The P.J. Fleck Fiction Issue

Northwestern came off the high of its commanding victory over UTEP, an important win that indicated that the Wildcats would be closer to normal bad this season rather than apocalyptically bad. The dozens of fans who were not put off by the program's futility "on American soil" and the scandal that engulfed the program and several of the people who were all in charge when it happened and are still there defiantly standing tall against themselves got to finally celebrate a win at Ryan Field for the first time since 2021. But despite the excitement of vanquishing the UTEP Miners as a home underdog, most people understood they probably would not fare as well against a surging nationally-ranked Duke team, and they didn't.

I am not going to lie, I did not really watch any of this game. I could not because my home does not get the ACC Network, so I to reverted to my pre-cable days and enjoyed the sonorous voice of Mr. Cat Dave Eanet on WGN for a chunk of the first quarter listening to the sound of someone describing a festival of shanked punts. Here I feel the need to make a correction: while last week's post implied that the nobody in the Greater Chicagoland Metropolitan Area got ACC Network, people with certain ubiquitous TV streaming services apparently got it, and I spoke to numerous people with different services who were able to easily watch Northwestern shank punts in real time. Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com apologizes for the error.

Hopefully this correction will prevent Jim Phillips from siccing his personal retinue of ACC goons to attack me for implying that the ACC Network is not available on multiple carriers in the Chicago area market if you want to watch Duke throw Northwestern into a port-a-potty in high definition

This Saturday, Northwestern returns home to an inexplicable night game against Minnesota. I understand that Northwestern must play night games under the terms of its contract with the Big Ten Network and have been playing them more or less at random for years, but they used to almost never play them, so night games to me still feel like Big Games under the trucked-in lights. This one is not. Minnesota looks to be right in the Big Ten West Zone this season, squeaking by over Matt Rhule's Cornhuskers, bludgeoning Eastern Michigan, and then getting wiped out by a ranked UNC squad. But a middling West team should likely not be threatened by this year's Northwestern team. The Gophers are heavily favored, even if stalwarts Mohamed Ibrahim and Tanner Morgan have graduated after several decades of excellent play.

The collapse of Northwestern's football program has conveniently lumped it in with the rest of this city's dilapidated sports scene. The Cubs, who looked poised to earn a wild card berth and get triumphantly swept out of the playoffs, instead suffered a series of embarrassing losses to some bad teams that put them squarely in the crosshairs of the Marlins, a team that has haunted them-- it remains one of the most underrated embarrassments for the Chicago Cubs, a team that is fueled by a history of failure and foundering, that they are continually bested by the Florida Marlins. The White Sox were numerically eliminated from the playoffs and Tony LaRussa has returned in some sort of consulting capacity as Reinsdorf's personal Baseball Rasputin. The Sky were sweatlessly escorted out of the WNBA playoffs by former Sky hero Candace Parker and the Las Vegas Aces.

No Chicago team, however, managed to embarrass themselves more this week than the Chicago Bears. After an unsurprising but embarrassing defeat at the hands of the miserable Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Bears spent the week having football pundits making 45 minute videos of themselves talking where the thumbnail is them making the youtube googly-eyed open mouth face at Justin Fields about how the Bears' offense is the worst thing that has ever happened to the National Football League. On Wednesday, the day began with what appeared like a standard Bears day of press with Justin Fields upbraiding his incompetent coaching staff for being incompetent before claiming that he was taken out of context and actually both he and the coaching staff are incompetent. Then, defensive coordinator Alan Williams, who had missed the game for vaguely defined "personal reasons" abruptly resigned under mysterious circumstances that the Bears coaching staff, which already operates at a level of ridiculous Fake Military Secrecy that Pat Fitzgerald used to use when refusing to say who would be playing quarterback in the home opener against Northeastern Illinois Stage Beard and Mustache Institute, refused to elaborate on. 

Looking to see if maybe I could find a picture of a football player with an elaborately funny fake beard, I stumbled across this artifact from March 2020 where the entire article was someone horrendously photoshopping beards on soccer players because of Covid lockdown, each one with a profoundly stupid caption, I cannot believe this still exists online.

While this was going on, wild rumors began to circulate online about Williams. The rumors escalated to the point that random Bears youtube guys were somberly saying that Halas Hall had been raided by all of the hut hut hut guys from the end of the Blues Brothers and that Charles Tillman who is actually in real life an FBI agent was running barefoot through broken glass and shimmying through vents in order to catch Williams. Then the Bears circulated an odd resignation letter from Williams, and an attorney representing him called into a sports radio show to quash the wildest of rumors but also not say anything else. On the one hand, this information frenzy is the result of the insatiable demand for information now now now now on something that is not consequential-- Williams is a person almost no one who does not follow the Bears closely had ever heard of and his resignation from coordinating a bad defense for an awful football team is not a matter of national importance. If there is some terrible scandal here, it will certainly come out. On the other hand it is hard to imagine the Bears handling this situation in a weirder way.

This clip might contain the greatest set of captions I've ever seen on a youtube video

Sports fans in this city are looking down the barrel of a pretty bleak winter. Boo Buie will have to do some heavy lifting.

AN ACCOUNTING OF THE LITERARY EXPLOITS OF P.J. FLECK

I first encountered P.J. Fleck through my publisher. I had gotten stuck after three years working on my novel, an autofictional account of the time I tried to return an ill-fitting sweater and how I felt it reflected on me in terms of masculinity, the self, the time I let out a massive fart during freshman English and even the teacher laughed at me and everyone called me Professor Rips Von Ass until I had to change school districts, and also Late Capitalism. The publisher was about to demand that I pay back my advance when they decided I could keep it if I took on a job ghostwriting Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat by P.J. Fleck, the head football coach at the University of Minnesota.

I do not follow sports at all, least of all football (an interesting fact about me is that I don’t own a television) and had no idea who this Fleck was or why he was writing a book about boats. Nevertheless, I was determined to try. I was in the midst of another divorce (one thing that kept derailing my autofictional memoir was that I had to keep adding ex-wives, although I combined the second and third into a single composite ex-wife), and was very close to losing my modest apartment and moving in with my other thrice-divorced writer friends onto Dirk’s houseboat. Besides, the agreement did not say anything about actually completing the book. I figured I would show up, let this Fleck character vomit off some incomprehensible hut-hut-hutsmanship gibberish, and then get dismissed by him as a hopeless football ignoramus. 

I arrived at Fleck’s estate just outside Minneapolis. There was a nautical-looking gate and instead of a bell, you pulled a rope and blasted a ship’s horn across the subdivision (later, I was told that the battle between Fleck and the HOA lasted years with Fleck’s attorneys citing his first-amendment rights as well as several sections of maritime law). Fleck answered the door himself. His eyes were ringed and hooded, like he had not slept in weeks. I greeted him as “P.J.” and he told to please call him either “Coach” or “The Admiral.” I smiled and asked him if admirals regularly were concerned with row boats. “Don’t question me about boats in my own home,” he said. We were not off to a good start.

We went into an office. There were legal pads everywhere, and crumpled yellow sheets covered the floor like autumn leaves. One of the walls was covered in letters and numbers. In the middle, he had written the word “W.R.I.T.E.” I asked him about it.

“That’s my writing process,” Fleck said. “WRITE. Waiting for ideas. Ruminating. Imagination. Torment. Editing. Got it?” 

“That’s a pretty good summary,” I told him. I had been stuck on Torment for about eight months after scrapping three chapters where I zinged my third grade bullies with a series of witticisms that my editor discovered that I had borrowed from a website called rejoinders.info. 

I asked Coach Fleck how he envisioned the book. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “The first thing people have to have in order to succeed is vision.” What sort of vision?" I asked. “Vital. Integrity. Smart. Intelligent. Omnivorous. Now.” 

“Oh, ok,” I said.

It turns out that Fleck had a lot of these acronyms and motivational sayings that he believed were the key to succeeding at life the P.J. Fleck way. He was constantly throwing them out and then explaining them to me: T.O.T.A.L.; E.F.F.O.R.T.; V.A.S.T.N.E.S.S.; M.I.Z.Z.E.N.M.A.S.T. Eventually I said to him I think that those are great, but what can you tell me about yourself, about your life. “Oh, you’re one of those,” he said.

He dug under the pile of notebooks and pulled out a manuscript held together by a binder clip and there it was: an outline of the highlights in the life of one Pteranodon J. Fleck (his actual name). It turns out I was not the first to try to ghostwrite Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat. Thirteen others had tried. Six left after two hours of acronyms. Two quit later. Fleck dismissed four more because he said they had no idea what he was trying to accomplish. One died.

The rest of the notebooks, though, had almost nothing to do with his book. They were filled with acronyms. Every time he got to a part he wanted to emphasize he ended up coming up with another acronym, stopping then and there to figure out each word. If it had something to do with the nautical life, he would highlight it and write it in a gigantic tome that he called his logbook for greater consideration. 

I thought we should try an exercise by writing the hypothetical first sentence, which would let him set the tone. “Rowing the boat,” he said. “Rowing the boat is not a slogan. It’s a lifestyle.” 

“That’s two sentences,” I said.

But he had already grabbed a fresh pad and started writing. “R.O.W.I.N.G: Reading Or I Will Never Grow. Now that’s about literature,” he said. “THE.  T.H.E. Do you see it? Do you see it?”

Coach Fleck got up and lifted his hands up in the air (I would later learn this was a Touchdown gesture) and sprinted out of the office, through the manse, and down the driveway to the gate where he began triumphantly tooting the ship horn as neighbors glared at him through their drapes. “This is it! Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

I understood. He was going to write the boilerplate book the publishers wanted but every word, every single word including articles would be an acronym which he would explain in a separate volume, his Master Annex of Acronyms in Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat. I was stunned.  I had not come to Minnesota to be confronted with a new literary form that would revolutionize non-fiction and finally get me on one of those panels where I can talk and chuckle at the same time. 

Publishers ridiculed my first experimental novel, which I planned to write in a not diabolical but somewhat challenging cipher that readers would have to decode. The real innovation would be that not every copy would use the same cipher– readers who had managed to solve it would theoretically be useless assisting their friends, whose copies of the book would present not only an entirely different cipher, but require an entirely different mechanism. Some, for example, would be elaborate pictograms, whereas others would be complex word and number replacements. The reward would be reading a transcendent novel about a code-making novelist whose most mysterious cipher would be his own vulnerability. Every publisher passed. The rejection letters I received were venomous– in one case a letter was actually coated in a rare snake venom but it had gotten lost in the mail and lost all of its potency before it was delivered, and the editor who attempted to poison me had his snakes seized. But this was now the chance to make my literary mark.

The months went by in a blur. The coach and I came up with sentences while crafting acronyms together. It was an arduous task. He put his fist through the wall after running into the third X for the day in the word “axiom,” which he insisted had to be in the book. We never left that office, and I began to sleep in child's sleeping bag in a guest room in the otherwise empty house. Fleck soon realized that his coaching duties were too demanding, and he requested a leave of absence, explaining that he and I were not just writing a book but developing a vital blueprint for life, the Acronymic Lifestyle. The university described it to the press as a leave of absence for mental health reasons, and Fleck agreed saying that he was so sane that it was blowing their minds.

It took about a year to finish the book and the original codex. I told the coach it was time to go to the publisher and release our masterpiece together (Fleck did not know this but I was going to try to get the “as told to” credit changed to the valedictory “with”). He looked at me in shock. We were not finished, he told me. No, we had just begun. You see, he had a vision and it was that the annex itself were all acronyms and they would be put into a third volume, The Appendix. Where was my V.I.S.I.O.N.?

I did not see it. The entire project was beginning to look like it was an exercise in madness. At this point I understood that I had allowed myself to be consumed by an insane task, that the power of turning words into acronyms with vaguely positive messages had taken over my life and the promise of literary fame and glory through working with an innovator like P.J. Fleck had blinded me to the immensity of the task. But I was not yet prepared to abandon the project. Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat was mine as much as Fleck’s. I was the one who came up with the second Boat Chapter. I was the one who came up with R.H.I.N.O.C.E.R.O.S. I could not leave simply abandon it and Fleck.

But the project quickly spiraled out of control. You cannot simply just make acronyms into other acronyms. We had to begin revising the master text in order to fit the Appendix acronyms, which affected the Annex acronyms. Fleck had thrown the entire mechanism off. It was at this point I noticed he had stopped sleeping. I would wake up and the light would still be on in the office, with Fleck writing away (he hated typing on a computer. I was the one who digitized everything because it would be impossible to do this without building an elaborate network of interconnected spreadsheets).

It was around this time that I began planning my escape. It was clear that if I did not leave then, it would consume the rest of my life. I had also begun to get tipped off from my third ex-wife that the second had hired the famed literary assassin Vancent Mant to murder me, and he had learned of my whereabouts at the Fleck estate. So one day, while Fleck was stuck pondering what Q.U.A.L.I.T.A.T.I.V.E.L.Y. could stand for, I slipped out and left the country for a decade or so until I had learned that Mant was himself killed by a literary assassin assassin, and I was free to return to the country and finish my own work.

I decided to stop in Minneapolis. The Fleck estate property was overgrown with vegetation. The horn at the gate had been disconnected and did not even let out a single AOOGAH. The front door was ajar and every room of the house was now covered in legal pads, the telltale periods dotting every line. The walls were all scrawled with notes saying “Annex 13” and “Endnotes and Arcana.” I saw the light on in the office but I whatever I had known of the coach would not be in there. P.J. Fleck was rowing his boat out to sea, alone.

High Winds Actors

 

There is one way to characterize this Northwestern football season that is not miserable and depressing and that is to think of it as a prolonged experiment in how much of a minor natural disaster it takes for the 2022 Wildcats to compete in a Big Ten game.

Earlier this season, Northwestern played a very good Penn State team in a ceaseless downpour and the conditions got so mucked up and horrible that it caused the Nittany Lions running backs to have the ball constantly squirt out of their hands nearly every time they tried to do anything other than fall down.  The conditions allowed Northwestern's Slopsmen to keep the game close enough to disgust the Penn State fans who had chosen to get soaked and voluntarily watch a football game involving Northwestern.

Last Saturday, big, bad Ohio State came into Ryan Field expecting the normal type of disastrous annihilation when the #2 team in the country plays a team that has not currently won a game in the United States in more than a calendar year.  Instead, they were greeted with gale force winds and torrential rain that would sort of pop up every once in awhile like Christopher Walken in a late 1990s comedy.  The result of this weather on Ohio State's deadly precision offense can be best described as hilarious.  Every series, the Buckeyes would send their superstar Heisman finalist quarterback out there to try to throw the ball to a gigantic, blindingly fast receiver that had a step on the Northwestern secondary and every time a gust of wind would turn into a Monty Python foot and slam the ball back into the ground.  Meanwhile, Pat Fitzgerald got to dust off the most perverted pre-electricity playbook he could find in some haunted football reliquary and refused to call a single pass.  The backs ran it.  The quarterback ran it.  In fact, for a large amount of time, there was no quarterback on the field and the Northwestern team was somehow using leather helmets and calling each other names like "Sport," or "Walleye."  

Some All-22 film of Ohio State's first-half offense

This worked, briefly.  The plan to use the miserable conditions as part of a concerted effort to avoid playing football meant that Northwestern held a lead and the Buckeyes to a tie for a large chunk of the game.  The weather helped the Wildcats' secret home field advantage that, despite fans being greatly outnumbered by visitors at all Northwestern home games, absolutely no one wants to be at Ryan Field.  For approximately two and a half hours, Ohio State fans were cold, wet, miserable, and forced to contemplate the impossible dignity of losing to Northwestern for the first time in 17 years, this time not to a decent team running a then-novel offense while the Buckeyes kept a future Heisman quarterback benched in favor of one of the most Big Ten quarterbacks to ever lumber out of an Ohio subdivision, but to a Northwestern team whose sole win is over a Nebraska squad whose entire strategy consisted of coordinated vomiting.  

 

Did Northwestern win this game?  Of course not.  But they largely succeeded in the Holy Mission of Northwestern Football, making Ohio State fans mad for a little bit.  With every loss, Northwestern gains a more powerful weapon by making the record worse and more radioactive, and every minute they can hold a lead, a tie, or even a sub 10-point deficit against a better team (which is all of them except-- and I cannot emphasize this enough-- the Nebraska Cornhuskers) they are going to annoy, irritate, and horrify opposing fans.  It was bad enough when these teams had to lose to Wildcat teams that were objectively good; the 45 real minutes or so when this Northwestern team was leading literally Ohio State because the game was being played in the Magnavox Guy's rumpus room had to be among the funniest 45 minutes of football played this season.

Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that Northwestern will be able to do more than briefly lead for the rest of the season.  Saturday they face a very good Minnesota team led by tailback Mohamed Ibrahim who feels like he has been running over the Big Ten West for 25 years.  He is joined by a new quarterback who is quickly-- oh wait, I have just been informed that Tanner Morgan is somehow still in Minneapolis and due to Covid-era Time Distortion, I cannot remember Minnesota having a quarterback who is not Tanner Morgan.  The Gophers are 6-3 under that moldy acronym-monger P.J. Fleck and his fucking boat.  After Minnesota, Northwestern in on the road against a  Purdue team that currently has a winning record and then must play a home Hat Game against an Illinois team that has suddenly turned into an unstoppable juggernaut that has Bret Bielema bellowing over the corpses of Big Ten West teams dumb enough to challenge him.  The dream of a two-win season feels bleak.

But it is November in the Midwest.  Perhaps Northwestern will play one of these games in a blinding blizzard where Northwestern backs are able to slowly sneak past the line of scrimmage.  Perhaps they will play in a small tornado where deafening sirens cause opponents to commit false start penalties.  Perhaps a godzilla or other kaiju will rise from the lake and immediately attack Evanston's one sort of tall office building and while everyone is pointing at the monster and yelling Evan Hull can get past the Illini defense.  Perhaps there will be a minor sharknado.  The fact of the matter is, as long as it is so shitty out that it is impossible to actually play football, the 2022 Northwestern Wildcats will have a chance

INDIANA POETRY CORNER

In 1963, the Indiana state legislature selected Arthur Franklin Mapes's "Indiana" as its official state poem.  In 2016, I was selected to review the Mapes papers for a forthcoming collection of some of his Hoosier-inspired works, where I was able to view the original manuscript for his poems.  I arrived at the State Historical Society of Indiana in Indianapolis, where I quickly fell under the watchful eye of a librarian, whom I immediately understood was reporting directly to my arch-rival in Mapes scholarship, G. Murdiel Klackwell.  

For those of you who do not know Klackwell, he is a middling critic who has nevertheless used his powers of bureaucratic maneuvering and sleazy politicking in order to keep Mapes scholarship within his ever-tightening grasp like an academic python.  Klackwell's own efforts have kept my own dynamic and boundary-pushing Mapes scholarship out of the main Mapes journals, and Klackwell has refused to let anyone confront him with pointed more-of-a-comment-than-questions in Mapes conferences by recruiting a cadre of unusually burly graduate students.  And yet, Professor Klackwell provides nothing but the most wafer-thin bromides while bulldozing over the subtleties and lyricism of Mapes.  Instead, my new annotated version of "Indiana" will rescue the poem from Klackwellism and provide what I believe is a fuller and more nuanced explanation of what is going on behind the poem in a crackling counterpoint to Mapes's gorgeous melodies.

-L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis, 2001

INDIANA 

by Arthur Franklin Mapes

God crowned her hills with beauty,
Gave her lakes and winding streams,
Then He edged them all with woodlands
As the setting for our dreams.
Lovely are her moonlit rivers,
Shadowed by the sycamores,
Where the fragrant winds of Summer
Play along the willowed shores.
I must roam those wooded hillsides,
I must heed the native call,
For a pagan voice within me
Seems to answer to it all.
I must walk where squirrels scamper
Down a rustic old rail fence,
Where a choir of birds is singing
In the woodland . . . green and dense.
I must learn more of my homeland
For it's paradise to me,
There's no haven quite as peaceful,
There's no place I'd rather be.
Indiana . . . is a garden
Where the seeds of peace have grown,
Where each tree, and vine, and flower
Has a beauty . . . all its own.
Lovely are the fields and meadows,
That reach out to hills that rise
Where the dreamy Wabash River
Wanders on . . . through paradise.

Commentary

"God crowned her hills with beauty...setting for our dreams"

Mapes is clearly describing Indiana as an ideal place.  These physical features and the state's crowning natural beauty are integral to his central ideas of the Hoosier state as an Edenic paradise.  By looking through the Mapes papers, although he never stated it directly, it seems obvious to me that the emphasis on bucolic nature is used as a contrast to urban areas, particularly other Midwestern cities which were dens of vice, crime, and the illegal pants trade.  Describing Indiana as the "setting for our dreams" clearly implies that he has a larger goal in mind for the state beyond just talking about hills and rivers.  Of course, if you were to ask the Klackwell set about it, this profound layer of meaning is utterly lost to them, possibly because Klackwell himself was spending his time building up his power in the Mapes Association of the Great Lakes in order to wield it like a cudgel and keep superior scholars out of his fancy black tie Mapes Dinners. 

"Lovely are her moonlit rivers...shadowed by the sycamores"

 Notice the play of moonlight and shadow.  This is a clear allusion to Operation: Sycamore, which would have been all over the news when Mapes was composing this poem.  This famous operation involved the NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett disguising himself as "Mr. Pumpkin" in the Sycamore Pumpkin Festival in Sycamore, Illinois, a town close enough to De Kalb that allowed him to find nearly a dozen Northern Illinois football players accepting a cache of stylish pants and jackets that were cleverly conveyed to the school underneath a float for Kornazacki and Sons Hog Stranglers as an elder Kornazacki had lured several linemen to the school by offering free apparel and ham hocks to the twelve squarest-headed lads in the county.  There is no doubt that Mapes had seen the plan to do the exchange at midnight, before Duckett intercepted them, as it was in the papers for weeks.  Mapes's brilliant way of folding this event into a geographic depiction of Indiana indicates the subtle work of a master, the type of verses that led me to Mapes scholarship in the first place.

"I must roam these wooded hillsides...seems to answer to it all"

Notice the contrast of the "pagan voice" calling with the invocation of God in the first word of the poem, setting up Indiana as a land so holy it answers to multiple sets of divine rulers.  This, along with the specific use of "roam" clearly alludes to the impermanent headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.  It was, at the time, flitting between Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, cities where Buck Duckett's investigations were interfered with and hampered by organized crime, most notoriously the Chicago Pants Outfit led by "Pockets" Mike Popstakl and his enforcers who had the entire Illinois defensive line in customized golf pants and Duckett's most reliable informants shut up or disappeared into various meat lockers and municipal stadiums. 

"I must walk where squirrels scamper"

An obvious reference to the time Buck Duckett disguised himself as an enormous squirrel in order to foil the delivery of a crate of custom athletic shorts to the Ohio State wrestling team.

"I must learn more of my homeland...there's no place I'd rather be"

Here Mapes's invocation of Indiana as a paradise clearly mirrors Buck Duckett's calls to move the NCAA headquarters to Indianapolis.  Mapes would have certainly been aware of this after the NCCA's well-publicized failed raid on an Ames dockyard on the Skunk River where Duckett and his team had surrounded a riverboat carrying dozens of crates of illegal socks for the Iowa State chess team.  What they did not know is that someone at the NCAA had tipped off Eddie Belch, a longtime associate of Pockets Mike (who would later turn on him and erupt in the bloody Chicago Pants War or 1967 which would end in dozens of mobsters strangled with their own pants and kept turning up in haberdasheries and department stores for months).  Eddie Belch's men opened fire on the raid, wounding Buck Duckett, and escaping with the socks.  While recovering, Duckett began to give interviews to magazines like Indiana Busybody suggesting a new site for the NCAA headquarters where his operations would not moved further away from midwestern pants gangs, and Mapes's language about Indiana clearly mirrors Duckett's invocations of it as a place where he and his teams could more effectively target the proliferation of illicit pants and pants-related activity throughout the region.

"Indiana is a garden...where the seeds of peace have sown"

Unfortunately, as Mapes knew, Buck Duckett was simply an investigator.  While he had unparalleled skills tracking down clues and extracting information through pressure and the occasional slap to the head, he was not prepared for the type of bureaucratic infighting that he needed to convince the NCAA heads to move their headquarters.  At this time, he was thwarted by his main rival Dreck Teckett, who Duckett suspected but was unable to conclusively prove was the key inside man for the Chicago and later Missouri Pants Outfits' operations within the NCAA.  Teckett was only the deputy for the NCAA's physical facilities branch, but his superior Gave Ledbrent was a notorious drunkard, and Teckett ran the department like a warlord extracting tribute for parking passes and access to the facility's "good" cafeteria on brown meat Mondays.  Duckett found his memos destroyed in garbage gondolas, his messages intercepted by Teckett's network of lackeys, and even his phone unable to dial internal lines which was a "maintenance problem" for months on end.  Anyone who has ever been in a struggle with this sort of rat, like how Klackwell controls access to the unread Mapes papers by requiring you to grovel to him in his palatial office can attest how draining and impossible it is for men of more magisterial talents to waste time with these petty tyrants. 

"Lovely are the fields and meadows...through paradise"

It is clear that Mapes has dedicated the final stanza of his poem to the future movement of the NCAA Headquarters to Indianapolis.  This interpretation may flow over the head of lunkheads like Klackwell and his coterie of imbeciles but observe how Mapes ends the poem with the slant rhyme of "rise" with "paradise," a clear indication that the importance of conveying this subtle message took overruled his otherwise perfect rhyme scheme.  Some scholars might reasonbly question that the invocation of the Wabash River since it does not flow through Indianapolis (that would be the White River), but this is a clear allusion to West Lafeyette, the city on the banks of the Wabash that was the site of Buck Duckett's largest operation. Operation: Wabash nearly shut down the entire Purdue basketball program when Duckett located and eventually destroyed a cache of the longest pants ever seized by the NCAA to accommodate Purdue's massive frontline of "Moose" Burton, "Moose" Jenkins, and "Big Moose" Kraboose, a 7'5" senior who dominated the Big Ten in the 1959 season despite being only able to briskly walk across the court. 

It is in the interests of Klackwell and his academic henchmen to preserve the masterpiece "Indiana" as a sentimental poem about a state and cover up Mapes's intention to use the poem to pressure the NCAA to move its headquarters to Indianapolis and away from the influence of the notorious pants-gangs.  That is why Klackwell personally intervened to prevent me from publishing a valedictory essay on this subject when the headquarters made its move in 1997 in Mapes Shapes the preeminent Mapes journal.  Instead, I was forced to self-publish it and, while the essay itself is, I believe, a persuasive and perhaps even moving testimony to the power of Mapes's works and Buck Duckett's own tireless toil preventing athletes from receiving pants from miscreants, it largely went unread and unremarked upon by both Mapes scholars and the NCAA itself even after I handed it out at the 2000 Final Four held at the RCA Dome until I was bodily ushered off the premises by jackbooted police officers sent there, I presume, by Klackwell.

As I have prepared for this new edition of my commentary on "Indiana," I have grown increasingly alarmed that Klackwell has entrenched himself completely into Mapes papers.  In fact, though Klackwell has claimed that he believes the words of Mapes are sacrosanct to the point where he has extensively noted any variations from the manuscript to the published version of his poems, I have come to believe that Klackwell will do anything to suppress the "Indiana" poem's true meaning including altering the manuscript or even have one his graduate students forge an alternate version.  

For that reason, I have been forced to, in the dead of night and using a series of keys I have stolen and duplicated, temporarily removed the Mapes papers from the Indiana archives and will keep them with me while I finish off my commentary.  It is obvious to me that Klackwell is in the employ of the remnants of the Chicago Pants Outfit and will try to alter or destroy the papers and have me garroted with my own sock garters.  Fortunately, I traveled to Indianapolis with my own trunk of wigs, train conductor uniforms, false mustaches, and a giant squirrel costume.  I suppose it should be obvious now that I have been using L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis as an assumed name and am the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett whose deeds Mr. Mapes has, for whatever reason, decided to memorialize in his poem.  Even as we speak, the agents of Professor Klackwell and whatever so-called "law enforcement" that is in his employ are trying to track me down to allow him access to the papers and block this commentary that will scandalize the entire government of Indiana.  But I am not intimidated by him or by the various pants-assassins who have been seeking me out for decades for simply doing the work of keeping college athletics free from the decadent influence of commerce.  But there it is, the tell-tale rustling outside the safehouse and I must get my old NCAA service revolver and prepare to defend these papers one last time.

The Spread

UMASS, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. U-MASS. The lips taking two steps to bleat out and hiss on the second syllable U MASS.

Imagine Orson Welles saying the word UMASS in the middle of a dyspeptic ad read for the university over the typical college commercial of eager kids staring at beakers through safety goggles, sketching things, and high-fiving the school mascot which in the case of UMASS is a guy with cartoon lockjaw in a tricorner hat who looks like Purdue Pete's cousin who drives a trans-am.
 
I don't know who the first person was to render a macot that 
is a person into a plush cartoon nightmare person, but they 
probably belong to an Ancient Society

Northwestern played UMASS in football and absolutely flattened them. After toggling between heartbreaking last-second field goal losses and losses where Northwestern’s broad football strategy mirrored the guy who breaks a beer bottle on a bar and tries to menace Steven Seagal with it, the Wildcats found a win against a profoundly bad football team.

The win did not come easy. For much of the first quarter, Northwestern struggled to move the ball and allowed UMASS to drive into range to kick field goals or ineptly turn the ball over in the a classic commedia dell’arte tradition. Northwestern went down 6-0 before scoring on of all things a blocked field goal return before subsequent UMASS drives ended with punts, turnovers on downs, and a broad misunderstanding involving the Barone’s precious scrolls, the underhanded machinations of the Visconte and his flunkies who mistook the young Gianni for the famed highwayman The Blue Skull of Umbria and a complicated mess involving counterfeit scrolls that required several minutes of explanation from the stock “referee” character.
 
Crossing route

The most compelling subplot of this game involved delving into the seedy underbelly of sports gambling. I am not by nature a gambler because I dislike losing money, because the only way to come out marginally ahead requires the mastery of tedious math or some other system that takes all of the visceral thrill of extravagantly losing money on roulette or craps or baccarat, and because the most fun thing for me to do in gambling and any other situation is do to a bunch of really stupid shtick that is a lot less fun if you are losing more than the price of a Heath bar, but the implications of gambling and people rooting for dumb things in otherwise meaningless games can occasionally transcend the game and enter the realm of the sublime. This is what happens when some bookmaker has decided to give 40 points to the 2019 Northwestern Wildcats.

In the second half, Northwestern’s offensive line had realized that even if the team is struggling this season they are still anthropomorphic trucks and could easily shove the UMASS defenders around enough for a freshman running back named Evan Hull to zip past them, and the Wildcats began approaching the Gambling Number.  At one point, late in the fourth quarter and with a commanding lead, Northwestern somehow accidentally sort of onside kicked it and recovered; at this point anyone who had bet on UMASS would begin sweating in an incredibly funny situation that they can only admit they had brought upon themselves by betting money on this obscure and wretched football game.  I know that it is 2019, that sports gambling is legal in many places, and the internet will allow you to bet on almost anything from the comfort of one's own home, but I am also sure that spiritually you should not be allowed to gamble on a Northwestern-UMASS game without going through a dungenous basement with one of those heavy doors that have a sliding peephole mechanism and speaking to a bookie with a name like "Todd the Dentist." 

At any rate, Northwestern won by 39 against a 40 point spread, the funniest possible outcome to this profoundly stupid game.
 
THE ROWBOAT APOTHEOSIS

Well, the maniac did it.  P.J. Fleck, the psychotically energetic sloganeer who has never managed to express a thought without turning it into a tortuous backronym that requires a five minute explainer video, has broken through.  The Golden Gophers are legitimate contenders.  They upset an excellent Penn State team, managed to stay undefeated until last week, and lead a satisfyingly insane West division where Wisconsin has already lost to what appears to be a very good Illinois team.  Fleck is driving his team towards a de facto West Division Paul Bunyan Championship Game and all that stands in the way is Northwestern. As Fleck himself might say: S.H.I.T.

I've made fun of Fleck a lot at this blog because he cuts a somewhat ridiculous figure.  To be fair to him, his job requires an embrace of absurdity.  Every college football coach is some combination of huckster and rage maniac or harbors some other sort of insane anti-social behavior that comes from the fact that the job asks its practitioners to spend their time alternately huddled in tape caves mastering a bizarre strategic argot and charismatically selling themselves to recruits, boosters, and television personalities-- it's like asking someone to be a general, chessmaster, and televangelist at the same time while being allowed to do as much unhinged screaming as possible.  All college football coaches are insane because only an insane person would want to do a job where they get fired every two years and are subject to the machinations of boosters named "Bale" Cronston the Feed King of the Greater Mump Junction Area and a hail of nonstop criticism from angry fans.  It is a job completely bereft of dignity. It probably should not exist.

Fleck's goofy Harold Hill routine was funny when Minnesota was mediocre.  Fleck swept into town with his Row the Boat catchphrase that he brought over from Western Michigan only after a legal settlement, came up with a bunch of dopey catchphrases, and sort of floundered around the Big Ten West like most Big Ten West teams.  He appeared in the conference doing a bunch of flashy sword swinging techniques and the Big Ten just sort of lazily shot him.  But Fleck obviously knows what he is doing.  He loaded the Gophers with talented players and bided his time before turning them into a powerhouse.  It is genuinely enjoyable to see any Big Ten team from the fraternity of ass-kicked cellar-dwellers to rise up and challenge for an opportunity to get mowed down by Ohio State in Indianapolis.  Northwestern has a chance to see a team that, like them, does not often get a chance to shine in the conference and implode their season like the Metrodome.

This is where Northwestern is right now: their chances to play in the "Big Boy" Bob's Lasertag and Go Kart Franchises of Northwest Pensacola Bowl have evaporated, they have yet to defeat a Big Ten team, they have only recently started scoring touchdowns.  Their main goals now are to be so bad that merely hanging close to a Big Ten opponent could cause them to plummet in the rankings-- an upset over Minnesota would force the Gophers to forfeit their final games to just think about what has happened for awhile until another Big Ten West team goes to find them a few years from now for one last job.  That and the battle to keep the Hat that looks so improbable that it is too depressing to think about, Lovie raising the Hat to the heavens as his beard transfers to the trophy before engulfing the entire Chicago area in triumphant beard for an entire year in an event known as The Hattening.
 
As much as Illinois is the Hated Rival of Northwestern and the Hat must 
not be lost at any cost, who doesn't like Lovie Smith?  Please sign my change.org 
petition The Illini Must Hire a Lunatic Doofus Specifically For Blogging Purposes

Meanwhile, Northwestern, despite the Wildcats' famous victory over the University of Mass, seems to be in more trouble than ever.  The injuries continue to pile up for the 'Cats, and they appear to be running out of available quarterbacks to the point where they need to start running out of obsolete formations like the Kaiser's Wedge or the Gruntback Option that require the entire team to grow mustaches.  Minnesota are heavy favorites and it seems unlikely that Northwestern will be able to score the massive upset and go out on a positive note from an otherwise wretched season on senior day. 

On the other hand, never tell me the odds-- unless Northwestern is favored by 40 points, then I absolutely need to know about those odds.     

BOAT RACED

Northwestern has won now won six consecutive games, a rare feat not accomplished in more than 20 years by going repeatedly to overtime, outlasting coaches and adventure quarterbacks and receivers whose hands have turned to stone at precisely the wrong time, by living impossibly long in a zone between winning and losing and beating Purdue but also letting them hang around and so it makes sense that they went out on a cold, wet, and miserable day and let the Earth envelop the Minnesota Golden Gophers.

Teams can no longer run on Northwestern's defense and Minnesota could not pass or hold onto the ball or do much other than stand around in the rain and write beleaguered civil war letters to their loved ones.  This has somehow become par for the course.  The Gophers haven't scored a point in Evanston since 2013.  Two years ago, the Gophers could not stop Northwestern from eating almost an entire quarter on a single drive.  Saturday, Gopher quarterback Demry Croft managed only two completions on the day while throwing three interceptions.  And a week after Purdue shut down the Northwestern running game, the Wildcats steamrolled the Gophers as Justin Jackson continued piling up yards and moving up in the Northwestern, Big Ten, and college football record books. 

P.J. Fleck rues forgetting to instruct his 
team in the art of S.C.O.P.R. (Score Points in Rain)

This game's theme was misery as rain and later sleet pounded the stadium.  Though it made the gameday experience unpleasant as the wind roared through the north endzone and rain seeped through saturated gloves and everyone involved wanted to go home and clutch at a mug of warm cocoa, it appears that Northwestern has found a winning formula to stem the tide of visiting fans from overwhelming the stands by largely making the entire stadium uninhabitable, much like how the Russian army destroyed their own cities to slow down the advancing Napoleonic forces.  Next time a Big Ten opponent rolls through, be it Iowa or Wisconsin or Michigan, Northwestern should consistently spray water at spectators, hurl small ice chips at them, and bring in gigantic fans to blast them with howling, frozen winds to empty the stadium of all but a handful of Northwestern supporters jumping around on defense in order to feel their limbs (this would not work on Nebraska fans who would somehow bud off each other to form ever-larger chains of red-sweatered colonies that would engulf the entire stadium while talking about how many more of their buds there are in the stadium and also yelling "let's go shirts").

Northwestern's largest ratio of Northwestern fans during a Big Ten 
home game this season

The Wildcats now have eight wins.  They are heavily favored over a truly wretched Illinois team trying to salvage a miserable season with a Hat and a deathblow of Northwestern's hopes to play in a higher-ranked bowl that will invariably skip them over for a better Football Brand school anyway at stake. 

Northwestern has had a truly bizarre football season that has played out like a higher-stakes sequel to last year.  While the 'Cats certainly could not match the original's shocking home loss to a bad FCS team, they raised the emotional stakes by looking shaky against crappy non-conference teams and dead in the water against a Duke Blue Devils team that has spent the ACC season getting repeatedly exorcised.  But the highs have been higher with a preposterous and literally unprecedented three-overtime winning streak, eight wins, and even a narratively satisfying blowout over the very same P.J. Fleck who had beguiled them in 2016 with a Big Ten roster to boot.  There is no way they can top this rollercoaster unless the team is literally disbanded in August, forfeits at least one game, and then reconvenes in time to inexplicably beat an Iowa team that is contending for the West title and also P.J. Fleck has now taken over at Alabama.  

There is no reason why Northwestern should not beat a young Illinois team whose best days are surely ahead of it.  Yet there is no telling what the promise of the Hat does surely makes madmen of anyone, and the Illini will certainly come out mustering all of the offensive firepower and Jeffs George that they can in this storied Rivalry Contest.

GUEST COLUMN: YOU WILL PRY THE HAT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HEAD

The following column was mailed to BYCTOM's North American Headquarters stapled to a crude, papier-mache Abraham Lincoln head and a flip book indicating various karate moves that would be inflicted upon the editorial staff of this website and the corporate hierarchy of the VIL Network, an entertainment and sports portal presented by Amalgamated Anvil and Anvil Lubricants.  

They sent me out with a cardboard box

Full of orange ties and laminated cards

With OSKEE acronyms

But what those bureaucrats will never know is

I took the Hat.

The current hat's a crude replica

I had done in the trophy underground

The very shop that made

The Civil conFLicCT for Diaco

He disavows

I wear the Hat around the house

And when I watch the Illini lose on TV

Yes it's quite heavy 

And my neck aches, hunched and stiff

Hamstrings are fine

Look at the woeful Illini now

On the eve of this Rivarly

Winless in the con'frence

Imagine how they'd do with signs that said

"No Northwestern"

Or Northwestern pinatas

Or plush Willie Wildcats mauled by trained falcons

Or shredded to fluff as I run them down in a combine harvester

While I yell over the roar to the team THIS IS WHAT WE WILL DO TO THEM

ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD

WE WILL COMBINE HARVEST THEM

ON OFFENSE, DEFENSE, AND SPECIAL TEAMS

And then I light myself on fire in a special suit

And run around screaming and making a scene

It's a metaphor for the team

To get Fired Up

Admit it, you miss all of this

With Lovie Smith and his placid dignity

Instead of signs and clocks

And literally falling and while I'm prone on my behind

Getting flagged

Here's my prediction for the game

I don't care at all

In fact I will spend the day in my Hat Shed looking upon the Hat, shining it and buffing it because I BUILT THIS HAT SHED AND SOMEONE CLOSED THE DOOR AND IT LOCKED BECAUSE I DIDN'T PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE LOCKING MECHANISM OK? I WAS TOO FOCUSED ON THE RECESSED HAT CHAMBER AND AREAS FOR CLOAKS TO MATCH WITH THE HAT AND I'VE BEEN TRAPPED HERE FOR WEEKS SO PLEASE AFTER YOU'RE DONE READING MY POEM AND PLEASE CALL A LOCKSMITH OR SOMEONE WITH A GOOD, STRONG KARATE KICK BOOT TO GET ME OUT OF HERE THIS IS A VEXING SITUATION, PLEASE MAKE SURE THIS PART IS RENDERED IN ALL CAPS.

A Win Streak

After 15 minutes of game time or approximately Lawrence of Arabia in real time, neither Purdue nor Northwestern had scored.  It was a cold, endless, inexplicable night game so perfunctory that Northwestern did not even bother to break out its Night Game Gothic alternative uniforms but instead paraded around in a ridiculous industrial camouflage.  The game was marred by strange penalties, an unending aerial assault (Purdue asked backup quarterback Elijah Sindelar to throw the ball 60 times).  By the end of the game, Northwestern looked fairly certain to win, but Purdue hung around enough in the fourth quarter to theoretically tie it-- by the end, I was hoping they would, that they would get their 15 points or whatever they needed to even the game and send it to overtime where I am pretty sure the remaining dozen Northwestern fans deranged enough to stay through all 19 hours of this game would have immediately smeared themselves with hot dog condiments, constructed cardboard capes, and chanted as Northwestern ceased being a football team and immediately became a bizarre overtime cult.
 
Remaining Northwestern fans prepare for The Overtime by performing 
their profane ritual of putting their hands in the air, putting their hands up in the air

The Wildcats hung on for their seventh win and fifth straight by maintaining their fearsome run defense, daring Sindelar to beat them.  Purdue, though, refused to allow the 'Cats to bash them with Justin Jackson.  They plugged every running lane, bringing in safeties and linebackers and Purdue fans with the most robust Joe Tiller mustaches to crowd the line of scrimmage.  That seemed to work until Riley Lees unleashed a brilliant punt return only to have the officials call it back-- with no clear footage of the infraction, a confused Ryan Field crowd unleashed a torrent of abuse screaming out SIR YOU WILL HEAR FROM MY LAWYER in disgusted unison.  The Wildcats responded with a quick drive and did not look back; a blistering 94-yard drive after a near goal line stand just before the end of the first half further increased the lead presumably because Pat Fitzgerald was unable to signal in his traditional end of half play to take the ball and tunnel underground.
 
Riley Lees gains a new nickname the Aggrieved Punt Returner

Wisconsin's win over Iowa ended any hope of Big Ten insanity somehow leading the 'Cats to a near-impossible berth in the championship game.  Northwestern will now try to avenge last year's defeat against the Gophers, who spent last Saturday sending the Nebraska Cob Nobblers to the Harsh Realm and extend their win streak.  It's all bowl positioning and hat trophies now, and the possibility of a nine-win season that would have seemed impossible after the Duke game.

ROW ROW ROW

More than any sport, college football nurses cults of personalities around charismatic coaches, none more so than Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck, who is charismatic enough to start his own cult.  The Gophers nabbed Fleck from Western Michigan where he led the Broncos to becoming a MAC powerhouse that may have also been no less than the third best team in the Big Ten West last season.  He also invented the greatest football slogan of all time in "Row the Boat," a motivational mantra he developed after the tragic loss of a child.  "Row the Boat" became inextricably linked with Western Michigan football, a horse team that somehow became confusingly adorned with all manner of nautical symbolism.

Western Michigan puts up a hippocamp statue of its Martime 
Horse theme outside Waldo Stadium

Last year, I wrote about Fleck being trapped by his popular catchphrase, tiring of rowing the boat but constantly harangued by those who want to hear about boats and rowing.  But that was a deranged fantasia written on the the world's final blogspot website.  Fleck has gone beyond rowing the boat to a host of ludicrous motivational acronyms.  Here for example is Fleck explaining F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Forget About Me I Love You) and H.Y.P.R.R. which is somehow an acronym for How Yours Process Results Response, which is a completely insane thing for an acronym to stand for.

Fleck is an acronym savant, the kind of person who would blast into a 
room prepared to tell a group of people about A.L.U.M.I.N.U.M. 
(Always Leave Unused Melodicas In Numbered Utility Modules) and then, 
finding himself in Canada, improvising to Actually Lackadaisical Ungulates 
Make Intolerable Neighbors In Unkempt Meadows without blinking

I normally think ludicrous motivational acronymeering is ridiculous and insipid, but it works for Fleck because he comes across as completely sincere, as someone who believes wholeheartedly in whatever HYPRR is and is ready to HYPRR with you and your entire family for months if necessary.  It also works for Fleck because he works in an insane business, the business of asking large young persons to smash into other equally large or sometimes even larger people while literally a 100,000 people scream at them and point at them accusingly with foam #1 fingers. Maybe Fleck hopping around in a rented hotel conference room with a wireless microphone telling his players about the revolutionary SCOMPTT Method (score more points than them) can bring the Gophers back to contention in this hilarious and miserable football conference; maybe his slogans will collapse in on themselves and remain plastered on the walls as ironic icons of football ineptitude like Butch Jones's Champions of Life rhetoric or Tim Beckman's numerous propaganda posters.
 
Illinois locker rooms are dedicated with the
 tattered remains of Beckman's information campaigns

I am not predicting anything about this season because Minnesota and the non-Wisconsin and non-Illinois Big Ten West is completely inscrutable.    

NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL NO LONGER MAKES SENSE

The single defining fact of Northwestern basketball had been its absence from the NCAA Tournament.  College basketball exists in a strange netherworld where teams play what seems to be like hundreds of games on frozen, anonymous weeknights and flash through on the ESPN score crawl in obscure, indecipherable initials before finally emerging in March as a fully-formed sports product kept aloft by buzzer-beating triumph, crowd-sobbing heartbreak, and a vast and technically illegal gambling apparatus.  There is winning those endless games, rising through the various arcane rating systems, and getting the team's name on one of those brackets and there is nothing, and for the entire history of the NCAA Tournament Northwestern did not exist.

Take it all in. We are dancing. #B1GCats | #PoundTheRock | #ItsTime pic.twitter.com/JYCyGosejd

— NU Men's Basketball (@NUMensBball) March 12, 2017

And then there they were.  They appeared to clinch their tournament appearance with a miraculous, last-second heave.  Then, buoyed by the emergence of Northwestern's vast alumni network of sports personalities that have somehow cornered the market on the world's dumbest profession, by Celebrity Moms and Dads, and through a tournament run that included The World's Least Advised Foul, a Goaltending Rules Controversy, and A Child-Meme, Northwestern became ubiquitous and almost instantaneously overexposed and despised.

This year's Northwestern team arrives in a different universe.  For years, every Northwestern team just wanted to make the tournament, to appear on that bracket, and to return to getting dunked through the Earth's core.  Now, the team has expectations to make the tournament.  The transformation of the team from a desperate also-ran to a very good team is welcome but the experience is totally different.  The Wildcats will be favored in several games.  Every win comes with the question of how it affects the Tournament Resume instead of being judged on the traditional Northwestern metric of how angry opposing fans are to lose to Northwestern.  A failure to make the tournament this year would be disappointing instead of a soothing swoon into the embrace of a sports curse.

Northwestern basketball will be unrecognizable because they are playing in an airport-adjacent monster truck and wrestling arena.  The school is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an awful and bullshit renovation of Welsh-Ryan arena that will have things like seats and lighting and ways for players to enter and exit the court without having to get all fired up and do their IT'S GAME TIME chants and then politely wend their way through the hot dog line, but this is a mistake as grave as the grave digger that plies its trade regularly at the All State Arena.  Welsh-Ryan was a glorious shit dump that turned into a bona fide home court by the end of the season, when Northwestern fans-- more than the other team even-- packed the cramped stands that floated on top of the court and turned it into a raucous thunderdome and now that the school has had like three games of this atmosphere they are off to play in front of a quarter of an arena filled with the skeletons of hardy explorers who attempted to sit in the top deck during a DePaul game and were never seen again.     
 
Northwestern saved money on Welsh-Ryan Arena renovation costs by 
making the NCAA Tournament and therefore opening a hole to other 
dimension from which energy flowed and destroyed the site of this unholy occurrence

The administration is trying to build Northwestern sports into brand that doesn't have anything to do with historical lousiness.  They've got a football team that makes bowl games.  They've got a basketball team in the tournament.  They've got the facilities and arenas from exorbitant amounts of money raised by top-hatted boosters.  And, as befitting a college sports program, there's even a discomfiting scandal complete with a disturbingly inept attempt at a cover up that looks like someone in the athletic department tried to run off a player by framing him for not performing in the bullshit make-work program they invented by forging his signature and repeatedly misspelling his name.

The Wildcats return nearly every key player from last year's run, bring back a few more from injury, and add additional recruits.  But last year's run was on a razor's edge-- McIntosh's dagger against Rutgers saved them, the Mighty Heave of Nate Taphorn got them in, and no one is as aware of the precariousness of NCAA qualification than the team that watched that Juice/Shurna team miss it by a combined total of  like five points spread over several agonizing games.  There's nothing guaranteed this season; they won't take anyone by surprise, they are playing in an arena on Mars, and they still rely on their starters to do nearly everything.  Northwestern basketball has cleared its greatest hurdle, but now, after the ecstatic excitement of filling out a bracket and seeing Northwestern players in One Shining Moment, the question is what can they do to follow up.