Holy Shit Northwestern Is In The Actual NCAA Tournament

At the beginning of this basketball season, Northwestern sent out an email with a video of a bearded Chris Collins in a windowless office imploring fans to come out and support the team that looked like a deposed head of state in exile calling for weapons and reinforcements. Northwestern's previous lackluster season finished with Iowa scoring 455 points on them in the Big Ten Tournament, and it seemed like more disappointment was on the way. For the second year in a row, its top players had left the program. Collins had found himself in the crosshairs of Northwestern's several dozen fans, and the new athletic director had ended last season with a cryptically worded statement that seemed to indicate that Collins would likely be fired at the end of another crummy campaign.  The program seemed to be in a death spiral or what would be a death spiral at other schools and was just sort of the baseline state of Northwestern men’s basketball. Four months later, a wave of students enveloped the court in ecstasy as the Wildcats beat number-one Purdue and secured their second-ever berth in the NCAA Tournament, and I am still trying to process that this has actually happened and I am not trapped in some bizarre fever dream and am going to wake up in September after getting hit in the head by a foul ball hit by a Cubs callup named Trant Manstadan.

Collins reassures supporters that Northwestern basketball still holds key fortifications near a Walgreens at the Wilmette border 

College sports have matched the pros in delivering a flurry of player movement, and it seems to me that fans have increasingly thought about their teams’ prospects in terms of getting players on or off the roster. This mindset makes it easy to forget that, especially in college sports, players can sometimes just get much better. Boo Buie, for example, spent three years as an exciting scorer whose outbursts could only reliably occur against Michigan State and then this season seemed to have had received a Promethean gift of basketball heroics and began playing as if every opponent had become a shrieking Tom Izzo whose head glistens red like a defrosting steak with every Buie dagger.

Northwestern's shocking improvement also comes from its transformation into a brutal, pain-in-the-ass defense. The turnaround is largely attributed to schematic changes overseen by new assistant coach Chris Lowery, but also from the players deciding to make every opponent half-court possession a nightmare. Chase Audige has emerged as a particular menace, cutting off passing lanes or suddenly materializing on the court to snag a pass he was nowhere near. The result of this makes Northwestern games delightfully miserable to watch. Their aesthetic is disgusting. Northwestern is not exactly a smooth offensive machine, so every Big Ten game they play is rife with endless scoring droughts. Their last game against Penn State in the Big Ten tournament appeared to take place in an arena testing out experimental rims smaller than the basketball as both teams ran intricate halfcourt shoving-based offenses that ended up with a ball bouncing dispiritingly off the hoop before they trudged to the other side and started doing it again. 

The result of Northwestern's transformation into a defensive juggernaut and vehicle for Boo Buie theatrics is the greatest season in school history.  They won the program's most conference games.  They went undefeated against the state of Indiana.  They beat Illinois wearing provocative Chicago-themed jerseys and Indiana with a last-second Buie floater that had Hoosiers whining about a push-off like a chorus of Bryons Rusell.  The Wildcats crushed Iowa so badly that Fran McCaffrey, who already looks like the villain in a Pixar movie except with less realistic hair, got insanely mad and had to be thrown out of the game, in front of all of his sons.  The Associated Press was still unable to locate a Northwestern logo when Northwestern briefly made the top 25.  Chris Collins won the Big Ten coach of the year award in a year where he was supposed to be fired and I remain both unsure whether he is actually a good basketball coach and positive that he is the greatest coach in program history.

That's when the attack comes SWISH from the sides, from the other fran mccaffery you didn't even know was there

In 2017, it took a series of terrifying, nervy games that climaxed with a last-second win on a full court heave of a pass in order to qualify for the tournament.  This year, a team that everyone picked to be last or second-to-last in the conference just whupped so many teams that they were jockeying for seeding in February.  It was a new experience for fans who are used to seeing the team clinging desperately to the bubble before waiting for a series of seemingly impossible misfortunes to catapult them into the NIT or the realm of other postseason tournaments that only make sense as vast money laundering operations. 

It has been genuinely confusing to watch Northwestern's last few games without panicking about them running afoul of some arcane bracket math.  The only thing at stake was the school's conference wins record and NCAA seeding, which as a Northwestern fan is a process I have never understood despite observing it for decades, much like how the family dog understands the rustle of the treat bag but is entirely ignorant about the concept of shopping.  And now here they are in the NCAA Tournament, poised to go further than any Northwestern team before them.    

BRONCO BUSTING

Northwestern is once again shunted off to the most remote region possible, playing Boise State in Sacramento.  It looks to me like Boise State is a popular upset pick against Northwestern, featuring three point shooters that may frustrate the Wildcat defense, which is designed to let teams bomb away from three and probably miss a lot because they are college students.  But I am not going to pretend like I any insight into Boise State.  I have not watched a single second of Boise State basketball this season or frankly any non-Northwestern college basketball.  I watched Northwestern and Rutgers play a game where they appeared to be trying to shoot with weighted medicine balls and then take approximately 85 minutes to complete the final moments of a game that was not really that close.  I do not have any spare time to watch Mountain West basketball even if I was spending that time searching out streaming services to see if I have to pay to watch the Arnold clone movie where the writers cruelly made him introduce himself as "Gordy Brewer." 

A Boise State-Northwestern game is apparently not a major draw.  They will play an evening game on TruTV, a forgotten Warner Brothers network that materializes annually for the NCAA tournament and exists at all other times to show endless reruns of shows like You Didn't Think I'd Shove You and Ryan Wears a Cape.  Northwestern's best chance to win involves playing the worst 56-52 grindfest you've ever seen that involves multiple invocations of the dreaded Time Without a Field Goal Clock.  Much like the apotheosis of Wildcat football under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern's basketball team this season exists to frighten and disgust otherwise unsuspecting bracket-wavers who do not know what they signed up for when they idly flipped over to the game.  

The rest of the region is brutal.  Should Northwestern manage to survive Boise State, they can look forward to a likely matchup with powerhouse UCLA.  If they were to somehow win that game, they would face what would probably be a rematch with that notorious goal-tending outfit Gonzaga, which knocked the Wildcats out of the 2017 tournament and caused Chris Collins to make the second most insane series of faces he has made in his career.  

My official power ranking of Insane Chris Collins Faces from least to most deranged: Michigan uncalled travel in the 2016 Big Ten Tournament; Northwestern blows 27-point lead against Michigan State in 2018 and Collins bugs his eyes out like Judge Doom from Rodger Rabbit; The Rubber-Faced Wow Offensive; Getting down on all fours and pounding the four screaming like an action movie protagonist seeing his partner gunned down three days from retirement.

And if you were to stare at the bracket long enough while enjoying a hallucinogenic journey you might observe there is a possibility no matter how remote that Northwestern could play Illinois in the Elite Eight, a cataclysm that would require the NCAA to create a rule specifically banning impersonations of Abraham Lincoln after dozens of brawling spectators would be injured attempting nineteenth-century wrestling moves.  

 

I have no idea what the the rest of this comic is other than this panel was placed without context in a WGN story about Lincoln's wrestling exploits that relates a wrestling match between Lincoln and Jack Armstrong, the toughest member of the Clary Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois and ends with a quote from Northwestern wrestling coach Matt Storniolo who said “I think you can see a lot of ways that wrestling could have influenced Abraham Lincoln.”

Regardless of what happens in the tournament, it is impossible to not be thrilled for Northwestern's players.  I will never hold any college player's decision to move on against him-- it is ludicrous to hold a grudge against any athlete choosing to exercise agency in this exploitative sport, and it is hardly ridiculous to want to go to a team that seemed more likely to make the tournament and play in bigger games and get more exposure.  Nevertheless, Buie, Audige, and Robbie Beran stuck around and they managed to get to the Dance.  It is incredibly gratifying to see them getting to play in big games in a packed Welsh-Ryan arena which actually seems like a home arena for the first time since the renovation.  I am giddy that with maybe one victory and a massive upset Boo Buie may transcend the miserable history of this program and become not just a Northwestern basketball legend, which he already is, but the program's first genuine March Madness Guy. 

UNDFEATED ALL TIME IN NCAA TOURNAMENT GAMES

Every other year, that ludicrous 35-foot Vanderbilt three would have gone in.  Or that last second halfcourt heave would have banked high off the backboard and through in a grotesque parody of Northwestern's tournament-saving pass, and the Wildcats' first-ever NCAA Tournament game would go into the giant pile of gut-wrenching blown leads, buzzer-beaters, complete bamboozlement in the face of a press, or times when the games seemed to end with the court itself snaring Northwestern players and dragging them into underground service areas and zamboni antechambers.  Instead, the Wildcats held on, took advantage of the most delightfully ill-conceived foul in the history of college basketball, and booked themselves into a clash with top-seeded Gonzaga because it is 2017 and Northwestern basketball has become immune to even the most obvious and inopportune Northwesterning situations.

There was no panic in this one.  Even as Vanderbilt rained threes upon the Wildcats and the NBA Jam announcer guy elbowed his way through dozens of security guards to try to seize the mic and scream HE'S ON FIRE at America, the comeback didn't hit the impending Northwestern sports catastrophe area of my brain because they had already made the tournament.  The never-ending and at times impossible attempt for them just to get there had already wrung everything out-- a blown tournament game lead has nothing on sweating out a home win against Rutgers under the ever-watchful eye of the Selection Committee. 

The Wildcats welcomed a national audience of people who had never been subjected to Northwestern sports with a traditional game where nothing makes sense and the play-by-play can be just as easily replaced with maniacal cackling; Northwestern games are not watched much as they happen to people.  In the last minute and a half, the two teams swapped leads half a dozen times.  Dererk Pardon iced clutch free throw after clutch free throw.  Then, just as the Commodores managed to grab another lead and Northwestern prepared to set up the inevitable Bryant McIntosh isolation play, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis, possibly subliminally programmed by years of Northwestern alums screaming at him about sports through his television and then activated by seeing Doug Collins's face turn a particular strain of magenta, inexplicably lunged at McIntosh and sent him to the line.

This is the most Dorothea Lange sports photo since the miserable woman clutching her child 
bravely in the face of Browns football

What an absolute bummer for Fisher-Davis, who had heroically shot Vanderbilt back into contention and picked the absolute worst time to blunder-- on the first day of the Tournament, in front of a national TV audience, against a school whose alumni are allowed to crash like an army of Kool-Aid men and women through the walls of ESPN studio shows and bloviate about the Wildcats, and in a situation that features the largest percentage of dudes watching the game who are alarmingly eager to explain to a neophyte why actually it is a bad strategy to foul there.

Northwestern fans showed up at the tournament.  A school that has played the vast majority of its home games in front of jeering visiting fans in their variegated Big Ten hoodies managed to take over Salt Lake City's arena with a raucous purple mob.

I can't see the Salt Lake City arena without immediately humming the bridge for Roundball 
Rock and waiting for Marv Albert to futilely ask whether or not Karl Malone would be able to 
come through in the clutch

The Wildcats' reward for their first win in the NCAA tournament is a dragon from the end of the map.  Tournament mainstay Gonzaga has its own tournament burden because the team has repeatedly fallen victim to disappointing tournament exits.  This year, expectations are at their loftiest.  They've only lost a single game the entire season and they've spent time as the top-ranked team in the nation.  Northwestern managed its top rank of 25 for one week where a panicking Associated Press graphics department was unable to locate a Wildcat logo for their poll.  Gonzaga will be heavily favored and motivated to break their own, much more ambitious barrier and qualify for their first Final Four. 

JAY CUTLER AND THE FACES OF SPORTS

There's that scene in Moneyball where all the crusty old scouts are sitting around chewing tobacco and they start evaluating talent based on whether a baseball player is handsome.  This is held up as the acme of Old Scout luddism, old leathery men whose decades spent squatting behind radar guns in the sun and shriveling up in budget hotel rooms can be obliterated at once by knowledge of onbase percentage.  Their methods are primitive, outmoded, and absurd and we're supposed to laugh at them and their inability to number-munch. Who thinks like that anymore?  Every day, as I sit around descending into the muck of sports takes on the internet and occasionally get dumb enough to listen to the angry, nasal men of Chicago sports radio it becomes clearer and clearer that the majority of NFL fans judge quarterback play almost exclusively by their face.

Football fans demand square-jawed quarterbacks.  The steely-eyed guy who can look at the huddle and tell his team they are winning the game and also do the same to issue non-answers about getting caught texting pictures of their penis to people.  Sure there are exceptions, but some-- like the Manning Brothers with their grotesque interception faces and Andrew Luck who looks like a spittle-flecked forest troll-- carried such a high pedigree that they were able to blunt criticism immediately. Otherwise, the freak shows like a bloated, waddling JaMarcus Russell or the Super Mario Koopa Troopa lookalike Jimmy Clausen always lead to fans despising them.

Jimmy Clausen takes questions at Halas Hall 

That is, I think, the central problem with Jay Cutler.  Cutler will go down as the Bears' best quarterback they will likely ever have, which honestly says more about the Bears and their moribund quarterback death-spiral than anything about him.  I don't know if I will ever see a more locally despised athlete and it all comes down to his face. Cutler has a leering, scoffing, face, a mug that is so openly contemptuous of everyone and everything around it that he doesn't even seem to have the energy to bother bullying people.  The most popular and possibly apocryphal story about Cutler is that he dealt with a fawning fan in a bathroom by leaning his head back and braying DOOOOOOOOOOOON'T CARE to the ceiling and for most Bears fans, that is how he spent his time in Chicago, leaning his head back in indifference and urinating more or less continuously for eight years.

Bears fans would have been able to forgive Cutler, or at the least watch him while suppressing the apparently universal human urge to strangle him, if he had managed to lead them to a championship. And there were glimmers!  His greatest run to the 2010 NFC Championship Game ended with an injury.  He spend most of his time dealing with incompetent offensive lines and eventually desiccated defenses.  At the same time, Cutler was never good enough to rise beyond the Bears' general, inbred incompetence enabled by a swarm of coaches, coordinators, and nincompoop front office personnel. He threw a ton of interceptions so profoundly dumb that they seemed spiteful.  It didn't help that the Cutler era paired with the rise of Aaron Rodgers, his opposite in every way, who is so infuriatingly good at playing quarterback that he demands only ten functioning human beings to score a zillion touchdowns.

There have been a ton of really shitty Bears quarterbacks, all of whom were way worse than Cutler but are far more fondly remembered because they were scrappy try-hards.  The irony of Cutler is that he was that way on the field, a guy who threw linebackers around with his throwing shoulder, a guy whose greatest weakness came from trying desperately to squeeze a throw into vanishingly tight windows, a guy who got pummeled more or less continuously to the point where the phrase "nine sacks in the fist half" became a reliable Chicago accent shibboleth, yet remains despised because 99 percent of humans who see a picture of his face immediately want to see him karate kicked in the scrotum.

Cutler was also, beyond his face, probably not a pleasant dude.  He constantly feuded with teammates and coaches (my favorite story was an assistant coach under Trestman anonymously shit all over him in the media and then tearfully apologized-- imagine tearfully apologizing to Jay Cutler).  Maybe if he won enough, all that would be forgiven, the way NFL explains away Tom Brady's infantile flag-begging tantrums or the way the Colts allowed Peyton Manning to summon the energy of the sun and blast it into his teammates' skulls through his gigantic, ray-gathering forehead.

The Bears have a new GM and a new coach and the only reason why they didn't build a catapult and fire Cutler into the lake is because of his onerous contract.  Now, they can finally be rid of him and hop back on the never-ending Treadmill of Bears Quarterback Mediocrity.  At his age, and with the completely barren team around him, there was no point in keeping him around.  But I hope, for the Bears' sake, that my theory of quarterback faces isn't true because look what just rolled into town.

The pre-Moneyball face scouting extends beyond quarterbacks.  Cutler's coach for several seasons was Marc Trestman, a guy who looked at all times like he was desperately sprinting after a bus.  In college sports, there's no better example than Tom Crean, who I am convinced could have wathered another down year at Indiana except that fans could not handle his uncanny valley face and weird and unsettling body postures that make him look like an incompetently programmed video game character.

ZAGGING 

Northwestern is in its golden age of sports.  In a single calendar year, they've won a bowl game and qualified for the NCAA Tournament; these are incredible feats for a school with sports teams unknown except for their prodigious and unfathomable losing streaks.  The Wildcats have even begun to attract a backlash built because sports media alumni have now begun breaking into people's homes and screaming about Northwestern basketball at them in the middle of the night, and the inability of a middle-aged sports reporters to refrain from dropping Seinfeld references.  

Gonzaga will be Northwestern's toughest opponent this season.  They're favored by double-digits and all of the analysts have KenPommed the Wildcats out of the tournament by Saturday night.  But in a year when the Wildcats have already shattered every expectation in the history of the program, why not add in an insane and improbable upset run to the Sweet Sixteen?  After a game when an opponent brutally northwesterned itself in front of a sea of purple, the laws of the universe no longer apply.  

NCAA TOURNAMENT PARTICIPANTS

Just a day before the Gumbel Brother put Northwestern on the bracket, Welsh-Ryan exploded in a paroxysm of basketball-related screaming, and the Sports Media Personalities unleashed their unholy torrent of purple-clad selfies, the Wildcats paid tribute to their basketball heritage by getting absolutely waxed by Wisconsin in the semi-finals of the Big Ten Tournament.  Most years, that kind of game capped off a losing season in the Big Ten, snuffing the tiniest ember of hope for a miracle Big Ten Tournament run to the dance.  This time, it didn't really matter.  Northwestern had already beaten Wisconsin in Madison without Scottie Lindsey.  They had made it further than any other Wildcat team had ever gone in the Big Ten Tournament by shithousing Rutgers with a record 31-0 first-half run and then silencing a rowdy, mother-booing, pro-Maryland D.C. crowd, and they had, by all accounts from even the most eccentric, apostate Bracketologists, qualified for the NCAA Tournament.

They can't stop it now; it was on television

There is no doubt about it now.  Wildcat fans can finally slam that Northwestern button on their internet NCAA brackets.  They can send off a glorious, stone-bleachered Welsh-Ryan Arena into Stadium Valhalla after it finally transformed from an empty house of basketball horrors into a venue capable of drowning out Jim Nantz.  They can surreptitiously watch the Wildcats at work on a Tournament Thursday while nervously toggling the "boss button" link that activates spreadsheets so profoundly fraudulent that they could only work on Kruger Industrial Smoothing-caliber management.

The "boss button" spreadsheets are a perfectly grotesque satire of 
whatever it is people do in offices

Chris Collins referred to the tournament berth as "the beginning of Northwestern basketball." It is not.  There has been more than a century of Northwestern basketball, most of which involved losing. More often than not, Northwestern basketball games meant trekking in subzero temperatures to a home arena full of opposing fans cocksure in their teams' victory and, more often than not, a loss. WGN had a great interview with Vic Law (Law comes on around the 1:45 mark) where he talks about wanting to change the atmosphere at Welsh-Ryan. "When we get good," Law remembers telling a reporter when he first committed, "we're going to blow the roof off the place."  This was a bold prediction about an arena where the Wildcats traditionally played home games only in scare quotes as rival chants echoed through the rafters.  Purdue-Northwestern games traditionally involved Wildcat fans surrounded by train costumes and Gene Keady combovers; whatever Purdue fans came gallivanting into the arena this year got completely drowned out on the television broadcast.

The consignment of Northwestern basketball to a pre-tournament dark age, though, obscures some really good players and teams, some of which could have even gotten to the Tournament if not for a truly beguiling series of separate misfortunes.  Northwestern may have lost games, but fans got to see Davor Duvancic take down Illinois, Michael Jenkins sink Iowa, Tre Demps buzzerbeat upon Michigan, and John Shurna break the scoring record with a jumpshot that could only exist at Northwestern.

Someone hoisted a Shurnahead at the Selection Sunday celebration 
because Shurnaheads should remain a Northwestern tradition even 
far into the future, when Welsh-Ryan is renovated again to have 
automated grape dispensers for high-dollar donors and basketball 
devolves into Bill Laimbeer's prophesied "combat" phase, a yellowed 
Shunahead stands watch over the severed heads of the Big Ten's weakest 
basketball robots

Northwestern could compete with and beat other Big Ten schools in basketball, but it had always felt outside the rest of the college basketball world.  The Carmody era partly fueled this-- almost no other team in the country played like Northwestern with its intricate offense and zone defenses, Carmody sought out international players that arrived with intriguing nicknames like "The Moroccan Michael Jordan," and he unleashed a masked Luka Mirkovic upon the Big Ten.  More than that, though, Northwestern usually hovered nowhere near the NCAA Tournament bubble with its attendant bracketologies and complaints about seeds and everything else.  The NCAA Tournament sucks up 99% of discussion about college basketball and Northwestern existed in a strange basketball Siberia, only affecting the tournament by occasionally ruining someone's RPI.

There is something that is ludicrous about Northwestern's Selection Sunday gathering. More than a thousand people gathered to celebrate a committee's decision that they were one of the 68 best teams in the country, promised nothing but an extra game-- should Vanderbilt clobber them in the first round, the hullabaloo over their bid would be as ridiculous as a silent film about a dandy dressing up in his finest tails and spats only to walk out his door and get sprayed by carriage puddles.  But more than 1,000 people in Welsh-Ryan didn't care about the sanity of sitting for hours for the chance to scream at a jumbotron showing promos for Kevin Can Wait.  Northwestern came in from the cold.

A HIGHLY TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF VANDERBILT

The tournament has spoken and, after sending a bunch of Big Ten teams to some extremely Big Ten cities, the Wildcats will meet Vanderbilt in Salt Lake City.  The location is disappointing to Chicago-area fans, but on the other hand, I am pretty sure they could put Northwestern in a regional so remote that it involves a rickety, slat-dropping rope bridge and we'd still be thrilled.

Northwestern will play Vanderbilt, a team that spent much of the season on the bubble because of its fifteen losses.  Their inclusion as a nine seed has stirred some controversy over on the Bracket Justice Internet where fans for whom inclusion in a 68-team tournament is not a once-a-century occurrence squabble about regions and paths and sound exactly like the Tom Hardy character from The Revenant replacing his endless pelt monologues.

MY SEEDS

The two schools have little basketball history-- they've played just five times, last in 1992, and have essentially no basketball animus.  But anyone who can't dredge up some dumb, sports grievance has no place writing a lightly-trafficked blogspot blog, so let's remember that the schools had a nascent football rivalry before Vanderbilt abruptly canceled a home-and-home series in 2013-2014 without warning.  The Chicago Tribune described the cancellation as done in "the coldest possible way--with a letter sent via U.S. mail," a schedule adjustment so callous that it inspired a major metropolitan newspaper to traffic in Dan LaFontaine sentences.  You might not think that this passes muster by even the flimsiest of margins, but as we speak BYCTOM rivalry-mongering intern Tim Beckman is hard at work drafting CANCEL THIS, VANDERBILT! (IN REFERENCE TO YOUR 2013-14 FOOTBALL SCHEDULING) signs to distribute in Salt Lake City but he keeps running out of room.

Vanderbilt's coach Bryce Drew made a name for himself in March Madness by leading Valparaiso on a magical run in 1998 most known for hitting a shot from a full-court pass eerily similar to Northwestern's own play against Michigan.  As his Wikipedia entry says: "Drew secured his place as a Valparaiso, Indiana, celebrity along with popcorn guru Orville Redenbacher."  Like Collins, Drew is the son of a coach, Valparaiso's Homer Drew. Chicagoans, however, may be more familiar with him as a brief member of the post-Jordan Shitty Bulls, where he teamed with Fred Hoiberg in an inadvertent Cradle of College Basketball Coaches.

Drew on the Bulls in the Dragan Tarlac Era

Both teams face a tough path out of the region.  The winner of Thursday's game will like face Gonzaga, lurking in the bracket like a Morrison-haired monster.  Almost no brackets have Northwestern getting past them to the Sweet 16, except for mine, where I will just keep writing down Northwestern's name because they're finally in the dang bracket and absolutely no one can stop me.

THE PASS

There was a risk that it could have all gone disastrously wrong, that Nate Taphorn's overhand, full-court baseball heave could have sailed over Dererk Pardon's outstretched arms into the face of a costumed, bodypainted student and given Michigan the opportunity to win the game with the ball under their basket because that's almost always how these games have ended.  There are few  basketball indignities that Northwestern has not yet experienced until they put in drastic rule changes that turn college basketball into the inevitable future death sport promised by every science fiction movie, which will give Wildcat fans the opportunity to leave disappointed because a Northwestern player accidentally activated the robotic basketball spider that devours key recruits.

Instead, Taphorn threw his pass, Pardon caught it, twisted, and converted a buzzer-beating layup to beat Michigan, win a school-record twenty-first game, and, in all likelihood, qualify for Northwestern's first NCAA Tournament.


The students swarmed the court, Chris Collins ran around like a video game character controlled by a Baby Boomer, Welsh-Ryan exploded, and the entire Chicago area went berzerk for its Big Ten Team including the enormous number of Michigan fans and alumni in the city who were forced to abandon their school and fall under the sway of Northwestern sports because of those billboards on I-94.  No doubt America celebrated as well, spurred on by Northwestern's endless supply of insufferable sports media personalities, with warm feelings for Collins's association with the universally-beloved Duke basketball team.

The win followed a brutal stretch where Northwestern lost nearly every game, squandered leads, ran out of gas, and threatened to turn ESPN's ubiquitous Doug Collins Cam into a horrifying snuff film as he disintegrated before our eyes like the guy who drank from the wrong grail in the Last Crusade.

Doug Collins watching his son's team.  Taking the free throw miss in stride. pic.twitter.com/wJfkHDYfmo

— Matt Schick (@ESPN_Schick) February 19, 2017

Northwestern was only days removed from its most painful loss on the road to Indiana.  The Wildcats took a late lead against a spiraling Indiana team in a building full of angry Hoosiers more interested in jeering demented hobbit-coach Tom Crean than stopping Northwestern.  With less than ten seconds left, Northwestern clung to a two-point advantage before Thomas Bryant muscled in a tying layup with a foul.  Bryant's free throw hit the back iron and bounced what seemed to be seven feet in the air before plunging down like a Basketball of Damocles on the Wildcats' tourney hopes.  McIntosh's desperation half-court heave clanged off the rim, a play that was probably less ridiculous and improbable than the actual ending to the Michigan game.

Crean in the process of molting before growing a new layer of pants

Sure, Northwestern has not yet qualified for the tournament.  Nothing is official until the Selection Committee emerges from its cave, flies the bracket by sparrow to Bristol, Connecticut, has an ESPN guy read out out Northwestern, and I immediately start to complain about seeding and how the Selection Committee HAS IT OUT FOR THE WILDCATS DAMMIT even though as a Northwestern fan I don't really understand what any of that means and am just trying to fit in.  Between now and then all sorts of things can happen.  They can cancel the tournament immediately because of excessive Northwestern participation.  They can get locked in the MCI Center during the Big Ten Tournament and watch the tournament start without them while Northwestern State fills in.  They can get in the bus on the way to the first tournament hame and get crushed by a giant Monty Python foot.

Northwestern's greatest men's basketball achievement since the 1930s comes with no guarantees.  All they get is an invitation.  The Wildcats' first tournament appearance could involve them drawing a Final Four-caliber opponent loaded with NBA players that spends the entire game floating above them on air currents and raining baskets from the rafters.  They could draw an obscure mid-major that throttles them.  Northwestern players could fall into a giant pie and collapsing tower of unicycles on the sideline or activate a contraption that plucks Chris Collins from the bench mid-tirade and flings him into a rub-a-dub tub.  No one will mind much because the closest thing we've had to that so far was to take hallucinogens, turn on last year's Holy Cross games, and squint.

Northwestern fans took desert spirit quests that allowed 
themselves to believe, for several hours, that a player 
named Rados Šampion had led the Wildcats to Patriot 
League glory

Northwestern plays Purdue on Sunday on Senior Day in front of a national television audience.  I have no idea if they will flourish, free from the suffocating tournament pressure, or will allow Caleb Swanigan, the Purdue sharpshooters who shot 255 threes in West Layfeyette, and the twelve-foot tall buzzcut guy to once again hammer them while Northwestern fans jubilantly don't care.  Northwestern will be honoring defensive stopper Sanjay Lumpkin, who will allow the first 3,000 fans to barrel into his chest while he draws a charge, and newly-minted hero Nate Taphorn.  Both players remain the last vestiges of the Carmody era, and it's only fitting that they both had crucial roles in getting the team over the hump.

Northwestern will play its final home game at Welsh-Ryan as we know it, just as the arena finally cultivated a genuinely nuts, loud atmosphere.  In previous years, the primary noise in the arena came from Widlcat fans' DE-FENSE cheers overpowered by visiting fans' muttered complaints that Welsh-Ryan was a high school facility.  Next year, the Wildcats will move to the gigantic, empty Allstate Arena to play games in between Whitesnake reunion concerts and Monster Jams.  As anyone who has gone to a DePaul game in recent years can attest, the arena will easily swallow even a sellout Welsh-Ryan crowd and render the games a sea of empty blue seats and Chicago Rush Arena Bowl XX championship banners. The refurbished Welsh-Ryan will have fancier seats and glowing screens and probably won't allow you to be inadvertently bowled over by a visiting team while trying to wait in line for a hotdog, but it's fantastic that Northwestern got to likely clinch their tournament berth in their ridiculous basketball barn instead of the Grave Digger Sedan Cemetery.

Wildcat fans look forward to their season 
at the home of ArenaBowl '88

After decades of broken ankles, dunk victimhood, and general Washington Generalsmanship and even some heart-breaklingly close calls, Northwestern has almost certainly made the tournament on a play so absurd that I still can't quite believe it.  Selection Sunday is March 12, and I'll be watching for the first time.

The NCAA Tournament is a Dumb Tournament for Jerks Anyway

The Northwestern basketball team is close, tantalizingly close, an overly-long fingernail's grip close to the very outer edge of the possibility of making it to the NCAA tournament. Northwestern fans have gone into NCAA Bubble Crisis mode, hanging their faith on RPI numerology and the false bracketology shamans making a living rearranging the names on a bracket like the map of Europe at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Negotiating the status of Fiume and the seed number
of Siena

The Wildcats are on the bubble longer than they've ever been on the bubble and because of this they want you to die. That is hyperbole. There are few things of less overall cosmic significance than which post-season basketball tournament deigns to accept the Northwestern Wildcats because in the long run you will die, and all of humanity will wilt (potentially destroyed at the hands of a race of super-intelligent apes, let's just lay all of our cards on the table), and the sun will eventually explode and destroy the entire galaxy in a brilliant conflagration leaving an eternal void unmoved by the consequences of a goal-bound chest jumper.

Then again, another loss like this past one to Ohio State may cause Bill Carmody to literally explode on the court-- you can just see it now, as he makes that how could this possibly happen to me expression that he makes for an unjust foul call or a careless turnover or a poorly selected shot or (presumably) a spontaneous combustion upon the floor of Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

The sound of a whistle causes Bill Carmody to contemplate the
Big Bang, the billions of years it took for simple one-celled
creatures to evolve slowly into plant and animal life and
dinosaurs and mammals and the beginnings of man as a tree
dwelling creature and the thousands of years of mankind
spreading across the globe, creating complex cultures and
civilizations, and his own ancestors that brought him to this
very spot, where he can't believe that Curletti committed a foul
with five fucking seconds left on the shot clock are you kidding me?

This evening's game was yet another close, heart-breaking and possibly bracket-breaking loss for the Wildcats, who I think may yet remain alive. As far as I can tell, a final Big Ten win and a decent showing in the conference tourney may convince some NCAA honcho to look upon the Wildcats and rotate his thumb up. Then again, I will leave the bracket prognostications to others with the patience to follow the hectic NCAA Tournament stock market, shouting frantically into a telephone with every bubble team basket. Come March 11, the only important prediction is whether I foolishly fill out a hundred brackets putting NU in the Final Four or the city of Evanston starts loading up on ticker tape for an NIT championship parade.

BUBBLE

The NCAA tournament is designed to use complex formulas, rankings, and no small amount of intrigue to determine an approximation of the 68 best college basketball teams in the country to play each other for our amusement and to swell the coffers of illegal gambling operations. Northwestern has never been one of those teams. Every year, Northwestern fans sit down to watch March Madness like other college basketball fans, dutifully filling out a bracket, cheering on upsets, rooting for the implosion of hated Big Ten rivals, seeing a guy play two or three games and then forming strong opinions on him before the NBA draft, enjoying the spectacle but not really having a horse in the race. It's sort of like being Jewish on Christmas Day.

Northwestern itself is sort of an athletic program on the bubble of college sports. The football team may shed its reputation as the worst in the history of the sport, win some Big Ten games, maybe even a conference championship, but never win a bowl game outside some sepia tinged Rose Bowl during the Truman administration. The basketball team may win some preseason tournament, knock a Big Ten team out of the tourney, make some noise in the NIT, but remain completely irrelevant away from the NCAA promised land. Casual college basketball fans will not get to turn on CBS and hear commentators yammer about the Princeton Offense; a horrified nation will not be exposed to John Shurna's hideously effective jump shot.

John Shuna's shooting form continues to baffle opponents

Making the NCAA tournament gives fans a chance to see the program in the rarefied air of March Madness, a spotlight that eludes the Wildcats no matter how well they do in the NIT or how many times they claw their way to the Pizza City Bowl and command the fleeting attention of people sort of watching the game while they wait for the takeout guy to fetch their order of cheesy bread. Admittedly, this is sort of a stupid thing for college sports fans to get hung up about. Then again, caring about the outcomes of sporting events at any level is pretty stupid to begin with, though understandable considering this country's draconian laws on bear-baiting. Nevertheless, it explains why making the NCAA tournament means far more to Northwestern than any other team in the country, except for maybe fans of Army, St. Francis, William and Mary, The Citadel, the Washington Generals, and every man who has attempted to punch Steven Seagal in a Steven Seagal movie.

No henchperson has ever connected with Seagal's face
in a classic Seagal film, I'm guessing his assailants
punch him in order to give him more time to squint
quizzically an offscreen pun cue card before
breaking their elbows

WILL NORTHWESTERN MAKE THE STUPID NCAA TOURNAMENT? WHO THE HELL KNOWS

Northwestern rides into Iowa pushed by the collective angst of desperate fans, a snakebitten coach, and players determined to cement their legacy as the team that brought the 'Cats to the Dance. A loss essentially ends the their already gossamer tourney hopes in front of a taunting Iowa crowd. This will be one of Northwestern's most important games, although let's refrain from calling it that because every time Northwestern has a must-win game, they've managed to fall short by the most painfully narrow of margins.

Shurna's loading up his fine-point pens, his blue books, his TI-83
graphing calculator, maybe a protractor, got a mechanical pencil
with a couple of extra lead inserts, he's going to war

And should the Wildcats falter, should the dream season of snaring an at-large bid and low seed in a basketball tournament that they can't possibly win evaporate in Iowa City, Northwestern fans can at least look forward to wreaking havoc in the NIT. For there is nothing more Northwestern than winning the NIT and hoisting that banner to the rafters of the drafty old Welsh-Ryan Arena, dispatching the also-rans, kings of the afterthought.

If Northwestern does not get into the NCAA tournament this year, Northwestern basketball won't end. There will be another stream of eager Wildcats pursuing that elusive tourney berth next year and the year after until the NCAA tournament no longer exists, or college basketball no longer exists and is replaced by something more exciting like a worldwide university slamball challenge with a 10,000 team tournament that Northwestern fans can desperately hope to make or some sort of sport using genetically modified apes that inadvertently leads to an inevitable ape-led apocalypse. But that is for the future. Northwestern can make the tournament right now, they can fulfill fans' wild hopes of transforming from a historically bad program that has never made the tournament to a historically bad program that has made the tournament once, they can taunt alumni of certain liberal arts colleges and army officers about basketball with impunity. Which is important because I'm pretty sure there's no way Northwestern would not have the world's shittiest slamball team.