Week 6: Big Ten Carnival

Northwestern tarps off one or two ends of the northeast stands for games.  This is to prevent the shameful appearance of naked bleachers on television, covering them with an aesthetically superior giant banner that says NO ONE IS SITTING HERE (CHICAGO'S BIG TEN TEAM).  It was a raw, overcast, two-tarp afternoon in Evanston when Minnesota came to open Big Ten play.  Northwestern's grounds crew could very well have tarped off the endzones when the Gophers had the football because they did not cross the plane.  They did not kick a field goal.  They did not get a safety or a point-after conversion or in fact score in any other way possible in a football game because the Wildcats shut them out, remained undefeated, climbed to #13 in the rankings, and actually I don't think I'm going to make it to the end of this sentence before I pass out.

Northwestern's defense has shut down all comers so far.  The defensive line goes ten deep.  Dean Lowry is playing football like UnderArmour has designed a special grass-camouflage alternate jersey and he keeps popping up in the backfield to tackle running backs who think the field itself has come alive and seized them.  After a referee inexplicably overruled an apparent interception, Tyler Lancaster poked the ball away from Gopher quarterback Mitch Leidner, and Anthony Walker ran it in for a touchdown.  Clayton Thorson ran in two touchdowns, Justin Jackson rushed for 120 yards, and the Wildcats Big Tenned their way to a field goal with a nearly nine-minute-long drive to open the third quarter that has probably been prescribed to someone as a sedative. 

I wish I could be as excited about anything in my life as Northwestern's PA 
Announcer is when Justin Jackson is The Ball Carrier.  Northwestern played 
once again in their gothic uniforms, which have become so popular that I 
expect the entire campus to become more gothic until the clock tower is
replaced by a moon-blotting bat alcove that broadcasts nightly cackling from 
university president Mortuary Shapiro

Northwestern has arrived.  It is currently part of The Conversation.  It is somewhat gratifying and bizarre to see Northwestern actually discussed in the context of major college football as a subject itself and not merely as part of a highlight montage of some Heisman candidate blithely stiff-arming a Wildcat into oblivion.  Of course, absolutely no national college football pundit has anything at all useful or insightful to say about Northwestern football because they are a bunch of square-jawed suit men whose entire job is to clumsily restate the obvious with the unhinged zeal of a doomsday prophet.
 
An ESPN analyst, dug from the rubble of a natural disaster, will immediately grab your lapels 
and explain that at the end of the day, I tell you what you move that ball up and down the 
field but what it's going to come down to is turnovers and scoring points off turnovers that's 
how you're gonna win this football game and also toughness

Only one victory remains between Northwestern and bowl contention.  Another win would set them up for an apocalyptic showdown against hated quasi-rival Iowa with Big Ten West Championship Implications.  But first, they have to get past another unexpectedly resurgent team from the East that has spent the last three consecutive years funded by a grant by the United States Department of Northwestern Football Misery.

SHIT, MICHIGAN IS GOOD AGAIN

Well, it had to happen.  Michigan fans, facing suffering unimaginable to less august fanbases when their team was not good for a couple of seasons, cried out into the night for a savior.  They got Jim Harbaugh, a grating football monomaniac who seems poised to return the Wolverines to tedious prominence just as he did at San Diego, Stanford, and in the NFL with the 49ers.  The Wolverines have jumped out to a 4-1 record and the AP top 25.  Michigan fans are excited; the revival of Michigan football reminds me of the Simpsons episode when the Soviet Union unexpectedly returned.

Michigan and Northwestern mirror each other this year.  Both feature fearsome defenses and suspect offenses.  And both feature animated coaches that irritate the hell out of other teams.  Jim Harbaugh and Pat Fitzgerald are the yin and yang of obnoxious football coach gesticulation: Harbaugh reacts to every penalty like a thwarted space emperor while Fitzgerald celebrates like he is at a Great Awakening tent revival and has just been moved for the first time by the spirit of Butt Slap Jesus.



Who maniacally cavorted it better

Northwestern will be relying heavily on workhorse Justin Jackson, but will need a big game from Clayton Thorson.  Thorson has only played one road game in his career at Duke's sedate Wallace Wade Stadium.  Saturday, he'll have to deal with the Big House and the cacophony of 100,000 Michigan fans disapprovingly harrumphing.  Michigan will turn to quarterback Jake Rudock, late of Iowa.  Finding a graduate transfer quarterback from Iowa is like finding the last grizzled, one-eyed captain in a sleepy bar in Marrakesh to try to run a shipment of dubiously-procured artifacts past an Ottoman blockade.  It is worth mentioning here that Northwestern has never defeated Jake Rudock in football.

Despite being undefeated and ranked higher in the polls than Michigan, Northwestern will enter this game as underdogs.  This game projects as a really Big Ten game, where teams will spend most of the first half building elaborate trench systems.  Both teams will be looking to make a statement and keep themselves in the Big Ten championship picture.  More importantly, Northwestern is playing for the distinct honor of ruining the afternoon for a bunch of people in Michigan Stadium, as high a calling as exists in the Big Ten Conference.

ALMOST BIG TEN CARNIVAL

The opening week of Big Ten play was an exciting time of upsets, near upsets, field goals, and the state of Indiana nearly upending the entire conference in a single fell swoop.  It could have been a Big Ten Carnival, an upsetting of the traditional order when the Great Powers of the conference were overturned in a drunken bacchanal.

Bruegel's Fight Between Carnival and Lent is a Big Ten painting, showcasing sixteenth-
century agricultural practices, beer-swilling, smoke meat enthusiasm and, on the Lent side, 
abstinence from the forward pass  

Ohio State 34, Indiana 27  
Urban Meyer is trying very hard this season to prove the old football chestnut "if you have three Heisman-caliber quarterbacks, then you have none."  The defending champs have looked listless on offense and a heroic Indiana team that lost its starting quarterback and running back nearly upset the number one team in the country.  Unfortunately, the Hoosiers called a play called "The Entire History of Indiana Football," that ended the game on a bad snap, but we all know that an SEC partisan has already gotten the phrase "they almost lost to Indiana, paawwwlll" tattooed backwards on his face in case he suffers a Memento accident.

Purdue  21, Michigan State 24  
Michigan State survived a spirited comeback from Purdue at home.  We are just minutes from inhabiting a bizarre world where Indiana and Purdue upset the first and second-ranked teams in the country, the college football world becoming contained entirely within their Old Oaken Bucket. Instead, the Hoosier state stuck to its moribund football destiny, forever forced to remain in the shadows of a powerhouse football state like Illinois.

Nebraska 13, Illinois 14
Illinois is now 4-1 in the post-Beckman era.  It is great to watch the Illini rallying around Bill Cubit, a man who once got into a heated sideline altercation with Beck Man while they were ostensibly coaching the same team.  The Illini are looking far friskier than the dilapidated husk of a team you would assume to see when a coach is fired eight days before the beginning of the season.  While the recovery of The Hat in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry remains paramount, I hope the Illini continue to bedevil Big Ten teams, if only because Tim Beckman is home watching these games while wearing a disconnected headset, drawing sideline interference penalties for dripping nacho cheese onto the sofa.

Beckman has not yet, as far as I can tell, followed through with his wrongful 
termination suit against the University of Illinois.  I imagine it is because 
he is thoroughly preparing to take the case to trial, fire his legal team, 
represent himself, and interrupt court proceedings every five minutes to 
yell INFILTRATION YOUR HONOR and then army crawl over to the defense 
to rifle through their papers

Iowa 10, Wisconsin 6 
I did not watch a minute of this game and assume that it involved two people screaming at each other at the 50-yard line until one of their heads exploded, after which the teams were assigned an arbitrary Big Ten score of 10-6 and the fans went home.

BIG HOUSE, BIG GAME

If there's one thing the last few years have told us, it is that Michigan-Northwestern games will defy the laws of physics and space-time in order to rip the beating heart out of a Wildcat football team.  Last year, the infamous M00N game ended with what I had described as Trevor Siemian's one-man Charge of the Light Brigade against the entire Wolverine defense on an ill-conceived two-point conversion.  Pat Fitzgerald had attempted to win in regulation because the previous two had ended in overtime after bizarre collapses allowed Michigan to tie.  In 2012, it was on a tipped pass hauled down by a Michigan receiver with just enough time for a field goal.  The next year, Michigan somehow rushed its field goal unit onto the field like Indiana Jones escaping a collapsing temple to get the kick off as the dying second melted from the scoreboard.  Every football game is a unique series of independent events that should not be affected by the approximate amount of insanity that ended the last game, but it seems entirely possible that the outcome of this game depends less on football plays than on a series of rivalries played out on some football Mount Olympus for reasons we cannot possibly fathom.

If this game plays out as predicted, it should be an unwatchable festival of the punting arts, with brown footballs raining from sky like autumn leaves.  The Wildcats have a lot to prove; Michigan fans seem to have already looked past this game to their contest against Michigan State the next week because they've spent the last several games effortlessly dominating Northwestern by winning in the dumbest, flukiest way possible.  

But, in the spirit of Big Ten Carnival, maybe the Wildcats will once again upset the traditional Big Ten order and maybe even win the West.  It is impossible to say because Northwestern has so delightfully surpassed expectations this season that it would be a shame to stop pundits from blandly pontificating about Northwestern because let me tell you when it comes to Northwestern football they're gonna need to go out there for sixty minutes and I tell you what this team they can play some defense in the Big Ten Conference but (he says, staring into the camera like he's about to tell the American people he has authorized the use of nuclear weapons against a meteor hurtling towards the Capitol building) you need to get into the endzone.

Week 5: UNDER THE LIGHTS

The sun dipped behind the press box, the lights shone on the field, and, with the eyes of the nation upon Northwestern in Big Ten Network Regional Action and with a fearsome two-tarp crowd, the Wildcats narrowly defeated Ball State to a deafening chorus. Northwestern is 4-0 and the Associated Press has declared them #16 in the country as they prepare for the perfunctory Big Ten play as a warm-up to an all-but-inevitable national championship.

Northwestern opened the game with a touching tribute to Classic Northwestern Football. The offense stagnated and turned the ball over, and the defense looked solid but more vulnerable than the top-ranked tackle wall that consumed its first three opponents. Ball State's freshman quarterback Riley Neal extended drives. More importantly, he continually hucked the ball in the direction of Jordan Williams, an eight-foot colossus with net hands who continually out-leaped Wildcat defenders for ridiculous catches.

Jordan Williams, artist's rendition

In the third quarter, though, the offense switched on. Clayton Thorson looked like a different quarterback, spreading the ball around, and letting Dan Vitale terrorize Ball State defenders and confuse Ball State coaches who presumably spent a week scouring arcane tomes of football lore to figure out what a superback was before deciding it was a myth and then found out only too late that it is a slightly different word to use for a tight-endish player. This is a successful tactic, and the Wildcats should come up with unnecessarily weird-sounding names for all of their positions, such as renaming guards to Man-Walls and the quarterback to the Unholy Shaman of the Ninth Eye.

IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE UNHOLY SHAMAN OF THE NINTH EYE
POSITION YOU NEED TO MAKE QUICK DECISIONS AND GET THE 
BALL OUT TO YOUR PODMEN AND YOUR KRAKUS GROUP IF YOU 
WANT TO WIN GAMES IN (SEARCHES DESPERATELY FOR FALLEN 
CUE CARD HOLDER WHILE HE PAUSES LIKE A DEER IN HEADLIGHTS 
BEFORE AN INTERN RACES TO HOLD UP THE CARD) THE NATIONAL 
FOOTBALL LEAGUE 

Ball State came back to pull within five, but the game never seemed in doubt. The 'Cats did suffer some injuries. Standout tackle Geoff Mogus left on a stretcher. Safeties Godwin Igwebuike and Kyle Queiro also left the game. Pat Fitzgerald has remained characteristically tight-lipped about his injured players, although at press time BYCTOM has been able to secure a confirmation from him that some of his players may be made of molecules.

It was a harrowing win, but let us remember that we are talking about Northwestern football. Let the football gluttons sit around in their tuxedos grousing about not winning by enough points and intriguing about playoff committees. Northwestern has started undefeated for the third time in nearly two decades and has yet to lose a game through a spectacular series of football misfortunes.

Over the course of following Northwestern, I thought I had experienced 
every single heartbreaking way to lose a football game. In the past two weeks, 
the Texas Longhorns saw a spirited comeback end when their kicker was 
 temporarily possessed by the Spirit of John Carney and then the next week 
were done in by a hideously mishandled routine punt. If the Longorns, the 
Habsburgs of college football, have experienced decades of football gluttony, 
this is their period of football gout 

BIG TEN RECKONING

Northwestern has beaten two good teams already, but the real season begins on Saturday with Big Ten play. The Big Ten West is hardly considered a crucible; instead, it is more often portrayed as a sad relic of Midwest, where the football factory has closed and rusted and now only manufactures fullbacks on back order since 1996 and rusted knock-off spread offenses that falter when weak shouldered quarterbacks, originally designed to dive heedlessly into an interwar leather-helmet ruck, now heave the ball in the direction of nowhere.

 The Northwestern-Minnesota game features two excellent defenses with suspect passing games. Conventional wisdom says that we should be in for another exciting game of field possession, dive plays, and punting. Hunter Niswander already attempted 10 punts in the Duke game. Any more double-digit punt games and he should be allowed to ride out onto Ryan Field on a custom-built punt-based motorcycle, his punting cape billowing behind him majestically while the marching band blares his majestic punt anthem.

Northwestern/Minnesota probably will not reach the heights of the 1939 Texas Tech/
Centenary College game, which featured 77 combined punts, including 36 by Tech punter 
Charlie Calhoun. The amount of punting is mind-boggling in a game that happened after the 
Spanish-American War. Were the teams handing off to a punter in the backfield who surveyed 
the defense and immediately punted? Was there a rule that any person involved in the game, 
including spectators and faculty members, were invited to stop play at any time to punt? Was 
Shreveport, Louisiana temporarily engulfed by a disruption in the space-time continuum 
that trapped a community in a maelstrom of endless punting and they could have been in 
there for years and have no way of knowing? It is also important to note that the Centenary 
College's team was known as the "College Gents" which is the puntingest football team name 
possible. 

The game also featured 14 fumbles 

I don't anticipate a nonsensical paelolithic Big Ten puntfest because I have walked this Earth and I know that Minnesota/Northwestern games are a cauldron of insanity. These games have ended with hail marys, walk-off interception returns, 100-yard kickoff returns, and more improbable reversals of fortune than the last five minutes of a movie where a villain thinks he has successfully killed Arnold Schwarzenegger. I expect this game will end with the discovery of a heretofore-unknown NCAA rule that football games do not end until a team has successfully telegraphed the NCAA Head Office in the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago even though it no longer exists, prompting donors to attempt to build the hotel first. The game will be completed in several dozen years after the lawsuits are finalized.

THE CUBS ARE GOING TO WHAT IS TECHNICALLY THE PLAYOFFS

I am a Cubs pessimist. I am a Cubs miserablist. I am a Cubs doom-sayer wandering around Wrigleyville in a sandwich board prophesying millennia of non-championship baseball, tormenting fans with occasional heart-breaking misery until they embrace the sweet release of death or become Yankees fans. 

 Now, the Cubs face a do-or-die Wildcard quasi-playoff invented by the champagne and goggle industry to have the honor of facing slaughter by the mirthless St. Louis juggernaut that trains by stomping on hearts. They will, barring a miraculous showing against the Pirates from a Reds team that ended its season two weeks ago and is now fielding their social media interns, travel to a raucous PNC Park to face an excellent Pirates team. The consensus is that the Cubs have the upper hand; they will send out Jake Arrieta, who has ascended to some Olympian plane of pitching transcendence that has made him nearly impossible to hit for months at the cost of only his facial expressions (Arrieta is scheduled to start Friday night; there is still time for him to suffer the entire litany of Springfield softball ringer tragedies before the playoff game on October 7). This is precisely the point where the impending Cub calamity is so glaringly obvious that Euripedes has already dismissed it as "on the nose" in a snarky blog post. 

 On the other hand, who cares? 

This Cubs season has been far too much of a joy to ruin with worry of an impending collapse. The Cubs have spent the past several years in an intentional death-spiral, slowly siphoning the fun out of the team like a python constricting the life out of a drunk, swamp-curious Floridian. The unfortunate reality of American sports teams, which favor bottoming out with no consequences, especially when you play in a tourist attraction guaranteed to draw during the summer despite sending an army of Darwin Barneys and Junior Lakes to helplessly flail at baseballs, nearly demands it. 

 The turnaround was not supposed to happen this fast. Kris Bryant, the probable Rookie of the Year, has been a star since he was brought up from Iowa awaiting the end of Theo Epstein's corn prison service time imbroglio. Addison Russell has been a revelation with the glove at short. Javier Baez and Jorge Soler have missed time with injuries, but both have returned towards the end of the season to clobber things. And Kyle Schwarber is a moon-faced stump person who has constantly entertained fans by finding new and more exciting ways to fall down and also smash baseballs into uncharted galaxies.

The team has been led by wacky old Joe Maddon who marries unconventional baseball tactics with whimsical entertainments for six-year-old birthday parties including dress-up days, zoo animals, and a magician. Anthony Rizzo could be making a case for an MVP-type season if Bryce Harper did not exist.

Harper (r) fights off Jonathan Papelbon's literal attempt to strangle him 
 according to baseball's unwritten rules of monster-violence. "Noose" 
 Papelbon plans to start a radio show with his twin brothers Garrotte and 
Throttle called Choke Talk where everyday Americans call in with problems 
and, after uproarious banter, one of them asks "have you tried choking 
 someone?" and then the brothers gently rib each other about the times 
 they've strangled and head-butted ineffectively 

The most curious part of the season has been Starlin Castro's transformation from the worst everyday player in baseball to a genuine force with the bat, hitting .403/.429./.708 in September. Castro was pulled as the everyday shortstop in August and his resurgence has been difficult to explain. But these wild fluctuations make up the Starlin Castro experience. Castro doesn't walk and, until recently, had shown sporadic power. His entire worth is based on fluctuations in batted-ball placement. He is a no true outcomes player. Starlin Castro performs as a baseball casino, letting the capricious whims of fate guide his game whether hitting slap singles or flipping a coin as a ball barrels towards him in the infield to decide if he makes an impressive play or attempts to fling it to the cutoff man in a sixteen-inch softball game happening at the lakefront park. 

 As much fun as the Cubs have been this season, the ultimate goal of a World Series seems unlikely this year, even if they get past the Pirates. Jake Arrieta is only one man and he cannot not pitch every day. Jon Lester has had a fine season of his own, but remains hampered by a bizarre inability to throw to first base, his feeble batting, and his use of David Ross as a personal catcher. Ross, a grizzled gray-beard who looks like a warrant officer on British frigate torn between his loyalty to a captain going insane on the high seas and the men fomenting mutiny to return the ship to combat, is one of my favorite players, but he swings the bat like a crusty Napoleonic naval officer who has never heard of baseball.

Sailing Master David Ross ponders a plot to lock the skipper in the brig
after the captain has disregarded RN orders in order to pursue the Captain's
sworn enemy Louis-Antoine-Cyprien Infernet across the seas

The rotation after Lester and Arrieta remains suspect. Jason Hammel, who pitched a strong first half, has imploded. Before the All-Star break, he sported a 2.86 ERA. After, his ERA ballooned to 5.10, he has pitched only 67 innings, and opponents have mashed a robust .856 OPS against him. That is an entire team of Kris Bryants. Kyle Hendricks has been better, but his 95 ERA+ (just slightly below an MLB-average 100) inspires little fear. The Cubs have cobbled games out of an armada of former starters in the bullpen, including Travis Wood and mid-season pickups Clayton Richard and Trevor Cahill. In order for the Cubs to win, they will need Lester and Arrieta to be essentially perfect for every start. 

 And should the Cubs reverse every single defining feature of their team for the past ten decades and defeat the Pirates, they will be forced to play the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals have had an incredible season. They lost numerous key players to injury for all or part of the season including superstar pitcher Adam Wainwright, but have steamrolled to baseball's top record. Talismanic catcher Yadier Molina is out with a thumb injury sustained when Anthony Rizzo slid into him. Starter Carlos Martinez will not pitch in the postseason. This will not stop them. The Cardinals are essentially a Terminator factory of anonymous boring dudes sent to mirthlessly destroy baseballs. Their season has been a commendable testament to resilience and organizational depth. To fans of other Central teams leveled by the Cardinals juggernaut over the past decade, it is also a depressing paean to their inevitability. Facing the Cardinals in the playoffs is like receiving a tax audit, an impending bureaucratic nightmare that cannot avoided or triumphed against.

Unsurprisingly, Wainwright has returned months ahead of schedule to join the 
Cardinals' playoff bullpen. I suspect that the Cardinals have cloned all of their 
players and have only been waiting for the first opportunity to unleash this version 
of Waino Mk. II in order to defray suspicion instead of replacing him immediately 
and while this may seem impossible, far-fetched, and taken from the opening 
segment of the crappy latter-day Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Sixth Day, 
may I remind you that the Cardinals' cheating scandal from earlier this season involved 
computers, case closed

Meaningful baseball has returned to the North Side for the first time in seven years. It does not matter that the Cubs will be playing in a truncated, bastardized play-in game seemingly designed by a malevolent baseball deity for Cubbish heartbreak. The season has been too enjoyable to be undone by a single disappointing loss. The Cubs, with their young bats, piles of free agent money, and bats still lurking in the minors seem poised to remain relevant for years to come; it is only then, with sky-high expectations, can Cub fans be properly and traditionally broken.

GOPHER INVASION 

The Gophers started the season with high expectations of Big Ten West contention. They opened with an encouraging loss against championship contender TCU, but have struggled against Colorado State, Kent State, and Ohio, defeating each by only a field goal. Minnesota's fearsome defense has also suffered attrition, more than Northwestern's. A win against a ranked Northwestern team would instantaneously restore Minnesota's status as a team to be reckoned with in the division while giving Northwestern fans flashbacks to the squandered 2013 season. A Northwestern win, though, will set the Wildcats up for a showdown with angry football muppet Jim Harbaugh's frisky Michigan team at the Big House for bowl eligibility.

 It is October, Northwestern is undefeated, and the Chicago Cubs are riding high into the postseason. Perhaps the most dangerous thing is not the tough Minnesota defense or presumed Pirates playoff starter Gerritt Cole. The most dangerous thing is the possibility of a comet striking the Earth.