Soaked

There is a small but extremely twisted slice of football fans in the United States who, like me, follow both the Northwestern Wildcats and the Chicago Bears, and since Pat Fitzgerald has taken over it has been like watching these two football entities merge into a hideous team like how Jeff Goldblum turned into the fly except instead of turning into a disgusting and vomitous mélange of insect and man who says ah a lot they are turning into a single football entity that runs doomed inside draws on 3rd and 5.  

There is a term called carcinization that is a process I know about only from this Wikipedia page I have just read that is the odd tendency for multiple unrelated creatures over billions of years to evolve into crabs, and this is how the Chicago Bears work: no matter how many new general managers and coaches they bring to install new offensive systems that they promise will bring about an exciting era of Bears football no matter who is in charge they keep defaulting into offenses where the quarterback throws for exactly 168 yards and they only win the game if their linebackers score two touchdowns.  Under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern has changed from a fun offense led by scrappy, tiny quarterbacks that desperately tried to outscore teams 48-45 to a defense and punts outfit that has until recently managed a shocking amount of success by trying to win games by going up by exactly three points in the second quarter and then switching to an offensive gameplan that involves getting the ball at their own 35 and attempting to dig a hole.

The Bears opened the season in a horrifying "supercell" storm that soaked the field and was watched by the few people in the area that were not bailing out their basements, and in this maelstrom the Bears' objectively hideous Mess Football managed to stymie a vastly superior San Francisco 49ers team that was also helpfully starting a person who appeared to have learned how to play quarterback by sending away for an instruction manual from the Sears catalog.  Last Saturday, Northwestern traveled to Penn State and played in what appeared to be a miserable constant downpour.  Penn State had trouble holding onto the ball in those conditions and it seemed like every five minutes one of their running backs would fumble the ball in a hilarious and exaggerated manner like an exasperated Daffy Duck flinging a tray of food 35 feet backwards after slipping on a banana peel and then having a safe land on him before his hands come out from under it and do the combination and open the door to reveal his lump-ridden head.  Unfortunately, Northwestern could not take advantage of these turnovers and pretty much immediately punted every time.  They scored zero points off the turnovers.  They ran for something like 6 yards.  The Penn State Nittany Lions playing in a tempest who were they thought they were and they let 'em off the hook.

Dennis Green's pronouncement that "The Bears Are Who We Thought They Were" is the most profound and accurate thing anyone has ever said about the Chicago Bears

No one was expecting Northwestern to upset undefeated eleventh-ranked Penn State on the road, but a sloppy shit game in horrible weather presented the ideal conditions for Northwestern football and they just could not manage to capitalize on it.  In what is looking like three out of four years of absolute football disaster, I am starting to question Northwestern's previous ability to look bad in one game and still manage to win several games it should not out of what appears to be pure stubbornness and spite.  And yet, despite myself, I still think they might have a shot at the Dreaded Wisconsin Badgers in what promises to the Big Ten's most miserable homecoming.

COACH CYCLE

If there is one time to face the Wisconsin Badgers it is this week when they are reeling.  They just got hammered by Illinois (a team that I think, unfortunately for fans of HAT trophies, is going to be pretty decent under Bielema, who has a proven formula to win the Big Ten West).  They have unceremoniously fired their head coach Paul Chryst.  Wisconsin dumped his ass.  Jettisoned him right in the middle of the season.  Put him on the cheese truck to Kenosha.  I can't remember the Badgers ever firing anyone in the middle of a season before because their coaches tend to just sort of bud off of Barry Alvarez like appendages until they grow the requisite number of chins and fall off.  He's the second Big Ten coach to get canned before the teeth of the season, joining Scott Frost whom I assume was dropped out of an airplane cargo hold somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean after screaming at the the athletic director "you don't have the balls to drop me from 30,000 feet into the aaaaaah."

Chryst could not be reached for comment because he vanished into a massive crowd of identical looking Pauls Chryst with the real one only identifiable because he was missing a single shoe.
 

There are a few things going for the 'Cats here.  For one, no team that has its coach unceremoniously eating a buyout in early October can be classified as doing well.  The Badgers are 2-3 after losing to an unheralded Washington State team and Illinois and getting completely dismantled by an Ohio State team that is for all intents and purposes a professional team that will never lose to a Big Ten West squad unless they are playing in Ross Ade stadium at night where the rules of football and thermodynamics are temporarily suspended.  There is also the Mystique of Ryan Field, one of the funniest phenomena in college football where the Badgers, no matter how immense their offensive line and how good their running back is and how much their perennial sort-of-ok quarterback manages to stay out of the way can't help but eat shit in Evanston despite their absolutely overwhelming fan advantage.  It is hilarious.  Even playing a de facto home game with their tens of thousands of Chicago-area alums and fans making the short drive down I-94 to flood Ryan Field's collapsing rusted guts with an arterial spray of red and making Northwestern go on a silent count in their own stadium, there was a period of time when the Badgers just could not win in Evanston and it would be a great college football story except it involved Northwestern and no one cared.

There are a few snags here when it comes to predicting a Northwestern Chaos Victory.  Two are practical: For one, Wisconsin's interim coach is the formerly extremely annoying Badgers safety and now defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard who is by all accounts a good and sought-after coach, and the firing of Chryst may be more a move to secure his services before he is poached by another program in college football's amusingly medieval succession system.  Another issue is the current state of Northwestern football.  Finally, there is a mystical problem here, where Wisconsin fans are pretty down about their season.  They are not "considering it possible to lose to 2022 Northwestern" down, but I maintain that the Ryan Field Chaos Engine cannot activate unless there is a scrappy Wildcat team and a preposterously overconfident Badgers team that has a Heisman-caliber running back and world-ending defense and ordinary quarterback that will prevent them from doing anything other than getting bulldozed by Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game. 

Without those conditions, I fear that the dreaded Wisconsin at Ryan Field Experience which ideally leaves the 75% of the stadium that is rooting for Wisconsin even though it is ostensibly Northwestern's homecoming game making the Producers Face as they somehow lose 13-11 in a game that somehow involves a one-point special teams safety may not come into play.  But goddamn I'm rooting for it.

BUCK DUCKETT IN DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PANTS

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea. I did not do any research about this. But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vignettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

Duckett was not sure if the three-eyed mutants in the mall stalls of New Indianapolis could tell the future when they went into their trance or if they were just bilking tourists but he had no interest in either outcome.  He usually just hurried by them as quickly on the way to NCAA headquarters, coat buttoned up against the elements and against the crowds of hustlers, unlicensed augmentors, and thieves.  He knew these alleys, and he knew what was waiting for him.  "It's Duckett," he said to the NCAA guards who never remembered who he was and how many pairs of pants he had confiscated in one legendary raid.  He even forgot, sometimes.

"Hell, it's cold out there," Duckett said, settling into the dingy basement office he shared with Crandall.  To get there, he had to go through three checkpoints across rows of auditing machines and past the authenticators that now took up most of the investigations department and down four flights of stairs to a subbasement now mainly used for storage.

"What's going on up there, three ring circus?" Crandall said.  Duckett hadn't noticed anything.  He generally kept his head down these days.  There was very little pants-related activity, and no one up there wanted to hear from him.  

"No, what's going on?" Duckett said.

"You didn't see the decks last night?  They got 'em.  They say they do.  Brutal Bolus.  All hell's breaking loose."

"Damn."

Brutal Bolus.  The top basketball player in the country, and he was augmented to hell and back.  At least, that was what the NCAA thought, although Bolus had passed every test they made him take for three years, even when he blasted Laser State's entire roster of forwards with his forehead cannon.

"And no one bothered to ask me about his socks," Duckett said. Crandall couldn't smile, but he managed a jocular grimace.

 Duckett was not sure why the NCAA kept him around.  He was their most senior investigator but that had happened largely by default after the Meltdowns.  He served at first largely as a symbol that the NCAA still had a mission and still cared about amateurism even after basketball stopped becoming recognizable and became a violent basketball-related spectacle that evolved from a four-volume Codex of Futuristic Violent Basketball Rules invented by Bill Laimbeer that also had full color illustrations about speculative haircuts. 

The NCAA was not interested in pants anymore.  Nor was it interested in shoes, cars, or even cash.  The NCAA was now issued in augmentors.  Every college basketball player these days was augmented somehow.  In the early days, they had their arms replaced with cannons or grappling hooks fused to their backs.  But soon players began to show up with strange abilities, eerie abilities to float slightly longer in the air than they should, abilities to move the ball around without touching it, slightly different cannons grafted onto their arms that the NCAA didn't like.  These augments were sophisticated and increasingly undetectable.  The players were rumored to come from vats and then show up at AAU tournaments with unconvincing backstories and the same few dozen memories.  The NCAA's investigations department shifted to unearth these illegal augmentors and ban them from college basketball.  

Duckett used to sleep in cars and in fetid piles of laundry in frat houses to catch an illegal pants transaction, but that was not how the NCAA worked anymore.  Its analysts monitored patterns: patterns of how players moved, how they bludgeoned, how they spoke in interviews.  Players suspected of illegal augments could be seized, and investigators subjected them to a series of cognitive tests.  Even the augments from big time programs who had been coached to pass would eventually crack, except for one.  For three years, Brutal Bolus had been called in multiple times a season.  They gave him the Ramper test.  They subjected him to Graschman's Paradox.  It did not matter.  He passed with ease, he smiled, and then he went out and put his forehead through a point guard ineffectively menacing him with a chainsaw.  The NCAA made him his top target.  

"How did they finally get him?" Duckett said.  He didn't really understand the new methods and did not particularly want to.  The whole enterprise seemed sort of grotesque to him, and the new analysts were blank and busy in a way he did not understand.

"Don't know yet," Crandall said.  

"Duckett up here. Now." The call on the old deck in the office startled him.  No one had called down here before.  He did not even realize it was connected to anything and thought it was a piece of junk like everything else.  But there was no mistaking that voice.  It was Lauck, the Subdirector.  Until that second, he would have bet that Lauck had no idea he was still here or even alive, but now he was summoned upstairs.  "On my way," Duckett said.

The NCAA offices were in chaos.  Chairs were strewn everywhere.  Analysis stations had dent in them.  It was eerily empty, and he had no idea where everyone was until he found them.  The hallway to Lauck's office looked like a field hospital, and analysts and other NCAA personnel lay around.  The lucky ones were getting bandages.  The unlucky ones were getting sheets.  It looked like when they tried to bring Bolus in, he had other ideas.

Lauck looked banged up.  He had blood on his sleeve, but it wasn't his.  You could fit a change of socks into the bags under his eyes.  

"Duckett, how familiar are you with the Bolus case?" Lauck said.

"Just what's on the deck," said Duckett.  "Crandall told me you got him?"

"Got him is one way to put it," Lauck said.  Duckett realized now that they had a much bigger problem than eligibility on their hands.  Bolus was dead.  Bolus was dead and Duckett was up here.  The mercury drained from his spine.  

"You're probably wondering why I asked for you," Lauck said.  "Bolus is in there, what's left of him.  Whatever augments he had are now gone.  No one we know about is capable of anything like his.  But when we got him we did manage to salvage these."  He opened a biohazard crate and steam hissed out.  Duckett leaned over.  It was a pair of pants.  Pretty standard model, decent stitching, athletic cut.  He reached out to feel them but Lauck grabbed his arm.  

"Look closer, Duckett."  Duckett leaned in.  The pants were moving.  It was subtle, small undulation, almost impossible to spot without staring at it.  It was like a breathing motion.  Duckett looked at Lauck.

"Is that a living tissue?  You found these on Bolus?  What's going on here, Lauck?  What the hell kind of pants are those?" Duckett said.

"That's what I want you to find out," Lauck said.

A Loss So Bad They're Destroying the Stadium

Northwestern's nightmare season continued under the lights at Ryan Field last Saturday when Miami of Ohio beat a Big Ten team for the first time since 2003.  That team was also Northwestern.  The Wildcats continue to spiral into disaster against teams they are favored against and enter the Big Ten season with the verve and excitement of the Terminator slowly sinking into a vat of molten steel.

The difficult thing about trying to figure out anything about Northwestern football this season is that the team transforms seemingly from series to series if not play to play.  The Wildcats had series where they easily marched down the field with Hull bouncing off arm tackles and Hilinsky shredding the defense.  Then the offense hit a wall and turned into a festival of punts and turnovers.  Miami struggled passing the ball all night and it seemed like Northwestern had them shut down and then their running back started finding holes and running through Wildcat tacklers like they were made out of wet cardboard.  I was sure Northwestern was going to win this one until they didn't.  This crushing loss puts them at 1-3 in what is supposed to be the easy part of their schedule.  What had started with a satisfying win in Dublin with dreams of qualifying for the Jesus Christ Why Didn't You Tell Me You Put That There Mousetrap Company Bowl now looks like it could be a repeat of last season or even worse.  Not only have the Wildcats failed to win at home this season, they have yet to win in the United States of America.

Northwestern football, still 1-0*!

(*—only games played in Ireland count) pic.twitter.com/SpXli3SruL

— Rodger Sherman (@rodger) September 25, 2022

Now they go into Happy Valley against an undefeated eleventh ranked Penn State team that has already shredded a mid-tier SEC team on the road.  The situation looks incredibly bleak.  In years past, we could draw inspiration from Northwestern's penchant for unpredictable and chaotic nonsense in Big Ten play.  We have seen Northwestern suffer some absurd losses in the nonconference and then pop up in the Big Ten somehow punting opponents into submission.  In this case, the losses have been so alarming that even the comfort of knowing that this team operates purely on spite and annoying people may not be enough to transcend the early season malaise.  Pat Fitzgerald has to come up with something to jump start the team; unfortunately Pat Fitzgerald has never come up with anything other than doing the exact same thing he has always done except louder and more magenta-faced.

Penn State, meanwhile, is riding high.  James Franklin just got to bask in being part of a semi-viral video where a heavily made up Eli Manning whose melting prosthetics made him look like the giant goblin creature that is always chasing around the Fraggles and while doing a fake voice that is somehow dopier than Eli Manning's actual voice pretended to try out for Penn State as a walk on who wowed people with his Manning arm.  The funniest part of this video for me was Franklin explaining to Manning that at Penn State they don't have walk-ons they have run-ons because no one should be walking, which was a type of doofus football coach talk from a master who was actually hovering in the air while saying it.  I find all coaching sayings and acronyms so incredible risible that it is impossible for me to believe they actually inform and motivate people, although it is important to note that is has been more than a decade since I have personally accomplished anything so maybe I should not be laughing at them.

THE MANIACS ARE GOING TO BLOW IT UP

This week, Northwestern announced they are no longer going through with their plan to renovate Ryan Field.  Instead they want to destroy it.  The university announced plans to demolish the nearly 100-year-old stadium and replace it with an $800 million dollar pleasure-dome that will have a smaller capacity that will still allow visitors to vastly outnumber Northwestern fans and also allow major events such as a football game involving literally any other team. This is a disaster.

Northwestern has proposed plans to demolish Ryan Field and build a modern, small-capacity stadium on-site.

The $800M project would be privately-funded and allow the venue to host games, concerts, and other events, per @CrainsChicago. pic.twitter.com/twKhL7UmHc

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) September 28, 2022

Let's be honest: Ryan Field is a dump.  It is a shithole.  When it comes to watching football you can go to any other Big Ten stadium, even the fake Big Ten East Coast teams, and there is a vague feeling of scale and spectacle and splendor and then you can go to a Northwestern game and see four people standing next to a tarp and stands that are rusting like the hull of a beached ocean liner.  They replaced the old astroturf with natural grass that is pockmarked like a WWI no man's land.  It is a profoundly ridiculous facility for a team that is pulling ludicrous Big Ten television money and for a school that has a quarter billion dollar death star athletic facility and a basketball/volleyball arena that no longer looks like the Junior Varsity Thunderdome where you can bungee around and instead of getting knives and chainsaws get dinner forks and pool noodles.  It is an obscenity, and abomination, and my favorite sports venue.

I wrote earlier when the plan was just to jazz up and renovate the field that it was a colossal mistake because it should be miserable to go to a Northwestern game.  Anyone brave enough to go to a Big Ten game there rooting for the 'Cats knows that it will be filled with hostile visiting fans complaining about the field and otherwise making nuisances of themselves and their reward for swarming the stadium in massive numbers should be sitting on frozen ass-murdering bleachers in a blizzard while Pat Fitzgerald orders 56 consecutive runs up the middle and the wildcat hiss-growl plays over the PA more or less constantly regardless of what is happening on the field.  There is an episode of the television show Nathan For You where he comes up with a way to advertise televisions for a dollar by imposing absurd conditions like forcing people to dress up in tuxedos and then crawl through a tiny door into a room where there is a live alligator, and these roughly approximate the ideal conditions required for Michigan or Wisconsin fans to see their teams beat up on Northwestern at Ryan Field.  

Northwestern officials prepare the hot dog concessions for an Iowa game

And despite the fact that Ryan Field is a football pit, I love that it is old as hell.  They've been playing Northwestern football there for nearly a century.  Granted, a large chunk of that century has been Northwestern getting embarrassingly clobbered, but why not embrace history.  Why does Northwestern, of all teams, need a shiny new stadium?  What does the administration think is going to happen here?  Will a new stadium all of a sudden make people show up rooting for this team?  Do they think people in Chicago will think oh Northwestern has a new stadium, actually those billboards are right this is now the Big Ten Team of the city that I'm in even though I went to Illinois?  Northwestern football as a product is perfectly matched to its stadium; for a Big Ten stadium it's easily accessible and exudes a shaggy charm that reflects the fact that it is really not a big deal at all and just sort of going on, which is a unique vibe for big-time college football.  I can understand some sort of renovation to prevent the stadium from collapsing on people or to stop bleachers from buckling and snaring fans' shins like a bear trap or putting up a net to stop kickers from braining people on the Randy Walker Terrace, but razing Ryan Field feels like an affront to everything this program stands for which is annoying people and making them uncomfortable.

THE LONG LEG OF THE LAW

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea. I did not do any research about this. But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vignettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

The gentlemen were still recovering from the previous night's Necktie Olympics at the Musth Club, an exercise that resulted in two whiplashes, one half-garroting, and a widespread plague of laryngitis when Barney Post-Duvet started leafing through the sporting news.  

"I say," said Post-Duvet, did you see that you could have gone in thirteen to one on Bruntingham defeating Grossharbor 28 nil?  What a spot of business that would have been."

"Do not say NIL in my company," said Rumpo Plainmash-Dorofice before storming out of the club.  When he got up we saw he was wearing the most preposterous trousers any of us had ever seen with an elaborate series of check marks and plaids that were so gigantic he was practically swimming in them.

In order to understand Runpo's distress, you should know that he has just returned from East Lansing, where his aunt Probity has a small cottage and likes to attend the autumn leaf season.  Rumpo generally tries to wriggle out of these outings when possible, often explaining to his aunt that the fall foliage tends to turn his nose into a plant producing sneezes and elaborate mucuses, although in general his greatest allergy involves missing the Plentham Stakes and old Pitney Pluvatt's annual ball where the boisterous attendees are regularly chased down from the chandeliers. This year, though, no amount of elaborate sneezing into handkerchiefs or notes from his friend Monty Manto who took several courses in chicken physiognomy and practically make him a physician that explain the dire effect of the leaves on poor Rumpo's health could dissuade her from demanding his presence.  So Rumpo went out to East Lansing prepared to subject himself to endless amounts of lectures on the flora and fauna from his aunt's roster of irrepressible bores.

But once he arrived in Michigan, Rumpo had a welcome surprise when he spotted his old school friend Gorge Blabbitt at an interminable lecture about saps at his aunt's country house.  Gorge, whose parents are on numerous boards and in too many societies to count, had become somewhat of an expert in being able to find some sort of amusement in these types of residencies; for Rumpo it was like being thrown into prison with a chap who is expecting the delivery of a file baked into a loaf of bread.  Gorge immediately motioned him to a side room where he pulled a small bottle that had been hidden in a bust of Earvin "Magic" Johnson.  

While Rumpo was a man with a large amount of sporting blood, Gorge was practically oozing the stuff.  This sometimes landed him in spots of trouble.  Rumpo had not, in fact, seen Gorge for several years.  It was rumored around the club that Gorge had tried to play the Yearwood Gang against Gramps Fester's operation but when Piper Puffer fell down in the third leg of the Welmingstor Stakes, both outfits began a friendly contest to capture Gorge and have him stuffed.  Rumpo had heard that Gorge took the opportunity to take a long holiday in areas of the world where they look down on taxidermy.

"Rumpo, it may look like we are trapped in an awful dungeon of nature walks," Gorge said, but I have found as sure of a money-maker than shaking a revolver at a bank teller.  They have college football here."

"College football? Is that the sport where the large lads have the thrashing pads and the bashing helmets?" Rumpo replied.

"Precisely.  And there is a mint to be made wagering on it," Gorge said.

"Well I enjoy shaking some notes in front of a blood sport as well as anyone, but I couldn't tell you a single thrashman from a bashing outfit.  How am I supposed to bet on a game I don't understand?" said Rumpo.

"It is simple enough when you know that regardless of what happens you will have the top players that make the other squad look like anaemic weaklings that could barely lift their arms for a smashing." Gorge said.

Gorge explained that he had gotten involved with a local booster named A. Pudrington Flost who scours the nation for the stoutest lads at the eating clubs and on the train-lifting circuit and invites them to play at this university.  Unfortunately, there are rival universities attempting to lure these giants into their own teams, and so Mr. Flost has devised a plan simply offer them incentives for their clobberous services.

"Do you mean you are part of a bribery scheme to lure youngsters with overstimulated pituitaries to your stadium?" Rumpo asked

"Preposterous," Gorge said. "We are not doing anything as gauche as luring them here with bundles of notes.  We are simply offering to outfit these gentlemen with such rare and unfortunate proportions with a well-fitting and stylish trouser as a courtesy for representing the old alma mater," Gorge said.

"This all seems a little bit rum, Gorge," said Rumpo. "Is this, strictly speaking, legal?"

"The law?" Gorge replied. "Well not any law on the books in the United States of America."  Gorge did mention that the trouser scheme did not technically adhere to a code that the university mandated in order to preserve the athletes' amateur status, but no one is particularly exercised about that.  He told Rumpo that he he was going to a deliver some trousers that afternoon to "Moose" Maszer and his steel biting club that afternoon under the guise of going to a conifer identification seminar and invited Rumpo along.  Rumpo, afraid that if he heard one more word about cartenoids he would have to hurl himself into the nearest creek, agreed to accompany him.

The two of them pulled up to the Greater Lansing Squashing and Thumping Club with a squeal of tires and a festive tooting of the klaxon and four of the largest people Rump had ever seen clambered out one by one ducking under the door to meet them.  Each was bigger than the next, with rectangular heads and shoulders that started around their ears and ended somewhere near their midriff.  They blotted out the sun.  The biggest one, whom Rumpo took to be Moose, frowned.

"You can't make all of this noise you blockhead. I've heard Duckett is nosing around here."

Buck Duckett, Gorge quickly explained, was a sort of detective in the employ of the athletic association who was forever trying to foil illicit trouser transactions and had become a pest to Gorge and his associates. Duckett was the zealous type, always prowling around in ditches or popping up unexpectedly from trees and once had been known to sleep for a week in a zoo enclosure with the facility's most ornery rhinoceros in order to prevent a cycling team from getting a haul of long underpants for free.  

"Don't worry about Duckett," Gorge said.  "This oaf would get hopelessly lost trying to find his own moustache."

"Is that so?" said one of the large men.  Rumpo noticed that he had looked less sturdy than the others, not more robust, but swaying and with a rubbery quality about him that Rumpo had assumed came from the diet of meats and tires that he must eat to keep up his mountainous physique.  But then his skin began to quiver and split.  A smaller man emerged as his bulk deflated and fell to the ground.  This wiry man slick with perspiration stood before them standing in front of what appeared to be a discarded rubber apparatus that made him look like a much larger fellow.  He ripped off a wig covering a bald head an then tore off a false mustache that had been concealing a smaller and more officious mustache.

"What appears to be going on here is a clear violation of NCAA trouser protocols," the man said.  It was the famous investigator Buck Duckett.  Moose stared at him and his mouth drooped open to resemble the approximate shape of a cave that Rumpo had been forced to enter at the behest of his aunt to study a bat habitat.  "I'm sorry Mr. Maszer.  I needed to do a spot of undercover work here as Caboose Cudlow in order to infiltrate your syndicate.  I assure that those tender things you said to me about your mother will remain in confidence."

Any thought that Gorge had of smiling at that remark retreated when Moose looked like he was about to crack his skull in between the folds of his brow.  

"Mr. Duckett, I believe you are misinformed," Gorge said.  My friend and I were simply coming by to show our chums the new style of trousers that we had purchased.  We were not going to hand them over.  As you can tell, these gentlemen are connoisseurs of the latest sartorial styles."

"If that is the case, let's see them on you," Duckett said.  Gorge and Rumpo looked at each other and began to put on the trousers.  They were enormous.  Each of them could probably fit entirely within a single leg with room for an umbrella.  The two of them stood desperately clinging to the enormous and garish garments scarcely able to move without causing them to fall down or allow an enterprising squirrel or forest pest to leap into them and rummage around for roughage.

"As you can see, the new style demands a bit of bagginess in the waist," Gorge said.  "Much like the Fabulous Five wore their short pants in their netball championships."

"The fact is there is nothing I can do for you ruffians," Duckett said.  "But this is all highly suspect.  Moose, I am afraid the NCAA is not going to allow you to play any football this season until we can get to the bottom of all of this."

Moose started to stomp towards Gorge and Rumpo.  It looked like he had been devising some rigorous new exercises that required the bending and stretching of human beings into new and anatomically impossible configurations.

"Well, if that's about it, I suppose we should be going. Moose, Mr. Duckett, good luck on the investigation and all of that," Gorge said as and Rumpo leaped into the automobile and sped away to get out of Michigan without any of their baggage.

At first when Rumpo returned to the club, he had been thankful to escape without his extremities used as an exercise apparatus, even if he had left all of his trousers behind and was forced to mince around in the gigantic footballer's slacks.  But his mood quickly darkened.  It appeared that the day after he had left, the athletic association had decided that football players like Moose and his prodigious ilk could accept all of the trousers they had liked as long as they were performing some sort of advertising.  This policy had been called name, image, and likeness or NIL He also got a cable from his aunt saying that she had called him to Michigan in order to give him a tidy some of monies she needed to dispose of for tax purposes that would have kept him in the black through the West Manglian Stakes, but due to his abrupt departure that had caused so much embarrassment in front of Professor Yorpling she had decided instead to donate it to a wolverine sanctuary.  His bank account was now close to nil as well.

Hey! Wha Happen?

Sometime on Saturday afternoon, Northwestern lost a football game to the Southern Illinois Salukis.  I did not know this happened.  I spent the day oblivious to the ominous things happening just up the Lake Michigan coast as the 0-2 Football Championship Subdivision SIU Salukis were painstakingly taking apart Northwestern in their home stadium in front of what I can presume were several Northwestern fans.  I taped the game, intending to watch it that night, but instead I checked the score and there it was: SIU 31, Northwestern 24.  I have not watched a single second of this game.

 

I had Werner Herzog listen to the broadcast to tell me what happened, but I am not sure I believe him when he says that everyone was murdered by the cold, unfeeling hand of nature

This is not the type of blog where I pretend to be a Football Person who analyzes the All 22 and tells you about blocking schemes and look at that guy fire off the line of scrimmage there, see he's just using the classic claimjumper's squat there with his outside leverage.  I have written blogs off of illegal streams, radio feeds half listened to by cleaning, and obsessively following one of those ESPN game casts where the little football moves around on arrows like a Family Circus cartoon.  But I don't really feel the need to analyze this game to see what went wrong when the thing that went wrong is that Northwestern lost to Southern Illinois.

I would say that this game, combined with the Duke game, and combined with the fact that the Wildcats' big win over the world-famous Nebraska Corn Huskers is looking less and less impressive as it becomes obvious that they are a bad team that was being held hostage by a maniac coach who was only there to demand his ceaseless Barf Tribute, augurs poorly for Northwestern, but the Wildcats are not a team that tends to augur.  Northwestern has gone to bowl games coming off seemingly impossible losses; this is by my count the third time Northwestern has handed a steel briefcase full of cash over to an FCS school and then gotten embarrassed by them in recent years.  In the past, it seems like nothing that happens in the non-conference season seems to matter to a Pat Fitzgerald football team.

One of the problems with rooting for Northwestern is that it bypasses one of the most joyful parts of college football fandom, which is people with absolutely insane takes hooting and hollering about football because there are so few fans that no one really covers them.  No one is too upset that Northwestern loses to an FCS team at home because for some reason everyone always expects the Wildcats to be bad even though it's been almost 30 years since they were putrid and Northwestern does not have nearly enough fans to get people to call into sports radio and go absolutely nutso.  

Some of the greatest pieces of audio art ever assembled was the Doug Buffone and Ed O'Bradovich Bears postgame show after the Bears inevitably got completely destroyed in a prime time game.  They were irate.  They were upset.  The callers were incoherent.  Everyone was screaming over a low din because they were inevitably broadcasting from an Elmhurst car dealership.  One time, they played the Giants and Jay Cutler got sacked nine times in the first half, and I discovered that the phrase "he got sacked nine times in da first half" was perhaps the greatest Chicago accent shibboleth that has ever been devised.  There is something satisfying and incredibly funny about people absolutely losing their minds over a sporting event that has gone badly. 

The idea of someone getting upset over a Northwestern sporting event is actually funny.  We got a meme out of it.  It's not like the Greater Chicagoland Region is bereft of maniac sports takes; the Chicago Bears alone are one of the most psychically deranging forces operating in the United States right now.  Would it be useful or satisfying to be able to tune into a sports radio station and hear someone braying trubinskyishly that Pat Fitzgerald is a fraud who was propped up by Mike Hankwitz?  Would it be interesting to hear eight different people call in all demanding to start a different quarterback, at least one which graduated six years ago?  Would it be tremendous to hear someone go on the air and criticize Pat Fitzgerald for wearing shorts?  

Actually that probably would not be very useful, as funny as it would be.  Now Northwestern is heavily favored over another team in a non-power five division that is coming into Ryan Field to ruin the Wildcats' day.

TIGERBLOG

It's 1997 in Primorye, a lightly-populated outpost in the far eastern outskirts of Russia in the taiga and a man is dead.  There is no doubt what has happened to him because only one thing looks like that.  It was a tiger attack.  The victim had been a poacher, the tiger the most valuable commodity available.  The question that immediately comes up among the local community and to the Inspection Tiger team that comes to investigate the attack is why the tiger had come for this man, why it waited for him, and whether it would be satisfied with this kill or come back.   

John Vaillant's The Tiger is about this attack, but it is also about Primorye and about the relationship of human beings to tigers and whether people's innate desire to destroy is an innate part of millenia living as prey.  It shares a lot with the other tiger attack book I reviewed earlier in this blog, Dane Hucklebridge's No Beast So Fierce about the infamous Champawat tiger that has traditionally been blamed for more than 400 kills in India and Nepal around the turn of the twentieth century.  Both books share a fascination with the horrifying efficiency and brutality of tigers as predators.  Both center a search and hunt for a maneating tiger.  Both use goofy sports analogies: for Hucklebridge a tiger is the middle linebacker of the animal kingdom, while Vaillant describes the tiger's head and limbs as a basketball team with the jaws as the center, the front paws as the forwards and the back limbs as the guards.  And both books seek to situate tiger attacks in the context of environmental change and despoliation and the political and economic changes that began to pressure tigers into more conflict with people.

For Hucklebridge, the main force that created the Champawat tiger and other man-eaters was colonialism as British policies increased cultivation and decrease the tigers' natural habitat that sent them in an increasing collision course with villages.  For Vaillant, the chief issue is perestroika, liberalization of the Soviet economy under Gorbachev, and the general chaos that came with the Soviet Union's dissolution in the 1990s.  Vaillant describes Primorye, at all times a hardscrabble border area, as one where the very meager supports from Soviet logging and energy companies in the 1980s completely collapsed and left many residents in a desperate struggle to survive off the taiga by foraging nuts, hunting and trapping whatever game they could find, and poaching.  Tigers came to represent a massive windfall.  Some hunters, according to Vaillant, referred to them as "Toyotas" because that was the amount of money they could expect to get for killing one and selling it over the border in China.  This practice was incredibly risky-- not only was tiger hunting illegal, but an attempt to kill a tiger that does not succeed results in just about the worst thing the hunger could possibly imagine.  That's what Vladimir Markov, the tiger's victim, unfortunately proved.

Where the two books differ is that the attack on Markov happened relatively recently.  Vaillant was able to travel to Primorye and meet the people involved (interestingly, Vaillant reveals in the acknowledgements that he did not conduct the interviews himself because he does not speak Russian, so they were all conducted by a research assistant, which lends an interesting coloring to the immediate you are there narration).  He also could draw on a documentary about the incident.  Hucklebridge, on the other hand, relies a lot more on conjecture and has no living witnesses to speak to.  Vaillant also structures the book differently.  While Huckleridge's account of the Champawat tiger reads sometimes like a monster movie as the tiger terrorized an entire region unsure when it would strike next, Vaillant's book reads more like a detective novel.  Here the central question revolves around trying to figure out the tiger's motive, which requires him to spend a lot of time trying to understand exactly what a tiger's motives are, how tigers think, and the fascinating question of whether a tiger is capable of vengeance.

One interesting concept that frames Vaillant's attempts to understand the tiger is the umwelt, a term coined by Jokob von Uexkull.  As Vaillant describes it, the umwelt is an organism's bubble of relevant things it can sense, understand, and perceive as important; within each umgebung, von Uexkull's word for the natural world, each creature has its own umwelt.

In the umebung of a city sidewalk, for example, a dog owner's umwelt would differ greatly from that of her dog's in that, while she might be keenly aware of a SALE sign in a window, a policeman coming toward her, or a broken bottle in her path, the dog would focus on the gust of cooked meat emanating from a restaurant's exhaust fan, the urine on a fire hydrant, and the doughnut crumbs next to he broken bottle.  Objectively, these two creatures inhabit the same umgebung, but their individual umwelten give them radically different experiences of it.

Vaillant argues that the residents of Primorye who depended on the taiga necessarily had to learn about the tiger's umwelt and generally could come to an uneasy peace with the tigers by understanding the tigers' boundaries and limits and their own place within the tiger's kingdom.  Markov also understood these things, but Vaillant suggests that he became desperate enough to believe he could overcome them.

If you are going to read one book on tiger attacks, I recommend The Tiger. Vaillant makes the story more suspenseful, he's closer to the people in it, and the questions he asks about people, the surrounding environment, and the functions of human behavior are more interesting.  The way he switches from flinty detective prose surrounding Yuri Trush, the local head of Inspection Tiger to lyrical contemplations about the meaning of human beings' descent from trees onto deadly ground is a better read.  It also feels to me that a lot of the scientific points Vaillant is making are sort of bullshitty, but I am not an animal behavior scientist, so that doesn't bother me.  There's also a harder edge and intensity to The Tiger and the prose is less forced.  There's nothing wrong with No Beast So Fierce.  These are two different books trying to do two different things and covering vastly different scales of time and polities.  At the same time, the politics and issues of conservation and of people's role preventing the eradication of tigers from the face of the Earth in both books converge in a fascinating way as two books that spend an inordinate amount of time discussing tigers as monsters and detailing the various unpleasant ways that a person encountering an angry tiger will be crushed, disemboweled, and devoured end up coming to the conclusion that people should do everything possible to keep them around.

BUCK DUCKETT SECTION

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea. I did not do any research about this. But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vignettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

1. 

There was not a lot of shade by the shuttle stop outside NCAA Headquarters and by the time the bus came, the official NCAA track suit I had that was issued to all employees was soaked.  It was supposed to wick away sweat, but it was outwicked, and my hair, which was recently trimmed to NCAA specifications, was not stopping it from trickling into my eyes and around my lips.  When the shuttle finally came, it felt like I had been thrown into a meat freezer.  This was around '18, back before the Reorganization.(1)

The orientation process had been a blur.  They flashed pictures of athletes wearing different pairs of pants at us and we had three seconds to determine if they were legal, illegal, or suspect.  They did not tell us how we did, but after four hours of this, about two-thirds of us were summoned into a room and told to gather our things and get on the bus to Plainfield.  

The NCAA's Pants, Shoes, and Apparel Processing Facility was temporarily located in Plainfield after the Tattoo, Jewelry, and Automobile section expanded.  It was a converted warehouse, and they had just screwed cubicles into the ground.  Everything echoed.  There was a single phone connected to the Section Head, Lynn Mealer who never stopped scowling about the relocation, and when it rang it sound like a piercing wail.  

Our job was simple, Mealer said to us, her voice booming like an offstage deity in a play.  We do not investigate.  We do not even try to investigate.  The Investigation Section back in Indy did all of the stakeouts, the following, the disguises, the shootouts on the docks.  We just watched.  All of us had a monitor and all day we looked at pictures and video of players' pants(2) and tried to determine if something seemed off.  If it was, we'd flag it and it would go to investigations for a second look.  At 9 AM you got your first feed.  No music, no radio, no conversation except for designated break areas.  You will learn how to differentiate brands and cuts of pants and you will know how much they cost and you will memorize the Pants Cost Matrix in the third tab of your binder, and if you start flagging too many normal pants, the investigators will come down here.  You don't want to see Duckett or talk to him, believe me.  You're the tip of the spear, she said.  When she was done, I asked to call my probation officer.  

My parents really wanted me to be good at football.  My father was all state in Ohio, my mom's brother's played DII ball, and I was good at running kids over in peewee football.  But I hated the game.  I hated the practice, I hated hitting people, I hated my dad, and I hated how Coach Tremppo told me I was lousy player and lousy kid and I was only on the team because he needed someone on the team to get shoved around.  What football did get me was access to players, and get me close to Price Glauker, who got me into pants.  Glauker's uncle was a booster with a pants warehouse.  Pretty soon, we had the whole team outfitted illegally and were moving onto the junior college the next town over.  The summer of my senior year, I spent the entire time driving from college town to college town giving away bags of pants and shorts to recruits and anyone on the teams who would take them, even the punters.  It was a punter that got me.  I didn't know he had washed out the team and got picked up the The A.(3)  The NCAA judge told me if I wanted to go to college I would be sentenced to working for the NCAA(4).

We all coped with the processing differently.  I started to see pants every time I closed my eyes.  Every time I left the Facility, I was immediately scanning everyone's pants and making notes.  At least four times, someone threatened to hit me, and that's when I generally stopped leaving the apartment complex. Gerry Wicks stopped wearing them altogether.  Even in the dead of winter, he was in shorts.  He was standing in a shin-high snow drift waiting for the shuttle from our Plainfield apartment complex, the Lamplighter, shivering, his legs turning red and raw but he would not put on a single pant, not even after a series of memos then meetings, then threatened legal action and counter-action.  Harry Denn was the only one who wanted to be there and he only talked about pants.  He checked into his station with a crisp pencil, he talked about pants on breaks, he talked about pants at lunch; I once saw him looking at pants Perry Crossing with a weird little smile on his face, his eyeballs sort of rolled up into his head.  It was like that for weeks before no one would talk to him anymore.  We just could not bear it.  He seemed to understand that, that his life would consist finding the exact amount of pants conversation anyone could bear before being relegated to his odd little world.  He would hit the buttons on his Feed with his eyes blissfully closed, and we could never figure out how he did it.  He hit the button and took small, strangled breaths.

2.

The phone rang buzzed in the car.  Duckett still had a flip phone and the NCAA made him turn it on but he could not answer it.  He was motionless under a blanket and wide receiver Darryl Mant was about to get some pants from a booster from the trunk, but it did not have any pants, but had Buck Duckett ready to spring into action.  The phone buzzed again, but there was also a crack of daylight.

It was another meeting he had missed.  Duckett knew that he could not avoid the Reorganization forever by hiding out in the field, but he was going to try as hard as he could.  Duckett's section chief Ed Nackro had been telling him that things were coming crashing down.  "Duckett, it's over for pants," Nackro said to him.  But Nackro had been saying that since '05, when they moved Pants over to that warehouse in Plainfield, and here they were still reeling in busts and suspensions and vacating basketball games.(5) 

Duckett had tried to get out of pants once.  He wanted cars.  Everyone in the entire section wanted cars.  He put his head down and did his best with pants.  The Deputy Vice President of Investigations cited him for his "dogged pursuit of pants violators."  And when they announced the promotions to Automobiles the next year, he was still in pants.  Instead, the promotion went to Phil Prompt, who made fewer busts but was at more meetings.  Prompt was great in meetings.  He always wanted to add technology; Prompt actually created the idea of Processing.  Processing produced few leads, that is far fewer than Duckett's network of pants informants in athletic departments and malls, but the NCAA wanted to move towards computers while Duckett was still filing reports in carbon.  After that, he got put on another reorganization committee, but he could not stand the endless power points and the meetings, the whole time there were pipelines of pants shooting through underground networks while they talked about more efficient ways to fill out forms.(6)

Now, though, Duckett had heard that they were going to legalize it all.  Duckett could not think about it.  He came in every day and looked at his corkboards, and talked to his informants.  His sources did not have much to say anymore other than questions about why he was still doing this.  Every day, ominous memos about The Reorganization piled up on his desk.  

1. The Reorganization was a massive reallocation of NCAA resources away from its Invetigations and Processing sections to its Sponsorships and Marketing sections.  In one stroke of a pen, 14 section heads were merged into other departments, 13 were bought out, and one, the Tattoos Investigation Section head Luther Varnich, disappeared completely with a briefcase of sensitive documents which were later recovered at the crash site outside a regional airport in Honduras.  

2. The Feed was introduced in 2005 as a more efficient way to monitor athletes and prevent costly and dangerous undercover missions.  It came as a result of a bureaucratic war that saw Investigations Deputy Section Head Walt Malt arrested after trying to sabotage the Feed servers with homemade explosives.  The explosion took head of Feed Security Irving Luarent's right hand, which he replaced with a menacing but useless claw.

3. Employess of the NCAA referred to it at the time as "The A."

4. The case was the first known attempt by a judge to sentence a defendant to work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association.  This judge, A. Barbara Three, had run on a reelection platform of cracking down on pants.  The next time she tried it, it resulted in the landmark case NCAA vs. Oprock, which got all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled 9-0 that this kind of sentencing was impossible and absurd.  The judge resigned.  Jimmy Oprock had lawyers and not parents who just told him to sign whatever they put in front of him.  Oprock later sued and won $468,000 for his trouble.  By this time, I had been finished with the Processing Facility for six years.

5. Buck Duckett's massive bust of the A&M Ring caused the school to vacate 22 wins in the season and take down an NIT Participant banner.  They gave Duckett a replica banner to hang in his office, but he never put it up.  It was the largest pants bust in NCAA history, with 75 pairs of illegal pants displayed for the TV cameras and Duckett grimacing through a press conference where he refused to speak.

6. To be more specific, the NCAA Investigation Section Reporting Meeting Series from April 2007 to February 2008 met to determine whether they should switch from the standard V-238 Violations Form for student-athletes caught with contraband which was then filed in a database to a V-500 Series report that was on a newer system and allowed tracking from other departments, which could be cross referenced into larger investigations and flagged for the Special Section, which would allow for much larger investigations and possible activation of the armed Enforcement Section.  The issue was whether the increased efficiency would be counterbalanced by the need to retrain all Investigation Sections and whether the availability of information would allow for investigations to be compromised.  This was not a concern when the Meeting Series was initiated in 2005, but in the next year, an internal NCAA mole connected to a powerful sports agency destroyed 38 active shoe investigations before the mole was chased onto the Chase Tower and he plummeted to his death.

Questions Asked, Questions Answered

Last week, the central question from this blog other than why I continue to post increasingly more deranged stories about a fictional NCAA pants inspector to diminishing returns was whether Northwestern had shown up in Ireland with a renewed purpose and got back on track or whether Nebraska was it the midst of a profound psychic collapse involving their maniacal Barf Coach.  Last Saturday, Northwestern struggled and then rallied against an apparently unbeatable Duke team in a genuinely insane game while Nebraska lost to the Sun Belt's Georgia Southern.  The Huskers could not take it anymore and fired Frost.  I believe when a coach gets fired three games into the season it is fitting to say that they fired his ass.  His ass is now toast.

Frosts's firing closes the book on the reigning funniest coach in the Big Ten.  He came back to the Huskers as a conquering local hero made good after leading the University of Central Florida to an undefeated season, a claimed national championship, and the only parade in Disney World that could be described as spiteful.  Then he got to the Big Ten and went insane.  In the midst of the pandemic, he joined with the conference's most strident meat restaurant protestors and demanded to play football when the Big Ten initially cancelled the season.  He threatened to go rogue and start barnstorming against other conferences.  When the Big Ten decided to play in 2020, Nebraska sucked and got destroyed week after week and got lambasted on twitter by a miserable Illinois team in the death throes of the Lovie Smith era.  He even got show caused by the NCAA for using an Illegal Special Teams Coach, which, like most NCAA violations, is an incredibly stupid and pointless penalty by a toothless organization just trying to get someone for breaking its fake rules, but it is still funny to imagine Frost putting a guy in the Herbie Husker costume who is secretly relaying punt coverages to the booth before he is chased by an NCAA Investigator in a pursuit that involves throwing down shelves and giant cardboard boxes and two Nebraska officials carrying a giant pane of glass through the tunnel for no apparent reason.   

Nebraska got so angry at Frost for his incompetence and general boobery that they incurred millions of dollars of extra penalties to fire him before October first.  They didn't care.  They are giving him a reportedly $7.5 million extra dollars for him to get the fuck out.  That' a lot of money for being bad at coaching college football, but the Scott Frost Hating Community can take solace in the fact that football coaching is a pathological condition and Frost's riches probably don't compensate him for the fact that he doesn't get to make teenagers barf anymore and be a big swinging dick around Lincoln and get up at press conferences every week to condescend to reporters asking him why he his team just ate shit again. 

Scott Frost's greatest crime is being named Scott Frost and never, not once, doing Arnold Mr. Freeze Voice

The Frost firing is a disaster for this blog.  I have not had a villain coach so inept and deeply strange to write about since the glory days of the notorious Beck Man.  Nebraska may or may not hire their way out of their program's very enjoyable quagmire; they almost certainly will not hire a coach this funny.  I don't know what happens to Frost after this meltdown, but I'm sure we have not seen the last of him.  Most importantly, I urge that a Big Ten West team immediately hires another maniac.

NORTHWESTERN IS BECOMING THE TEAM THAT CANNOT BEAT DUKE AT FOOTBALL

Is Northwestern-Duke a rivalry? Is Duke football somehow becoming the Wildcats' most hated nonconference opponent?  It it time to start fearing that D logo on the schedule and not just because the immediate image it conjures up is Coach Kshevsky making the most unpleasant face a human being has ever managed to knit its eyebrows and nostrils into?  

Northwestern has now lost four in a row to Duke.  They have lost with very good teams (the ten-win 2017 team and Big Ten West champion 2018 team) and with very bad teams.  The last two games have gone almost identically.  In each game, Duke raced to an early lead before stymieing a inspiring late Northwestern comeback.  Last Saturday, the 'Cats spotted the Blue Devils a 21 point lead behind a defense that, like last year, seemed unable to stop Duke from doing anything.  But in the second half, Northwestern managed to finally figure out how to get some stops and draw closer as the offense, led by Ryan Hilinsky and Evan Hull, got the 'Cats within striking distance and moved the loss from frustrating blowout to painful but also somehow funny hijinks.

After a week off, the defense seemed to come out a bit rusty

The game seemed to be over with a Northwestern interception down five with less than four minutes left.  The defense managed a goal line stand to only allow a field goal and remain technically alive with less than a minute and a half left.  Hilinsky and Hull somehow led a drive and with only 12 seconds left and no timeouts, Bajakian, cackling in the press box, called an obviously insane running back draw up the middle that somehow worked.  It appeared that Hull had powered through to the goalline leaving Northwestern only a two point conversion shy of tying the game.  Until it didn't.  Five minutes before that I didn't think Northwestern had any chance of getting that close.  But I am refusing to let this game be a referendum on Northwestern's season because Duke somehow is a miniboss for Northwestern football, and apparently will be for the next two years until Pat Fitzgerald can figure out how to beat this team and presumably buy a stuffed animal monkey and performatively destroy it.

This week, Northwestern takes on Southern Illinois.  The FCS Salukis are 0-2 after getting crushed by Incarnate Word and losing a heartbreaker to Southeast Missouri.  Generally, even Northwestern's most disappointing recent vintages have managed to convincingly beat up on FCS opponents with the exception of that extremely funny loss to Illinois State a few years ago, so even a commanding win probably won't tell us much about the team this season.  The most important thing this represents is their best chance at win number two of the six desperately needed for a mediocre bowl game played on the roof of a meat warehouse.  

BUCK DUCKETT IN THE ADVENTURES OF THE SPECKLED HEM

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea.  I did not do any research about this.  But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vingettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

 Of the many cases and adventures on which I have accompanied my friend Buck Duckett, there are few I can recall that vexed him and tested him as arduously of the matter involving “Clump” Hardley and his trouser predicament that scandalized the entire country. The features of this particular situation were so shocking and so outré that it would be irresponsible of me not to chronicle Buck Duckett’s methods and my own small contributions that led to the astonishing revelations that had gripped the papers for months.

It was a languid autumn afternoon when I found myself near the flat I used to share with Buck Duckett. My medical slapping practice had been growing and I spent most of my days whacking people with Railway Spine and headbutting sufferers of various Suppressed Gouts, the result of which was that I had seen far less of Duckett than I cared to. A fortuitous housecall to kick a man in the spleen took me back to the old neighborhood in Indianapolis’s Fog District, and I decided to call on my old friend. 

When I arrived, Buck Duckett was sitting on a couch, his brow furrowed, staring at a pair of trousers with a curious design riding up the hem. “Ah, Pladd, it is good for you to look in on me after vigorously kicking that rheumy man with the cat over on St. Gabbert’s street. I see that the practice is doing well, although you do not seem to believe it yourself. You also left your copy of The Medical Pugilist at Mr Dunnet’s shop,” he said. Even though I had lived with Duckett and saw his methods amaze and stupefy his callers, it was still mystifying when he turned his attention to me, and, despite my attempt to reign in my look of befuddlement, he still whirled on me and began his instruction.

“Pladd surely by now you are familiar with the processes and the simple logic that reveals everything to me with a quick glance at your trousers,” Duckett said. “The seams on your bottom are strained in a way that only comes from vigorous kicking, which I understand is still the latest treatment for rheumatisms. And surely you can see your legs are covered in cat hairs, while you would never keep such an animal at home. The bottoms of your cuffs are stained with gravel that you only see from public works projects, precisely like the one that has the footpaths on St. Gabbert street in a rough condition,” he said, while loading up his lip with mouth tobacco.

“As for the state of your practice,” he continued, “it’s all written there on your slacks.” The backs of your legs, where one expects to see an indication from a hard cab bench, are smooth, which means that you can afford the more expensive, plusher cabs. And your trousers have been let out some, which suggests that you are prospering. But on the other hand, you have not replaced them. In fact, I see numerous small repairs that show that you have kept them, which indicates that you don’t trust your successes and are reluctant to spend money on new clothes.”

“Remarkable,” I said. “But how could you know about the periodical?”

“That is simple,” he said, before spitting a long spray of oral tobaccular juice into a filthy jug he kept for this purpose. “Your pocket reveals the unmistakable shape of Dr Wedcrumb’s Pipe Tobacco, which was featured in an advertisement as the most health-ful pipe tobacco for the vigorous-lunged man in the Medical Pugilist, which I can tell from the protrusion and the small ink stain that you had been carrying around in your right rear pocket. You certainly consulted it when you stopped at the only tobacconist you would visit in this neighborhood, which would undoubtedly be Mr Dunnet. It is all clear from your trousers. You can read them like a newspaper. I believe that the key to understanding a man is in Gluteal Phrenology, the study of the ridges and dimples in his buttocks, but it is nearly impossible to examine a live subject this way. Therefore one must turn to the trousers. In fact, I have written a monograph on it.”

A sudden rasp at the door interrupted the conversation. “Oh, that must be Inspector Fistclough.”

Inspector Fistclough of the N.C.A.A. had worked there with Duckett until Duckett, dissatisfied with the organization’s unscientific method and the new name, image, and likeness policies, left to work as a consultant to pursue trouser related intrigues. But from time to time, Fistclough still asked for Duckett’s advice on more peculiar matters.

Firstclough was a tall, gangly man whose scalp, despite his young age, was advancing on all fronts against his hair and had two tufts pinned into a defensive position just above the ears. Normally a robust man who was all too eager to throw about ruffians who had run afoul of N.C.A.A. policies– he once chased an entire triangular weightlifting team who had been accepting free single-strap singlets into the side of a train– but today he stood before Duckett as a pale and ghostly spectre.

“Have you seen anything in those trousers, Mr Duckett?” Fistclough said, rubbing his arm.

“I do believe these trousers reveal some points of interest, but perhaps some fresh details will come to light if you recite the tale again, this time to Dr Pladd,” Duckett said.

“It is still the most puzzling thing I have ever seen,” said Inspector Fistclough. Now he began rubbing his leg. “We were down on the docks. You see, Dr Pladd, since the new policy, the athletes are now allowed to sell and receive shipments of trousers, short pants, breeches, and pantaloons, but the N.C.A.A. inspects processes, and stamps each article to make everything is above board. No more chasing croquet teams getting free trews into the moors.  Two days ago, we received a shipment of trousers. Ordinary, except for a strange stripe along the hemline. They were for the great rugbyist 'Clump' Hardley.”

“The one who broke the record for most bashings in a single thrashing?” I asked. His feats had been featured in all of the papers.

“The very same, Dr Pladd,” the inspector said. “The records all appeared to be in order, so we quickly checked to see if the trousers were concealing anything.”

“And what sorts of objects to you suspect may be secreted within the them?” Duckett asked.

“We see all various manner of things,” Inspector Fistclough said. “Precious stones, curios, notes. Once we found entire sets of illegal trousers sewn into the very slacks we were inspecting.”

“We moved the crates to a staging area behind the docks and fitted with a paper seal. That is standard procedure. The area remains under constant watch.”

“But not constant this time,” Duckett said.

The inspector lowered his head. “No I am afraid not this time. I called Sergeant Bithe off his post. In one of the crates, the trousers seemed to be moving oddly, nearly writhing. I was afraid that they could be concealing snakes. This had happened several weeks ago. A junior inspector had been badly squeezed and we needed our top bludgeoning unit to free him. I needed all available men with sticks.”

“But you did not find any snakes,” Duckett said.

“No sir,” replied Fistclough. There appeared to be some sort of machinery manipulating the trousers to make it seem like it could be snakes. Bithe was gone for maybe three minutes at most. The rest of the time the crate of trousers was under his watch. But when we went to move them later, the crates were light. We opened them and they were gone. Every last pair.”

“As you can see, Dr Pladd, a very curious set of circumstances,” Duckett said.

“Mr Duckett, please tell me you have unearthed some sort of clue to retrieve these trousers," the Inspector said, scratching at his face.

“Inspector Fistclough, there are certain points of interest in this case that I believe may lend themselves to a scientific explanation. There is only one person I believe fiendish and daring enough to have seized this shipment in this way, one person cunning enough to make a mockery of the entire N.C.A.A. and Mr “Clump” Hardley. Dr Pladd, I believe this may be the work of Jacopo Manheaven. The Napoleon of Pants."

Is Northwestern Good or is Nebraska in a Grim State of Psychological Collapse

Lost in the thrum of the opener this season in the midst of clumsily shoehorned Irish references and the excitement from a stadium losing control of its payment system to douse spectators in unlimited free beer and the general celebration of Scott Frost's various ineptitudes and nincompooperies is the question of whether Northwestern might actually be kind of good.  That is to say, have the Wildcats discovered a passing attack and brought back their Big Ten-irritating defense enough to get back return to the Fauxltry Powdered Gravy Substitute Bowl or even the Mail Order Nunchuks (For Display Only) Bowl played at an abandoned Discovery Zone?

Here's something that happened in the first half: Ryan Hilinsky, whose identity as starting quarterback was hidden by Pat Fitzgerald by having all passers practice in trench coats and call cadences using the vocal distortion the news uses for mob witnesses absolutely torched Nebraska's defense.  Receivers Malik Washington and Illinois Turn-Hat Donny Navarro were always open. And in the second half, Northwestern's offensive line picked up Nebraska's defense and carried it around like a sack of groceries while the Wildcats' suddenly extremely scary cadre of running backs gobbled up yardage.

Last year's offense was particularly gruesome, but under Fitzgerald the offense has rarely been the point.  Northwestern has flourished when its offensive playbook looked like one of those surrealist toilet paintings.  Last year, the defense also struggled with the departure of its guru Mike Hankwitz and several key upperclassman stalwarts, and it looked like that trend might continue into 2022 as Nebraska quarterback Casey Thompson flung the ball around and made insane video game physics throws on broken plays where he was somehow throwing howitzer passes while moving backwards.  But in the second half, something changed.  Thompson began to falter.  The Wildcats began to get pressure on Nebraska's offensive line, which came out of the locker room all barfed out.  Thompson threw two backbreaking interceptions including one that sealed the win for the 'Cats as Frost fled the premises being pursued by Husker fans who had filled up on free beer and were wielding their corn hats with ill intent.

Frost turns around in terror as he is cornered by Nebraska fans who have formed up in a corn hat testudo formation.

The Duke game should be an interesting test for Northwestern because it will be their first contest this season against a normal team.  I don't know how good Duke is, but it will be a football team that is playing football and not a vaguely football-themed organization in the midst of a deranging psychic collapse.  Scott Frost is the anti-Northwestern; while Fitzgerald frugally aims to win by exactly as many points as necessary with no waste, Frost seems determined to choke as narrowly as possible, and his teams dig deep into an unlimited reservoir of boneheaded special teams gaffes, comically malfunctioning trick plays, and horrendous turnovers at the worst possible moment that can be explained only by deliberate sabotage, hypnosis, or possibly a combination of the two in a nightmarish Manchurian Corndidate Scenario.  The Duke game should show if Northwestern is good enough to win against the types of Big Ten West teams it will need to beat in order to play in December or if they are simply good enough to stand back and allow Frost and the Huskers to sink into madness and despair.

THAT FEELING...WHEN YOU KNOW ME, AL

Ring Lardner covered the Cubs and White Sox in the early twentieth century for a few different papers, but he found the best way to convey the spirit of baseball in those early tumultuous years was not through beat reporting or interviews but from from a series of fake letters written by an oaf.  These collections of letters from fictional pitcher Jack Keefe to his friend Al back home in Bedford, Indiana after joining the White Sox as he tries to establish himself with a Major League pitcher but mainly gets swindled, humiliated, and drunk.  Lardner surrounds Keefe with real life baseball personalities like Charles Comiskey, Kid Gleason, and opponents like Ty Cobb and Christy Matthewson.  Given how popular the series became, I am surprised Ty Cobb didn't try to spike Lardner in his office or hijack and train and try to drive it into him.  

Lardner depicts Keefe as a lazy, stubborn, and prideful jerk who refuses to listen to anyone, constantly searches for excuses for his mistakes including blaming teammates for what he sees as fielding ineptitude, and is quick to anger and ineptly threaten to fight people, but who remains sort of lovable and charming because of the incredible scope of his gullibility.  Lardner has one consistent bit and that is having Keefe describe how he absolutely refuses to do something under any circumstances in one letter and then immediately in the next letter describing how he is doing all of that enthusiastically by regurgitating whatever bullshit someone fed him in order to change his mind.  That is how he negotiates his contract with Comiskey and how he tries and fails to go to the Federal League; it is how he ends up married.  It's one of those devices that starts off as amusing and then gets old when you figure out that is going to happen in every letter and then gets extremely funny as it just keeps happening over and over again to an oblivious Keefe who keeps running into tunnels painted on the side of a mountain and then fuming several colorful but deliberately grammatically desolate letters later about his hatred of left-handed pitchers.

What distinguishes Lardner is the dialogue, which is conveyed in brilliantly rambling passages from Keefe.  Here's an example from when he returns to spring training after ineptly trying to force his way onto the Tigers and meets with Sox coach Kid Gleason:

He says Are you in shape? And I told him Yes I am. He says Yes you look in shape like a barrel.  I says They is not no fat on me and if I am a little bit bigger than last year it is because my mussels is bigger.  He says Yes your stumach mussels is emense and you must of gave them plenty of exercise. Wait till Bodie sees you and he will want to stick round you all the time because you make him look like a broom straw or something.  I let him kid me along because what is the use of getting mad at him? And besides is all O.K. even if he is a little rough.

Ping Bodie, who Keefe makes look like a broom stick or something.
 

You Know Me, Al is only a small fraction of the Busher's Letters series because they were so popular.  According to Wikipedia, Lardner wrote dozens more, only a few of which were anthologized; the immediate sequel, which has Keefe swearing up and down that he will absolutely not go on an all-star world tour covers his inevitable time on that world tour.  There was apparently a series where Keefe goes into the army and fights in World War I where I imagine he is persuaded to go over the top dozens of times a day after dubious promises of increased pay or because a field officer convinced him that a German machine gun nest was operated by former Cub Fritz Mollwitz.  Larnder seemed to grow increasingly resentful of the Busher content fans demanded, which included a syndicated newspaper comic.

Here's an example of the comic which also gives a pretty decent sense of what the book is like, found here.

As Rob Manfred reaches his apotheosis of Rules Mongering and ushers in all sorts of clocks and restrictions on what areas of the field players are allowed to be on, it raises the question of to what extent the baseball in a book like You Know Me, Al will even be legible in the future.  One of the appeals of the game is that its ruleset has remained relatively static when compared to the other major popular sports in the United States; a football game from 1914 is for all intents and purposes a different game then what you see today, whereas the baseball scenes that Lardner narrates through Keefe's self-aggrandizement and various feuds and grudges that he believes are causing all of his problems largely, with exceptions for Keefe using increasing darkness to his advantage and pitchers hitting the ball with bats, translate to modern baseball fans.  One major change, though, would be Keefe's role, where instead of waiting around for a start, he would be bouncing in between the minors and the majors to throw two innings before being sent back down only to wait for the next injury.  I'm sure Keefe would have a lot to say about that, to Al.

ENTER THE SERPENT'S MAW: A BUCK DUCKETT NOVEL

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea.  I did not do any research about this.  But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vingettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator. 

THE YACHT "LADY OF NUTZ"

THE DALMATIAN COAST

"You don't have to go to all this trouble, Belly," the man in the shiny suit said, gesturing to a lavish spread of caviars and fancy cheeses in the grand ballroom of the Lady of Nutz, a 148-foot yacht anchored in the Adriatic.

"This isn't for you, Jan," H.S. Belton Waynesneed, Jr. said.  Belly was for his buddies, but not for Jan.  "I have guests. And I told you I don't want you hanging around."

"And here I thought we were becoming such good friends," Jan said, putting his feet up on a table that cost more than his house. He had immaculately groomed stubble and an untraceable accent.  "Very well, we talk business first."

"Let me see the stuff," Waynesneed said.

"I think you will find the merchandise is top quality." Jan opened a briefcase. Inside was a pair of almost impossibly fancy pants. "What you're looking at is the ultimate in luxury trouser. Fabrics so fine they are illegal in your country.  Top designers. Hand-stitched.  These are clean. No serial numbers, no factory labels. Untraceable."

"And you have them ready to go for the whole team? I sent you those measurements."

"To the inch. Even the... what do you call it, the kicker." Jan smiled. "You know in my country they are all the kicker."

Waynesneed handed him a steel briefcase.  "You're one slippery son-of-a-bitch, I'll give you that."

Jan opened it and smiled. "May I?" he said, but he was already wrist deep in rocquefort. A shadow moved over his face from another ship gliding into the harbor.

"You make me sick," Waynesneed said. "Take the money and get the hell off my ship."  The faint sound of thumping music began to oontz-oontz its way through the walls.  "Sounds like my guests are here. Beat it."

The other ship started to slowly turn to face the Lady of Nutz.

"Next time it's double," Jan said, wiping off his hand. "Pants scene is getting more dangerous every day.  I nearly lost my own, you know what you put on the truck..."

"I don't care what kind of sick shit you to do get me the pants. I told you I don't want to know details. I pay you for the pants... and the discretion."

Suddenly, a klaxon blared throughout the shit. "Goddamn it, I told the captain I wanted that damn aoogah horn disabled. I'm not here to get aoogahed on my own damn..."

The captain burst in. "Signore!" he said. "Signore, we need to..."

"Goddamn it I told you for the last time..." Waynesneed said, before the captain cut him off.

"Signore, it's a torped..."

NCAA HEADQUARTERS

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

"Duckett, my office." It was Quinn Chavous, the head of Duckett's N.P.I.S. (NCAA Pants Investigator Service), part of the NCAA's larger I.B.I.B. (Illegal Benefits Investigation Bureau) as part of the Joint P.T.S.J. Taskforce investigating pants, tattoos, shoes, and jewelry. Chavous answered only to bureau chief Jeff van Steve, and he only answered to Mark Emmert who only answered to God.  

"I got the State Department breathing down my neck wanting to know how a goddamn NCAA asset-- your asset, by the way-- got torpedoed off the coast of Croatia," he said.  "Goddammit."

Henry Smorris Belton Waynesneed, Jr. was the president of the nation's top artificial truck testicle company.  It now controlled 97 percent of the artificial truck testicle market after brutally crushing or acquiring three competitors and a breakaway novelty "only the shaft" company during a decades-long war in the truck testicle industry that had cost two executives their lives and one CEO his actual testicles.  But that had been H.S. Belton Waynesneed, Sr.'s war.  The younger Waynensneed was raised in luxury and installed in the top job after his father's fifth heart attack.  Waynesneed, Jr. at first attacked his position with the raw ambition of youth, but after a disastrous and expensive attempt to market various truck testicle characters as part of a Saturday morning cartoon and merchandise empire nearly plunged the company into bankruptcy, he was encouraged to step into a more ceremonial role while the board took over the company's everyday operations.  Waynesneed, Jr. was fine with that.  It left him more time for his true priority: football.

Over the past several years, Waynesneed, Jr. leveraged his enormous fortune and endless appetite for football into a position as the most powerful booster at his alma mater. And soon he found that it wasn't enough for the practice field to bear his name or for him to have a private suite with a personal touchdown bell that only he was allowed to ring.  No, he wanted the players to look good. That's when he got into pants. Deep into pants.  

Two years ago, Waynesneed, Jr. found himself in a steamy warehouse negotiating the sale of 109 pairs of satin lounging slacks to a mysterious, Brezhnev-eyebrowed international pants broker he only knew as Tench.  That broker was actually Buck Duckett.  The eyebrows were fake.  They made a deal.  Duckett would not report the transaction and the team would not have to vacate their win in the Online Boner Pills Sent In Discreet Packaging Bowl, but Waynesneed, Jr. would need to start getting Duckett to the source of the pants.  And now he and whatever information he had was at the bottom of the Adriatic with a cache of slacks almost to sumptuous to behold.  

"Duckett, I need that B.S.V.D. on my desk right now as in before I finish this goddamn sentence," Chavous said.

The Booster Source Vetting Document consisted of a folder bulging with press clippings, interviews, and a complete psychological dossier.  It was currently spread out in his office as he had been staring at it all night since the news came in.

"I've seen them shot, garroted, and dropped into rotating helicopter blades, but torpedoed is a first." That was Shane Schenk, from Duckett's unit. He grinned and handed him a coffee.  "Congratulations."

Schenk and Duckett met at the I.B.I.B. academy and went through Pants School together, where Duckett graduated at the top of his class, Shenk near the bottom.  But Schenk knew every top booster at every program from the biggest SEC school to some NAIA powerhouses. He partied with them at their ranches and boats. He knew their biggest secrets.  He slept with several of their wives.

"You want us to go out there and crack some skulls?" asked the Pordon "Backhoe" Valence as he squeezed his enormous frame into the office. Valence, a former all-American fullback and member of the NCAA's elite combat unit known as the Rhinoceros has officially killed 38 men.  No one has beaten his Rhinoceros record for breaking fifteen bricks with a single headbutt.  He earned a commendation for unusual valor in thirteen of the NCAA's most dangerous operations and an eye patch for a desperate scythe fight with the Wisconsin offensive line after catching them accepting an illegal crate of wheely shoes on a dock at Lake Mendota.

"We can cross-reference all apparel-related torpedo attacks in Western Europe with unsual activity from known pants hot spots," said another team member Muriel Utrecht, a woman.

Duckett looked at his team. "This is not an ordinary pants assassination," he said. "I didn't want to tell you this before because it seemed ridiculous or even impossible, but something has been gnawing at me with Waynesneed and it won't go away. I don't think he was taking us to a normal pants supplier.  I think he was in something much deeper."

"What do you mean, Duckett?" Schenk said. "Shorts? Maybe even a capri?"

"Jesus christ, that sick bastard would try something like that," Valence said.

"No, I don't think this has to do with manufacturing or distribution at all," Duckett said gravely. "I think whoever it was that torpedoed Waynesneed is not after some nickel-and-dime shorts operation.  I think whoever did this is trying to transform how college athletes are compensated." He swung around a whiteboard that he had been hiding in a corner. It said "N.I.L." Duckett put down his coffee and leaned forward on his desk. "I think they're trying to legalize pants."