It is All Star Weekend in Chicago, the entire NBA has come here to shiver and to network and to watch some profoundly bad basketball exhibitions, and the Chicago Bulls don’t exist. They do not have an All Star. Zach LaVine will participate in the embarrassing also-ran three point competition only because, presumably, they couldn’t get Jud Buechler into the Celebrity Game. It’s a sad state of affairs for another wretched season that began with promises to contend in the putrid East and has come to the break in a familiar catastrophe of injuries, thinly-veiled trade demands, and foam-mouthed Jim Boylen reveries. And with no hope on the horizon, the Bulls made no moves at the trade deadline, furthering a miserable season instead of doing the obvious thing and acquiring a Weird Guy. The Three Oafs Managin' Company takes over a basketball team, putting together a crappy squad and accidentally sending 500 basketballs bouncing down a staircase into the path of a caterer carrying a gigantic layer cake who then trips over each ball in succession before smashing the cake directly into the face of the Dowager who screams "Why I'd Never!" No matter what the Bulls have been this decade, they have had one thing in common and that was the players, coaches, and front office relentlessly scheming against each other in dysfunctional melodrama. The Tom Thibodeau era exploded with insane accusations of plotting and skulduggery; at one point, Adrian Wojnarowski ran a piece suggesting that Bulls assistant coaches used desk fans as white noise because they feared that John Paxson had bugged their offices. The Bulls front office also maintained simmering feuds with players that flared up into snitty press exchanges. Mostly they sniped at Derrick Rose, who existed in a Schrodinger situation of being both Back and Not Back simultaneously for years. They feuded with Jimmy Butler, who emerged from nowhere as a surprise superstar and immediately turned into a person who voluntarily spends time with Mark Wahlberg. The Bulls at this point devolved into less of a basketball team than an opera. They brought in headstrong veterans Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo who formed, with Butler, the “Three Alphas,” all of whom immediately began feuding, in various configurations, like the Princely States of the Habsburg Empire. From the Poison Pen of Rajon Rondo, a Most Invidious Instagram Jeremiad against Wade and Butler. From Bobby Portis, a legitimate Weird Guy whose basketball expertise consists solely in bugging out his eyes at people, an insane and still-mysterious attack on Niko Mirtotic’s entire face. The team supported Portis, suspended him for a token eight weeks, and then forced the two power forwards to play with each other before trading Mirotic to the Pelicans but not before the two of them somehow formed an effective enough frontcourt tandem to wreck the Bulls’ draft position. Bobby Portis, making the exact face that Weird Al makes in UHF when he's making fun of the way that Sylvester Stallone yells Even in this new era of the Bulls, they managed to keep things interesting by bringing in Jim Boylen, a maniac. Boylen insisted on unnecessarily arduous practices, led the team to its worst home defeat in history, and caused a near player mutiny stopped only by the level head of Robin Lopez, a man who probably sleeps in the world's largest race car bed. Boylen spent the rest of the season coaching from a Hannibal Lecter restraint. The Bulls extended him for multiple years. This season, the Bulls are not only bad, but extremely boring. Boylen is doing his best-- he installed a profoundly idiotic punch clock in the team practice facility and has spent much of the season crouching on the sideline with his shimmering head erupting in sweat floes -- but you cannot have a compellingly dysfunctional team where the only Weird Guy is the head coach. The rest of the team seems to be made of up generally pleasant and inoffensive players who do or say nothing interesting. Denzel Valentine, the Bulls’ most compelling personality whose main quirk is his refusal to come to terms with the sobering reality that he is, in fact, Denzel Valentine, at least had the decency to drop a profoundly wretched rap video recently where he raps while sitting on a couch.
I am extremely sorry for bringing this into your life, althoug the fact that it was "shot by @jay_cutty" is almost too funny to be real
That’s it. I don’t know anything about Zach LaVine other than he is an extremely good basketball player who is flawed in specifically frustrating ways and seems like a very nice person who cares a lot about being good at basketball. The same could be said for all of the rest of these Bulls. Say what you will about Cam Payne, but he had an almost Buster Keaton-esque genius for playing basketball in a zany, madcap way from the way he shot threes like he was hovering on an invisible surfboard to the many, many times he would inexplicably fall down in one direction while his hair would somehow move in a perfect counterpoint. In order to save their season, the Bulls desperately needed to make a move to acquire a maniac, a headcase, or a weirdo to poison their clubhouse, do strange social media posts, or futilely taunt a much better player. The Bulls need someone who is good enough to accrue regular playing time while at the same time getting into a series of rich, enjoyable headgames with John Paxson or Gar Forman or at the very least attempting to lead a mutiny against Jim Boylen by stealing his clipboard or somehow tricking him into posing with the types of of wigs that Al Pacino wears in made-for-television movies. The NBA has soared in popularity as it has embraced players' personalities on and off the court as they talk shit on social media, recruit each other, post the Eyeballs Emoji, and generally create a soap opera that supplements the dunking. In an age of player movement and intrigue, the 2020 Bulls have none. They lose games, they do not have any of the precious ASSETS that bloggers are constantly prattling on about, they didn't even do one of those dispiriting, awful trades where they let a semi-competent basketball player go so they could get a future second-round pick with byzantine protections or the rights to an overseas player so obscure that he could be an alias. They have bland, pleasant players, and even their inept front office League of Oddly-Shaped Heads does not appear to be feuding with, undermining, spying on, sabotaging, attacking in the press, or challenging the manhood of anyone. The Bulls have been an embarrassing train wreck for years, but they're not even that anymore. They just suck. Their Weird Guy cupboard is bare.
Lost in all of the losses, the roster upheavals, the endless disinformation campaigns, and the instagram recriminations, there was a cold comfort to the Three Alphas era of Chicago Bulls basketball. The front office, fresh off of proclamations that the team would become younger and more athletic, signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, two decorated, headstrong veterans with big personalities and collectively two and a half functioning knees between them to a universal chorus of disapproval from the basketbloggerati, and the entire enterprise collapsed exactly along the lines that everyone predicted. In a year that has seen the entire project of prediction and conventional wisdom fall by the wayside, it is at least reassuring to know that when Rajon Rondo is introduced to a volatile environment of executive sabotage, espionage, and bumbling coaching howdy-doodery, a rational person can still count on the inevitable dysfunction. The Bulls ended the Three Alphas project by trading Jimmy Butler to their old nemesis Tom Thibodeau, who committed the cardinal sin of winning with enough vomiting Nate Robinsons that people gave him credit instead of John Paxson and Gar Forman. There is no need to go over the details of the trade-- there is an entire internet of that for the universal condemnation of the hideous return the Bulls got for one of the best players in the league. That was to be expected. While there's a decent case to be made that the Bulls should cash in Butler, no Bulls fan wanted the flustered Adam West-era Batman Villain front office to get swindled for a package headlined by a Knee Guy. Chicago fans once again go into the attic to get the crutches for their ironic knee-related art installations The Bulls are left a smoldering crater of basketball horror, the remnants of poor drafts, lopsided trades, and a bizarre commitment to targeting players despised by fans. The Three Alphas turned out to be a lone alpha operation. Rondo, who honed his game into a Shermanesque repudiation of jumpshooting, played competently only in select national TV contests. Wade disintegrated before our eyes like the guy who drank from the wrong grail in the Last Crusade on numerous dunk attempts. He will pick up his option and gleefully pocket his $24 million while easing into semi-retirement-- it is possible that he will replace his seat on the bench with a hammock. With the exception of the time he paid $25,000 to make throat slash gestures at the Boston Celtics, Wade's willingness to put up with the gruesome specter of hoiball in order to take more of Jerry Reinsdorf's money is the only thing he's done as a Bull that I respect. The Bulls are now left with two vestigial alphas clogging the salary cap and sowing dissent as the team sinks to the bottom of the standings like a rotting ship floating aimlessly because the entire crew has already mutinied and eaten each other. The Three Alphas devolved into increasingly bizarre social media feuding The Jimmy Butler trade has ignited a firestorm of fan anger towards the Bulls' front office. John Paxson, the floppy-haired hero of the 1993 Finals, has transformed into a bald, flinty-eyed executive who runs his front office like a crime boss in an action movie who spends all his time sitting angrily in an overstuffed office chair waiting for someone to be brought in to be either berated or fed to a carnivorous animal. Paxson holds press conferences infrequently and only after an earth-shatteringly boneheaded move where he irritably fends off questions by people who he clearly thinks are too dumb to comprehend his plan even though he works in a field with the most literal definitions of success and failure possible. Gar Formans' job is to burst out of ducts and gnash his teeth at people. Bulls fans secretly hope for a Terminator incident to prevent Paxson from sinking that shot in the 1993 Finals in order to prevent him from trading Jimmy Butler for a guy who is going to be dunked into a Wile E. Coyote accordion There is little to look forward to. A team with Butler and the largely incompetent roster from this season would battle again for a brief playoff cameo. The Bulls acquired no additional draft picks and sold their second-round pick, a pick so old that it's riddled with those s that look like f letters for straight cash to the Golden State Warriors. That money should, at the very least, go to upgrading the fleet of t-shirt blimps, hiring dozens of playwrights to come up with a new Stacy King catchphrase, or at least lowering the free big mac threshold to 99 points. The Bulls are a sclerotic organization run by people who seem to have given over the entirety of their jobs to petty feuds and contracting exotic gouts. Thank goodness the city has an entire Big Ten team to fall back on. FORD'S RAINFOREST There are few things in the world more unnerving than a wealthy, powerful industrialist who decides that it is time to do something especially if that industrialist has enough money to buy a tract of land the size of two Delawares and has a vision of society includes strict and specific ideas about folk dancing. By 1927, Henry Ford had developed a company powerful enough to try to industrialize the Amazon rainforest while indulging his belief that he could also build a community based on his own bizarre beliefs in a non-existent idealized America in the heart of the jungle. Greg Grandin's Fordlandia follows Ford's disastrous Amazon rubber plantation between its founding and abandonment in 1945. Grandin argues that, in Fordlandia, Ford saw the rainforest as not only a source of rubber but a blank slate upon which he could project his interpretation of American ideals that were, he believed, under increasing attack in the United States from forces like the government, unions, Jews, and as Grandin suggests, the very forces of consumerism unleashed by his own ubiquitous automobiles. Grandin shows how this grand Amazonian Fordism fell apart in the face of remote and incompetent management, workers who chafed against Ford's strange and exacting behavioral expectations, and the jungle itself, which laid waste to millions of rubber trees and rendered the entire enterprise futile. Ford's foray into Brazil came from a concern over the rubber supply. Brazil had been the world's foremost rubber supplier. That all changed when a bumbling, hard-luck British man named Henry Wickham managed to spirit a cache of rubber seeds back to Kew Gardens. British cultivators brought them to Sri Lanka and Malaysia where the trees thrived with no natural predators. Soon, Asian production outpaced the less efficient Brazilian supply and brought rubber under British control. Wickham's story is chronicled in Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World, which ends with a brief section on Fordlandia, and which I reviewed although I focused mainly on a brief passage that involves one of Wickham's ancestors getting cheated in a horse race by the slovenly George IV. As Grandin describes it, Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone resented that the British government had the ability to tax and restrict their access to such a precious resource and began to scheme to grow their own rubber, free from taxes and restrictions and the grubby fingers of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. Grandin describes how Fordlandia from the start had problems with managers who were hired to build cars and then found themselves shipped out to carve an America from the rainforest. One early manager, an overmatched ship captain, turned to drink as disease claimed three of his children. His successor, a Ford engineer from Detroit, left after the heat made him swell up. He did two stints, and I like to imagine that he returned, fit, and glowing with health only to step off the gangplank, blow up like a parade float, and get rolled back into a cabin. Willis Long Reeves Blakely, the first manager and an acolyte of Ford's enforcer Harry Bennett, established himself by repeatedly subjecting the port city of Belém to his naked ass:
Blakely quickly gained a reputation among the rogues and expatriates as a drunkard and exhibitionist. He stayed in the best corner suite on the second floor of the Grande Hotel, Belém's finest, with a veranda an floor-to-ceiling windows, the shutters of which he left open as he walked around naked and made love to his wife. The hotel, since demolished, was located on the city's central plaza, and Blakely's room faced the majestic Theatro da Paz, where the city's gentry promenaded every evening, coiffed and bedecked in formal wear. "Everyone on the street could see," complained the hotel manager...
When Ford came to a region, whether it was a Michigan lumber town or millions of acres of rainforest, it brought the promise of investment, infrastructure, hospitals, and high wages. The price, as anyone clamoring for Ford involvement found, was a demand for conformity with Henry Ford's ideas about how to live. These ideas included enforced temperance, refraining from jazz age "sex dancing," and not unionizing; Ford unleashed Bennett's Service Department, a violent, cudgelous goon squad, to intimidate, infiltrate, and physically attack any group with a whiff of union about it. Bennett (l) with Ford (c) sporting his signature bow tie look that he wore because of its strategic value in fistfights. Bennett's most interesting role in the company was in a bizarre Ford family psychodrama where Ford set him up as a rival to his son Edsel. Ford delighted in taunting and insulting Edsel, who he saw as weak and unable, unlike Bennett, to call in swarms of violent goons to render violence against his enemies and hammer them with his fists probably with weird nineteenth-century boxing stances In Fordlandia, the Ford proscriptions extended to Main Street USA style houses wildly unsuited to the climate; Grandin's interviewees and archival sources described them as "hotter than the gates of hell," "galvanized iron bake ovens" and "midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares." A switch to a sweltering mess hall and buffet system so incensed workers already pushed past exhaustion clearing brush through a maze of biting insects and poisonous snakes provoked an uprising in late 1930 that could only be quashed with help from the Brazilian army. Ford's greatest folly was his belief that industrialization could be brought to bear on the Amazon. The grand economies of scale that had turned Ford into an automotive juggernaut could not produce rubber. The company's attempt to mimic the enormous plantation production in Asia failed Brazil, where an entire ecosystem had developed around destroying tree clusters. As Grandin describes it, the rubber tree canopies became highways for blight as waves of insects, fungi, and caterpillars leveled the trees year after year. Ford's management figured out how to perform elaborate tree grafts, but production remained dwarfed by Asia and, by the late 1940s, petroleum-based synthetic rubber. In 1945, Ford's grandson Henry Ford II took over the company and sold Fordlandia back to the Brazilian government for the cost of back wages owed the workers. Grandin trawled through archives and traveled to Brazil to chronicle a largely forgotten monumental enterprise. Parts of Ford's settlements and factories still exist with roads and water towers and homes and possibly stacks of mildewed newspapers with strong a strong editorial voice in favor of the fox trot. The strength of this book is its profile of Ford as a man with the resources and will to not only bring a Fordlandia into existent but to suffuse it with his various monomanias, to send armies of people to clear and plant and build and die, and to try to control how hundreds of thousands of people ate and dressed, learned, and thought about time itself. The whole enterprise invites an inevitable comparison to Fitzcarraldo on a massive scale, Werner Herzog's movie about a madman trying to move a boat against the unyielding rainforest while yelling and making Klaus Kinsky faces. If Ford yelled at the rainforest, though, he did so in Detroit. He never visited Fordlandia.
Here they come. The reporters with their feature stories, the announcers with their anecdotes, the Lunardis and the KenPoms and the retinues of seeders and bracketmancers, all bivouacked in Evanston because the Northwestern Wildcats inch ever closer to the NCAA Tournament. Before, the fresh-faced, short-straw reporters for ESPNRequiredByContract covering a Northwestern basketball game would wait until up to several seconds of game clock had expired to mention the Wildcats' woeful tourey drought. Now, they all live in the Chicagoland Metropolitan Area and spring from elevated train platforms and Italian beef wholesalers to proclaim to passersby that Northwestern has never made the NCAA Tournament. Did you know Northwestern has never made the NCAA tournament The Wildcats are 17-4 and rising through a delightfully mediocre Big Ten. This could be the best Northwestern team in modern history, albeit a history of opponents metaphorically dunking on Northwestern for decades at a time, even in decades where the scandalous dunk shot was banned from college basketball and opposing players had to subject them to vicious layups followed by strongly-worded letters to the college newspaper. Northwestern's historical basketball futility means that every single time they do something, the broadcasters need to break out their historical gas prices. Their latest feat involved downing Ohio State in Columbus for the first time since 1977, as announcers gleefully changed into their disco pants and haircuts. Ohio State plans to change the historical sign from the site of their Big Ear telescope that previously noted that in 1977, scientists discovered a potential extraterrestrial signal with an unknown origin and also the Buckeyes lost to Northwestern in basketball. BRACKETOLOGY Northwestern's unending Sisyphean attempts to qualify for the NCAA tournament always bring to the fore the experts in seeding and strength of schedule and all of the statistical models and bracket hokum that usually serve the purpose of telling us that the Wildcats will not make the tournament. While some teams that always make the tournament seem to cruise through losses to non-conference Washington Generals and tournament-tainting RPI infections like Northwestern most years, they seem unaffected, materializing as a seven seed in a far-flung regional. On the rare occasions when Northwestern seems poised to qualify, any loss to any team seems to knock them off the bubble, consigned to the dustbin of the NIT. People who pay attention to and understand NCAA Tournament seeding have logical, iron-clad, and data-supported reasons why this happens, but as a person who wastes enough of my own life immersing myself in dumb sports arcana, I cannot bring myself to learn about this process and get angry over seeding; I prefer to give myself over to the numbers sorcerers and the Selection Committee and watch every Wildcat game in a preventive flinch. The creation of the latest Mock Bracket The annual desperate charge towards the NCAA Tournament remains the all-consuming goal for Northwestern basketball despite its meaninglessness. A recent ESPN article compared the tourney drought to the Cubs' historical win in November, but while the Cubs threw off more than a century of thwarted attempts to become the champions of the entire sport, Northwestern desperately hopes to qualify for a tournament that continually expands to more and more rounds to the point where you or I may actually be in the NCAA Tournament right now and not even know it. It's not even a conference championship; at best, it represents a Certificate of Basketball Competence, and a way to end the sole defining feature of the program in January and February where the name of the school for all intents and purposes becomes Northwesternwhichhasnevermadethetournament. A streak like the Cubs' championship drought tortures Cubs fans but also accumulates folklore and fanciful legends and generational yearning. Northwestern has accumulated droughts in athletic feats so prosaic that they have no meaning at all to anyone. They nurtured a bowl loss streak for more than sixty years, even as the number of bowls proliferated to the point where teams can declare bowl eligibility by filling out a notarized form. Bowl wins have become devalued and instantly forgotten and yet the Wildcats' inability to win one of the crappy bowls they qualified for became an unbearable albatross that inspired nothing other than a plush monkey purchase by Pat Fitzgerald. Their inability to qualify for the NCAA Tournament even as it keeps doubling in size remains an achievement in and of itself. Northwestern's loftiest sports goals of winning crappy bowl games and getting to the NCAA Tournament often serve as fireable offenses at other schools. These modest goals represent the larger goal for Northwestern's programs, which is to exist in the Big Ten as sports teams and not a traveling museum of historical athletic catastrophe. See the team that once lost a bunch of football games and threw the goalposts in a Great Lake. See the team that has never made the NCAA Tournament. See the stadium so filled with opposing fans that they have to go to a silent snap count or endure free throw taunts echoing from the rafters of their basketball barn, which the opposing fans taunting Northwestern players find inadequate. There are few things in sports more fun than a historically downtrodden team making its run. Let's hope we have a reason to watch the first Selection Sunday I would ever care about. THANK GOODNESS THE BULLS ARE IN THE THROES OF A COMPLETE MELTDOWN The Per Synergy Sports basketblogging set have argued that the worst place for an NBA team is on a treadmill of mediocrity, where teams have no chance to compete nor have they been shitty enough to be rewarded with a high lottery pick that could blossom into a superstar. They are wrong. The best thing an non-contending team could do is to throw off the yoke of basketball decorum and descend into a shit-flinging soap opera of madness. Virtually everyone who pays the slightest attention to the National Basketball Association looked at the Bulls adding an aging Dwyane Wade and combustible brick artist Rajon Rondo to a front office that hires an organist to follow Gar Forman and John Paxson around to play foreboding diminished chords and a head coach who looks like he spends the off-season getting swindled in carnival games had the look of a disaster. Even me, a dullard who knows next to nothing about basketball, described the crowning of the Three Alphas as a nickname that hilariously summed up the exact way that the team was destined to fall apart. Wednesday night, after the Bulls blew their 400th consecutive loss to the Atlanta Hawks, the entire thing exploded in a glorious cacophony of recriminations. Wade complained to reporters that his teammates suck. Jimmy Butler, the Bulls' All-Star who made a miraculous transformation from a role-playing defensive specialist to one of the best players in basketball, agreed with Wade that his teammates suck. Wade invoked Michelle Obama to complain that his teammates suck. Rondo, already disgruntled about his descent from major free agent acquisition to a space on Fred Hoiberg's point guard minutes roulette wheel, could not sit on the sidelines without wading in. That's Rondo's nature. He appears to have a reputation so toxic that NBA GMs seem to be only interested in acquiring him to put in a sealed train and send to rivals like how Germany sent Lenin to St. Petersburg. Rondo's innovation in the art of the destructive meltdown involved chastising Wade and Butler through a free verse poem called "My Vets." (Borat Voice) My Vets Bulls hero Nate Robinson has been closely monitoring the situation and has put out his own social media postings of angry Wade and Butler quotes with a plea to rejoin the Bulls, where he is only four years removed from his vomit-strewn takedown of the Brooklyn Nets. I think that the Bulls should bring him in and should conduct all personnel business via Instagram. So it begins. Wade and Butler are marching down Madison Street. Rondo is massing his forces from the East, preparing to siege the Advocare Center. The rest of the Bulls' crappy players are hiding in Hoffman Estates. Paxson has retired to his goblet-hurling arena while Fred Hoiberg wanders the country looking for a Blockbuster Video so he can find some inspirational movies to splice into his game film of the Bulls advancing upon each other in testudo formation. Doug McDermott is having extreme plastic surgery to disguise himself as Creighton's Maurice Watson and claim he has miraculously returned from injury. Doug McDermott undergoes a Recreightioning Procedure Thank goodness the Bulls are rotting, dysfunctional mess. They enter the doldrums of the NBA season as an unwatchable mediocrity that relies almost entirely on two players to make contested jumpshots. They will either fade into the late lottery or cling by their fingernails to an eight seed in the putrid east where they will be more or less instantaneously annihilated in the first round. Fortunately, they have decided not to quietly limp to the finish in a parade of missed 75-foot Mirotic jumpers but to implode into a ridiculous black hole of infighting and social media sniping that has filled the void of spending these months wondering if Derrick Rose is Back. BASKETBALL IS HAPPENING Northwestern's glorious run hits its most precarious stretch as it faces Big Ten powers Indiana, Purdue, and Wisconsin. They could continue to hang on or they can make a convincing case for themselves with a major upset. This team has come back, it has hung with some excellent teams on the road, and it has closed out games at the line and with defense. The players say they are focusing on one game at a time as required by law, but fans know that every dribble, pass, and shot is weighted with tournament implications. It's nerve-wracking in the service of a modest achievement, but the best basketball in the Chicago area is happening at Welsh-Ryan while the Bulls destroy themselves through poisoned letters and sword duels. Maybe this is the year we don't need to bask in the reflected funhouse glory of Bill Carmody.
After two weeks, Northwestern looked doomed to a miserable season of weekly clobberings by even the Big Ten's most abysmal teams. Now, they're 4-2 and sitting in second place in the Big Ten West, their offense has looked at times unstoppable, and they are in a sound position to make a bowl game; none of this seemed possible when an Illinois State field goal bonked off the goalpost, that Northwestern would knock off the admittedly reeling participants in last year's Lucrative Conference Championship Game in simultaneous weeks and spend 30 minutes rampaging against Indiana in a maniacal offensive spree. The first half of the game, Northwestern mangled the Hoosiers. Clayton Thorson threw over them unchecked. Austin Carr, who leads the Big Ten in every meaningful receiving category, scooted around the defense. The offensive line flattened the defense for Justin Jackson to run over them, and the Wildcats raced out to a 24-3 halftime lead. After halftime, though, Indiana's defense reappeared. They shut out Northwestern and the Wildcats spent the entire time desperately clinging to a shrinking lead. Hoosier linemen who spent the first half driven into the turf now walled off Jackson's running lines; defensive backs flummoxed by the receivers now found themselves in better positions. As Indiana narrowed the gap, the Wildcats defense managed to stop them on numerous fourth downs and with turnovers. Montre Hardage ripped a ball from a Hoosier receiver. Kyle Queiro, with one hand encased in a protective club, leaped up and made a one-handed interception that might be the single greatest individual defensive play I've ever seen from a Northwestern player with a club hand, claw hand, or hook hand that he uses to spear interceptions and appear suddenly in the back seat of cars. Who knows what shifted in halftime to make Northwestern's offense go from an unstoppable touchdown machine to a broken-down touchdown machine heaving exhaust and barfing oil at its own 35-yard-line in the second half. But Northwestern will need its best offensive performance to keep the pressure on the looming ogre of the Big Ten this weekend. BUCKEYE RECKONING Northwestern has bullied its last three Big Ten opponents, but now they have to go face big, bad Ohio State in the Horseshoe. The last time these two teams met was during a primetime ESPN Gameday showdown in Evanston, as the ranked Wildcats faced off against the Buckeyes in a Football Apocalypse. That did not end well. Northwestern stayed in the game, but lost even though Kain Colter got that first down and I have been passing out hastily-xeroxed literature about it at Ryan Field weekly ever since to spread awareness of the vast refereeing conspiracy that meets by flickering torchlight, an ancient order that has been denying crucial first downs to generations of Colters. After that game, the Wildcats spiraled into a ludicrous string of misfortunes that all blend together in a montage of ill-timed interceptions, overtimes, hail marys, and footballs adversely bouncing into a sea of opponent arms as the Wildcats plummeted from undefeated and ranked into a melancholy bowl-bereft winter. Now, Ohio State is coming off its first loss of the season, a shocking upset at the hands of Penn State. There are two ways this can affect the Buckeyes. It is possible that Penn State, and a Wisconsin team that had taken them to overtime the week before, have shown some weaknesses in what appeared to be an unstoppable juggernaut on the way to the playoff. On the other hand, the loss may have refocused the team and whipped them into a football frenzy, with the entire organization from the Athletic Director to the coaching staff to the towel-wrangling student managers unwilling to contemplate anything other than defeating Northwestern and slipping into Jon Gruden's Disease where they are unable to express anything without slipping into a bizarre football argot. GRUDEN: THAT'S WHY WHAT YOU'VE GOT TO DO RIGHT THERE IS GO SCATTER TWO BUNCH RIGHT ZIP FIRE TWO JET TEXAS RIGHT OF FLAT X-Q IN THIS PARTICULAR SITUATION UNLESS OF COURSE YOU CAN AUDIBLE TO THE HOT GUY RIGHT THERE AND SEND HIM ZEPHYR GORGON 14 SEVEN MARK THREE Z IF YOU SEE THEM IN ZONE COVERAGE. GROCERY CLERK: Sir, the question was is this your signature Northwestern has not beaten Ohio State since 2004. They have not beaten Ohio State in Columbus since 1971 because their plan has disappeared. Last known image of the man entrusted with Northwestern's plans to win football games in Columbus The Buckeyes will be heavy favorites in this game. Northwestern still remains inconsistent and still relies on young defensive backs learning on the fly. Ohio State still remains a national championship contender while Northwestern fans will be delighted with a berth in the A1 Refurbished Ball Bearing Bowl, and the Buckeyes' roster is filled with Mr. Footballs and All-Americans and future NFL stars. But this is college football where the inevitable occasionally yields to the jubilantly improbable. ALPHA SEASON The Bulls season is on the horizon after a complete rebuild of the team. Gar Forman and John Paxson built the team using the vaunted Guys You've Heard Of blueprint to bring in a hobbling Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, whose basketball career has devolved into something like the TV show Kung Fu except he wanders the Earth seeking assists and moves on after he's alienated everyone on the team. It should be remarkably entertaining because it has been designed for disaster perfectly, like the first part of the monster movie. A million basketblogging Goldblums simultaneously uh um huh hey the Three Alphas problem and next thing you know, Hoiberg is running for his life through a United Center kitchen and complaining about minutes and touches Rondo nicknamed himself, Wade, and Bulls star Jimmy Butler the Three Alphas, and I can't think of a better nickname for the inevitable way this team will collapse upon itself. It's poetic. It's a Greek Tragedy. There hasn't been a better nickname-as-mechanism for destruction since some jabroni swingman would call himself the Jordan Stopper and then get violently dunked upon and tongue-wagged and probably forced to endure some other heretofore unknown form of insane Jordan vengeance like him hiring a team of evil psychologists to disguise themselves as sports therapists and convince the erstwhile Jordan Stopper to unearth some memory of a childhood fear like of clowns or bats or clown-bats and then break into his house as a clown-bat and then use that moment of terror to hustle him at some exotic, illegal except in international waters gambling game. Jordan Stopper Gerald Wilkins was last seen cleaned out on a cruise ship in a complex card game called Purser's Rummy The team's strong-willed personalities combined with a coach who seems like he calls people a "grumpy gus" are not the only problems with the Bulls. Their style of play remains completely and utterly mystifying. While the NBA's successful teams trend towards utilizing space and shooting, the Bulls have three ball-dominant guards who like to slash to the basket or, in the case of Rondo, refuse to shoot without a resolution from the UN Security Council. The Bulls plan to play retrograde anti-basketball, where their best hope to stop the other team will be to so aesthetically offend them that they walk off the court in a fit of disbelief, like the likely exaggerated stories of people storming out of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at the premier of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The Bulls doubled down on this philosophy by trading Tony Snell for Michael Carter-Williams, a long-limbed brick artist. The Bulls' best shooter will be Doug McDermott, who defends as if he has just been dropped in a Running Man situation and has no idea that Professor Sub Zero is coming after him with a sharpened hockey stick.
(I wrote this all before the Bulls rode an insanely hot-shooting Wade against the Boston Celtics and Wade uncorked the meanest non-Garnett mug anyone in the NBA has seen and now I'm all in on the Three Alphas) The Bulls' top players are talented enough to make the playoffs in the abysmal Eastern Conference. Even if they remain relatively cohesive, even if they aren't sniping at each other through bloggers aligned with each Alphas' camp, even if Fred Hoiberg hasn't been driven back to Iowa into the welcoming arms of seed magnate boosters, even if Rondo hasn't become so toxic that he is being introduced at the United Center in one of those Hannibal Lecter masks, the future of the Bulls is uncertain. They have a few promising young players, several not particularly promising young players and Butler under contract for the next four years. The Bulls are not set up to win anything in the near future, but the Three Alphas era should give us some memorably hideous basketball and intrigue from the reliably dysfunctional front office to entertain us through the entire miserable winter. UPSET SEASON It's a weekend of upsets as Northwestern attempts to change the season from delightful surprise to shocking West contender. There's been a lot of work by sports analysts to take the guesswork out of sports as analytics has moved from the basement to million-dollar front offices. But unpredictability remains the bedrock of sports-- I'm sure every stat in the universe has Northwestern getting drawn and quartered by the Buckeyes, but who knows? Maybe they can pull off a ridiculous upset. It's not the only improbable Chicago sports scenario. Maybe the Three Alphas can get past their bizarre, retrograde basketball stylings and fight through the front office meddling to become a factor in the East. And maybe the Cubs can somehow pull off an upset against the larger forces of the universe and win a World Series how am I typing this sentence.
