Week 1: Fall of the House of Beck Man

Football has returned!  On Saturday, the twenty-first ranked Stanford Cardinal drive their crowd-sourced content-centered Silicon Valley Tesla bus into Evanston while the Wildcats will try to disrupt their Pac 12 North title bid.  A long, bleak, hatless offseason finally ends.  Northwestern football is back to terrify the Big Ten West, to seize the Land of Lincoln Trophy from the cold, fired hands of the Beck Man, and make it back to a damn bowl game because I am pretty sure there are no more possible ways for Northwestern to lose every single game in a bizarre last-minute conflagration of football misery.

Since last week's exhaustive preview, Pat Fitzgerald has named a starting quarterback.  Redshirt freshman Clayton Thorson has emerged to grab the starting job, probably because you can't bench the offspring of a Norse deity.  The coaching staff hopes that Thorson will remind Wildcat fans of the traditional scrambly Northwestern quarterback that has led the team during successful years without betraying his lack of experience.  He'll have some help with the return of speedy wideout Christian Jones, who missed all of last year, and Pierre Youngblood-Arry, the Cockney Prince of Agincourt.

Northwestern's offense plans to baffle the opposition with a secret play 
called "The Invisible Didgeridoo"

Northwestern's out of conference schedule this year includes a miniature tour of equally insufferable Power 5 private schools.  Stanford can be seen as a funhouse mirror Northwestern, albeit far more successful on the field, with much nicer weather and an ignominious loss involving a kick return team running over a marching band instead of an ignominious win involving the drowning of a goal post.  The Cardinal went 8-5 last year, including a loss to Notre Dame, a team that crumbled easily before the might of the Wildcats and the cumulative effect of every single lucky break that Northwestern had been denied in nearly two full seasons of football action. 

Maybe opening against a top-25 powerhouse with a freshman quarterback is not the ideal way to start a season.  But top-quality opposition will invite the full pageantry of non-conference football to Ryan Field: ESPN broadcast, Stanford's hallucinogenic tree mascot, and Chicago's Big Ten Tarp.  Northwestern's greatest seasons in recent memory have come out of nowhere.  It is time for them to once again ruin opponents' seasons, crush dreams, and travel to a bowl game even if we have to invent one from whole cloth using shell companies and a long con involving inventing a dot com company.

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BECK MAN



We don't have Tim Beckman to kick around anymore.  Last week, Illinois abruptly fired him amid allegations of player abuse.  Beckman's dismissal could hardly be seen as unexpected after years of futility, controversy, and general flailing Beckmania-- at one point his Wikipedia page contained a section entitled "Public Outcry"-- but his sudden termination eight days before the start of the season certainly caught the college football world unaware. He spent his last year of coaching like Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea; we all knew he'd get eaten by a shark, but the end was still sudden and jarring.

There's nothing at all amusing about the reasons why Beckman was ultimately canned.  A University of Illinois-commissioned report claimed that Beckman pressured injured players to keep playing and threatened players with the loss of their scholarships.  These charges are not that surprising in the world of college football, where some tobacco-stained mustache columnist is probably still rhapsodizing about the time an old-school hat-wearing Woody Hayes type yelled "you're not injured. I'll show you injured" before running a walk-on through with a Civil War cavalry saber.  A cynic could also note that the report gave the university adequate legal ammunition to fire him with cause and save nearly $4 million owed to him on his contract and his buyout.  Beckman denies the allegations and vows to fight for the money owed on his contract.

It seems likely that Beckman's tenure involved shady injury practices and provided the university with a way to renounce his salary. Illinois administrators, already riven with scandals in the athletic department and embattled leadership at the top, found an opportunity to free themselves from financial commitments to a losing coach who continually acted like Tim Beckman in public.  The allegations against Beckman don't seem outside the realm of possibility because they had already been echoed by some former players and because Beckman has coached like he bought a Weekly Reader book from 1967 called Trench Bludgeoner's Guide to College Football and Commie Spotting and dedicated himself to Cold War-era football: thus insisting on having players play through pain, demanding favorable coverage from print media, and nurturing the second-most ridiculous rivalry in college football.

THE HAT RIVALRY IN THE POST-BECKMAN ERA

If there is one thing that Tim Beckman accomplished at Illinois it was successfully creating a Northwestern-Illinois rivalry.  It is still not a true rivalry the way most intrastate rivalries work; instead, the Beck Man has somehow reinvented the entire concept of a college football rivalry as a quixotic crusade waged by a single man.  His immediate declaration of war against Northwestern was nothing short of ludicrous. His ham-fisted attempts to stoke that rivalry devolved into farce. It is possible to read the entire Beckman treatment of Northwestern as a brilliant deconstruction of rivalry itself, recasting the Iron Bowl, or the The Game, or the dozens of other actual football rivalries as absurd, rendering all football fans as dimbulb Beckman simulacra.

But, let's give the Beck Man his due here: it sort of worked.  No one hates Northwestern football. Northwestern football is briefly remembered and occasionally pitied. I have spent the past few weeks skimming thousands upon thousands of words of college football and Big Ten previews and almost none of them deign to mention the existence of Northwestern football except as evidence of a Big Ten contender's easy schedule. So when Sheriff Beckman swaggered into town with his school up north euphemisms and purple clothing bans, it was fun.  Beck Man stood in front of the press, the world, and his god decrying Northwestern football with a straight face and it was impossible not to respond with hat-taunts as he floundered about. In theory, the rivalry was against the University of Illinois.  In reality, it was a rivalry with Beck Man himself, who inexplicably continued his one-man anti-Northwestern jeremiads while simultaneously comporting himself like a man in an infomercial unaware that an overstuffed kitchen cabinet is about to unleash an unholy rain of tupperware upon his person.

This actually happened.
This actually happened.
This actually happened.
This actually happened.

What on earth are we going to do without Tim Beckman?  Bill Cubit seems unlikely to burst into a press conference with a fresh barrage of Northwestern hate-mongering-- it is possible he removed the anti-Northwestern symbol from the Illini locker room only to discover it was covering up a secret cache of VHS recordings of an unsold television pilot called "Tim Beckman's Hat Police."  I don't know anything about Cubit other than his name is an obscure, ancient unit of measure that is good for maybe one half-hearted stiff-arm joke per season.  Our only hope is that Cubit somehow becomes mesmerized by the Hat, loses all grip on reality, and turns into a Klaus Kinsky character over the course of the season, his clothes in tatters, his hair frayed, his press conferences devolving into incoherent hat-shrieks, only no one notices because that is still slightly more reasonable than Tim Beckman.

Illinois fans, we're in this together.  Beckman may have have stared blankly into the middle distance for the last time as the Illini coach, but we have a conference, a trophy, and two bleak programs eclipsed in our own state by a MAC team and FCS team, respectively.  We only have each other. 

Beckman, banished to the Phantom Zone, vows to defeat That School 
From The Adjacent Dimension Well Actually There's No Way To Define 
Its Relation To Us In Time and Space

Give us our damn hat back.

Damn the Hessians, an Independence Day Update

As the summer chugs along into our Fourth of July celebration over the British Empire and her unstoppable Hessian legions allowing us our own football code, Northwestern football is still laying dormant and preparing to liberate the Big Ten title.

Fist-pumping across the Delaware in order to ham-handedly desecrate famous paintings

The Hessian soldiers that fought in the American revolution were a mixed bag. Some were subjects of George III, who retained the title of Elector of Hanover and therefore shared with all four George monarchs the ability to call upon German troops to fight their dirty imperialist wars (the title did not carry to Queen Victoria, as women could not serve as Electors of Hanover; Hanover lost its independence shortly after as part of the German Unification). Other troops came on loan from other German aristocrats, who eagerly sent their paupers, petty criminals, and press gang victims over to the American colonies.

A group of Hessian reeanctors draw the short straw at the reenactment lottery.
The uniform of the Hessian soldier is the inspiration behind the popular
Revolutionary War slogan "Do not fire until you see the reflection of their
giant golden party hats"

Corey Wootton was named to the Playboy Preseason All-American team. It's good to see Wootton recognized for his excellent season last year, and although the proliferation of sponsored college football awards has rendered them a less meaningful as corporations turn out a chum of sponsored watch lists covering approximately 38 percent of all college football players, this particular award can fortunately be taken advantage of as a thin justification for running this wonderful picture:

Hugh Hefner showing off the cravat, puma, and femme fatale henchmen he
purchased from the 1970 Bond Villain skymall catalog

THE MADNESS OF A.J. III

Though interleague play has finished, the Cubs and Sox still have a game to make up, which could be a factor since both teams are still afloat in their crappy divisions. One of the players always in the mix during the series is White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski, who remains despised by Cubs fans largely because Michael Barrett inexplicably decided to introduce his knuckles to his face several years ago. Pierzynski is not a popular player around baseball; he left both Minnesota and San Francisco on somewhat bitter notes (this article is full of classic baseball post-trade character assassination by nameless Giants players who accused him of being a "cancer in the clubhouse" and accused him of continuing to play cards instead of going over hitters with Brett Tomko in the grand baseball tradition of innuendo about playing cards in the clubhouse undoing a player's repuatation).

Pierzynski gets a lot of negative attention from fans because he has a reputation of a provacateur, and his face defaults to the "who, me?" expression of an Edwardian public school boy caught red-handed going slightly too far with one of their homoerotic flogging rituals. Most of his antics, however, are simply an attempt to squeeze every possible advantage out of baseball's occasionally arcane rules. His greatest feat was getting on base through the dubious application of the dropped third strike rule against Anaheim in the 2005 ALCS (by immediately bolting to first, he put the onus on the befuddled umpire to decide whether it was indeed a dropped third strike). Last year, he convinced the same umpire to call him safe after drawing a shady interference call by falling down and letting Willy Aybar sort of bump into him as the Sox announcing crew work themselves into a Pravda-style lather. My favorite Pierzynski antic is his automatic appeal to the first or third-base umpire on any checked swing. In essense, on a checked swing, he now catches the ball and points to the ump in a single fluid motion.

Pierzynski in a state of nature

These sorts of antics, however, are pretty much harmless. Pierzynski has a decent bat for a catcher (he has a career OPS of .754; last year, league average for MLB catchers was .715-- I assumed he had better numbers than that because I see him mostly against the Cubs, when he carries an .832 OPS for his Cub killing resumé) and augments that with a roguish attempt to get an extra call here and there, certainly nothing to cause a cascade of boos upon his person. If you must hate A.J., you can hate him for somehow getting involved with professional wrestling while displaying an acting ability that even for wrestling is shocking. Fortunately, Ozzie steals the show by hitting a guy with a chair (evidently something that happens in an alarming frequency in pro wrestling matches along with the announcer referring to a villainous woman as a "jezebel.") In fairness, Alfonso Soriano had his own run-in with a pro-wrestling antagonist that involves him reacting to the interminable yakking of some guy in a glitter hat with the mixture of confusion and indignation that comes with not being aware that attending a professional wrestling event might mean getting yelled at by a guy in a glitter hat (I don't follow wrestling, so I have no idea what Glitter Hat is on about, although I admire that the telecast game him more screen time than Meet the Press would allow for Rep. Ron Paul to rant about fiat gold).

JOIN, OR DIE

The U.S. put on an admirable display in the Confederations Cup, overcoming two embarrassing losses at the hands of Italy and Brazil and qualifying due to an improbable combination of a 3-0 defeat of Egpyt and a 3-0 trouncing of Italy by Brazil. Despite the euphoria of playing world-class soccer for 135 minutes, ending Spain's undefeated streak and leading Brazil 2-0 at the half, the U.S. came up short in its bid to win its first major international tournament. True, the Confederations Cup is not the most prestigious tournament in the world (it started as the King Fahd Cup as a showcase for the Saudi Arabian team), but Spain and Brazil both played almost all of their regulars.

Now the U.S. moves onto the Gold Cup, which they won in 2007 thanks to this fantastic goal by BYCTOM favorite Benny "The Jet" Feilhaber against Mexico at Soldier Field. The U.S. is sending out its "B" team to this year's Cup, along with many other CONCACAF sides (with the exception of Costa Rica), but will be anchored by veterans Brian Ching and Steve Cherundolo and give Freddy Adu watchers something to get excited about.

The U.S. goes up against Grenada on the fourth, and the former British Crown Colony forfeited upon independence the ability to recruit German mercenaries like Michael Ballack, future Luc Besson movie villain Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Oliver Kahn, the frightening half-ape version of Klaus Kinski.

A German experiment goes horribly wrong

Grenada has been a place where Europeans have come to plunder spices in the Western Hemisphere for hundreds of years-- first the French, then the British after the Seven Years War. It briefly was a member of the short-lived West Indies Federation, a Commonwealth organization dominated by Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago's Eric Williams and Grenada's Sir Eric Gairy

Grenada's official website provides a host of important information, such as that the flag contains a nutmeg which "signifies that Grenada is one of the world's largest producers of nutmeg," an excellent flag design strategy of getting straight to cash crops that I wholeheartedly endorse instead of flogging around with abstract symbol bullshit. The site also creates a mystery around what visitors can eventually expect from the Fish Friday page that could possibly surpass what is already there.

Enjoy your weekend by watching the Cubs battle the insolent, shirt-untucking Brewers, jingoistically lashing out against the good people of Grenada, and ordering man-apes from the James Bond villain catalog. Of course, it wouldn't be Independence Day without a gratuitious Jeff Goldblum mention, so here's an article about him being needlessly weird on Law and Order: Criminal Intent or unexpectedly not dead.