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.

So Your Football Team May or May Not Have Theoretically Unionized

In April, Northwestern football players voted on unionization.  The results, however, won't be known for awhile.  They will be revealed after the federal NLRB rules on the NCAA's appeal to overturn the landmark decision that allowed Northwestern athletes to be classified as university employees.  That means it will be several months before the union forms or we see an excessive celebration from Mark Emmert.

A classless display by Emmert.  In my day, NCAA presidents would simply hand their legal briefs 
to their legal team and act like they've continued the baffling marriage of a mutli-billion dollar 
minor-league sports apparatus to a university system before

What does this mean for Northwestern moving forward?

Disclaimer: BYCTOM is a legal expert on all matters of Internet Football Law.  Our legal team has been hunkered in a closed concrete bunker for the past several months receiving legal documents through a pneumatic tube system to explore every possible precedent for legal action in this case.  Do not trust other websites or so-called legal experts to explain any part of this situation to you.  There is no more trusted, accurate analysis of the Northwestern union situation on the entire internet than a blogspot website called "Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat," and you should expect to see this post mentioned in legal citations for generations.  BYCTOM also specializes in horse-law and shipwreck treasure arbitration.

This image would theoretically get old in a blog that updates more than 
once every several months

THE BACKLASH

While Kain Colter, College Athletes Players Association, and others have been encouraging unionization, the efforts have not been popular with other Wildcats.  Quarterback Trevor Siemian opposed the measure, stating that he was satisfied with his treatment at Northwestern.  This was troubling since he and Colter combined into a theoretically unstoppable passing/running multifaceted quarterback threat for the past two seasons, and I assumed that the Cats' unorthodox sleep studies and training with Navy SEALs were experiments designed to link the two signal-callers' brains like the robot operators in Pacific Rim.  Other players have suggested that the union fight is a distraction.  The case certainly drew far more attention to Northwestern athletics in the spring at a time when the basketball team traditionally eliminates itself from the NCAA tournament and everyone forgets that Northwestern football exists.

Certainly Northwestern's administration did all that it could to dissuade football players from unionizing.  Coach Fitz has found himself in a strange position.  He has depicted himself as an earnest, crew-cutted boy scout troop leader, selling Northwestern's academic bona fides.  When Colter began to publicly ally support unionization by stenciling references to the "All Players United" slogan on his wristbands, Fitzgerald publicly supported the gesture while disagreeing with the message.  But, with a looming unionization vote, Fitz has lined up squarely behind the university.  He has sent out messages to, in his words, "educate" players and their families about the university's fears against unionization. 

Union supporters fear that the fist pumps of encouragement may turn into the 
Pinkertons' cudgels

Regardless of the results, union activism has made some impression.  Athletic Director Jim Phillips has recently argued that athletes should have voting voice in major issues that concern them.  He opposes a union, however, because he, Northwestern, and the NCAA do not believe that athletes are employees.  Phillips, like Fitzgerald, claims that schools should act in the best interests of athletes without the involvement of a union.  Union activists counter that schools will continue to pay lip service to changing conditions unless an organization representing players can apply pressure and bargain collectively.

The central problem is that the link between a massive minor league football apparatus and universities makes absolutely no sense.  Our national love affair with watching organized people smash into each other, mixed with regional pride, mixed with college students holding up signs and the pompous pronouncements of television personalities, and combined with people willing to call into Paul Finebaum's show and yell at each other like professional wrestlers for my amusement, is grafted onto an already unwieldy educational complex.  It seems unlikely that the NCAA can continue to hold this all together.  It is impossible to endorse the status quo, where enormous piles of money make their way to universities, the NCAA, conferences, and other college sports-adjacent organizations while the young people who smash into each other are governed by an elaborate set of rules designed to prevent them from capitalizing on their smashing while Ed Orgeron is allowed to use his football notoriety in order to convince people to pay him to talk in public.

COLLEGE ATHLETICS

College athletics, especially in the big revenue sports, is inherently absurd, corrupt, unfair, and hypocritical.  Northwestern's unionization efforts have contributed to the increasingly loud outcry against the NCAA.  Northwestern, which has tended to position itself as a model program that graduates nearly all of its athletes and insists on higher academic standards for recruits, now stands as a citadel against athletic unionization and for the untenable status quo.  It's certainly not news that that college sports are rife with contradictions or that the NCAA's defense of amateur athletics rings hollow.  This has been true since college sports existed.  But it is odd to see Northwestern at the front lines of organization efforts.  It's hard to celebrate college football while the NCAA and others taking a share of monstrous college sports profits comport themselves with the fiscal integrity of a nineteenth-century political machine.
 
The Bowl Championship Series, for example, made waves by 
pocketing millions from universities and dodging taxes by operating 
as charitable organizations while paying half-million dollar salaries to 
bowl executives.  The 2007 Fiesta Bowl even featured allegations 
of reimbursing employees for campaign contributions, which I enjoyed 
because it's as if the Fiesta Bowl executives were making a list of ridiculously 
unethical things to do with the windfall from college football games while 
staging some sort of boring executive bacchanal when someone said wait we 
haven't figured out a way to also make illegal campaign contributions yet and 
then a bunch of balloons fell from the ceiling while Kool and the Gang blared 
from the speakers and then they all started betting on toddler fighting or 
something equally awful just because they can

The reason why all of this money is at stake is because college football is spectacular.  I love Northwestern football.  I can't wait for next season.  I hope Northwestern's football people smash the crap out of lesser football people.  I want to hear the fight song when Venric Mark zooms past a bunch of hapless linebackers.  I want Northwestern to anger a bunch of people from Iowa.  I want to root for the Wildcats to take the Former Legends Division while being conflicted that the Big Ten has sane, cardinal-direction based divisions and I can't make fun of the LEGENDS DIVISION anymore.  Most importantly, I want to continue to support Northwestern athletics for the sole purpose of frustrating the designs of Tim Beckman, who made the grave error of trying to respect Northwestern as a rival and has thus fated himself to be ground into dust by the state's slightly less miserable conference rival.
 
Captain Beck Man spends another season in pursuit of his Purple Whale

NEXT SEASON OUTLOOK

Kain Colter, the face of college football unionization, has graduated.  He will attempt to catch on with the Minnesota Vikings along with Tyler Scott.  Both hope to join Corey Wootton, who signed with the Vikes as a free agent because the Minnesota Vikings have apparently hired me as a general manager to build the team the way I used to load all of my Madden teams with Wildcats.

Madden 05 was the last copy I owned, but it had a bunch of NU guys and the "hit stick" feature,
which let you launch horrifyingly illegal headhunting tackles that would get you fined in the modern
NFL, but let you gleefully injure Digital Brett Favre, one of the greatest villains in the history of 
video games alongside Bowser, Soda Popkinski, and those dumb birds from Ninja Gaiden that knocked
you into the game's seemingly endless array of bottomless pits

Colter's work with CAPA has deservedly taken the lion's share of attention, but the Wildcats will miss him on the field as well.  Kain Colter was probably the most fun player Northwestern has had.  He lined up all over the field, but as quarterback he was more effective as a runner than a passer.  On third and long, over and over again, he took the snap and scampered past a helpless defense that had to know what was happening but was unable to stop it.  When Mark was healthy, they formed the most exciting option attack Northwestern had ever fielded.  He  came off the bench to hit Ebert with a strike that went 81 yards to help upset Nebraska in Lincoln in one of the most memorable wins of the Colter era.  And, he clearly got that fourth down against Ohio State, regardless of what the corporate ESPN mainstream media want you to believe.


It's all very clear if you just look at the video evidence

Northwestern's outlook for the season is unclear.  The 'Cats lost Colter and a number of other talented seniors, but they will return Venric Mark and the core of an improving defense.  It is also unlikely that they will suffer from the horror of last year's impossible season when they lost game after game on plays that only happen at the end of sports movies.  Historically, the 'Cats have not performed well lately with preseason top-25 rankings and expectations, and will have the luxury of letting the season grow into what it will.

No matter what happens on the field, the unionization issue will continue to hover over the program.  We're all looking forward to the Wildcats feeling their way into a new Big Ten landscape brought about by another wave of ridiculous and byzantine conference realignment.  I look forward to developing an enmity towards Rutgers and Maryland when it comes time to actually play them.  I look forward to Sonny Dykes swearing revenge after accusing the 'Cats of faking injuries without the panache of their face-clutching basketball and soccer-playing compatriots.  And, most importantly, I look forward to a version of college athletics where players have an opportunity to challenge the NCAA and universities in order to gain fair compensation for totally wrecking an opposing quarterback.  

Northwestern Basketball Coaching Search

They're all gathered from 'round the globe, in their purple regalia and their academic hats and their business-casual khakis.  The Northwestern faithful are huddled together at the Rebeca Crown Center waiting for the signs of a decision: black smoke means no decision has been made, purple smoke means a new coach, red smoke means they've found an occasion to use that smoke machine that the University Police seized from the raid on an off-campus Dillo Day party, and white smoke indicates an overextended, overwrought, and clumsy comparison between hiring a new basketball coach and picking a pope.
 
In my defense, how often do you get to make topical Pope Smoke 
references?  Unless we can convince Hollywood to get a lot more 
secretive and ostentatious about how they choose the new host of 
Family Feud.

Bill Carmody, who served for thirteen years as the head coach of Northwestern, was fired after a depleted, injury-riddled squad did what every single Northwestern did in the history of the program and missed the NCAA tournament.  For thirteen years, Carmody's teams have tormented Big Ten opponents with barrages of three pointers, backdoor layups, and relentless Balkan trashtalk.  Now, the 'Cats will have to find a new identity that will hopefully lead them to the promised land, when the name "Northwestern" appears on Selection Sunday without that ugly, disappointing State appendage-- I'm convinced that Northwestern State University is a guy with a telephone in an empty office in Natchitoches, Louisiana that finds a dozen dudes to put into the tournament as an ongoing prank on Northwestern's futile morass of basketball ineptitude.

THE BILL CARMODY ERA

It has been so long between BYCTOM posts that there is an unpublished draft pondering whether or not to fire Carmody.  And I had come down on it as a mistake.  This has nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with a concern about unbalancing the humors in Northwestern's coaching.  Bill Carmody served as a crucial balance to Pat Fitzgerald.  Carmody complemented Fitz's square-jawed,  crew-cut, fist-pump enthusiasm with his dour, sarcastic, miserablist sideline demeanor.  Fitz coaches the football team like it's a violent Boy Scout jamboree; Carmody comported himself like the basketball version of Sisyphus, forever trying to push a rock from the former Yugoslavia up the hill of the Big Ten basketball juggernaut.  What would happen if Northwestern hires another young, enthusiastic coach?  I don't want to alarm anyone, but I've done the research and it's entirely possible that the entire campus can be seized by a rash of spontaneous butt bumps, inability to function at any rate other than one game at a time, and the fist pumps, I can't even imagine the fist pumps.
 
A thoroughly scientific rendering of the Fitz/Carmody dynamic, 
which now may be seriously compromised

As much as Bill Carmody's teams have frustrated NU fans, they also reached unprecedented heights.  Even in dismal years, they provided memorable moments with his motley crew of overlooked locals and international findings.  Who can forget when Northwestern downed Iowa 40-39 in what was later prosecuted in the International Basketball Court as a crime against the sport, or that time the Wildcats trampled upon the hopes and dreams of Rick Rickert in the Big Ten Tournament, which sort of seemed like a big deal at the time for some reason?  Carmody led the 'Cats to numerous wins in dubious preseason tournaments held in unused Kumite arenas and three NITs, the only tournament that pauses for media timeouts and to allow shattered NCAA Tournament bubble teams to weep in the arms  of loved ones.  
 
A college basketball coach accepts an NIT bid

That progress was the essential Bill Carmody conundrum.  Fans braying for his head on a stick could seem unreasonably impatient with a historically woeful program, but it was also possible to wonder whether Carmody could ever get the 'Cats over the hump.  There is no sense in belaboring the debate.  Northwestern's administration has made its decision.  A new coach gets to stride into Welsh-Ryan arena and announce that he will be the one to break through the Tourney barrier, to compete in the Big Ten, and to be astonished that yes, that is actually where Northwestern plays its college basketball games.

NORTHWESTERN IS A FOOTBALL SCHOOL, HERE IS FOOTBALL STUFF

On a less depressing note, the 2013 Gator Bowl Champion Northwestern Wildcats return to the field to prepare for a season with dreams of Indianapolis in their eyes.  They'll be playing in the newly-named "West" division with all of the LEGENDS as well as Tim Beckman's Northwestern-hating Illinois team and one of Indiana or Purdue.  While many people are dancing upon the noble graves of the LEGENDS and LEADERS division names and the return to sane, cardinal direction-based titles, I'm extremely concerned.  Jim Delany has been defeated, which portends a new round of megalomaniacal pronouncements.  I expect that a cape-wearing Delany will mandate that Big Ten coaches stalk the sideline in full academic regalia in order to emphasize the conference's academic credentials, he will start replacing all positive adjectives in official press conferences with the words "legendary" or "leaderous," and he will purchase hour-long blocks of late-night programming on rival conferences' television networks that consist of him cackling on a golden throne and end with ominous threats of Big Ten expansion.
 
Scene from"You're Next, Missouri," set to air from 2-3 
AM on the SEC Network

Northwestern has struck a deal to make a return to Wrigley Field after the Cubs finish renovations.  The future Wrigley games will utterly fail if the renovations allow the full use of all available endzones.  I refuse to count any touchdown that is scored in the designated "bad endzone," and any player who breaks the plane should be followed around by a group of robed malcontents who will pester him constantly with spooky endzone chants for the duration of the season.  I've made my feelings clear to Northwestern and Cubs management by sending a literary letter that metaphorically describes the forbidden endzone as the former Soviet Union and scoring in it as taking my brain waves and using them to power a 30-foot mechanized Bukharin, so I'm sure they are taking the suggestions very seriously.

THIS IS MADNESS

As the nation full of college sports fans watch the empty, hollow, spectacle of March Madness, I'll be defiantly watching my reel-to-reel tapes of Tavaras Hardy, Jitim Young, Vedran Vukusic, Mohammed Hachad, Juice Thompson, John Shurna, and all of the rest of the Carmody-era Wildcats and pondering the future.  Unfortunately, the athletic department has refused to issue vague riddles and rhymes that will gradually reveal the identity of the new basketball coach, so there's nothing to do but sit tight and wait.  I look forward to cheering for Carmody wherever he ends up next, although I'd prefer not to see Northwestern victimized by backdoor cuts and the 1-3-1 zone defense anytime soon.  More importantly, I look forward to a basketball season less marred by suspensions and injuries that will see Northwestern return to the postseason, even if its not the glory of the Dance.  Perhaps we'll all meet back here next march, filled with insincere NIT braggadocio, ill thoughts about the Tulsa Golden Hurricane, and a new coach ready to launch Northwestern to the stratosphere of being the 68th-best basketball team in the nation.