Debacle Trojan Style

Last Saturday, the Wildcats channeled former head coach Dennis Green in an excruciating loss to Big Ten front-runners Michigan State. Thoughts about State were proven correct. Hooks were let off. Asses may possibly have been crowned.

Although Northwestern fans might react to the game by gnashing their teeth and thrashing their footmen (the old gnash and thrash is a Northwestern tradition), I suggest they stay their hands, their canes, and their sharpened monocles. The Wildcats looked very good against a legitimate Big Ten title contender and have traditionally finished strong in the Pat Fitzgerald era. In particular, the emergence of freshmen Venric Mark, Rashard Lawrence, and Adonis Smith are encouraging, not least because an outstanding game from Smith has crusty sports editors on high pun alert.

A consortium of sports editors stand at the ready to
deploy Adonis-related headlines comparing the
Wildcat running back to the mythical figure
conceived by some sort of combination of incest and
trees

DIABOLICAL TRICKS

The turning point of the game came on a Michigan State fake punt in which the Spartan offense took a delay of game penalty to disguise their duplicitous intentions, then had the punter heave a strike to a wide-open receiver. Dantonio masterminded a similar trick play against Notre Dame earlier this season. It is no fun to be the victim of a trick play, but losing a football game is a minor consequence compared to some more underhanded trickery. You could, for example, find yourself stranded in a jungle on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras with only your wits and piles of the nineteenth century equivalent of arcade tokens.

That is what happened to the victims of Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish adventurer who managed to sell off large parcels of prime coastal real estate to hopeful would-be colonists whose adventure soured when they realized that the country they had hoped to colonize did not technically exist.

Gregor MacGregor (left), shared with Lord Gordon-Gordon a penchant for
redundantly-named Scottish swindlery, although he came by his name
honestly. Gordon-Gordon was one of many aliases for a nineteenth
century confidence man who also went by Lord Glencairn and the
Honourable Herbert Hamilton

MacGregor was a military adventurer at a time when one could simply traipse over to the Western Hemisphere and start annexing territory with nary an admonishment. MacGregor successfully raised enough money and men to fulfill the reasonable dream of invading Florida in 1817 to remove it from the yoke of Spanish oppression. Instead, he spent the money, his men deserted and he mustered only enough of a force to take Amelia Island (off the coast of Florida near present-day Jacksonville) and set up a republic under the charge of Louis-Michel Aury, who had been building his leadership credentials by running a nest of pirates out of Galveston. The island fell to the United States several months later as part of the U.S. campaign to seize East Florida.

Florida divided into East and West in 1810 during the reign of Napoleon's
brother Joseph over Spain. By the time of the U.S. took over Florida in 1819,
Bourbon Monarch Ferdinand VII (right) had taken over. Ferdinand,
imprisoned for six years during the Napoleonic rule of Spain, fell again to a
coup in 1820, before coming back to power after which, in the words of the
author of his wikipedia page, "he revenged himself with a ferocity which
disgusted his far from liberal allies." The same page notes that he later
became "torpid, bloated and unpleasant to look at" which is sort of a default
Bourbon monarch setting

But MacGregor's greatest coup came after his return to Britain in 1820. There, he ingratiated himself into the horse-racing, muttonchop-growing, rabble-scattering, society types and began telling people that he had become Cacique (prince) of the Principality of Poyais off the coast of Honduras by the blessing of King Frederic Augustus II of the Mosquito Shore. He published a book describing the region as developed and friendly to British settlement and began selling land to colonists eager to live in this earthly paradise.

In 1822 and 1823, two ships full of would-be settlers left for Poyais, but instead of a glistening settlement friendly to the British, they found a jungle friendly mainly to tropical disease and the occasional hermit and nowhere to redeem their worthless Poyais dollars. The wretched survivors escaped on a ship that had come to give gifts to Frderic Augustus (or, as contemporary documents referred to him, the Mosquito King) to Belize. This document is chock-full of details of the Poyasian scheme, with transcripts from a lawsuit against the British Honduran authorities accusing them of seizing property from the Poyais settlers. It not only serves as virtual handbook of eighteenth century synonyms for wretchedness, but also serves as a handbook of miscellaneous Poyasian documents.

A copy of the oath to be taken by Poyasians to swear
loyalty to MacGregor. Other correspondence in the
Proceedings reveals that MacGregor took, among
his various bogus royal titles, the wonderful alias
Baron Tinto

Undaunted, MacGregor attempted to run the same Poyasian scheme in France, this time calling in the big guns by turning to someone actually named Gustavus Butler Hippisley. The alert French authorities, curious as to why French citizens were attempting to obtain documents to travel to a country that as far as they could tell did not exist, halted the expedition and arrested MacGregor associates including Hippisley and eventually MacGregor himself. Still undeterred, MacGregor continued to fashion Poyasian constitutional documents and sell Poyais-related land and stock until the lat 1830s. The most fascinating part of the story is his investment in the fictional land of Poyais; it seemed not to occur to him that after being caught in a grandiose scheme of making up a country, he could just as easily pull another fake country out of thin air without having to deal with the baggage of the Poyasian legacy of not being a place on the surface of this planet, Earth.

OTHER FRAUD

Perhaps the greatest British confidence man was William Chaloner, a forger, counterfeiter, and purveyor of dildos in late seventeenth century London. Chaloner excelled in three main schemes: counterfeiting coins, fabricating Jacobite plots in order to muster government rewards, and turning on associates. Chaloner was not shy about becoming an informant about criminal schemes which he was involved in just before the authorities came in; he named names, he blackmailed accusers, and he funded whimsical bucolic holidays for witnesses that could finger him.

This would normally be the part of the story where I describe how Chaloner went too far and crossed the Royal Mint, but I don't think it was possible for Chaloner to go too far. It's not as if he was some sort of scheming heist mastermind planning one job at a time. Instead, Chaloner existed as the eye of a whirlwind of spectacularly multifaceted and continuous criminal activity on a remarkable scale, and his undoing came from circumstances leading him into the crosshairs of a Sir Isaac Newton.

A BYCTOM estimation of a typical week of Chaloner activity

Newton ran afoul of Chaloner when he became warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 with the job of investigating counterfeiting. He broke up a machine coining operation and arrested one of Chaloner's associates. Chaloner attempted to infiltrate the Mint himself by cooking up false conspiracies of corruption among Mint officials, going so far to name one of his own aliases as a co-conspirator in a flamboyant display of criminal confidence. While gallivanting around Parliament, denouncing schemes that he would certainly take part in if he got a job at the Mint, Newton recognized him as a counterfeiting suspect. By 1699, Newton swore to take Chaloner down and recruited an underworld network of spies and Chaloner associates. Chaloner deployed an unstoppable three-step defense: feigning madness, peppering all particpants in the trial with a barrage of insults, and finally claiming that his operations fell outside of the court's London jurisdiction. He was hanged.

LOOKING TOWARDS THE HOOSIERS

Northwestern will be looking for redemption and continuing a quixotic quest for bowl eligibility on Saturday against Indiana. The Hoosiers will test Northwestern's defense with their prolific offense, and hopefully Pat Fitzgerald will test the Hoosiers with a variety of trick plays and confidence schemes that will baffle the Indiana defense and defraud supporters. When the dust settles, Wildcat fans will be hoping that no one will be who anyone thought they were, there will be no hooks for anyone to be let off of, and asses will remain blissfully crownless.

NFL Draft

The NFL draft weekend is over, the NU picks have settled, and the collective brains of football fans have recovered after the severe neurological strain of being shouted at by pundits in flashy suits who will all be proven wrong as soon as the first snap of the NFL preseason begins. The draft has evolved from the comfortable atmosphere of a back alley craps game in the league's early years to a Vegas style revue missing only the show-girls and unexpected tiger attacks. At the center of everything is ESPN's ringmaster Mel Kiper, Jr. whose Big Board has only slightly less power over the fate of young men than General "Buck" Turgidson's.

The sweater invites you to the
World of Make-Believe while the
hair invites you to a world of
brutal gangland debt collection

The NFL draft is so compelling for a number of reasons. Unlike basketball, hockey, or baseball, the NFL is basically it for worldwide professional football. Baseball, basketball, or hockey players have a much wider network of minor leagues or foreign pro leagues as occasional fall-backs. NFL washouts can play in Canada, which is not quite the same game. The Arena League is on hiatus and NFL Europa no longer exists, although I liked the classy move of changing the name to "Europa" because the American pronunciation was the thing keeping Europeans from watching World Bowl 2001 MVP Jonathan Quinn. The NFL also has just the right amount of rounds. While baseball has dozens of rounds, with very little chance of seeing even highly touted prospects for years, the NBA has only two rounds, with bad teams essentially risking the team's future on each first-round pick.

The differences between the MLB and NBA drafts encourage vastly
different strategies

The NFL, on the other hand, has the perfect amount of rounds, allowing for both high-profile draftees expected to make an immediate impact and guys that you try to talk yourself into over the whole summer who will often be heartlessly cut after appearing for five minutes in a preseason game and then forced to wander from door-to-door in dusty Texan hamlets offering to mend fences or perform cone drills for a bowl of gruel or a lift to the nearest slow-moving freight train junction. When high profile picks bust, they inevitably work third shift at a garage door factory in Russia, Ohio.

The scouting aspect of the draft is so fascinating because of the way performance at drills at the combine or on a pro day can greatly raise or lower stock. Of all of them, nothing can make or break a prospect like the 40-yard dash, which does not seem to be a particularly effective judge of 90% of what happens on a football field. If anything, offensive linemen should be graded up for a slower 40 speed for my amusement since the only time they run 40 yards at a clip at maximum velocity is on some broken play that involves them comically lumbering down the field with a the terrified wide-eyed look of an undercover cop who has gone too deep and now has to kill his partner in cold blood in order to prove his loyalty to the maniacal head henchman of a drug kingpin.

The obsession with the 40 time is chronicled in Rough Draft, where Clay Travis, a 28 year-old former lawyer turned sportswriter, joins a bunch of players in training for the 2008 draft combine. The trainer, Kurt Hester, has observed that speed is valued much higher than strength in the combine, and the prospects know that mere tenths of a second separate them from multi-million dollar signing bonuses and falling from the draft altogether. Travis shows that the 40 and all of the other combine drills are skills in and of themselves, and that succeeding in them has only an ancillary connection to football skill. Hester is also portrayed as a lunatic Cajun who travels everywhere on a fanboat and talks like Paul Prudhomme, except that he would use a blend of Cajun spices to blind a wild boar before beating it to death with a floppy fat guy hat.

Occasionally, to get a high school team fired up when they're training in his Louisiana gym, Hester releases wild alligators he's caught in the swamps in the weight room. He's put camouflage tape around the alligator's mouth, but the kids don't know this and go wild thinking the thrashing gator is about to attack them. After he's gotten them fired up, Hester sprints across the weight room, pulls out a knife, and stabs the gator in the head with a large hunting knife. He did this before a Louisiana high school football game recently, his team was playing a team nicknamed the Gators, and the team he trains won by four touchdowns. When I tell Eastern Michigan defensive end Jason Jones this story in the locker room a few minutes later, Jones nods, "That's a good idea," he says.

Of course, most teams take things other than 40 speed into account when drafting a player, but its importance is almost certainly overvalued. Especially if you are Al Davis, who appears to get a list of players based only on 40 time and a special Raiders psychological test where players are subjected to hours of watching footage of balcony rants and rambling old person stories.

The Raiders' special combine evaluation procedure tests endurance and mental fortitude

NORTHWESTERN PLAYERS AND THE DRAFT

No NU players were drafted this year, although three went as undrafted free agents to the NFC North. Tyrell Sutton chose the Packers after receiving numerous offers. John Gill will be a Lion. Gill had some momentum going into the draft, even being identified as a potential sleeper in a Dallas newspaper. Most excitingly, Eric Peterman will reunite with Brett Basanez on the Chicago Bears. Before announcing the signing, Angelo noted that the Bears had found a pretty good receiver in their own backyard, and he was not talking about Jeff Samardzija. The Sun-Times, when not extensively covering Mr. T's jury selection as a lead story on their website, has also reported that C.J. Bachér will attend a tryout for the Bears along with Missouri's surplus Chase and Florida's Drew Weatherford.

"If you're innocent, I'm your best man," Mr. T told the reporter
lucky enough to get this monster scoop. "But if you're guilty, I pity
that fool." "You've got to testify! Tell somebody about it. God is good!"
he told an admirer as he tried to leave the building. "I pity the fool
that don't get it." Mr. T then apparently spent the next 3 hours
reminding state employees and passers-by that he indeed pities
fools in case anyone had forgotten over the past 25 years.

THE BEARS DRAFT

The Chicago Bears' draft has been overshadowed by Jay Cutler trade and the lack of any first day picks. I've never seen any of the Bears' draft picks play except for Juaquin Iglesias and Henry Melton. Melton remains a BYCTOM favorite for his play as an enormous bowling ball of a running back during his freshman and sophomore years at Texas before converting full time to defensive end. He formed part of an enormous running back arms race with Texas A&M, who unleashed Jorvorski Lane upon the world.

Although they tried to recruit even bigger backs than Melton and Lane, recruiting
violations forced the Horns and Aggies to stick with normal sized running backs

The Bears also took another Vanderbilt player in corner D.J. Moore, which could put as many as five Commodores on the Bears roster, exacerbating a well-established trend. In crucial Vanderbilt news, Cornelius Vanderbilt was locked in corporate warfare with James "Diamond Jim" Fisk and Jay Gould in the Erie War over control of the Eerie Railroad during the 1870s. Gould became so desperate to control the landlord that he turned to a British con-man who was apparently so confident in his swindling activities that he adopted the impossible name "Lord Gordon-Gordon." When Gordon-Gordon escaped to Canada with more than $1 million of Gould's money, the jilted titan of industry formed a small band to personally extradite the confidence man by kidnapping him. Instead, Gould and his merry band was arrested by Mounties before he could escape with Gordon-Gordon. The arrest of Gould and his men and subsequent denial of bail by the Canadian authorities led to an international incident between the U.S. and Canada. As the Manitoba Historical Society relates, Minnesotans prepared to go into battle for their incarcerated countrymen:

The situation in the United States was reaching a high state of tension. The St. Paul Pioneer of August 1, contained a heading, "Our People Should Make Ready," denouncing the crime committed by the corrupt and venal Canadian authorities and advised putting no obstacles in the way of the Fenians should they decide to move upon the colony in force. If any other plan should he preferred, it should be well matured, but there should be no delay in preparation. "It should be swift, silent and terrible."

Gordon-Gordon escaped from Gould's bearded wrath by melting into the
background disguised as a typical nineteenth century American

The Bears also took wide receivers Johnny Knox and Derek Kinder, who will stand in Peterman's way at camp, Buckeye linebacker Marcus Freeman who has been described as the Lance Briggs to Laurinaitis's Urlacher, and finally the alliterative duo of tight end Lance Louis and safety Al Afalava from San Diego and Oregon States respectively.

With football season still months away, expect to hear very little about any of these picks unless one of them gets horribly injured or arrested in Canada with a threat of Fenian raids as retribution.