Haturn Devouring His Hat

HAT-- Hat!

Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat.  Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat?  Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat; hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat!  Hat-- hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat.

Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat.  Hat hat hat hat hat.

Hat hat hat hat?

Hat.

Hat.
 
Hat hat hat

Hat hat hat hat hat.

THE LAND OF LINCOLN TROPHY

It is Hat Week.  Hide your valuables.  Send your loved ones away.

Northwestern's season has come down to this.  The Wildcats have not won a football game since September 21st.  They will not be bowling.  They have suffered a litany of football indignities too gruesome to describe on the way to a stunningly awful season.  There is no hope.  There is no redemption.  There is only Hat.

Last week, Michigan State did something only few other teams have been able to do on a miserable, cold, windy day in Evanston (and lest you think it was not windy, I defy you to rewatch the game and count how many seconds it would take ESPN's ace announcing crew to refrain from talking about the wind.  That's why Northwestern is Chicago's Big Ten team-- because the announcers will not stop talking about wind conditions).  They decisively beat the Wildcats without having to resort to some bizarre, last-minute, physics-defying, deity-intervening play.  The 'Cats moved the ball well on the Spartan defense in the first half, but the loss of Kain Colter to injury and some big offensive plays from Michigan State tipped the game in their favor, Northwestern lost, and now hat.

There is one indignity so wretched and one low that Northwestern has avoided so far: to lose The Hat to a woeful Illinois team coached by Beck Man.  And that reduced this season to a single game.

I don't care that the 'Cats are not going to Indianapolis, and I don't care that they're not ranked, and I don't care that they have lost every game in an increasingly horrifying fashion that has convinced me that we are living in Homeric times and Pat Fitzgerald has accidentally started a petty feud with a lesser ancient Greek demigod who has decided to punish his fist-pumping hubris with a series of outlandish defeats.  This season has been a waking nightmare, but these seasons happen and Northwestern will return to bowl contention.  But I care deeply about the Hat and all hat-related ideas, and I refuse to see the Land of Lincoln trophy spirited away by that purple-hating, no Northwestern sign-having, "that school up north" referring, visor-wearing, sub-Zookian geek show from Champaign-Urbana.

THE HATFIELDS AND THE NO HATFIELDS

General Beckman was confident coming off his first conference victory at West Lafeyette.  By the end, soldiers had written that he was at the end of his rope.  He had in the past been reprimanded for sideline interference and the unauthorized use of mouth tobacco, so it was no surprise that he had attacked a subordinate with a spittoon.  There's no evidence for this, but a rumor had started that said he had long, bleary-eyed late night conversations with a hat that he whittled.







Historians now believe Beckman's campaign was derailed by 
his unceasing obsession with hat-vengeance

Letter from the front of Tim Beckman's War on Northwestern

November 25

Dear Mother,

It is cold.  The lads were heartened by our victory in West Lafayette.  We were far from home and the enemy had a train and a drum.  Gen. Beck-Man had us return home and dig trenches around the hat.  We are tired, we are strained, we have a losing record.  One weary soldier has mentioned something about basketball season, and when Gen. Beck-Man heard about this, he said I'll show you a basketball and tried to dunk on an entrenched artillery piece.  He has reprimanded us ordering the officers to violently rip hats off of our heads.  They do this half-heartedly.  I long to come home, but I suppose we may not until Gen. Beck-Man finally gets his hat or is fired out of a cannon.

M.F.B.

Beckman's men were exhausted.  He had marched them day and night from Indiana, but refused to proceed in a Northern or Western direction because they didn't do that in his company.  He had an officer plot out a route that included an Atlantic crossing and the Cape of Good Hope.  Instead, the officers ceremonially renamed the directions "Chief" and "Dee Brown."  Their compasses were artfully redesigned (chuckles softly to no one).





November 29

Dear Mother,

We are under constant watch.  Some of us have begun to refer to Gen. Beck-Man as "Lord Stovepipe."  He has taken our razors and made us wear long beards to look "more civil warry."  Only one man has tried to desert, but he was found by J Leman and ceaselessly pelted with monocles.  We have been building a giant Pat Fitzgerald out of straw and our unit must attack it each day and take the hat from its head.  It is shoddily built, and has fallen on many good men.  We dare not question or protest.  We can only shout "Chicago's Big Ten Team," affix our bayonets, and hope that we avoid its flailing fists.

M.F.B.   

HAT, NOW

This is the last game of the season.  The Wildcats can salvage some hope against an equally downcast Illinois team or face a cold, hatless winter.  Let us endure one more game, let us rally for The Hat, let us flood Memorial Stadium with our Lincoln regalia, let us spend the rest of our lives taunting our Illini friends and loved ones by wearing nothing but stovepipes in their vicinity, let us hope we have Tim Beckman to kick around for as many seasons as it takes to drive him into hat-madness. 

Hat?

Hat.

Good Gravy

We should have seen this coming.  All of the preseason hype, all of the accolades, all the sweet dreams of the Kolter-Mark option (which sounds like an exotic financial implement that could short-circuit the United States economy), all of the rankings.  It has all come crashing down like a proverbial House of Cards, by which I mean Pat Fitzgerald is now inexplicably talking with an absurd southern accent and delivering fourth-wall breaking asides about Purdue to a camera that isn't there.
 
Kevin Spacey sounds so much like a Shelby Foote impersonator that I expect him 
to threaten to bring hellfire on someone's district then turn to the camera and 
start talking about Beauregard

Last week, Northwestern faced a Nebraska team without its wobbly slingshot passing all-everything QB Taylor Martinez and looked like they could finally pull off a Big Ten win.  Instead, with no time remaining, a ninth-string quarterback impossibly named "Ron Kellogg III" lofted a ball in the endzone at a Northwestern defender who improbably tipped into the waiting hands of a Nebraska receiver in a play known as Inconceivably Heartbreaking Defeat Right.  At least that is what I am told.  I did not see the play because I was busy gambling on jai alai, but at this point Northwestern football no longer has the ability to shock me.


Chi Chi Ariguzo's endzone collapse is a pretty decent summation of the season to date
 
Northwestern is 0-5 in the Big Ten and is desperately scrambling to make a bowl, any bowl.  The 'Cats will play anyone, any time in December.  They will play the fourth-place Sun Belt finisher in an abandoned tile warehouse?  They will play the remaining UFL all-stars in a rendering plant.  They will undergo some sort of Captain N process to play against the 1991 Los Angeles Raiders in a Tecmo Super Bowl.  They could really use a win.

THE VICTORS

Northwestern hopes to avenge it's entire season by taking out a mediocre Michigan team on Saturday.  Michigan, also touted as potential LEGENDS DIVISION contenders, is not having a great season by any stretch of the imagination.  The Wolverines sit at 2-3 in the Big Ten and have yet to record a positive rushing total in the past two games.  Fans, though, can be comforted that they have at least qualified for a bowl game that Michigan fans can haughtily look down their collective noses at.  

Michigan's offensive woes have made this a winnable game for the ailing 'Cats.  And even though a theoretical Northwestern victory has lost a lot of luster against the unranked Wolverines, it would still be vastly satisfying.  One of the great pleasures of college football fandom is rooting not only against a current team but entire programs, fanbases, and civilizations.  All Big Ten fans have been traumatized by Michigan and Ohio State for so long that you could put a winged helmet on Rocky Balboa and I'd be singing the Soviet National Anthem.

Of course, this would mean that Northwestern would have to pull out a victory at all.  Last week, I speculated on twitter about some potentially devastating Northwestern loss scenarios for this season including deadly meteor strikes, vacating the 1995 Big Ten championship, and having a mass of Chicago-area Northwestern fans cause a large enough ruckus to force a forfeit.  I've brainstormed a few more since then:

-Colter breaks away for game-winning touchdown but is tackled by the Visitor Section Tarp, which has escaped its moorings and is out for vengeance.
-All of Northwestern football turns out to be an elaborate long con from a family of grifters who wait for the 'Cats to be in winning field goal range before announcing that the game is over, disassembling the stadium, and selling it to be ground up and shipped as gravel as part of an art installation project.
-Northwestern wins a game in dramatic fashion, but does so to the advantage of Biff Tannen, who has traveled back in time, wagered heavily on the 'Cats, and immediately forces us all to live in a post-apocalyptic Biff Town.
-A Soviet sleeper agent alters Northwestern's super-patriotic flag uniforms to hypercolor fabrics that reveal pictures of Lenin when exposed to sweat and moisture.  The game is forefeited when a riot breaks out led by the surviving relatives of Apollo Creed and professional wrestlers from the 1980s.

Northwestern's uniforms have created a Patriotic Singularity 

LET US WIN A BIG TEN GAME

The Wildcats are certainly hungry for a victory.  They will be without Venric Mark the rest of the season and have a fairly banged up with emerging threat Stephen Buckley also injured.  It has been a rough season for the 'Cats, but a victory here would still keep them in bowl contention and give some much-needed stakes to the Hat Game.  Buck up, Northwestern fans.  The 'Cats have been alternately maddening, depressing, and shocking, but never boring, and they can use your fist claws this afternoon.