BYCTOM Investigates!

Playoffs are exciting, championships are thrilling, but sports leagues across America and the globe know that nothing is more gripping than investigations bearing reports spanning hundreds of pages, hearings, and stone-faced press conference denials. As professional sports have evolved from corrupt rackets started for the benefit of gamblers to corrupt rackets worth billions of dollars, it's time to give fans what they want and start a Sports Investigation Hot Stove League that captures all of the excitement of dour lawyers, slumping, jowl-heavy officials, and the refusals to comment that we all crave.

THE UNITED STATES VS. FIFA

This week, the United States and Switzerland staged daring sheet raids on FIFA officials accused of various acts of bribery, corruption, and basically being FIFA officials. FIFA graft has been as much a part of international soccer as falling down and rolling around on the ground as if the pitch was covered in a complex series of invisible bear traps. According to the New York Times, "Soccer officials treated FIFA business decisions as chits to be traded for personal wealth, United States officials said. Whether through convoluted financial deals or old-fashioned briefcases full of cash, people were expected to pay for access to FIFA’s river of money and publicity."

The main reason why the United States has finally acted was because the justice department successfully strong-armed a criminally corrupt soccer official into cooperating. The informant is named Chuck Blazer because of the well-known rule that if you're a shady soccer bureaucrat ready to make a government deal and you also have a separate apartment for your cats then you have to have a Steven Seagal name.

The most surprising aspect of the FIFA arrests is that an international body is actually making an attempt to hold some corrupt officials accountable. This is the same body that awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a site so ludicrous that bribery is the only rational explanation other than gambling that by 2022, soccer will have transformed into an apocalyptic death-cult where players who can survive the searing heat will be allowed to live within the walls of the city and work on post-apocalyptic society constitutions that are ham-fisted metaphors for current crises. The Qatar World Cup has already had an appalling human cost in the thousands of migrant workers trapped in exploitative and deadly conditions to build stadiums, infrastructure, and hotels. FIFA has examined these troubling reports of thousands of worker abuses and deaths and decided that the best course of action is to move the 2022 World Cup to the winter.

As I am writing this, the world waits on tenterhooks to see if FIFA President Sepp Blatter will resign or get voted out. Blatter has stated that he will not, and he usually has a steadfast coterie of cronies that he can count on to re-elect him in perpetuity even though him and his supporters within FIFA are literally the only people on the planet who want to see any more of his oily visage popping up on television to say something impressively awful.

Blatter defaults to making "I don't know how these with artifacts from the 
recently-looted pyramid came to be carefully arranged in the living room 
of this luxury hotel suite" gestures

Blatter operates with the charm of a low-level political donor with dubious diplomatic license plates; he is the prototype of the international bureaucratic lizard person, and he infuses a sport with unmatched global appeal with the spirit of crooked bean counting.

UPDATE: Sepp Blatter has won re-election as FIFA president. He is the Sphinx, he is a pyramid, he is eternal and unmovable; he is a bad vaudeville act with a cane-cutting chainsaw. 

DAYS OF DEFLATION

There is nothing funnier in American sports than when the National Football League and its overwhelmed Vice Principal Roger Goodell vow to get to the bottom of something. The NFL, a non-profit pickup truck marketing agency, wants Americans to know that it stands for America and it won't allow its players to besmirch the reputation of a sport where millionaires run into each other as fast as possible. And when players, coaches, and equipment managers threaten the very game itself, there will be hell to pay.

The Great Patriot Ball Deflation Media Event is quite possibly the greatest NFL scandal of our lifetimes. Its stakes were violations of pedantic NFL rules which, as of this publishing, have not yet been added as amendments to the United States constitution. It involves the type of moronic Patriots wacky races-style skulduggery that trapped a standoffish coach and perennial homecoming king quarterback in a series of hilariously humiliating press conferences. It involves Goodell squandering any ounce of goodwill he could have gained from this by throwing around suspensions with the reckless abandon of Barney Fife with a submachine gun.

In the NFL justice system, the players are represented by two separate
yet equally important groups: Roger Goodell, who hands down
punishment; and Roger Goodell, who arbitrates appeals to Roger
Goodell's decisions. These are their stories.

But the by far the best part about the Deflation Event is the Wells report, the results of an investigation running more than 200 pages with transcripts of text messages, scientific charts, and the results of hundreds of man-hours of digging into the question of ball pressure. Today, we examine one of these heroes.

THE ADVENTURES OF BROCK JAW: NFL INVESTIGATOR

Brock Jaw woke up in his car. He used takeout cartons for a pillow and a racing form for his blanket even though he had an officially licensed Kansas City Chiefs branded snuggy in his trunk. It was time to go to work. It was always time to go to work.

For five weeks he tailed the Patriots' assistant equipment manager. He knew his apartment, his car, his friends, his bar. He woke when he awoke, slept when he slept, and lived in his shadow. Brock Jaw didn't have to go home anymore, not since the divorce. He figured his wife would take him back after he cracked the incorrectly-branded headphone case, but he was wrong. She didn't understand. She wasn't out here, defending everyone from garish cleats.

Goodell told him not to engage with the equipment manager. The Commissioner said he'd take his badge. But Roger Goodell didn't sleep in his car for the past five weeks and wake up smelling like gas station coffee. Roger Goodell didn't spend hours at a corkboard tracing football needle receipts. Roger Goodell didn't have to watch that smug son-of-a-bitch walk around like there was no Brock Jaw around every corner, held back only by the bylaws of the National Football League and probably municipal laws, but Brock Jaw wasn't sure.

"BROCK JAW, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE," Jaw said as his car fishtailed around a corner into twelve fruit stands. "Did you deflate the balls?" he said, shaking the equipment man. "Did you tamper with them? Did Brady know? "DID BRADY KNOW?" he screamed, wiping produce from his eyes.

"You're with a professional sports league, I don't have to talk to you," the equipment man said.

Brock Jaw launched a pomegranate inches from the equipment manager's face. From his car, the NFL radio dispatch squawked out an emergency signal. "This isn't over," he seethed. But for now it was. Brock Jaw stepped on his accelerator and turned on his siren blaring The Equalizer. It was a code 451: illegal pants. "Jesus Christ," he said.

BECKMANIA

Our old pal Illinois head football coach and frustrated bear swatting at out-of-reach picnic supplies Tim Beckman has found himself in hot water again. Beck Man has been in fine off-season form since unthinkably wresting The Hat from its rightful place in Evanston and has been clearly driven mad with Hat Power since. In February, he demanded that reporters cover Illinois football positively. "The challenge is still, how important is the University of Illinois to you? It's very important to us. We can be successful if we're all in it together." "I AM THE HAT-HOLDER," he added, throwing on a cape. "I AM YOUR NEWSPAPER. HERE'S A HEADLINE FOR TOMORROW'S EDITION: BECK MAN HAT MAN."

Beckman then announced the creation of a Beckman-edited Illinois 
propaganda newspaper called Iltruthni filled with articles such as 
"Illinois Football's Tractor Procurement Numbers See Dramatic 
Increase" and "Hatless Pig-Dog Pat Fitzgerald Cowers Like Child"

More seriously, former Illinois football player Simon Cvijanovic accused Beckman of mistreating and abusing players. Other former players from Illinois and Toledo have corroborated his allegations while still others came to Beckman's defense. Cvijanovic claims that Beckman and his coaching staffs dismissed injuries and forced players into dangerous and stressful situations. Beckman denies the allegations, and the university has begun an investigation.

One of Cvijanovic's allegations, however, seems completely in line with what we've come to expect from Beck Man, as the Tribune reports:

Cvijanovic said Beckman created a dangerous culture around injuries, forcing hurt players to wear purple signifying the color of rival Northwestern.
"This shows how he views injured players. Like you're weak," said Cvijanovic, who will graduate from Illinois.

There is no doubt that stoking the flames of an intrastate football rivalry between two bad teams that no one cares about is the first priority of all Beck Man practices. Here are some other likely Illini practice scenarios:

• Recruits are blindfolded and forced to take the hat from a papier-mache Pat Fitzgerald without ringing any of the bells placed on his person
• Illini football players enrolled in seminar class called "We Have Always Been At War With Northwestern"
• All tackling dummies now say "Chicago's Big Ten Team"
• It is the last day of training camp. It's a hazy dusk and Beckman pulls aside the newcomers and says to them your last task is to get to the dining hall. They take their first tentative steps when they see them charging down a hill. It's a dozen makeshift Willie Wildcats built by Beckman at the anti-Northwestern crafting studio he built in a shed, but his costume-making techniques are still crude, so the Willies have crooked smiles and mismatched eyes, and they are coming straight at the players out of the forest and they are on fire.   

INVESTIGATE!

Several open questions remain: Will Sepp Blatter ever be successfully removed from his post at the top of FIFA and sent off to some soccer St. Helena?  Will Roger Goodell get his man? And will Embattled Coach Tim Beckman (his title as specified by the latest AP Style Guide) be able to prove that his brand of deranged coaching psychosis is within university-sanctioned bounds of deranged coaching psychoses?  And if he is fired, will he still keep up a one-man anti-Northwestern hatred campaign by standing at Ryan Field wearing a t-shirt with his anti-Northwestern logo on it but no one notices because it is a Big Ten game and only 35 people are cheering for the home team?  Only one man knows, and he is Brock Jaw, and he can't tell you because he's got a hot tip about improperly branded sports drinks.

Cubs Baseball Returns to Make You Miserable

It is April and the Chicago Cubs will begin playing baseball in order to cause misery and despair to legions of beer-swilling mustachioed mustard monsters.  For several years, the Cubs have been irrelevant: the team has been stripped of competent baseball players in exchange for prospects and allowed to sink to appropriately Cub-like depths in a shameless tanking exercise. Ticket prices, of course, remained among the highest in baseball even as team president Theo Epstein all but announced OUR STRATEGY IS INTENTIONAL INEPT FLOUNDERING GIVE US YOUR MONEY.

It's equally exciting as a Cubs fan and infuriating as a fan of baseball teams trying to win baseball games and a person who has foolishly given money to a Ricketts that this plan appears to be working. The Return of the Cubs to Contention is a major baseball story this spring.  The team is a trendy pick to contend for a wildcard spot; enough maniacs have descended upon Las Vegas to give them absurdly low odds to win the World Series.
 
That is insane enough to be the plot of one of those 
bachelor parties gone bad movies but instead of 
inadvertently murdering a croupier or getting in 
too deep with an organized crime syndicate or falling 
victim to a crooked casino with complicated gambling 
games that are just made up on the spot but all called 
"baccarat" in order to fool unsophisticated rubes the 
protagonists decide to put actual hard-won dollars, 
AMERICAN dollars for the love of god, on the Cubs to 
win the championship of Major League Baseball

The optimism has come with the development of young players.  Anthony Rizzo had a breakout year by learning to hit left-handed pitching.  Starlin Castro returned to the All-Star game after a year as one of baseball's worst everyday players.  Jorge Soler came up to give major league pitching the battering he once threatened to unleash upon an entire dugout's worth of baseball players.  And Javier Baez, glorious Baez, joined Cubs in August.  Baez, a mercurial baseball maestro whose potential to alter the Earth's tide with his tater-mashing is held in check only by his complete inability to successfully hit a ball with his bat.  Consider this: Baez came to the plate 229 times last season.  Of those, he put the ball in play 36 times.  Nine of those 36 hits left the yard; that's a dinger percentage of 25% and if that isn't a real stat it should be.  He also struck out 95 times, more than 40% of his total plate appearances.  This sample size is so small that baseball stats people would regard it like Vigo the Carpathian regards ghostbusters, but still.
 
A thorough analysis of advanced batting statistics (click to enlarge)

 And, after a couple of weeks superprospect Kris Bryant will appear as soon as he has passed a bizarre and arbitrary deadline that will allow the Cubs to keep him on a rookie payscale for an additional season, which the Cubs have  justified by saying he needs to work on his fielding with the subtlety of a CBS sitcom character ordering a footlong hotdog in mixed company. The Cubs have a number of heralded prospect bats waiting in the wings, but Bryant has eclipsed them all by demolishing minor league pitching last year and going on a spring training rampage that left a trail of baseball carcasses in his wake.

The Cubs were not content to sit around with their exciting young team.  They made additional not fucking around moves.  First they signed America's Favorite Cool Grandpa Joe Maddon to manage the team.  Maddon unexpectedly became available when Tampa GM Andrew Friedman bolted for the sunny skies and infinite money piles of Los Angeles.  The Cubs fired first-year manager Rick Renteria and signed Maddon in a round of baseball skulduggery that has the Rays filing tampering charges and (presumably) Renteria plotting vengeance in smoky tents filled with medieval topographical maps.  The Ricketts brought to the Cubs a healthy dose of intrigue: Theo Epstein's Second Clandestine Voyage from Boston, the Wooing of Joe Maddon, the Betrayal of Renteria, and the War of the Spanish Succession.
 
This time, bereft of gorilla suits, Theo Epstein fled 
Boston in the disguise of Lenin disguised as a 
Guy Who Isn't Lenin

Then the Cubs signed Jon Lester, the first big-time free agent pitcher of the Epstein era (let's forget Edwin Jackson exists).  Lester was brought in as the ace who can one day anchor a champion pitching staff.  Not to be fatalistic, but given the success rate of big time ace pitcher free agent signings and the involvement of the Chicago Cubs, there has never been a larger Sword of Damocles hovering over a baseball pitcher; there is an Aircraft Carrier of Damocles regularly sending squadrons of Damocles bomber jets at Lester's shoulder and cruciate ligaments.  

For several seasons Cubs games were not only meaningless in the existential sense of all sporting events being a trifling distraction from societal problems and I don't even an own a TV, but meaningless even within baseball's limited universe. You could slate the Cubs into last place in April and find them comfortably resting there undisturbed in September.  The only mild pleasure from Cubs games came from the potential of watching Cubs ineptly run into each other.  Now, even if they don't make the playoffs, the Cubs are at last interesting and it is not just because they will be playing their games in a dilapidated hellhole.

WRIGLEY RENOVATIONS

The Cubs' renovations of Wrigley Field are behind schedule.  This makes sense because the Cubs are philosophically behind schedule.  The outfield bleachers will spend this season as pits, barren baseball wastelands filled with dirt, more than a century of stale beer, and, by the end of the season, I assume roaming bands of abandoned prospects attempting to build a civilization out of sunflower seeds and fungo bats.

Theo Epstein, wearing a crown fashioned out of forbidden Old Style cans and Jed Hoyer, wearing pinstriped epaulettes, will begin to use the pits as part of hardline contract negotiations.  Edwin Jackson will be the first to be DFP'd-- designated for pits, forced to rely on his wits, charm, and ineffective fastball to negotiate his way through the numerous pit civilizations.  He will team with a man once known as Brian LaHair but now goes by his pit name Gargantuous The Hair who knows the ways of the pit but may have his own agenda.  But the greatest horror in the Pit does not come from the warring factions of pit dwellers or the pit pits or the festering bites of vienna hotdogs mutated into sentience by decades of proximity to urinal trough organisms.  No, it is the Toweled One, a mysterious man who stalks silently at night.  He wears ragged pants, a tattered jersey with only the letters "ior" visible and a cap pulled low over his face.  Severed elbow ligaments dangle from his belt.  Only one man has escaped and he has been driven mad; he screams about Tommy John surgery and teeth before becoming transfixed with fear and the only words he'll mutter are "in Dusty we trusty."
 
The Cubs' new Special Adviser to the General Manager on Pits, 
Thunderdomes, and Mutant Outlands

The Cubs are also installing a videoboard this year.

SEASON OUTLOOK

The Cubs will be improved this year.  This is because they have decided to use actual major league baseball players.  In addition to the ballyhooed prospects, the Cubs brought in on-base specialist Dexter Fowler, and Miguel Montero, a solid defensive catcher and maker of intense yell-faces.  Montero is also adept at pitch-framing, an art of openly deceiving umpires that is an acceptable part of baseball unlike attempting to steal signs, which is punishable by having a baseball thrown at your face because baseball is a violent murder sport invented in the nineteenth century by train robbery gangs. 
 
Early baseball action: a strikeout

Yet, while it's exciting to have a baseball team that aims for more than a top draft pick, it's probably a bit premature to assume they will make the playoffs.  For one, they play in the same division as the dangerous Pirates and the grimly inevitable St. Louis Cardinals.  Other awful teams, like the Padres and the Marlins will also contend for the Wild Card.  Fortunately, I can't imagine either of those teams ever causing  misery to Cubs fans.

Secondly, the Cubs' prospects, as good has they have been, are still prospects.  Soler probably won't continue his blistering pace.  Baez may never learn to hit major league pitching.  Kris Bryant has played exactly as many big league games as you or me, assuming that Carlos Zambrano did not just google himself for 1,000 pages.  Pitchers Jake Arrieta and Justin Hammel may not replicate last season's breakouts.  Joe Maddon's honeymoon will end under the thunderous echo of 10,000 guys with mustaches and a Chicago sports press manned by lumbering men writing the words "wins=winning games=winners yes?" in their notebooks next to sketches of sausage products.

And yes, the Cubs are still the Cubs.  Stewards of a century-plus World Series drought, compilers of losing seasons, standard-bearers of sporting ineptitude.  Perhaps, the Cubs will win one year, but it is equally possible they continue to lose until baseball transforms into another sport entirely after Wrigley Field is taken over by the pit people and baseball quickly transforms into an inevitable future death sport involving bullpen cars and pitching machines.  The Cubs have gouged fans and reached for taxpayers' wallets.  They have sent forth armies of stonegloved fielders, strikeout mongers, belly itchers, and Junior Lake against professional baseballers, they have intentionally made a mockery of team whose name and everything it stands for is already a mockery and in 2015 they have attacked us with the absolute worst thing with which to afflict a Cubs fan: hope.  You maniacs.

HATURDAY HATPOCALYPSE HAT GAME BOWL GAME HAT

It is here.

Which team will qualify for a virtually non-existent bowl game in Detroit or somewhere spiritually aligned with the concept of a Detroit bowl game ? Which team can persevere in the face of intense media scrutiny?  Which team has what it takes to be the second-best team in the state?  Which team has a better back-up quarterback?  Whose cuisine will reign supreme?  Who wants The Hat, the universally-recognized symbol of the greatest rivalry in the history of college football?
 
Hat

It's Hat Saturday.  Haturday.  Win or go home.  The most important game between Northwestern and Illinois in the history of the rivalry and it's to punch a golden ticket to a Siberian bowl wasteland or be forever cast into the dustbin of forgotten teams that don't play in bowls even though the difference between playing in a crappy bowl game or not playing in one is for all intents and purposes meaningless.  This game is no less than the climax of the Tim Beckman era, and a win or die showdown for watered-down, grade-inflation bowl eligibility; it is the platonic ideal of a Land of Lincoln game.  This game could be a glorious continuation of Tim Beckman-related Hat Invincibility or it could go down as one of the most ignominious defeats in Northwestern history which includes losses via multiple onside kick returns, allowing the greatest comeback in the history of college football, losing to an FCS opponent at home, losing 34 consecutive games as students threw the goal posts in Lake Michigan in mock triumph, and failing to defeat Brady Hoke.

DO BECK MEN DREAM OF ELECTRIC HATS

Tim Beckman is one of the best things to happen to Northwestern football.   Illinois and Northwestern shared Big Ten Cellar-Dweller Solidarity, occasionally rising to the top of the conference and serving as a welcome breath of fresh air against the ceaseless and boring domination by the Ohio States and Michigans.  Illinois's football past is only slightly less bleak than Northwestern's.  I can't sum up the Illinois football experience better than the lede from this article: "Illinois senior football players were asked to name their favorite memory during their time in the program for the team's website. For most of the 18, the best memory was the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl."

The rivalry game, first for the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk and then vastly superior Hat, was a good way to end the season and usually seen as winnable.  Then Tim Beckman came to down, guns blazing, staring down piano players.

Beckman made no secret of what he wanted: state pride and its currency: Hats.  His introductory press conference was rife with references to destroying purple objects, referring to Northwestern as "that school up north," putting up that anti-Northwestern sign in the locker room, and probably getting angry at Kansas State and sending hate mail to the purple teletubby for what the producers of the that show would see as novel and unexpected reasons.  If you for whatever reason have read more than one entry of this blog, you've noticed that I think the War on Northwestern is an unending wellspring of hilarity.
 
Try to think of something funnier than this

But, in some ways, Tim Beckman has won.  Beckman, and the conversion of the trophy into a coveted Hat, has made the Illinois game a must-win.  It's more than just a win against an in-state rival (Beckman, who makes pronouncements with the understated, soft-spoken cadence of a desperate Depression-era carnival barker, declared this the "state championship," apparently oblivious to the existence of Northern Illinois).  The cosmic laws of the universe simply cannot allow a person who uses all of the ridiculous flopsweat-addled manufactured rivalry tricks on what is historically the worst program in the history of college football to prevail in that game.  Instead, Beckman functions best as a frustrated foil; Beck Man the Saturday morning cartoon villain whose plots are forever frustrated by his own incompetence.

If Tim Beckman had turned the Illini into a football juggernaut, his goofy Northwestern-baiting would be embraced as part of his motivational tactics.  But his Illini have not exactly set the world on fire.  Beckman has won a total of four Big Ten games since taking over in 2012.  His tenure has been marked by weird incidents on and off the field, including a public censure by the NCAA for chewing tobacco on the sideline, acquiring sideline interference penalties including the one linked above where he's simultaneously flagged and run over by a referee, and criticism for attempting to poach Penn State players seconds after sanctions came down.  I don't blame him for any of those things; there's no room for dignity in coaching college football and Beckman should be able to use whatever sideline substances he wants whether it's chaw or the chemicals that are constantly pumped into Ed Orgeron on gameday to prevent him from removing his shirt.  But it would also be fair to say that his position at Illinois is under siege, and he may well be coaching for his job on Saturday.

GET ON UP FOR THE HAT GAME YOU CHUMPS

What else can we say?  It's the Hat Game.  Northwestern is carrying a modest two-game win streak including a decisive 38-14 victory over a train accident Purdue team that was never really in doubt.  But the Wildcats suffered a massive blow on offense when Trevor Siemian injured his knee.  That means that the already-struggling Northwestern offense will turn to big-armed backup Zack Oliver.  Oliver looked good to close out the game.  It would not be surprising to see the 'Cats use their other quarterback in Alviti Packages because they sound like the Macguffin at the center of a heist movie.
 
Slide the briefcase across the floor.  Stay there.  I need to make a call.  If I don't call 
by precisely 2:30, we'll destroy the Alviti Packages.  You're not getting anything 
until my boss confirms he has the Colter Options

The Illini may also use their backup at quarterback.  Beckman replaced a rusty Wes Lunt with Riley O'Toole in their win against Penn State.  Northwestern fans may remember O'Toole from his cameo in the 2012 game, when he relieved Nathan Scheelaase in a Northwestern romp.  Lunt may also play.  Maybe the teams will switch quarterbacks at halftime just to mix things up.

The game will match one of the country's least productive offenses (playing with up to two quarterbacks, neither of which has ever started a game) against one of the worst defenses.  Northwestern plays defense better than anything the Illini do and are at home, albeit badly outnumbered by Illinois fans.  The 'Cats have beaten Wisconsin and Notre Dame while the Illini have felled mighty Minnesota.

Don't write off the Illini.  This game is for The Hat.  It is for a bowl.  It is for Tim Beckman's job, for continued irritation at the whole Chicago's Big Ten team thing, for a tiny crack of dawn in the darkness that has shrouded the Illinois football program since the Fall of the Zook Empire, and I expect the Illini to come out like maniacs to let that Hat radiate happiness around Champaign in the dismal winter months to come in The Greatest Rivalry in All of College Football.

COME OUT THIS SATURDAY.  It is the Hat Game.  It is going to be pleasant outside.  Are you prepared to sit idly by and ignore what will certainly be the hattest hat game of the century with a trip to Detroit at stake when you and your loved ones can be part of a braying purple throng ready to sweep Beck Man and the Illini down I-57, hatless and bowl-less, in the last opportunity to do so at Ryan Field this season, and with the only socially acceptable venue for yelling at college students who are running into each other for our amusement?  Don't let the Illini enact a Glorious Revolution and turn Ryan Field into a House of Orange.
 
Beckman's hatred for Northwestern is so intense, I 
can see him taking over another team and 
attempting to maneuver them into the Big Ten and 
use their resources to try to crush the Wildcats, like 
William III attempted to do against the Sun King, 
Louis XIV

HATURDAYS OF THUNDER

This is the greatest Hat Game in history.  A bowl is on the line in a win or go home thunderdome.  We might not have Tim Beckman to kick around anymore.  No one wants to see Beckman ever hold a Hat in triumph; the thought is sickening, appalling, disgusting.  At the same time, I want to see more on the line in this game.  Beckman's ridiculous, tone-deaf, absurd rivalry campaign has made this game relevant again and not even entirely ironically.  I hope he sticks around for many more Hats to come and for this game to be not about Detroit or whatever shitty bowl game the bowl gods conjure up but one day about Indianapolis or Pasadena.  

Even in a sport where wins and losses can swing the tenor of an entire season, this has been one of the most bizarre Northwestern seasons I can remember.  It featured at least three or four moments when all seemed lost.  It featured a heinous blowout at the hands of the hated Hawkeyes and a football game against Michigan so terrible that it was not played so much as perpetrated.  It continued the inexplicable and frustrating Northwesternings from last season, but also contained one of my favorite Northwestern games ever played when every single break Northwestern missed over the past two years came to their way in the service of ruining Notre Dame's day.  And it culminated in a knock-down drag-out fight to the death for a Hat, a crappy bowl game, and all that is worth rooting for in college football.

Notre-Dame: This is Northwestern Football

Turn up the Coolio, put up your Jud Buechler posters, and hang with Mr. Cooper.  Northwestern has gone back into South Bend and improbably beaten the Notre Dame Fighting Irish nineteen years after their last trip to Notre Dame Stadium convinced America that Northwestern football existed.  And they did so with a game only marginally more ridiculous than Northwestern's losses in the past two seasons, a game that unfolded like a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine designed to ruin Notre Dame football.  Look, I know anyone who has gone far enough down the Northwestern football rabbit hole to actually be reading this blog has probably watched the game and read all the articles and produced a 1920s silent film reel about it, but I can't think of anything more pleasurable than reviewing the stupefying chain of events that led to Northwestern victory.
 
Excerpt from silent film The Hiphooraysman.
The gif comes from @NUHighlights's spectacular collection of Fitzgifs, including one where 
Fitz temporarily vanishes from the Coaches' Review graphic box because he is reacting like a muppet

1. A botched hold on an extra points allows Nick VanHoose to return the ball some 98 yards for a two-point conversion.  You are not allowed to do this in the National Football League because only the kicking team can score National Football Points on a point-after attempt as mandated by the NFL's Committee of Guys With Folded Arms Slowly Shaking Their Heads.

2. A football bounces off an iconic Notre Dame Golden Helmet into the waiting arms of Anthony Walker for a rare Domeception.

3. The 2014 Northwestern Wildcats score multiple touchdowns in the same game.

3.Up 40-29, Notre Dame Head Coach Brian Kelly decides to go for two, even though a PAT would force the Wildcats to score two touchdowns instead of a touchdown, two-point conversion, and field goal because it's called playing the percentages and it's what smart managers do to win ballgames.
 
"More points! More points!" screams Kelly, demanding the Irish go for two in the 
manner of a reprobate Roman Emperor

4. Northwestern scores a touchdown and converts for its 37th point. 

5.With 96 seconds remaining in the game and Northwestern out of timeouts the Fighting Irish have the ball.  Virtually any football action here such as running, passing, falling down, performing an elaborately choreographed Busby Berkeley dance number, snapping the ball and yelling I DECLARE A FOOTBALL, would have virtually ended the game.  Instead, the running back fumbled the ball right back to Trevor Siemian and the Wildcat offense.

6. Northwestern drives down the damn field.

7. Kicker Jack Mitchell (MITCHELL!), who did not hit a field goal longer than 29 yards all season, straight up stone colds a 41-yarder to send it to OT.  Then, after a Notre Dame miss in overtime, he blasts a 45-yarder to just end Notre Dame.

After enduring a two-year supply of fourth-quarter meltdowns, Fourth and Shorts, Ron Kelloggings, kicker-slidings, overtime debacles, Husky tauntings, two point conversion slips, and the entire case history of Universe v. Northwestern Football, it culminated in a game where everything short of the Red Sea parted for the Wildcats.  And they did it to Notre Dame in South Bend on the Notre Dame Television Station in front of thousands of Notre Dame fans and in front of you and me and America.

THIS IS NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL

Northwestern football has been kind of bumming fans out lately.  No one expects the Wildcats to be a football juggernaut-- in fact Northwestern football had been defined by its decades-long stretch as a reverse-juggernaut that was better than any other team in this nation at getting trampled upon.  But the improbable way the Wildcats have lost football games has given fans the same kind of dour combination of disbelief and resignation that John McClane has in the first 25 minutes of any Die Hard movie when he learns he's at the center of another plot concocted by an as-yet undiscovered Gruber Brother. 

The advent of the playoff system (and its inevitable future expansion) and the Embrace Debate culture that permeates college football's nonsensical championship raises questions about the relevance of the rest of the teams.  What do you root for when your team is irrelevant to the playoff picture?  Why does the Big Ten bother to play football?
 
"Because it's there." George Mallory and this guy

Wildcat football is not likely to figure in the playoff most years.  They are not likely to contend for conference championships, although it's far from impossible in the Big Ten West: Division of Dreams.  But Northwestern, like 100 other teams in the FBS can have successful seasons.  There's the eternal quest for six wins and a golden ticket to one of dozens of Pizza City Bowls.  There's the Hat, the symbol of victory in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry.  And there is the possibility to just absolutely brutalize some other team's hopes and dreams.

This is the essence of Northwestern football.  If you cannot be a football powerhouse forever stressing about strength of schedule, transitive properties, shadowy playoff committees, and all of the other nonsense that goes into disguising the essentially arbitrary process that determines the national championship, you might as well be a team that infuriates other teams by beating them. 

Northwestern will beat a ranked team.   That team's fans will respond with apoplectic calls to fire their coach, their athletic director, their mascot, their band director, their chair in zoology.  They will write angry things on the internet about how the situation is unacceptable, despite the fact that the word unacceptable should only be by used be people like international observers monitoring elections in that fictional country ruled by Dr. Doom.  They will fail to acknowledge the existence of Northwestern except as a force to expose their team's flaws, like the Wildcats are an unexplained blight or pestilence.  No one ever gives credit to the sun for being really clutch at melting Icarus's wings.

College football has organized and commodified a process of demolishing expectations and crushing hope.  We know that all too well-- both seasons since 2000 that Northwestern entered with a preseason rankings ended as four- and five-win debacles.  I don't know how fans of powerhouse teams do that every year.  It does not seem fun to consider nine-win seasons and bowl victories as catastrophes or get genuinely upset when the team does not win by enough points.  It's great when Northwestern can rack up victories and contend for Big Ten Championships.  I sincerely believe the 'Cats will make it back to Pasadena at some point even as I've made peace with the fact that I will die without seeing the Cubs play in a World Series and all of their young talent is an elaborate cosmic taunt.  But, in those leaner years, Northwestern will remain an agent of chaos, spreading football discord and trampling upon the hopes of other fans, and chaos wins in college football more than anything. 

HAVING SAID THAT, LET'S HAVE UNREASONABLE BOWL EXPECTATIONS

The Notre Dame victory did more than satisfyingly infuriate Notre Dame people.  It also kept bowl hopes alive for Northwestern.  Should the Wildcats win out against Purdue and Illinois, they are going to Detroit or Dallas or the back room of a chicken slaughtering facility.  Neither team opponent is a world-beater, and Northwestern may well be favored in both.

The Wildcats are coming off their best offensive performance of the season.  The 40 points they scored in regulation is the exact number of points they scored in their last three games. Trevor Siemian threw for 284 yards, but could have had more if receivers could have come down with some few well-thrown bombs that bounced off their hands. He also ran for 32 yards and a touchdown, although he probably could have moonwalked into the endzone.  Justin Jackson has already rushed for 910 yards despite not beginning the season as a starter.  Jackson's not overwhelmingly big or blindingly fast-- instead, he has an innate sense that allows him to find cracks in the line and an apparent disdain for opposing tacklers that are forced to leave messages for him about tackling because he is too busy running the ball.
 
A late tackle attempt

The biggest story of the Notre Dame game was Jack Mitchell.  HEY DID YOU KNOW JACK MITCHELL IS A BASEBALL PLAYER?  IT IS TRUE, HE LITERALLY PLAYS TWO SPORTS.  THAT'S MORE THAN ONE SPORT, DOUG. I don't know what it is about multi-sport athletes that makes announcers lose their fucking minds with dumb, unfunny references to batting averages and walk-offs and wRC+, but we all lived through the Greg Paulus Imbroglio and as happy as I am for Mitchell and the rest of the 'Cats, I would not wish that on any fan base, even Notre Dame.

I don't know anything about Purdue football.  They have three wins this season and the worst record in the Big Ten (powerhouse Northwestern boasts four wins).  Darrell Hazell, who took over from Danny Hope last year, inherited a program that had fallen far from its heights as a reliable generator of NFL quarterbacks including Drew Brees, The Pride of Buffalo Kyle Orton, and Curtis Painter.  The Boilermakers' quarterback is a person named Austin Appleby.  It's been a grim year in West Lafeyette and probably all other Lafeyettes.
 
Hazell may be forced to take extreme action to rally his 
Boilermakers

Purdue is the worst team in the Big Ten this season.  But there's no point in assuming anything with this Northwestern team.  Purdue will see the 'Cats as a potential win, the Wildcats are coming off an emotional victory over yet another ranked opponent, and I bet Austin Appleby is really scrappy.  Perhaps the Notre Dame victory has managed to reverse the demonic curse that has befallen Northwestern since the Ohio State game last year.  Perhaps Northwestern players will build on the win.  Perhaps nothing has changed at all and this game will end with Purdue temporarily winning a court injunction to suspend the out of bounds rules on the final play and will lateral the ball around the stadium and parking lots and on hastily constructed Mad Max dune buggies that will allow them to lose the Northwestern defense somewhere around the Tippecanoe battle site and then wind their way back down to score a secret touchdown in the dead of night.

But the even larger implications surround the Apocalyptic Northwestern-Illinois Showdown looming in Evanston on November 29.  I'm turning my back on the Greatest Rivalry in the History of American Quasi-Amateur Sports this weekend to root full bore for the Beck Men to beat Penn State.  Both NU and Illinois have four wins.  If Northwestern manages to win against Purdue and the Illini beat Penn State, the teams will be playing for more than a Hat.  The last, shittiest, Big Ten bowl berth will be at stake.

The Battle for the Sixth Win would be the greatest Illinois-Northwestern game of all time.  The two teams have only played once with bowl status on the line as far as I can tell: in 2008, the Wildcats knocked Ron Zook's Illini out of bowl eligibility.  This could be potentially the first knockdown bowl berth death bowl ever played, and the fact that it would be for a forgotten place in some far-flung nonsense bowl makes it the greatest possible game between these two hallowed squads.  Plus, the winner gets the damn Hat and the undisputed crown as the second-best football team in the state of Illinois.

WILDCAT FOOTBALL

Notre Dame football looms over Chicago like the ominous shadow of a rubber monster suit over a scale model of Tokyo.  It is inescapable.  Despite sitting nearly 100 miles away and in another state, Chicago's a Notre Dame town only because of some weird quirks like the Fighting Irish dominating college football for the vast majority of its existence.  Meanwhile, only a few miles up the road, Northwestern toils in front of braying Nebraska fans, tarps, and no one, even in winning seasons.  The last win was the beginning of a great Northwestern team announcing its presence; this was a greater upset as the sputtering 'Cats regained their mojo.  

Two wins for bowl, one win for Hat, and zero wins left for chaos to reign.   

The Season's Not Over Until You Pry a Hat From My Cold, Dead, Head

Well, shit.

If you, like me, measure the relative success of Northwestern seasons by a berth in a much-ridiculed and ignored bowl game, then the season is likely over.  If you enjoy college football as a living museum art piece dedicated to exploring every possible way to lose, then you may have this Northwestern football season framed and hanging on your wall in violation of everything you think you know about the physical laws of the universe.

Two weeks ago, the Wildcats were coming off two unexpected Big Ten wins and a competitive half against Nebraska.  They also had a close loss against Big Ten West powerhouse Minnesota that they could have won except it had been a couple of weeks so fans needed to be subjected to a Northwestern Ending.  It seemed like Wildcat football would center on defense and Justin Jackson barreling into people.  And then Northwestern went into Iowa City.  I've prepared an elaborate video filled with high-level football strategy talk to summarize every element of the Iowa game.
a
Gott dame it

After the Iowa stomping, Northwestern still clung to hopes of a bowl game with three games against a reeling Michigan team, Purdue, and the Tim Beckman's Hat Apocalypse as well as a tough road matchup with Notre Dame.   The 'Cats entered last week with everything left to play for: a crappy bowl game, a perfect Hat record against Illinois in the Greatest Rivalry in the History of College Football, and the remote possibility of knocking Notre Dame out of the playoff hunt and ruining their season.  Even though Northwestern had an up-and-down season, those three goals are pretty much the zenith of the Northwestern football experience.

LOOK ON OUR FOOTBALL, NON BIG-TEN PEOPLE, AND DESPAIR

Years from now, when millions of Americans that eagerly follow collegiate water polo or ultimate frisbee or competitive eating, someone will reflect on what happened to kill college football.  They'll point to the usual suspects: concerns about the long-term health consequences of the sport, the unsustainable avarice of the NCAA and its member universities, a rash of football-related tree poisonings, but most likely they'll point to November 8th, 2014 when Northwestern and Michigan reached the apotheosis of Big Ten-related football ineptitude.  Both teams threw out their play books and replaced them with animated gifs of stuntmen in fire suits flailing around.  For most of the game, both teams treated the endzone like Moses treated the Promised Land.
 The Apotheosis of Big Ten football (click for full size)

So when Northwestern improbably marched down the field and somehow managed to crack through the invisible forcefield surrounding the Ryan Field endzones, it is not surprising that Pat Fitzgerald decided that the moment was ripe for a Pat Fitzgerald Gutsy Moment.  It's not like going into overtime had worked that well against Michigan last year.  Unfortunately, the coaches decided to send Trevor Siemian on an ill-advised one-man Charge of the Light Brigade into the entire Michigan defense and then Siemian fell down.
 
Two more yards, two more yards,
Two more yards onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the one quarterback.
“Forward, the Siemian!
Charge for the deuce!” Fitz said.
Into the valley of Death
He sort of fell on his butt.

Miserable Michigan faced aghast Northwestern in the So It's Come To This Bowl.  Northwestern still hasn't come down from the highs of winning a Gator Bowl and getting enough hype to host ESPN College Gameday.  Since then, the 'Cats have turned into a well-funded art installation dedicated to losing football games in increasingly bizarre and unfathomable situations-- the Siemian slip is not even the most ridiculous way that Northwestern has lost to Michigan in the past two seasons.

Michigan, meanwhile, is having less of a bad season than an existential crisis.  Michigan is not just Big Ten bad, where a team beats up on other lumbering Big Ten teams enough to get ritually sacrificed in lopsided bowl game, it is regular football team bad.  And that is spectacular.

College football's spectacle depends on inequality: on titanic clashes between powerhouse teams and on the field-rushing jubilation from when one one of those mortal teams manages to beat them.  And while previous success tends to replenish teams into perpetual juggernauts, the landscape underneath them shifts tectonically; teams start losing recruits, teams hire bad coaches, teams join the Big Ten.  The descent of a traditional powerhouse program into another mediocre team scrapping their way into the galleryfurniture.com bowl like the rest of us is one of the most enjoyable aspects of college football.
 
Brady Hoke, along with recently-departed Athletic Director Dave Brandon has drawn the ire 
of the Michigan faithful.  Currently, a google's image search for Hoke has an entire category 
of pictures under the heading "Fred Flintstone."

Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of Michigan Men, it's unlikely the program will remain in its dormant state forever.  I'd be surprised if Michigan didn't return to the Big Ten title picture sooner rather than later, although it remains to be seen if a good Big Ten team will have any relevance to the national championship picture as the conference plods itself into Rotel oblivion.  In the meantime, Michigan fans can enjoy baselessly speculating about NFL head coaches, install the standard creepy flight-tracking software, and start reinforcing the railroad pump cart they'll use to run Brady Hoke out of town as he claps forlornly.  

THE DAMNED DOME

Nineteen years ago, an unheralded Northwestern team marched into Notre Dame stadium and walked out with a football program.  There's no doubt that the 1995 victory was the most significant in Northwestern's modern history.  Northwestern and Notre Dame have not played football since.  During the interval, Northwestern won three Big Ten Championships and one bowl game.  Notre Dame plummeted into football mediocrity before storming back into a BCS championship game under Brian Kelly.  Modems stopped screeching at people.  A president was impeached but not convicted.  Humanity landed a probe on a comet.  The Big Ten expanded to 14 teams.  Notre Dame kind of joined the ACC much like how the Irish Free State was kind of in the Commonwealth during the Éamon de Valera era. 
 
Éamon de Valera's feuds with the British government over
 land annuity payments and references to the King in the
 Oath of Office led to a devastating mutual boycott.  This
 Punch cartoon lampoons his attempts to move the Irish 
Free State closer to a republic while remaining in the 
Commonwealth.  In reality, both de Valera and British 
government officials spent the 1930s complaining about each 
other undermining the Commonwealth while de Valera refused 
to leave and the British government refused to kick the Irish Free 
State out.  In the end, both parties maintained an uneasy 
membership by using the well-worn "no one knows what the 
hell the Commonwealth is or does" defense

In 1995, Northwestern came into South Bend in a Trojan Horse containing a Big Ten champion.  No one expected anything from the 'Cats.  According to Teddy Greenstein's oral history of the game (unfortunately locked behind the Tribune's paywall), Gary Barnett does not think Irish coach Lou Holz watched any film of NU quarterback Steve Schnur.  Barnett also suggests that Holz did not even know who he was.  This year, Northwestern's team resembles a trojan horse with no one inside, except maybe Pat Fitzgerald who has been living in it for nearly twenty years pumping his fists.   

It's a shame that Arizona State already robbed the Wildcats of the most important motivation for a win: to knock Notre Dame out of the playoff picture, destroy its season, and festively square dance across the season's ashes.  Congratulations to the Sun Devils for living the dream.  Instead, Northwestern will be scrapping for its bowl life as a Notre Dame win will knock them out of the postseason for a second consecutive year.  

If they are to have any shot at an upset, Northwestern needs to find a way to score points.  The Wildcats score fewer points per game than almost any other team in the country.  Last week, Fitzgerald and Mick McCall experimented with a two-quarterback system by using Matt Alviti to run the option.  I'm all for that, believing strongly in the old Northwestern chestnut "if you have one quarterback, then you have not enough quarterbacks" and a return to the is the running quarterback going to pass oh wait you think he's going to pass but really he's going to run just kidding here's a third quarterback who's playing wide receiver and now the offensive coordinator is wearing a cape plays from the Kain Colter era.  That strategy was not particularly effective (Alviti rushed 3 times for -2 yards), so we'll see if the coaching staff can think of any other wrinkles to move the ball other than giving it to Justin Jackson or strong rhetoric to convince the Irish that they have achieved first downs.  

HAT COUTURE 

Should Northwestern falter, they'll be down to one season goal, but it's the most important one of all: The Hat.  With two seasons filled with avant-garde losses and likely two seasons spent in a bowlless wilderness, only reasonable goal for Northwestern fans is hat-based monomania.  I hope Northwestern can keep its nineteen-year unbeaten streak going against Notre Dame and somehow claw its way to the Detroit Lions Pizza City Bowl.  But Northwestern cannot under any circumstances lose possession of The Hat.  It is the only thing keeping us going through this season.  

It's Hat Season.  The Beck Man is coming.  He's coming to your town.  He's coming for a Hat.  

Also, the basketball team has a guy on it named "Vic Law," which is an incredible basketball name.