Northwestern Turns Unwatchable Slog Into Overtime Thriller

The NCAA tournament does not care how a team wins its game, only that they win.  If they play one of the worst halves of basketball possible or an opposing player temporarily forgets that basketball exists in a limited amount of time and does not extend infinitely past the temporal limits of human experience or if the broadcast is temporarily halted to show us a message from Buckingham Palace but they still win in overtime then they still get to live another day.

Northwestern and FAU played the first half they had been placed in some sort of TruTV prank show where they replaced the baskets with narrower novelty rims from carnival games that made it all but impossible for a ball to successfully pass through the hoop.  Their game kicked off Friday's slate of games, so for several minutes, this was the only thing on TV: Northwestern and FAU players fruitlessly running back and forth across the court shoving each other and then missing layups until the Owls' seven-foot center got to attempt a couple of free throws.  For Northwestern fans, this was normal and something that regularly happens when the football team is accidentally shown on national television and America is forced to bear witness to the team's Iowa cover band aesthetics on their way to a plodding 17-13 win against Nebraska.

When it's 20-19 in the first half

The first half looked alarmingly like it was following the formula for a Northwestern loss, which was for a team to commit all of its resources to stymieing Boo Buie and for the rest of the Northwestern roster to miss open shots.  The Wildcats, though, stayed in the game with some ferocious defense.  I missed the last several minutes of the first half because I realized too late that my television provider's ads about being able to pause live television on their app only work if I am in my house and not trying to watch the game at work with my finger hovering over the delightfully anachronistic "boss button" that still exists on the official NCAA website and has moved from showing a generic pie chart to, I assume for its 2024 edition, a whole bunch of fake AI bullshit.

The NCAA Tournament's 2045 Boss Button

Things looked far better in the second half.  The 'Cats started to cruise, Boo Buie started to take over as the best player on the floor, Ryan Langborg and Brooks Barnhizer began to hit shots even as Bill Raftery slandered Barnhizer's mustache growing ability, and it looked like Northwestern would easily win.  But then the game started to turn towards FAU.  Things fell apart after Nick Martinelli was whistled for a flagrant after Vlad Goldin put his face right where Martinelli's elbow happened to be while he was going for a rebound; after that the 'Cats couldn't get anything to fall and FAU took a late lead before Barnhizer heroically tied the game on a last-second layup.

Something happens to Northwestern's tournament opponents in the last second of close games where they feel compelled to forget everything they've ever known about basketball.  In 2017, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis, who had been unstoppable in the second half of that game, inexplicably fouled Northwestern's free throw expert Bryant McIntosh with his team up one with 14 seconds left.  On Friday, Johnell Davis had the ball with with seven seconds left and the game tied but sort of casually loped up the court and dribbled around before launching a hopeless 27-footer into three Wildcats allowing the game to go to overtime. 

Surely there's room somewhere for Northwestern to create an art installation dedicated to its basketball program's greatest work of art: the Ryan Langborg overtime.  I am very sorry to casual readers who might get a little lost in the technical basketball terminology I am going to use here to describe what happened because it's the only way to convey it, but Langborg went absolutely nutso in overtime on Florida Atlantic.  He didn't miss a shot.  He drained threes as the twenty four second clock was losing it's last tenths of a second.  He outscored the entire Florida Atlantic team singlehandedly.  The 'Cats just kept taking 29.999 seconds to hit shots; the Owls couldn't respond, lost, and then their coach pulled up stakes to the University of Michigan.  I knew it was over as soon as Boo Buie hit one of the most preposterous shots a person could take in a high-level basketball game. 

"BOO BUIE, MAJOR SPLASH" 💦#MarchMadness @NUMensBball pic.twitter.com/VauGhv0iyv

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2024

Northwestern has yet to lose its opening game in its three appearances.  They also have yet to advance past the second and this year face toughest opponent the tournament could offer.

TOURNAMENT VIEWING

The NCAA Tournament is one of the great sports TV events, especially the opening rounds with several games happening at once, the potential for incredible upsets, and introduction of this year's class of Midmajor Oafs and NCAA Tournament Guys.  You can find complaints about the current state of men's college basketball: the combination of one-and-done NBA talents with the chaotic movement of players means that there is almost no continuity among teams although it is very difficult to argue that the reasons this is happening which are to allow players freedom to leave their programs and make money are bad.  Player movement has also led to more upsets and the delightful phenomenon of any player who stays with a program for more than a year seem like tenured faculty or even the relatively new phenomenon of a midmajor Upset Hero resurfacing on another program; the ability to see Max Abmas in a Texas jersey and remember him as an enjoyable NCAA Tournament guy is one example, and I'm sure there were a large number of people who sort-of remember Princeton's Sweet 16 run last year pleasantly startled to see Langborg pop up on Northwestern shooting the flaming He's On Fire basketballs from NBA jam.  

NIL has also brought us the incredible brand-new phenomenon of Round One NCAA Guys immediately filming horribly janky phone-camera commercials in hotel hallways, a sports commercial type that is already creeping up the rankings toward the hallowed ground of car dealership commercial where the athlete says the dealership's slogan in unison with a chorus of local children.

The most important thing that makes the NCAA Tournament elite television, though is the fact that it airs during two work days where the appeal of college basketball games between schools you don't care about and have never heard of goes from compelling to irresistible.  There's absolutely no reason to watch a game between like Louisville and Oral Roberts on a beautiful spring weekend but if that is what is happening instead of looking at TPS Reports or whatever it is the most important thing going on in the entire world.

This is why it is crushing to see every close tournament game devolve into unwatchable bullshit.  I know this is not a novel complaint, but the introduction of the referee review is in my opinion a catastrophe.  There is nothing less interesting than watching a bunch of people in stupid-looking shirts squinting at a little television monitor for five minutes while you see the same replay of a ball maybe glancing off some pixels that might be a guy's pinkie 45 times in a row.  There is no reason to ever hear the most unwelcome sound in all of sports: the voice of Gene Steratore.  I have nothing against Steratore himself, but the only you ever hear from him is when the game has gone to the Referee Shadow Zone, the announcers are trying to parse Basketball Molecules, and you are about to see the same insurance commercial for the exact number of times where your brain is no longer able to process the Insurance Iguana without turning you into a werewolf.  

As we've seen across sports, the lie that video replay can actually reveal objective truth instead of revealing a series of finer parsable concepts of truth based on the interaction of pixels at split-second increments beyond any human being's ability to perceive them is one that has turned referee decisions into the boring version of forensic analysis done on those CBS procedurals about crimes people do in the Coast Guard and turns a series of basketball games into a Pentagon briefing.  Also it hurts the viewing experience that basketball coaches no longer have to wear ridiculous formalwear because it is much funnier watching people have tantrums while wearing ill-fitting, sweated-through suits than in athleisure.

The cutting edge of Coach Fashion is a television detective who is being shoved out of an interrogation room

NORTHWESTERN STILL HOPING FOR "THE UPSET"

Northwestern's reward for winning this game is a matchup with UConn, last year's champions and this year's overall top seed that is coming off a 39 point evisceration of the Cowboy Hat School.  The Huskies have only lost three games this entire season and, at a time when basketball rosters are as fluid as they have ever been, emerged as one of the most dangerous threats to repeat as champions since Joakim Noah's Florida teams managed to do it seventeen years ago.  It is hard to imagine there are too many people outside of Northwestern sickos who have picked Northwestern to advance on their brackets.

If your historically shitty basketball team makes the tournament and you care more about winning your bracket than picking your team to win it all, then I am sorry that is the acme of cowardice.  Also, if Northwestern makes some sort of miracle run then you have an enormous chance of winning the online bracket as all of the other brackets having Northwestern advancing far will be disqualified since 90% of them are from sportswriters legally prohibited from collecting prizes

The Wildcats have what appears to be an impossible situation in front of them against an unstoppable basketball machine.  But the appeal of the tournament is that on any given day, these are still college basketball teams and capable of playing an absolute stinker at the worst time.  There's one person in Brooklyn who knows Northwestern can win this one and it's Boo Buie.

Holy Shit Northwestern Is In The Actual NCAA Tournament

At the beginning of this basketball season, Northwestern sent out an email with a video of a bearded Chris Collins in a windowless office imploring fans to come out and support the team that looked like a deposed head of state in exile calling for weapons and reinforcements. Northwestern's previous lackluster season finished with Iowa scoring 455 points on them in the Big Ten Tournament, and it seemed like more disappointment was on the way. For the second year in a row, its top players had left the program. Collins had found himself in the crosshairs of Northwestern's several dozen fans, and the new athletic director had ended last season with a cryptically worded statement that seemed to indicate that Collins would likely be fired at the end of another crummy campaign.  The program seemed to be in a death spiral or what would be a death spiral at other schools and was just sort of the baseline state of Northwestern men’s basketball. Four months later, a wave of students enveloped the court in ecstasy as the Wildcats beat number-one Purdue and secured their second-ever berth in the NCAA Tournament, and I am still trying to process that this has actually happened and I am not trapped in some bizarre fever dream and am going to wake up in September after getting hit in the head by a foul ball hit by a Cubs callup named Trant Manstadan.

Collins reassures supporters that Northwestern basketball still holds key fortifications near a Walgreens at the Wilmette border 

College sports have matched the pros in delivering a flurry of player movement, and it seems to me that fans have increasingly thought about their teams’ prospects in terms of getting players on or off the roster. This mindset makes it easy to forget that, especially in college sports, players can sometimes just get much better. Boo Buie, for example, spent three years as an exciting scorer whose outbursts could only reliably occur against Michigan State and then this season seemed to have had received a Promethean gift of basketball heroics and began playing as if every opponent had become a shrieking Tom Izzo whose head glistens red like a defrosting steak with every Buie dagger.

Northwestern's shocking improvement also comes from its transformation into a brutal, pain-in-the-ass defense. The turnaround is largely attributed to schematic changes overseen by new assistant coach Chris Lowery, but also from the players deciding to make every opponent half-court possession a nightmare. Chase Audige has emerged as a particular menace, cutting off passing lanes or suddenly materializing on the court to snag a pass he was nowhere near. The result of this makes Northwestern games delightfully miserable to watch. Their aesthetic is disgusting. Northwestern is not exactly a smooth offensive machine, so every Big Ten game they play is rife with endless scoring droughts. Their last game against Penn State in the Big Ten tournament appeared to take place in an arena testing out experimental rims smaller than the basketball as both teams ran intricate halfcourt shoving-based offenses that ended up with a ball bouncing dispiritingly off the hoop before they trudged to the other side and started doing it again. 

The result of Northwestern's transformation into a defensive juggernaut and vehicle for Boo Buie theatrics is the greatest season in school history.  They won the program's most conference games.  They went undefeated against the state of Indiana.  They beat Illinois wearing provocative Chicago-themed jerseys and Indiana with a last-second Buie floater that had Hoosiers whining about a push-off like a chorus of Bryons Rusell.  The Wildcats crushed Iowa so badly that Fran McCaffrey, who already looks like the villain in a Pixar movie except with less realistic hair, got insanely mad and had to be thrown out of the game, in front of all of his sons.  The Associated Press was still unable to locate a Northwestern logo when Northwestern briefly made the top 25.  Chris Collins won the Big Ten coach of the year award in a year where he was supposed to be fired and I remain both unsure whether he is actually a good basketball coach and positive that he is the greatest coach in program history.

That's when the attack comes SWISH from the sides, from the other fran mccaffery you didn't even know was there

In 2017, it took a series of terrifying, nervy games that climaxed with a last-second win on a full court heave of a pass in order to qualify for the tournament.  This year, a team that everyone picked to be last or second-to-last in the conference just whupped so many teams that they were jockeying for seeding in February.  It was a new experience for fans who are used to seeing the team clinging desperately to the bubble before waiting for a series of seemingly impossible misfortunes to catapult them into the NIT or the realm of other postseason tournaments that only make sense as vast money laundering operations. 

It has been genuinely confusing to watch Northwestern's last few games without panicking about them running afoul of some arcane bracket math.  The only thing at stake was the school's conference wins record and NCAA seeding, which as a Northwestern fan is a process I have never understood despite observing it for decades, much like how the family dog understands the rustle of the treat bag but is entirely ignorant about the concept of shopping.  And now here they are in the NCAA Tournament, poised to go further than any Northwestern team before them.    

BRONCO BUSTING

Northwestern is once again shunted off to the most remote region possible, playing Boise State in Sacramento.  It looks to me like Boise State is a popular upset pick against Northwestern, featuring three point shooters that may frustrate the Wildcat defense, which is designed to let teams bomb away from three and probably miss a lot because they are college students.  But I am not going to pretend like I any insight into Boise State.  I have not watched a single second of Boise State basketball this season or frankly any non-Northwestern college basketball.  I watched Northwestern and Rutgers play a game where they appeared to be trying to shoot with weighted medicine balls and then take approximately 85 minutes to complete the final moments of a game that was not really that close.  I do not have any spare time to watch Mountain West basketball even if I was spending that time searching out streaming services to see if I have to pay to watch the Arnold clone movie where the writers cruelly made him introduce himself as "Gordy Brewer." 

A Boise State-Northwestern game is apparently not a major draw.  They will play an evening game on TruTV, a forgotten Warner Brothers network that materializes annually for the NCAA tournament and exists at all other times to show endless reruns of shows like You Didn't Think I'd Shove You and Ryan Wears a Cape.  Northwestern's best chance to win involves playing the worst 56-52 grindfest you've ever seen that involves multiple invocations of the dreaded Time Without a Field Goal Clock.  Much like the apotheosis of Wildcat football under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern's basketball team this season exists to frighten and disgust otherwise unsuspecting bracket-wavers who do not know what they signed up for when they idly flipped over to the game.  

The rest of the region is brutal.  Should Northwestern manage to survive Boise State, they can look forward to a likely matchup with powerhouse UCLA.  If they were to somehow win that game, they would face what would probably be a rematch with that notorious goal-tending outfit Gonzaga, which knocked the Wildcats out of the 2017 tournament and caused Chris Collins to make the second most insane series of faces he has made in his career.  

My official power ranking of Insane Chris Collins Faces from least to most deranged: Michigan uncalled travel in the 2016 Big Ten Tournament; Northwestern blows 27-point lead against Michigan State in 2018 and Collins bugs his eyes out like Judge Doom from Rodger Rabbit; The Rubber-Faced Wow Offensive; Getting down on all fours and pounding the four screaming like an action movie protagonist seeing his partner gunned down three days from retirement.

And if you were to stare at the bracket long enough while enjoying a hallucinogenic journey you might observe there is a possibility no matter how remote that Northwestern could play Illinois in the Elite Eight, a cataclysm that would require the NCAA to create a rule specifically banning impersonations of Abraham Lincoln after dozens of brawling spectators would be injured attempting nineteenth-century wrestling moves.  

 

I have no idea what the the rest of this comic is other than this panel was placed without context in a WGN story about Lincoln's wrestling exploits that relates a wrestling match between Lincoln and Jack Armstrong, the toughest member of the Clary Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois and ends with a quote from Northwestern wrestling coach Matt Storniolo who said “I think you can see a lot of ways that wrestling could have influenced Abraham Lincoln.”

Regardless of what happens in the tournament, it is impossible to not be thrilled for Northwestern's players.  I will never hold any college player's decision to move on against him-- it is ludicrous to hold a grudge against any athlete choosing to exercise agency in this exploitative sport, and it is hardly ridiculous to want to go to a team that seemed more likely to make the tournament and play in bigger games and get more exposure.  Nevertheless, Buie, Audige, and Robbie Beran stuck around and they managed to get to the Dance.  It is incredibly gratifying to see them getting to play in big games in a packed Welsh-Ryan arena which actually seems like a home arena for the first time since the renovation.  I am giddy that with maybe one victory and a massive upset Boo Buie may transcend the miserable history of this program and become not just a Northwestern basketball legend, which he already is, but the program's first genuine March Madness Guy.