Northwestern Football Makes Sense (In a Losing Effort)

After a miserable early season featuring embarrassing blowout losses where the defense appears to have spent much of its time responsibly socially distancing themselves from opposing running backs, Northwestern football finally makes sense to me after a 33-7 clobbering from the hated Michigan Wolverines. 

 

I don’t mean to be flippant and appeal to the tortured history of Northwestern by suggesting that getting wiped out by every non-Rutgers Big Ten team they have played Northwestern has finally returned to its rightful place as the doormat of the Big Ten; in fact they have been more or less fine and sometimes even great for nearly a quarter of a century, and the people who have direct experience with Northwestern’s most wretched years are getting fairly wizened at this point even if they remain the most visible parts of the fandom because they are a notable ESPN Mike. 

 

What I mean is that Northwestern finally looks like a normal Pat Fitzgerald Northwestern team having a down year and not an avant-garde art piece entitled “mispositioned linebackers.” On Saturday, the Wildcats did what we expected: they deployed a stingy bend-but-don’t-break defense that irritates the absolute shit out of a Big Ten opponent until the defense runs out of gas because Fizgerald’s ideal form of offense is cackling at a three and out because Northwestern gets to do linebacking again. For thirty minutes, Northwestern had the number six team in the country clinging to a 10-7 lead thanks to a 75-yard Touchdown-Wisconsin-Excuse-Me-Northwestern run from Evan Hull and a glorious Michigan fumble on the three yardline that had Michigan fans angrily attempting to ram their heads through their baseball caps in what appears to be a traditional folkway of Michigan Football Angst. 

 

A beautiful tradition passed down through generations of Michigan Men

 

I have not watched a lot of Fox's Big Noon Saturday broadcast this year so I had no idea what to expect from their broadcast.  I can't bear to spend a sunny autumn Saturday watching TV knowing that once October rolls around we could be looking at the Last Nice Weekend; I don't often watch Northwestern games live so I spend a lot of Saturday afternoons neurotically avoiding the internet and evenings anxiously fast forwarding through games to the point where sometimes if an opposing offense is mounting a particularly harrowing drive, I will pretty much zoom through it like I am hoping to get through a particularly grisly scene a horror film.  The Fox Sports crew treated Northwestern like a routine but boring exercise for Michigan and the halftime show-- I was so excited for Northwestern being within three at halftime that I actually watched a bit of the halftime show instead of gleefully fast fowarding through it-- the hair gel guys did not mention that Northwestern was playing at all, acting like the Wolverines were playing a practice game against some local toughs.  Unfortunately, their disregard was proven right.

 

The worst part for me about Northwestern's second-half collapse was the blocked punt.  We've seen bad turnovers and we've seen a defense that has been on the field for nearly the entire game get tired and start getting run over, but under Pat Fitzgerald Northwestern is first and foremost a punt-producing operation.  Fitzgerald wants to force punts, and he apparently wants to see Northwestern punt; he is a punt pervert, gleefully cackling every time that ball arcs high into the air and an opponent waves his hand around for a fair catch, and he receives magazines featuring photographs of classic punts that he tells people he reads just for the articles which are even more disturbing from their lurid descriptions of special teams coverage.

It is illegal to send this magazine to 13 states

 

It is not a surprise that Northwestern could not pull off the enormous upset at the Big House.  Perhaps, as the commentary suggests, Michigan just spent the first half in neutral sort of dicking around while they await their big game against the rival that they don't really want to admit is a rival.  Or maybe the first half of this game, combined with the exceptional defensive performance against Rutgers, shows that Northwestern has turned a corner on defense and can actually start to stay in games against slightly less tough competition by tackling and punting at them, the only way we expect and want them to do it.

 

FINALLY NORTHWESTERN AND MINNESOTA PLAY AGAIN

 

The question is the extent to which Minnesota represents the standard Big Ten West team that Northwestern can frustrate and sometimes defeat.  The Gophers are 5-2 with one of those losses an impressive opening-night effort against Ohio State and one of them a baffling loss to a two-win Bowling Green team; they also have multiple close wins against not particularly great teams scattered around.  This seems to me like a game that can demonstrate whether the Wildcats' defensive turnaround is for real or whether Minnesota's collection of backup running backs will form a sixty minute conga line against the Northwestern defense. 

This is the first meeting between the teams since 2019, a year where a rising Minnesota team climbed to the top of the Big Ten West standings only to lose to arch-rival Wisconsin.  Last year's game was canceled after a Covid outbreak on the Minnesota team, which was part of a convoluted scenario where Northwestern fans had no idea whether they won the Big Ten West because of game cancellations. 

For P.J. Fleck and the Gophers, this game looms large.  The Gophers are still very much alive in the Big Ten West with a down year from Wisconsin and Iowa finally losing to Purdue, and Fleck desperately wants to get this team to Indianapolis.  It seems to me like the bloom is coming off the rose a bit for Fleck, who captured the nation's imagination by yelling "row the boat" a lot, but since coming to Minnesota, his team has largely been mired in the Big Ten West's aesthetic of pretty OK football; for a guy who looked like he was a rising star just two years ago bringing the Gophers to the precipice of a division championship, his hype train seems to have temporarily stalled in Minneapolis.  Fleck is still making nearly $5 million a year for a program with fairly limited ambition and he gets to spend all summer in a lakeside Acronym Studio, so I think he will be OK, but one of these days Fleck is going to need to actually win something if he wants to wage another legal battle to take his catchphrase to a higher-profile program.  This season is their best opportunity to prove 2019 was not a fluke and the Gophers have arrived as a force to reckon with in the West.  A loss to Northwestern would absolutely devastate their season, sending them crashing down from dreams of losing to Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game to listening to a long-winded speech from the Vice President of Mortgages at the Music City Bowl. This is what Northwestern as a program is built for.

There's a lot riding on the line for Northwestern as well.  Fans hope that a defensive improvement coupled with the big play threats on offense could be enough to propel the Wildcats them out of the toilet with renewed hope of stealing three more wins to get to a bowl game.  Another blowout loss, particularly one where the opponent once again scores within the first 45 seconds, would end dreams of Boxing Day in Detroit and leave Northwestern fans clinging to their last potential trophy: The Hat.

Last week, Illinois and Penn State played one of the most chaotic and deranged football games in recent memory, a massive Illini upset.  The teams played to a standstill; Bielema devoured overtime periods like a Hungry Hungry Hippo until Illinois triumphed after the ninth and final frame, a feat of overtime-mongering so twisted that even Pat Fitzgerald whom I have suggested has turned Northwestern Football into a Cult of Overtime would blanche at it.  I have no idea what to expect from Illinois this year except that after this year we deserve the most hideous and stupefying Hat Game that any of us have ever seen.

 

 AN EXTREMELY GRUMPY WORLD SERIES OPINION

For many years, I tried to stay up on new developments on baseball because in the early 2000s the concepts of getting on base and not bunting were so obvious and the arguments against them made by squinting baseball lifers and local newspaper columnists whose entire line of reasoning against mathematical proof was "shut up, basement" and "that's not how THE MICK would have done it" were so preposterously stupid that it was almost impossible to see a manager putting a guy with a .290 on-base percentage as the leadoff hitter because of speed on the basepaths and not fling up your hands.  So it pains me to admit that an age-related descent in to curmudgeondom and a general irritation with playoff baseball has led me finally to turn against science and rationality and declare: enough with the relief pitching.

Baseball, especially in its playoff form, has transformed over the last five or six years into a battle of bullpens and bullpen matchups-- starters almost never last past the fourth inning, and games slow to a crawl as they turn into a parade of semi-anonymous relievers one after in game after game.  Baseball teams and their army of Spreadsheet Guys have proven fairly conclusively that teams to hit far better against a pitcher the third time they've seen him.  Therefore, teams will do almost anything to prevent this from happening, even on days when starters seem to have dominant stuff.  This strategy naturally reached its apotheosis with the Rays, the ultramodern team seemingly run by an algorithm, when manager Kevin Cash removed Blake Snell from a one-hit performance in a pivotal World Series Game 6 and then the reliever immediately gave up the runs that led the Dodgers to a championship.  The frustrating thing is while the strategy seems wild and in fact even insane, it is not that surprising of a strategy (the Braves, for example, pulled starter Ian Anderson during a no-hitter in this year's Game 3 of the Series) and even though it blew up in the Rays' face it is probably actually by the numbers a justifiable if not optimal strategic move.  And doesn't that absolutely stink.

 

Every sport in the past two decades has abandoned itself to the numbers gurus but in no other major American sport have optimal strategies for winning games so devastatingly collided with the aesthetic enjoyment of the game.  Basketball, for example, has used rule changes and statistical models to lead to a free-flowing drive-and-kick game so inured to the three pointer that no lead appears to be safe.  You can grumble about the preeminence of shooting threes to the detriment of almost all other offense or get irritated at the extent that games turn on superstars hunting for foul calls by leaping into defenders and making extremely annoying anguished i got fouled faces, but even I, a person whose enjoyment of basketball peaked in the Jordan era, can admit it is a more pleasing product than watching Dale Davis elbow people.  The NFL has also altered rules and has shifted in strategy where teams just throw insane passes all over the place now unless they are the Bears whose decades long inability to pass the ball no matter who is playing or in charge would one of the most fascinating and baffling sports phenomena if it didn't make me so personally aggrieved.

Nearly every single one of baseball's strategic innovations this century has made the game absolutely a drag.  Pitchers are better than ever and teams have removed the stigma from striking out so now about a quarter of MLB plate appearances end with a K.  Batters now draw walks on agonizing at-bats that last ten minutes.  Defensive shifts based on computer models have made ground ball hits a rarity.  Here are all of the cool things from baseball that the Analytics Revolution revealed are extremely stupid and therefore taken from us: drag bunts, hitting an empty .310, crafty left-handed relievers that throw 85 miles per hour, weird-ass submarine pitchers, unironic mustaches, guys with curl mullets whose offseason conditioning regimen is mostly poker, reckless and reckless and ineffective base stealing.  

A side by side comparison of the 2021 Romine Brothers and the 1975 

Reuschel Brothers reminding us of the aesthetic disaster that ballplayers no 

longer look like they are about to explain to you that yep, what you've got there are termites

But the overarching problem for baseball is that pitching is too good.  Bullpens are stocked with guys who all throw at least 96 and feature an insane breaking ball, even the horseshit guy on your team who you hate because he walks guys constantly is throwing an assortment of pitches that would beguile hitters only twenty years ago.  Why risk tiring a starter when you can just deploy this anonymous arm army at the other team and if one of them lets one or two guys on base then replace him with the next one?  Pitchers now have access to software, video, and instruction far beyond what the pot-bellied relievers of yore had as well as access to a bunch of newly-developed glues and liniments to smear on the ball that baseball is pretending to crack down on, and there is no solution to making baseball a more enjoyable sport than somehow asking players to pitch worse for our entertainment.

Baseball players have never been more skilled, more athletic, and more capable of doing amazing things every game in the field, on the bases, and on the mound, and today's Big Leagues are filled with delightful, effervescent personalities that are now sometimes allowed to enjoy themselves instead of grimly spitting tobacco juice on the ground and ostentatiously adjusting their penis-protecting equipment.  And yet, the only way to win games is to turn every game into a four-hour slog featuring a dozen pitchers all of whom spend nearly a minute in intense contemplation before throwing a pitch.  It's a genuine conundrum, one with a solution that would elude even people who cared about the game, which is unfortunately not a group of people that overlaps with the people running Major League Baseball.  The solution, as best as I can tell, involves asking baseball teams to simply be stupider; fortunately this is the one league where that could possibly work.

Northwestern Triumphs in Perverse Game Broadcast From Mars

Years of cable market-cobbling and conference-mongering got us here: an 11AM game between Rutgers and Northwestern in front of 85 people that featured 16 punts and two missed field goals that transformed an otherwise fine autumn day into a grim football puntscape.

The Big Ten Network seemed to understand what they were serving up to the twisted maniacs choosing to tune into this game and gave us a chaotic broadcast fit for the criminally insane. My DVR recorded the entire game as a series of digital fits and starts, with the picture and sound cutting out every few minutes, occasionally leaving me to piece together what had happened. I assumed this was a recording issue, but one person, at least, told me that this is how the game went out live, as a herky jerky Paul Verhoeven broadcast from a base on a distant planet that was seconds away from being blown up. They also unleashed Matt Millen, the reigning Prince of Midwestern Shit Football to explain to viewers which of the football players they were watching were Football Players in a manner best described as mustachedly. It was awful, stupid, and glorious, and exactly what we deserved.

 

BTN releases a broadcast where Millen and J Leman scream the word

“Football” at each other in an otherwise bare room until they are too exhausted to continue

Last week’s post was full of foreboding about a potential loss to Rutgers after a dispiriting shellacking at the hands of Nebraska, but fortunately Rutgers football managed to assume the general shape of Rutgers football. There may be a time in the near future when Rutgers manages to right itself and the Scarlet Knights become respectably mediocre and boring, but right now they can be counted on put on a top hat and fall down a manhole or get chased down the stairs by a piano that is somehow falling in a pattern that plays a Hungarian Rhapsody in perfect rhythm on its way down, or somehow dodge a thrown pie, smirk, and then immediately having the World’s Largest Pie fall off its display and engulf it. As Jeff Goldblum might ah hem her haw about them: Rutgers finds a way.

At least for one week, Northwestern managed to shore up its maligned run defense against a conference opponent, stymieing the Rutgers attack on the ground. Adetomiwa Adebawore lived in the Rutgers backfield. On offense, Northwestern’s receivers flashed the big play ability they’ve been hinting at all season, including a juggling sideline catch by Stephon Robinson that is one of the best catches I’ve seen from a Wildcat in quite some time and a Malik Washington touchdown where a Rutgers tackler seemed to fly away from him like a weightless CGI protagonist in one of those superhero movies that all end with people being flung into buildings for 35 minutes to no apparent effect.

But you turned on the game to watch a Rutgers/Northwestern game, so you also got Pat Fitzgerald dialing up one of the most ludicrous fake punt plays I’ve ever seen where the punter received the ball and was told to just run into the line of scrimmage like he was going over the top at Gallipoli. We also witnessed a near-disastrous Northwestern flea flicker run in a way where Wildcats appeared to be throwing the football the wrong way down the field in exactly the same way that Big Daddy says "there's a saying down on the ol' bayou-- BLEH" then throws Ralph Wiggum at Skinner and Chief Wiggum before leaping out the window to gradually get away.

And there was a Rutgers coach who managed to get hit with the Beckman Penalty for getting in an official’s way on the sidelines. I was crushed it was not Schiano himself.  This was my first taste of Schiano as a Northwestern opponent and he lived up to the billing as a Dour Football Dipshit, even by Big Ten standards. He spent the game seething on the sidelines, occasionally hopping up and down and grinding his teeth when Rutgers hit with yet another penalty. He spent the week leading up to Rutgers’ game against Michigan State in a snit alleging that Spartans coach Mel Tucker stole his “keep chopping” slogan, one of the funniest demonstrations of a warped football-brained cosmology that apparently assumes that the phrase “keep chopping” conjures up some sort of magical football acumen that one associates with Greg Schiano that differs from every other extraordinarily stupid motivational slogan used by every football team on every level.

 

P.J. Fleck needed a legal settlement to use Row the Boat at 

Minnesota, but since then he has come up with a foolproof 

way to prevent other coaches from stealing his slogans by 

making acronyms so clumsy and hare-brained that no one else 

can even comprehend them

The central question for Northwestern is whether they have turned a corner defensively or whether they have encountered an inept and moribund Big Ten team and are due to get shoved around again. Fortunately, they can ease back into the schedule with oh no.

THE BIGGEST NOON THEY'VE GOT

I have no idea what arcane contract language has forced Fox’s to televise a Northwestern football game to the entire country but surely there is a lawyer somewhere that can find an obscure provision that will allow Gus Johnson to pull a lever and put on a Sun Belt game or three and a half hours of that strongman competition where they wear a Volkswagen like a vest and stagger around for awhile. Despite Northwestern’s comfortable win over Rutgers, the Wolverines are heavily favored; the only way that gambling sites could get a respectable amount of action on Northwestern was to ask the most degenerate bettors whether Northwestern could finish within 23.5 points of Michigan and the only way Northwestern stands a chance is to turn the game into an unwatchable festival of garbage so obscenely riddled with punts, turnovers, and penalties that it causes college football to be banned from public airwaves.

Michigan fans want to be seen as underdogs because they get their asses destroyed by Ohio State every year but the fact of the matter is that outside of that they tend to be a pretty good team, and this dual identity of being the schoolyard bullies who get to cosplay as Charlie Brown for one weekend a year is something I believe to be kind of annoying. I understand life is more difficult in the Big Ten East, and Northwestern has gotten to take its medicine from the Buckeyes in the glitz and glamor of Indianapolis, but the ‘Cats have never beaten Michigan under Jim Harbaugh or even the maligned Brady Hoke. They haven’t won since 2008, against a 3-9 Michigan team in the death throes of the Rich Rodriguez era, so I am not particularly sympathetic to angst about whether Harbaugh can win The Big Game or whatever they call it or if they got bonked around in the Outback Bowl. Not my problem.

Unfortunately, this year Michigan is extremely good. They’re undefeated and currently ranked #6 in the country (below a one-loss Ohio State in the AP Poll, naturally) and rolling. Unlike Rutgers, they do not have several converted defensive lineman and maybe one or two husky guys from the cafeteria attempting to play offensive line, they have two excellent running backs to test Northwestern's maligned rush defense, and depending on your beliefs about Michigan State, they are the toughest team Northwestern has faced this season. It can be a very long afternoon in Ann Arbor.

Michigan football fans, from what I have seen from reading about them because the program is so ubiquitous in college football media, seem to me to have become somewhat fatalistic and are bracing at all times for a shocking heartbreak. This year, that could come from an also-unbeaten Michigan State team that features just below Ohio State on the ability to cause Michigan fans tsuris, or from a perceived lesser team that could humiliate the Wolverines in this, their year of destiny. I would very much like that team to be the Northwestern Wildcats, a team that has come back from even more shocking lows than these early season buttkickings to Big Ten competence but has been atrocious enough in the early season that a win against Michigan would be genuinely funny.

Imagine, for example, Jim Harbaugh, that dean of sideline histrionics, getting so angry that he throws his cap-- in fact he is wearing a giant stack of hats like the children’s book Caps For Sale-- and he is throwing each and every one of them onto the field in disgust because of a dubious Neutral Zone Infraction that gives Northwestern a fresh set of downs which is enough time for Hilinski to hit Stephon Robinson with a bomb in the endzone as time expires and 100,000 stunned Michigan fans reenact the expression that the audience has to the play in The Producers and the outcome leaves Pat Fitzgerald needing to get experimental fist surgery after pumping too hard so he spends the rest of his career coaching with an iron claw that he uses to angrily point at referees while making dying goldfish faces when they call unjust holding penalties. That would surely be more entertaining than a desultory Michigan win.

Despite Northwestern's struggles, I still believe they have it in them to harness their power and absolutely wreck a team's season.  It probably will not be Michigan this weekend, but I hope the apex of the season is not convincing Rutgers fans that their team still stinks.

USA BASKETBALL UPDATE

As the NBA started its first normal-length regular season with fans in attendance, there was one piece of basketball new on everyone’s mind: USA basketball has chosen a coach for its regional qualifying tournament for the FIBA World Cup. That coach is Jim Boylen.

For the past year, I have sarcastically suggested Jim Boylen for every sports-related job opening I could think of, including a very stupid twitter bit that only I think is funny where I change my name to NBA Coaching Insider and jump into the replies to any big account tweeting about coach searches to weigh in that My Sources have told me that the front office has only one name in mind, and it’s Jim Boylen (I believed I had the most success doing this with Philadelphia because Sixers fans’ exposure to years of Process Discourse have made them the most deranged sports fans on the internet. Still though I want us all to participate in a thought experiment where Jim Boylen was the coach of the 76ers right now and attempting to heal that team by chasing after Ben Simmons and angrily tooting his whistle). This was self-evidently a joke because Jim Boylen could not possibly be in charge of anything after his disastrous run as the Bulls coach. I don’t want to talk out of school here, but he came across as a real boob. I can’t imagine any team wanting a round bald man who loves ineffectively screaming at accomplished professional athletes and then asking reporters if they have seen the movie where Whoopi Goldberg is a police officer who teams up with a Tyrannosaurus.

One of the strangest bits of Boylen lore is when Zach LaVine 

went on Zach Lowe's podcast and told him that Jim Boylen 

referred to him as a "Cephalapoid" which is the alien that Will Smith 

chases down in the beginning of Men in Black, an absolutely stunning 

revelation of how deep Boylen went into Men in Black Lore in order to 

make a profoundly stupid point

The United States does not send its NBA Superstars to the FIBA Americas qualifying tournament, but they will send an unheralded melange of G-Leaguers and NCAA Tournament Guys. Readers of this blog might remember the last time the USA was in this tournament because Wildcat basketball legend Reggie Hearn hit some buzzer beaters and was named USA Men's Basketball Player of the Year. That team was coached by professional Grumpy Announcer Jeff Van Gundy and now it is in the hands of professional Bald Asshole Jim Boylen.

 

I love international basketball, and I enjoy rooting for Team USA, but at the same time it would be extremely funny if the United States did not get to play in the World Cup because Jim Boylen decided to have a bunch of two-a-days hours before tipoff of every game and then told the media that he was losing games but winning the Toughness Battle and that his strategy was based on the time Jean-Claude Van Damme got that crotch powder thrown in his eyes by Chong Li in Bloodsport. Or if every American player defected to the Cuban national team because Boylen insisted on making them listen to a poem he wrote called “The Winner’s Edge.”

Sports exist as a bizarre sort of projection of a nation onto the rest of the world. In that case, maybe there is no better representative of the United States in 2021 than Jim Boylen.

It's Time to Stare Into the Bleak Abyss and Realize Northwestern Could Lose to Rutgers

There comes a time in every person’s life when they must surrender to the darkness, stare into the abyss, and come to the realization that the football team they root for could lose to Rutgers.

 

Rutgers joined the Big Ten in 2014 with Maryland, two teams that appeared in a cloud of mutual confusion that had no reason to be here and that no one else particularly wanted except the one guy who shaved Rutgers welcome to the Big Ten into his chest hair; the best analogy I can think of is that Tom Hanks movie where the guy gets stuck in an airport due to a confounding visa problem and ends up just living there for awhile. Any attempt for the Big Ten to explain this while spewing its odes to Tradition and History as anything other than a ridiculous cash grab for cable television markets was farcical but given that then-commissioner Jim Delany’s job was to straight-facedly recite the pieties of Our Student Athletes’ Amateurism while everyone in the world knew he was blatantly lying as if he was a lawyer insisting on a procedural exception in a trial while the judge, jury, opposing counsel, and everyone else involved was one of those windup toys of a monkey playing cymbals is why he had the job.

Jim Delany makes a cogent point refuting the lion stuffed
animal but it is sustained by the judge, one of those leathery
wrestlers that are grown from a capsule in a glass of water

The result was Rutgers joining the Big Ten, getting placed in the absurdly unbalanced East Division, and spending the vast majority of its football games getting lifted up and thrown out into a back alley like a cartoon drunk. It was grim. With the exception of its opening season where they went 8-5, upset Michigan, and won the delightfully bleak Boxing Day bowl game in Detroit, they have not managed to win more than four games in any season, including a 1-11 season that somehow to me feels worse than losing every single game, the aesthetic difference between a catastrophic blizzard of freshly fallen snow versus that same blizzard three days later when it has become a slurry of grime and dog piss and is still causing heedless drivers to get stuck in alleys and futilely spin their wheels.  

 

As a Northwestern fan, I understand that teams have their ups and downs, and sometimes have stretches where they lose 34 consecutive games, for example.  But since joining the Big Ten, Rutgers has been the reliable butt of jokes as the litmus test of futility, even in years where they were not technically the worst team in the conference because they are new and because they have piled up hilarious lopsided losses like a stretch in 2016 when they lost 58-0 and 78-0 to Michigan and Ohio State in consecutive weeks (in 2018, their worst season when they lost eleven consecutive games, the closest game they played was against the West Division Champion Northwestern Wildcats who beat them 18-15).  It took an entire season of Scott Frost demanding to play against football teams that immediately annihilated the Huskers during a pandemic for them to temporarily lose the title of the Big Ten's Funniest Team, and they can settle into a less notorious version of malaise by winning games against, for example, a struggling two-win Northwestern team. 

 

The 2021 Wildcats are not favored at home for this contest. Northwestern’s defense has gone from being a comical novelty this season to a full-on calamity. Once again, they got shredded within a minute, and then a mediocre Nebraska team that has spent the last two seasons in an incomprehensible psychosis managed to run them over and I mean that literally. They handed the ball off and a bunch of Northwestern defenders started grasping at air or got manhandled by their running backs or got folded up into a small ball and then mailed back to the state of Illinois, and this has happened against every team they have played against where they have not been able to win because they are able to pick up and carry the opposing lines around.

 

Northwestern does not always beat Nebraska, but the game has traditionally been an utterly messy display of a football-like mush that tends to end on plays that are both miraculous and incredibly stupid. It is very rare to see an outright clobbering, and for Northwestern to go down like this as the Homecoming opponent in a stadium full of Nebraska fans deranged by the team's inability to beat Illinois stunk. Although Nebraska’s feisty showings against Oklahoma and Michigan State that may show that they are better than their record, this was not a game against Ohio State or even (and it is nauseating to even type this) an ascendant, undefeated Iowa. There is nothing more disturbing to note about this game than the fact that a Northwestern team that continues to struggle like this may put the Hat atop the bulbous head of Bret Bielema. 

Bielema has returned to the Big Ten as a Far Side character
 

Rutgers, on the other hand, is not particularly good but it may not matter. Rutgers has their secret weapon back. We have learned that Greg Schiano is not a particularly good NFL coach, that he refers to his favorite types of players as “Schiano Men,” that the specter of Looming Schiano coupled with allegations that he knew about Jerry Sandusky’s crimes at Penn State caused an open revolt when Tennessee tried to hire him, and none of that was enough to stop Ohio State from employing him as an effective defensive coordinator. Schiano has returned to Rutgers, his coaching powers seemingly gaining power from Piscataway in the same way that Superman gathers power from Earth’s yellow sun. 

 

In 2019, Northwestern and Rutgers managed to reach almost operatic levels of offensive futility.  Northwestern cycled through quarterbacks, desperate to find a successor to Clayton Thorson; Rutgers attempted to play football.  I wrote for Banner Society that even though the two schools were not slated to play each other, they were both so putrid on offense that they should be allowed to face each other directly after the Big Ten Championship Game in the ruins of the Pontiac Silverdome.  It was a crime that Northwestern and Rutgers could not play each other despite being two of the worst teams at moving the ball in the entire FBS, only because it was possible that they would invent avant-garde ways to lose yards such as by trying to tunnel into the bowels of the planet.  Unfortunately, the Big Ten once again would not listen to reason and put on what could have been the most perverse football game since the time Iowa and Penn State played a game with a final score of 6-4.  

 

This week's game will likely not be as depraved as a hypothetical 2019 contest.  Northwestern has some legitimately fun receivers and may be able to move the ball a bit more, and the defense has yet to show they can stop anyone.  As much as Fitzgerald has turned the Wildcats into an offense and defense that manufactures punts like he is operating a punting factory under a Stalinist Five Year Plan, it might be time to do things differently and embrace the tenets of Randy Walkerism by giving up as many points as humanly possible and somehow scoring a bunch of touchdowns.  We were promised and missed out on the spectacle of Northwestern and Rutgers moving backwards for sixty minutes in 2019.  I believe that fans and whatever truly disturbed people watch this game without any rooting interest and should probably be put on some sort of Federal List deserve nothing more than the mind-warping spectacle of a Northwestern-Rutgers shootout.

THE SKY HAVE SAVED CHICAGO SPORTS

 

I am not going to pretend that I have been a Chicago Sky superfan over the season because the times I have chosen to watch sports during the summer I have largely decided to watch a Cubs team that has disappointed, infuriated, and made me cackle incredulously, but over the last few weeks I have gotten extremely into the Sky's march to the WNBA Finals because they are incredibly fun.  The Sky became an intriguing team in the offseason when WNBA legend Candace Parker decided to leave the Los Angeles Sparks and come home to Chicago to help bring something resembling a defense to what had been a run-and-gun squad known primarily for losing in the playoffs in heartbreaking manner and it actually worked out and here they are.

 

The Sky ideally have one more game left to polish off the Phoenix Mercury on Sunday afternoon and win their first title; otherwise they'll be forced into a do-or-die Game 5 on the road.  They've frankly looked much better than the Mercury for most of these games except for the fourth quarter and overtime of Game 2.  The Mercury are limping along-- Diana Taurasi is absolutely terrifying except she is battling serious ankle and foot injuries and is limited to shooting hideous, leaning 26-footers that might very well go in because she is Diana Taurasi.  Sophie Cunningham, a tremendous shit-stirrer, is recovering from an injury of her own but that did not stop her from repeatedly juking Diamond DeShields very rudely in Game 2, and the Mercury also have Brittney Griner who rampaged through the Olympics and seems like she should be able to win most games by herself.

While the Mercury desperately try to will themselves back into the series and while the Sun tried to dominate them physically through the basketball art of Legal Shoving, the Sky have gotten this far by flying around the court and passing the ball.  This is ultra-modern basketball, five players all of whom can shoot including backup center and 3 x 3 gold medalist Stefanie Dolson whose role on offense basically to set screens like one of those walls that spring up from nowhere to bedevil the Battletoads.  Courtney Vandersloot may be the best pure point guard on a team I have rooted for.  But while the Sky can occasionally reach heights of sublime ball movement, it does not always matter because they have Kahleah Copper.  The best way to describe how Copper plays is like a sentient tornado; she cannot be guarded one on one, she can score from any bizarre angle a person can invent under the basket, she can shoot threes, and she never stops running around and never appears to get tired.  No one has been able to stop her in the playoffs, and the Mercury are running out of bodies to throw at her.

.@kahleahcopper put on a SHOW last night 🎬

Kah put up 22 points in Game 3, going 6-for-10 from the field in just 24 minutes 💪#WNBAPlayoffs presented by @YouTubeTV pic.twitter.com/7T1WQY9lHE

— WNBA (@WNBA) October 16, 2021

 

The Chicago sports landscape is otherwise bleak this weekend.  The White Sox were eliminated by the can-banging Astros, going out the way everyone anticipated with Tony La Russa sniffily litigating hit batter etiquette in the press.  Northwestern is locked in the most demented college football game on offer.  After several months of nineteenth-century parlor drama where not him but sources allegedly close to him said that we would be rid of Aaron Rodgers, he has returned to humiliate the Bears once again.  But fresh off a world-historical asskicking in Game Three, the Sky can clinch a championship Sunday to wash all of that away.  Until I noticed something about Kahleah Copper.

The Unfathomable Sadness of the Possibility That Northwestern Could Lose to Nebraska

It saddens me to come to understand that Northwestern can clobber a struggling MAC team, to shut them out until a meaningless touchdown on the final play of the game against an empty bench, and to run them over like eleven bulldozed Ricardos Montelbán and my reaction has been the wrinkled forehead of concern. This is what multiple bowl victories and two Big Ten West Division Championships in three years can do to you even though we have watched even very good Northwestern teams lose to teams like the 2021 Ohio Bobcats because games played at Ryan Field in September are controlled by cackling football deities who love it when a bad MAC team or even an FCS team celebrates on the field and leaves Pat Fitzgerald sputtering about how “we weren’t good enough today but all credit to the Mid Central Illinois Barn Owls” while the message boards attack him for wearing shorts.  Winning a game like this does not always seem like enough.

 

Pat Fitzgerald and his coaching staff planned to win the game and not prove any points about what the Wildcats may or may not be capable of against a Big Ten team, so they when they found out that Ohio's defense would offer little resistance against the running game, they decided to just batter them like besiegeing medieval army and save the question of Ryan Hilinsky's role in the passing game largely a mystery for the next opponent.  It was fun to see Evan Hull loosed against this defense; it was less fun when the Big Ten Network unveiled its novel Visceral Vomit Cam. 

 

I was going to make fun of BTN's faded postindustrial midwestern Tim Riggins 

J Leman who is exactly the person the Big Ten Network sends to a Northwestern 

vs. Ohio game that involves prominent vomiting, but sometime in the fourth 

quarter he flawlessly rattled off the Litany of Twenty-First-Century Northwestern 

Quarterbacks and I don't think there is anyone else in college sports media who 

could remember C.J. Bacher without hesitation 

 

NEBRASKA PREVIEW

 

Northwestern fans are on edge because after two listless performances against Michigan State and Duke, the 'Cats are out of lower-division opponents and its time to figure out of Fitz can hit the October Button and start irritating conference teams or if the season is going to plummet into ignominy, and this is something I suspect that Northwestern fans would like to figure out before they play Nebraska.

 

Sports, especially college sports, are an incredibly dumb place to look for anything resembling justice.  The satisfaction that fans get when a team or coach or someone else does something dumb and the only way anyone knows to make this person feel bad is to hope the team loses remains hollow.  In the case of Nebraska and Scott Frost's bellicose demands to play football right this fucking minute in the midst of a canceled Big Ten season and then in the face of a game called because the opponent had a covid outbreak so they tried to illegally barnstorm through the Sun Belt Conference, their irresponsibility in the larger context of American sports was one of degree, not kind.  Every league did that, just not as oafishly.  Northwestern took that money.  No one is a hero.  But we all can admit that even though it did nothing to make sports less cynical or dangerous in 2020, watching Nebraska take the field every week and just get absolutely upon whaled after insisting on playing football was one of the funniest subplots of the season.

The fact of the matter is that Nebraska under Scott Frost has somehow become the funniest team in the Big Ten.  It is not that they are bad, although they have been very bad.  It is that Nebraska entered the conference doing all sorts of fancy sword moves in the market and then has been lazily shot by every shitscraping Big Ten West team we can throw at them.  Frost represents Nebraska's golden years in the 1990s when they remorselessly clobbered everyone and were a national power and now he is leading them to humiliating losses to an Illinois team that I believe Bret Bielema is coaching while wearing flip-flops.  

I think all reasonable people outside of Lincoln can agree that Scott Frost has reached a level of operatic buffoonery that must be punished by losing to what so far appears to be an unimpressive Northwestern team.  But despite the losses, Nebraska has a lot going for it-- a fearsome defense that played well against an Oklahoma team that Frost reportedly attempted to wriggle out of after last year demanding to take on all comers, an elusive mobile quarterback, and the fact that they dominated Michigan State in terms of yardage but then kept doing dumb things in an exact sequence of events that made them lose.  Unfortunately, the Huskers do not appear to be as bad as their record.  They are heavily favored at home, and the biggest advantage Northwestern has is the tendency for Northwestern/Nebraska games to turn into preposterous sludge matches that end on an impossibly stupid play.  If Northwestern wants to get into the win column in the Big Ten, it just might take this baffling, snake-bitten Nebraska team to get them there.

nebraska joining the big ten expecting to mix it up in the title game against ohio state every year and then finding themselves playing in a deranged annual rock fight against northwestern is one of the funniest things that has ever happened in college football

— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 8, 2020

Win or lose, Northwestern won't prove anything by beating Nebraska.  In fact, a loss may drive Frost further into football derangement, attempting to schedule more games, possibly multiple games at the same time.  At the same time, Nebraska will not do anything by rolling over Northwestern other than bumming me out; I doubt that panicking Husker fans will be placated by a win over Northwestern.  They are trying to do anything to let the crown of the funniest Big Ten team revert to its rightful place with Rutgers.  Nothing could worse than losing to Rutgers.  Let's take a look at who is next on Northwestern's schedule.  Oh no.

RENOVATIONS

Northwestern Athletics pay pig Patrick Ryan has once again come through with an enormous $480 million donation to the school, a large portion of which will go towards renovating his eponymous stadium.  The renovation follows a similar face-lift that turned the decrepit Welsh-Ryan arena into a modern facility along with the practice facility Xanadu on the Lake.  To me this is kind of a bummer.

There is no plan yet for the renovations, but we can be sure that a refurbished Ryan Field will drain the charm out of playing in a dump.  After Welsh-Ryan reopend, I wrote about how the new arena had taken the illusion of Northwestern standing slightly outside the cesspool of college sports because the teams lost a lot and played in what appeared to be the arena that Snake Plissken fights the beard guy in but once they start playing in high-dollar facilities it is impossible to even pretend.  

I also believe that playing in a wind-swept, tarp-strewn slab of concrete will separate Northwestern football from its essence, which is annoying visiting fans.  The fact of the matter is that no Northwestern game against an even reasonably decent opponent will ever involve Wildcat fans not being completely outnumbered.  Given the fact that Northwestern football is essentially in the business of hosting away games for the benefit of Chicago-area Big Ten fans, it behooves the team to play in an ass-murdering sleet box that is probably going to run out of buns by the third quarter and sell cut up hot dogs in a paper cup.  If you want to see your team romp on the Wildcats then at the very least your should be uncomfortable and your train back to the city should be stuck at Argyle for "signals."  Also there's a chance that Northwestern will punt 55 consecutive times and then win, that should be printed on the ticket the way baseball teams warn you about foul balls.  I fail to see the point of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make Michigan fans complain slightly less about the stadium when they send a strongly-worded letter to the Provost, but then again I might be a hypocrite because when I got to a game I often will decadently spring for seatbacks.

On the last Northwestern broadcast, they interviewed new athletic director Derrick Gragg about the project and he was waxing rhapsodically about field-level suites like they have in the fancy new NFL stadiums.  The plan is to decrease seating and put in more luxury boxes; personally I think that anyone who would watch Northwestern sports from a luxury box is an absolute maniac while at the same time acknowledging that watching young people smash into each other while decadently guzzling fancy cheese cubes and doing Deals is in fact extremely Northwestern. 

Dyche stadium opened in 1926, and has gone through several renovations already, most recently the 1997 one that restored natural grass, added a new press box, and other bathrooms, and most controversially renamed the stadium to Ryan Field in direct contradiction to the original naming agreement.  It opened with no endzone seating surrounded by pastures.  It is cool that Northwestern has not yet demolished the stadium and continues to play in its cozy Jazz Age venue.  The stadium will be a nicer and more pleasant place to watch a game on the inside.  The 11AM kickoffs, the droves of visiting fans, and likely the sour punting will remain integral to the Northwestern experience.  But, much like how odd it felt to go to Welsh-Ryan Arena and be greeted with fancy scoreboards and space age seating and not watching the teams have to mince their way past people buying nachos, the renovations won't feel quite like Northwestern football to me.

Well This Doesn't Bode Well

 It looks like it may be another one of Those Seasons.  Northwestern followed a Big Ten West winning season in 2018 with a three-win campaign in 2019, and the 2020 season seems to be headed toward that same disastrous conclusion.  Pat Fitzgerald has once again unveiled the 2019 Menagerie of Quarterbacks, and what seemed like a position set in stone even after the Michigan State loss now appears to once again be in flux.  More worryingly, the defense that has carried Northwestern through the Pat Fitzgerald era seems to be struggling against Power 5 opponents, with running backs carving their way through the defensive line and receivers slicing their way through the Wildcats’ vaunted secondary.  Fitzgerald is used to punting and trying to advance the ball through one of those party games where you pass it down the field using only your neck but I am not sure he will be able to handle watching his beloved linebackers get pancaked into the depths of the Earth every week.

Pat Fitzgerald looks like he is about to be attacked by a terminator robot in this picture

 

At 1-2, Northwestern is not out of anything yet, although the Big Ten does not appear to be as delightfully chaotic as last year’s deranged Pandemic Season.  Still, even if things continue to go south for the Wildcats, we can take comfort only in the looming showdown with Illinois under Bret Bielema and the possibility of the greatest football game ever played hopefully with cameras on the coaches the whole time so we can watch Fitzgerald and Bielema bellowing at each other until one of them suffers a serious neck vein injury and needs to be airlifted to a clinic for the Severely Pissed Off.  

 

I had wanted to put a picture of Bielema yelling here but what I found was 

this headline and I think we can all agree that this is better
 

DUKE-NORTHWESTERN RECAP

This week, BYCTOM has brought back special correspondent Karl Ove Knausgaard to go analyze this matchup.  Knausgaard, the brooding Norwegian author of the six-part My Struggle series of autofiction about being a brooding Norwegian author and the forthcoming The Morning Star, shares his thoughts on college football.

 

 

I told my agent a thousand times that I would not under any circumstances write about American football.  Every day I am assailed with e-mails from American editors saying Karl Ove how about you write a feature story for our magazine about the Los Angeles Rams and I tell them I cannot because it is absurd.  I do not know anything about football, I have no interest in it, the visceral violence is appalling, the beer-soaked facepaint atmosphere is ridiculous, and frankly the concept of a Los Angeles Ram is insane to me.  Several times a day, I log onto my e-mail account and I tell them I will not write about the Jacksonville Jaguars even if you are telling me that they are an avatar of futility and meaninglessness and try and tempt me by saying that I bet it reminds me of my friend Geir knowing that I know several dozen Geirs and it is likely that one of their lives resonates in some way with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Ultimately, what they get you with is the money.  I am not too proud to admit it.  One thing that nobody tells you when you become an international literary sensation is that your expenses soon outpace your own earnings no matter how many conventions you do where thousands of people watch panelists chuckle-talk at each other and then ask you what you meant when you spent 237 pages writing about having a tedious and embarrassing parent-teacher conference because your daughter had been hogging all of the glitter and then running into the teacher in the supermarket and having to make awkward small talk after he took an hour implying that she was not learning about glitter sharing at home before spending the rest of the afternoon ruminating on the concept of Masculinity.  There are payments due on rustic brooding sheds and fresh divorces and lawsuits from angry family members.  So at some point I simply had run out of ways to say no to a prestigious American publication when all I had to do was watch a football game.  
 

I had no idea there was so much football.  I assumed I would be writing about the National Football League, the one with the Super Bowl and the Los Angeles Rams but I was shocked when the editor insisted that I write about college football, which I did not know existed.  This is football played in universities by university students-- not normal university students who spent their time listening to Roxy Music and desperately navigating the politics of the student literary magazine, but hulking young men who play on national television every week.  The editor explained to me that these university games on the biggest level were played in thundering stadiums of 100,000 people with pyrotechnics and bands and sometimes live animals in cages with unruly mobs of drunken students howling and sometimes taking to the streets to burn couches.  But then I was told I would be watching a game that was not like that at all and would be played between two middling programs in front of a sparse crowd for almost no stakes.  The e-mail explained that this is also an important college football experience, and to understand the game as most fans enjoy it, as a revel in the pointlessness of it all housed in “a simulacrum of college football pomp.”  I wanted to kick this person in the throat but had never met him before and I had taken his money.  I had never been so humiliated by an editor that actually used the word “simulacrum.”

An American television with cable has thousands of channels and seemingly dozens of college football games on at any time.  I could, for example, watch Mississippi State versus Memphis or Georgia Southern vs. Arkansas or even Wyoming vs. something called “Ball State” but my game would not appear.  I logged on the web.  Eventually I learned that the game I wanted to see was on something called ACC Network, which I did not have.  The ACC Network website gave me a list of cable companies but mine was not listed.  They told me to call my cable provider, so I did.  I waited for minutes while getting blasted with hold music and a robot reassuringly telling me my call was important to me while I seethed.  I have never experienced anything as bleak as being told that there was nothing I could do in order to get access to the ACC Network.  

My friend Geir had told me there were certain websites out of Eastern Europe where I could illegally watch this game.  I did not know where to find these websites.  I entered “Duke Northwestern Bulgarian??” into my web browser but nothing useful came up and I also did not want to risk getting a computer virus and wiping out my work.  I had been asked to write a guest issue of the Spider-Man comic for a series pairing comic book characters with international literary sensations for an experimental Marvel imprint and had a freestanding essay on Hitler and the nature of evil that was going to be delivered by the Rhinoceros that I had not yet backed up onto floppy disk.

“I am sorry, but I do not have ACC network and cannot watch this game,” I wrote to the editor, hoping that would be enough to get me out of this, but he simply wrote back “sounds great!” It was like trying to argue with quicksand.  When I was 15 years old my friend Trond took us out on his brother’s boat.  The boat was not much.  It was a rickety rowboat with peeling paint and when the three of us got on with the stash of beer we managed to hoard throughout the summer by carefully grabbing one can at a time wherever we could find one. The boat could barely float, but we felt like kings.  Trond was not supposed to take the boat.  His brother had told him that if he touched his boat while he was away on a monthlong expedition with his beekeeping friends he would lock him in the barn with the apiary and spray him with illegal pheromones that agitated the bees that he had ordered from the back of a catalog if he was lucky, but that did not stop us at all.  The sun washed over us on the lake and the beer was so cold and before long we were singing and taking turns diving off the boat when Gunnar said that we should go to the pier where there were probably some girls and try to get them on the boat with us.  Trond was worried because the only way through was a narrow, rocky passage but our oars were already digging into the lake.  It seems so obvious where this was heading now but at the time, it simply did not occur to me that anything could go wrong.  After all of the subterfuge to get the beer and the boat that we had to clandestinely carry hundreds of meters from the house and even the cooler that I had spirited away from my father, all of that worrying and sneaking and preparation had paid off, and I was enveloped in a drunken happiness.  We didn’t even see the first rock.  It should have been impossible, on such calm water and at such low speed for this to happen, but the boat was already riding low because of all the weight and then we rammed right into it.  Gunnar and I had no idea what we were doing so while Trond frantically tried to tell us which way to paddle, we got confused and went the opposite way and managed to get the boat wedged between rocks; when Gunnar panicked and tried rocking the boat between the rocks to free it we heard the first crack.  “Gunnar you fucking idiot!” Trond yelled but it was too late.  The boat was taking on water.  I futilely tried bailing it out with beer cans but we had to jump out and made our way to the shore ro watch it sink.  Gunnar was talking a mile a minute about salvaging it, and I paced back and forth saying “oh fuck. Oh shit.” to myself and Trond just stared, clinging to a single oar.  It took us nearly an hour to walk back to his house, not because it was far but because we did not want to get there and we were soaked and miserable.  I had lost a shoe in the lake and cut my foot on a sharp pebble.  I didn’t see much of Trond the rest of the summer.  We were not very close to begin with and the only thing we really had in common was Depeche Mode and the boat scheme, and every time I saw him I was overcome with disgust and guilt.  That was now the same feeling I had when I opened my web browser to track what was going on with the Duke and Northwestern football game that I could not see or write about.  Duke was winning by 21 points already, and I had no idea what that meant but it probably was not very good.  One of the players for Duke was named “Jake Bobo.”  

I tried watching one of the other games that was on but frankly it was indecipherable and meaningless.  Every time I thought I had figured out what was going on they would call some sort of penalty and undo it. It was maddening and I understood why everyone was drunk all of the time.  I thought about getting drunk but I had to go to a children’s birthday party later on and glower at all of the adults.   I explained all of this to my editor and he said he would “punch it up.”  I could not imagine anything worse.

NORTHWESTERN VS OHIO

The Wildcats have a chance to get things right again against another struggling team when Ohio comes to town.  The Bobcats are winless this season, including a close loss to FCS Duqesne.  This is Ohio’s fist season after Frank Solich retired and led the team to respectability, including a victory in the Potato Bowl.  Solich left as the winningest coach in MAC history after getting run out of Nebraska so they could hire various charlatans and maniacs.

The biggest question for Northwestern is who will play at quarterback after the Wildcats went through three last week and whether another game against a lackluster opponent will allow the defense to cohere after a strong performance against Indiana State did not carry over to the Duke until the second half during Northwestern’s comeback.  A loss here would be devastating.

Northwestern will have to get right quickly before beginning Big Ten play with upcoming games against Rutgers and Nebraska.  Nebraska has become a laughingstock, and the ‘Cats have never lost to Rutgers even as that program has improved under Rutgers savior Greg Schiano.  What is on the line is far more important than berths in bowl games or Big Ten Championship games, but the ability to laugh at Nebraska and Rutgers, the most important prize in Northwestern football other than the Hat Trophy. 

Who Knows

Many people attempting to tune into Northwestern football last Saturday had the experience of watching Mack Brown make the exact face of an alderman who has returned home to see that the FBI is ransacking his office for documents and then within seconds the broadcast switched to show Northwestern lining up to block an extra point already down 6-0 after 13 seconds, and the game never really improved over that. 

 

This is how I believe many Chicago Alderman have looked when the FBI 

discovered several clearly marked folders saying "Meat Crimes"

 

With the exception of last year's unexpected and inspired buttkicking of a pandemic-discombobulated Maryland team, it is not uncommon for Northwestern to stumble around the opening portion of its season, at some point desperately fending for life while down to a school that has just started playing a football again after some tough-looking guys showed up on campus one day in a van.  This is a suspect tactic in most years; in a year when the Wildcats had to start against a mysterious Michigan State team full of dynamic new players, it was disastrous.  By the fourth quarter, virtually no hope for a victory remained and with I continued to watch only because Northwestern football is on television and because I needed to do some important scouting of Northwestern's quarterback even though my knowledge of quarterback technique involves using up to three passing plays in the version of the NCAA football game with Larry Fitzgerald on the cover.  All that was left was to grimly wait for the most brutal consequence of a loss to the Spartans: Magic Johnson enthusiastically tweeting out the exact number of yards that Kenny Walker had run against the Wildcats.

 

One way to react to the loss is to panic.  Mike Hankwitz, the wizened defensive coordinator, has retired and been replaced by Jim O'Neil fresh from helming fairly bad NFL defenses, and if you really wanted to savor and lean into a narrative of collapse and ruin you could say that Hankwitz had been propping up the program while Fitzgerald served as the enormous figurehead and now Northwestern is going to go back into the days where they lost every game 49-3 and the students will have to purchase earth-moving equipment to throw the goalposts into the lake in the rare event that they eke out a win against Western Illinois and on top of all that several smart-alecks on the internet may go so low as point out that Northwestern is no longer geographically in the Northwestern portion of the country.

 

On the other hand, it is possible to take comfort in the fact that Northwestern remains a confounding and impossible program capable of the highest highs and lowest lows in the same season.  Maybe the defensive performance will remain at the wretched level we saw Saturday or maybe it will improve; maybe the offense will figure out how to get an effective running game going or maybe they will be forced to operate in the Tecmo Super Bowl offense when the computer decides to start cheating by making its players several times faster than yours and the only play that works in the playoffs is trying to eke out a few lumbering yards on Mike Tomczak scrambles except for the few times he is maybe able to dink it over to the tight end before he is instantly tackled. 

 

To be honest I have a hard time writing about reacting to these wins and losses because frankly I am not football person, I am not grinding tape or crunching numbers or speaking to anyone even tangentially associated with Northwestern football and so when I analyze Northwestern football on my Northwestern football blog week after week it appears the best I can come up with is fuck if I know.  What we are trying to do here (using the royal we here because imagine that this blog was actually a functioning organization and there were people here scurrying around a busy press room to get me a poorly photoshopped picture of Pat Fitzgerald turning into a werewolf that can be hastily crammed with a caption that is comically small while I'm barking on my phone to get quotes about a swashbucklingly corrupt nineteenth-century Chicago aldermen who died because his mustache got caught in an industrial apparatus) is not to try to figure out why or how Northwestern can win a game to determine how funny each result is and also to make fun of P.J. Fleck's Coaching Acronyms.

 

Northwestern's next game is against Indiana State, which will serve as an important test case to see if Northwestern can beat Indiana State.  Anyone looking to panic will find what they are looking for in this game; there is no amount of points that Northwestern can score against the Sycamores that can convince the skeptics that the Michigan State game is a fluke and anything less than a completely dominant performance can effectively augur doom and gloom.  Games against FCS opponents offer little more than a cheap win or the very amusing and satisfying upset for everyone else if a power conference team loses at home and then has to cut a large novelty check to the opponent and one can imagine a loss here would finally force Fitzgerald to tearfully admit that he is a "Rece Davis."

 

It is difficult to get too high or low for Northwestern.  While many of the people reading this have been lucky enough to support the Wildcats in their Golden Age of Decency and the years of crushing futility are now decades past, they still, I believe, maintain a hold on the program.  And leaving the 1970s and 1980s behind, the expectations for Northwestern football are still fairly modest: have a winning season, go to a bowl, and irritate the hell out of the Big Ten West.  While losing individual games can be a bummer, it is still kind of funny imagining a fuming a Northwestern fan storming out of the room after watching a desultory loss to, say, Minnesota and then angrily explaining to someone who doesn't watch football that "they're going to the Music City Bowl" when "I wanted them to go to the Outback Bowl." 

 

THE RETURNS

 

I am not really a pro wrestling guy-- even though I enjoy the concept of wrestlers getting unexpectedly betrayed then bonked on the noggin or how a wrestler will startle an opponent by appearing with the full fanfare of a theme song while everyone in the ring just stands there in a slack-jawed summerstock reverie while the music finishes up or even how much fun it is to imagine a professional wrestler who is just podcast personality Marc Maron who says things like "oh we're hitting each other with chairs now? really?" I don't really follow it or know who anyone is who is not a withered hot dog man who fought against Mr. T. or a member of the 1985 Chicago Bears.  But I did enjoy the video of the wrestler walking into the United Center and having people lose their shit for several minutes because I appreciate that a spectacle of athletic violence where people leap off of cages and occasionally slice their own faces open for dramatic effect is at heart a sentimental business.

 

This weekend Kris Bryant returned to Wrigley Field.  He is the first of the World Series players traded at the deadline to return to the park (Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber returned earlier this year after being let go last offseason).  A tearful Bryant got a rapturous ovation, a sentimental video, a piece of the scoreboard, a 2016 banner, and a photo with the team owner who ostensibly is the reason Bryant is no longer on the team.  The fact that Bryant is not a creaky retiring player but is in fact in his prime and an impending free agent that the Cubs traded only because they do not want to pay him what he and his agent think he is worth made this whole thing a little confusing.  The only more cynical tribute I can think of is the Bulls welcoming Luol Deng with a warm video after nearly killing him with an unnecessary spinal tap.

 

Regardless of the circumstances, I always eat up these videos and tributes to players coming back because I am a sentimental idiot.  It is always heartening to see players return to where circumstances-- usually a draft that consigned a player to years toiling for a crappy team-- allowed them to flourish and grow up and connect to fans.  Bryant and the other traded Cubs will eventually form bonds with other fanbases but right now they are just hired guns here to help get a team over the hump.  No one has felt this more acutely than Javy Báez, who has found that Mets fans are less accommodating of his tendency to swing at pitches that are currently being thrown at Yankee Stadium and reckless attempts at derring do on the basepaths because he did not help them win their team's first World Series in 108 years.  Báez and his teammates got involved in one of baseball's funniest controversies this season when he admitted that he was making a thumbs down gestures at the fans to boo them because he could not go to their places of business and heckle them, causing them so much distress that they run out of work and lose their pinky toe to a street cleaning machine.

 

The Mets immediately issued a press release claiming that 

Javy had been "very unfair to Mets fans with the thumbs" and that 

they are "looking into it very strongly."

 

It was impossible to imagine that the Cubs could do anything after the trades this season other than roll around and die in an undignified manner, but they somehow have been staggering through because of the improbable play of three 30-year-olds who have never had meaningful playing time in the majors and now are guys that Cubs fans may remember in ten years.  Patrick Wisdom has been bashing home runs since he came up in May and Rafael Ortega has delivered dramatic, game-winning hits.  But no Cub has more quickly endeared himself to fans than Frank Schwindel.  Schwindel, called up as part of the baffling array of players conjured seemingly from thin air on July 31, has been hitting the ball at an impossible, Roy Hobbsian pace.  

 

Schwindel has the unassuming look of a guy in suspenders knocking down cans of corn from the top shelf with a wooden pole.  He doesn't sound like a real ballplayer in 2021, but Frank Schwindel sounds like a name you would use if you were writing a lightly fictionalized version of the 1919 Black Sox and needed a name for a minor character who wasn't on the take and keeps trying to rally the team with dopey motivational speeches after they continue to lose World Series games with a series of spectacular errors. Schwindel was selected in the 18th round of the 2013 draft by Kansas City.  After five years in the minors, he managed to cling onto the major league roster for a few weeks before getting sent down and bouncing through a couple more organizations.  He played a bit for Oakland this year before they released him.  The Cubs did not so much promote Schwindel as unleash him.  He has hit .361/.414/.684 as a Cub with ten home runs in only 145 plate appearances and after hitting a home run is often found in the dugout soaking it up and making endearingly goofy facial expressions to the camera.

 

 

The central question when it comes to a player like Schwindel is whether this is sustainable.  Of course it is not.  It is unlikely that a 29-year-old journeyman minor leaguer is all of a sudden a version of Miguel Cabrera you would get if a video game did not have the rights to his likeness.  Every year, guys we have never heard of go on tears for a month or two at a time before coming back down to Earth; we've even seen almost the exact version of this in Chicago this year with Yermin Mercedes who terrorized opposing pitchers as The Yerminator before getting into a profoundly stupid controversy with Tony LaRussa  over Baseball Decency and then watching his OPS lower itself into a vat of molten steel.  

 

But the question I have is who cares?  I'm not the general manager of the Chicago Cubs so I don't have to worry about who their first baseman will be next year.  I'm not popping into a ballgame with the green visor of baseball statistics to mutter something about small sample size and regression to the mean with a set of numbers developed to help people win fantasy baseball leagues and general managers avoid spending too much money on free agents. I am not concerned if Schwindel follows the path of Cubs All-Star Brian LaHair and ends up playing overseas next year.  Every single one of his at-bats has counted.  He had a stretch where he single-handedly won a bunch of games with home runs, grand slams, and the first time I have ever seen a slide into first base work.  He is a former minor leaguer on a team that has given up as profoundly as any team has in the twenty-first century and he is going out there and exuding magic so that the Cubs can make an otherwise depressing series against a Pirates team that seems like it is actively trying to lose to blatantly that it requires an investigation fun, and he has made himself from a player toiling fruitlessly in the minors for years into a household name in Chicago however briefly.  I have seen multiple people wearing Frank Schwindel replica jerseys.  I am very sorry that I referred to him when he first came up as "Frank Schalmiel."

 

The central condition about baseball is that there is so much of it.  It is almost absurd how much baseball there is.  They play nearly twice as many games as the next major pro sport in this country and they are on every day and anyone who just casually flips on a game every now and then immediately gets to know the players whether they are formerly anonymous journeymen or superstars.  It is unlikely that Schwindel or Wisdom or Ortega get the type of ovation we just saw for Bryant at Wrigley Field.  But they play an important role even if their job is ostensibly just being there and not costing the owners a lot of money as they try to unearth the next Bryants and Rizzos and Báezes.  I am not sure how much I will remember this brief late Summer of Schwindel, but there he is every day, for real.