, I wrote about the SEC grabbing Texas and Oklahoma, the formation of Superconferences, and where Northwestern fits in it.  The fact of the matter is that while the college football world's recent desire to rip off its fig leaves about amateurism and tradition and strut around nude and open for business is not really something I care about and in fact has been good for getting at least some money to players, it seems likely to me that this bodes ill for Northwestern's time in a big time football conference.

Northwestern has nothing to rely on to keep it in the Big Ten other than residual tradition.  The school's revenue sports programs offer no revenue to the conference.  Northwestern has been unsuccessfully waging an information war on Chicago-area highways to try to convince an indifferent populace to root for the team since the existence of this blog, which I support because it makes people really angry for some reason; it offers mostly a cold bench once a year to Chicago-area alumni of other schools.  To the extent it has a national brand, it is either the team that sucked a lot in the 1970s and 80s or a factory that produces annoying television sports personalities.

The fact that the football team has been good, or at least good enough to win the Big Ten West twice in the last four years is, I believe, irrelevant.  What Northwestern football represents is a pain in the ass: a win that means nothing to fans of big teams that believe that they should always beat Northwestern no matter how good they are because of the program's legacy of futility and because Pat Fitzgerald has been spending the past decade analyzing football rules to figure out how he can possibly win games one to nothing or 4.3 to 4 or they could lose in the shittiest football game anyone has ever seen and that will immediately drop them 15 points in the rankings and get their dozen most deranged message board posters in a thread called "Uncalled Holding Penalties" put on a watch list.  The times when Northwestern finds itself in Indianapolis or even in a particularly prominent bowl game, opposing fans are either casuals who are confused by the existence of the team or they are someone who has watched Northwestern play this decade and know that they're about to watch four hours of armpit football.

As a Northwestern fan, the prospect of irritating other teams and having one of the program's most prominent fans be a tarp is the best part of college football, but it is hard for me to see how that fits in the sport's new paradigm.  Having a team like Northwestern around when college football was still pretending to be an amateur sport was useful for the Big Ten; I am not sure it makes sense in a professional league for a team that cannot fill its own tiny stadium, has no television audience, and has a name that is even more flagrantly mendacious in a conference that could literally include the northwest.  As long as college football clung to its notions of tradition, Northwestern could slop around with the big boys through organizational inertia.  Now that conferences are being torn up and consolidated and college sports has finally arrived at their fuck you pay me apotheosis, I struggle to see what Northwestern offers.

On the other hand, I am an idiot and don't know anything.  Maybe there's more money in amassing as many teams in a conference as possible.  Maybe college football is such a bulletproof television product that it is more lucrative for the Big Ten to keep broadcasting Northwestern games much like how ESPN pays an unfathomable amount of money to broadcast the Head On Apply Directly To Forehead Bowl to families having low, hissing fights at airport gates even if it takes an amount of precision research with maps rolled out on tables to find a bar that is actually showing a Northwestern game in the very city it is the Big Ten Team of.  Maybe the Northwestern psychology department has put a subliminal signal in every Big Ten broadcast so that every time a Big Ten executive tries to float the concept of kicking the school's ass out of the conference he or she instead makes the Wildcat First Down Noise and immediately pivots to a powerpoint presentation comparing advertising rates for competing gout treatments.  Maybe Northwestern and USC can develop a famous rivalry.   

The situation in college sports is collapsing and exploding day by day.  For the time being, Northwestern plays in the Enormous Ten, one that could be growing more enormous.  Fans are tracking conference realignment the only way they can, by citing anonymous message board sources and analyzing flight logs.  The past week imagining flop-sweated conference commissioners in frantic calls with panicking athletic directors while boosters do donuts in the parking lot in 1970s cadillacs whose horns bleat out the school fight song and while the coaches try to wrangle recruits with NIL promises from the Suspenders King of Mant County is delightful, a Hieronymus Bosch triptych of football decadence unfolding in all corners of the college football universe.  

At least we can be sure of one thing and that is Northwestern's return to the Rose Bowl is now guaranteed.

Media Day

We are nearing August, when football training camp begins in earnest and the Wildcats begin the 2015 season, or as I call it, HATRIBUTION '15.  This week, Big Ten coaches will meet with the media to address hard-hitting questions about whether or not they are excited for football to start.  Big Ten officials will field questions about expansion, because in the rapacious Enormous Ten, the goal is to capture as many television markets as possible in the United States and abroad.  Expect Jim Delany to strut around asking reporters if they had ever seen such a big ten in their lives and who has a bigger ten than him.

Pat Fitzgerald is scheduled to speak Friday.  Those who can't wait can read Skip Myslesnski's interview that addresses the uncertainty on the roster, not only a quarterback but up and down the depth chart.  Fitzgerald doesn't give up much and Myslenski is reigned in instead of the florid, lyrical Myslenski that injects training camp stories with much-needed elements of the introduction to Conan the Barbarian movies.  Though I am writing this before Fitz has spoken, BYCTOM moles have obtained a transcript of his remarks, and he is expected to delight the crowd with references to Our Young Men.
 
Pat Fitzgerald expects fireworks after last year's revolutionary speech 
when he scandalized the football media by vowing to take things one 
game at a time, drawing heckles from disbelieving football personnel used 
to taking things two or three games at a time. Jerry Kill denounced 
Fitzgerald as a sick, sad man and Kyle Flood leaped through a plate glass 
window

Yesterday, Illini football coach and man who doesn't need your advice about opening that pickle jar just give him a second ok Tim Beckman spoke to reporters. Let's check in on Beck Man.

Usually, this is a time for Beck Man to stand astride a podium, cape fluttering in the fan he has brought, while he denounces Northwestern and issues boasts and taunts from the anti-Wildcat underground, but this year Beckman immediately found himself dealing with reports about player abuse allegations.  The Chicago Tribune recently spoke to 50 Illini current and former Illini players about the allegations.  It is clear that Beckman will continue to face questions that he'd rather not answer when he should be preparing for a Soldier Field hat defense.

Big Ten media days are a pointless, ridiculous exercise in nonsense.  None of the coaches will say anything particularly noteworthy about his program and none of them want to be there when they could be screaming at teenagers to run into inanimate objects in the sweltering Midwestern sun.  On the other hand, media day means that we draw ever closer to football season and the attendant miseries.   

BRITISH SOCCER MOVIE REVIEW

What happens when a group of race car conman billionaires takes over a sports team, attempts to rocket them to glory, turns into a global cabal of Steinbrenners, and hires someone to film it?  The end result is The Four Year Plan, directed by Mat Hodgson about the rise of Queens Park Rangers to the Premier League.

The film covers the 2007 purchase of Queens Park Rangers by a consortium of billionaires including F1 racing honchos Bernie Ecclestone, Flavio Briatore, and Alejandro Agag and Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, rescuing the club from bankruptcy.  The investors were interested in QPR because of its history (founded in 1882), location in West London, and presumably a whimsical name that brings to mind an ambitious episode of Walker Texas Ranger where he traverses the Atlantic to jump kick English cattle rustlers.  Their goal: to raise QPR from the second-tier Championship to the lucrative Premier League.

FLAVIO: We need to work on our set piece
ECCLESTONE: We should set a piece of this stadium on fire and collect 
the insurance money
BOTH: ho ho ho ho ho ho ho

The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers.  Scandal has dogged Briatore wherever he has gone; he spent several years dodging prison from numerous fraud convictions in Saint Thomas and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, spent portions of the 1980s as an Italian Elmore Leonard character:

In 1986, in Milan, Briatore was sentenced to 3 years for fraud and conspiracy for his role in a team of confidence tricksters who, over a number of years, set up rigged gambling games using fake playing cards. The judges described these as elaborate confidence tricks, in which victims were invited to dinner and then "ensnared" in rigged games that involved a cast of fictional characters and realised enormous profits for their perpetrators.

Hodgson's cameras follow Briatore as he stalks about the club.  He denounces managers as idiots.  He disparages players in the stands with Director of Football Gianni Paladni.  He orders substitutions from the owner's box.  He walks around in hilarious European rich person puffy jackets presumably invented to prevent a disgruntled peasant from stabbing him with the jagged edge of a stale baguette.  Briatore, who goes through no less than five managers in his first two years with the club, comports himself like a ludicrous and incompetent dictator. 
 
Gianni Paladini enjoys a soccer game. Paladini comes across in the movie as Briatore's lackey, but 
had actually been a powerful agent who had purchased a stake in QPR in 2003. In fact, in 2006, he 
was involved in a bizarre incident where he claimed that a minority owner had hired a gang of "hard men" 
to intimidate him into selling his stake during a match.  You should read that whole article as it is 
completely fucking insane and something that Hodgson doesn't mention at all in the movie.  
Flavio Briatore is the angry man gesturing behind him.
In an related note, that is pretty much how I watch all sporting events

The best part of the movie by far is when QPR fans revolt.  They chant "FUCK FLAVIO."  They angrily sing "we want our Rangers back" to the tune of La Donna e Mobile while scuffling with police, their blood-curling aria echoing through the streets of Shepherd's Bush.  Briatore tells a group of fans that he will sell the team and leave it to rot while obsequious hangers-on beg him to stay.  He demands names.  What Flavio Briatore would possibly do with the names of people who boo him is unclear; I like to imagine he will use his billions to set up a fake sweepstakes luring them to his private island where they will be hunted for sport, not by Briatore, but by a group of Robert Muldoon-like characters he has flown in while he hovers over the island in a helicopter denouncing them as shitty, incompetent hunters using the speaker system from Apocalypse Now.

The other major figure who emerges is Amit Bhatia, an investment banker and Mittal's son-in-law.  Bhatia comes across as a slick but enthusiastic bean counter who acts as the more reasonable counterweight to Briatore.  He becomes the central face of ownership after Briatore steps down, tainted by an F1 match-fixing scandal.  Shortly after, QPR poaches manager Neil Warnock and rockets to the top of the table.  Yet, even the team's greatest triumph remains mired in allegations of cheating.  The Football Association launches an investigation into an illegal transfer.  The FA threatened fines and a points deduction that would strip QPR of its championship and automatic promotion to the Premier League.  It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the film that the most touching moment of catharsis is not the team's  locker room celebration after clinching the championship, but Paladini jubilantly sprinting through the stadium screaming "NO POINTS DEDUCTIONS!"

The film is an odd window into a deliriously dysfunctional sports organization.  Again, Hodgson remains upfront that the funding for the movie came primarily from the ownership, which he depicts as operating with operatic absurdity (it never acknowledges the various scandals and corruption allegations floating around Briatore and Ecclestone and their role in Britatore's exit).  Though the movie has the rhythms of an underdog sports movie, we rarely see the players and have little sense of what is going on on the field.  We keep track of the team's progress by seeing them moving up and down the table and through montages of the owners celebrating or angrily calling for the manager's head.  Managers get more screen time, but come across like teenagers in the first 20 minutes of a slasher film, given veneers of personality before they are inevitably axed.  Hodgson is more concerned with showing how Bhatia saves money by purchasing less ostentatious food and floral arrangements than why QPR has gone from mid-table embarrassment to champions.  But that perspective is more compelling than the traditional narrative, not only because it is a part of sports not often captured, but also because Flavio Briatore comes across as irresistibly loathsome.
 
Manager Neil Warnock celebrates the 2011 championship.  Ecclsteone quickly sold his share 
to an ownership group headed by Malaysian airline magnate Tony Fernandes.  Fernandes 
fired Warnock into his first season in the Premier League, but QPR continued to scuffle 
and was relegated back to the Championship after only one season

The Four Year Plan resonates because it illustrates the helplessness of sports fans when it comes to ownership.  The movie depicts a team saved and backed by the unexpected largesse of deep-pocketed owners, but kept in chaos by volatile, impetuous, and incompetent management.  Capricious owners have been around since the concept of owning sports teams was invented, but the almost unimaginable expenses and profits associated with modern professional sports and the globalization of leagues has amplified effects.  Fans of teams with meddling, boorish, incompetent owners have no recourse other than futile chants and angry arias.  The exception remains the Green Bay Packers, and I hate them so much that I hope their team is purchased by a Habsburg who moves the team to Jacksonville and changes the name to the Muskie Haters.

DON'T DESPAIR IT IS NEARLY FOOTBALL

If there is one thing more arbitrary and absurd than professional sports ownership, it is the NCAA.  We are only about a month away from the season opener against Stanford, quarterback-related anguish, silent home snap counts, and hat vengeance.   

Big Ten Expandomania

After years of conference skullduggery, the day Big Ten fans have dreamed about is here.  Maryland and Rutgers have joined the Big Ten, bloating it up to 14 teams and hundreds of possible teams.  For those of you who haven't been diligently following, printing, and annotating the blogspot Northwestern football blog Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat posts for the past several years, this is a positive step in the direction of the creation of the Enormous Ten, an all-encompassing college sports conference that involves every single team in the country with the possible exception of Purdue.   The Enormous Ten football season will play out with a series of regional Tournaments of Roses, eventually culminating in a Big Ten Champion of Champions ladder that involve prestigious Big Ten bowls such as the Rose Bowl, the Alamo Bowl, the Motor City Bowl, and the Big Ten Championship Super Bowl Bowl played at a newly-built luxury sports facility at the exact geographical center of the continental United States, which will be the Big Ten's remit.
 
The Big Ten extends its manifest destiny as it moves east, west, north, south, and a multitude 
of other directions

For football, Maryland and Rutgers will be placed in the Big Ten East, and neither will play Northwestern next season.  It is, however, important to assimilate them into the Big Ten culture as quickly as possible.  Spearheading this effort will be Illinois football coach Tim "Beck" Man, who will also be serving as the inaugural Big Ten Director of Rivalry and Mutual Antagonism.  Here are some leaked documents obtained by BYCTOM contacts in the Illinois athletic department detailing how Beckman plans to welcome Rutgers and Maryland to the greatest athletic conference in the midwest and some parts of the northeast.

EXCLUSIVE LEAKED BECK MAN COMMUNIQUES

The following is a transcript of a series of recordings of conversations held in Tim Beckman's Anti-Wildcat Command Center in an underground bunker underneath Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois.  Voices identified as Jim Delany, Tim Beckman, and an unidentified Illini assistant.

Monday, March 10, 2014, 7:51 AM

DELANY: ...like legends and leaders but with more attitude, you know, like in those doritos commercials.  Like the upstanding young person division but with those rap songs where people announce who they are and what they're going to say.
BECKMAN: [to unknown] I SAID NO PURPLE IN HERE YOU TELL THEM I'M NOT GOING TO PAY FOR THAT DIMETAPP DISPLAY THIS IS ILLINI COUNTRY.  What was that?  Legends?  Leaders?  I get paid to win ball games x 22 rocket right burn evanston hut.
DELANY: Coach as you know, we have two more top-flight educational institutions in the lucrative East Coast television market and the problem is no one here hates them or knows anything about them.  We need you to do what you do best: ban their logos, headbutt photos of their mascots, spit chewing tobacco all over their flags.  Something, leaderous.  Legendary.  [whooshing noise]
UNKNOWN VOICE #1: Your cape just got caught in that smoldering wreckage of Ryan Field model
BECKMAN: I've got no time for those schools out east.  Is one of them Youngstown State?  Because next game is Youngstown State.  You know, Toledo lost to those guys in 1961, and I've been going to zoos and roughing up people in Penguin costumes
DELANY: No, you unhook it at the front, it's held together by that Big Ten Legend Juan Dixon pin
BECKMAN: And the Burgess Meredith people don't understand college football at all and that's why he

[18 minutes of silence]

DELANY: ...but what if we call them the LEASTDERS and the WESTGENDS, I said to the guy I was just spitballing but we're paying you thousands and I just came up with that in five minutes, you know?
BECKMAN: So it's Maryland?  Maryland's easy.  What's in Maryland?  Crabcakes?  I'm going to have an assistant fly out there and bring back a crate full of crabcakes and I'm going to stomp them one by one while dressed as...what's their mascot?
UNKNOWN VOICE: The terrapins.
BECKMAN: Is that some sort of wild cat?
UNKNOWN VOICE: It's a turtle
BECKMAN: A turtle?  Ok, I'm going to stomp on on a bunch of crabcakes while pretending to be controlled by a floating anthropomorphic brain in a gigantic belt.  Done.  What's the other one?
DELANY: Rutgers, a fine educational institution with generations of Big Ten tradition.
BECKMAN: Is that a small, private university?  [suspiciously] Are they purple?
DELANY: They're a state university, and they're scarlet knights.
BECKMAN: Ok, I'm going to joust a guy and rip a flag from, where the hell is Rutgers?  Michigan?  Ohio?  Kentuckey?
DELANY: Jersey
BECKMAN: Jesus Christ.

Intercepted E-mail from Tim Beckman to Jim Delany

Monday, March 10, 11:26 AM
From: r.zook@illinois.edu
To: legendleader14@b1g.org

i am going to win bon jovi's house and im going to burn it

tbman
 
THE NBA IS A VIPER'S NEST OF INTRIGUE AND INNUENDO

Carmelo Anthony is a free agent.  So is LeBron James.  And so are dozens of other of NBA stars, semi-stars, role players, guys who come in for five minutes and elbow people, and Drew Crawford.  Teams like the Bulls and Rockets have been pulling out all the stops, lining their stadiums with Pro-Carmelo propaganda like he has just successfully pulled off a coup d'etat 
 
And at that point Melo knew he loved the Houston Rockets

The NBA's byzantine salary cap has made it extremely difficult to determine whether or not the Bulls can afford to pay him and retain key pieces such as Taj Gibson, Jimmy Butler, the rights to Nikola Mirotic, the crown of Spanish Poneramia, and one of Stacey King's old gym socks.  The Miami Heat are involved in a convoluted dance to re-sign their Big Three at enough of a discount to add another player who does not spend his time between playoff games in a sarcophagus.  Meanwhile, we can all agree that this convoluted player movement is all for naught unless we can get Dwight Gooden one step closer to playing for every team in the Association.

But the most entertaining intrigue this off-season has been with coaches and executives.  Former point guards have been taking advantage of an NBA pilot program to send former players with no coaching experience directly into head coaching positions and somehow this has resulted in bizarre power plays.  Mark Jackson departed Golden State amid allegations of a falling-out with assistant Brian Scalabrine, which would be an incredibly funny development to someone in 2005.  The Warriors then hired Steve Kerr who had been a general manager and now only needs to become a majority owner in order win some sort of NBA job decathlon.  And Jason Kidd, hired months after his retirement, has somehow forced his way out of Brooklyn through a series of attempted power grabs in order to take the reins in Milwaukee.  Kidd's major accomplishments were coaching Brooklyn into the playoffs in an abysmal Eastern conference, tactically spilling a courtside beverage, decisively exiling his rival Lawrence Frank to an abandoned film room, and growing a beard that makes him look like the villain in one of those Iron Man movies.  Usually, this is the place in BYCTOM where I would compare all of this to some sort of early modern Holy Roman Empire situation, but a treacherous Duke was allowed time to scheme in private and not have to deal with twitter rumor-mongering, the NBA salary cap, transnational Russian nickel-mining concerns, and the trauma of having been dunked upon in the recent past.  Thank goodness for professional sports.