The Pat Fitzgerald Era Ends In Tawdry Shrek Humping Scandal

On Thursday, Pat Fitzgerald was history's least-embattled 1-11 college football coach preparing for the final season in the recognizable Big Ten.  Three days later, the university where he was so entrenched that it seemed like he would coach until he died and then get stuffed like Jeremy Bentham so that his ghoulish death mask could be trotted out to intimidate a referee after a particularly egregious pass interference call fired him amid a maelstrom of grotesque hazing allegations, secretive reports, and incompetent flailing from the highest reaches of the university bureaucracy; the result was a preening coach, program, and university that tediously sold itself as a model for doing things The Right Way imploding over tawdry, Shrek-related humping incidents.

Allegedly, According to Reports, Etc.

The trajectory of the scandal was bizarre. After the season, Northwestern announced an investigation into allegations of hazing in the football program.  Last Friday, the university issued a press release saying that the investigation by an independent law firm found hazing in the program but could find no evidence that the coaching staff knew anything but also that they were suspending Pat Fitzgerald for two weeks.  The entire thing raised more questions than it answered: if there was no evidence that Fitzgerald knew anything why suspend him? And if the administration felt he was implicated enough in the hazing to be suspended, why would a token two weeks during a completely dead period in the college football calendar suffice?  It seems clear that the administrators at the top reaches of the university had hoped the vague report summary, suspension, and the general shroud of national indifference over anything having to do with Northwestern football would be enough to make the allegations go away and allow Fitzgerald to return and pursue that elusive win on the continent of North America that had eluded him for nearly two years.

The plan immediately backfired.  Student journalists at the Daily Northwestern published the puerile details of the hazing rituals from former players along with new claims from those players that Fitzgerald and program staff knew about and tacitly encouraged them.  The timing of the suspension during a completely dead period whether intentional or coincidental meant that the Northwestern hazing story filled a vacuum of college football news and brought attention to the scandal and more scrutiny than I have ever seen associated with Northwestern football to which the administration seemed to have no answer other than to occasionally release Official Comments dripping with flop sweat while more allegations about hazing and racism in the program kept piling up through the Daily, a group of players describing themselves as the "entire team" released a statement of support for Fitzgerald, and also at the same time unrelated reports surfaced about the baseball coach who has apparently been acting like the red-assed baseball version of a Mad Max warlord.

It is hard to imagine a more flailing and incompetent response from the administration.  University president Michael Schill still argues that the official investigation found no evidence that Fitzgerald knew anything about the hazing in the very press release where he fired him. Athletic Director Derrick Gragg, who was hired quickly because the guy they originally hired was accused of reacting rudely and indifferently to a lawsuit about sexual harassment in the cheerleading program, seems to be running a toxic department with a Lord of the Flies football team and a baseball coach who was too much of a belligerent hardass for the literal United States Army. Fitzgerald maintains that the official report backs up his claims that he did not know that the hazing was taking place and seems poised to sue Northwestern.  It is hard to imagine the situation will not get uglier.

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Pat Fitzgerald had found a successful formula at Northwestern: under him and with defensive coach Mike Hankwitz, the Wildcats had mastered a brand of unwatchable, punt-based toilet football that allowed them to win enough games in a mediocre, gerrymandered division to regularly go to bowl games, defeat its downtrodden Hat Rival, and generally serve as a normal mid-tier Power Five team.  This was all anyone wanted.  Fitzgerald's job was to keep Northwestern football from the abyss, the logical place where a small private school that intentionally hamstrings itself in recruiting, has no fans, and plays very close to the capital of Big Ten post-graduate migration which ensures that it is overwhelmed by people cheering from the opponent in nearly every game in its tiny, rotting, tarp-adorned stadium should be.  

Fitzgerald took the Northwestern job suddenly and amidst tragedy at the age of 31, and cultivated a wholesome camp counselor image as he exhorted the team with elaborate fist pumps and posed in square-jawed coaching faces on the sidelines.  He became more and more entwined with the program until Northwestern football had two mascots: the person in the fuzzy wildcat suit capering on the sidelines and the burly, rectangular-haired guy bellowing "go 'cats" and bloviating the same Our Young Men speech unceasingly for seventeen consecutive years. His emergence of the face of the program and of Northwestern athletics was lucrative for him and for the program as he, former athletic director Jim Phillips, and Northwestern mega-donor Pat Ryan led efforts to lavish the sports teams with fancy new facilities including an Ozymandian lakeside practice facility, a major renovation to the basketball and volleyball arena, and a proposed $800 million football stadium that has stalled in fights with the Evanston City Council and now has a tougher sell as the House that Fitz Built.  

The longevity of Fitzgerald amid the constant churn of college coaches eventually made him one of the Big Ten's elder statesmen by his early 40s.  Every year there would the attendant upheaval and rumors and message board flight tracking as goateed men named Chip and Buddy shuttled among college coaching gigs and then at Big Ten media days there would be Pat Fitzgerald and Kirk Ferentz dug in like Egyptian obelisks overseeing the entire thing and then annually playing the worst football game anyone has ever seen.  Fitzgerald seemed to enjoy this status and began a new phase of Andy Rooney-style pontification against cell phones, the run-pass option ("the purest form of communism"), and an ESPN personality whose reference to Northwestern's team as a bunch of "Rece Davises" he took as an unutterable football insult.

Fitzgerald sold himself and the program sold him as ambassadors of the NCAA student-athlete model.  This attitude meant a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting about graduation rates and recruiting restrictions, but it also meant accepting NCAA rules designed solely to prevent players from earning any money for their considerable efforts as some sort of ideal instead of a racket.  It is no surprise that when some members of the team led a drive to create a new sort of players' union, the university stepped in to stop it-- the school, because a university will attempt to stop a unionization effort by anyone in its ranks reflexively like a jellyfish lashing out with a tentacle at any external stimulus, and Fitzgerald because he is management.  Fitzgerald's pitch to the players against the union was that the team was like a family and the players could go to him with any of their concerns.  The allegations of the abusive culture within the program have made this argument in retrospect even more odious.

The total control that Fitzgerald sought created his downfall.  It is very difficult for Fitzgerald to have spent nearly twenty years proclaiming that he is Northwestern football and Northwestern football is him and then claim that he had absolutely no idea that bizarre, organized nudity rituals were happening under his nose for a decade passed from class to class and written about on whiteboards in the facility.  Either he is a maniac whose football culture comes from a fraternity house in the Hellraiser cinematic universe who should not be allowed to be in charge of anything or he is an oblivious fraud who should not be allowed to be in charge of anything.

It did not help his case that whatever strategies Fitzgerald used to keep the Wildcats comfortably competitive were beginning to falter.  The team record plummeted to 1-11, a level of futility not seen since the 1980s.  Fitzgerald failed to win more than three games in three of the last four years.  The defense has fallen apart since Hankwitz retired and the offense, reliably putrid during the Fitzgerald years to the point where it seems like it is part of a perverse blasphemy against the passing game, has reached new levels of blight.  

Beyond the games themselves, it appears as though Fitzgerald had not solved or even deigned to acknowledge the massive shifts in the landscape of college sports since he took over in 2006.  It seemed to me that Pat Fitzgerald, a man who even by the stoneheaded standards of college football coaches came across as one of the most stubborn people to scream beet-red into an air traffic controller headset, both had no idea how to adapt his formula for winning into the rapidly-changing, increasingly professionalized world of college sports in the 2020s and no desire to try.  Instead, he seemed content to perform his jut-jawed monologues about Student Athletics while the program retreated to its 1980s nadir.

The trajectory of the program made it seem like Northwestern was going to have to decide what football would look like after Fitzgerald within the next few years.  In that scenario, the school would be firing a university legend and faced an unknown world of trying to lure someone to a program where they have to use a silent snap count during Big Ten home games.

Now that reality has arrived except Fitzgerald is exiled in disgrace and vowing legal action, there are less than two months before the season, the entire athletic department is under a shroud of scandal to the point where I would not be surprised if there was a report that a fencing coach had forced team members into organized banditry against spice caravans traveling on the Green Bay Trail, many football players seem disgruntled and likely to leave at the nearest opportunity, and the entire university bureaucracy has been operating like an Armando Ianucci ensemble as they issue panicked press releases and zoom in from various vacation hotspots.

Meanwhile the football team is going to apparently try to have a season.  New defensive coordinator David Braun, a December hire whose brief tenure is enough to give him plausible deniability, has been named interim coach.  The administration will continue to scramble to cover its ass, likely by hiring more administrators and establishing various protocols, and likely firing a few more people like the asshole baseball coach and the athletic director, and they will hopefully put a sticky note somewhere that says that the next time they want to invest all of the power and resources of a major college football program in a single person because that person claims to do things the right way they should probably figure out what that person means by the right way because it might not be normal.

This might be a good time to ask once again whether Northwestern needs to have a semi-professional football team attached to it, but the enormous quantities of money that the television networks throw at the university has already answered the question.  The university, it seems, will wait and hope enough people can watch this football team without thinking about what the former players have told the Daily about their experiences on the team and hope that Northwestern can comfortably retreat back into its bland anonymity in the college football landscape while the checks still clear.

Please dont put in the newspaper that i got march mad

In 2017, Northwestern went to the NCAA tournament and challenged Vanderbilt to a three-hour heart attack.  After every play, the camera cut to Doug Collins, who appeared to be suffering the effects of a perilously consumed Wonka raspberry candy, as the score flipped back and forth.  The Wildcats ultimately won when the Commodores' best player temporarily lost his mind and committed a foul so ill-advised that the best explanation for it was that he was hypnotized and activated by a rogue Northwestern basketball sabotage team. 

On Thursday, the Wildcats played a Boise State team that emerged through the week as a trendy upset pick, and they calmly dismantled them.  The Broncos had no answer for Boo Buie, who was clearly the best player on the floor.  They never, not even for a split second, took the lead.  The game was close enough for Boise State to never really be out of striking range and to even tie it in the second half, but they mostly just sat at a comfortable cruising distance of about six points until it was time to start pointlessly fouling people for 45 minutes, which is the fate for all college basketball games within 15 points.  This was an uncomfortable feeling as a Northwestern fan, where any big win usually feels like being hunted for sport or at the very least besieged.

More ball.#GoCats | #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/T9QitwwxiZ

— Northwestern Basketball (@NUMensBball) March 17, 2023

One unique thing Northwestern is doing is attempting to steal Beam Valor. I hope an angry Kings fan runs up to a Northwestern fan screaming LIGHT THE BEAM and yells "Excuse me, how many rebounds did Chimezie Metu have last night? What capacity does Leandro Barbosa serve in the Organization????"

Northwestern's reward for their victory is a matchup against powerhouse UCLA on Saturday night.  The Bruins have some key players injured but that did not matter in their game against UNC-Asheville that looked like a contest between the monster truck Grave Digger and several dozen 1980s sedans.  There is no rogue Bracketologist favoring Northwestern over UCLA and no secret advanced metric that the numbers-mongers can point to that show a hidden Northwestern advantage somewhere.  The only people who have the Wildcats penciled into the Sweet Sixteen in their bracket are me, a deranged person who has picked Northwestern to win the entire tournament because what is the point of living if you don't pick your team to win it all, and people filling out brackets based on late night network TV talk show hosts. 

But that's the magic of the tournament.  No one had Northwestern worthy as playing in the same building as Gonzaga in 2017 and they very well might have won if Zach Collins had not been allowed to nail an old wooden board to the bottom of the basket which caused Chris Collins (no relation) to earn a crushing technical foul after illegally turning into an anthropomorphic bagpipe.  Just before I started writing this, Purdue was eliminated by a school called Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey, which I learned was founded by and named after a guy who made his fortune manufacturing grisly early twentieth-century surgical implements.  Every year, Matt Painter shows up with the largest person on the face of the Earth who is capable of dribbling and every year they get tripped up in the tournament as they reach the outer limits what humans can achieve by lumbering until they seemed to reach their apotheosis by playing through a player so immense and so skilled that they seemed nearly unstoppable outside of Evanston.  

 

Illustration of Purdue playing a double-digit seed in the NCAA Tournament

It has not been a very good tournament for the Big Ten.  On the one hand, I suppose I should be concerned because if the conference continues to perform in every tournament like the Indiana Jones Sword Man, it will result in fewer bids awarded to Big Ten teams and therefore a more difficult path for Northwestern to the Dance.  But on the other hand, that's not my problem.  It is much more fun to delight in watching conference foes and rivals eat shit on a national stage, especially if it involves the humiliation of an unhinged monster-coach like Iowa's Fran McCaffery or Illinois's Brad Underwood, both of whom reach flights of anger so impossible by the standards of normal human behavior that they can be only described as operatic, spending three and a half hours bellowing their arias about how that's a moving screen there, that's a goddamn moving screen, how did you not fuckin' see that, all goddamn day with these screens SHIT! MOVING SCREEN FUCK!  There are few sights in college basketball more satisfying than watching Tom Izzo eliminated and sputtering like a malfunctioning lawnmower.

 

Underwood brings down the house in his showstopping number Jesus Christ Will You Fuckin Box Out

I am not going to pretend that I have any expertise on UCLA.  I tried watching their tournament game to prepare some detailed scouting notes such as seeing the names of the players, but the game was so out of hand and boring that I quickly turned it off in favor of closer contests, so my knowledge of UCLA is that their head coach bears an eerie resemblance to the angry vice principal from the Back to the Future movies.  But I do know that the Wildcats will not be fazed by the overwhelming odds.  There's no reason to think Northwestern can win this other than every single thing that this team has done this entire season.  

BASEBALLS OF THE WORLD

I am disappointed that the World Baseball Classic, which has been a perfect late-night sports option for the past couple of weeks, has now run into the most chaotic parts of March Madness.  Memphis was desperately attempting to fend off an upset from Florida Atlantic in the second half as Mexico tried to rally against Puerto Rico in front of a delightfully insane crowd in Miami.  Tonight, the United States will try to solve unexpected tournament juggernaut Venezuela during the Northwestern-UCLA game.  It's a shame that these two tournaments have crashed together this weekend in a ports conflagration; it is hard to focus on baseball, particularly the painstaking version of high-intensity elimination game baseball, while a college basketball team filled with guys with orthopedic accessories is nipping at the heels of a two-seed.

The World Baseball Classic is a tremendous sporting event because of the enormous disparity of talent on display.  On the one hand, several teams are awe-inspiring collections of galacticos; the Dominican team alone could function as a pretty good all-star squad, and the American team's lineup features multiple MVPs.  At the same time, most of the other teams are collections of amateurs, minor-leaguers, marginal major league players, and, most enjoyably, former marginal major leaguers-- there are few things better than looking at a WBC roster and seeing a guy you vaguely remember from ten years ago is still pitching in Curacao..  The tournament's darlings were the Czech team made of up players who actually live in the Czech Republic and work day jobs except Eric Sogard and watching them in awe that they get to play in the same game as Shohei Ohtani.

While the collisions of the heavyweights have been enjoyable (the pool elimination game between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico was a like a playoff Game 7 atmosphere that also seemed like a party), I've really been enjoying the games between teams with players I've never heard of.  The feeling of turning on high-stakes baseball game at 10 pm contested by teams filled with players you don't see often in MLB-- squat, spherical outfielders, 45 year-old pitchers who look like they might need to take an urgent business call in the dugout, excited teenagers-- while an announcer desperately is searching for things to say like "Donovan Bluddle made it to Double A with the Brewers in 2013 and now plays for the Brisbane Gobblers" is powerful enough to require a prescription.

The World Baseball Classic is also an enjoyable tour of international baseball cultures.  Watching always provides a depressing reminder that the dour American unwritten rules are perhaps the least fun way to watch and play baseball that exists on the planet.  For a brief moment, Miami becomes the most joyful baseball venue imaginable before it once again becomes infected by the Marlins.  The atmosphere at the games in Taiwan during home games looked incredible.  I also appreciate the teams largely made up of North American players attempting to come up with stereotypical on-base celebrations.  The British team decided to mime sipping tea with their pinkies extended when they got on base and let Trayce Thompson strut around the dugout with what appeared to be a Burger King-quality crown after hitting a home run off Adam Wainwright; the Italian team, made up almost exclusively of Americans, decided to celebrate with a suite of Vaguely Italian Gestures.

 

The WBC's elimination phase is, like the latter stages of the NCAA Tournament, less compelling to me than pool play.  By now, the teams filled with hopefuls, amateurs, and waddling sports geriatrics have all been eliminated and either dispersed back to the American minors or their own domestic leagues struggling to grab a foothold on dusty fields in places where people generally don't like baseball.  The rest of the tournament is mainly filled with different configurations of players we generally will be watching the rest of the summer.  The exception is Japan, which is largely made up of excellent players in NPB that I never see and several phenoms that will eventually make their way to the United States, and Shohei Ohtani, who is worth watching in any context.   

The magic of the WBC and NCAA Tournament is not only the delight of upsets but the peek beyond the highest-profile teams that reveal the more distant horizons of a sport, that once you get past the teams and players you see on TV all the time there is a vast array of people still playing at a relatively high level but who also have been sifted out of the highest levels because they are too small or too rotund or a little too slow or they look ridiculous in rec specs, and the joy that they get from being in the spotlight for awhile even if its just to get shunted out of the tournament by a much better team.  But sometimes they don't and they continue to win beyond all expectation, and I hope to see one more colossal upset Saturday night. 

Holy Shit Northwestern Is In The Actual NCAA Tournament

At the beginning of this basketball season, Northwestern sent out an email with a video of a bearded Chris Collins in a windowless office imploring fans to come out and support the team that looked like a deposed head of state in exile calling for weapons and reinforcements. Northwestern's previous lackluster season finished with Iowa scoring 455 points on them in the Big Ten Tournament, and it seemed like more disappointment was on the way. For the second year in a row, its top players had left the program. Collins had found himself in the crosshairs of Northwestern's several dozen fans, and the new athletic director had ended last season with a cryptically worded statement that seemed to indicate that Collins would likely be fired at the end of another crummy campaign.  The program seemed to be in a death spiral or what would be a death spiral at other schools and was just sort of the baseline state of Northwestern men’s basketball. Four months later, a wave of students enveloped the court in ecstasy as the Wildcats beat number-one Purdue and secured their second-ever berth in the NCAA Tournament, and I am still trying to process that this has actually happened and I am not trapped in some bizarre fever dream and am going to wake up in September after getting hit in the head by a foul ball hit by a Cubs callup named Trant Manstadan.

Collins reassures supporters that Northwestern basketball still holds key fortifications near a Walgreens at the Wilmette border 

College sports have matched the pros in delivering a flurry of player movement, and it seems to me that fans have increasingly thought about their teams’ prospects in terms of getting players on or off the roster. This mindset makes it easy to forget that, especially in college sports, players can sometimes just get much better. Boo Buie, for example, spent three years as an exciting scorer whose outbursts could only reliably occur against Michigan State and then this season seemed to have had received a Promethean gift of basketball heroics and began playing as if every opponent had become a shrieking Tom Izzo whose head glistens red like a defrosting steak with every Buie dagger.

Northwestern's shocking improvement also comes from its transformation into a brutal, pain-in-the-ass defense. The turnaround is largely attributed to schematic changes overseen by new assistant coach Chris Lowery, but also from the players deciding to make every opponent half-court possession a nightmare. Chase Audige has emerged as a particular menace, cutting off passing lanes or suddenly materializing on the court to snag a pass he was nowhere near. The result of this makes Northwestern games delightfully miserable to watch. Their aesthetic is disgusting. Northwestern is not exactly a smooth offensive machine, so every Big Ten game they play is rife with endless scoring droughts. Their last game against Penn State in the Big Ten tournament appeared to take place in an arena testing out experimental rims smaller than the basketball as both teams ran intricate halfcourt shoving-based offenses that ended up with a ball bouncing dispiritingly off the hoop before they trudged to the other side and started doing it again. 

The result of Northwestern's transformation into a defensive juggernaut and vehicle for Boo Buie theatrics is the greatest season in school history.  They won the program's most conference games.  They went undefeated against the state of Indiana.  They beat Illinois wearing provocative Chicago-themed jerseys and Indiana with a last-second Buie floater that had Hoosiers whining about a push-off like a chorus of Bryons Rusell.  The Wildcats crushed Iowa so badly that Fran McCaffrey, who already looks like the villain in a Pixar movie except with less realistic hair, got insanely mad and had to be thrown out of the game, in front of all of his sons.  The Associated Press was still unable to locate a Northwestern logo when Northwestern briefly made the top 25.  Chris Collins won the Big Ten coach of the year award in a year where he was supposed to be fired and I remain both unsure whether he is actually a good basketball coach and positive that he is the greatest coach in program history.

That's when the attack comes SWISH from the sides, from the other fran mccaffery you didn't even know was there

In 2017, it took a series of terrifying, nervy games that climaxed with a last-second win on a full court heave of a pass in order to qualify for the tournament.  This year, a team that everyone picked to be last or second-to-last in the conference just whupped so many teams that they were jockeying for seeding in February.  It was a new experience for fans who are used to seeing the team clinging desperately to the bubble before waiting for a series of seemingly impossible misfortunes to catapult them into the NIT or the realm of other postseason tournaments that only make sense as vast money laundering operations. 

It has been genuinely confusing to watch Northwestern's last few games without panicking about them running afoul of some arcane bracket math.  The only thing at stake was the school's conference wins record and NCAA seeding, which as a Northwestern fan is a process I have never understood despite observing it for decades, much like how the family dog understands the rustle of the treat bag but is entirely ignorant about the concept of shopping.  And now here they are in the NCAA Tournament, poised to go further than any Northwestern team before them.    

BRONCO BUSTING

Northwestern is once again shunted off to the most remote region possible, playing Boise State in Sacramento.  It looks to me like Boise State is a popular upset pick against Northwestern, featuring three point shooters that may frustrate the Wildcat defense, which is designed to let teams bomb away from three and probably miss a lot because they are college students.  But I am not going to pretend like I any insight into Boise State.  I have not watched a single second of Boise State basketball this season or frankly any non-Northwestern college basketball.  I watched Northwestern and Rutgers play a game where they appeared to be trying to shoot with weighted medicine balls and then take approximately 85 minutes to complete the final moments of a game that was not really that close.  I do not have any spare time to watch Mountain West basketball even if I was spending that time searching out streaming services to see if I have to pay to watch the Arnold clone movie where the writers cruelly made him introduce himself as "Gordy Brewer." 

A Boise State-Northwestern game is apparently not a major draw.  They will play an evening game on TruTV, a forgotten Warner Brothers network that materializes annually for the NCAA tournament and exists at all other times to show endless reruns of shows like You Didn't Think I'd Shove You and Ryan Wears a Cape.  Northwestern's best chance to win involves playing the worst 56-52 grindfest you've ever seen that involves multiple invocations of the dreaded Time Without a Field Goal Clock.  Much like the apotheosis of Wildcat football under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern's basketball team this season exists to frighten and disgust otherwise unsuspecting bracket-wavers who do not know what they signed up for when they idly flipped over to the game.  

The rest of the region is brutal.  Should Northwestern manage to survive Boise State, they can look forward to a likely matchup with powerhouse UCLA.  If they were to somehow win that game, they would face what would probably be a rematch with that notorious goal-tending outfit Gonzaga, which knocked the Wildcats out of the 2017 tournament and caused Chris Collins to make the second most insane series of faces he has made in his career.  

My official power ranking of Insane Chris Collins Faces from least to most deranged: Michigan uncalled travel in the 2016 Big Ten Tournament; Northwestern blows 27-point lead against Michigan State in 2018 and Collins bugs his eyes out like Judge Doom from Rodger Rabbit; The Rubber-Faced Wow Offensive; Getting down on all fours and pounding the four screaming like an action movie protagonist seeing his partner gunned down three days from retirement.

And if you were to stare at the bracket long enough while enjoying a hallucinogenic journey you might observe there is a possibility no matter how remote that Northwestern could play Illinois in the Elite Eight, a cataclysm that would require the NCAA to create a rule specifically banning impersonations of Abraham Lincoln after dozens of brawling spectators would be injured attempting nineteenth-century wrestling moves.  

 

I have no idea what the the rest of this comic is other than this panel was placed without context in a WGN story about Lincoln's wrestling exploits that relates a wrestling match between Lincoln and Jack Armstrong, the toughest member of the Clary Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois and ends with a quote from Northwestern wrestling coach Matt Storniolo who said “I think you can see a lot of ways that wrestling could have influenced Abraham Lincoln.”

Regardless of what happens in the tournament, it is impossible to not be thrilled for Northwestern's players.  I will never hold any college player's decision to move on against him-- it is ludicrous to hold a grudge against any athlete choosing to exercise agency in this exploitative sport, and it is hardly ridiculous to want to go to a team that seemed more likely to make the tournament and play in bigger games and get more exposure.  Nevertheless, Buie, Audige, and Robbie Beran stuck around and they managed to get to the Dance.  It is incredibly gratifying to see them getting to play in big games in a packed Welsh-Ryan arena which actually seems like a home arena for the first time since the renovation.  I am giddy that with maybe one victory and a massive upset Boo Buie may transcend the miserable history of this program and become not just a Northwestern basketball legend, which he already is, but the program's first genuine March Madness Guy. 

A Hat? In This Economy?

If you can say one positive thing about the 2022 Northwestern football season is that it is mercifully over.  The Wildcats are nursing a single win over Nebraska, they will have their worst season since 1989, and the program seems to have plummeted from the highs of a Big Ten West championship back to its miserable historical depths in only two years.  On Saturday, they will have one more desperate attempt to salvage something from the season by prying the Hat from atop the bulbous, far side caricature skull of Bret Bielema and then retreat to whatever lair Pat Fitzgerald crawls into the offseason as he tries to figure out how much longer he can retain his imperial control over the football program while actively in the Rick Venturi Zone.

The last two losses summarized the season so far.  The first turned into a miserable blowout in Minnesota, where they only interesting wrinkle was the Gophers tearing through every available quarterback; there was a point in the fourth quarter when it seemed like the Wildcats were one quarterback injury away from the impressment of anyone large and wearing a purple sweatshirt.  

Beer is served in clear, plastic cups at TCF Bank Stadium in case a fan finds Fitzgerald's Shilling and is forced to play quarterback for the Northwestern Wildcats 

The second game was close enough to imagine Northwestern winning.  Then again, the game was only so close because of an incredible turn of events where a Purdue pick-six was called back because the officials found the cornerback guilty of Illegal Hurrahsman-ship for high stepping for 30 yards and made them take the ball back at the 30, which resulted in a three and out and a missed field goal.  

I am sorry for even putting such offensive and disgusting content on this website.

As a college football fan, the officiating on this play was a travesty, an insanely draconian outcome for overly festive running that serves as a reminder that the NCAA's ruling cabal of severe, frown-lined bureaucrats seem to have a bizarre vision of college football where the thousands of drunk people at games many of whom were dressed inexplicably in shark costumes would see a guy lifting his legs a few extra inches off the ground on a game-securing touchdown and say "that simply will not do."  On the other hand, as a fan of a team who benefited from the call, I can say that, as a turn of events, it was extremely funny.

(SIGH) HAT HAT HAT HAT

Northwestern has an opportunity to salvage their season by doing the seemingly impossible and prising the Hat from the prodigious skull of Bret Bielema.  That will be a difficult task.  The Illini are finishing an excellent season; last week they nearly took out Michigan on the road.  They have an impregnable defense and their running game will test a Wildcat defense that has struggled all season stopping opponents' ground games.  Illinois will be heavily favored and the Ryan Field stands will be glowing orange. But in this game, North America's greatest sports rivalry, one can only hope that it is an indescribable and possibly deranged urged for the Hat can drive Northwestern to an inexplicable victory.

 

If The Hat is not won during the game, I will assemble a Heist Crew to steal it from the Illinois Athletic Facility where we are call caught 35 seconds after entering the building.

Illinois has more than just Hat Lust on the line; a win and Purdue loss against Indiana that could happen if for example they have multiple touchdowns called back for Too Many High Fives or Excessive Smiling would thrust the Illini into a potential Big Ten West championship clusterfuck. After Iowa's very funny loss to Nebraska, there is the possibility that four teams could finish 5-4 in Big Ten play, which would require cracking open the dusty books of Legends and Leaders to determine the ancient Tie-Breaking Scenarios with one team headed to certain slaughter in Indianapolis and the rest somehow all heading simultaneously to the Music City Bowl.

Breaking down the potential Big Ten West Tie-Breaking scenarios if Purdue chokes.
 

This season, I have been seeing a lot of discussion online about how the Big Ten West is a flaming garbage scow and the federal government should intervene specifically to stop the Big Ten West teams from playing unwatchable lummoxing football at each other every week and I'm incensed.  Anytime there is grousing about how breathtakingly mediocre and hideous the division is, Northwestern should be contending in it.  Northwestern football is like one of those single-celled organisms that live in volcanoes and hydrothermal vents that are viable in environments where no one wants to be, and when the Big Ten west is essentially a giant pile of toxic waste, the Wildcats should be thriving.  Unfortunately they have one year to get their act together before the California teams force some sort of grand realignment and the conference is forced to create new divisions such as maybe "legends" or "leaders" that could destroy the magic of the Big Ten West.  I hope that Kevin Warren and his henchmen think long and hard about the effect on Northwestern and all of the other grasping oaf programs in college football's greatest division before acting too quickly.

One innovation I think could help the Big Ten West become even more annoying would be to bring back ties.  I was inspired by USA manager Gregg Berhalter's heroic decision to have Christian Pulisic simply kick a ball to nowhere in order to seal a tie at the end of the USA-England game when it occurred to me what Pat Fitzgerald would do offensively if the Wildcats were able to weaponize a draw to drive opponents completely insane.  Imagine a scenario where it would benefit both Northwestern and Iowa to tie instead of trying risky forward passes and they just alternately kneeled for the entire game.  Imagine a scenario where every Big Ten West team has like four ties during a season because no one is letting their extremely Big Ten West quarterbacks dare to throw the ball for the entire second half while fans throw garbage on the field.  Imagine the Playoff Committee having to sort through the concept of a one-tie Conference Champion while sports radio callers besiege their headquarters with towers and sappers.

Unfortunately there is no tie scenario today.  The stakes are binary: you either have the Hat or you slink away from the stadium, crushed and bare-headed.  This season has been such a disaster that no amount of Hats can salvage it, but it would sure feel better to go into an offseason with a heroic Hat victory than the same thing that's happened every other week.

BUCK DUCKETT IN THE PANTS FROM BEYOND

"Why does he want to meet us in the middle of the woods?" Crodway asked, brushing back a branch in the dark.

"Obviously, there are a lot of eyes around. Once we get the pants, we just bring them home. No one can prove where we got them. No one can say shit," Laslow said.  

Crodway was not assuaged.  The forest was impenetrably dark save for the beams of their flashlights, and he suspected that Laslow didn't know where he was going.  

"You'd better not get us lost in here. Coach has got Madford looking for us making sure we're not getting in trouble.  This is definitely trouble."

"Relax," Laslow said.  "We're almost at the clearing."

Crodway didn't answer.  This whole thing was Laslow's idea.  Sure, he could use some new pants.  Laslow said they were rare and had never been seen in the United States before.  That's what Mr. Gludcrul had told him.  But he was out here mainly because Laslow would otherwise be out in the woods alone, and he was already dangerously close to the bench after throwing three picks in last week's game.  Crodway, who already spent his Saturdays desperately trying to prevent opponents from hitting his quarterback, figured that he might as well try to stop him from getting completely lost in the woods.

"I don't see his car yet," Laslow said.  "Dude, you should see this car," Laslow said.  "Rolls.  Phantom.  He said he'd maybe let me take it for a spin if we get the win." 

But they were at the clearing and there was no one there.  It was eerily still, like the trees themselves were trying desperately to avoid detection.  There was silence.  Then a rustling.  The sound seemed to come from behind them then from the left.  But when they aimed their flashlights into the forest surrounding them, they saw nothing.

"Five minutes, Laslow, then we have to go," Crodway said.  

There was nothing.  And then there was something.  Some formless shape seeming like it had materialized from the trees, something almost imperceptible but definitively there and something that was definitely moving towards them.  They turned to run but no matter what direction they turned it was in front of them moving closer and closer.

-----------

Detective Carl Tratt was five minutes from the end of his shift when the call came in, five minutes from a warm house with a warm, brown bottle and instead he was squatting in the frost in a forest clearing looking at two bodies.  A professor found them on what he told the officer was his "morning constitutional," which made Tratt dread having to the professor later on.  He was told what he'd find when he'd come in but he was still not prepared for this.  The bodies were desiccated, almost shriveled.  Neither seemed to have much blood in them, but there was none at the scene.  

"Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to them?" he asked the Paul Quatch, the medical examiner.

"I've never seen anything like it.  No blood.  No wounds.  No trauma.  I have no idea what the hell could have done this."

Tratt's phone rang.  He listened for a few minutes and frowned, then hung up and paced around.

"Quatch, that was the office.  Coach called in this morning.  They've got two football players missing.  One of the roommates saw them grab some flashlights on the way out.  Says they were on the way to get some pants."

"Oh no," Quatch said.

"That's right," Tratt said, sighing. "They've already called in Duckett.  He's on the train from Indianapolis."

"Well better get your cloak cleaned and your amulets shiny," Quatch said.

Tratt had never met the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett, but he heard about him.  It was bound to happen when you worked in a college town.  Most of the time, you would just hear about Duckett poking around in a trash can outside an athletic facility or harassing some big time booster at a country club.  But Duckett was also an encyclopedia of college football's dark underbelly.  He knew all of the secret deals, he knew the networks of people funneling money into the sport.  It was rare that any of that dealing crossed from an NCAA infraction into the realm of an actual crime, but when it did he was a useful person to talk to.  But no one on the force wanted to.

The fact is that any conversation with Buck Duckett could swerve in bizarre directions.  The rumors were that Duckett believed in all sorts of strange, spooky stuff: monsters, spirits, demon cults, that sort of thing, and word spread among campus police that he could be found doing incantations or reading from scrolls.  He creeped everyone out.  Now, because some kid had mentioned pants to a detective, he was rolling up on Duckett's doorstep.  

------------

"Chief, this is ridiculous.  The guy's not even law enforcement.  He gets people suspended for eating a burrito that someone else paid for," Tratt said.  They were in the office, and the blinds were drawn.

"Tratt, my hands are tied.  This is the only thread we have, and we're pulling on it," Chief Stunch said.  "You know if these kids were looking for pants, he's the best shot at finding out who they were getting from and why they were in that clearing.  If you have any better ideas, let me know."

Tratt fumed.  He had nothing else.  "Fine, I'll talk to him.  But I can't investigate a murder and keep an eye on this guy.  You know what he does.  He slinks around.  He talks to people.  He hides in dumpsters and he has false mustaches.  I can't watch him constantly," Tratt said.

"Well you'll have to keep him close to you, then.  He's here," the Chief said.  He picked up his phone.  "Bring him in."

Duckett glided through the door.  He was not what Tratt was expecting.  He thought that Duckett would be wearing a cloak or at least some sort of skull necklace.  He was expecting him to have a sack of poultices or amulets.  But the man who walked in was dressed in a crisp suit with a tie and an anachronistic men's hat and carried a briefcase.  If anything, this was more disconcerting.  He looked like an FBI agent from the 1950s.

"Buck Duckett, NCAA," Duckett said.

"Carl Tratt," Tratt said.  "We found two bodies in a clearing.  Likely football players.  Quarterback and a center.  Seemed one of them might have had a line on some pants." 

"Thanks for coming, Duckett," Chief Stunch said.  "I'll leave you two to it.  Tratt should have everything you need."  He left the room.

"You know of anyone throwing money around who likes to do pants drops in the forest?" Tratt said.  "Is that the MO of any operators?"

Duckett opened his briefcase and picked up a file folder and slapped it on the table. "Errol 'Jimmy' Budesnon III."  He grabbed another one.  "Bud 'Poke' Hanragason.  Tad Hadley.  Hudd 'Scrote' Thomas."  

"That's a lot of pants guys," Tratt said.

"No, it's just one.  I haven't figured out what his name is here yet."

"You're telling me there's a booster doling out pants and changing his name and no one has caught on yet?" 

Duckett just stared at him.  He closed the briefcase and removed his hat.  A deep scar ran down his head parallel to the his scalp on the left side leaving a trench in a square buzzcut.

"You know who I am and what I do," Duckett said.  "I know you don't want me here.  I know you all think I'm a kook.  I understand that.  But I also know that this is the first time he's ever left the bodies like deflated sacks in the woods."

Tratt paused.  He hadn't mentioned the state of the bodies or that the baffled medical examiner's office was already on the phone with some out-of-state experts.

"This booster is not just changing his name.  When he leaves, it's as if he never existed.  Just a disappeared athlete and what appears to be no memory.  Holding galas for the coach and showering them with money and then he's gone.  The locker room is renamed.  You see that enough times and you start to believe there's something more sinister going on here than pants," Duckett said. 

He took a large dusty book out of his briefcase.  It took me sixteen years to find this thing and it damn near cost me my skull.  I've been tracking this thing since those fullbacks disappeared.  I think I know what we're dealing with.  But I'm going to need your help.  He opened the book.  Lesser Pants Daemons. 

High Winds Actors

 

There is one way to characterize this Northwestern football season that is not miserable and depressing and that is to think of it as a prolonged experiment in how much of a minor natural disaster it takes for the 2022 Wildcats to compete in a Big Ten game.

Earlier this season, Northwestern played a very good Penn State team in a ceaseless downpour and the conditions got so mucked up and horrible that it caused the Nittany Lions running backs to have the ball constantly squirt out of their hands nearly every time they tried to do anything other than fall down.  The conditions allowed Northwestern's Slopsmen to keep the game close enough to disgust the Penn State fans who had chosen to get soaked and voluntarily watch a football game involving Northwestern.

Last Saturday, big, bad Ohio State came into Ryan Field expecting the normal type of disastrous annihilation when the #2 team in the country plays a team that has not currently won a game in the United States in more than a calendar year.  Instead, they were greeted with gale force winds and torrential rain that would sort of pop up every once in awhile like Christopher Walken in a late 1990s comedy.  The result of this weather on Ohio State's deadly precision offense can be best described as hilarious.  Every series, the Buckeyes would send their superstar Heisman finalist quarterback out there to try to throw the ball to a gigantic, blindingly fast receiver that had a step on the Northwestern secondary and every time a gust of wind would turn into a Monty Python foot and slam the ball back into the ground.  Meanwhile, Pat Fitzgerald got to dust off the most perverted pre-electricity playbook he could find in some haunted football reliquary and refused to call a single pass.  The backs ran it.  The quarterback ran it.  In fact, for a large amount of time, there was no quarterback on the field and the Northwestern team was somehow using leather helmets and calling each other names like "Sport," or "Walleye."  

Some All-22 film of Ohio State's first-half offense

This worked, briefly.  The plan to use the miserable conditions as part of a concerted effort to avoid playing football meant that Northwestern held a lead and the Buckeyes to a tie for a large chunk of the game.  The weather helped the Wildcats' secret home field advantage that, despite fans being greatly outnumbered by visitors at all Northwestern home games, absolutely no one wants to be at Ryan Field.  For approximately two and a half hours, Ohio State fans were cold, wet, miserable, and forced to contemplate the impossible dignity of losing to Northwestern for the first time in 17 years, this time not to a decent team running a then-novel offense while the Buckeyes kept a future Heisman quarterback benched in favor of one of the most Big Ten quarterbacks to ever lumber out of an Ohio subdivision, but to a Northwestern team whose sole win is over a Nebraska squad whose entire strategy consisted of coordinated vomiting.  

 

Did Northwestern win this game?  Of course not.  But they largely succeeded in the Holy Mission of Northwestern Football, making Ohio State fans mad for a little bit.  With every loss, Northwestern gains a more powerful weapon by making the record worse and more radioactive, and every minute they can hold a lead, a tie, or even a sub 10-point deficit against a better team (which is all of them except-- and I cannot emphasize this enough-- the Nebraska Cornhuskers) they are going to annoy, irritate, and horrify opposing fans.  It was bad enough when these teams had to lose to Wildcat teams that were objectively good; the 45 real minutes or so when this Northwestern team was leading literally Ohio State because the game was being played in the Magnavox Guy's rumpus room had to be among the funniest 45 minutes of football played this season.

Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that Northwestern will be able to do more than briefly lead for the rest of the season.  Saturday they face a very good Minnesota team led by tailback Mohamed Ibrahim who feels like he has been running over the Big Ten West for 25 years.  He is joined by a new quarterback who is quickly-- oh wait, I have just been informed that Tanner Morgan is somehow still in Minneapolis and due to Covid-era Time Distortion, I cannot remember Minnesota having a quarterback who is not Tanner Morgan.  The Gophers are 6-3 under that moldy acronym-monger P.J. Fleck and his fucking boat.  After Minnesota, Northwestern in on the road against a  Purdue team that currently has a winning record and then must play a home Hat Game against an Illinois team that has suddenly turned into an unstoppable juggernaut that has Bret Bielema bellowing over the corpses of Big Ten West teams dumb enough to challenge him.  The dream of a two-win season feels bleak.

But it is November in the Midwest.  Perhaps Northwestern will play one of these games in a blinding blizzard where Northwestern backs are able to slowly sneak past the line of scrimmage.  Perhaps they will play in a small tornado where deafening sirens cause opponents to commit false start penalties.  Perhaps a godzilla or other kaiju will rise from the lake and immediately attack Evanston's one sort of tall office building and while everyone is pointing at the monster and yelling Evan Hull can get past the Illini defense.  Perhaps there will be a minor sharknado.  The fact of the matter is, as long as it is so shitty out that it is impossible to actually play football, the 2022 Northwestern Wildcats will have a chance

INDIANA POETRY CORNER

In 1963, the Indiana state legislature selected Arthur Franklin Mapes's "Indiana" as its official state poem.  In 2016, I was selected to review the Mapes papers for a forthcoming collection of some of his Hoosier-inspired works, where I was able to view the original manuscript for his poems.  I arrived at the State Historical Society of Indiana in Indianapolis, where I quickly fell under the watchful eye of a librarian, whom I immediately understood was reporting directly to my arch-rival in Mapes scholarship, G. Murdiel Klackwell.  

For those of you who do not know Klackwell, he is a middling critic who has nevertheless used his powers of bureaucratic maneuvering and sleazy politicking in order to keep Mapes scholarship within his ever-tightening grasp like an academic python.  Klackwell's own efforts have kept my own dynamic and boundary-pushing Mapes scholarship out of the main Mapes journals, and Klackwell has refused to let anyone confront him with pointed more-of-a-comment-than-questions in Mapes conferences by recruiting a cadre of unusually burly graduate students.  And yet, Professor Klackwell provides nothing but the most wafer-thin bromides while bulldozing over the subtleties and lyricism of Mapes.  Instead, my new annotated version of "Indiana" will rescue the poem from Klackwellism and provide what I believe is a fuller and more nuanced explanation of what is going on behind the poem in a crackling counterpoint to Mapes's gorgeous melodies.

-L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis, 2001

INDIANA 

by Arthur Franklin Mapes

God crowned her hills with beauty,
Gave her lakes and winding streams,
Then He edged them all with woodlands
As the setting for our dreams.
Lovely are her moonlit rivers,
Shadowed by the sycamores,
Where the fragrant winds of Summer
Play along the willowed shores.
I must roam those wooded hillsides,
I must heed the native call,
For a pagan voice within me
Seems to answer to it all.
I must walk where squirrels scamper
Down a rustic old rail fence,
Where a choir of birds is singing
In the woodland . . . green and dense.
I must learn more of my homeland
For it's paradise to me,
There's no haven quite as peaceful,
There's no place I'd rather be.
Indiana . . . is a garden
Where the seeds of peace have grown,
Where each tree, and vine, and flower
Has a beauty . . . all its own.
Lovely are the fields and meadows,
That reach out to hills that rise
Where the dreamy Wabash River
Wanders on . . . through paradise.

Commentary

"God crowned her hills with beauty...setting for our dreams"

Mapes is clearly describing Indiana as an ideal place.  These physical features and the state's crowning natural beauty are integral to his central ideas of the Hoosier state as an Edenic paradise.  By looking through the Mapes papers, although he never stated it directly, it seems obvious to me that the emphasis on bucolic nature is used as a contrast to urban areas, particularly other Midwestern cities which were dens of vice, crime, and the illegal pants trade.  Describing Indiana as the "setting for our dreams" clearly implies that he has a larger goal in mind for the state beyond just talking about hills and rivers.  Of course, if you were to ask the Klackwell set about it, this profound layer of meaning is utterly lost to them, possibly because Klackwell himself was spending his time building up his power in the Mapes Association of the Great Lakes in order to wield it like a cudgel and keep superior scholars out of his fancy black tie Mapes Dinners. 

"Lovely are her moonlit rivers...shadowed by the sycamores"

 Notice the play of moonlight and shadow.  This is a clear allusion to Operation: Sycamore, which would have been all over the news when Mapes was composing this poem.  This famous operation involved the NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett disguising himself as "Mr. Pumpkin" in the Sycamore Pumpkin Festival in Sycamore, Illinois, a town close enough to De Kalb that allowed him to find nearly a dozen Northern Illinois football players accepting a cache of stylish pants and jackets that were cleverly conveyed to the school underneath a float for Kornazacki and Sons Hog Stranglers as an elder Kornazacki had lured several linemen to the school by offering free apparel and ham hocks to the twelve squarest-headed lads in the county.  There is no doubt that Mapes had seen the plan to do the exchange at midnight, before Duckett intercepted them, as it was in the papers for weeks.  Mapes's brilliant way of folding this event into a geographic depiction of Indiana indicates the subtle work of a master, the type of verses that led me to Mapes scholarship in the first place.

"I must roam these wooded hillsides...seems to answer to it all"

Notice the contrast of the "pagan voice" calling with the invocation of God in the first word of the poem, setting up Indiana as a land so holy it answers to multiple sets of divine rulers.  This, along with the specific use of "roam" clearly alludes to the impermanent headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.  It was, at the time, flitting between Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, cities where Buck Duckett's investigations were interfered with and hampered by organized crime, most notoriously the Chicago Pants Outfit led by "Pockets" Mike Popstakl and his enforcers who had the entire Illinois defensive line in customized golf pants and Duckett's most reliable informants shut up or disappeared into various meat lockers and municipal stadiums. 

"I must walk where squirrels scamper"

An obvious reference to the time Buck Duckett disguised himself as an enormous squirrel in order to foil the delivery of a crate of custom athletic shorts to the Ohio State wrestling team.

"I must learn more of my homeland...there's no place I'd rather be"

Here Mapes's invocation of Indiana as a paradise clearly mirrors Buck Duckett's calls to move the NCAA headquarters to Indianapolis.  Mapes would have certainly been aware of this after the NCCA's well-publicized failed raid on an Ames dockyard on the Skunk River where Duckett and his team had surrounded a riverboat carrying dozens of crates of illegal socks for the Iowa State chess team.  What they did not know is that someone at the NCAA had tipped off Eddie Belch, a longtime associate of Pockets Mike (who would later turn on him and erupt in the bloody Chicago Pants War or 1967 which would end in dozens of mobsters strangled with their own pants and kept turning up in haberdasheries and department stores for months).  Eddie Belch's men opened fire on the raid, wounding Buck Duckett, and escaping with the socks.  While recovering, Duckett began to give interviews to magazines like Indiana Busybody suggesting a new site for the NCAA headquarters where his operations would not moved further away from midwestern pants gangs, and Mapes's language about Indiana clearly mirrors Duckett's invocations of it as a place where he and his teams could more effectively target the proliferation of illicit pants and pants-related activity throughout the region.

"Indiana is a garden...where the seeds of peace have sown"

Unfortunately, as Mapes knew, Buck Duckett was simply an investigator.  While he had unparalleled skills tracking down clues and extracting information through pressure and the occasional slap to the head, he was not prepared for the type of bureaucratic infighting that he needed to convince the NCAA heads to move their headquarters.  At this time, he was thwarted by his main rival Dreck Teckett, who Duckett suspected but was unable to conclusively prove was the key inside man for the Chicago and later Missouri Pants Outfits' operations within the NCAA.  Teckett was only the deputy for the NCAA's physical facilities branch, but his superior Gave Ledbrent was a notorious drunkard, and Teckett ran the department like a warlord extracting tribute for parking passes and access to the facility's "good" cafeteria on brown meat Mondays.  Duckett found his memos destroyed in garbage gondolas, his messages intercepted by Teckett's network of lackeys, and even his phone unable to dial internal lines which was a "maintenance problem" for months on end.  Anyone who has ever been in a struggle with this sort of rat, like how Klackwell controls access to the unread Mapes papers by requiring you to grovel to him in his palatial office can attest how draining and impossible it is for men of more magisterial talents to waste time with these petty tyrants. 

"Lovely are the fields and meadows...through paradise"

It is clear that Mapes has dedicated the final stanza of his poem to the future movement of the NCAA Headquarters to Indianapolis.  This interpretation may flow over the head of lunkheads like Klackwell and his coterie of imbeciles but observe how Mapes ends the poem with the slant rhyme of "rise" with "paradise," a clear indication that the importance of conveying this subtle message took overruled his otherwise perfect rhyme scheme.  Some scholars might reasonbly question that the invocation of the Wabash River since it does not flow through Indianapolis (that would be the White River), but this is a clear allusion to West Lafeyette, the city on the banks of the Wabash that was the site of Buck Duckett's largest operation. Operation: Wabash nearly shut down the entire Purdue basketball program when Duckett located and eventually destroyed a cache of the longest pants ever seized by the NCAA to accommodate Purdue's massive frontline of "Moose" Burton, "Moose" Jenkins, and "Big Moose" Kraboose, a 7'5" senior who dominated the Big Ten in the 1959 season despite being only able to briskly walk across the court. 

It is in the interests of Klackwell and his academic henchmen to preserve the masterpiece "Indiana" as a sentimental poem about a state and cover up Mapes's intention to use the poem to pressure the NCAA to move its headquarters to Indianapolis and away from the influence of the notorious pants-gangs.  That is why Klackwell personally intervened to prevent me from publishing a valedictory essay on this subject when the headquarters made its move in 1997 in Mapes Shapes the preeminent Mapes journal.  Instead, I was forced to self-publish it and, while the essay itself is, I believe, a persuasive and perhaps even moving testimony to the power of Mapes's works and Buck Duckett's own tireless toil preventing athletes from receiving pants from miscreants, it largely went unread and unremarked upon by both Mapes scholars and the NCAA itself even after I handed it out at the 2000 Final Four held at the RCA Dome until I was bodily ushered off the premises by jackbooted police officers sent there, I presume, by Klackwell.

As I have prepared for this new edition of my commentary on "Indiana," I have grown increasingly alarmed that Klackwell has entrenched himself completely into Mapes papers.  In fact, though Klackwell has claimed that he believes the words of Mapes are sacrosanct to the point where he has extensively noted any variations from the manuscript to the published version of his poems, I have come to believe that Klackwell will do anything to suppress the "Indiana" poem's true meaning including altering the manuscript or even have one his graduate students forge an alternate version.  

For that reason, I have been forced to, in the dead of night and using a series of keys I have stolen and duplicated, temporarily removed the Mapes papers from the Indiana archives and will keep them with me while I finish off my commentary.  It is obvious to me that Klackwell is in the employ of the remnants of the Chicago Pants Outfit and will try to alter or destroy the papers and have me garroted with my own sock garters.  Fortunately, I traveled to Indianapolis with my own trunk of wigs, train conductor uniforms, false mustaches, and a giant squirrel costume.  I suppose it should be obvious now that I have been using L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis as an assumed name and am the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett whose deeds Mr. Mapes has, for whatever reason, decided to memorialize in his poem.  Even as we speak, the agents of Professor Klackwell and whatever so-called "law enforcement" that is in his employ are trying to track me down to allow him access to the papers and block this commentary that will scandalize the entire government of Indiana.  But I am not intimidated by him or by the various pants-assassins who have been seeking me out for decades for simply doing the work of keeping college athletics free from the decadent influence of commerce.  But there it is, the tell-tale rustling outside the safehouse and I must get my old NCAA service revolver and prepare to defend these papers one last time.

Not Gross Enough

Last week's game against Iowa was the most promising one on Northwestern's remaining schedule not because the 'Cats had any better chance to win than any of their other games but because of the hope that Iowa's offense, which had spent most of the season moving with the efficiency of a person drowning in quicksand, would combine with Northwestern's own struggling unit in a display of football so hideous and offputting that Pat Fitzgerald and all of the available Ferentz in North America would be hauled in front of a congressional panel so that they could be berated by bipartisan lawmakers showing blown up pictures of holding penalties while demanding that they answer to the American people. Alas, that did not happen. Northwestern just got smoked again in a normal bad game.

The Wildcats, with a single win that happened what feels like twelve years ago and absolutely no reason to believe they'll add a second to the tally, are on their way to their worst season since 1989. That year they lost every single game they played. They lost to a then-independent Rutgers. Every game was a double-digit blowout, except the game to Minnesota, which they somehow lost 20-18, a score that to me does not seem possible in 1989. This is not the 1980s, though. Northwestern and its donors have inexplicably poured hundreds of millions of dollars into athletics including a fancy training center, a renovated basketball/volleyball arena, and a proposed new stadium that will cost nearly a billion dollars in its own right, they are paying Pat Fitzgerald a mysterious but presumably hefty salary, and they are getting the same results that they did when the facilities were a strip of grass and a port-a-potty. To be honest this is objectively funny.

To be honest I have not seen a single second of the Iowa game. I was unable to watch the game live and when I saw that the score featured actual numbers and not the primal scream of an undead language, I had absolutely no incentive to watch the specific ways that they had gotten bludgeoned and pinioned all over Kinnick Stadium. Northwestern under Fitzgerald has rarely been a fun team to watch; the entire enterprise, even at its best, often involved grimly clinging to the lead in the second half in a way that resembled watching the second half of Uncut Gems every Saturday. 

This is how I win

Now, Fitzgerald has the Wildcats play the same style of grimy, grinding football, and the results for the past two seasons have not been there. The faint hope of infuriating or at the very least annoying the various teams of the Big Ten has been evaporating.

The Big Ten West this year is a shit show, a maddening collection of mediocrity. This is the type of year where Northwestern has in the past been able to wriggle through the abyss and end up in Indianapolis or at the very least the Eccentric Uncle Mustache Pincher Wax Bowl. Instead, they just keep getting bonked about the helmet. It is normally hard to make the case to anyone why they should watch Northwestern football or that Northwestern has a football team with uniforms and everything; it is impossible to do so now. Time to look at this week's opponent.

A TECHNICAL AND DETAILED ANALYSIS OF NORTHWESTERN'S UPCOMING GAME AGAINST THE OHIO STATE BUCKEYES

THE WORLD SERIES IS AN INSTRUMENT OF MADNESS

Every baseball fan wants to see their team in the World Series, but it is no small comfort that when that doesn't happen the fan is rewarded with the immense luxury of not having to watch her team play in the World Series. Neutral fans get to enjoy the unbearable tension of each pitch, the crowd roaring and retreating like an ocean wave, the catharsis of a timely hit and the crushing misery of an error and the fans of the two teams playing experience the world series by thinking to themselves: aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh aaaaaahhhhh.

Every big game in a sport offers tension and drama, but baseball's pace is best suited to emotional torture. It's already a slow game, but in the playoffs become glacial. No other sport forces spectators to indulge the players in so much housekeeping.  In between each pitch they kick the dirt around, they adjust their gloves and their crotch protecting equipment, they blink and make those weird open-mouthed guppy faces that Dustin Pedroia used to do.  The pitchers stare off meaningfully into the middle distance.  Every pitch for both teams could mean certain doom.

 

Baseball excels at doing this to people for four entire hours

Baseball's general slow and ambient nature-- the game is best enjoyed as a soothing background to something else going on during the summer-- gets weaponized into a terrifying dirge in the postseason as the stakes get higher.  In its ideal summer form, Ron Coomer is talking about the time he got sandwich poisoning on a road trip in 1988 after eating fourteen chicken parms on a dare from Rick Wrona while you chop onions without a care in the world; October finds you watching Jake Arrieta stare at the catcher with pupils the size of pinpricks for 45 seconds while feeling like you are going to vomit.  

But for those of us lucky enough to root for shitty teams, the playoffs offer a delightful voyeur's window into mass nervous breakdowns.  Every cut to a fan shows a group of people on the verge of bursting into tears, every home team setback is met with an eerie, miserable silence.  Baseball is the only major sport that allows fans space to perceverate and to stew, unbothered by anything happening other than players standing around.  Everything about the postseason, from the way that its best teams are promised nothing from a short series to prolonged the way games unfold over a feeling of relentless dread, makes the fans of teams almost rooting for it to end.  It is absolutely wonderful to enjoy without caring who wins and utterly unbearable to endure for fans of teams in it, and I desperately hope the Cubs make it back so I can be miserable again.

THE INDIANAPOLIS EXPRESS

Hugh Millhew was not sure why he stopped the bus for the stooped, bearded man or why he decided to change course and ferry him to Indianapolis. He figured he had a bus now, and when he stopped the man tried to get on, and, after thinking about it for a few minutes he could not come up with a good reason not to go to Indianapolis.

Millhew hadn’t planned on driving a bus on this trip or at any point in his life. His problem was that he liked talking to people and, in this case specifically, people in a bar next to his motel. In this case that was M. Powell Straigthurt, the proprietor of Straithurt Motors on Route 19 who pulled up in a glistening Dodge and told Millhew he could have it for his old Buick plus $180. Millhew said he wasn’t a fool, he wanted to have a look at the thing first. He popped the hood right in the parking lot.

“This thing has a worn alternator, the tires are practically bald, and the radio only gets the bad religious station,” Millhew said, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “Clutch is sticky too.” Millhew also did not have $180 on him either, but he kept that to himself.

“Son, you drive a hard bargain, but I can tell you know your way around an automobile,” Straighthurt said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. How about a straight up swap? I could always use another Buick, even if it’s just for parts.” 

That irked Millhew. Sure, the Buick needed some work, the fuel pump was nearly shot, and every four or five times it needed a kick in exactly the right place on the front fender in order to fully turn over, but he had kept it running all the way from Lubbock. But he couldn’t pass up a swap.

Straigthurt proposed doing the trade tonight. He said that did not want other customers seeing him give Millhew such a good deal and then demanding a nice Dodge for their own hunks of junk. Millhew was a little dubious, but he also noticed a flushed and swaying demeanor in the man and figured the rum cocktails he had seen Straighthurt downing one after the other could be playing a role here and it might be best to act before the man sobered up.

Millhew could tell Straighurt Motors was a major operation based on the billboard he saw with the M. Powell’s grinning face looking like the face of the moon and the fact that roof had an enormous inflatable gorilla ("Get yourself a deal that's INSANE!!!" the sign said, making the gorilla's presence somewhat of an enigma). Straighhurt took him to the business office in a trailer in the back of the lot. Millhew sat filling out dozens of forms. It seemed like every for paper he filled out, Straighthurt produced two more and as he attacked them, Straighthurt pounded addenda and clauses out on his typewriter, squinting through half-glasses. Finally he finished. Straighthurts produced a bottle of something brown and offered it to Millhew, but Millhew did not feel like celebrating. 

“If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Straighthurt, I’d just like the Dodge and I’ll be on my way.” 

“Well, I’ll be,” Straighthurt said. “We have a bit of a complication. You see, the Dodge, I just saw it is not available. Already sold to Mr. Lardner N. Wiltnoy. Taking delivery on the 24th. What a horrible oversight. My deepest apologies.” 

“OK then, I’ll just take the Buick back,” Millhew said

“Well, I'm afraid I can’t do that. You see, you’ve just signed it over to Straighthurt Motors. Here it is, in triplicate. Why, I just saw you fill out the forms yourself.”

Millhew was furious. He cursed. He whirled around to get the police. But then he saw it: a whole wall of photos of Straighthurt grinning that billboard grin of his with every badge in the county. There was one with him and the police department softball team he sponsored. There was one directly behind his head with the sheriff. He was smiling the same smile as in the picture now. 

“You’re welcome to talk to Sheriff Maughton. I’m sure he would be happy to take a look at the paperwork we’ve established here,” Straighthurt said. “Of course, I would never just take a car from someone like you. That would be fraudulent and you don’t get to be the sponsor of the sheriff’s bowling team with those sorts of lax attitudes towards the law and the constitution. I can’t get you the Dodge, but I’ve got just the vehicle for a youngster who knows his way around an engine block.”

Millhew had no choice and he followed him to the back of the lot. That’s where it was: an ancient, rusted bus. It still had “Billy’s Big Billy Boy’s Band, Brownsville” stenciled on the back. It smelled like it was leaking oil like a gutshot gunfighter. 

“Look at this fine automobile. Been all over the country, all over the hemisphere. Still runs like a dream. Seems perfect for an itinerant man such as yourself in his journeys. Maybe meet a nice girl. Maybe meet a few nice girls. You’ve got the room in here.” 

Millhew didn’t want the bus. But he also didn’t want to walk out of there and those were his only choices. He also noticed that Straighthurt had his hand grasping something in his pocket. He sighed and took the keys and the registration.

The plan had been to take the interstate out east and track down his friend Frad Croddle, but Frad had stopped answering the phone and the one time he tried to take the bus on the interstate it had moved so ponderously that multiple drivers threw hamburgers at him and he needed to stop and clean off the windshield. Millhew began meandering through backroads. That’s where he met Professor Huddry.

Millhew had noticed him at the Tri Booth Inn.  An old man bearded man in a rumpled suit with threadbare elbow patches was hunched over a table sniffing the fumes from what looked like a cup of tea or whatever spices they managed to dump in a mug full of hot water for him. The old man was surrounded by decrepit cardboard boxes.  The man looked at Millhew and introduced himself as Professor Huddry of the Huddry-Mantis Institute, but Millhew  simply nodded and went out to the parking lot.  He was done with conversations with eccentrics after the Straighthurt fiasco. But when he went to leave, there was Professor Huddry standing in front of the bus’s door like he was getting on the crosstown express.

“I noticed that were driving alone in this great big bus,” the man said. 

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” said Millhew.

“Well, if you’re heading east, I can use a ride to Indianapolis. My previous travel arrangements fell apart due to a small amount of treachery, leaving me to lug my books and articles and I can't find a single ride that does not appear to be a death trap. This must be the jalopy capital of the United States.  I can contribute some gas money.”

Millhew thought about it. He was down to his last $25 or so, and while he had no intention of ever setting foot in Indianapolis, it was at least vaguely in the right direction. Besides, he figured he could kick this odd little man to the curb if he became too tedious. He told him he’d take him up on his offer and began loading the boxes into the bus. There were dozens of them and they had been water damaged by some rain or a puddle and barely held together. It seemed like they had books in them and it took some time to get everything loaded up.

“You don’t know it now, but you’re taking a step to save amateur athletics in this country,” the Huddry said.

"How about we save that first tank of gas,” Millhew said. 

The first hours started in silence. Millhew blared the radio (it was the bad religious station, the one with a firebreathing preacher shrieking about his audience going to hell for embracing Satan’s radio) until it faded from the dial and that's when Huddry saw his opportunity to start talking.

“Have you heard of NIL?” the professor said.

“NIL? Is that some sort of chemical?” Millhew replied.

“No, it’s an acronym. That’s when you have letters that stand for words,” the professor said.

“I know that.” Millhew hissed.

“Name, image, likeness. Do you know that that means? Of course you don’t,” Hoddry said. “It means that crime is legal. It means that athletes are for sale. It means that a man’s integrity is on the open market like a hog’s carcass. Name, image, likeness. You’ve got college athletes getting paid now. And it’s all legal.”

Millhew was at a loss. “Why do you care if college athletes get paid?”

“That is just what I expect to hear from a nincompoop. It’s classic nincompoopery. Page 14. Habeas nincompooperus. Do you hear yourself? Do you understand integrity? Amateurism? The ideal of the scholar-athlete? Listen to yourself.”

“You better watch that nincompoop stuff or you can walk. Don’t forget this is my bus.”

“Of course. I apologize,” the professor said. “Not everyone has been exposed to the beauty of pure amateur athletics. You don’t strike me as a collegian.”

In fact Millhew had done one semester at State before both he and the administration came to a mutual understanding that he would no longer burden the faculty with his presence.

“This is exactly the type of situation that Duckett discusses in Chapter 15. I take it you have not heard of Buck Duckett?”

“No,” said Millhew. He pawed at the radio dial.

“Duckett is the foremost mind in amateur athletics. A guardian of sorts. An investigator for the NCAA. I assume you’ve never heard of the Tennessee Pants Bust of 1978. The author of In Cold Pants, a methodological guide to investigating illegal payments but, more than that, a metaphysical journey, a meditation on the soul of amateurism. The most profound sports text that has been written or will be written this century.”

The bus shuddered.

“I hope you don’t expect that I pay for repairs for this wretched wreck,” the professor said.

“The bus is fine. Just needs a little transmission fluid in a few miles,” Millhew said.

“The soul of amateurism,” Hoddry continued. “Do you know that Duckett once broke six ribs impersonating a scout team punter while discovering a ring of Tech players receiving free hoagies every single day from a devious sandwiches magnate?”

“I don’t know, those football players must get pretty hungry running around in the sun all day,” Millhew said.

“Of course they do,” said the professor. “But there are legal sandwiches and illegal– anyway the point seems to elude you. But what I hope is that it won’t elude the National Collegiate Athletics Association. As you can see I’ve prepared several proofs, mathematical proofs based on a numerological reading of In Cold Pants that I have written up so elegantly that it could get through to even the most thickheaded bureaucrat. I believe that once they are confronted with the texts from Duckett, Duckett scholars, and my own work showing that Chapter 13, the one where he details how he rigged up a crude funicular in order to sneak into a fraternity house and reconnoiter a set of golf clubs given to a point guard is actually, when run through a crude but effective cipher, a clear rebuke to the exact NIL code governing the NCAA rules, they will have no choice but to revoke the imbecilic law and stop this monstrous professionalization of football, darts, and croquet.”

Millhew finally managed to find a radio station. It was a small station and it was playing something called the Symphony of Discordant Accordions but he would listen to hours of snoring or shrieking babies to avoid having to endure to more speeches about Buck Duckett and the NCAA. Eventually they decided to stop and get something to eat at a roadside diner. Duckett had hoped to sit alone at the counter but Hoddry motioned him into a booth, and Millhew's manners wouldn't allow him to abandon him.

“The key to understanding Buck Duckett is in line and page numbers, which is why you need the third edition. You see, the key does not work in the first or second editions quite well with the roman numeral introduction and the beastly fourth edition, with an entirely superfluous chapter about the various swashbuckling incidents Duckett endured while investigating fencing teams that was probably ghostwritten by some dullard publisher's assistant.”

A strange man sitting at the counter swiveled around his stool and stared at them. He was as tall as Hoddry was stooped, gangly, clean-shaven, with remarkable ears that drooped down across the length of his tiny face. Millhew was embarrassed because Hoddry was talking his nonsense loudly and occasionally gesturing with a fork. The man got up, seemingly unfolding himself from the stool and materialized next to them with impossibly long strides.

“What’s this Buck Duckett nonsense you’re raving about?” he said.

“Well, this is high-level theory and scholarship. I don’t have time to explain it to another thick-headed oaf. I’m a very busy man with business before the NCAA,” the professor replied.

“Buck Duckett is nonsense. That was debunked years ago. All tall tales from a sad man writing stories about busting water polo players. If you had simply read Pack Bracket, you would have no issues defending amateurism,” the man said.

“Pack Bracket? Pack Bracket? I should have been able to tell I was dealing with a Bracket Man by looking at the ridges on your skull. Look at his head,” Hoddry said turning to Millhew. “The classic shape of a cretin. It is a miracle this man is able to feed himself. Pack Bracket.” Now he looked up at the tall man looming over him. “You realize that it was Bracketism that led right to NIL? The Bracket Men’s texts were so harebrained that the NCAA laughed them out of the room. Or did you not see the issue of ‘Amateur Sports Theorems’ about it? Maybe there weren’t enough pictures.”

“That hearing was a damn stitch-up and you know it,” the tall man said. “The whole thing was already a joke when people started reading this fake detective talking about disguising himself as a waiter to catch Moose Caldwell accepting illegal fireworks when everyone knows Caldwell’s own uncle turned him in.”

“Please,” Hoddry said. “The Moose Caldwell Uncle theory is something I’ve easily debunked if you read chapters four and six of my manuscript. All of the evidence shows that Duckett not only intercepted the pants but also left a series of prophesies embedded by analyzing the sentence structure. But I wouldn’t expect a Bracketist to be able to follow such a basic line.”

“Then you haven’t read Nick Nacket. I have it right here.” The tall man ambled over to the corner of the diner where he had his own mess of cardboard boxes that seemed impossibly damp and began rooting through them. 

“Let’s go. We can leave this deluded maniac to his scribblings. We have no time to waste,” the professor said as he gobbled up the remains of his meatloaf and stood up. But he was not fast enough. By the time he finished and paid the bill (the only reason Millhew had not left him at that gas station hours earlier when he got into a thirty minute argument with the attendant about Charleston Chew), the tall man had loped over to the parking lot and was already loading his boxes onto the bus. 

“I ain’t letting you go to Indianapolis without at least reading Nick Nacket,” he said, waving a battered volume at the professor.

“Do you think I haven’t read it? Or at least sampled enough of his incoherent nonsense to understand the futility of this enterprise?” By now both men were on the bus pointing their arms at each other and taking turns rifling through boxes to shove documents at each other while invoking the names of Beckett Heck and Truck Van Truk.

Millhew quietly slipped out of the parking lot and onto the road and stuck out his thumb.