MINT CONDITION BYCTOM #1

There's no more sure sign of the impending return of college football than the first dispatches of Northwestern media hype products. In 2010, the Wildcat Department of Athletic Aggrandizement peppered Chicagoland with billboards declaring Dan Persa "Chicago's [Big Ten] Heisman Candidate" and sent weights labeled "Persastrong" to the media.  In 2013, they built a custom Goalpost On Wheels and traveled to regional news outlets threatening to tie reporters to them and assail them with kicked footballs until they agreed to add Jeff Budzien to the Groza Award watch list.  Northwestern promoted the 2014 season with a flurry of pamphlets denouncing unionization.

Other promotions considered included a jeweler's eye labeled 
PersaAccurate and a bracelet that says Persascape that, when put on 
the wrist, summons a group of dangerous persons with themed costumes 
that hunt the ultimate prey: Big Ten beat reporters 

This week, Northwestern announced a campaign promoting superstar linebacker Anthony Walker Jr. as "The Franchise" because of his propensity to license the Anthony Walker Jr. name to enterprising linebackers around the country.  According to Insidenu, they sent selected media members a lunchbox, t-shirt, and custom Anthony Walker comic book that references body clocks and contains the single greatest comic book panel of all time:

Photo by @rodger_sherman

The outsize world of college football should have the heroic exploits of players, coaches, and stodgy commissioners in comic form with an applied photoshop filter aesthetic.  So here is a collection of Big Ten comic panels showing the conference in action outside of Big Ten Network Regional Coverage.  

 

BYCTOM Big Ten Comics encourages you to send away for the nunchuk starter kits, x-ray specs that allow you to find BTN2 in your TV listings, a Purdue Pete that grows in water into a figure so grotesque that it could be banned by the government at any time, and special crystals from Rosemont, Illinois that, when configured correctly, will reveal the next eight members of the Big Ten.  Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery.

Media Day

We are nearing August, when football training camp begins in earnest and the Wildcats begin the 2015 season, or as I call it, HATRIBUTION '15.  This week, Big Ten coaches will meet with the media to address hard-hitting questions about whether or not they are excited for football to start.  Big Ten officials will field questions about expansion, because in the rapacious Enormous Ten, the goal is to capture as many television markets as possible in the United States and abroad.  Expect Jim Delany to strut around asking reporters if they had ever seen such a big ten in their lives and who has a bigger ten than him.

Pat Fitzgerald is scheduled to speak Friday.  Those who can't wait can read Skip Myslesnski's interview that addresses the uncertainty on the roster, not only a quarterback but up and down the depth chart.  Fitzgerald doesn't give up much and Myslenski is reigned in instead of the florid, lyrical Myslenski that injects training camp stories with much-needed elements of the introduction to Conan the Barbarian movies.  Though I am writing this before Fitz has spoken, BYCTOM moles have obtained a transcript of his remarks, and he is expected to delight the crowd with references to Our Young Men.
 
Pat Fitzgerald expects fireworks after last year's revolutionary speech 
when he scandalized the football media by vowing to take things one 
game at a time, drawing heckles from disbelieving football personnel used 
to taking things two or three games at a time. Jerry Kill denounced 
Fitzgerald as a sick, sad man and Kyle Flood leaped through a plate glass 
window

Yesterday, Illini football coach and man who doesn't need your advice about opening that pickle jar just give him a second ok Tim Beckman spoke to reporters. Let's check in on Beck Man.

Usually, this is a time for Beck Man to stand astride a podium, cape fluttering in the fan he has brought, while he denounces Northwestern and issues boasts and taunts from the anti-Wildcat underground, but this year Beckman immediately found himself dealing with reports about player abuse allegations.  The Chicago Tribune recently spoke to 50 Illini current and former Illini players about the allegations.  It is clear that Beckman will continue to face questions that he'd rather not answer when he should be preparing for a Soldier Field hat defense.

Big Ten media days are a pointless, ridiculous exercise in nonsense.  None of the coaches will say anything particularly noteworthy about his program and none of them want to be there when they could be screaming at teenagers to run into inanimate objects in the sweltering Midwestern sun.  On the other hand, media day means that we draw ever closer to football season and the attendant miseries.   

BRITISH SOCCER MOVIE REVIEW

What happens when a group of race car conman billionaires takes over a sports team, attempts to rocket them to glory, turns into a global cabal of Steinbrenners, and hires someone to film it?  The end result is The Four Year Plan, directed by Mat Hodgson about the rise of Queens Park Rangers to the Premier League.

The film covers the 2007 purchase of Queens Park Rangers by a consortium of billionaires including F1 racing honchos Bernie Ecclestone, Flavio Briatore, and Alejandro Agag and Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, rescuing the club from bankruptcy.  The investors were interested in QPR because of its history (founded in 1882), location in West London, and presumably a whimsical name that brings to mind an ambitious episode of Walker Texas Ranger where he traverses the Atlantic to jump kick English cattle rustlers.  Their goal: to raise QPR from the second-tier Championship to the lucrative Premier League.

FLAVIO: We need to work on our set piece
ECCLESTONE: We should set a piece of this stadium on fire and collect 
the insurance money
BOTH: ho ho ho ho ho ho ho

The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers.  Scandal has dogged Briatore wherever he has gone; he spent several years dodging prison from numerous fraud convictions in Saint Thomas and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, spent portions of the 1980s as an Italian Elmore Leonard character:

In 1986, in Milan, Briatore was sentenced to 3 years for fraud and conspiracy for his role in a team of confidence tricksters who, over a number of years, set up rigged gambling games using fake playing cards. The judges described these as elaborate confidence tricks, in which victims were invited to dinner and then "ensnared" in rigged games that involved a cast of fictional characters and realised enormous profits for their perpetrators.

Hodgson's cameras follow Briatore as he stalks about the club.  He denounces managers as idiots.  He disparages players in the stands with Director of Football Gianni Paladni.  He orders substitutions from the owner's box.  He walks around in hilarious European rich person puffy jackets presumably invented to prevent a disgruntled peasant from stabbing him with the jagged edge of a stale baguette.  Briatore, who goes through no less than five managers in his first two years with the club, comports himself like a ludicrous and incompetent dictator. 
 
Gianni Paladini enjoys a soccer game. Paladini comes across in the movie as Briatore's lackey, but 
had actually been a powerful agent who had purchased a stake in QPR in 2003. In fact, in 2006, he 
was involved in a bizarre incident where he claimed that a minority owner had hired a gang of "hard men" 
to intimidate him into selling his stake during a match.  You should read that whole article as it is 
completely fucking insane and something that Hodgson doesn't mention at all in the movie.  
Flavio Briatore is the angry man gesturing behind him.
In an related note, that is pretty much how I watch all sporting events

The best part of the movie by far is when QPR fans revolt.  They chant "FUCK FLAVIO."  They angrily sing "we want our Rangers back" to the tune of La Donna e Mobile while scuffling with police, their blood-curling aria echoing through the streets of Shepherd's Bush.  Briatore tells a group of fans that he will sell the team and leave it to rot while obsequious hangers-on beg him to stay.  He demands names.  What Flavio Briatore would possibly do with the names of people who boo him is unclear; I like to imagine he will use his billions to set up a fake sweepstakes luring them to his private island where they will be hunted for sport, not by Briatore, but by a group of Robert Muldoon-like characters he has flown in while he hovers over the island in a helicopter denouncing them as shitty, incompetent hunters using the speaker system from Apocalypse Now.

The other major figure who emerges is Amit Bhatia, an investment banker and Mittal's son-in-law.  Bhatia comes across as a slick but enthusiastic bean counter who acts as the more reasonable counterweight to Briatore.  He becomes the central face of ownership after Briatore steps down, tainted by an F1 match-fixing scandal.  Shortly after, QPR poaches manager Neil Warnock and rockets to the top of the table.  Yet, even the team's greatest triumph remains mired in allegations of cheating.  The Football Association launches an investigation into an illegal transfer.  The FA threatened fines and a points deduction that would strip QPR of its championship and automatic promotion to the Premier League.  It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the film that the most touching moment of catharsis is not the team's  locker room celebration after clinching the championship, but Paladini jubilantly sprinting through the stadium screaming "NO POINTS DEDUCTIONS!"

The film is an odd window into a deliriously dysfunctional sports organization.  Again, Hodgson remains upfront that the funding for the movie came primarily from the ownership, which he depicts as operating with operatic absurdity (it never acknowledges the various scandals and corruption allegations floating around Briatore and Ecclestone and their role in Britatore's exit).  Though the movie has the rhythms of an underdog sports movie, we rarely see the players and have little sense of what is going on on the field.  We keep track of the team's progress by seeing them moving up and down the table and through montages of the owners celebrating or angrily calling for the manager's head.  Managers get more screen time, but come across like teenagers in the first 20 minutes of a slasher film, given veneers of personality before they are inevitably axed.  Hodgson is more concerned with showing how Bhatia saves money by purchasing less ostentatious food and floral arrangements than why QPR has gone from mid-table embarrassment to champions.  But that perspective is more compelling than the traditional narrative, not only because it is a part of sports not often captured, but also because Flavio Briatore comes across as irresistibly loathsome.
 
Manager Neil Warnock celebrates the 2011 championship.  Ecclsteone quickly sold his share 
to an ownership group headed by Malaysian airline magnate Tony Fernandes.  Fernandes 
fired Warnock into his first season in the Premier League, but QPR continued to scuffle 
and was relegated back to the Championship after only one season

The Four Year Plan resonates because it illustrates the helplessness of sports fans when it comes to ownership.  The movie depicts a team saved and backed by the unexpected largesse of deep-pocketed owners, but kept in chaos by volatile, impetuous, and incompetent management.  Capricious owners have been around since the concept of owning sports teams was invented, but the almost unimaginable expenses and profits associated with modern professional sports and the globalization of leagues has amplified effects.  Fans of teams with meddling, boorish, incompetent owners have no recourse other than futile chants and angry arias.  The exception remains the Green Bay Packers, and I hate them so much that I hope their team is purchased by a Habsburg who moves the team to Jacksonville and changes the name to the Muskie Haters.

DON'T DESPAIR IT IS NEARLY FOOTBALL

If there is one thing more arbitrary and absurd than professional sports ownership, it is the NCAA.  We are only about a month away from the season opener against Stanford, quarterback-related anguish, silent home snap counts, and hat vengeance.   

Bowl Game Part V

It's nearly 2013, which means that Northwestern fans have an opportunity to recover from their New Years' revels, roll out of bed, scrape the vomit from their hair and clothing and extremities, and watch the Wildcats take on Mississippi State in the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl.

This year's postseason had less intrigue than other mid-tier bowl selections.  This is a shame, because I really enjoy baselessly speculating about the machinations of bowl executives planning the football team's fate in a walnut-lined state room where national bowl representatives and corporate sponsors meet to wheel, deal, and bet on brutal animal-baiting tournaments away from the prying eyes of polite society. 

Bowl officials take a break after a grueling morning filibuster from the Beef 
O'Brady's people before a leisurely afternoon picking the Belk Bowl matchups 
and then hunting the ultimate prey: man

Every year, someone will mock the proliferation of crappy bowl games, bemoaning their necessity, mocking their increasingly ridiculous corporate affiliations, and deriding them as all but meaningless in the standings.  These are ridiculous accusations.  Bowl games are more college football and allow you to turn on your television at 4:30 on a weekday and be pleasantly surprised by a game that usually includes one potential Future Big Ten team.  Corporate names will serve as a useful footnote in history books that want to explain how a goofy-looking puppet served as the business plan of several late-90s internet enterprises that were rich enough to purchase naming rights to a crappy bowl game.  And no fan base in the history of crappy, also-ran bowl games wants to win the Gator Bowl this year as much as fans of Northwestern.

The 2012 football season has seen the Big Ten devolve into a joke, its best team undone by the promise of free tattoos,  its reverse Manifest Destiny expansion eastwards into an ever-bigger Ten, its school-grabbing setting off another wave of conference realignment.  None of this matters to Northwestern, losers of nine bowl games since 1949.  While this season has been a pleasant surprise, a bowl win could topple the last barrier standing between Northwestern's awful football history and current football decentness.

NOW WE HAVE A TOP HAT HO HO HO

The last game of the 2012 season was more than an intrastate struggle between a surging Northwestern team and an Illini team down on its luck.  It was a reckoning.  The Illini had been in possession of the Hat for two unbearable years.  Northwestern fans suffering from a nervous disorder commonly referred to as "hat fever" screamed about hats in their sleep, removed all hats from orange-wearing persons in their vicinity, and even constructed crude hats out of paper in order to cope.

Those affected with hat fever may take solace in scholarly Lincoln research or by 
covering their walls in homemade Lincoln paraphernalia, such as the Lincoln 
constructed by University President Morton Schapiro

In the first half, the Illini startled the Wildcats by moving the ball with ease.  It seemed as though Tim Beckman's anti-Northwestern saber-rattling had lit a fire under them, and that is not a mixed metaphor because I am implying that the saber could be rattled against a stone, creating a spark that could ignite some kindling beneath the Illinois players, which is a very common motivational tactic at the highest levels of competitive football.  Northwestern fans braced for another harrowing game coming down to the final seconds.

That did not happen.  The game got out of hand in the second half.  Illini drives stalled and extended Northwestern possessions with penalties, including two on Coach Beckman himself for sideline interference.  The video of one of the penalties involved the official chasing the play along the sideline, running over Beckman, and, without a moment's hesitation, throwing a flag down on his prone body to add insult to injury.  That may not even be the strangest Beckman sideline moment this season; he was reprimanded by the NCAA earlier for surreptitiously dippin'.  I don't blame Beckman for that.  College football coaching is a stressful job, and coaches should be free able to use all of the smokes, chaw, snuff, and opium products they desire during the course of a football game besides their traditional recourse to ass-slapping and screaming at someone without the slightest modicum of human dignity.

No one should be allowed to get this angry without having immediate access to 
chewable barbiturates or a horde of hearty fellows sworn to medieval vengeance 
upon an unsavory duke

The 50-14 rout was one of the most lopsided wins in Northwestern history against a Big Ten foe.  By the end, Fitzgerald seemed more concerned that all of the seniors got a chance to play, even if that meant putting Bo Cisek in at running back to achieve some measure of Ditkaness.  The big win was enough to put Northwestern back into the polls at #20.  More importantly, it meant that The Hat has returned to its home in Evanston, where it will hopefully remain as Beckman fumes and comes up with more ways to comically denigrate Northwestern football.

Here's something to denigrate: somebody give me the name of the person 
responsible for making a hat trophy attached to a base, denying all of us in 
attendance the opportunity to see various Northwestern players parading around 
Ryan Field while wearing the trophy as a hat while haranguing anyone in the 
Illinois football organization named Douglas

OFFICIAL BYCTOM BOWL PREVIEW

Mississippi State, like Northwestern, started the season on a tear.  They began 7-0 before the realities of life in the SEC West led them into a brutal three game stretch against Alabama, LSU, and the Johnny Football Men.  They managed only one more win the rest of the season, against a reeling Arkansas team in its death throes of the John L. Smith era.  Nevertheless, the Bulldogs, like every Northwestern opponent in the history of Northwestern football, see the Gator Bowl as a winnable game and a way to end their season on a high note.

The Bulldogs boast two of the top cornerbacks in the country in Johnthan Banks and Darius Slay.  Between the involvement of Taxslayer.com and Darius Slay, this will be the slayingest bowl game in the country, especially if Slayer can play the halftime show that consists of them acting out the dozens of crappy movies and TV episodes entitled "Slay Ride."

Slayer members have the choice to act out a T.J. Hooker episode described 
on IMBD as: "Stacy realizes a couple who foiled a drug raid are a team of 
robbers" or a Kojak episode with a plot summary that contains the sentence 
"Discovering that a young Army wife had fallen from a roof at an earlier 
convention (which they had attended) leads Kojak to her call girl sister."

Fortunately for Northwestern, the Wildcats no longer throw the ball, so Slay and Banks will be spending most of their time trying to tackle Mark or Colter.  The Bulldogs do have a terrifying wide receiver in Chad Bumphis, and, while the 'Cats have shown some improvement in pass defense, they are still vulnerable to the big play.  Mississippi State is less terrifying on the ground, where it averages about 140 yards per game, good for 88th in the country.  Conventional wisdom would suggest that Northwestern's best chance for a victory will involve stymieing Bumphis and successfully keeping it on the ground and away from their rapacious defensive backs.  But because this is Northwestern, I predict that the best way to win this game is to go out to a significant first half lead, collapse entirely in the second half, and allow the Bulldogs to get within 45 seconds of winning the game but hope that the final hail mary falls three centimeters short of Bumphis's grasp in the endzone as unconscious Wildcat fans plummet down the stairwells at EverBank field because their nervous systems can no longer bear the strain except for the fat-cat alumni who have had fainting couches installed in their private skyboxes.

AND I AIN'T GOT A DURN THING AGAINST PA

Northwestern may not be playing a bowl game in the state of Texas, but that does not make the early twentieth century reign of the Fergusons any less fascinating, as described in Randolph Campbell's Gone to Texas and James L. Haley's Passionate Nation.  In 1914, an obscure banker named James E.Ferguson came, essentially, out of nowhere during the Democratic gubernatorial primary.   Like many Southern states, Texas was governed by one party.  The fractious Democratic Primary in most elections determined the winner of the election, and was therefore more spirited and hard-fought than the general election. 

The major issue in 1914 was prohibition, and Ferguson's opponent, Thomas Ball, was an ardent prohibitionist.  Ball, however, belonged to a country club that served drink, and, while he claimed he did not imbibe, his membership created a clear "I did not inhale" situation in 1914 Texas terms.  Ferguson ignored prohibition and declared that he would treat any legislation for or against prohibition the same folksy way: "I will strike it where the chicken got the axe," he proclaimed, although the historical record is less clear about whether or not he hooked his thumbs into his suspenders.

Ferguson was a populist candidate, and "Farmer Jim" ran on a platform promising rent relief to tenant farmers.  He was an expert at hurling invective at his opposition, mustering every Southern blowhard trick in the book to go after Ball.  When President Woodrow Wilson endorsed Ball, Ferguson portrayed it as Yankee meddling, invoking the "sacred principles for which the gallant Confederate soldiers fought and bled on so many Southern battlefields," which is the rhetorical equivalent of dressing as a giant thumb and hooking yourself to a 30-foot wall-mounted suspender.  He won the nomination and the general election.
 
Texas Governor James E. "Farmer Jim" "Pa" Ferguson 
grafted his hands onto state monies as effectively as 
he cultivated home-spun nicknames

Ferguson's first term had some successes.  He passed a bill to lower and fix tenant rents for farmers (although it was eventually ruled unconstitutional), formed a state highway commission, and passed a bill for compulsory education.  Soon, he began interfering with school administration, high-handedly ousting the president of Prairie View Normal and Industrial College.  Edward Blackshear had drawn the ire of Ferguson as a supporter of Ball and as an African American academic whose rise to prominence contrasted with Ferguson's virulent white supremacy.  Ferguson then turned to the University of Texas.  He threw his weight around, attempted to remove the president, demanded the firing of several faculty members whom he believed had crossed him, and signed an official proclamation demanding the trustees present him with their lunch money at the capitol every afternoon. 

The fight with the university made him powerful enemies, who quickly latched onto allegations of corruption.  Ferguson moved more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of state funds into his own private accounts and mysterious loans of dubious origin floated into his coffers.  He was indicted, impeached, and convicted of fraud and embezzlement and barred from state office.  But a simple conviction of fraud would not keep Ferguson out of politics.

In 1924, Miriam A. Ferguson appeared on the ballot.  James Ferguson had opposed women's suffrage; now his wife ran for governor with the thinly-veiled understanding that newly-dubbed "Ma" Ferguson came as a package with "Pa."  Running under the slogan "Me for Ma, and I ain't got a durn thing against Pa," the Fergusons swept back into power on a platform opposing the rising influence of the Ku Klux Klan.  Miriam Ferguson became the first woman elected as a state governor, but "Pa" clearly pulled the strings.  The impeachment and conviction had not slowed down Fergusons' gleeful corruption; they began selling pardons to anyone willing to pay the vastly inflated price of Ferguson livestock and meted out state contracts to those willing to pay for expensive advertising space in their newspaper. 

The Fergusons on the campaign trail striking a blow for equal rights 
for women in terms of graft and state-wide corruption

A reformer swept out the Fergusons in the next term, but they reappeared during the Depression.  Ma Ferguson returned to Austin in 1932, just in time for them to control the distribution of New Deal federal relief funds.  The Fergusons throughout remained dedicated to their principles of lining their pockets, attacking people with pointed folksiness, and, disparaging academics as "mutton headed."

LET US FINALLY WIN A BOWL GAME FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING

The Wildcats have had a surprisingly successful season mixed with gut-wrenching disappointment and ulcer-forming excitement.  These are also ways to describe Northwestern's bowl appearances, as they have continued to come up just short for several frustrating years.  This year, the 'Cats seem primed for another close game against an evenly-matched squad.  They will almost certainly try to kill you, me, and our friends and loved ones because that is how Northwestern plays football this year except against Illinois and FCS teams.  There's nothing more to be written that has not already been written or personified in plush monkey toy form about the unfortunate bowl victory drought of more than 60 years.  Many fans may not care whether or not their team wins their crappy bowl game.  I intend to celebrate the only way I know how: by renting a gigantic alligator costume with a GATOR BOWL CHAMPION sash and crown and proclaim myself King of the Alligators on the steps of City Hall.    

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

The post's title is the maniacal cackling we let out after another close shave from the Wildcats in their wild opener against Syracuse.  A few more like that, I fear, will cause a fan to finally crack; after watching Northwestern squander a 35 point then come back to win a quadruple overtime game on a play where the ball bounces off of no less than four defenders before nestling in the arms of a Wildcat receiver in the endzone, he or she will don a purple bodysuit and terrorize the neighborhood by knocking balls, kites, and birds out of the air, acting as a demented vigilante defensive back.  Football is back and I could not be more excited.

Northwestern's traditionally crack offenses and generous defenses have made for thrilling come from behind wins and shattering collapses, sometimes in the same quarter.  The "Cardiac 'Cats" image may be just the thing the school needs to gain fans.  Instead of attempting to appeal to Chicago (which does nothing but bring the wrath of Martez Wilson upon us), why not embrace the reputation as the football team most likely to cause heart conditions?  Ads can depict a guy in a purple shirt yawning as he bungee jumps, base jumps, hang glides, lion tames, and participates in various late 90s Mountain Dew commercials until he finally keels over while watching the Wildcats hold a six point lead with less than five minutes remaining. 

Later billboards will show Fitz intensely loading fans into cannons, scaling the Petronas towers, and 
hunting the ultimate prey: man

Fans certainly have cause for alarm.  Last year's vulnerabilities against the pass look like they've returned.  Trevor Siemian replaced Kain Colter, as the sideline reporter conjured tales of quarterback intrigue (Colter revealed this week that he sustained injuries and asked for Siemian to step in a gentlemanly display).  The Carrier Dome remains an airless death trap filled with misery, despair, and the pervasive stench of armpits.  Yet, the 'Cats remain undefeated as they head to their home opener against their SEC equivalent.

VANDERBILT II

This may shock you, but the last time Northwestern played Vanderbilt, they withstood a harrowing near comeback to hold onto victory.  At that point, the Commodores' head coach had retired just before the beginning of the season, and they sputtered to a 2-10 record.  Last year, new head coach James Franklin led Vandy to the Liberty Bowl.  They may be Northwestern's toughest non-conference opponent.

Franklin prefers the sideline karate chop to the fist pump, making him and 
Fitzgerald ideological enemies

Northwestern has a tall task ahead of them after last week's adventure.  But let's not forget that they looked dominant for much of the first half.  Venric Mark had a spectacular game returning punts, running, and shaking loose for a touchdown reception.  Chi Chi Ariguzo changed the game on defense.  The Wildcats refused to give in after a demoralizing collapse. Northwestern needs a big home win.  Northwestern and Vanderbilt have a kinship as small schools in power conferences that have traditionally been dragged around the football field like a dead bull in the Plaza Del Toros.  There is one key difference.  Northwestern was far better at sucking at football than Vanderbilt.  In fact, in its heyday, there was no school in the country better at losing football games than Northwestern.  Now that both Vandy and NU are scrapping for fringe bowl appearances, it is time to get unnecessarily riled up about beating them and giving them something to think about should we ever meet again in Pizza City.   

THE WORLD'S SHORTEST NFL PREVIEW

Professional football is here, and expectations for the Bears could not possibly be higher.  Brandon Marshall gives Cutler his best receiver alongside rookie Alshon Jeffery.  The aging defense hopes to eke out another creaky season, assuming Urlacher makes it to the end of the year without his knees eroding into stumps and forcing him to haul himself around on a plank of wood like the "hand me down a whiskey" guy from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  A healthy Matt Forte is one of the best backs in the NFL.  And they tell us that the offensive line should be somewhat better for some reason.

Bears fans are expecting a playoff berth and dreaming of a Superbowl.  They face a difficult path.  The NFC North is one of the toughest divisions in football.  Their three best players are coming off injuries.  Brandon Marshall is on the team.  The NFL has been turned over to replacement referees who will official like so many counterfeit Enrico Palazzos.  Everyone is waiting to exult in Jay Cutler failures because of an instantaneous and visceral reaction to his face. 
 
The only way for Cutler to catch on with the fanbase is to market himself as 
"The Sultan of Surl," a fearless circus man who performs acts of derring-do 
such as high-wire, wing walking, and standing behind J'Marcus Webb on a 
third and long situation.  Of course, he cannot do this without a mustache

The Bears will also be going into the season with additional Wildcats.  They traded for cornerback Sherrick McMannis, who will join Bears stalwarts Nick Roach and Corry Wootton.  They still remain outnumbered by Commodores-- Cutler, D.J. Moore, Earl Bennett, and Chris Williams all hail from Vanderbilt.  I would be shocked if the Bears ever had this many combined alumns from Northwestern and an opponent on the roster at the same time, a vital statistic of mainstream interest that I expect to hear about on both Northwestern and Bears telecasts.

THROWN OBJECTS

There has been a lot of talk of stunts, acts, and daredevilmanship this week as Northwestern football promises another season seat-gripping intensity.  Naturally, I've been boning up on my knowledge of what Wikipedia refers to as the "impalement arts," the practice of hurling pointy things at another person for the delight and amusement of spectators.  These acts include the "Wheel of Death," "The Devil's Door," "The Double Ladder of Death," and "Bending Over on the Orient Express to Tie Your Shoe and Then You Look Up and There Is a Knife Wobbling Where Your Head Was Which Means You've Been Drawn Into a Web of International Intrigue Except This is On Purpose."  Nonetheless, I owe thanks to the heroic anonymous author(s) of this Wikipedia article for including the following sentences:

"There is a trick behind this stunt and budding impalement artists are warned not to attempt it unless coached by an experienced professional."

"For example, organising bodies for competitive archery prohibit activity that involves deliberate shooting in the general direction of a human being."

Most contemporary knife throwers are rank amateurs compared to Lon Chaney's character in The Unknown because they have arms.  In The Unknown, a 1927 Tod Browning silent film, Chaney plays an armless circus performers who delights the crowd by shooting firearms and throwing knives at Joan Crawford with his feet.  Chaney's dark secret is that he actually has arms, but prefers to hide them presumably because the prehensile foot act is more lucrative and throwing knives with your feet while wasting perfectly good hands seems unsporting to discerning 1920s circus audiences.  He is determined to protect his secret at all costs, and anyone who sees his arms ultimately dies by them.  Having hidden arms must be a tremendous tactical advantage and I am surprised that more professional boxers have not considered it.  Here is a clip that not only shows Chaney's act but also shows the comeuppance of an impertinent mustachioed strongman.


HOME OPENER

Northwestern hopes to keep up its winning ways against an equally hungry Vanderbilt squad at home.  As someone unlikely to take up skydiving or jousting or attempting to get the jump on Lon Chaney anytime soon, I'll gladly let the thrill of watching the football team attempt to score more points than the other team substitute.  There's nothing else to do but strap ourselves in and yell about football in the privacy of our own homes or football stadiums.  Five more wins and all roads lead to the Pizza City.

Northwestern Hoops

In December, Northwestern fans believed that this could be the year that Northwestern finally broke through its moribund sporting reputation and burst into mediocrity by winning a bowl game and qualifying for the NCAA basketball tournament. The bowl bid bust into a thousand bits of awkward alliteration despite a valiant comeback led by Freshman QB Kain Colter and the befuddling coaching of Tommy Tuberville, who coached the second half with the shaky overconfidence of a cartoon supervillain.

Tuberville inexplicably orders an onside kick in the third
quarter of the Inaugural Ticketcity Bowl over the advice of
more cautious assistants, who acquiesced after being threatened
with being cast into something that has the word "doom" in it

WILDCAT BASKETBALL

As of now, a tournament spot for Northwestern looks unlikely after the strong non-conference start, despite blowing heartbreaking losses to Michigan State and missing the upset of Ohio State by only one. Nevertheless, the win over arch-rivals Illinois at a significantly more purple Welsh-Ryan arena this weekend means that Northwestern isn't technically out of it yet, although my knowledge of bracketology, bracketometry, braxonomy, or any other bracket-related science or vaguely sinister alchemical pseudo-science is not up to par.

A stunning upset in the Southland Conference
Tournament provokes a dangerous unbalancing
of critical NCAA bracket humours

The Wildcats spent the early part of the season propelled by the deadly chest shooting of John Shurna and senior Juice Thompson, who, with over 4,000 minutes logged, has technically played more Northwestern basketball than anyone ever. I'm also impressed by freshman Jershon Cobb and The Masked Adventures of Luka Mirkovic in the paint.

Mirkovic should not only keep the mask next year, but experiment with
different masks to terrify opponents into costly turnovers

As far as I'm aware, the Wildcats are still clinging precariously to the bubble, but even if they slip they can of course still get to the NCAAs by winning the Big Ten tournament. In fact, winning the Big Ten Tournament would be the most satisfying way for Northwestern to finally kick in the doors of the NCAAs, although at this point I would also accept a Northwestern NCAA appearance wrought by storming the United Center and handcuffing themselves to a piece of infrastructure like the scorer's table or Bill Wennington until let into a game or cleverly disguising themselves as Kansas State.

THE FUTURE OF SPORTS

A significant controversy coming into this weekend's Super Bowl involves calls to improve player safety as we come to better understand the deleterious effect of armored men smashing into each other at maximum speed on the brain. This year has seen the NFL in particular make concussions a point of emphasis. But, despite attempts to decrease the violence of football, a trend dating back to the first decade of the twentieth century when a more barbaric game saw the use of stampedes, cudgels, and blimp bombardment as legitimate methods to stop ball-carriers, football is still rife with concussions. In a recent New Yorker article, Ben McGrath questions whether football as we know it can persist as doctors get a better picture of just how much damage concussions can cause.

Attempting to find better equipment is a logical step
to keep athletes safe unless it looks goofy I mean
come on that thing looks like it has space for auxiliary
heads

You can argue about the effectiveness of the NFL's increasing use of flags against big hits or rail against the league's hypocrisy, but the new policies at least demonstrate a growing popular concern for athlete safety in complete contrast with what we'd expect from movies. Instead, future sports in movies invariably become more violent, culminating with The Running Man in which participants are encouraged to maul each other to death with colorful, themed implements. Even in the latter-day Arnold opus The Sixth Day, future football involves a quarterback dying on the field, only to be surreptitiously replaced by a clone (the Sixth Day is a pretty bad movie, but at least watchable as shown on this graph charting the enjoyability of Schwarzenegger movies since 1996):

The hardest part of making this chart was deciding whether End of Days or Collateral
Damage represents the nadir of the Arnold Schwarzenegger experience. Although End of
Days is absolutely abysmal, I decided on Collateral Damage because the movie ends with
Schwarzenegger killing a guy with an axe and letting the guy die with nary a pun. He
didn't need to axe-cuse himself? There was no need to axe the guy a question? This is
coming from the same man who once quipped "you're luggage" after shooting a crocodile
at point-blank range

There are more helmets (the fact that people once played hockey bareheaded is absolutely mind-boggling), more padding, body armor in baseball, more goggles in basketball, and I'm sure race car drivers are doing things such as trying harder not to crash into each other. We don't have rollerball or state-sponsored game shows that involve hunting the ultimate prey: man; it's 2011 and we've not seen a single death race. Bill Laimbeer is being closely monitored. So, even though there is a lot of soul searching to do about the costs of football, compared to a fictional dystopia where deadly gladiator games mask the ever-stomping bootheels of authoritarianism, we're doing pretty well.

TO MARCH MADNESS

The rest of the month of Wildcat basketball should be a thrill ride, as the team clings to hope of amassing enough victories to finally make the tournament. Even if the 'Cats don't get in, they'll hopefully get another shot to at least make a decent run in the NIT, which would almost certainly gain popularity if it was turned into a chaotic mess of Running Man-style basketball. I'll turn the end of this post over to the NBA D-League's Maine Red Claws promotions department:

There's no better way to tell someone you care than through the
use of a make-shift anthropomorphic crustacean Cyrano de
Bergerac

Wrigley Game

The possibility of a Northwestern-Illinois game at Wrigley Field heated up this week as Chicago Cubs president Crane Kennedy met with officials from both schools. According to this Sun-Times article, Coach Fitz remains hesitant about giving up a home game in front of what will certainly be an overwhelmingly pro-Illinois crowd.

Wrigley set up for Bears football-- the padding on the ivy gives it the feel of some sort of
jungle based arena league where you don't just play football but hunt the
ultimate prey: man

The argument about giving up a home game on the surface has merit, but on the other hand a decent Illinois team traditionally draws a crowd that dwarfs or at best matches the mustering of Wildcat fans at Ryan Field. More importantly, the Illinois-Northwestern rivalry is traditionally the worst rivalry in college football. A game at the Friendly Confines will surely provide the morale-boosting taunting, shouting, and potential drunken donnybrooks that will fuel this rivalry for years to come. More importantly, the game will attract both local and national attention to Northwestern football which may even distract from a media-created snit between Bears players rumored to equate teammates with various female genitalia. Giving up a home game is one of two ways to focus attention on the Land of Lincoln Trophy (the other involves dressing both coaches as Lincoln with Zook assuming the presidential beard and stovepipe hat look and Fitz as the younger clean-shaven Lincoln fist-pumping Stephen Douglas into a tiny submission).

A Wrigley Field game would give the Illinois-Northwestern game the cachet
and excitement depicted on this 1927 poster found at this blog full of vintage
football posters, including a 1936 clash between the Wildcats and the
Prisoner of Zenda

BASEBALL STEROIDS CONTROVERSY

This week, another bombshell broke in the never-ending national dirge about steroids in baseball as investigative reporters continued to name names and columnists began orgasmically quaking with moral outrage. The last round several rounds of outings have been spectacularly underhanded as players who thought they were submitting to anonymous tests have been ambushed by the pointed finger of the media. On the one hand, the test results continously demonstrate that the steroid problem has been endemic and that there absolutely nothing that anyone can do about it. On the other hand, it looks like it will continue providing hilarity as names continue to get leaked and eventually the steroid train gains enough momentum to crash resoundingly into the baseball's fortress of stodgy overreaction in the Hall of Fame.

The BBWA examines the credentials of a steroid-era player

The steroid scandal has pretty much everything one can hope for in a sports scandal: a posse of high horses riding out from major metropolitan newspapers, inevitable "what about the children" backlash, and the wonderful side effect that steroids occasionally made players develop comically swollen heads that has turned baseball fans into amateur phrenologists. The best part involves a player high-handedly denouncing steroid users before inevitably getting caught red-handed, like a bear reaching into a trap filled with salmon that would make it larger and more dangerously omniverous.

Rafael Palmeiro's "Never. Ever. Period." speech was the highlight of grandstanding
leading to invitable guilt, whereas Sosa attempted to make language learning a fun
adventure. According to this site, the text on Palmeiro's poster says: "Capital: I will
crush Soviet Russia in my fist!/But it only clenches its fist in impotent anger!"

Although one could probably become exhausted from the way that the steroid scandal is being played out in its predictable pattern of a leaked list, accusations, denouncements, tearing of the hair over the sacred history of a game marked by spitballing, sign-stealing, fake handshakes, trick mustaches, brawls, intentional vigilante beanings, segregation, Dominican birth certificates, and constant crotch manipulation in full view of polite society, the scandal has provided some bizarre sideshows. Take, for example, ex-White Sox pitcher Jim Parque's astounding 3,139-word confession to taking HGH printed in the Sun-Times last week. To say that Parque emerged from the shadows of anonymity granted to middle of the order pitchers is an understatement-- he tobaganned down from a Himalayan yurt of anonymity to a series of canoes, hand cars, dirigibles, and other obscure modes of transport in order to spray his mea culpa across the pages of a semi-reputable daily newspaper. In order to capture the full breadth of Parque's confession, I'll be placing it next to passages from Bukharin's confession of crimes against the Soviet state from his 1937 show trial:

Parque: I know that in admitting to this, I am a cheater, a villain and nothing more than a drug user in the eyes of the media and some fans.

Bukharin: I first of all wish to concentrate on my own theoretical anti-Leninist and anti-Marxist errors, in order to give a clear, general theoretical basis for the following exposition and in order not to repeat myself in my consideration of individual questions.

Parque: It was the sixth inning. There were two outs, and John Olerud was up. I had retired the last nine batters I had faced and was on my way to securing a Chicago victory. I threw a slider, striking him out looking, but I felt a pop in my left shoulder.

Bukharin: The substitution of dialectical flexibility and of the greatest degree of concreteness by abstract schemas of a renovated “theory of equilibrium”, with all assurances of mobile equilibrium, in reality meant a fixation on dead abstraction and stasis that hindered me from seeing the concrete changes in all of their multifarious and complex interweaving of appearances.

Parque: So, Kenny, as I have stated personally to you, I publicly apologize for putting you through what I did, mainly because you were the one responsible for giving me a chance. Your ability to separate the personal relationship we shared from business is a testament to why the White Sox won a World Series and have continued to be productive.

Bukharin: According to this notion the main road, the highway to the development of socialism in the countryside lay not through the productive unification of peasant households, but through a process of management, through attracting them by the market, by cooperation in trade, credit, the banking system, etc., during which the “kulak nests” would peacefully grow into socialism. In this way the most important question of the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry was treated by me in a fundamentally incorrect manner.

Parque: Work harder, you say? Take vitamins and get in better shape? Did it, and I was rewarded with pathetic Triple-A stats, a fastball now in the low 80s and an average high school curveball.

Bukharin: Thus I was already beginning to create for myself cadres for the following struggle with the Party leadership headed by Stalin. In place were special ideological formulations, people, and their consolidation. The sense of closedness, fractional loyalty, conceitedness, anti-Party talks about Stalin’s supposedly low theoretical level, petty criticism, gossip and anecdotes about the leadership of the Party were made more serious by the fact that I, in a criminal manner, initiated the nucleus of this fraction to all the most intimate affairs of the Party leadership, acquainted this nucleus with secret Party documents of the CC, Politburo, Executive Committee and Presidium of the Comintern; I praised these young people and thereby corrupted them politically, sowed the seeds that would bring their own criminal fruit

Parque: I prided myself on working hard every day, eating properly and taking care of my body. For those of you who think otherwise, have you ever seen me in person? I stand 5-11 and weigh 185 pounds. I graduated high school at 5-5, 132 pounds. I looked like William Hung, another reason I spent many a dateless night in high school.

Bukharin: We gathered all possible information about the opposition to collectivization, about the various manifestations of peasant dissatisfaction, about the slaughter of farm animals, about the lack of bread, about the growth of price inflation, about various economic paradoxes (this was called “the economy rearing up”), we carefully gathered together facts such as that wagon-drivers were feeding their horses with baked bread because that was cheaper, etc. without end.


Jim Parque, mediocre baseball starter. Nikolia Bukharin, Bolshevik theorist,
communist fashion icon

Steroids in baseball are bound to continue popping up for quite some time. And, as each predictable revelation begets another round of breast-beating from baseball's self-proclaimed guardians, hopefully the Jim Parques of the world will come out of the woodwork and throw a monkey wrench in the proceedings until I get my wish of a Hércule-Poirot style j'accuse from one prominent player to another, igniting a hilarious Jose Mesa/Omar Vizquel-style blood feud that in the best of possible worlds involves Kyle Farnworth, leading to my surefire money-making scheme.