Watch Me Make This Hat Disappear

Even as we speak, the Hat Caravan is heading down I-57 from Big Ten Headquarters with the Hat Courier handcuffed to the Hat Trophy in a briefcase that is also shaped like a Hat.


Let's get things out of the way: Northwestern lost the Minnesota game.  It was not particularly close.  At one point it was 21-2, which is the most 2019 Northwestern score possible.  The Wildcats did find a spark with new quarterback Andrew "Kundun I Liked It" Marty and rallied to score several touchdowns, but P.J. Fleck's Backronyms of the Damned headed on their collision course for the Western Division Axe Championship.  There is no Big Ten Championship Game.  There is no bowl game.  All that stands between the Northwestern Wildcats and football oblivion is the coveted Hat.

The two points Northwestern scored in the second quarter came from a Joe Gaziano sack, which set the all-time school record.  Gaziano has been a rare bright spot for the team this year, an all-time Northwestern great and the leader of a unit that so often spent 45 minutes on the field after a Northwestern drive resembled the Grandpa Simpson entering the burlesque show gif.


Northwestern has dominated the Hat Game since the Tim Beckman apotheosis of 2014.  In that game, probably the football game I am most obsessed with, Northwestern and Illinois were both 5-6 and playing for a berth in the Heart of Dallas Bowl located in the creepy, rotting carcass of the old Cotton Bowl.  Tim Beckman, a maniac, had reached the height of his powers by winning more than one Big Ten game.  Neither team had a starting quarterback.  Beckman won, but did not make it to 2014 before being fired for egregious player abuse, which in college football is like firing Jim Varney for excessive mugging.

Now the tables have turned an ascendant Illinois team is hoping to finish off a Northwestern team in the throes of its worst season this century.  Even though this represents another storied chapter in America's Second Greatest Hat-Based Football Rivalry, I can't be too upset about Illinois's season.  Anyone who has been foolish enough to root for the Chicago Bears for the last decade has an appreciation for Lovie Smith, and Illinois fans deserve to have a team that upsets Wisconsin and goes to a Bowl Game.  

But Illinois really should have won the Hat last year.  A.J. Bush played really well, and Illinois repeatedly had opportunities to take the lead against a Northwestern team that was saving all of its ammo for the Big Ten Championship game.  Smith, though,  seemed to lose his mind and become obsessed with futile field goal attempts.  Even as Northwestern's starters left the field one by one and Pt Fitzgerald tried to kneel out the entire second half, Smith would not allow his team to go for broke to the amazement of Illinois fans in the stadium and me, who thought it would be funny for Northwestern to play in the Big Ten Championship game with seven wins and a loss to last year's Illinois team.  Maybe Fitzgerald will react in a different way by falling into a crazed Hat-based fugue state, and Northwestern will burst out some reverse flea flickers or fake punts or plays where they throw down a smoke grenade and suddenly there's two guys wearing number 7 and they're both taunting people to try to salvage at least something from an otherwise miserable season.

A VERY TIMELY AND IMPORTANT MOVIE REVIEW

Everyone knows about the beginning of the Last Boy Scout, which begins with a pitch-perfect 1990s Monday Night Football opening parody called Friday Night Is For Football that the Big Ten should immediately use. Then the film begins the famous scene where a ball carrier pulls a gun out of his pants and blasts away at would-be tacklers.  This might be the least insane thing that happens in this movie, and I am incredibly disappointed that no one is pouring enormous amounts of money into profoundly stupid action movies like this anymore; the only way we would see a Last Boy Scout in 2019 is if it was called Last Boy Scout: Awakenings and part of a dreary Extended Universe where everyone needs to get emotionally invested in Bruce Willis's dumb Stock Bruce Willis Character Is Sort Of Divorced arc instead of enjoying people shooting a car once and having it explode.

The Last Boy Scout is a football movie.  There is the iconic what if football players shot each other scene, which should be immediately remade so they can tortuously add terrible cameos like Stephen A. Smith screaming "if it were me I would have DISARMED the player, I would have ROLLED TACTICALLY, SKIP" and Troy Aikman saying "uh uh uh the uh wide receiver absolutely not, you ju-- can't just cannot shoot someone with a gun in this situation, Joe." There is Damon Wayans's character, a washed-up quarterback who partners with Bruce Willis to go after the villain, who is essentially Jerry Jones.  There is a final scene in a football stadium where Wayans somehow tackles a ball carrier by riding a horse over him and then throws a football with a hand that he has just been shot through at the exact right moment to knock a sniper's bullet out of the air meant for a corrupt senator played by Eddie Harris from Major League.  

The entire film takes place in one of those universes where they can't get the rights to NFL teams so they invent a fake NFL that always ends up looking ridiculous-- the XFL really should exist only as a consistent fake football league that you can sell to movies and television shows instead of doing things like drafting Matt McGloin and blocking Josh Johnson from playing for the Detroit Lions, forcing them to activate David "That Name Again Is Mister" Blough.

The XFL is going great

The film is a relic of 1990s football discourse-- pro football is still roiling from the scandalous cocaine-soaked Cowboys heyday.  The evil team owner explains to Bruce Willis, after emerging from a pool and having his henchman played by classic villainous character actor Taylor Negron threaten Willis with a knife because Bruce Willis (who I should mention is a disgraced former secret service agent who was repeatedly shot protecting the president) had killed another henchman by hitting him in the nose really hard which I think is supposed to drive bones into the brain according to 1990s Action Movie Physiology, that the only way forward for football is to legalize gambling because people are too scandalized by football players to root for them otherwise.  This takes place at a time where the largest football scandals involved people getting angry about football players making money instead of the NFL conspiring to cover up the fact that the sport does horrific damage to players' brains; the NFL had not yet decided to turn itself into an organization where Roger Goodell goes on television to solemnly announce another Investigation.

I watched The Last Boy Scout because it is on a streaming service that is being increasingly cannibalized by competitors to leave more and more dreck on its servers.  The streaming revolution has turned into a suite of hollowed out Content Deserts, with a few legitimately good things to watch propped up by a pile of obscure detritus.  One of the things they have been investing in recently has been largely forgettable big budget 90s action movies.  Action movies now seem to either be infinite-budget franchise tentpole movies or forgettable microbudget movies based on someone paying Nicolas Cage to spend a few weeks in Bulgaria.

It is comforting to know that  every time you watch Cage in a direct to streaming 
movie called like The Serpent's Punch, he is just doing this bullshit the entire time

The Last Boy Scout exists as a piece with Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, which came out two years later.  Both imbue their fake football leagues with the violent psychosis of 1990s football, a time when ESPN would glorify players with ham-sized neckrolls trying to turn each other's heads into rock-em-sock-em robots, and a time when the movie in pro sports and football especially had swelled into unfathomable riches.  Any Given Sunday made the point with stylized, visceral football scenes and Al Pacino bugging his eyes out and screaming at people; The Last Boy Scout mainly used it as a framing device for Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans to drive a car over a cliff pursued by a henchman whose car lands into a pool and then explodes and has Willis shoot everyone inside for good measure only for the main henchman to somehow sneak out of there and kidnap his daughter before leaving to set up a sniper's nest in stadium lights.

The obscene violence at the core of football still exists although in more hushed tones.  The money around football has only become more ridiculous.  But the NFL has gotten more buttoned up and obsessed with changing the narrative around the sport since the wild 1990s by taking itself more and more seriously.  The Last Boy Scout in 2019 would definitely provoke an NFL Investigation; it would involve a grim-looking commissioner announcing an Onfield Horse Protocol.        

The XFL and the XFLs Promised

This week, America’s Lumpiest CEO Vince McMahon announced he had looked at the XFL, which only exists as a faded joke emblematic of absurd early twenty-first century boondoggle sporting ventures along with Slamball, the second version of American Gladiators, and the various celebrity boxings and human vs. bear hotdog eating competitions, and decided it needed to return. The XFL comes at a time when the NFL’s bulletproof reputation has faded as it has been smothered by a tapestry of incongruous grievances: people horrified by the league's grotesque cover-up of its devastating concussion problem, people bored by nine-hour games mired in replay review that have turned football into the part of a board game where you scrutinize the inside of the box for rules infractions, the people who have threatened boycotts over the NFL because they have conflated symbolic player protests over police brutality with a charge that the sports league that regularly holds Soviet-style tank parades before games is no longer imbued with enough theatrical patriotism, and relentlessly aggrieved Patriots fans.

Vince McMahon hopes to fill this void by reviving the XFL nearly 20 years on, precisely long enough to hope that everyone has forgotten that it was so dumb.
 
The XFL operated from an organizational philosophy 
that the coolest shit in the world was flames and the 
Boo Berry font

The XFL's original incarnation in 2001 promised a version of football that doubled down on brutality, prurience, and the exciting drama one could expect from the world of professional wrestling where oiled pectoral men screamed at each other and McMahon regularly pretended to die by getting trapped in various exploding limousines.  Off the top of my head, I can still recall the XFL's selling points: an end to the fair catch rule and replacement of the opening kickoff with some sort of violently lawless football scramble; even as ESPN included its "Jack'd Up" segments to celebrate the infliction of brain traumas, the XFL offered viewers the opportunity to see players jacked to heretofore unimagined altitudes.

The XFL emerged as the wheezing death rattle to the 1990s trend of "extreme" advertising, where all products aimed at teenagers and children emanated from the fever dreams of a 57-year-old marketing executive who fell into some sort of cocaine reverie in front of a BMX bike shop in 1992 and spent the rest of the decade screaming at people to put more Xs and Zs in names and throwing terrified subordinates through windows then yelling WHY DOESN'T THIS HAVE A FUCKING SKATEBOARD? For the XFL, this meant making sure all teams had edgy, vaguely violent names that, viewed in 2018, all look exactly like a Korn logo ineptly stenciled onto an Algebra II textbook. 
 
"The team's name and logo were designed to lead the team's 
fans into calling the team "The Ax", a shortened form of the 
word "maniacs". Regardless, the name and logo were roundly 
criticized by advocates for the rights of the mentally ill,^[who?] 
believing they were derived from a derisive term for a person 
suffering from mental illness, "maniac", and/or a depiction of a 
deranged axe-wielding murderer, though no picture of an axe 
was in the logo. Still, many of the fans formed their own cheering 
section at the Liberty Bowl unofficially known as 'The Asylum'"
(I already don't have to tell you this is from Wikipedia)

Part of McMahon's plan involved inserting wrestling personalities into the broadcast.  That is how viewers wound up with football games called by Jesse "The Body" Ventura, a supernatural antenna for the late twentieth century's goofiest shit: professional wrestling, Arnold movies, the XFL, stolen valor accusations, third-party politics.

The XFL made it one season and folded, a disaster for pretty much everyone involved except for Tommy Maddox.  Its gimmicks failed to hold anyone's attention past the opening weeks, and McMahon and NBC were left with a league full of also-ran players that no one wanted to see. Its sole influence comes from some camera angles and the fact that a guy put the words "He Hate Me" on the back of his jersey and briefly became a minor cultural phenomenon solely for that reason.  I would venture to guess that anyone who has lingering warm feelings for the XFL regards it as kitsch, a dumb totem from a spectacularly dumb moment in American culture, something that is inherently funny because it actually existed.


I think that whatever ironic nostalgic for the XFL exists concerns an imagined XFL, the XFL promised.  Not the sad reality of NFL Europe washouts humming dumpoff passes into running backs' ankles, but the idea of a professional sports league run not by the staid necessities of sponsors and television executives and team owners every single one of whom is a ruthless oil investor or the incompetent child of a rich person who spent his or her 20s driving sports cars into bodies of water and who all sit around in suits and force everyone around them to call them "mister," but springing from the deranged imagination of someone involved with professional wrestling.  The XFL, in my head, involves a team called the Sacramento Blood Demons rising into the endzone while the entire linebacking corps wails on electric guitars.

The initial appeal of the XFL to me was not necessarily the violence or the implementation of rules dreamed up by every stoned football fan, but it was the fact that it was connected to wrestling, a theater of the absurd.  The NFL at the time and now remains a stodgy, self-serious league that only allowed joy to be expressed once a week by Brett Favre; professional wrestling features undead zombie men, wrestlers reliably stunned into slack-jawed reverie by their arch-rival's theme song, and two guys from New Zealand whose entire gimmick involved silly walks.  Football, long the purview of grim-voiced television analysts and autocrat coaches who force players to wrestle alligators if they are two seconds late to this 7:00 meeting and by 7:00 I mean 6:57 sharp could use that kind of levity.  The NFL sports draconian celebration penalties.  The NFL once specifically forbade players from doing "incredible hulk."  In 2014, Richard Sherman gave a pro-wrestling-style interview that used Erin Andrews as a makeshift Mean Gene Okerlund and the entire football world lost its mind.

That's not the XFL Vince McMahon offers now.  The new XFL will not have nose tackles giving long monologues about how they are going to pass rush someone through the gates of hell, they will not have quarterbacks who are pretending to be space aliens or angry bureaucrats from the internal revenue service, they will not have a team line up for a kick and then Gustav Holst's Mars the Bringer of War comes over the speakers and the quarterback comes running out of the tunnel with the offense to do a two-point conversion even though we all know that's exciting because it is basically how Kentucky chose to end the Music City Bowl.  McMahon's XFL revival seems to be mainly about appealing to the people who have been losing their minds about players kneeling for the national anthem, full stop, which is the dumbest reason I can imagine for watching a minor-league sporting concern.

The sole entertainment value from the new XFL will be from whatever remainder bin quarterbacks end up starting for the Fort Wayne Reverse Mortgages and the five seconds of laughing at Jimmy Clausen getting sacked by a 45 year-old Julius Peppers will likely be its entire legacy instead of Jimmy Claws Son getting mauled by a 45-year-old Julius Peppers who has entered the stadium on third down in a smoke-filled boat accompanied by the Third Down Pass Rush Specialist brass band.  We will never get the XFL we deserve.

Northwestern Preview

In scant weeks, the college football will again get underway and soon, perhaps as soon as the first forlorn kickoff returner is scraped off the field, it will be time to have The Conversation.

The Conversation dominates college football's bloviosphere for the entire season.  Its cosmology is heliocentric; everything revolves around the playoff and, ultimately, the National Championship.  For a team must be in The Conversation before it can be in the playoff, and each week, each minute of college football season, unavoidable college football pundits and bloggers and unhinged Finebaum shouters who, without Finebaum, would be forced to call people to yell at them about Alabama one at a time starting with A Aaronson and ending with T Zbikowski to cast teams out of The Conversation like the Almighty banishing Moses from the Promised Land.  It is a process so weightily asinine that it requires a Bill Simmons-esque Capitalized Phrase.

The crew of Bloviosphere II begins its two-year project to live in a self-contained ecosystem 
generating all of its energy from nightly screaming matches about the SEC.
N.B. College football is so dependent on subjectivity, arguments, and nonsense that it is the 
most Bill Simmonsy sport possible-- we should be living in a world where Bill Simmons 
develops a feud with Phyllis From Mulga

College football is the only major American sport where The Conversation has tangible effect on determining a champion.  There are 128 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision and the sheer impossibility of determining the four top teams results in a hodgepodge of computer formulae, polls filled out by hat-wearing journalists and graduate assistants, Lou Holtz's saliva, residual Civil War animus, and people paying to fly airplane banners over stadiums. Then, a mysterious Committee of Thirteen picks them with no accountability.  College football has found the most convoluted, compelling and profoundly stupid way to pick its champion short of Nostradamus texts.

Approximately 90% of the media discussion about college football is about The Conversation and more than 90 of the 128 FBS teams will not be in The Conversation for a single second.  Northwestern is one of them.

Also-ran teams in top "Power Five" conferences exist only when a Conversation team rampages through their stadiums with their entourage of bloodthirsty alumni.  Those outside the Power Five, the Mid-Majors without the influence and the money and the ludicrous propaganda television networks might as well exist in Siberia or a the very least Moscow, Idaho.

Big Ten Network programming subtly works in a sponsor while airing its The Big Ten Invents
Football: Rutgers documentary

Northwestern, along with the vast majority of college football teams, exists in a shadowy netherworld apart from the dominant college football narrative.  These teams toil in relative obscurity as tackling dummies for contenders or by beating up on each other on games televised by contractual obligation that only warrant a passing mention if they end with the requisite number of overtimes, laterals, or 300 pound men precariously running with the football, gleefully living out their Pop Warner touchdown fantasies before they gained several hundred more pounds and coaches convinced them to smash into other giants, triumphantly gallumphing along the sidelines desperately looking for someone to stiff-arm.  In an ideal world, these teams are agents of chaos, ruining a contenders' season and exulting in their opponents' shock, sorrow, and internet coach-firing.  Notre Dame, for example, deserves the indignity of losing to Northwestern so completely that, if Northwestern did not exist, we would have to invent it and its temporarily unstoppable baseball kicker.

Teams outside of the championship face spread offenses, blitz packages, and genuine existential quandaries.  There are 128 teams.  There are no draft picks rewarding miserable seasons; the only prize is its merciful end.  For these teams, the season is a Sisyphean struggle where quarterbacks metaphorically hand off enormous unmovable rocks. This is the best football.

Fans of teams in The Conversation suffer through football season as a precarious drudge through a dozen potential calamities.  Anything short of a championship is agony, a nine-win season is a failure, and anything short of that requires the immediate installation of creepy flight-tracking software to analyze coach movements.  In a sport featuring a weird, oblong ball, every unpredictable bounce portends doom and misery, and every discussion of the team welcomes a thousand armchair Napoleons spouting inane theories about a winning mentality.

Turn on the television and college football is about ESPN College Gameday, poll positions, committees, and trophies.  But for most fanbases, The Conversation is irrelevant white noise.  It is about grasping a frozen beer at 10:00 in the morning before entering an empty, windswept stadium, exulting in invites to the forgettable dregs of bowl season, buckets, Hats, and the faintest hope of ruining the season for some juggernaut team.  Their asses will remain uncrowned. It does not matter.

NORTHWESTERN ON THE FIELD

Northwestern has had a rough couple of seasons.  The 2012 campaign ended a bowl drought that originated in the Truman administration in a bowl that people actually have heard of.  The Wildcats began 2013 with high expectations, eventually summoning College Gameday to campus in a football apocalypse against Ohio State.  Since then, it is misery and strife.  Northwestern has experienced a beguiling series of impossible, last-second losses culminating in the catastrophic Hat Game Bowl Game defeat at the hands of Beck Man in their own goddamn stadium.  There have been no bowl games since the 2013 Gator Bowl.  The Hat resides in Champaign, under guard from Beck Man's elite Order of the Mustacheless.

The Order is trained from birth to defend the Hat with hand-to-hand combat, stump 
speeches, Abraham Lincoln Trivia facts, period-accurate timepieces, and bo staffs.  
Before 2009, they were known as the Order of the Flying Tomahawk with a whole other set of 
birth rituals, each of which was probably offensive and problematic, so if you think about it 
the whole turnaround into a Lincoln-based artifact-guarding death cult in such a short amount 
of time is pretty impressive

The main question is at quarterback.  Candidates include big-armed senior Zack Oliver, dual-threat sophomore Matt Alviti, and John Grisham protagonist Clayton Thorson.  Less than two weeks before the season opener against Stanford, the quarterback situation remains unsettled.  Northwestern does not necessarily need a single incumbent starter.  During the Kain Colter/Trevor Siemian heyday, the 'Cats altered quarterbacks successfully; Northwestern should push that further by having at least three quarterbacks on the field at all time, occasionally playing quarterback, occasionally playing other skill positions, and other times simply standing in the backfield attempting to confuse the defense with unpredictable arm motions while Justin Jackson runs around them.

If there is one thing to look forward to on offense, it is the return of Justin Jackson.  Jackson seized the starting job as a true freshman after the unexpected departure of star running back Venric Mark.  He ran for 1,184 yards despite coming on as the featured back in the third game.  As Siemian battled injuries, Jackson carried the offense, including going for 162 in an upset against Wisconsin and 149 against Notre Dame.  Jackson's game depends on an expert reading of holes and coverages as he slinks and slithers through the line, ending up where linebackers aren't looking for him.

A frustrated linebacker punches the mirror where he thinks Justin Jackson is, but he is not 
there; no, he is 20 yards away, scampering past a hapless safety or maybe he is cutting back,
warding off the nose tackle with his claw hand

The Wildcats will lean heavily on their defense this season.  They lost some stalwarts last year including ball-hawking safety Ibraheim Campbell and all-encompassing tackle monster Chi Chi Ariguzo.  They return a senior-heavy defensive line and Nick VanHoose at corner.  Safety Godwin Igwebuike and linebacker Anthony Walker made excellent debuts last season.  Igwebuike picked off three passes in the Wisconsin game alone, although picking off Wisconsin passes is equivalent to 1.65 normal passes since the Badgers only break out the forward pass as a droll party trick.  Walker memorably returned a pick for a touchdown in his first start and made another vital pick against Notre Dame off a pass that had comically bonked off a Notre Dame player's helmet.

The road to an unheralded Pizza City bowl game will be difficult.  The 'Cats open the season against a strong Stanford team vying for a Pac 12 North title.  They also face a resurgent Duke team in Durham.  The Big Ten West division does not inspire reverent rhapsodies or rapid mouth-foaming soliloquies on sports talk radio, but it still offers little respite; the 'Cats will likely need to eke out three or even four Big Ten victories to qualify for a bowl game.  After Fitzgerald guided Northwestern to five straight bowl appearances, fans had become accustomed to them, treating these excursions to Texas (always Texas) like a dubious birthright.  Now, expectations have relaxed.  A big upset would be great.  Bowl eligibility spectacular.  But none of this matters when some Midwestern Roscoe P. Coltrane has absconded with The Hat and it is finally time to do something about it. 
   
NORTHWESTERN OFF THE FIELD

While the Wildcats attract little attention during football season, they've found themselves at the center of the unionization debate.  This week, the National Labor Relations Board surprisingly overturned the regional board decision that labeled football players employees and allowed them to vote on forming a union.  The NLRB examined the evidence, looked at the trailblazing work by Kain Colter and the CAPA and the growing unease about the way billion dollar sporting leagues are incoherently bolted onto universities and boldly declared: "THE HELL IF I KNOW."

The NLRB overturned the earlier ruling argued that the designation of athletes as employees at a private institution would cause conflicts when expanded to public universities.  According to this article, Michigan and Ohio have passed laws specifying that scholarship athletes are not employees in response to Northwestern's initial unionization attempts.

The unionization case has exposed the dark underbelly of college football at Northwestern.  The nonsensical marriage of universities and big-time football is endemic and ever-present in the nature of college football the way the air we breathe is rife with microscopic fungus spores and our gas station soda cups are inescapably inundated with images of captain something-or-other who will defend humanity by throwing people into buildings with no apparent effect in an endless series of movies.  Even Northwestern, which has recently invested in a series of various-sized tarps to cover up empty stands (ranging from FCS Illinois Team to Purdue and It's Snowing) is inundated with Big Ten Network money and plasters fans with ads from companies who paid actual American dollars to be the Official Such-and-Such of Northwestern Football because they were swindled by some dashing Harold Hill figure.

Players, university officials, and easily-riled internet commenters can debate about the extent to which they feel athletic scholarships adequately compensate athletes for their time or the extent to which unionization is the right path for athletes.  But it is also difficult to square the opulent spectacle of college football with the actual demands from Colter's College Athletes Players Association for things like expanded medical care, protection of scholarships, and payment for use of images so they can make some money from when I use a thinly-veiled Kain Colter video game facsimile to get an endless supply of first downs against Virtual Ohio State.  It is not clear what behooves the NCAA or its member conferences to increase benefits for players when players have essentially no leverage to play anywhere else until Vince McMahon brings back a new version of the XFL where players are forced to comply with a fringe cowboy hat dress code and play is constantly interrupted by washed-up former players dramatically entering the field while everyone involved unconvincingly feigns stupefaction.

The Macho Man Timmy Hat Rage leaves college to 
join the reformed XFL, enjoying a stellar run as a guy 
who keeps forgetting his gimmick

FOOTBALL RETURNS

Northwestern is irrelevant in the national media's coverage of college football.  But off the field, Northwestern has become the most important team in the country when it comes to showcasing the meaninglessness of the NCAA's "student-athlete" designation.  Ultimately, the battle for college athletes to gain what they decide is their fair share of the monstrous profits generated by college sports will continue to dominate the off-field narrative.

But the bizarre nature of college football, almost impossible to explain in the abstract, will once again make sense as soon as the meats sizzle in parking lots, the marching bands blare their Chicago covers, and the students begin ramming into each other for our amusement.  Northwestern kicks off against Stanford in two Saturdays and all becomes lost in a haze of tarps and hands contorted into crude wildcat claws. I want college sports to reach a more equitable place even if that means massive changes that render them unrecognizable.  But I also want to watch Northwestern players score ludicrous touchdowns, completely destroy some Big Ten team's season, and defeat the Illini in some way that causes the winning touchdown to somehow trigger a vast Rube Goldberg apparatus that hits Tim Beckman in the face with a pie.  I have no idea if these two desires can coexist or if this is a delusion created by the pageantry of the music, the stadiums, and the people dressed like angry anthropomorphic animals imploring the team to touchdowns.

Spring Pro Football

Northwestern has extended Coach Fitz through 2015 in an effort to extend the fist pump gap against Big Ten opponents. The deal is a no-brainer; Northwestern fans cannot think of anyone else in the country they want in charge of the program, and Fitzgerald says he does not want to go anywhere. That Wildcat fans believe him when most college football coaches are a combination of treacherous snake oil salesman, glad-handing, corrupt good ol' boy state congressperson, and poet/warlord speaks volumes to what he means to the program. Things did get a bit convoluted late last year with swirling Fitz to Notre Dame rumors no doubt cooked up by the Sun-Times and the sort of conniving papist agents that Dan Brown really wants to exist, but those have dissipated.

Coach Fitz gets his ceaseless energy from NU fan enthusiasm and by traveling
around the country decapitating lesser coaches who stand in his way

In other Northwestern news, three former NU players have been drafted by the new USFL league tentatively scheduled to begin play in February 2010 and fold sometime in March. C.J. Bachér has been drafted by the as-yet-unnamed New York team, and Prince Kwateng was chosen by San Francisco. Tim McGarigle has evidently turned in his badge to St. Louis after growing disgusted with the due process involved with their special teams and decided to tackle ball carriers himself after the brutal stiff-arming of his partner just one week from retirement, but failing that, he has been drafted by the Orlando USFL team.

"You're a loose cannon, McGarigle"

Look also for the return of Dennis Green, who coached the Wildcats in the 1980s and has evidently been punching at the microphone to return to coaching. Other notable players include Michigan's Chris Perry, Wisconsin's Brooks Bollinger, and someone named "Fred Bledsoe."

SPRING PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUES

There are few things more prone to a tragic romantic failure than an attempt to start an alternative spring football league. These operations fail for a number of reasons: for one, the sports landscape becomes crowded in the spring, with basketball and hockey playoff races heating up, March Madness, and the childlike joy of the first images of corpulent relief pitchers waddling around some complex in Florida or Arizona practicing a nineteenth century stretching regimen followed by the arrival of new players and the first sweet crack of the bat heralding the beginning of baseball season that will inevitably end with disappointment or searing heartbreak because your team hasn't won anything since the Kaiser menaced Europe and Yugoslavia was born and collapsed and never will for some mystifying cosmic reason.

Planning the next professional spring football league

The other reason is because these spring leagues are inevitably bereft of solid franchise ownership and constantly plagued by teams moving, bad management, and comically bad ideas. For example, the World Football League, as shoddy a fly-by-night sports organization as any that had ever existed, where players feared visits by both the Turk and the repo man, nearly implemented a special color-coded system for players' pants based on position including featuring stars on the pants for quarterbacks. The World Football League did become a pioneer in ridiculous team names including the Birmingham Vulcans, the Memphis Southmen, and the Shreveport Steamer, which will escape further comment.

The original USFL lasted from 1983-1985 and managed to lose $163 million. Few teams lasted from season to season, and at one point Arizona and Chicago somehow traded franchises. According to the widipedia page, the San Antonio Gunslingers simply stopped paying players, some of whom "were forced to move in with sympathetic fans." The UFL did attract NFL-caliber talent including MVPs Jim Kelly and Herschel Walker as well as the venerable Doug Flutie, but, much like the World Football League, it could not remain stable enough get a grip on fans and ended up inevitably pursuing an anti-trust suit against the NFL.

The most spectacular bust in recent memory is Vince McMahon's XFL, that sought to bring the understated sophistication of professional wrestling broadcasts to football.

Vince McMahon

On paper, the XFL had many advantages: it owned all of the franchises, preventing the squirrelly management that hurt the WFL and USFL, it secured the participation of Dick Butkus, snagging him from the set of "Hang Time," and it promised the type of tawdry gimmicks that inevitably come from using the letter X to stand for "extreme."

The X-treme phenomenon taken well past its logical limit. My
review of xXx: State of the Union can be summed up by the
sentence "Xibit has lines."

The XFL did debut to massive hype and made a number of small contributions to sporting lore: Rod Smart's inexplicably brilliant "He Hate Me" jersey, the return of Rashaan Salaam, the questions raised about the duties and responsibilities of a sitting Minnesota governor, and the possibility that Maniax might be the most inane name of any sports team ever, including the Paraguayan soccer team named after Rutherford B. Hayes.

Even a spring league officially sanctioned by the NFL was destined for failure. Granted, NFL Europa was designed to foster interest in football in Europe as well as develop talent, but American fans largely dismissed it as a curious punchline, and as its existence facilitated a chain of events that led to Jonathan Quinn starting games for the Chicago Bears, I am forced to agree.

NFL Europa employed some minor stylistic differences from NFL
football to make it more palatable in Europe

The financial chaos of the WFL and USFL are actually seductive; that is, owners think that if they can get a business model that does not involve moving teams in the manner of military commanders pushing tanks around those giant table maps with those special tank pushing croupier devices, actually pay players to play, and maintain stable leadership, the leagues could succeed. Instead, the new USFL should consider whether there is a natural saturation point in interest in football and if it is possible to create fan interest in teams after they have already invested so much attention in college football and the NFL. It's impossible to see any spring league rising above the level of niche league beyond appealing to absolute football fanatics and fans of novelty sports leagues.

The odds are against the success of the new USFL, but it is in the hands of Commissioner Michael Huyghue, who boasts an mystifyingly unpronounceable name, but also an uncanny ability to manipulate the shape of his head.

These are two images of Huyghue taken from the USFL site, from his blog index
and then an actual post. I refuse to support the USFL until it resolves this
crucial issue of the exact grade of Mr. Huyghue's head pointiness

BASEBALL AND GOGGLES

Earlier this evening, Cubs closer Kevin Gregg served up a walk-off two run homer after a fantastic shot by Micah Hoffpauir off of Joel Zumaya put the Cubs ahead. Gregg has an above-average ERA+ of 110, a fairly average WHIP of 1.33, and 11 saves, which conventionally means that he's not a terrible pitcher (although Fangraphs calculates a more damning Fielder Independent Pitching stat of 4.59 on an ERA scale). A rational person might argue that it is his tendency to walk batters and occasionally melt down that creates an anti-Gregg furor among Cubs fans; the fact that he replaced Kerry Wood does not hurt although Wood's recent performance has mollified those feelings. Instead, I argue that the invective against Gregg has as much to do with his stupid goggles as his occasional incompetence on the mound.

The Kevin Gregg experience

In fact, I posit that goggled relief pitchers inspire a unique ire in baseball. In other sports, especially basketball, Rec Specs added a certain charm: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Horace Grant, BYCTOM favorite Antoine "Big Dog, damn your eyes Glen Robinson" Carr all were accepted with their goggles. Basketball fans even embrace those face protector masks that Rip Hamilton wore that make it look like they are the only things preventing them from launching into a Lecter-esque cannibal frenzy.

Goggled relief pitchers, however, tend to have sordid reputations-- Francisco Rodriguez, whose wild gesticulations recall the spasmodic reaction to an unexpected encounter with a Portuguese Man o'war or the celebration of a lesser Gramatica, Eric Gagné, the portly department store Santa implicated in the Mitchell Report for all but writing "steroids" on a check memo, and Kyle Farnsworth, baseball's greatest brawling pitcher who started wearing goggles most likely as a way to conceal a shiv and is guaranteed a job in the majors for fear of a Shawn Chacon incident that would turn an executive into a crater and a damp wingtip.

The Legion of Goggled Relievers

By donning the goggles, Kevin Gregg willingly joins this evil legion. I imagine that they gather in a bullpen in a hollowed out volcano, coming up with plots to blackmail the UN into forcing umpires to enforce a looser strike zone, owners to increase the dimensions of their parks, and someone else to give them a card promising a lifetime supply of Chicken McNuggets. Unfortunately, their plan, developed by Farnsworth, involves writing the words "Space Lazer" on a giant sheet of cardboard covered in tissue paper and festive streamers. Gagné prepares the "Good afternoon, gentlemen" speech in front a rasterized portrait of Ricky Vaughn, while Rodriguez practices a series of enraged fistpumps to show the depth of his seriousness and Kevin Gregg, I'd imagine, merely runs back and forth after accidentally setting himself on fire.

The Legion of Goggled Receivers is less
effective than other master criminal legion
organizations

The new USFL presumably has a more competent organizational structure behind it than a set of rogue goggled relief pitchers. It, however, faces a long struggle to become a relevant sports institution, stepping over the bloated corpses of myriad failed opportunities to extend the football cash cow into the spring. Even if it does not work out, perhaps it can keep Bachér, Kwateng, and McGarigle in the football limelight long enough for them to catch on with an NFL team. In the meantime, the USFL owners will leave Commissioner Huyghue tilting at the windmills, dreaming the impossible dream, and somehow adjusting his head.