The Crosstown Cup is in full sway, delighting Chicago's fans of interleague baseball and extremely nasal arguments that end with the brandishing of switchblade sausages. There's even more underlying tension in this year's matchup as Cub fans continue to bask in their team's championship and the White Sox languish in a rebuild. It has been the sad lot of White Sox fans to suffer through decades of historically moribund baseball only to be overshadowed by the Cubs because the Sox have been less famously and catastrophically inept. Even ESPN got into the act, omitting the Sox's 2005 championship from a list of Chicago sports titles while giving themselves over to the sporting world's unchecked Cubmania.
ESPN's 2005 World Series graphic vs the graphic shown on its Oct. 25, 2016 broadcast The other bit of intrigue floating about the Crosstown classic comes from a rare blockbuster trade between the two teams. The Sox sent their ace Jose Quintana to the Cubs as part of their scorched earth rebuild strategy, a grand purge of baseball competence. In return the Cubs sent four prospects headlined by their heralded outfielder Elroy Jimenez. The front offices hope this trade benefits both teams, with Quintana helping to stave off the grim reaper that has been stalking the Cubs' aged rotation this season and Jimenez joining the Sox's armada of superstar prospects to launch them into contention down the line. For fans, the stakes are much higher-- if the trade turns out to be lopsided, fans of the swindled team will have to read about the exploits of their lost superstar in the same paper every day and will be unable to move about the city without being confronted by opposing fans sporting their Barrett or Pierzynski jerseys mocking them with fingersnaps and pirouettes. This year's series has already erupted into fireworks. John Lackey, the grizzled old Cubs pitcher who looks like he has hunted Tony Robbins for sport and taken his teeth as a trophy, hit four White Sox batters, including an astounding three in the same inning. Lackey's maniacal beanball rampage provoked the ire of White Sox announcer Hawk Harrelson, who managed to drag himself to Chicago for the series in case anyone needed to be challenged to a duel.
The venomous way he spits out the word "LACKEY" is his greatest achievement in a long baseball announcing career of threats and grievances. Harrelson further clarified his comments on Lackey on Wednesday, telling a Tribune reporter "“I was hoping that they would drill his ass big time because he’s an idiot.” "He's full of shit and you can print that," Harrelson continued, adding that Lackey's "gonna look pretty funny tryin' to eat corn on the cob with no FUCKIN' TEETH." The Cubs-White Sox rivalry has seemed to cool after the novelty wore off; the crosstown series has reached its twentieth year, and interleague clashes have faded into the fabric of the regular season. Perhaps the Lackey-Harrelson feud can spice things up beyond the Quintana trade and the Rick Renteria Vengeance Quest. Or they can find a way to drum up excitement beyond baseball by throwing each other off the Reichenbach Falls. HAULING THE SHIP Here in 2017, Werner Herzog has been more or less Walkenized, almost entirely engulfed by his own caricature of a grim-voiced German who looks at an idyllic meadow and sees a hissing cauldron of murder. Herzog is the maestro of the word "murder." The word murder was invented for Werner Herzog to use it over narration of adorable penguins; in the same film, he repeatedly pronounces the McMurdo research station in Antarctica as "McMurder." There are elements of that in "Burden of Dreams," the 1982 Les Blank documentary about the making of Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo." Towards the end, after years of fighting the logistical and political difficulties of filming in the Amazon and the impossibilities of shooting a Werner Herzog movie in the Amazon with its attendant Herzogian problems, Herzog breaks down and goes on a Herzog rant: But the Werner Herzog in most of the movie is not the expected despairing sourpuss. He's possessed, singularly focused on finishing his movie, seemingly indifferent to the suffering of his cast and crew and workers that will be placed in wholly unnecessary danger by his unwieldy, bulldozer-driven winching system. "Fitzcarraldo" is about a 1920s opera buff who hopes to finance an opera house in the Amazon lavish enough to lure Enrico Caruso through a quixotic rubber scheme that hinges on hauling a ship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog tries to make a movie about a man's quixotic quest to haul a ship over a mountain by hauling a ship over a mountain, quixotically. At one point, a frustrated Herzog explains to his engineer that he simply must haul the ship over the mountain because of his metaphor. But there is no metaphor. The struggle to haul the ship over the mountain has become completely literal. "Burden of Dreams" continuously plops viewers down in the middle of various crises-- the departure of his two stars Jason Robards and somehow Mick Jagger; the delicate political situation between his crew, indigenous groups, and various South American governments; a late-night arrow attack; the laws of physics-- but the larger question of Herzog's obsession with hauling a 320-ton steamship up a mud-slicked mountain remains barricaded in Herzog's psyche. Somehow, the film, which is more or less an unbroken chronicle of calamity, always seems to hint at something stranger going on in the background as Herzog offhandedly explains some other insane, herculean task by pointing out how a ship has been towed through thousands of miles on a map or with snippets of a scowling, jumpsuited Klaus Kinski stalking about the set. I would watch a documentary about the documentary crew filming this movie, complete with a documentary about that crew in an endlessly recursive pre-taped call-in show loop of televisions until we can get to the bottom of the ludicrous lengths Herzog went to in order to film "Fitzcarraldo." HEADS There are a multitude of uses for severed heads: triumphant displays of justice, phrenology, cryogenically freezing them for some sort of future resurrection that I always imagine involves being medically stapled to a robot body and and then rampaging about New England as a terrifying Irving-esque Reverse Horseman, and Frances Larson explores them all in Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found. Larson has a serious-minded and scrupulous approach for a topic that in lesser hands could lend itself to the pages of “Gross Let Me Look At That Magazine” for summer camp twelve-year-olds. Nevertheless, the book does not dilute the bizarre and macabre element of its subject by including sentences like “Rosenbaum vomited in disgust, but his physical revulsion could not temper his desire to take possession of Haydn’s skull.” Larson writes that she decided to write this book while doing research at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, famous for its collection of shrunken heads. She places the collection at the center of a booming nineteenth-century trade in shrunken heads as curios for the Victorian elbow-nudging set and for museums and other institutions on a worldwide mission to collect and categorize artifacts. As Larson explains, lecturers and museums used shrunken heads to titillate and unnerve Victorian patrons by presenting them as barbarous practices to contrast with Western civilizations. At the same time, Western demand for the heads completely divorced them from any cultural context as they became commodities produced exclusively for export; some British head collectors in New Zealand, Larson notes, became victims themselves, their heads posthumously tattooed to be sold as Maori heads betraying an expression of simultaneous horror and appreciation for grim irony. Augustus Pitt Rivers, a man who could not possibly look more like the exact person you are picturing when thinking of the namesake of a museum known for a dubiously-sourced collection of shrunken heads Another important nineteenth-century use for skulls was phrenology, the pseudoscience that I hope influenced numerous plays with stage directions like MRS ORKENNEY dropped her ladle, for she could see in the flash of lightning that MR CAVENDISH had the brow ridges of a monomaniac. Here’s Larson, with one of the greatest sentences ever composed in the English language: “Historian Roger Cooter has described how, by 1826, ‘craniological manica’ was said to have ‘spread like a plague...possessing every gradation of [British] society from the kitchen to the garret.’” Phrenology dovetailed with a general mania for collecting and studying skulls. Larson points out that, like with the collection of shrunken heads, this scientific collection of bones encouraged gruesome behavior; scientists colluded with all manner of tomb raiders and grave robbers to build their head caliper ossuaries then used them as the basis of bogus racial science that these scientists would invariably find proved to them that the most advanced civilization was the one that had the scientists ankle-deep in purloined skulls. Larson writes that prominent phrenologist Franz Josef Gall's "appetite for skulls became so well known that eminent men began to fear for the safety of their crania." Larson provides an eclectic and broad, if sometimes scattershot, look at our severed heads and ourselves. In doing so, she expertly walks a fine line between historical rigor, contemporary resonance, and, let's face it, the type of oddities a person seeking out a book described on the jacket as "an idiosyncratic history of decapitation (the New Yorker)" would be looking for-- grotesque stories involving medieval executioners attacked by bloodthirsty mobs with flaming projectiles for their lack of beheading competence, pictures of frowning muttonchops standing around large piles of labeled skulls (there are few things more unnerving than reading a book about severed heads and immediately being presented with a multipage listing of illustrations), a historian of phrenology named Roger Cooter. Severed does not offer up a Grand Theory of Head Collection; it can be read almost as a catalog of things people have figured out to do with heads including shrinking, guillotining, graverobbing, dissecting, worshiping, and cryogenically freezing them. Larson displays an impressive breadth of research into these disparate practices raising all sorts of fascinating questions that would have never popped into my head that remains for the time being anchored safely into my neck until I insult the Dauphin.
For the past week, the National Football League has taken over Grant Park, the Auditorium Theater, and the surrounding environs for a three-day list-reading spectacle. Now, it has blown town like an indolent carnival, only leaving the indentations from the CHRYSLER DRIVE TO THE ENDZONE LEGAL BRIEF ZONE and the VERIZON 4G LTE ENTERTAINMENTS TENT featuring some hideous corporate simulacrum of a good time. Now, after a fanfare-laden Schedule Announcement, there is little the NFL can do until the Beginning of Minicamps and the inevitable revelation of some hideous football scandal that requires Roger Goodell to grimly sit behind a lectern in front of a gaggle of gravely tweeting reporters. All of the major American sports leagues have expanded their drafts into spectacle. Major League Baseball now televises its draft, even though many top prospects will need to be outfitted with cadaver ligaments before they throw a pitch in the big leagues. The NBA has turned the ordering of lottery picks into a show itself, where general managers cringe as the capricious whims of fate reward their season of tanking with the rights to draft high-upside teenagers who might not know how to play basketball and wispy Europeans harangued by basketball xenophobes. The NBA draft itself has become a fashion spectacle, far removed from the days when players would dress like bellhops and, during the 1990s, an entire textile's factory worth of fabric hastily cut into the shape of a suit. Bonzi Wells's NBA career was undone by a massive scandal when he was revealed to be three children sitting on each other's shoulders The NFL draft's bloated, grotesque self-importance has become its most entertaining aspect. Over the course of three days and countless hours of coverage, the draft broadcasts features men in suits discussing some MAC tight end with the gravity of an unfolding missile crisis interspersed with ineptly stage-managed spectacles involving children or the armed forces. The draft combines the demented square-jawed football authoritarians with the uncanny valley corporate branding strategists who are genuinely excited about product integration in an exciting contest to determine the most irritating type of person on the planet. The ringmaster is Roger Goodell, the loathsome avatar of swaggering corporate dick-swinging in whose hands a minor rules infraction about football air pressure turned into a months-long legal siege that has generated thousands of pages of legal briefs and tied up the actual United States judicial system. Roger Goodell reacts to boos like an indignant vice principal while dressed, inexplicably, like a secret policeman from a dystopian future movie who works for a shadowy government cabal with a name like The Curators The NFL draft also serves as an annual symposium on stilted language. Draft analysts, driven mad by the existence of their job, struggle each year to come up with new and increasingly abstract ways of describing players as fast, strong, and skilled, which are the same qualities that football teams have looked for in their players since time immemorial. Instead, they combine a desperate desire to say something new witbh the requisite QUARTERBACK POSITION IN THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE dialect that surrounds the sport to convince anyone listening that they are finally suffering the neurological effects of a lingering elementary school dodge ball injury. This year, analysts decided to, for the first time in the history of English, describe human beings as "sudden." That nonsensical usage could only appear in an NFL draft broadcast or by an unhinged Dostoevsky translator in one of those scenes where the protagonist is thrown out of a tea reception when everyone becomes incredibly hostile for some reason. You do not need me to tell you that the NFL draft is tedious, ponderous, and hilariously self-serious. The entire NFL brand revolves watching enormous men tear each others' ligaments described by a panel of shouting Jack Webbs that pauses only to sell us trucks and boner medicines. And yet, the biggest moron of any person involved in the NFL draft is me for paying attention to it because Chicago's Big Ten Draft would possibly involve Wildcats. GODDAMMIT I CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT THE STUPID NFL DRAFT Two Wildcats were chosen in the draft. Dan Vitale followed in the footsteps of Drake Dunsmore and went to Superback City. He enters the NFL as a fullback because superback sounds like it is a position that exists only in those fake intramural Harry Potter sports. Dean Lowry's draft selection video features a man broadcasting from a creepily-preserved Vince Lombardi office mausoleum. Then, the draft analyst immediately denigrates Lowry as short-armed and possessing the brain pan and skull contours of a rotational player who may lack the alimentiveness of a full-time defensive end. McSHAY: This fellow's ratio of brow-ridge to frontal cortex indicates such a pronounced deficieny in the philoquarterbackal instinct that I should look askance at anyone who drafts him as anything other than a common grout-monger KIPER: Must improve: skull Most distressingly, Lowry now plies his trade for the hated Packers. While I hope for Lowry to have success in the NFL, his victories will be won over the prone body of Jay Cutler. I don't know how fans of teams with armies of draftees reconcile their divided loyalties between college and pro football other than by yelling roll tide at all football occasions and damning everything else. The Chicago Bears performed a number of trades to draft a bunch of people I've never heard of based on the work of dozens of scouts and phrenologists. I'm pretty sure they drafted a linebacker named Kwiatkoski specifically for the benefit of sports radio callers so they can demand he play more because dat guy's hard nosed instead of calling to complain about Jay Cutler or attempting to order Italian beef sandwiches when they mistakenly think they've hit the other number on their speed dial. CHICAGO IS THE BASEBALL CAPITAL OF THE UNIVERSE Chicago is the epicenter of baseball. The ballyhooed Cubs have lived up to the ballyhooers, storming their way to the top of the NL Central. Jake Arrieta has continued his rampage from last season with another no-hitter. He now appears in hitters' dreams to strike them out and terrorize them with fiendish wordplay. The Cubs have walked and bashed their way to victory after victory, even after the beefy lad Kyle Schwarber tore all of his knee ligaments running in the outfield like a Chuck Jones cartoon character. Schwarber flies too close to the sun Meanwhile, on the South Side, the White Sox have been equally destructive. The Sox, bolstered by a new infield and nuclear pitching rotation led by enchanted Fantasia broom Chris Sale, have lain waste to the American League. Last year, a young and exciting Cubs team became the darlings of baseball while a promising Sox team languished. The Sox have succeeded this year while managing to overcome the all-consumingly bizarre Spring Training saga of Adam LaRoche. LaRoche retired after the Sox attempted to prevent his thirteen year-old son from spending every single moment with the team. This protest spun into a near-mutiny, with LaRoche's supporters on the team hanging the younger LaRoche's youth-sized jersey in the locker room and describing the precocious lad as team leader. The whole affair climaxed in a interview with the Elder LaRoche that detailed his work in overseas prostitution sting operations. Adam LaRoche's season unfolded like the first chapter of a Murakami novel (Original ambiguously sinister caption from the Chicago Tribune) It is the sad lot of the White Sox that, through no fault of their own, they remain overwhelmed by the droning media cacophony over the Cubs. Both teams are historically terrible; after the Versailles Peace Conference, both Chicago teams dedicated themselves to complete baseball ineptitude. While the Cubs and Red Sox garnered the losing streak sympathy, the White Sox, whose streak eclipsed the Red Sox, attracted far less attention. When the White Sox finally won a World Series in 2005, the national baseball media treated it like a baseball championship; the Red Sox victory a year earlier was greeted with the cathartic jubilation usually associated with the end of world wars. Ken Burns's Tenth Inning addendum to his endless baseball documentary included what seemed like an entire feature film's worth of people in book-lined studies rapturously celebrating the Red Sox victory while barely acknowledging the White Sox; this is even though the White Sox won with a stunning series of dominating pitching performances, a dramatic fourteenth-inning game-winning homer from an anonymous bench guy who could have been invented by Ken Burns, and an unhinged maniac manager. As the Cubs suck up all of the baseball oxygen, the White Sox have quietly matched them in heroics. Chicago boasts the two best teams in baseball. That said, there is nothing more likely than the White Sox winning a World Series in a year filled with overwhelming Cubs hype. ADVERTORIAL
Do you like the web-log Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com, the very website you're reading right now? Are you tired of angrily pushing buttons on your computer unable to summon more BYCTOM posts and then flinging your keyboard into a nearby creek? Then you may also like BYCTOM's shorter stories posted on Medium. These include: Chicago, This City Is Now Under Football Law by General Truckbeer NFL General Truckbeer regulates the Chevy Truck Month General Football Administrative Area College Football Is Not About Just About Succeding On The Field, It's Also About Christ How Could You Miss That Block You Lollygagging Shit-For-Brains by Head Coach Jack Kakkowicz Head Coach Kakkowicz shares how football imparts lessons about life...and faith You're Wrong, the Fans Will Love This Post-Modern, Deconstructionist Wrestler by Bryce Hransky-Flamenco A wrestling fan pitches a surefire new character Stop Trying To Change Baseball From What It Should Be: A Relentless Murdersport by Wervil "Bark" Menderdorn Former ballplayer "Bark" Menderdorn has had it with all these soft, modern rules Thank you for reading. IT IS COMPLETELY INSANE THAT THE NFL DRAFT IS LIKE IT IS It is possible to trace the evolution of the NFL draft into the ludicrous spectacle it has become. Americans like professional sports, they love football, and even after the league has added national games, invested in football-adjacent products like fantasy pools, and purchased an entire television network to broadcast old football games and football talk and underwear-clad draft prospects running around cones, they still have not managed to exhaust interest in professional football. The overproduced telecasts with 37 panelists and aggressive animated robots makes sense as well-- football's maximalist pageantry is part of its appeal. The attachment of advertising and sponsorships to everything but the air surrounding the stadium can be explained because this is America. Yet, while the NFL draft makes sense within the insane context of twenty-first century sports, its grave tone and air of pompous pronouncement remains jarring. Each pick immediately becomes subject to a tribune of solemn haircuts who sit in judgment of their 40 time, game tape, and phrenological skull construction. Players may rise and fall based on a few hundredths of a second in a drill or because of "character concerns," an amorphous concept that covers prospects equally tainted by marijuana usage, saying dumb things on social media, and terrorizing people with violence. None of this bloviating has anything useful to say about the success or failure of any of draftees, but that does not stop anyone from releasing voluminous grade reports made of guesswork and, more recently, tedious value charts that add another layer of abstract analytics talk to people smashing into each other. The worst part about the NFL draft, though, was that it did not take place in New York when the Jets moved up to take Christian Hackenberg.
This week, the Playoff Committee released its newest rankings which, we should all remember, remain entirely meaningless at this stage. For example, the Playoff Committee could rank Purdue at #2, just ahead of Faber College and Texas State (not the Texas State in San Marcos, but the one carried to glory by a chemistry graduate student with NCAA eligibility played by Sinbad in Necessary Roughness) and it would not matter one bit until the Playoff Selection Committee selects the actual playoff teams.There is still no explanation as to why the Playoff Committee spends much of the season as the Sure, These Teams Might Make The Playoffs Committee. The current Texas State had previously been Southwest Texas State and originated as Southwest Texas State Normal School. Lyndon Johnson attended and, according
to Robert Caro, immediately turned the student government
into a polarized hotbed of political intrigue before he went
on to the White House to deploy the the Great Society and
perfect a bunghole-sensitive pants ordering procedure The playoff picture once again revolves around Northwestern. The Wildcats own the only defeat against #7 Stanford, while they were obliterated by the undefeated fifth-ranked Iowa Hawkeyes. The Cardinal, however, remain in the playoff hunt. Playoff Committee Chairman Jeff Long explained that Stanford's loss to Northwestern counts less than other losses because the arduous journey from the California Bay Area to Evanston wreaked havoc on the players' body clocks.
I think we would not be doing our due diligence if we didn't recognize that a team was playing at 9 a.m. Pacific Time, and I recall last year we had a game, I believe UCLA traveled to Virginia. So we look at those things. They're a factor. How big of a factor? I can't quantify that for you, but I know it was discussed by the committee members and probably should have been.
There is no other satisfying explanation for a loss to Northwestern. It was the beguiling Central Time Zone, conceived of by midwestern railroad barons specifically for football purposes, that made Stanford players incapable of tackling Clayton Thorson or stopping Kevin Hogan from lofting a passes to Kyle Queiro in the endzone. Ryan Field's dozens of home fans and aggressive tarp arrays already bring the Big Ten's fiercest home field advantage, but what can teams do when the very laws of time and space are brought to bear on their helpless players? It is a good thing that the Playoff Committee is here to sift through the unpredictable and impossible riddle of college football and come up with rankings that factor in time zones, humors, and phrenological analyses of quarterback skull shapes to throw into chaotic mix. "I think we would not be doing our due diligence if we didn't recognize that the quarterback's forehead indicated docility and inability to diagnose defenses at the point of the snap is a factor when arbitrarily determining a list of good football teams because 45% of power in the Southeastern United States is generated by people yelling at Paul Finebaum," Long said The issue of body clocks has obscured the week's more important clock revelation. The University of Illinois released the full Beckman Report. The report, available in full here, is more than 1,200 pages long. Under the heading "Team Culture and Environment," the Beckman Clock is revealed, an ominous Instrument of Intimidation that counts down to the Hat showdown between the Illini and "The Team Upstate." Time is a hat circle Here is the report's sixty-fifth footnote that might be my favorite thing ever written about Tim Beckman:
Some players complained that Coach Beckman’s requirement that injured players wear purple jerseys and placement of an anti-Northwestern sign in the athletic training room improperly communicated to players that being injured or seeking medical treatment was the equivalent of being a hated rival, at least to Coach Beckman. The vast majority of players, coaches, and sports medicine staff interviewed dismissed any such notions and reported no concern or even interest in either issue. Instead, witnesses interpreted these motivational tactics as meaningless.
PENN STATE RAN OUT OF TIME Penn State faced numerous obstacles coming into Ryan Field. For one, they bravely transitioned from Eastern Time to Central Time. Then, they had to face the Wildcat defense. For most of the first half, Northwestern stymied the Nittany Lion attack. After an injury to Clayton Thorson, Justin Jackson took over, going for 186 yards on the day. Northwestern led 20-7 at the half, with at least one other scoring opportunity sailing past the uprights. But in the second half, Penn State came back. On one drive, the 'Cats got a stop only to give their opponents second life with consecutive roughing calls on a punter and a sliding quarterback. Then, wide receiver Geno Lewis picked up a fumbled reverse like an Australian Rules football player and heaved a perfect pass to his colleague in the endzone. Jack Mitchell's missed extra point gave Penn State the slimmest lead in the fourth quarter. But when the defense stuffed Saquon Barkley and backup quarterback Zack Oliver managed to complete a long pass on third and the approximate distance between Evanston and Happy Valley, Mitchell got a chance to win the game. Jackson moved the ball effectively into range and Mitchell blasted one through the uprights for a thrilling comeback. Penn State got the ball back with nine seconds, in which they did nothing. This unfortunate turn of events stymied reporters' efforts to call it a walk-off kick because Jack Mitchell plays baseball and the Iron Law of Sports Announcing clearly states that if an athlete plays another sport, it is necessary to shoehorn that into broadcasts as much as humanly possible until viewers want to declare that they play a second sport of kumite fighting and are going to travel to the press box and pummel some godforsaken Joe Buck acolyte. Sports announcers were probably responsible for Pro Stars, a cartoon product where Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Wayne Gretzky used their sports skills to defeat the forces of evil in lairs that, because of the participation of Gretzky, always inexplicably contained at least one large sheet of smooth ice Clocks once again played a central role in the game. Penn State coach James Franklin deployed an avant-garde use of timeouts during the final minute, inexplicably allowing the 'Cats to run the clock down instead of allowing his offense about 30-40 seconds to get into field goal range on their final possession. Some Penn State fans took exception to his clock management and responded in the best way possible: by flying into an incoherent rage on the internet. Something about college football turns ordinary men and women into capricious space emperors, ready to cast out coaches, athletic directors, and anyone else involved in the football team into the space pits used for henchman and failed head coaches of as-yet-uninvented space sports. The entire apparatus of a university is not safe from the wrath of football fans. Nebraska supporters, already reeling from a streak of improbably close losses including one at the hands of Northwestern, suffered the ultimate indignity of a loss to Purdue. Purdue fans spent the week confused, like they were henchmen who managed to kill Batman in the first 20 minutes of a movie and then had to figure out with the next two and a half hours. Nebraska's most unhinged fringe sent e-mails to the university chancellor. Every fanbase, including Northwestern I'm sure, has its epistolary football maniacs, but not every fanbase had their letters conveniently loaded onto the Worldwide Web so we can see internet comments brought into the Academy for the first time outside of a seminar entitled UNCALLED HOLDING PENALTIES: Discourses of Internet Football Commentary, this moderator is a joke and MUST BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY by the Department of Internet Football Semiotics. Purdue faces Northwestern at Ryan Field on Saturday. The Boilermakers suffered a 48-14 shellacking at the hands of the Illini last week. Purdue fans have gone past pessimism and resignation to a rarefied football nihilism, staring stoically at another touchdown drive that means nothing. The Wildcats are heavy favorites in the game. At the same time, the appeal of college football is its unpredictability; it is a sport fueled by improbable upsets, jubilant goalpost-handling, and sour-faced upset victims staring despondently into the unknown. Purdue will rely on its strength: the Big Ten's greatest reserve of really scrappy-sounding quarterback names. Darrell Hazell will has benched Austin Appleby for freshman David Blough, both of whom train by having Purdue Pete burst through the walls in their lecture halls and chase them around campus on one of those old-timey railroad handcars. There are no guarantees in college football except that a Purdue win will result in a liveried footman delivering my angry scroll letter to Northwestern's president demanding he turn in his University President’s Sword. CLEAN THEIR CLOCK College football is the story of desperate teams running into each other at the mercy of a callous clock. Teams can stop the clock, they can eat clock, they can kill the clock. In the end, only the clock decides when the game ends, unless the game ends on an insane series of laterals with zero time remaining and then there is no time, everyone is simply floating in an ether beyond the concept of time itself between the fourth quarter and infinity, inscrutable to even our most learned scientists, philosophers, and ACC video replay officials. Our clocks are oblivion devices, counting down to our inevitable demise one picosecond at a time. There is no way to stop or reverse time; our regrets remain alive and the dinosaurs remain dead. Stanford can do nothing about its loss to Northwestern except complain about body clocks, James Franklin can't get those 30 seconds back, and the Beckman Clock is always counting down to the next Hat Game on the horizon.
