Review/Preview

It is impossible to write anything more evocative on Northwestern's tortured, miserable, last-place basketball season than this gif of Chris Collins on all fours slapping the floor, his eyes glazed with a sheen of madness.  This might be my favorite basketball gif of all time.  Collins is no longer coaching.  He is not drawing a play.  He is not giving an inspirational speech about rebounding.  He is watching his team hang tough with the number two ranked team in the country, he has seen a foul called, and he is reacting as if he is Charlton Heston and the University of Michigan has erected a Statue of Liberty in the student section.

One of the funniest things about sports, and college sports in particular, is the dichotomy between the figure of the coach as stern disciplinarian, here to shape athletes into better people under his or her gruff tutelage and the fact that we allow them to spend games in a maniacal reverie that would be otherwise baffling and unacceptable in any other context.  Successful coaches are allowed to parlay their fame into getting paid to go into a grain silo accessories sales executive convention and talking about Leadership and Discipline and Being A Winner Who Wins Like A Winner and then getting onto a field or a court to scream at an official while their heads flash red like an airplane wing light and their faces swell and bulge into an impression of the world's least subtle mime acting out a dogbite on the groin scenario and this is apparently fine.

There's a reason to draw a thread between Chris Collins's on-court histrionics and Northwestern's rough season because Wildcat fans are searching for a reason for a slew of early departures that have ravaged the team since Collins took over.  If there is one common theme for the Chris Collins era other than the triumphant 2017 tournament berth, it has been departure.  Several of Collins's recruits have transferred to make way for other players; one player alleges in a lawsuit that he was essentially thrown off the team and encouraged to give up an athletic scholarship via methods that included being barred from practice, remanded to landscaping duties, and getting accused of shirking through time cards that look like they had been forged and doctored because the person filling them out could not successfully spell his name.

This week, three graduated players with eligibility remaining have decided to leave as graduate transfers.  Barrett Benson, a presumed starter at center, graduated in three years in order to hasten his departure.  It is, I suppose, not fair to speculate on why players are leaving the program-- they may all have their own reasons, and the timing could be a coincidence-- but I do not think it is unfair to at least ask some questions about the guy above who looks like he's taking a foul call less well than the villainous cartoon character Skeletor.

The swirling mass of transfers has created an air of crisis around Northwestern basketball beyond its usual crisis of being Northwestern basketball.  The 'Cats had already graduated two all-time great players in Vic Law and Dererk Pardon, both of whom had been instrumental in getting the Wildcats to the tournament for the first time; Pardon's last-second layup to beat Michigan and clinch the tourney berth is the greatest Northwestern basketball play that did not take place in the 1930s and did not involve someone building a catapult to launch the ball towards the basket under the rules of the time. 


Two years ago, Collins stood in front of a jubilant Welsh-Ryan crowd talking about beginnings.  Now, he will spend an offseason scrambling to find enough players to fill out a roster.  It's not all doom and gloom; there are several good young players who will have an opportunity to find their footing in the Big Ten and, like his last team, learn how to play together to get back to the tournament or the NIT or one of those weird tournaments where there are no rules and are played in torchlight and the hoops are hollowed out cattle skulls.

A REVIEW OF NORTHWESTERN'S FANCY ARENA

Of course Welsh-Ryan is far nicer now.  They have seats now instead of bleachers.  There are new videoscreens.  The whole building is slick and new and covered in purple like the an arena on an alien spaceship.  It glistens.  There are somehow luxury boxes, even though the person who wants to watch Northwestern basketball but in a luxury box is impossible for me to fathom.  The thing it does most effectively and depressingly is to finally destroy the quaint illusion of Northwestern basketball and put it right in line with the bizarre and inexplicable spectacle of big-time college sports.

Opposing fans always loved to grumble that Welsh-Ryan was a glorified high school arena.  That's not necessarily fair-- it was bigger than a high school arena and also sometimes had halftime entertainment like live The Simon Says Guy-- but it was certainly stripped down in comparison to sleek Big Ten buildings.  The first basketball game I ever saw at Welsh-Ryan was a high school game, and Welsh-Ryan seemed just like a natural extension of what you'd expect to see-- bleachers, but more of them; a dot scoreboard, but one that could display cartoon ads.  I didn't watch college sports when I was younger so the idea of a college team playing in an arena that was basically the gym except without a bunch of side baskets made sense.
 
Old Welsh-Ryan arena just before tip-off for a Big Ten game

Northwestern basketball is big time college sports collecting the same insane checks as every other Big Ten team, but it was easy to pretend that it wasn't.  Welsh-Ryan was a creaky old barn where you could literally bump into Chainsaw Nick Smith on the way to the bathroom.  And for a long time, Northwestern was not very good at basketball.  Opposing fans would take over the arena, loudly complain about it, watch their players dunk for a couple hours and go home.  Even in the years when Northwestern was decent under Bill Carmody, they seemed to be playing a different sport filled with gangly goofballls doing slow motion backcuts and undulating zone defenses.

Of course, that is illusion: college sports are the same insane, exploitative spectacle even if the team plays in a dumpy arena that's biggest selling point was minimum distance from Gene Keady and even if the team was historically bad tournament-missers.  And yet, the spectacle of college sports, especially the NCAA Tournament which was built to allow people to get fully invested in obscure teams featuring guys named like Benton Wrench somehow beating NBA players, is absolutely incredible.  That is the dichotomy of the Tournament: a delightful show plowing along as it always, and if a few minutes' scrutiny makes it impossible that it can continue for another minute before collapsing under its own contradictions that feels like just about everything right now.

THE CHICAGO CUBS ARE AN ABSOLUTE BUMMER NOW

The Chicago Cubs have been in three of the last four National League Championship series.  They won 95 games last season.  A Cub was runner up in the MVP vote, a different player from the Cub who won MVP just two years earlier.  They are only three seasons removed from the greatest in team history, culminating in a championship that generations had been waiting for.  Also they appear to be in complete crisis and everyone is angry with them.

Part of this comes from the Cubs completely punting on the offseason.  They gleefully joined nearly the entirety of baseball in deciding that baseball players were too expensive and sitting out the Bryce Harper and Machado sweepstakes.  Beyond that, though, the Cubs did nothing else.  They fired a bunch of coaches and brought in a utility infielder and a couple of relievers as the Cardinals, Brewers, and even the basement-dwelling Reds improved.

While the Cubs could certainly bounce back into form with the return of a healthy Kris Bryant and Yu Darvish, there seems to be a sense of treading water.  The PECOTA projections picked the Cubs to finish last in the NL Central.  Hilariously, Joe Maddon is using this as bulletin board material without stopping to think that PECOTA is literally a math formula and there is no one to gloat over if the Cubs win more than its projected 79 games unless he is secretly funding a project to implant the PECOTA formula into a host body to assume corporeal form and then invite the shambling monster to the Cubs dugout to get humiliated by disco music and crotch-thrusting dance moves after the Cubs win their 80th game.  It appears the Cubs seem poised to fire Joe Maddon, their most successful manager since Frank Chance, because everyone is just sick of his shit.

But the more dispiriting Cubs stuff has been a parade of scandal and an accretion of generalized rich people mania thrust into public display.  If there's been a single thing the Cubs have committed to in the offseason it is disingenuous apologies-- those from Addison Russell, who remains on the team for some reason, those from the Ricketts family after the publication of Joe Ricketts's bigoted emails.  The Cubs will be donating money and working with groups and raising awareness this season. 

The most recent spate of Cubs e-mails published by Deadspin are less inflammatory.  In this case, they delve into the various shady accounting practices the Ricketts family used to purchase the Cubs, but they also include various embarrassing levels of vaguely Habsburg-level family intrigue where they all sent e-mails to each other instead of threatening to invade the Low Countries.  While Tom Ricketts complained that there was no money left to sign free agents, fans can rest assured that the family was all buying up local railroads to they could all try to destroy each other while sending long email chains where they are all dressed in nineteenth-century sidewhiskers.
 
"How am I supposed to tell my children that it is not 
their uncle alone who owns the Detroit, Toledo, and 
Ironton railroad, but the entire family has banded together 
to crush the operators, buy out their stock, and divert their 
cargo of precious pig iron to our own depots?" reads one email

And yet, the Cubs still have Javy Baez doing Javy Baez things, a healthy Kris Bryant, and a first game that was just a general annihilation of a tanking Rangers team featuring pitchers named "Kyle Dowdy."  It has been a long, impossibly cold, and miserable winter.  Baseball is an incredibly dumb sport that makes no sense and it one of the best wastes of time ever invented.  Let's hope the Cubs and the odious, bumbling family that owns them don't continue to find reasons to make us forget that.

Week 12: SINKHOLES

I remember a time when Purdue cut a reign of terror through the Big Ten, when Purdue regularly sent its quarterbacks to the NFL instead of to SEC teams as ghoulish Big Ten specters, when the mustaches were blond and resplendent on the sidelines like an army of Bounty Men ordering a neverending bombardment of touchdowns while Purdue Pete taunted the opposition with his blank homicide face.  That was not that long ago.

Everything Purdue Pete does is disturbing and threatening

But recent years have not been kind to the Purdue Boilermakers who have devolved into a pit of forlorn football ineptitude.  The pit is not metaphorical.  Earlier this season, a burst water main caused the formation of a large sinkhole in the Ross Ade endzone, as reported by a twitter account described as "The Official Twitter of the Purdue University Intercollegiate Athletics Sports Turf Crew."

pic.twitter.com/VmK3GkOnXY

— Purdue Sports Turf (@PUSportsTurf) October 4, 2016

It was as if Purdue's own stadium had grown sentient, preferring to devour itself instead of bearing witness to the miserable football perpetuated against it, against long-suffering Purdue fans, and against the various interim personnel haplessly watching mediocre teams treat Purdue like sports movie winning streak montage opponents.

The strange thing about the Boilermakers is that they have not played up to their bumbling reputation.  They have started games strong and have taken leads to halftime.  They leaped to a 10-0 lead against Northwestern on Saturday, and they took close games to halftime against Minnesota and Penn State.  Then, it all falls apart.  The most foreboding site for Purdue has not been another member of the injury-ravaged roster limping to the sidelines or former coach Darrell Hazell attempting to draw up another ineffectual play with a puzzled look; it is the chilling thump of the World's Largest Drum unleashed during a halftime spectacle to signal the impeding doom of the Dread Second Half.


Normal football fans have pointed to Purdue's injuries and lack of depth for its second-half descent into the abyss.  What I like to imagine, though, is that it is completely due to interim coach Gerad Parker's halftime speeches.  Parker, perhaps wearing a false blond mustache, walks into the locker room before the game screaming football things at them about clear eyes and full hearts and they go out inspired to football greatness.  Then, at halftime, Parker attempts to rally the squad but he starts sweating and screaming before finally a larval Purdue Pete bursts forth from his chest and scuttles into the air ducts and then when David Blough rears back to throw he thinks he sees the creature incubating in the very football he is holding and is forced to repeatedly throw it to Montre Hartage.

BIG TEN FOOTBALL ACTION

The Wildcats will travel to Minnesota to take on the Golden Gophers, desperate to get that sixth win and claim a crappy bowl berth like the third son of a dynasty bumbling into a minor bishopric.  The Gophers lost their opportunity to contend for the Big Ten West after falling to Nebraska and now jockey to move up the arbitrary hierarchy of also-ran bowls.

Last year, the Wildcats pounded Minnesota.  They were unable to run the ball, and Anthony Walker terrorized quarterback Mitch Leidner into throwing footballs like they had been replaced by lead football sculptures.  Northwestern inched over the field on a drive that took almost the entire third quarter.  This year, the Gophers look for revenge with an improved team with a tough defense and fearsome running back Rodney Smith, the Big Ten touchdown leader.

But the Gophers will also have to deal with Austin Carr.  Yes, Carr was on last year's Northwestern team.  He recorded one catch for fourteen yards in last year's Minnesota game.  This season, though, Carr has seemingly come out of nowhere and emerged as the best receiver in the conference.  Carr has already tied Jeremy Ebert's single-season touchdown record, and he leads the Big Ten in every major receiving category.  Carr, along with an improving Thorson, has helped transform Northwestern's offense from a lurching tank designed to throw Justin Jackson at the defensive line long enough for the defense to rest and attain punting position to an actual threat to move the ball.  

Northwestern's 2015 offense practices its offensive system known as the "pre-punt"

The Gophers are favored, but these teams appear evenly-matched.  The Wildcats hope to head back to Evanston garlanded in Belks.
  
BASKETBALL SEASON

Northwestern's basketball season is here and so is heartbreak.  The 'Cats lost to a buzzer-beater against Butler, and suffered an early blow against the eternal and seemingly-impossible quest to actually make a postseason tournament.  Northwestern basketball exists in an endless continuum of buzzer-beaters, overtime losses, and last-second putbacks in every game that they play against an opponent that is not leaving Welsh-Ryan arena with a suitcase full of cash for getting violently dunked on for 40 minutes.

The Wildcats graduated stalwarts Tre Demps and Alex Olah who now play together as noted by the greatest sentence ever written about Northwestern basketball: "Olah joins his former Northwestern shooting guard Demps on Belfius Mons-Hainaut, which plays in the Belgium Scooore! League." (It should be noted that the Scooore! League is now known as the Euromillions Basketball League, which is slightly less delightful).

Belfius Mons-Hainaut's mascot, Le Renard Clip Art

This basketball season will be the final one at Welsh-Ryan arena before it undergoes renovations.  The team will move to the empty, desolate All State Arena for a year and move back into a disappointingly opulent arena, resplendent in video boards and actual seats and this is terrible.  Welsh-Ryan Arena is a gloriously dilapidated barn, and the only renovations allowed should be to add side backboards like an elementary school gymnasium and a cage from which spectators can hang and taunt the opponents like you'd find in any respectable thunderdome.  They should redecorate the arena only if Northwestern qualifies for the tournament and then the whole thing should be decorated with elaborate friezes depicting the team's glorious entry to the four-team quasi-Tournament by dint of winning a second game in the Big Ten Tournament forcing all of Indianapolis to cower before the might of its zone defense.

Northwestern's renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena includes a much-sought cage ticket and 
complimentary chainsaw check

INEVITABLE NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL SCANDAL

Anyone who follows college sports does so with clenched teeth waiting for the inevitable scandal because college sports are an insanely corrupt enterprise propped up by a shocking gulf in compensation between the players and the institutions that profit from the spectacle.  The whole thing is orchestrated by the NCAA, which polices this tension by drawing up hundreds of pages of guidelines about the exact hours which maniacal coaches can text emojis at teenagers.  So it is inevitable that this system that remains a vestige of nineteenth-century mustache guys literally stomping each other to death on football fields leads to shit that can best be described as fucked up.

This week, former Northwestern basketball player Johnnie Vassar sued the school, alleging that basketball coach Chris Collins and the entire athletic department pressured and harassed him into leaving the team after the NCAA rules prevented him from transferring.  The complaint argues that Collins, who recruited Vassar, felt he was not good enough to play on the team and wanted him to give up his athletic scholarship and accept an academic scholarship so the school could use it on a different recruit.

The lawsuit alleges that Northwestern tried several ways to get get Vassar to relinquish the athletic scholarship: by replacing his practices with something called the "Wildcat Intern Program" that involved menial janitorial work at athletic facilities, by crudely doctoring his time cards to threaten him with dereliction of duties as a means to yanking the scholarship, and by informally offering a cash payment to "go away."

Northwestern has denied the allegations.

Vassar's lawsuit also attacks the NCAA's transfer rules, which prevented him from moving to a different school.  The Tribune's Teddy Greenstein explains the reasoning behind the NCAA's restrictive transfer policy at the end of the article [italics mine]: 

NCAA transfer rules exist to discourage schools from "poaching" players from other programs. Schools put in a considerable amount of time and money to recruit players, so the feeling has been that their investment should be protected.  Plus coaches believe that if a player can simply leave and immediately play elsewhere when he or she faces adversity or tough coaching, it promotes a bad life lesson.

This last part raises eyebrows considering that successful coaches often leave for more attractive jobs without warning on train cars specifically designed to ferry them out of the town that they have paid for with the giant canvas sacks full of money with which they are compensated.

The Vassar lawsuit's allegations are disturbing.  The legal process is ponderous, and we don't know if a court will find that Northwestern's pressure on Vassar to transfer was as grotesque as the methods listed in the complaint.  

Collins desperately wants to get Northwestern to the Tournament, and has method includes an aggressive approach to his roster.  His arrival saw the departure of numerous walk-ons and players recruited by Carmody to pave the way for players that fit his system.  But the Vassar lawsuit shows that, even ignoring the troubling allegations of payoffs and internship time card frameups, Collins is willing to move on from his own recruits just as easily if he doesn't feel they will get him to March Madness.

To me, the appeal of Northwestern athletics has always been its obscurity.  The stakes remain low: desperate attempts to qualify for low-rent bowls, a defining failure to make it to a tournament that allows an ever-increasing number of entrants, and the howling from opponents of far more historically successful teams shamed into losing to a team whose most visible fanbase is tarps.  I had thought that these low stakes could shield Northwestern from the worst of the NCAA's inherent bullshit not because Northwestern is any less corrupt any other school with major sports programs but because the ruthless recruiting and rostering shell games that are absurd enough in the quest for national championships become unabashedly ludicrous when they apply to a team whose greatest recent success involves disdainfully refusing to play in the CBI. 

Of course that is naive and stupid.  For Chris Collins and the athletic department, bowls, Hats, and downmarket basketball tournaments that weave perilously in and out of existence are not enough. Collins seems to think that his management of scholarships will help him win. As we've found from the fallout from the football union, the NCAA's byzantine restrictions infect every instance of big-money college sports.  Historical crappiness cannot save you. 

Home court advantage

It's been a somewhat disappointing weekend for Northwestern as they dropped a close one to a reeling Iowa team on the road. Coming up next, they have a tough home stretch against Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio State in the friendly confines of Welsh-Ryan, which is sure to be orange, maize, and scarlet for the next three contests. Welsh-Ryan is practically a second home court for the Illini, who will fill the arena with their fans and the possibility that their mascot will swing into the arena like Douglas Fairbanks to thumb his nose at NCAA sanctions before slicing a three-stroke "I" into the shirt of the nearest official and then fleeing the premises as his 1950s here there be Indians theme music blares triumphantly into the background.

Northwestern should be getting a better home court advantage. Granted, I am certainly not suggesting that NU fans should be giving visiting players the Clemson treatment, but there should be a way to get the edge back. Perhaps the Athletic Department can make improvements to the arena to make it more menacing. For one, they can move Welsh-Ryan Arena into the a hollowed out volcano or decorate it with the severed heads of vanquished foes.


Mussolini's Fascist Headquarters subtly evokes the image of a doom fortress

Of course, the Duce had the advantage of intimidating people by riding in on his own personal tank, surrounded by the world's most sullen army.


Mussolini promises Italians the type of government that involves standing on
tanks and yelling

A suitably intimidating Welsh-Ryan Arena would give Northwestern players a psychological advantage over the opposition and the visiting fans. I also believe that Welsh-Ryan could be modernized, marrying the appeal of its low-key glorified high school gymnasium charm with the amenities of a modern major-conference facility, as demonstrated in this crude model:


In this model, Northwestern's antiquated scoreboard with missing dots is replaced
by a giant, fang-bearing snake. Legions of chaos, of course, sold separately

FROM MUGSHOT TO EPAULET

Mussolini grew up to become a journalist and a socialist firebrand, following the in the footsteps of his father (I guess his later rejection of socialism and invention of fascism can be projected as a type of Freudian rejection, although my favorite example of that remains George IV, whose pro-Whig leanings made him the patron of Charles Fox, his father's gravest political enemy except during his porphyritic outbursts when his main political enemies included moon-men. George IV supported the Whigs mainly to oppose his father; after he finally gained control of the throne in 1820 at the age of 58, he mainly continued in the political tradition of George III, as he was more concerned with gorging himself until sufficiently gouted and pursuing increasingly homely royal mistresses as he became almost certainly the most hated modern monarch in British history).


George IV possessed the perfect combination of girth and incompetence that made him a
hit among political cartoonists (right) or artists depicting him as the last thing you see
before you die of some horrible nineteenth century illness such as "The Swoons"

The Young Mussolini was arrested in Switzerland for vagrancy in 1902. Pictures of young Mussolini are of course fascinating in examining the transformation of a young, scared, and disreputable looking youth into a strutting dictator with closets lined with comical military uniforms and ill-conceived plans to invade Abyssinia.


Mussolini demonstrates the classic acquisition of dictator accouterments: the
scarf, the mustache/glower combination, and finally the angry fist-shaking that
propelled him into power

Mussolini's arch-nemeses in the Soviet Union also have classic mug-shots. For example, Lenin's baby face in his 1895 mug shot quickly gives way to a revolutionary hardness just two years later.


By 1897, Lenin is prepared to take on all comers in the popular historical table-
top game "Everyone Dies in the Crimea," and he's brought his rule books to
prevent cheating and the development of overseas colonies as a way to continue
rampant monopoly capitalism

The Australian essayist, cultural critic, and sometime television personality Clive James once wrote that "The most exciting way of getting into Russia is to cross Germany in a sealed train and arrive at the Finland Station in St Petersburg to be greeted by a cheering revolutionary mob who promptly name the city after you." Of course, James is already a personal hero for pointing out Arnold Schwarzenegger's resemblance to a brown condom filled with walnuts and for using British television to publicly call attention to Michael Caine's 1978 killer bee opus.

Lenin's sealed train ride to Petersburg apparently included a rigid no-smoking policy enforced by the cigarette-hating Lenin, who exiled all smokers to the lavatories. In this TLS review article, Charles King describes the train ride:

That was how the journey to the Finland Station began: with a band of about thirty carousing Russian intellectuals, fuelled by beer and Swiss bread, occasionally singing the “Marseillaise” and telling bawdy jokes, all led by an allergic, ill-tempered martinet, clicking and jerking their way eastward towards the Revolutionary crowds of Petrograd.

Young Trotsky's mugshot gives off an intellectual bent as well as providing key inspiration for Yahoo Serious's star turn in Young Einstein.


Trotsky's patented pince-nez glasses would unfortunately serve as a damning
mark of identificantion when occasionally charicatured as a massive man-eating
demon being rampaging through Russia

Of course, Trotsky met a bad end in Mexico, depicted here with the utmost historical accuracy:

This depiction shows Trotksy falling for the old there's
two types of spurs, those that come in through the door
and those who come in through the window trick.
Allegedly, Trotsky told his guads "Do not kill him. This
man has a story to tell" after assassin Ramón Mercader
finished whaling upon him with an ice axe.

Stalin has several mugshots, one of a young Stalin in 1902, followed by a 1908 arrest for rampant gangsterism, which led to exiled in Siberia and a dearing escape to his Baku headquarters desiguised as a woman.


Though Stalin was acquitted in 1902, his revolutionary policies of tying women to
railroad tracks and rent-raising led to his exile. By 1912, Stalin was rehabilitated as a
kindly bus driver

One of the bizarre rituals that Stalin demanded once in power was the participation in binge-drinking sessions resembling an insane Communist frat party. Here Simon Montefiore's excellent recent biography In the court of the red tsar provides an invaluable service by explaining which Stalinist lieutenants could hold their liquor:

Sometimes the drinking at these Bacchanals was so intense that the potentates, like ageing bloated students, staggered out to vomit, soiled themselves, or simply had to be borne home by their guards. Stalin praised Molotov's capacity but sometimes even he became drunk. Poskrebyshev was the most prolific vomiter. Khrushchev was a prodigious drinker, as eager to please Stalin as Beria. He sometimes became so inebriated that Beria took him home and put him to bed, which he promptly wet...Malenkov just became more bloated.

Malenkov was also apparentlynicknamed
"Melanie" for his broad hips. There's an .
excellent picture of him in the Montefiore
book walking with Stalin, Beria, and Molotov
in the 1945 victory parade where he's wearing
a sailor suit that transforms him into the
Stay-Puft Soviet Marshmallow Man.