Pat Fitzgerald has a saying he likes to bleat out from time to time: "stats are for losers." This sort of sentiment comes partly from Fitzgerald's frustration from feeling overlooked and underrated due in part to Northwestern's historical ineptitude, a bizarre and thin-skinned fascination with media figures (it will always remain a mystery to me why he spent so much time calling out some ESPN guy I've never heard of repeatedly for daring to pick Pitt in the Pinstripe Bowl), and a sort of cheeky macho posturing where Pat Fitzgerald feels the need to act like the model of his look, a gritty, middle-aged Duke Nukem. And yet one of the curious things about Fitzgerald's tenure as head coach has been a consistent gulf between Northwestern's rating by various advanced statistical metrics and the team's performance. This comes from a bizarre pattern where the Wildcats struggle against a coterie of profoundly non-threatening foes like the Central Eastern Corner of Illinois Feeblemen or Jabroni Technical College before somehow roaring back to life against Big Ten opponents, all of whom are defeated by seven points or less if they cannot be dragged into Northwestern's overtime chamber. This season, Northwestern has somehow risen to win a profoundly troubled conference and play in the Big Ten Championship game; SBNation/Football Outsiders' S&P+ ratings say that the Wildcats are the 76th best team in the country. College football can work this way because football itself is a bizarre and impossible game where the outcome of games can hinge on one or two plays, and Northwestern has made nearly all of them. “They beat teams just like that," P.J. Fleck said about last week's loss. "Iceman from ‘Top Gun,’ for all the people who know that. Cool as ice. Never makes a mistake." "I.C.E.M.A.N." Fleck said. "Intensity. Coolness. Execution. Mangling. Anklyosaurus. Neurotransmitters." I also want to point out the incredible next paragraph from the Star Tribune article where I got the Fleck quote from columnist Jim Souhan: "Most of Fleck’s speechifying targets 18-year-olds who may be impressed
by such silliness. Iceman from ‘Top Gun’? I may have been one of the few
people in the room old enough to know what he was talking about, yet I
had no idea what he was talking about. He might as well have been
comparing Northwestern to Gatsby, or Shemp." The season is short or, in statistics jargon, the samples are small. With the exception of the world-devouring Alabamas of the world, it is very difficult to tell if a team is better than another, and because of the nature of the game, it is almost impossible to predict if a team will beat another team or whether a team is better. Fans and pundits have several strategies to deal with the ambiguity baked into college football. One way is to try to build empirical models and rankings. The other way is through rhetoric, logical fallacies, transitive property wins, television analysts with tie knots so large that they are orbited by smaller tie knots going on television and talking about the Positional Matchups with grim certainty even though they have absolutely no idea how any of this is going to play out, ad finally people screaming at each other. There is also the tried and true method of Plushomancy, divination by Giant Mascot Head And yet, one of the strange epistemological paradoxes in sports in general, but particularly in college football, is that you could build a computer that takes of several acres with whirling tape machines and people dressed like NASA ground crews scurrying around with armfuls of printout graphs that could tell you precisely how good every team is and it has no effect on what actually happens. The central question surrounding Northwestern football this season is: why? And also: how? A Northwestern team that has not looked particularly impressive has amassed enough ugly wins over the exact configuration of teams it needed to beat to win the West. Have they been profoundly lucky? Do they have some sort of transcendent clutch switch that allows them to make the exact play they need to make at the exact instant they need to make it and no other time? Are they the avatars of a cursed football deity, brought forth by the unholy addition of Rutgers and Maryland brought in to smite the maniacs who dared to divide the Big Ten into this precise configuration of divisions by forcing Jim Delany to watch Northwestern play in the championship game? There are some answers. Northwestern's early-season struggles came from an offense juggling two quarterbacks as Clayton Thorson returned from his horrifying knee injury. Then, star running back Jeremy Larkin retired, and the Wildcats' running game stalled until the emergence of freshman battering ram Isaiah Bowser. Wisconsin played Northwestern with a quarterback making his debut. Kirk Ferentz is being held hostage by a Speed-inspired madman who has threatened to destroy Kinnick Stadium if the Hawkeyes go above eight wins. Northwestern refuses to blow anyone out because the program is in the grips of an overtime cult.
Regardless of what the numbers say or what cavalcade of coincidences and clutch play has allowed Northwestern to make it this far, the fact is that they are the Big Ten West Champions. They cannot be stopped from playing in the Conference Championship Game by anyone. And should they do it one more time, they look at the numbers and the statistics and Pat Fitzgerald prints them out and rips them apart on the sidelines like the time he had the team destroy a stuffed animal monkey when they finally won a bowl game, they would be finally proving once and for all that beating Ohio State or Michigan and knocking the entire conference out of the playoff would be extremely funny. SOFTENING THE CLAIMS TO THE HAT With the big Hat Showdown coming once again, it is important to point out that the state of Illinois is in the midst of a full-blown Hat Crisis, a seething cauldron of intrigue, fraud, and skulduggery involving the prize Lincoln Hat in the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. According to this tremendous report from WBEZ, which I cannot to full justice to in this blog post, the a private collector sold the hat to the museum, claiming that Lincoln gave it to a farmer from Southern Illinois as a gesture of gratitude in 1858. Even that information remains cloudy-- an affidavit from a descendant of the family suggested that William Waller received the hat in Washington D.C. sometime after 1861. Those reports represent the sum total of evidence that the hat ever belonged to Lincoln and is not just some nineteenth-century hat that some people had lying around in the closet. The Lincoln Hat of Dubious Prominence casts a hat-shaped shadow over Springfield According to the WBEZ article, the Lincoln Presidential Library spent $25 million on Lincoln artifacts in 2007, and the hat was the centerpiece of the collection. As the article says "in 2007, an appraiser valued the hat now in Springfield at $6.5 million
and used adjectives like 'transcendent' to describe its apparent
majesty." In my imagination, this involved the entire board of the Library seeing the hat and determining they must have it during a bacchanalian Lincoln trivia contest and speech-reading competition and paying for it with cash in a priceless period-accurate briefcase that may have belonged to Stephen Douglas. Now, with the Lincoln Library and Museum in some financial trouble, the authenticity of the hat is coming into question.
When historians looked into the hat in 2013, they were unable to find much evidence that the hat had ever belonged to Lincoln, although they found nothing to specifically disprove the claim. This is when the foundation called in the FBI and presumably its top Historical Hat Authentication Team led by grim, black-suited agents, battle-hardened from the never-ending Pancho Villa Sombrero Debacle and at least one of whom has scars from a violent confrontation with someone claiming to own a fraudulent Betsy Ross Bonnet. As WBEZ reports, "two tests were performed in 2015, comparing DNA samples from the hat
itself with Lincoln’s blood-spattered handkerchief, gloves, and shirt
from the night of his assassination, and two tufts of Lincoln’s hair,
among other things." But even these sophisticated tests could not prove that the hat belonged to Lincoln.
Here are some sentences from the rest of the article:
"In an interview, Nick Kalm, the foundation’s vice chairman, said his
organization is still satisfied that the hat is Lincoln’s and that
nothing uncovered by the FBI testing or museum curators disproves that.
He went on to note that with some historic relics, “leaps of faith”
sometimes exist in determining their authenticity."
"Underscoring the secrecy, federal agents were encouraged by the
museum’s former Lincoln curator, James Cornelius, to “disguise
themselves as a news crew” when they entered the museum, [Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Executive Director Alan] Lowe told WBEZ,
based on internal correspondence only recently discovered. Lowe described the overall secrecy surrounding the FBI testing as a form of 'subterfuge.'"
"'I have been on the front lines defending the provenance of the hat, but
I have been doing that not having all the available information. This
is unacceptable. We simply cannot operate that way,' Lowe wrote to
foundation CEO Carla Knorowski and foundation Chairman Ray McCaskey." To sum up, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum may have been snookered into buying a fraudulent Lincoln Hat based on just some guy saying so 150 years ago, and at some point an FBI Hat Crew snuck into the museum in disguise in order to DNA test the hat based on Lincoln's bloody death pillow and absolutely nobody knows what to do with this dubious hat other than the obvious thing-- make it the trophy for the Illinois vs. Northwestern Rivalry Football Game and allow the winning coach to parade around in it. HAT GAME Meanwhile, there is a football game to get to. Illinois, fresh off the worst defeat in school history, is in a traditional death spiral to end the season. They have had another difficult year, one where the most notable thing that happened was Lovie Smith growing a spectacularly grizzled beard and then the school handing out some incredibly soggy bottom boys-ass fake beards. The Beard Out is a tremendous gimmick, I sincerely hope none of the beard recipients tried to eat a hot dog The game has essentially no stakes beyond the hat. Illinois will not go to a bowl. Northwestern has already clinched its spot in the Big Ten Championship game, and the only question remaining is whether Jim Delany would hire a mercenary militia to stop a 7-5 Northwestern team with a loss to Illinois from appearing in Indianapolis. The Wildcats are heavily favored but will also be looking forward to next week's game.
There is nothing on the line except for the Hat, the Greatest Rivalry in American Sports, a knock-down drag-out fight between these two august programs fighting for a trophy. And whoever gets it can hire the FBI to figure out how to put it on their dang head already. I am on the front lines defending the provenance of the Hat.
Let's just lead off with it: the Northwestern Wildcats have won the Big Ten West. There are two games left; Northwestern could spend its road trip in Minnesota lounging on hammocks and its Hat Game against Illinois in a beach resort, zinc-nosed and sun-addled, and they can be 6-6, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them from showing up in Indianapolis to represent the entire Big Ten West. Football analysts, burning out their BCS computers and going through cartons of green accounting visors have all stared at their Johnny Mnemonic virtual reality devices and come to the same conclusion: this is incredibly funny. College Football analysts try to deal with their computer models that keep showing that Northwestern won the Big Ten West This is not to take anything away from the Wildcats, who have had a simultaneously disastrous and heroic season. It is to say that Northwestern has managed to win an entire division championship to the point where they get to wear special hats and get a trophy that I had no idea even existed until Saturday by what has been very close to the absolute minimum number points required. Northwestern will be the first major conference team to win a division without defeating a single out of conference opponent-- this includes Akron, a profoundly shitty MAC team whose win over Northwestern was its first over a Big Ten opponent ever in a football history that stretches to the nineteenth century. Northwestern won the West by racing to an enormous lead against Purdue then failing to score a point in the second half, by beating an at-the-time winless Nebraska team in the throes of its worst season in recorded history by scoring ten points in less than three minutes including a 99-yard touchdown drive to send the game to an overtime period won by a backup kicker playing in his first game, by somehow needing to come back against a Rutgers team so putrid that they had been trying to consolidate their turnovers with an agency so they just owed the entire Big Ten a few interceptions on weekly installments. When you're coaching Rutgers The Wildcats have confounded predictions, statistics, numbers, gamblers, logic, and reason. They have won the Big Ten West through what appears to be the absolute minimum amount of success. For three months, the Big Ten West has been told to get its act together and, with minimum competence, seize the division but no one has; Northwestern's stand is like the terrifying and insidious effects of climate change. And so the Wildcats go into their next two games in the perfect position. They cannot lose. Yes, they should beat Minnesota, a team that is currently thrashing about every week while deciding whether or not to turn into a werewolf. And yes, they should beat the flailing Illini, who remain under a tailspin under Lovie Smith who has just decided to cope by getting grizzled, even with the prized Hat at stake. But consider this: what if they lose? What if they get rowed by the Gophers or the Illini sneak by while Northwestern follows their patented just sort of hang out and see whatever happens is good with me gameplan and then they lose? They can't get taken out of Indianapolis at this point. Jim Delany can't deploy a cardboard Yosemite Sam that says "you must win this number of games against the Illini to play in the Big Ten Championship." And while the Big Ten would prefer to set up road blocks between Evanston and Indianapolis for this game than let a 6-6 Northwestern team play there, there is nothing stopping them. Of course, it would be a giant bummer for Northwestern to lose the next two. But it would also be extraordinarily funny, and the Wildcats have seized the mantle of America's Funniest Power Five Division Winner as an avatar of chaos that will easily carry them over whatever unlucky chump gets served to them in the Big Ten Championship that they are actually playing in (you can look it up) and then head to the Rose Bowl to attempt to win their first out of conference game. RIVALRY It has the sorry lot of Iowa fans to wake up in the middle of the night over the last decade and realize they have a rivalry with Northwestern. They would, like most Big Ten fans, like to have a rivalry with a traditional Big Ten Power like Ohio State or Michigan or even Wisconsin, the type of rivalry where you have a Farm Implement Trophy and songs about how you hate each other and the Big Ten Power actually does despise them back but instead they are forced to deal with Northwestern every year. The Iowa-Northwestern rivalry is not a traditional football rivalry where fans taunt each other and letter jacket guys kidnap the mascot and perform sporting japes worthy of stories that will last for generations at the Grim Waterfowl Club; their rivalry is more like the one between homeowners and termites. Northwestern has now beaten Iowa three years in a row. Each victory has been a disgusting affront to football. Last year, in the midst of a howling southern gale at Ryan Field, both teams refused to score until Northwestern lured them into overtime. This year, they battled to a putrid 3-0 half and basically refused to play offense until Bennett Skowronek made one of the greatest catches I've ever seen from a Northwestern player almost at random and then Iowa decided to close the game by bashing themselves in the head with large, comical props. My sources on Iowa message boards inform me that Northwestern got away with numerous Uncalled Holding Penalties. This is what life is like now, for the Hawkeyes. Their fans do not want to give in and debase themselves to admit they have a rivalry with Northwestern; every year, Northwestern comes in and the teams blow raspberries at each other until the Wildcats ruin their season. In 2000, the Wildcats took on an abysmal Iowa team with an outright Big Ten Championship and trip to the Rose Bowl on the line and they lost one of the most devastating games in Northwestern history. It was bitterly cold, and on the way out of the stadium, Iowa fans gleefully taunted anyone in purple to enjoy San Antonio, taking it as a given that the Citrus Bowl would pass up Northwestern for the more lucrative Michigan fanbase even though Northwestern had beaten the Wolverines head to head in one of the greatest games ever played. Those vengeful Hawkstrodamuses were proven right. This time, though, Northwestern's win, combined with just an absolute Rube Goldberg Machine of Big Ten shittiness propelled them to a Division Championship to celebrate upon Kinnick Stadium in front of disgusted Iowa fans who had, along with every other Western team, squandered an opportunity to win this wretched division. Last week, Northwestern took on Notre Dame in another sort of quasi-rivalry game. There is no way that Notre Dame considers Northwestern a rival: all of Notre Dame's rivalry is with the past itself, a sepia-toned succession of leather helmet mustache guys gouging the eyes of Army or valiantly battling the Spanish Flu; Notre Dame's current rivalries seem to mostly be with the entire sport of college football as everyone else has grown sick of the men's hats of the Associated Press constantly vaulting them into title games based on a stale, ghostly aura only to see them humiliated by a never-ending succession of JaMarcuses Russell. This is how Notre Dame exists now, its pugilist cartoon mascot now squaring off at every fanbase in the world waiting for them to lose. It is fitting that Notre Dame will play today in Yankee Stadium as their football program is the closest thing to every Boomer anecdote about Mickey Mantle made flesh. A middling Big Ten program that resurfaces every dozen years when Notre Dame deigns to play them until they lose and mysteriously vanish off the Irish schedule cannot compete with History. A 1991 image of "Mickey Mantle," a fictional baseball player invented in the late 1980s by Bob Costas and Ken Burns has created a cottage industry of fake Boomer Baseball Anecdotes and must be exposed by courageous people not afraid to put the truth on Blogspot.com College football rivalry fits within the sport's completely discursive tradition in that the biggest marker of a rivalry are fans talking about whether or not a fanbase is or is not their rival. Conferences and schools try to cement these with annual games on the schedule, "rivalry week" showdowns, and trophies, but the concept of rivalry belongs entirely to the fans. The greatest moment in the history of college football rivalry was Bob Diacco's laudably insane quest to build a trophy from scratch and instigate a Big Game with UCF and UCF's hostile indifference to the Civil ConFLiCt. No one has seen the trophy since it was abandoned somewhere on a sideline, ignored by UCF who would not even deign to parade it around. In an ideal world, the complete rejection of this Rivalry Overture would eventually twist its way into a real rivalry, with UCONN coaches bringing larger and more elaborate rivalry trophies to the stadium every year while UCF makes more pointed shows of ignoring it until the Huskies roll up with a semi full of life-sized Dog-Knights while UCF has hired a crew of backhoes to immediately bury them. The other great rivalry moment of the twenty-first century is this: The accepted, Branded Rivalries are the most boring in college sports. Instead, it's the ones at the margins, the ones that are constant sources of bickering about whether the teams are actually rivals, whether one team cares as much as the other about a rivalry, ones where there very nature of the concept of rivalry is contested in a way that would make an absolutely unreadable and dreadful paper called like "'Little Brother' or 'Big' Time Rival: College Football 'Rivalry' and the Discourses of Disparagement in American Society 1978-2012" in PAAAWWWWLLL Quarterly.
The sole exception remains America's greatest rivalry game, the Battle for The Hat and I'm concerned because Lovie would look tremendous sporting that thing with his silver beard.
Yes, there may be a person, huddled in a shack somewhere or in one of those vans that are full of computers where people karate chop keyboards and scream that they’re being hacked by an animated ASCII skull, who has analyzed the film and advanced data that can tell you credibly what the hell is going on with Northwestern football this season, but you can stop right there because I can tell you that it is because the entire program has been subsumed into an overtime cult.
Last year, the Northwestern Wildcats were exposed to three consecutive overtimes; they emerged victorious but forever changed from a mid-tier Big Ten West team to an organization based entirely on the concept of overtime, the suspension of normal time into an infinite dimension where time itself falls away into a worthless abstraction, where football can continue indefinitely to a period of never-ending Perfect Overtime stretching into infinity and also (it goes without saying) everyone gets a really cool cape. Once you understand the idea of Northwestern as a twisted overtime cult, their season makes far more sense: once the Wildcats, clearly an unstoppable force in Big Ten football, have staked out numerous imposing leads over teams in the first half, Pat Fitzgerald gathers the team in the locker room, puts on the Overtime Crown (a gigantic, bejeweled flat top that fits on top his normal flat top), assembles the Overtime Implements, and implores the team to let their opponent take them into overtime in the way that a river carries silt through its tributaries into the ocean. Yet, even a team like the Northwestern Wildcats cannot always achieve overtime without the co-operaion of the other squad, and Northwestern has been forced to hang on to win against Purdue, to blow the lead to Michigan, to lose to Akron through a series of ludicrous misfortunes that can only be explained as the machinations of a football cult, or to do whatever it is occurred at the end of the Rutgers game that led to an impossible, blasphemous five point lead. Only once this year, did the Wildcats manage to successfully go to overtime on a ludicrous 99 yard drive. There, with the sideline and the crowd chanting in a hideous dead language, their fists curled into claws, and with Pat Fizgerald foaming at the mouth from a psilocybin protein powder, the Wildcats achieved their aim, a single overtime period. Northwestern performs the Ritual of the Pumpéd Fist upon achieving Over Time Ask anyone about installing a secret overtime cult at a major college football program and they will tell you that it is harder than it looks. For one, overtime did not exist in college football before 1996. All noted overtime cults beforehand had been conspiracies to bring about the existence of overtime itself: the Society of the Skinned Hog, the Hearty Touchdown Lads known for sporting cravats (to display their disdain for ties), and the Grackle's Call Syndicate whose writings were easily dismissed as forgeries written decades later by the famed hoax specialist A. Quintet Pumnt (undone, in the end, by attempting to fake a trove of heretofore undiscovered James Joyce love letters, the infamous "I am also into pee" series). Many people underestimate the logistics involved in developing an overtime cult. The selection of Implements alone can sometimes take years. Because of the layers of secrecy involved in the Northwestern football program (it is a private school shielded from FOIA requests; Fitzgerald uses a series of arcane codes to disguise his injury reports) this blog is unable to give a full report. Several credible accounts point to a juddering countdown clock, a live falcon named Lance Moses, a music box that only plays unearthly cackling noises, and thousands of jodhpurs whose use has never been explained. Furthermore, Northwestern's new quarter-billion dollar practice facilities contain at least two ziggurats to be used for blaring horrid music from a compact disc entitled "royalty free music for cults and public access breathing programs." This week Notre Dame will visit Ryan Field with their playoff ranking and their legions of Chicago-area fans and their medium-rare coach, and they think they will be playing a football game. Notre Dame makes its first visit to Evanston since 1976. They play after Northwestern unexpectedly beat them on the way to the Rose Bowl and then they stopped playing for nineteen years, exactly long enough for Northwestern to return to South Bend and beat them as part of an elaborate prank.
These teams do not play nearly enough for this game to have meaning, but it does. They mirror each other. Notre Dame has a large nationwide fanbase that is the closest thing that Chicago has to a college football team; Northwestern has billboards. Notre Dame celebrated national titles in the twentieth century while Northwestern fans ripped down the goalposts after breaking a record for futility. This meeting will the be the fifth time these teams play in 25 years but for some reason the rivalry has a wikipedia page. But Northwestern no longer cares about victory. They are here to drag the Fighting Irish to overtime, to extend the game beyond the boundaries of time and space, to dwell in Evanston in overtime as the universe is destroyed and reborn over ageless eons. The last time Northwestern played them, Brian Kelly's brain became warped and twisted by the promise of overtime, and he kept trying to go for two unsuccessfully until he found himself in overtime and at the mercy of the Wildcats and their Baseball Kicker. We already live in an insane world ravaged by the ripple effect of overtimes. The Northwestern Wildcats currently sit in first place in the Big Ten West-- this game against Notre Dame has far less import for them than the three remaining games against Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois after another stirring Northwestern win against Wisconsin at Ryan Field, a reliable abattoir for Wisconsin title hopes. The Wildcats can literally win the Big Ten West. They can arrive, with their buses and their trucks and their secret unmarked vans carrying Mick McCall's overtime cowl and conjuring lanterns, in Indianapolis where they can unleash upon the dome an overtime heretofore unseen by college football spanning days, months, and eons, the whole time yelling and fistpumping and trying to figure out which configuration of emojis translates to "Beauty and the Beast" or "There Will Be Blood." All Notre Dame is trying to do make the college football playoff.
Northwestern's brilliant 99-yard drive down seven with two minutes to go and no timeouts to tie the game looked fantastic on the stilted play-by-play slowly loading onto my phone and on the anguished face of the Nebraska fan in my train car scowling his phone like it opened to the website that suggested he must try Malort. I was on the train watching the ambiguous Clayton Thorson text updates because I had left the game when Nebraska was up by ten with less than ten minutes left. The weather was perfect. I did not have to change into a tuxedo for a Function with the Arch Duke. I left because it looked like Northwestern was going to lose the game and I didn't want to listen to Nebraska fans celebrating, doing their creepy sing-song "Go Big Red" chant in the exact cadence as Sloth yelling "HEY YOU GUYS" in the Goonies all the way to the Howard stop, so I left and helplessly watched as Northwestern put up one of their greatest if not dumbest comebacks they've had in awhile on the way to yet another overtime victory because I'm an idiotic sports oaf.
I am very sorry for this
Leaving a game early because of Sports Anguish triggers bizarre conflicting emotions: of course I wanted the Wildcats to win in precisely the type of agonizing comeback and requisite Northwestern overtime that they specialize in so they have a chance to qualify for the Camouflage Pants and Ninja Knife Expo '97 Bowl. But there's also a small part of me that was rooting for them to fall predictably short, to justify my ridiculous decision to rage-quit a live sporting event because evidently it is far more satisfying for me to be right than happy. Almost every game Northwestern plays at home against a Big Ten team is a road game, and it is profoundly embarrassing to admit that this annoys me. The other fans have done nothing wrong other than wear a different color shirt and yell different letters and the only thing I want is for them to go home vanquished and disappointed. It is like when a professional wrestler gets so irritated and anguished by hearing his opponents' entrance music that he stares out of the ring in bug-eyed incredulity except it is real and I can't believe I actually do this. The fact that I missed a ludicrous Northwestern comeback is annoying; the fact that it was against Nebraska is depressing. Northwestern has never beaten Nebraska at home. In fact, only two games have ever been won by the home team in this series and both under insane circumstances-- last week's insane Northwestern comeback in Evanston and the other a hail mary by a Nebraska backup backup backup quarterback in Lincoln. Every year, Nebraska fans flood Ryan Field and even though this happens for every single major team that comes here, the Nebraska fans still find this novel and exciting and worthy of the same amount of discussion that one would find at a meeting of the Congressional Committee on Mileage. This year, Nebraska had yet to win a single game and the fans still piled in ready to finally celebrate a win and figured not inaccurately that Evanston was a decent place to get it. The Nebraska fans around me saw their team finally hire the messianic alumnus coach, the hottest lower-tier coach in the country who had played for the Huskers and knew about running the dang option and then the team just fucking cratered into an 0-5 oblivion.We can all admit that it is extremely funny. But given these circumstances, Nebraska fans, seeing their team finally winning, finally, maybe turning it around, were jubilant and over the moon and I sat there seething like that picture of Jack White at the Cubs game who looks like he been confused his whole life about what baseball was and finally saw it in action. Jack White discovers he had been led to believe that the sport of baseball involved lathes and elaborate bat-crafting phases and about 84 percent less spitting This is the darkness inherent in sports fandom. It is an effect for me that is far more visceral in person than on television or on a flickering illegal stream that doubtlessly infected my old computer with thousands of undetectable viruses that have sent my number munchers high scores to the seediest corners of the Dark Web. It is the appalling and disgusting revelation that once again some sickos and deviants have come to my section with the perverse desire to root for the team they prefer against the Northwestern Wildcats who WON the GODDAMN MUSIC CITY BOWL WHAT ELSE DO THEY HAVE TO DO that triggers some horrifying dinosaur-brained impulse to say that I want them to be quiet, I want them to leave, I want them to go home utterly crushed and forced to look their loved ones in the eye and admit they are kind of sad their team didn't win the game. The flip side to Ryan Field being filled at all times with opposing fans is that it rarely occurs to them that they could ever lose and on the occasions when they do it is incredibly satisfying. Their teams only lose to the Wildcats for two reasons: one of the coordinators is incompetent and needs to be fired and Uncalled Holding Penalties. A small sample of the most unhinged Michigan State fans I can find on the internet demanded that their offensive coordinator should be fired after every loss to the Wildcats-- by the third one, I believe they demanded that they fire him, rehire him, and then fire him again while ordinary citizens jeered him with menacing karate poses. One of the funniest things to see if you are a complete idiot and enjoy watching people be angry about football online is to read fans grouse about how wily ol' Fitz has fooled them again with an offensive gameplan while simultaneously reading Northwestern fans demanding that Wildcats' offensive coordinator be fired and then symbolically chopped in half by a distressingly incompetent magician. This is why the most distressing thing I've read this week is that Northwestern is favored by 21 points going into today's game against Rutgers. Rutgers, playing a brand of football so wretched that it appears they have somehow transported players from the mythical first football game to the twenty-first century completely unable to discern the rules of modern football and also distracted by television, indoor plumbing, Instagram, and the relative unpopularity of mustaches. Rutgers fans have succumbed to the saddest fate in the Big Ten: a belief that their team could actually lose to Northwestern. In fact, they seem resigned to a drubbing from the Wildcats. Rutgers players practice for Northwestern by lining up in their signature formation The Nineteenth-Century Conflagration There are myriad reasons why Northwestern should win comfortably. But there are also the Iron Laws of Northwestern Football which clearly state that that the goal of any game above all is to enter that sacred realm of Overtime.
There was a point in the second quarter, just after Northwestern went up 17-0 against the fourteenth-ranked Wolverines when play stopped and Pat Fitzgerald ran on the the field in a one man fist bump bacchanalia, his face and neck as purple as the players' jerseys, when it seemed possible that Northwestern could actually win. There, in a home game, against a sea of gold and a two-digit line and Harbaugh and Harbaugh's pants and his whole thing, the Wildcats came out and not only gained a quick lead but seemed to dominate the game at both ends. But when someone rubbed some smelling salts under the Wolverines' noses and they came back and Northwestern's offense went off to whatever bizarre dimension it goes to in the second half, it also was not surprising to see the whole thing fall apart and raise the familiar question of: so what. Northwestern football fans face an existential question that hovers over the program every year that can best be summarized as: why? I hope it does not seem too defeatist to suggest that the mighty Wildcats seem unlikely to play for a national championship. It seems slightly less unlikely they will qualify for the playoff in its current form or even an expanded form. Even a Big Ten Championship seems more out of reach than ever with the East Division heavyweights lurking in Indianapolis should Northwestern manage to finagle their way out of their bumbling West Division; I'm certain they will do it one of these years when Wisconsin comes down with the flu. But, in more seasons than not, Northwestern's season success seems to be governed mostly by the relative prestige of the bowls they play in, a decision governed equally by their record and decisions made by bowl executives motivated entirely by the amount of exposure they can get for their Named Sponsor, a weed trimming backpack repair company. Northwestern poses with a piece of dumpster cardboard fashioned into the Music City Bowl Trophy No sane person watches Northwestern football hoping for championship glory-- no sane college football fan should, given that about a dozen teams share an iron grip on sustained success, and Alabama has rendered the concept of the football championship into a joyless inevitability. Programs outside the Power 5 have almost no chance to compete for a championship. It is college football's innate impossibility that gives it its joy because the single-minded RINGS focus that hovers over professional sports cannot exist and the entire apparatus governing college football fandom appears to be animated by animus and spite. The saving grace to college football's impossible, top-heaviness is that the sport is insanely punitive; one loss is dangerous, two is catastrophic for any team with playoff implications, and the goofy subjective nature of the ranking process means that a loss to a crappy team can instantly destroy a contender. Fans of the struggling, the down year, and the historically abysmal can enjoy their team's complete and utter ineptitude by knowing that they are so radioactive that they can infect a big brand team and drag them together straight to hell. So while it was unpleasant to watch Michigan mount their inevitable comeback, to hear Ryan Field come alive when the Wolverines' Clay Matthews-looking guy sacked Thorson, to know that Northwestern did not manage to annihilate Michigan's playoff resume from the face of the Earth and their reassured fans were able to strut out of the stadium satisfied that their natural order had not been impugned, for three quarters they all wanted to barf and it was great. Northwestern lost this game too The funniest thing I've seen at a football game was a chorus of Michigan fans inveighing against The Refs in a grand collective harrumph. There exists no universe where, if the referees had a conspiracy against a team in a Michigan-Northwestern game, it would be in favor of knocking the Michigan Brand out of the playoff hunt. The explanation involves Michigan committing more penalties and college football referees being inconsistent and semi-competent. If the calls did tend to unfairly favor Northwestern for whatever reason, that is incredibly funny to me and I would be happy if Northwestern players got away with throwing the Chong Li Bloodsport Shorts Powder at the Michigan lines while the referees were distracted by the scoreboard, desperately trying to see which Northwestern players could successfully name the most Disney films in ten seconds. In the end, Northwestern lost, another scoreless second half, and an alarming blow to bowl contention. On the other hand, a bunch of Michigan fans were temporarily inconvenienced. BASEBALL DEFEAT The Cubs won 95 games, had the best record in the National League for most of the season, and watching them this season mirrored the soothing and relaxing feeling of being hunted for sport. This is the burden of actually watching a good team. For most of my life, the Cubs reliably sucked, trotted out players named Tiff Bungus who all spent September running into the ivy and then spontaneously combusting in the offseason, and no one cared. Then, they started going to the playoffs every year and the whole thing became more serious. The Cubs brought in two starters this season: an ace who pitched several largely ineffective games and then vanished to the Mark Prior netherworld and a reclamation project whose inability to throw strikes went from maddening to almost openly antagonistic. One of the ludicrous aspects of following multiple sports is the strange shifting identity. I spent most of the Michigan game like I do most Big Ten games, mildly irritated at the visiting fans claiming the stadium and having the gall to root for their own teams. But, at the same time, I root for the Cubs, whose fans now consistently invade other stadiums and annoy the absolute shit out of everyone. At the end of the season, when an exhausted Cubs team stumbled towards the end of the season and a seemingly-unstoppable Brewers juggernaut fueled by Christian Yelich's transformation into a skinny youth pastor Barry Bonds collided in a game 163 at Wrigley, it seemed only fair that Brewers fans had taken over. For years, Cubs fans had ridden in Mad Max caravans up I94 to take over Miller Park and engage in absurd, honking Midwestern shouting matches. IN MY STADIUM THEY DO THIS? The Wild Card game served as a fittingly operatic end to this Cubs season. It featured inspired pitching, a Cubs team that appeared to try to hit the ball with a twin-sized mattress, Javier Baez getting away with an illegal hug because it was cute (in this exact situation in the NFL, Goodell would have spent the next day outlining a Legal Embracement Protocol where announcers could slow everything down and say "right there, Joe, that's when a collision turns into snuggling"), and everything but the stadium lights dimming and Tyler Chatwood appearing as the Phantom of the Ballpark aiming a candelabra at someone but missing by 15 inches. The Cubs played in a cloud of controversy at the end of the season. They had some heinous motherfuckers on the team that were not fun to root for. Joe Maddon drove everyone completely insane. A deranged set of Cubs fans became embroiled in a debate over the fucking hitting coach; I have spent a truly embarrassing amount of my life watching baseball and I could not for the life of me name a single Cubs hitting coach until this year because a bunch of maniacs have been screaming about Chili Davis on the internet-- they believe that he went into the locker room and told them in no certain terms to stop hitting home runs. The whole thing would be exhausting except that it is sports and you can always turn it off. This is one of the best things about sports. Because you can spend hours invested in a team and watching with no control as it gets crushed, annihilated, and utterly owned, cheated, collapsing, and falling apart, and in the end you can turn it off and go about your day completely unaffected. What a luxury. MICHIGAN STATE PREVIEW Northwestern plays Michigan State, in amateur football: this weekend.
Northwestern's new quarter-billion dollar sports facility sits under water, only accessible by private submarine. There, athletes have access to the Big Ten's heaviest weights, wettest pools, and cutting-edge virtual reality displays where they take the field to explore game situations from routine plays to extreme scenarios where they are cloned and must destroy the most dangerous opponent of all: themselves. The new facilities will allow players into football simulations so immersive they will cause an epistemological crisis between themselves and their VR doppelgangers with names like Bryntch Laserman Pat Fitzgerald's office is in a hollowed out volcano. It is filled with Northwestern memorabilia, jarring modernist statues of pumping fists mounted to the wall, and a giant lever that he can pull to immediately get blasted by a rotating supply of foreign currencies. This is a small perk by college football coach standards. Jimbo Fisher, as part of his lucrative contract with Texas A&M, is allowed to adjudicate cases in Brazos County Court while wearing a custom Whataburger robe. Chip Kelley is signed to Death Row Records. Nick Saban will now only appear in public while wearing a solid gold mask and any attempt to talk to him will be met with karate chops from his private guard. Northwestern will play basketball in a new arena this season that floats high over Evanston, accessible only by private blimp. Their old arena, a galleon rotting in the shallows of Lake Michigan, will be ceremonially disposed of by Northwestern's Big Ten Runner-Up Scuttling Team. The new arena features bouncier courts, up to seven available baskets, and a series of hot dog kiosk candelabras that can be manipulated to open up secret passages to even fancier hot dog kiosks where VIP patrons can get slightly more mustard. There are fewer seats available; in fact, the new arena will have thirteen seats in total, all for large donors who respond to massive dunks by yelling "I say!" and somehow at least seven of them will be taken by Indiana fans. Northwestern paid Akron about one million dollars to come to Ryan Field and beat them. The Wildcats were favored by three touchdowns. They led 21-3 at the half. For much of the game, the Zips did not only seem unmatched but completely unfamiliar with the rules of football. But football is a ludicrous game and some heinous turnovers, avant-garde pass defenses, inability to move the ball, and a truly heroic performance by Akron quarterback Kato Nelson who spent the first half eluding tacklers only to watch whatever progress he made called back because one of his lineman was flagged for bringing a unicycle onto the field, caused a Northwestern collapse. Northwestern has decided to get serious about their Revenue Sports, and the way to get serious about Revenue Sports is to wave piles of money at them. This cash infusion from television money and moneyed boosters, and the hideous cartoon-numbered Jason Wright jersey I bought in 2004 goes into stadiums and training facilities that are designed to show that Northwestern is serious about football because only a program that is serious about football would spend roughly the GDP of Palau on a facility where athletes can, with only their voices, ask a supercomputer to change the P.O.D. song blaring in the weight room mid-grunt. The explosion of money in college sports is not unique to Northwestern. It is part of a larger trend across campuses. Part of it comes from men's basketball and football programs raking in enormous sums from television networks; this article shows that Michigan got a $50 million payout from the Big Ten Network for the 2018 season, which is evidently just raking it in from the farm implement and extra large men's pants commercials. These fancy new buildings certainly seem like a fantastic way to spend money in any way other than giving it to athletes. But the architectural spending fit with other goals. One is a general mania for building that affects universities beyond their athletic fields; few universities would rather spend money on anything more than building a Ramrod "Rod" Yaarghdarrgh Facility For Business Technology Where Students Plug Their iPods into Bigger iPods. Furthermore, fancy new facilities are a crucial part of advertising and branding-- every Northwestern football and basketball broadcast this season will feature a paean to the new facilities and arena, with awe-struck announcers saying things like "I took a tour of this stadium, Joe and let me tell you, it's really something" with B-roll of Pat Fitzgerald flying around on a personalized jetpack that he needs to Analyze and Facilitate the Development of Football Stratagems. The Tactical Coaching Jetpack allows coaches to soar high above practices while top of the line communications technology allows them relay real-time instructions like "What the fuck is that Horseshit tackle there what are you doing you asshole horseshit"
While it is not surprising that the multi-billion dollar windfalls from college sports would culminate in a ludicrous facilities arms race in a sport run by a combination of bureaucrats and boosters who love to name things after themselves and coaches whose entire aesthetic is dad whose lawnmower has a little too much horsepower, the new facilities at Northwestern can be best described as hilarious. For years, Northwestern's single animating aesthetic in its football and basketball program was the stadiums' shabbiness-- of cold, unyielding bleachers, of legions of visiting fans whining about them, of heroic upsets of Big Ten giants and unfathomable losses to a multitude of Akrons under a semi-functional dot scoreboard. Of course, that was all a fiction-- a Big Ten team is still in the Big Ten and spending unfathomable sums on training and advertising and sending Pat Fitzgerald to talk about Young Men in teenagers' living rooms. It is one thing for an unwieldy Northwestern team still defined by its decades of futility to get boat-rowed by a MAC team; it is infinitely funnier for a Northwestern team with a quarter-billion dollar practice facility. MICHIGAN Now the Wildcats move into the meaty part of the schedule. Michigan has aspirations; they are ranked, they have just completely eliminated Nebraska from the face of the earth, and they are still coached by Football Noid Jim Harbaugh, who has thumped the 'Cats in all of their meetings. Northwestern is reeling after a devastating loss to Akron with their bowl aspirations hanging on a thread in front of a nightmare schedule. The Wolverines should be terrified.
Northwestern football under Pat Fitzgerald has been marked by a tendency to inexplicably lose games to teams they should not lose to and somehow winning games they have no business winning. How many times in recent years have the Wildcats limped out of the non-conference schedule after watching an FCS team somehow lateral the ball for 25 minutes and win by a half point, sent fans panicking by scrutinizing the schedule, and then somehow winning three Big Ten games in increasingly bizarre ways that cause opposing fans to immediately demand that they fire the offensive coordinator?
Last year, Northwestern won ten games. That included a nearly mathematically impossible three consecutive overtime wins; a fourth, in the bowl game, involved thwarting a two point conversion that I choose to believe happened only because Mike Stoops became terrified of going to overtime. That team was about 75 cumulative seconds away from barely qualifying for the Halloween Store in the Mall That Operates for Two Months Bowl. Northwestern football constantly operates on the margins and it is impossible to predict.
There is no reason why the Wolverines shouldn't come in, jog around Ryan Field for an hour, and win by 30. Northwestern has not looked very sharp this season, and Evanston will be inundated with blue-clad fans loudly scoffing. Northwestern's penchant for chaos is by definition unpredictable; if it you could pick the games where a double digit underdog Wildcat team would pull out an insane win, none of us would have to work because we would all be a collection of Biffs Tannen ruling our own communities of terrified gamblers. Maybe it is cowardly and stupid to write thousands of blog-words analyzing football to say the fuck if I know, but here's my conclusion: the fuck if I know.
Football fetishes its strategic sophistication. All coaches now need to communicate via radio to their Tactical Press Box Command Centers except for quarterbacks who need to use the last landline telephones in existence for some unexplained reason; coaches shield the mouths against the possibility of sideline lip readers; no play can be called without three assistant coaches and every backup quarterback performing vigorous, bug-eyed calisthenics to signal the play; referees constantly litigate impossible rules to the pixel and then give complex explanations to the crowd in a clunky law enforcement argot. The needlessly complexity distracts from the fact that, at root football is about violence and mayhem. On every play, gigantic human beings smash into each other, shove each other, drive each other into the turf, and generally clobber each other for our amusement, and every few plays the whole thing stops to someone can writhe around in pain while trainers run out to assess the damage and broadcasts pause to sell us trucks. The brutality of the entire enterprise is part of its appeal; even the most stringent football wonks appreciating the sublime architecture of an R.P.O. also get excited to see a defensive end come in and blast the quarterback enough to drop the ball or huck it straight towards a cornerback. And the violence is an integral part of strategy. When announcers talk about receivers "hearing footsteps" or quarterbacks having a clock in their head, they're talking about the fear of physical violence, that no matter how much these athletes have conditioned themselves to take beatings and play through injuries gruesome enough to keep me in traction for months, at heart no person wants to get absolutely whaled upon; that threat is an integral part of the sport. The notion of pain as an unavoidable part of tackle football the way it is currently played always exists, but becomes greatly magnified when a you are stuck on a couch watching some unfortunate lineman clutch his ankles while having to steel yourself through pain to reach the remote in order to fast forward through a commercial for extreme sports nachos. Football players put themselves through agonizing training sessions and getting yelled at by obese goatee guys and then go out there and let some of the most well-conditioned human beings on the planet run into them as fast as possible; I woke up wrong. It is never pleasant to watch a person collapse in high-definition agony, but it is something that comes into sharper focus after an ill-advised commute through heavy traffic ends with me in a parking lot face down in the driver's seat, legs danging out of the car, back muscles attempting for some reason to wring me out like a sponge. That was not a spectacular condition to watch Northwestern play its first home game, propped up by pain medications and orthopedic brace devices that look like discount professional wrestling championship belts and flinching as players blasted into each other with familiar football clacks and grunts and, miraculously, getting up most of the time. I would like to say that awareness of pain and the various clobbering and clobber-adjacent injuries created by this sport trivialized the silly, moronic disappointment in watching the team I root for get once again hammered by Duke of all places, but I cannot lie: it's not good. NORTHWESTERN'S FOOTBALL SEASON Duke and Northwestern doesn't even sound like it should be a football game in 2018. It sounds like some sort of nineteenth-century leather helmet spectacle that takes place only after both teams saw four men trampled death and dozens students inflicting riots upon each other in preposterous Victorian boxing stances. It seems ludicrous o write about a Duke-Northwestern game in modern terms instead of noting that the Duke-men rousted North Western's staff of Quarter-Backs while bamboozling its Defenders with plays like the Governor's Sash and the Winsome Circus Boy. North Western managed a hard-fought victory against Indiana's Train Lads and Purdued-Petes Pat Fitzgerald managed to wrangle one positive from the Duke loss by popping up in the news referring to the run-pass option as "pure communism" in a press conference. This insight led to some light mockery across the internet because several wags and goof-makers had to point out the minor point that there exists no historical or philosophical context in which his remark makes sense. The comment led to two responses online: a horde of pedantic Football Bukahrins unfolded their pince-nez spectacles to confront Pat Fitzgerald, an anthropomorphic jaw, on the finer points communist ideologies; a gaggle of shirtsleeved Cubicle Guys overheated while constructing elaborate flop sweat-laden RPO/communism puns. I am not sure to what extent Pat Fitzgerald has studied up on World Communisms before comparing them to specific football strategies, but I am positive that his understanding of communism has been influenced most by the 1984 film Red Dawn and the run-pass option is definitely something the devious Soviets would have done while invading various high schools and local drug store hangouts. Pat Fitzgerald stands in Northwestern's new $270 million Oafish Communist Comparisons Building Both games featured an array of quarterbacks. Northwestern is no stranger to quarterback committees. Some of the most successful years involved a rotation between a running quarterback and a throwing quarterback so slow that he was mounted to a wheelbarrow and pulled around the pocket. This time, though, the quarterback chaos comes from an unwieldy attempt to manage Clayton Thorson as he returns from knee surgery. The first rotation happened in the Purdue game. Fitzgerald remained characteristically coy about Thorson's availability leading up to the game. Thorson started, but came out after two brilliant series without explanation while the sideline reporter scrambled to figure out if Thorson was injured again, whether Fitzgerald was playing some sort of mind game, or if something more nefarious was afoot like the Thorson disappearing under mysterious circumstances or the NCAA discovering that Trevor Siemian had gotten Face/Off surgery and had taken his place and they would need to vacate the Music City Bowl victory. Thorson's backup is T.J. Green, a junior who has tantalized broadcasters eager to induct his father, former NFL quarterback Trent Green, into Northwestern's inner circle of Celebrity Sports Parents along with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a beet-red Doug Collins who spends of Northwestern basketball games doing an impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall when he is thrown out onto the surface of Mars. Green is also cousins with receiver Bennett Skowronek, which I only mention because it led to the Dan LaFontaine Schwarzenegger Trailer-caliber Tribune headline "Bonded by blood, Northwestern's Ben Skowronek and TJ Green hope to find home in the end zone." The Wildcats have another inexplicable MAC night game showdown against Akron. The quarterback situation remains unsettled. Northwestern fans would be thrilled to see the 'Cats leap out to a quick and decisive lead and let Green gain experience against the demoralized Zips; after watching Northwestern teams, I am pretty sure that no matter how good Akron may or may not be (SBNation's preseason Numbers Rankings had them at 166th in the country), I have determined that Pat Fitzgerald is committed to giving fans good money value for their tickets and ideally would take every single game to overtime except the Illinois game because the Hat is too important to leave to chance. ELEPHANT RAMPAGES Spencer Hall's Elephant article reminded me of a book I picked up earlier this year called Behemoth: The History of the Elephant in America by Ronald B. Tobias. Tobias, a nature documentarian, traces the presence of elephants in the United States both literally, as circus and zoo attractions, but also as rhetoric, symbols, and mascots. Tobias's book is wide-ranging and often tragic, describing the plight of circus elephants in revolting conditions and deaths that came from attempting to keep them contained. But what really struck me reading this book was the reminder that the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a vast, wild, and lawless place, where elephants were kept in bizarre and casual situations that occasionally resulted in them rampaging all over a town. Imagine that a circus comes to town and an elephant (usually male and in musth, a months-long hormonal phase that renders them violent and unpredictable, especially when kept in chains and assaulted by nineteenth-century mustachioed trainers) frees itself. Few towns at the time had anything resembling an elephant-stopping infrastructure; they had several confused constables and panicking circus personnel; an elephant rampage was essentially a Godzilla-level event. World militaries differ in strategies, values, and promotion system but what binds them all together is evidently the universal belief in promoting any officer whose Godzilla Defense Strategy involves continuing to attack it with conventional weapons long after they prove useless Tobias, for example, describes the exploits of Tusko, an elephant that repeatedly ran amok in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and 30s. In 1922, Tusko, held by the Al. G. Barnes 4 Ring Wild Animal Circus got loose in Sedro Woodley, a town along the Skagit River in Washington State. Tusko, in the heat of musth, threw his keeper 30 feet in the air and then crashed through buildings and fences before smashing into a bar to gorge on sour mash as residents drunkenly followed him around. "When it was over," Tobias writes, "Tusko had squashed or overturned twenty automobiles, collapsed the walls to three houses, knocked down a variety of oubuildings, and pushed a farmhouse off its foundation. His swath of destruction ran for thirty miles." "The local paper dscribed the bull as 'frisky' and 'full of hijinks.'"
In 1931, the circus sold Tusko to a circus promoter named Al Painter who "used him to ballyhoo dance marathons at a 'Million-Dollar Pleasure Paradise' called Lotus Isle, near Portland Oregon." But Painter could not contain him either. A pilot buzzed the building where Painter kept Tusko chained and he once again became free and basically destroyed Lotus Isle. The attraction shut down. Painter sold Tusko to another former circus man named "Sleepy" Gray for a dollar. The elephant nearly escaped again; as Tusko thrashed against his chains in Portland and the mayor called in the National Guard. Gray sold Tusko again to "Colonel" H.C. Barber, according the strict law that says that any unseemly and huckster-adjacent enterprise in the United States must at some point involve a self-proclaimed Colonel. Gray still lived with Tusko and tried to take him to Seattle, but the city would not allow him to bring Tusko within its limits. Here, in a situation so insane that it could only happen in Depression-era America, Gray got hired by a demolition company to let Tusko smash houses, just showing up with his rampaging elephant.
Tusko, though, could not turn a profit; when the Colonel planned to have him killed and stuffed the Mayor of Seattle impounded Tusko at the Woodland Park Zoo (Tobias notes that the city complained that Tusko had been "used continually as a racket"). Seattle residents donated money for his feed. But he only survived a year in custody and died heaving against his chains after another musth season.
