The Narrative

James Franklin has finally done it.  After losing to Northwestern at Vanderbilt, canceling a game against the Wildcats by ordering a specially designed goblet that said "home and home series against Northwestern," and smashing it against the walls of his palatial Coaching Mansion and then mailing the shards to Northwestern's athletic department, and then moving to Penn State to build them up specifically, one presumes, to defeat Northwestern, Franklin stood triumphant on Ryan Field under a darkening sky with a cloud of crows and ravens and other species ordered off the Foreboding Birds catalog released to terrorize Evanston, and he departed victorious, with nothing left to play for.

Sportswriting exists to invent narratives for events that involve a lot of luck and happenstance. Wisconsin, for example, had failed to win a game at Ryan Field from 1999-2016; this streak comprised of four whole football games, each with its own discrete improbable insanities that had nothing to do with one another but became perfect for inventing a narrative of the Badgers unable to win at this lakeside doom fortress in front of a hostile crowd of nearly 40% Northwestern fans.  I have absolutely no idea if James Franklin cares at all about Northwestern or about his epic three-game losing streak dating back to Vanderbilt, but I also know that in my brain he spends most of his time skyping with Tim Beckman about his cadence in late-night fireplace-lit pacing as he composes angry couplets about Pat Fitzgerald and the yowling Wildcat noise on the PA system and Air Willie, which I am pretty sure has not existed during Franklin's entire Big Ten tenure but is something he could have read about on the internet.

James Franklin, as he always does, pondering how to beat Northwestern, 
a real rivalry that I know for a fact has consumed him

Another misleading narrative would be to look at the final score and assume that a febrile Northwestern squad flailed against a top-five Penn State team.  Northwestern's defense bottled up Penn State's fearsome attack for the first half, and Saquon Barkley, that terrifying running back who trains by leaping canyons and stiff-arming university buildings marked for demolition, could do nothing at all.  The Wildcats' offense, though, bungled a few early opportunities to take the lead, including a sequence of penalties near the goal line where they were called for holding, false starting, conspiracy to false start, and mail fraud and then turned it over.  The defense in the second half, often called upon to stop the Nittany Lions from within Northwestern territory, eventually faltered, Barkley finally unleashed his most terrifying move by psychically moving a referee into the way of a helplessly diving Wildcat, and Penn State romped through the rest of the game.  This is the second time Northwestern has played a top-tier opponent tough through a half of football, which may not count in the standings but does count in the extensive glossy literature that will be sent for the consideration of the people at the Bleedgrowl Bear Trap and Bear Trap Accessories Bowl should the Wildcats successfully win Big Ten games.

MARYLAND

Maryland has been in the Big Ten since 2014, but has been hiding in the conference's weakling East Division the entire time, safe from the Northwestern Wildcats and their onslaught of occasional bowl-caliber football competence.  No longer!  The Terrapins will now face a desperate Northwestern team coming off consecutive losses to two of the Big Ten's best teams while Maryland hopes to build on the momentum of a season featuring wins against the crumbling rot of late Ottoman Empire-era Texas and P.J. Fleck's Order of Rowboatsmanship, both on the road.

What does Maryland look like this season?  This is a blogspot website that is all about integrity, and I will not insult you by pretending to know anything about Maryland football.  I remain in shameful ignorance; the only Maryland football I can recall watching was the end of last year's Quick Lane Bowl, a tedious Goal Line Fumbles Exhibition in front of 47 people, the apotheosis of the Quick Lane Bowl experience, and one I desperately want for the Northwestern Wildcats.  From what I can tell through extensive minutes of research, a runaway combine harvester has mown down all of the Terrapins' quarterbacks, and they hope that third-stringer Max Bortenschlager, who sounds like the video game boss second form of Blake Bortles, will be healthy.

These projections predict the emergence of a third Bort Quarterback by 2025

The narrative here is confusing: either Northwestern has valiantly struggled against two top teams to open Big Ten play or they are bad and the only thing to do is to go on the internet and call for the citizen's arrest of all of the coaches for the crime of calling ill-advised speed options.  Last year, the Wildcats found themselves in a similar place before rallying against the middle of the Big Ten. This game, against a team outside the AP top ten, will let us know which narrative to pursue: a miserable decline that depends on only on holding onto the Hat, or another triumphant march towards bowl eligibility.

CURSES

Sports narratives are part of the atmosphere of the baseball playoffs; they roll in like a ghostly fog carrying the ominous spirits of every baseball fuckup that has ever happened to a team stretching back generations.  Baseball playoffs are the province of snake-bitten managers, dominant pitchers forever labeled as postseason chokers, of grudges and of curses because the events of a baseball playoff game are almost completely random and defy rational explanation.

Last night, the Cubs and Nationals played an operatic 75-hour baseball game, a tortuously long time for anything that is supposed to be entertainment, but especially baseball because playoff baseball is an exercise of prolonged dread.

Every agonizing moment of playoff baseball, of watching the manager turn his roulette wheel to another shaky relief pitcher with guys in scoring position, of grimacing through errors, of knowing the guy coming up with two outs and men on base is the guy who is going to chase balls out of the strike zone every time why would you swing at that it's in the goddamn dirt, of Jon Lester staring at a man who is sitting down cross-legged between first and second, and the human mind is incredible at knitting those anxieties into prophesies of doom.

The Washington Nationals are cursed.  Not in the supernatural vengeful spirit in disguise who is not at all happy about getting sprayed by that chariot sense, but in the sense of the narrative overwhelming the rational, of the ridiculous baseball catastrophes congealing into a palpable wad in the pit of every fan's stomach, and the desperate search for a connection between every misfortune into a larger explanation of why the team cannot win.  

The Washington Nationals are cursed because it is almost impossible to believe the following things happened in the same baseball game: an ace pitcher comes out of the bullpen as a reliever (a tremendous playoff baseball wrinkle*), gets two quick outs, and then the following sequence of events happen: a infield single, bloop hit and RBI double, a controversial dropped third strike involving an arcane baseball rule about hitting the catcher with the follow through that I've literally never heard of, a catcher's interference, a hit batsman, an egregious error, a valiant comeback against a Cubs bullpen that appeared to be throwing the weighted baseballs that pitchers grab to make Pete Townsend windmills motions as they warm up, the ending of an inning against a beleaguered, laboring Wade Davis on a pickoff play where the officials determined that numerous Lobaton Molecules had strayed from the bag for several microseconds as measured by the New York Office's electron microscope.

Javy Baez's controversial and possibly illegal backswing against Matt 

Wieters gives him his A.J. Perizynski Moment. You know that this was 

a rule because if it was not, A.J. Pierzynski probably would have spent 

his career walloping catchers on follow-throughs or kicking them in the 

facemask before loping over to first while already pointing to the section 

in his rulebook that he has taken from his pocket that has numerous 

post-its pointing to where it doesn't say you can't do that

The Washington Nationals are cursed because they are managed by a man who has been engulfed by the narrative.  Dusty Baker has made numerous mistakes in this series, but so does every manager; in a league overtaken by the tenets of La Russism where a manager is expected to use at least a dozen pitchers in every game, where the most radical thing a baseball manager can do at this point is to identify his nine best players and ask them to play an entire game of baseball, there are an infinite number of decisions that will look dumb in retrospect.  Baker's most controversial decision, the bizarre public waffling on the Many Ailments of Stephen Strasburg eventually revealed with the subtlety of Chairman Kaga unleashing the asparagus, worked out when Strasburg heroically struck out 12 Cubs and even allowed the Nationals to survive long enough to invite this debacle.  But Baker has overseen too many catastrophes to avoid having the narrative swallow him, where Baker's various baseball management mistakes have been compounded by the inexplicable and the unholy.

Dusty Baker signals for a relief pitcher and an explanation of why this 

keeps happening

Sports curses exist because we need to make sense of things, because the truth that every single baseball game is its own discrete event and that sometimes fatal flaws intersect with weird luck more than once and sometimes that happens to an entire city's worth of sports teams in the playoffs for decades is cold comfort.  It is because we need stories and explanations beyond sometimes shit happens, in baseball.  It is because people naturally find it much easier to believe that something that has happened before will happen again than to believe that something that has not happened will; the Cubs choked and imploded in every playoff series my entire life and therefore it was easy to believe that they would never win, that there was some bizarre, inexplicable force preventing them from winning anything ever instead of individual events like Lou Piniella deciding to save Carlos Zambrano for a game that will never come one year or the Cubs' bad defensive infield biting them another year or having most reliable bullpen arm be a person named "Joe Borowski" in another.

For the first time, the Cubs are not only the team without the narrative, they appear to have been getting all of the breaks.  They head into the NLCS with a strained, exhausted pitching staff against the best team in baseball.  Their only fresh pitcher is aged prospector John Lackey who seems capable of only giving up home runs and bellowing the word fuck; Lackey has hinted at retirement after this season and there is nothing more terrifying than a Lackey with nothing to lose, a Lackey who could even come in from the bullpen and rip his jersey off to show he has the word FUUCCKKK tattooed on his belly, which he is exposing to the entire world while also bellowing.  

The Cubs this year are not the best team in baseball in a desperate fight against the narrative.  They are a good team going against a better team in a playoff format where being better matters only slightly and where chance and ill-fortune swirl intersect with every move.  I have no idea how to watch baseball without desperately groping for doom, I have no idea how to react when the other team has imploded and are blaming obscure rules infractions and mystic forces beyond our control, but I have to say it's not bad.



---------------------------------------------------------
* MCCARVER (bursting through the studio show set in an MRAP and handcuffing himself to Alex Rodriguez before dramatically swallowing the key) Not a lot of people know this, Joe, but in the movie Major League, Ricky Vaughn was the starter coming out of the bullpen. He was not the closer, Joe. He was clearly a starter coming out of the pen in a Game 163 situation.  Tell them, Joe.  Tell my family not to forget me and also not a lot of people know this but a lot of managers don't like to use their starters in these situations because (he cannot be heard over the grinding sound of from the sawblade cutting through his handcuffs).

The Gauntlet

Northwestern held the lead at halftime.  They came into a hostile and raucous Camp Randall as heavy underdogs and managed to keep Wisconsin's offense and Alex Hornibrook in check mainly because the Wisconsin Badgers all agreed to replace their hands with the robotic grasping claws from the pick-a-prize carnival game and could barely manage to hold onto the football for more than a few plays at a time.  The Badgers' opening kickoff rolled into Northwestern hands and the Badgers fell on several more fumbles.

Wisconsin's ball security was affected by each player going back into
time and accidentally preventing their parents from falling in love at
the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance 

Unfortunately for Northwestern the turnovers and defensive stops only led to a few points.  Time after time, Northwestern faced a third-and-one and Wisconsin's defense clamored through the line to tackle Justin Jackson and force a punt.  In the second half, the Badgers made an adjustment to the Tecmo Bowl Called Play defense that left Clayton Thorson scrambling for his life so profoundly that he leaped between graphical planes and appeared in one of the approximately 35 cut-ins that showed Hornibrook playing catch with someone named Brock Huard that ended when Hornibrook chopped off his head with a sword and absorbed his left-handed quarterbacking powers through a lightning storm while a barely visible speck of Thorson hoofed it across the field in the background hoping to avoid any Wisconsin tacklers who had also transcended time and space.
  
JAMES FRANKLIN'S REVENGE

James Franklin has never beaten Northwestern.  He lost as coach at Vanderbilt, and then struck the 'Cats from their schedule in a minor bureaucratic move that readers of this blog may be familiar with because I have put far more thought and energy into disparaging him for this than any other human being on the face of the earth for literally years.  I have suggested that Franklin had ducked Northwestern in order to qualify for a bowl game and that he moved to Penn State to marshal their resources against the Wildcats much like how William of Orange assumed the British crown in order to have a better chance of defeating his arch-nemesis Louis XIV; according to the person who edits his Wikipedia page, "Louis described William as 'my mortal enemy' and saw him as an obnoxious warmonger."


This time Franklin has with him the most terrifying player in college football.  We thought that had been the case with quarterback Christian Hackenberg, but Hackenberg turned out to be a bizarre case of people anointing him as an NFL quarterback after his Freshman year, watching him repeatedly throw the ball to defenders and patches of otherwise undisturbed turf, and continuing to rate him as a professional quarterback because the Football People once decided he was one until he managed to, through the sheer force of inertia, make it into the New York Jets' Quarterback Purgatory where he backs up at least one McCown Brother although spiritually he might be backing up all McCown Brothers past, present, and future.
 
A McCown in action 

I have no idea how a team is supposed to stop Saquon Barkley, a sentient monster truck who is somehow allowed to play college football.  One way may be to rig the field with traps like the end of Predator, where Barkley breaks free and crosses the fifty after knocking over dozens of Northwestern players and spectators before leaping over pits, log traps, and Northwestern's safeties who have coated themselves in grass and are screaming I AM HERE, JUKE ME NOW.  It may also be possible to form a complex Defensive Alliance among Big Ten West teams by offering to annex five yards of Ryan Field to Iowa in order have their linebackers secure it.  Or, Northwestern could do what they did the last time Barkley played at Ryan Field and stuff him on the very last play of the game while James Franklin refuses to call timeouts because he left them all at Vanderbilt.

THE CUBS ARE IN THE PLAYOFFS AGAIN

The Cubs are in the playoffs for the first time in a century without the goat, without the curse, and without a cackling Joe Buck bursting forth from a grave to deliver solemn Vincent Price Thriller monologues about how many people have died watching the Cubs fail to win the World Series.  The Cubs are in the playoffs as a baseball team and not the wretched personification of failure.

Last year, the Cubs had been designed to foment baseball anxiety.  They led baseball in everything, won 103 games, and earned a trip to baseball's playoffs that exist only to eliminate the regular season's best team.  They survived a tour of baseball's mystical bullshit, first against a team whose fans have come to believe in numerology, then against a team that shut them out repeatedly, and finally in a World Series that seemed designed specifically to induce emotional breakdowns from both teams' catastrophist fanbases.  This year, the Cubs meandered their way through a crappy division and have sort of popped up in the playoffs again.

The World Series was supposed to have exorcised the playoff demons and silenced Cubs fans' overrwrought and irritating pessimism and obnoxious public displays of baseball woe, but habits die hard, and it is very difficult for me to watch the Cubs in the playoffs without immediately looking for the most humiliating and awful way they could lose.  Last year, for example, I was sure that Cubs castoff pitcher Jeff Samardzija would shut them out in the playoffs because ex-Cubs always came back to haunt them and then he gave up a home run to a relief pitcher.

This season, the obvious Cub hobgoblin is Dusty Baker.  Baker is older now, a little more stooped and Piniellabellied, and suffering from Kirk Hinrich Sports Accessory Syndrome where he is slowly being overtaken by wristbands.  A lot of Cubs fans blame Baker for the tens of thousands of arm and shoulder injuries that slowly engulfed Mark Prior and Kerry Wood and the subsequent collapse of the Cubs, although Baker could not possibly be responsible for the dozens of times Prior collided with baserunners, got struck with comebackers, fell into open manholes, and had vivid dreams about demons slashing his shoulder capsules with claw-fingers and then woke up and collapsed during a towel drill the next day while some surreal dreamland Anti-Prior gained shoulder capsules until his shoulders were nothing but capsules that turned into wings as he flies around knocking out other dream people's teeth and taking their pants before public speeches.  Baker and the Nationals have a tremendous pitching staff and a fearsome lineup, and it is possible that Baker will have his day celebrating at Wrigley Field.  This time, it will be because his team played better and not because he has been reborn as an avatar of Ironic Cub Destruction.

Cubs Perennial September Call-Up 
Augie Ojeda, picked up by the Diamondbacks, 
became another Avatar of Ironic Cub 
Destruction and batted like .450 against 
them the in the 2007 NLDS while his eyes 
glowed an unearthly red light after exposure 
to anti-Cub artifacts secretly buried in the 
Wrigley visitors' locker room by a heretofore 
unknown Cubs curse mystic  

We now live in a world where the Cubs will be playing in a series against a fanbase worried about its own nonsensical set of curses and inexplicable playoff failures.  The Nationals have yet to get out of the Division Series with their loaded roster, and the Cubs will try to continue that streak in an attempt to one day cultivate a group of fans as performatively sad-sacked as those who root for the Cubs.
  
Now famous, the World Series Cubs can be found on 
local commercials

The world is, for now, free from having to hear about Cubs fans rhapsodizing about how they will never win and from announcers throwing up pictures of old-timey cars on broadcasts and the Litany of Cubs playoff failures and the people saying "black cat" in profoundly Chicago accents, and the harrowing footage of Steve Bartman escaping Wrigley Field while 20,000 people simultaneously menace him with beer bottles.  Humanity now faces something perhaps more dangerous: confident Cubs fans who travel en masse across the Midwest, waving W flags and honking Go Cubs Go at otherwise innocent bystanders. 

Week 10: Playoff Picture

Well, the College Football Playoff Committee has come out of its walnut-lined antechambers and released  their rankings.  There's still a month left of college football action, and the rankings have essentially no meaning, yet here we are, in a world where college football playoff rankings have been released with the subtle dignity of an Imperial Durbar.

The Delhi Durbar of 1903, marking the ascension of Edward VII to the throne with an 
elephant and pith helmet party  

What is the best college football team in the country?  There are three polls that tell you.  The Associated Press poll ranks the top 25 teams in the country and is voted on by a panel of newspaper men selected on the quality of the old-timey reporter hat they wear in their newspaper column photographs.  The College Football Playoff poll is compiled by ten people involved in collegiate athletics, a former USA today reporter, a retired Air Force general with "3,261 flying hours," and a former Secretary of State whose expertise on the Soviet Union has given her unparalleled insight into the byzantine bureaucracy of bowl subdivision football. The Coach's Poll is not actually filled out by anyone and appears, fully formed, on the desk of a USA today sports editor every Sunday written on crumbling vellum and enclosed in a hollowed-out mastodon femur.

DID FORBES NAME ANYONE ELSE IN THIS ROOM THE MOST POWERFUL WOMAN 
IN THE WORLD? I DIDN'T THINK SO. SIT DOWN, RADAKOVICH.

What is the best college football team in the country?  The best way to tell is through head-to-head competition.  Unfortunately, there are few opportunities to set up games directly between the best teams.  Instead, the preferred method is innuendo, insults, shaky applications of the transitive property, arguments about the strength of conferences that are not entirely but still sort of fueled by residual Civil War animus, and screaming at people.

What is the best college football team in the country?  The best way to tell is to take a playoff committee of randomly-selected bureaucrats and put them in a conference room where they change into tunics and headbands, take psychedelic drugs, and hallucinate football games that cannot happen.  "I see Alabama taking the lead against Clemson by turning themselves into a swarm of bees that move to the score of a pipe organ played by an octopus made of colors," one says.  "I see Notre Dame and Ohio State, wait I don't see them anymore now it's a really graphic depiction of the conception of a griffin with the roars and screeches and I can't look away," says another.  "Third and three and it's a dive play up the middle for a first down, great block by the right guard," says Barry Alvarez.

What is the best college football team in the country?  Fuck it, it's probably Alabama.  It's always Alabama.

FESTIVAL OF FIRED COACHES

We are still a month away from the end of college football season, and the Football Bowl Subdivision is a smoldering heap of fired coaches.  Two coaches have retired mid-season: Jerry Kill has left Minnesota because of health concerns; Steve Spurrier just threw up his arms, said fuck it, and immediately left South Carolina to shirtlessly drive dune buggies around golf courses and yell PLAYING THROUGH before showering unsuspecting foursomes with empties.  Al Golden was fired after angry Miami alumni demanded it through a series of airplane-borne banners in much the same way they buzzed an MLA convention to demand a new vice provost.  Maryland fired Randy Edsall, who spent weeks attempting to avoid detection by hanging out on the sidelines of Maryland football games. Former Illini coach and man who woke every morning to shake his fist in the direction of Evanston Tim Beckman lost his job shortly before the season.

The only thing college football fans enjoy more than winning is ousting a struggling coach.  For one, college football coaches have an enormous effect on programs from recruiting players to setting strategies, to gland-handing administrators and pretending to care about what some old cigar-chomping, ostrich boot-wearing, scowling, combed-over plutocrat has to say about running the option in an effort to convince him or her to donate millions of dollars for new facilities in the ludicrous college sports facilities arms race. 
 
College football coaches, millionaire tyrants on the practice field, whose visages are splashed 
across local papers and who leverage their fame into lucrative local commercials bereft of 
dignity, have their jobs depend on the largesse of a person with a name like "T. Boone Pickens."

When a program sputters into a futile, bowl-less wilderness or, for a big-time team, stops winning a national championship every year (the Unacceptable Valley, named for fans using the word UNACCEPTABLE on radio shows, message boards, and other places where otherwise rational human beings temporarily transform themselves into professional wrestlers), firing the coach cuts the head off the snake slowly squeezing the life out of the program. In addition, football or basketball coaches at public universities are, without exception, the highest paid public employees in each state, and demanding that they are fired for losing to a MAC team is the closest thing that Americans have to accountability for their public officials.

THESE THOUGHTS ABOUT JAMES FRANKLIN ARE NOT UNHINGED

It's a battle of two-loss teams at Ryan Field as Penn State attempts to avenge last year's cruel bludgeoning at the hands of Northwestern.  The Wildcats won that game 29-6, the worst Nittany Lion home loss since the legendary 2001 Miami Hurricanes crushed them 33-7.  Northwestern's win over Penn State involved my favorite play of all time, the Manchurian Linemandidate, when a Penn State lineman blocked a teammate into oblivion allowing the Wildcat defense to swarm in and erased the running back from the face of the Earth.

The look of determination on number 72's face as he executes a textbook block against an 
enormous man whose only thought is "why are you blocking me, I'm your friend" makes this 
an all-time great Northwestern sports gif that does not involve Pat Fitzgerald contorting 
himself into a Jim Carrey The Mask face

Penn State James Franklin has never beaten Northwestern.  The 'Cats beat Vanderbilt twice in a row (though Franklin was only coach for the second game), and then the Commodores canceled a home-and-home series with the Mighty Wildcats of Northwestern because of scheduling concerns, a hollow excuse that Franklin and the athletic department used out of cowardice, the terrifying image of the Colter/Siemian monster rampaging through his nightmares.  In 2014, the very year the Commodores were scheduled to steam up to Evanston, Franklin jumped ship.  He took over Penn State.  Some might say that Franklin left a tough job at a Northwestern-like private school with little history of football success in the ridiculously tough SEC conference to run what had been one of the great programs in college football.  From a different angle, though, his strategy was clear.  Much like how Dutch monarch William of Orange married into British royalty and then used the resources of the British Empire against his arch-nemesis Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, James Franklin clearly accepted the Penn State job for one reason only: to one day ride into Evanston with a highly-touted quarterback and stout defense and finally do what the lowly Commodores could not and crush the Wildcats in their own stadium while checking Northwestern's claims on the Duchy of Savoy.

William and Louis's rivalry was marked by massive European wars, fierce mercantile trade 
policies, and an unceasing competition to build the largest and most elaborate Cape Swirling 
Rooms in their respective estates

Northwestern shrugged off its tough losses to Michigan and Iowa with a close win over a terrible Nebraska team.  They are coming off a desperately-needed bye week for an injury-riddled squad.  Cornerback Matthew Harris, who leads Northwestern in interceptions, for example, is expected to return after recovering from a broken face.  Nevertheless, the 'Cats face a tall order against one of the country's best defenses.  There is no doubt that the Wildcat defense can give Northwestern a chance to win, even against a superstar quarterback like the Nittany Lions' Christian Hackenberg.  They will stand little chance, though, if they spend the entire game attempting to stop him after a series of sputtering three-and-outs from the offense. Nebraska could not stop Clayton Thorson from gradually loping down the field, and that made the difference last game.  This week, Thorson has a chance to show he can move the ball through the air for a whole game and lead the 'Cats to another big upset in front of thousands of screaming tarp enthusiasts.  Or, Penn State lineman can heroically block each other at inopportune times enough for a Northwestern win.

The stakes between these two unexpectedly decent Big Ten teams are not particularly high.  Both teams would need an astounding confluence of events to propel them to the Lucrative Conference Championship Game.  The winner will probably enter the top 25 poll.  These teams, however, are mainly jockeying for bowl position, which will tend to be disregarded by bowl committees eager to throw in for the biggest Football Brand they can attract regardless of record, with bowl representatives stuck with Northwestern over a bigger school due to arcane bowl selection rules forced to impotently stand around in their bowl selection command centers and hurl pottery at their  butlers and footmen in fits of rage.  Most importantly, though, Northwestern is playing to frustrate the designs of James Franklin, who will be forced to once again retreat to his lavish traveling quarters and angrily stab daggers into maps.

PLAYOFF EXCITEMENT

After five weeks of excitement, Northwestern's pipe playoff dreams fell apart with two crushing losses.  One the one hand, it is disappointing that the Wildcats have fallen off the radar.  It is much more fun to beat Iowa and Michigan while Jim Harbaugh throws Daffy Duck tantrums on the sidelines than see those teams nonchalantly dispatch them.

A dramatic reconstruction of the Northwestern-Michigan game

On the other hand, it is liberating to escape the inscrutable machinations of the Playoff Committee, the next step in college football's arbitrary method of choosing a champion. Fans of teams with a legitimate claim wait on tenterhooks every week for the Committee to emerge and welcome that team to the Promised Land of lucrative playoff football or get cast out into the dustbin of the Holiday Bowl, and this goes on for a literal month before the rankings actually mean anything and no one has been able to explain why this happens other than the Playoff Committee enjoys issuing pronouncements.  

Meanwhile, Northwestern's season is far from over.  There are still four games remaining, and the 'Cats can still put together a memorable season.  They are going bowling.  They have an opportunity to force James Franklin to leave Evanston shaking his fist.  And, somewhere over the horizon, just visible if we squint, the Hat is out there, Chicago's Big Ten Rivalry Trophy to be seized within the city limits themselves and not just in Chicago's Big Ten El-Connected Suburb.  Welcome to big time college football, Bill Cubit.  Give us our damn hat and we'll be on our way.   

Tremble Big Ten, Unironically

These were the facts heading into Saturday's contest in Happy Valley: Northwestern would be playing at Penn State's homecoming (Northwestern is a perennial Homecoming Opponent, forever treated by the Big Ten as the first or second guy Van Damme fights in a Van Damme is kicking everyone's ass montage in one of those infinite Van Damme movies where Van Damme is in an underground fighting tournament for money, for love, for United States foreign policy objectives).  Northwestern had played poorly in its first three games.  Penn State was undefeated, and now allowed to appear in post-season games.  And the Big Ten is a festering cauldron of nonsense football.

What I don't think anyone expected was for Northwestern to flatten Penn State for a decisive 29-6 win on the road.  This was Penn State's worst loss at home since getting clobbered by the legendary 2001 Miami Hurricanes team.  The Wildcats' defense held Penn State's highly-touted quarterback Christian Hackenberg to 22 completions on 45 attempts for 216 yards.  The Lions managed only 50 yards on the ground.  By the end of the game, discombobulated Penn State offensive linemen were out of answers and attempted to slam into each other while yelling "WHY ARE YOU BLOCKING YOURSELF."  This did not help.
 
An alternative explanation involves deep-seated subterfuge and hypnosis in what's known as the 
Manchurian Blocker theory

Trevor Siemian looked crisper, repeatedly finding a wide-open Dan Vitale moving through the middle of the field, a desolate area abandoned by Penn State defenders.  Justin Jackson and Warren Long led the rushing attack, although it was Siemian who cashed in three rushing touchdowns from the one yard-line and should now be referred to as "Touchdown Sneakian."  On defense, the story was freshman Anthony Walker who started his first game at linebacker and appeared everywhere on the field at once.  He essentially ended the game by scoring on an interception in a tribute to his injured comrade Colin Ellis.  Northwestern's defense looked like it could keep the 'Cats in games while the offense rounds into shape.

CANCEL THIS

Myths and legends are much more of a daily part of our lives than we like to imagine.  We swim in a sea of apocryphal common knowledge.  Our understanding of the world around us is shaped by half-remembered lectures shrouded by daydreams, discredited theories, misinformed relatives, television, and That Great Deceiver Wikipedia.  The things we don't just think we know but we know we know are riven with cracks and papered over by over-simplifications, false anecdotes, even outright lies.

I'm sure there are nuanced reasons why the Vanderbilt Athletic Department canceled its series with Northwestern.  I'm sure the addition of two new conference teams wreaked havoc with their scheduling.  But it's way better to imagine a furious James Franklin angrily clearing his desk of Commodore memorabilia with one sweep of his forearm and shouting CANCEL THEM into a red hotline phone that handles football scheduling emergencies.  I've been regularly taunting Vanderbilt for abandoning the series as The Assassination of the Northwestern-Vanderbilt Rivalry by the Coward James Franklin because I strongly believe that any time you get a chance to make fun of someone for ducking Northwestern and you have a high-powered and influential blog like this one you take it.

I've recently learned that certain corners of the 
internet refer to Franklin as "CJF," which stands 
for Coach James Franklin.  I really like how "Coach" 
is an honorific title like Lord Palmerston or 
Captain Cook or Chairman Kaga

In any event, Northwestern traveled to Happy Valley and unexpectedly ruined their Homecoming festivities, which is close to the platonic ideal of a Northwestern road victory.  The win also jolted the Big Ten, which has been usurped by chaos and uncertainty as these flailing programs start to play each other.  The conference in the midst of a Carnival season, where boring agents of stability and order have fallen apart and no one knows if any of these teams is actually decent.  Only Nebraska remains unbeaten.  Ohio State lost a Heisman-caliber quarterback.  Michigan is so bad that its students are staging literal demonstrations against the athletic director. 
 
Legend has it that a campus screening of a football-related opera ignited a fervor 
amongst Michigan students who took to the quad demanding independence from 
their athletic director Dave Brandon.  Brandon, the former CEO of Domino's Pizza, 
remained defiant, and as of press time was constructing a balcony that could be 
used to taunt protesting students while preparing to advance on the crowd with his 
personal elite noid guard

Northwestern might be ok enough to win games in the Big Ten West.  Four more wins might be possible.  Everything is up for grabs.

BADGER-BAITED

What is certain is that Wisconsin is among the best teams in the Big Ten.  The Badgers' sole loss was to Les Miles's LSU team from the Invincible SEC West filled with teams that can only be defeated by other SEC West teams much like how Highlanders can only chop off each others' heads.

Nick Saban celebrates a 2013 win over Texas A&M on the roof of 
A&M's Department of 1980s Production Values

This year's Wisconsin team wins games by doing the same Wisconsin shit they have been doing since time immemorial.  They have a stable of a stable of excellent running backs led by Heisman hopeful Melvin Gordon running behind giants.  With Joel Stave out, Wisconsin has gone Full Wisconsin and started converted safety Tanner McEvoy at quarterback.  There are few certainties in this world, and it is a comfort to know that Wisconsin is still Wisconsinning at people nearly 20 years after the reign of terror perpetuated by Ron Dayne. 

Northwestern put up a stellar defensive effort against Penn State, but Wisconsin will be a far tougher challenge.  The Penn State offensive line had been a concern all year while the Wisconsin line is an anthropomorphic ozone layer.  If two Wisconsin linemen accidentally block each other, the result would be a seismic calamity orders of magnitude beyond a catastrophic Jump Around  mishap.  Gordon himself will give the Wildcat defenders fits if he gets any space.  Certainly, Wisconsin is one of the most difficult matchups left on Northwestern's schedule.  Even at home, Ryan Field will be at least half full of Wisconsin fans braying at Siemian. 

At least Wisconsin will not be bringing this abominable Terror Badger to horrify 
petrified spectators and unsuspecting Evanston residents on the second floor of 
their homes

As excited as we were by last week's romp at Penn State, the Badgers will be heavy favorites.  The Badgers have designs on a Big Ten Championship.  As we all know, though, the true Big Ten Champion this season is Chaos.

LET US BECOME UNREASONABLY CONFIDENT

Which Northwestern team is the real Northwestern team?  Is it the team that looked lost during the first half against Cal and in disarray against Northern Illinois?  Is it the team that failed to pulverize Western Illinois to a satisfactory pulp?  Or it the team that shut down Penn State's offense and sent thousands of disappointed Nittany Lion fans home to their Unhappy Mountains in the fourth quarter and frustrated the James Franklin, the Apocryphal Dodger?  There is no doubt that the Wildcats can match up in the post-Big Ten Big Ten.  There is no doubt that the Badgers have a very good team that views Northwestern as a stepping stone to the conference championship game.  And there is no doubt that, if the game is close, we'll only be able to see if this is a new Northwestern team by how completely and utterly insane things will get in the fourth quarter starting at a baseline Northwestern Football Fourth Quarter Chaos Scale that starts at major natural disaster, reaches a middle of expected Godzilla attack, crescendos into unexpected Godzilla attack, and tops out at 2013 Northwestern vs. Nebraska.

The Least Northwestern of Games

Last Saturday, the 'Cats opened the season at Ryan Field by hosting out-of-conference nemesis Syracuse.  The 'Cats hoped to improve on their first game with the comforts of home: a reasonable time slot instead of playing at some ridiculous midnight moon time, stands full of Wildcat partisans, and an inspiring tarp that stood in for empty seats that opposing teams could look towards and imagine thousands of angry fist claws shouting at them on third down, theoretically.
 
Early speculation remains that the tarp will be deployed at a future Big Ten game-- 
imagine the opposing team feeling comfortable down by the north endzone and 
prepared to go about its business when the tarp is suddenly lifted to reveal a secret 
cache of Northwestern fans in a common football tactic known as the "Trojan Tarp"
(Photo from nusports.com)

Northwestern and Syracuse have played enough over the past few years to create something of a rivalry.  Some Syracuse fans have complained about the officiating in the last game that allowed Northwestern's dramatic comeback; I will never forgive Greg Paulus for his excellent play in a win against Northwestern, and I'm disappointed that Fitz never returned the favor by putting in Juice Thompson or Luka Mirkovic in for a play to show them what it's like and also to accrue a never-used NCAA infraction for attempting to play graduated basketball players in a football game because of spite.

WHAT THE HELL KIND OF WIN WAS THAT?  I WANT MY MONEY BACK

I think as Northwestern fans, we can all be greatly disappointed by the kind of football played by Northwestern the past weekend.  Kain Colter returned to combine with Trevor Siemian into an unstoppable bomb-throwing, scrambling, optioning, quarterbacking monster that I will be referring to as The Colterian.
 
As the old football adage says: if you have two quarterbacks you 
have no quarterbacks unless they are melded into a two-headed 
multi-limbed mutant capable of optioning to itself and coming 
up with the world's most elaborate celebratory handshake

The high-powered offense and an opportunistic defense that snagged another four interceptions allowed the 'Cats to leap out to a 34-7 lead at the half.  I don't know about you, but I watch Northwestern for the adrenaline after last year's Four Quarters of Terror campaign, not to watch them slice up a defense, to watch Dan Vitale and Treyvon Green become stars, and to see the spread offense wreak havoc with an arsenal of receivers who are all named Jones.  There weren't even accusations of Wacky Races skulduggery to have opinions about and no coaches calling the team a disgrace to the concept of college football which is doubly insulting because the NCAA exists and sets a pretty high standard of being an insult to college football. 

I hope the Northwestern football establishment realizes the disappointment of fans who expect to spend the duration of games strapped into their recliners as the Wildcat defense is expected to perform a Reverse Teen Wolf and return to a feeble teenage Michael J. Fox status that allows the other team to start inexplicably executing hail mary passes and Roundtree Catches.  What kind of lunatic who is invested in a college football team wants to see them playing extraordinarily well against an ACC team because of an incredibly entertaining offense that dominates even with Venric Mark out?  I don't ask much from Northwestern football other than a vision of oblivion in the last five minutes of the fourth quarter where I enter an otherworldly plane, an out-of-body experience that is happening because I'm worried that the football team I like might lose.

BRONCO BUSTING

This week, Northwestern will play Western Michigan.  This was not supposed to happen.  It came about because of the Assassination of the Northwestern-Vandebilt Rivalry by the Coward James Franklin.  As you may recall, and given that you are reading like the eighth-most trafficked Northwestern football blog on the internet I'm guessing that you do, Vanderbilt canceled its 2013 and 2014 series against the Wildcats with a variety of low-tech notification methods including a telegraph, a passenger pigeon, a Soviet-era analogue hotline, and a disastrous attempt to send a gorilla-gram with an actual gorilla that just ended in a tragic Nashville-area gorilla rampage presumably because Northwestern kept beating them and James Franklin and the Vanderbilt Athletic Department are yellower-bellied than the Yella Fella Yellawood pitchman who is apparently a powerful football booster at Auburn University.
 
No, thank you, I prefer not to be Coltered, says a 
terrified James Franklin.  I should probably add here 
that I have no idea if Vandy dropped the series because 
they wanted an easier schedule, but I took a vow long 
ago that if I could vaguely accuse an opposing athletic 
program of ducking Northwestern I would react the 
same way that Clubber Lang would because I train 
alone, I blog alone, and I tweet "shut up old man" at 
any geriatric Vanderbilt supporters I can identify 
in cyberspace

Western Michigan is a program in transition.  They are led by 32-year-old first-year head coach P.J. Fleck, who has the square-jawed enthusiasm of a Fitz but has decided that he is obsessed with overwrought boat-paddling metaphors.
Fleck traces the influence of his motivational techniques to Hagar the Horrible

The Broncos have had a rough season so far.  Last week, they were upset by FCS Nicholls State in the Fortress Waldo Stadium (which is perhaps the platonic ideal for a MAC stadium name, with the possible exception of Kelly-Shorts-- much like the Great Fillmore/Arthur Muttonchop Debate, I believe that is best left to the taste of the reader).  Northwestern is expected to prevail here against an inexperienced team whose best days are ahead of it.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume the 'Cats are taking this lightly.  Pat Fitzgerald is more committed to living one game at a time than Vin Diesel is to living one quarter-mile at a time and expressing himself through tank top.  Fitz doesn't care about what happens beyond that; if a government agency were to deploy to his house and tell him that in two weeks, a group of malevolent aliens will invade the Earth and the only way to stop them is by commandeering a spacecraft that can be piloted by high-intensity fist pumps and that Fitz was the only one who could stop the imminent destruction of the planet, I'm fairly sure he would send them away because he wants to take another look at that Western Michigan bunch formation.

HAT UPDATE

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the Illini had a fairly convincing victory against a Cincinnati team  that had previously laid waste to Purdue University.  This week, they take on a ranked Washington team in Soldier Field.  According to ESPN's Big Ten Blog, "Illinois athletic director Mike Thomas said back in 2011 that he hoped the university would become the 'king of Chicago,'" in the escalating War to Determine Chicago's Big Ten Team.  Jim Phillips then escalated the situation by dressing in regal purple robes in front of a map of the Demesne Kingdom of of Chicagoland with sketches of dragons in Missouri and giants near Peoria.  The desperate attempt of Northwestern and Illinois to capture the Chicago market has been one of the most dramatic turf wars in the Big Ten as they vie against each other and the approximately 99% of Chicagoans who root for the Bears and whatever college they went to.

Meanwhile, Tim Beckman and new offensive coordinator Bill Cubit are planning on extricating themselves from the Big Ten cellar this season.  A win against Washington would not only be a major step in righting the program and establishing the Beck Man Era in Champaign, it would also be a warning shot fired across the bow of Northwestern, a notice that the Beck Men are coming for The Hat.  As we speak, Beckman is doing pull-ups in a dimly-lit corner of the Illini football complex and had #HAT tattooed across both of his sets of knuckles.

A CLOOTS BY ANY OTHER NAME

"However, when the revolution broke out, he changed his name to Anacharsis Cloots and set himself up as a spokesman for the human race."

That is a pretty good sentence, and it is by Hugh Gough in an essay about the French Revolution's effect on Europe (in his edited volume Ireland and the French Revolution).  He is referring, of course, to the Baron de Cloots, a Dutch-Prussian nobleman who got caught up in the revolutionary fervor of 1789 as a way to promote his ideas about a broader revolutionary world state.  Cloots was a close relative of Cornelius De Pauw, a French philosopher who pushed the idea that the New World degenerated all men and beasts who arrive there.  Americans took umbrage to this.  Even ideological enemies Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could agree that they did not live in an ecological backwater that stunted growth and had cruddy, inferior wildlife.  Jefferson and Madison exchanged notes on weasel measurements in order to counter claims of degeneracy; Jefferson attempted to counter the claims of the Comte de Buffon, the leading degeneracy advocate, with a process that could best be described as "take a look at this moose-- who is degenerate now, Buffon?" 
 
Buffon scoffs at the paltry size of American 
weasels

Cloots got too wrapped up in the Revolution for his own good.  As the Terror folded back on itself, Cloots was unable to see the Revolution carried into universal human principle.  On the other hand, he left a legacy of inspiring historians to craft spectacular sentences, such as this one by William Doyle in the Oxford History of the French Revolution:

"To substantiate the charge of a foreign plot, a clutch of colorful aliens perished with them too, including Clootz, who bade farewell to his beloved human race in front of the biggest crowd ever to surround the guillotine."

WEEK 3 IS HERE, EVERYONE

Western Michigan may not be the most daunting opponent on the schedule, but the Broncos have nothing to lose in Evanston.  Fitzgerald will attempt to guide his team to another rejection of Northwestern football as we know it by winning without trying to kill his fans and without accusations of intrigue.  And then he will take the title of Anacharsis Fitz, Spokesman For All Humanity when he declares "Something something, Our Young Men, Winning, Go 'Cats."

Fistpump.