Going Iowanfinite: The Rise of a Football Revolutionary

Reports of the death of Northwestern's football program have been greatly exaggerated.  The team, reeling from the fallout from the hazing scandal, the firing of Pat Fitzgerald, the promotion of a coach with so little experience that the university felt it necessary to install Skip Holtz as some sort of guiding figure, and a team that had looked barely competitive in its previous few seasons seemed to augur a disaster of a season from a win-loss standpoint, a return to the early 1980s Northwestern of entire seasons without a single win and a program turning into a weird nineteenth-century vestige in one of college football's expanding major leagues.  And then that didn't happen.  The Wildcats are fine.  They are a perfectly cromulent Big Ten West team slopping around their division with other teams that are simply dealing with being Big Ten West teams.  It is the strangest outcome to a season this season that I could have possibly imagined.

Evidence that Northwestern is not in last place
 

When Northwestern started playing other teams in the division, I thought they had a proof of concept of how they could win.  They would go headbutt with the other Big Ten West teams in a frankly obscene display of offensive rectitude and occasionally come up with a victory.  But that was not supposed to happen against Maryland from the Big Ten East, with its 5-0 record to start the season, star quarterback and ability to hang tough against the likes of Ohio State.  Instead, Northwestern simply outplayed them.  The defense harassed Taulia Tagovailoa to the tune of six sacks and an interception, Brandon Sullivan threw for 265 yards and rushed for 56 more, Coco Azema was everywhere and sealed the game with an interception, and the Wildcats managed to hang on.

Northwestern is now 4-4.  They have a decent shot at a bowl game.  They are even I guess sort of technically in the race for the Big Ten West but only because whoever leads the Big Ten West gets a phone call that says "seven days" and then J Leman crawls out of their jumbotron the next week and the team fumbles the ball 55 times and loses 6.5-3.  This is remarkable.  David Braun has seemingly stepped in and managed to get something out of this team that is enabling them to compete in football games and it seems more and more likely that he will at some point get a shot to take the job permanently.  The fact that Northwestern is managing to even function at this point in a year where they were considered the worst major-conference team in all of college football has certainly raised some questions about what Pat Fitzgerald was even doing although I am sure his legal team will be prepared to discuss it.

Of course it is still difficult to separate what Northwestern is doing on the field with the lingering rot in the athletic department.  On Friday, former players Rico Lamitte and Noah Herron spoke at a press conference detailing a culture of racism in the Wildcat football program dating back to their playing days in the early 2000s.  More than 50 players have filed more than 20 lawsuits against the university in the wake of the scandal alleging incidents of racism, abuse, and sexual hazing in the football team and other athletic programs, and it is likely that more and more appalling incidents continue to filter out.  

WRETURN TO WRIGLEY

Well, here it is.  They took the most Big Ten West possible game and, in the final year of the Big Ten West, they have shunted it to a paywalled streaming service that mainly shows old episodes of Frasier, and they are doing it in an ancient baseball stadium which has yet to successfully mount a college football game without calamity.  

 

NILES: I have never heard such disgusting, vile language in a crowd than from those visiting Iowans.  Maris is glued to her fainting chair.

FRASIER: Her fainting chair?

NILES: We're having the couch upholstered, I had to improvise.

MARTIN: Have you seen that rowdy crowd out there? I tell ya, those Iowa fans really like to see their team punt. They're even chanting for it.

NILE: Punt? They were saying punt? (Grabs coat and sprints out the door) I have to intercept a strongly-worded letter I sent to the university provost.

In the original Wrigley game in 2010, the Big Ten famously forced both teams to only go one way for fear that using both endzones would risk players smashing each other into brick walls only padded by dead ivy.  Last year, the field was so slippery that a Purdue player could not even successfully execute a kickoff without falling down and it felt like they had just left the infield dirt, bases, and a few bats and catcher's masks laying around in the middle of the field.  

Now the Wrigley game features Northwestern's less than stellar offense against Iowa's notoriously non-functional attack. The pundits expect a shockingly low-scoring game, perhaps one in the negative numbers.  This would fit in the parameters of historic Northwestern-Iowa games in this, the final season of the Big Ten West, where true aficionados of toilet football expect both teams to get together and produce one of the most disgusting football games available on the college football calendar.  

There are some actual stakes in this game-- Iowa is still somehow leading the Big Ten West title race and Northwestern can get closer to bowl eligibility with a win, but the real intrigue is in both coaching staffs.  The Hawkeyes already did something very strange and pre-fired offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, saying he will serve out the rest of the year but not return next season, as if to say that they no longer could sanction his putrid anti-football but he needs to keep doing it a few more times, as a bit.  This awkward half-dismissal ends a favorite parlor game for a certain segment of online college football weirdos, which was to monitor Iowa's scoring output each game based on a clause in Brian Ferentz's contract that would reportedly void it if the Hawkeyes did not score 325 points by the end of the season (an average of 25 per game); it is possible that Iowa prematurely announced that Ferentz was not coming back because the athletic department noticed that people were having fun with some element of Iowa football and they moved immediately to quash it.  Northwestern, on the other hand, is working with an entire interim coaching staff.  This game might lead the nation in the most Temporary Coaches working a regular season game.

At the very least, the imminent dismissal of Brian Ferentz certainly will make for a tense Thanksgiving at the Ferentz house, where I imagine things already get irksome if anyone asks for a dish to be passed

Despite its world-famous offensive ineptitude, the Hawkeyes are favored in this nominal home game for the Wildcats because they still boast a sinister defense. Wrigley will be completely overrun with Iowa fans.  I am sure the broadcast will find ways to play up the baseball angle by comparing a potential low-scoring game to a pitcher's duel or discussing how Brian Ferentz has ordered his quarterback to bunt, but hopefully this game ends the Big Ten West the way an Iowa-Northwestern game has traditionally ended: as an unwatchable game that Northwestern wins on a very stupid Iowa penalty that gets at least three Iowa message board posters investigated by a federal entity.  

GOING IOWANFINITE: THE RISE OF A FOOTBALL REVOLUTIONARY

Note: The following excerpt from the author embedded within the Iowa football program in the spring of 2023, is from a book originally completed before the 2023 football season and published on Friday, October 27, 2023.     

“Let me ask you something,” Brian Ferentz said to his offensive coaching staff.  He sat at the head of a large u-shaped desk at the Hansen Football Performance Center leaning back, his arms behind his head.  “What’s the most efficient play in football?”

He stared at the group before him, wizened old coaches whose heads bore permanent marks and indentations from years of headset squinting through half-glasses, eager young graduate assistants still in playing shape and looming like distant mountains in the corners of the room, afraid to say anything, and me, trying not to be noticed as I wrote everything down.

“Three point three yard run,” wheezed out Mackett.  Walt Mackett had been with the Hawkeyes since he played as a nasty fullback in 1952 and unofficially led the Big Ten in biting incidents.  Mackett officially retired in 1997, but still hung around in meetings and prepared detailed longhand scouting reports that he passed around.

“Wrong,” Ferentz said.  “Plannitz.”

Plannitz, a nervous assistant who had just graduated after five years as a walk-on and who never got into a single game because the one time they decided to send him in in a blowout against Western Illinois he was on the toilet, gulped.  “Uhhh, five yard out,” he said.

“Wrong.”  He began randomly pointing around the room with his marker.

“Tight end screen.”  

“Nope.”

“Jet sweep.”

“No.”

“Flea flicker.”

“That's not even real. Oh Grady, you think this is boring?  Well, enlighten us.”

Grant Grady, a hotshot receivers coach who was not too fond of Ferentz’s little quizzes, had been folding a playsheet into a paper giraffe in a sort of hostile origami.  “I don’t know Brian, what about a fuckin’ punt.”  

Everyone laughed.  The stagnant nature of Iowa’s 2022 offense was a running joke in the football media and one that Ferentz didn’t think was very funny, which is why he was in the meeting room.

“You know what you’re not that far off.”

Ferentz stood up and sauntered over to the whiteboard.  He maintained the bulk and bearing of a former lineman.  He uncapped his marker and wrote a two on the board.  

“Safety.  How many plays did the offense run?”

“The offense, coach?” said Plannitz.

“Yeah.  How many did we run?  It’s not a trick question.”

“Uh, none,” Plannitz said.

“Damn straight.”  He put a slash sign with a zero next to the two.

“Fumble return, how many did we run?”  He wrote a six on the board.

This time two or three coaches chimed in at the same time.  “Zero.”  Six slash zero on the board.

“Right.  Punt return?” He wrote another 6 then a slash.  

All of the coaches said “zero” in unison as Ferentz wrote it on the board except for one or two that said “none” and Grady, who was intently drawing teeth on his giraffe.  

“How about a situation where a team lines up for an extra point or two-point conversion but somehow manages to lose possession of the football in its own endzone on the complete other end of the field?”

“Zero,” they yelled out because that was the pattern but many of them looked confused.  “That’s right,” Ferentz said and then wrote a one slash zero.  “Do the math on those.  Which one is most efficient? We’re talkin’ points per offensive play.  Who here knows basic division?”

A few brows furrowed.  Plannitz pulled his phone halfway out of his pocket and then sheepishly put it back when he noticed no one else doing that.  A heavy silence settled in the room.

Grady looked up.  “They’re all horseshit.  You can’t do ‘em.”  “You can’t divide by zero.  It’s not allowed or something.”

“That’s absolutely right.  They’re all exactly the same.  The same efficiency.  Zero plays for the offense.  It’s so efficient that it is scientifically impossible to determine.  Every other offense in the country is running plays.  They’re trying to do yardage.  They’re trying to do points.  Well guess what, you take the best offense in the goddamn country and you know what they’re doing?  Look at their efficiency numbers.  They exist.  Ours don’t.  There’s no defense in the goddamn universe that knows how to stop our shit.”

Grady exhaled deeply.”

“Got something to say, Grant?”  

“This is the absolute stupidest shit I’ve ever heard, Brian,” he said.  Ferentz walked over to him and they met forehead to forehead.  

“Get the fuck out of my football performance center,” Ferentz said.

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Grady said as he gathered his stuff and walked out.  “Good luck, fellas.  I mean that.  Good fuckin’ luck.”  Ferentz grabbed the giraffe in his meaty hand and crushed it.

“Undetermined.  That’s our strategy.”

**********

You would not think that Iowa’s football team, a notoriously staid institution where Brian’s father Kirk has been churning out the same defense, tight ends, and punts operation for decades as the longest-tenured coach in the Big Ten would be something I would write about.  My interests tend towards the cutting edge.  For example, in Jeeves Nation, I explored the world’s most innovative search engine poised to remake the entire concept of searching the World Wide Web.  In Liar’s Pogs, I examined the burgeoning pog economy emerging in schoolyards that turned into a complex international financial system of its own.  My own interest in sports came out in The Trestman Cometh, a story about a coach whose battle to bring revolutionary strategies from Canadian football to the NFL was derailed by the fact that he looked like a ventriloquists’ dummy from the cover of an R.L. Stine novel.

College football represents a far more diverse array of strategies than the NFL.  Teams are limited based on their own resources and available players.  Teams are also molded to coaches' idiosyncratic preferences.  Some teams like to try to gradually run over their opponents like a slow-moving molasses calamity.  Some teams try to move as quickly as possible and exhaust their opponents.  Other teams, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force teams unable to field players with the wide-bodied bulk of their peers, like to confuse opponents by running archaic option configurations that befuddle defenses unsure of who can run the ball.  

At Iowa, though, whatever system they had was not working.  In 2022, Iowa ranked dead last out of 130 total teams in yards per game, averaging nearly 30 yards fewer than the next-worst team Eastern Michigan.  They averaged only 117 passing yards per game; the only teams that threw for fewer yards were Navy and Air Force, which intentionally eschew the forward pass as part of their offensive strategy.  Despite the pitiful and ineffectual play of its offense, Iowa's defense still managed to carry the team to eight wins, including a victory in the Music City Bowl.  But Brian Ferentz was sick of hearing about how crappy his offense was.  With his offense already at rock bottom, Ferentz was prepared to unleash his new concept and forever change how college football was played.

I first came to know Brian Ferentz after publishing “Boylenball”, an article for the New Yorker that featured a coach who revolutionized the concept of the timeout in the NBA using innovative mathematical models to time them while philistines dismissed him as a bald asshole taking pointless timeouts while already hopelessly behind because he was mad.  Ferentz reached out to me to ask about a photo that ran in the article where Boylen wore a pork pie hat because, as a man with an equally enormous head, he had trouble finding a one that could accommodate his bulbous cranium.  I told him that Boylen was no longer talking to me because he thought the article made him seem like a “boob” but the photographer tipped me off to a place called Fred Gazoo’s Huge Haberdaschery that specialized in hats for the large-headed gentleman.  We started corresponding after that and finally met for a drink when he was scouting a player not far from where I was embedded with the founders of WebTV.  This is when I learned about Undetermined Football.

The easy way to talk about Brian Ferentz is with the cliched story of a son desperate to escape the enormous shadow of his own father.  After all, that is how things appear.  He played for Kirk and then, after a brief foray coaching in the NFL, returned to coach for him, steadily rising through the ranks, rankled by charges of nepotism while never being able to satisfy the old man.  The book practically writes itself.  But, at least as Ferentz tells it, that has nothing to do with his entry into football.  He instead sees it not as some sort of complicated King Lear-style family drama but as an intellectual puzzle.  He’d be happy to run his experiments anywhere.  But Iowa provided an opportunity and a head coach who would at least have to listen to his ideas because his mom would yell “Kirk! Listen to Brian’s ideas.”

Ferentz had been nurturing the idea for undetermined football for some time.  He tells me that the idea is rooted predictably in rebellion.  He had grown up with the idea of staid Iowa football and as a teenager became obsessed with offense, with elaborate ways of marching down the field and scoring points.  He studied the then-novel spread offense, the air raid, the old run & shoot.  As a boy, he hid play sheets showing the run/pass option under his mattress.  But as he got older, Ferentz grew tired of exotic offensive looks.  He had in mind something better.

“Do you know about Napoleon in Russia?” he said.  I told him I did but he kept going as if I said I did not.  Ferentz, a history major and the owner of several books about horse-based  warfare, began to explain how, as the Grande Armée penetrated deeper into Russia, the Russian forces defeated them by retreating further, stretching the French supply lines as winter encroached upon it.  “I thought to myself, well in the Big Ten we have a hell of a winter.  What if we also have retreat?”  

Ferentz told me that his new offensive gameplan was not just based on mathematics and the impossible “divide by zero” principle but also had elements of psychology.  He showed me papers on the concept of “mirroring” where humans as social animals had an unconscious need to emulate other humans in a similar setting.  Therefore, instead of having his team model brilliant offensive behavior such as by completing multiple forward passes or earning first downs, his team would instead foster an environment hostile to offense.  His running backs would run pointlessly into defensive tackles.  His quarterbacks would throw the ball mainly to the turf.  The other team, unaware of basic human psychology, would find themselves also playing like dogshit subconsciously out of a fear of ostracization that resided in the vestigial lobes of our primate brains.  Pretty soon both quarterbacks would be hurling themselves into linebackers or letting snaps fly over their head but only one would be doing so by design.  “Everyone's trying to run plays that work.  But we don't.  That’s the advantage right there,” he said to me as he drilled his running backs on letting a ball hit them in the face.

The idea was as counterintuitive as it was brilliant.  An offense that functionally refused to act, that performed the minimum amount of offense allowed in a football game, would act as a fulcrum where the defense and special teams would have more and more opportunities to score points.  This process would become so efficient, at least according to Ferentz’s calculations, that Iowa would become one of the highest-scoring teams in the country.  And this year he was going to find out.

It was unclear around the program whether Kirk Ferentz was on board with his son’s program or simply didn’t notice.  I tried speaking to him about this, but during our brief allotted interview time he simply squinted at me and ate an entire white onion like an apple.  

I had found a new innovation.  My publisher told me to go ahead and embed myself with the Iowa offense during training camp for the 2023 season.  To make things even more interesting, Ferentz had Iowa’s athletic director add in clauses to his own contract about how many points the team would score.  I was nervous about fitting in, so I started wearing hats and coach-style sunglasses and constantly spitting and calling things “horseshit” until I seamlessly blended into the sideline. That summer, I observed Iowa secretly installing new drills that no one had ever seen: fumbling, taking idiotic penalties at the exact wrong time, and summoning the punt team.  My publisher sold the film rights for $12 million.

It was obvious that Ferentz had stumbled onto a revolution in football strategy.  No one in the Big Ten knew what as coming.  No one in the football press knew this would happen, except for one person: me.

Please enjoy my next project Planet of The Apes: How NFTs Reshaped the Global Economy.

Lock In Success The Mike Locksley Way

All week long the football pundits were screeching about the twisted hideousness of an Iowa-Minnesota matchup.  Look at this disgusting freak football, they all said about a Peak Big Ten West game where everyone expected the teams to spit and blow their noses on the football for three downs before forcing the other team to handle it.  And they were right.  The 12-10 affair won by Minnesota on a controversial Illegal Punt Gestures penalty was a gruesome mess that no one but the most deranged midwesterners huffing pork intestine fumes could watch for extended periods without intense vomiting.   But that was a game with actual stakes and intrigue with Iowa vying to lock down the division.  Further down the dial on Big Ten Network Regional Action and, presumably, the only game available for inmates in the Face/Off Magnet Shoe prison for psychological reasons, was the deranged anti-football available between perpetual football ruiners Northwestern and Nebraska. 

 

A football fan settles in with to watch the afternoon slate with his beloved pet bees but has just learned the only games available on TV feature Big Ten West teams

I assume anyone who is deep enough down the Northwestern rabbit hole that they are not just reading normal internet football stuff but have found themselves on a blogspot web page that is now mainly a repository for experimental coach-related fan-fictions is also a person sick enough to have watched an entire Northwestern-Nebraska game, but I am going to recap the first few drives anyway because only by explaining them to other people can I convince myself that what I saw actually happened and was not some sort of AI rendering of the prompt "Northwestern and Nebraska play a game that gets football banned in the United States."  

Nebraska's quarterback, on the very first play of the game, throws a ridiculous interception directly to a Northwestern defender.  Northwestern gets the ball and moves backwards then punts.  Nebraska gains three yard and punts.  Northwestern gains five yards and punts.  Nebraska's quarterback then throws another interception in the Huskers' own ten yard line.  Northwestern loses 14 yards and kicks a field goal.  Emergency medical teams in the stadium report dozens of people are succumbing to Punt Madness.  The Big Ten attempts to intervene to force the teams to move the ball, but the sadistic Nebraska governor mobilizes the national guard to stop them.  A Nebraska fan is arrested outside the stadium for completing a pass during a tailgate.  Only a Nebraska touchdown late in the first half prevents a wide-scale riot as anxious Nebraska fans prepared to leave the stadium en masse and run the option all over Lincoln.  "These are the eventualities that you have to prepare for and execute at," Northwestern coach David Braun said at the half. 

If you look at this you will get a call that says Seven Days and then a spooky woman will crawl out of your television and run for a -2 yards.

Northwestern was unable to regain the lead and eventually scored another touchdown to ice the lead.  The Wildcats never managed to find the endzone.  The loss probably ends the team's unlikely quest for bowl eligibility because it is very difficult to imagine them playing a Big Ten team worse than Nebraska that spent the entire first half sending strongly worded telegrams to the Northwestern sideline all but demanding that the 'Cats take an enormous lead.  But it is still possible.  The team is slowly regaining its identity as a pain-in-the-ass defense that can make it very difficult to score without an effective passing game, and they play in the Big Ten West: Home of the Oaf Quarterback. They no longer look like the worst major-conference team in college football but merely a recent-vintage Northwestern team enjoying its final year rolling around in the garbage with its lumbering midwestern peers.

Unfortunately, they do not face a lummoxing punt factory team this week.  Maryland is 5-2 this season, and averages about 33 points per game.  They are, however, coming off two losses-- one to Ohio State and one to fellow Big Ten West slopsmen Illinois, but are also coming off a bye.  Maryland, like all Big Ten teams is heavily favored against the Wildcats.  Autumn has finally descended upon Chicagoland, and a nasty, blustery, and gray day will match the general vibes of Ryan Field.   I received an email from Northwestern offering a "flash sale" on tickets earlier this week, so I assume there will be approximately seventeen people in the stands forcing Northwestern on crucial downs to rally its army of tarps.  This might be the least-anticipated football game played today.

MICHIGAN SKULDUGGERY UPDATE

Last week, the college football world met Michigan Intelligence Asset Connor Stalions, who allegedly masterminded an elaborate sign-stealing operation by sending his network of agents out to various Big Ten stadiums to record opponents' sideline signals.  We have learned more this week.  Stalions is, according to reporting, the author of a strange Manifesto about Michigan football, which is something I cannot really make fun of because what you are reading on this blog is equally embarrassing.  The NCAA, ridiculed and stripped of almost all meaningful power, is rallying around its ability to investigate an actual Football Crime and as we speak Stalions' network of Joes and Lamplighters is getting rolled up while the association takes aim at its nemesis Jim Harbaugh.  This, at last, is a perfect NCAA football scandal where everyone involved seems to be a nincompoop and the results only affect football games and undermines Michigan's self-described Football Paladin reputation while its fans begin going rogue by making right turns on red lights or ringing up organic produce as normal produce in the self-checkout aisle.  

 

Stalions and his agents, adorned in this cloak, were able to roam the sidelines undetected at eleven Big Ten stadiums.

Last week, I asked readers to submit their own Airport Thriller paragraphs about Connor Stalions.  I'd like to thank everyone who wrote in, and here are their contributions, each of which I have titled.

Codes Blue, by noahcoffman22:

Ask anybody in Ann Arbor about Connor Stalions, and one of the first things they'll tell you is that he's a man with a code. Right now, he has several of them, actually, burning up the inside pocket of his vintage leather jacket as he hightails it out of Piscataway. His Harley squeals into a sharp left toward the New Jersey Turnpike, discarded milk bottle (a present from "Big Jim" himself) clinking away behind him. Slowly, he allows a smile to creep across his grizzled visage. Cupping his custom earpiece, he mutters the only two words he needs for the man on the other end to know the job has been done: "signs.....stolen."

Ooooo RAWR RAWR RAWR by Kermit Van Jensen

A naked bootleg is not unlike an amphibious landing. An operation drunk with stupid courage, yet critically reliant on tactical deftness. Any Marine, no matter how hard-headed, knows no feat of bravery can save a botched landing. A forewarned defensive battalion will massacre an amphibious force left with nowhere to run.

This thought repulsed Stalions, who now envisaged himself holed up in a pillbox, directing perfectly sighted fire on his hapless brothers in arms.

He shut his eyes, hard, and briefly pulled the binoculars away from his face.

What he did see was a grad assistant in neon green wildly flailing both of his arms from a proud kneel.

“This shit makes me sick,” he muttered to himself, referring not only to Northwestern’s offense, but also his own betrayal of the Corps’ values.

“Semper Fi … Go Blue,” he sneered with sardonic cadence.

“Doesn’t mean nothing to a grunt like me” 

The Spider Weaves Its Own Web: A Connor Stalions Novel by Joshua L.

“You’re a long way from the Big 10,” Kiffin chuckled softly, almost wryly.

Under other circumstances it might not have been an unfriendly sound, but here—with a sixth consecutive Jaxson Dart bubble screen throw headed directly toward Connor Stalions’s already bruised eight pack abs—it was the very chorus of evil. “You wanted a look at our playbook, Mr. Stalions,” the Ole Miss coach whispered from underneath his signature white visor before leaning close to look directly into the flint-gray eyes of Stalions, who remained bound firmly to the tackle dummy.

“Well, you got it. Jaxson! bubble screen, strong side, hut!”

Stalions had trained for this. Bracing his abdominals for impact, he began working the razor edge of Kiffin’s laminated play sheet, which he’d lifted from the coach’s windbreaker just moments before, against his bonds. Harbaugh had to know what Stalions had seen in Oxford. The world had to know.

Day of the Jackal 2: Different Day, Different Jackal by Anonymous

Ryan Day laughed.

Operation Cheeseburger failed to turn public support against the Enemy, but this would achieve that aim. Deep Punt had come through with the needed intel. Now he just needed to get to the drop site undetected and RonEnglishFanJS09 would finish the mission.

He knew that Stallions had cracked his publicly exposed signaling network like the Allies had deciphered the Enigma Machine. That must be the only reason they experienced setbacks; not their inability to block Aidan Hutchinson. Now he would rectify this.

Day knew that when Mike Leach’s network was compromised, he arranged an elaborate ruse to exploit his enemy’s assumed faulty intel. But the rogue pirate’s tradecraft was flawed. Don’t plant false information to use against the opposition. Complain to the teacher instead!

He reached the spot. Glancing around nonchalantly, Day reached into the back of his pants and pulled out the laminated A0 play-card and finished the dead drop. “Who is born on third base now?” he muttered as he walked into the cold night.

LOCK IN SUCCESS THE MIKE LOCKSLEY WAY

And when it ended, all Mike Locksley wanted from me was an explanation. I told him I was desperate and that I needed money.  More than that, I wanted a shot-- I spent all day answering calls and turning people down on my boss's behalf as they tried to throw money and plaudits at him, but no one ever called and asked for me.  He told me this was not a road to success the Mike Locksley way.  I know, I said.  I had read all about it in his papers.

I had been working as the assistant for legendary sports personality ghostwriter Roddy Pfampfor about eight months.  My novel, an experimental work about hypotheticals and the objectivity of "truth" that I explored by writing about something happening and then writing "or did it?" right after or sometimes in a footnote, had been rejected by 71 small presses, journals, quarterlies, websites and even some 'zines, and I had just been fired from a job proofreading manifestos.  I got the job with Pfamp after seeing a bizarre ad for a "Literary Fetchman" in the print shop where I was picking up another copy of my manuscript that I was going to send to a publisher that specialized in vintage microwave owner's manuals.  I learned that I was the only one who answered that ad, and soon I found myself at the right hand of Roddy Pfamp.

Pfamp was not a household name, but most people encountered him at some point by picking up one of his ghostwritten memoirs.  He written hundreds, including The Hat Had It Coming by Lou Piniella, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Literature, and Climbing to the Majors: A Matt Stairs Story.  Pfamp was a ghostwriter's ghostwriter, always refusing credit and press.  On any occasion where he had to be credited as an "as told to" or even a "with," he always used a different pen name; no one knew that Losing to Win by Matt Millen with Herb Nadacky was by the same author as Winning to Lose by Marv Levy as told to Larry "Gred" Gredsonof.  Pfamp also refused to be photographed and wore elaborate disguises every time he met with an author in order to maintain his air of mystery.

Pfamp needed an assistant because he had been seriously injured on his last assignment.  No one knew that Pfamp had another secret career as the ghostwriter for the entire literary output of famed sportswriter Warren "Plaid" Blanton.  Blanton had been a fixture in the sports press for decades, known for his outrageous participation stunts, his love for an exotic form of Flemish badminton, and his ever-present pipe.  What no one knew was that everything under Blanton's byline was actually written by Roddy Pfamp.  Blanton never wrote a word of his book Fly Me To The Ground chronicling his attempt to win a home-made flying contraption contest nor did he write the famous prank article where he invented a legendary baseball player named "Mickey Mantle," which bamboozled an entire generation of Baby Boomers. Blanton was a handsome man who sounded vaguely European despite having grown up entirely in the United States and who divided his time between the literary fête circuit and by expounding from his book-lined study in documentaries about boxing, squash, joust injuries.  The two had met when the they were covering a varsity squinting competition.  Blanton was a young stringer for Cudgel, and the two of them essentially invented the Plaid Blanton persona over a drunken, weeks-long bacchanal that resulted in Pfamp ghostwriting Blanton's first "I Say" column and Blanton purchasing his first ascot.  

Pfamp's injury occurred when he was writing a book about Blanton secretly joining the new Slamball revival.  What people didn't realize is that Pfamp also silently joined in these stunts, working alongside Blanton as a lion-tamer, monster jam driver, and competitor in the New England Maritime Salty Sea Dog competition.  Pfamp felt he needed to join the Slamball league disguised as someone named Titus Slamballicus despite being 77 years old, and he instantly severed 70% of his leg ligaments on his first attempted slam.

It was not particularly fun to work for Roddy Pfamp.  I thought he would be full of interesting and colorful stories about the famous sports-men he met, but he was gruff and quick to anger.  I'm not sure he ever learned my name.  Instead he just called me "egghead" because of the remarkably round and admittedly somewhat bulbous shape of my skull.  "You, Egghead, get me the 1959 Almanack of Yachting Winds," is something he might say.  Or "How can I get it into your head to get no pulp orange juice? I'm speaking literally, how does anything penetrate that cranium?"  I brought up my writing often and even left copies of my manuscript around in areas where he would normally read it but he became so agitated even seeing it that a doctor told me that I had to burn it in front of him or he might suffer from a rare condition common in old, mean writers called Literary Agita.

My main job, aside from helping with the basic household tasks, was dealing with Pfamp's voluminous correspondence.  Even in his ailing state, publishers bombarded him with requests.  Sports personalities needed memoirs, magazine profiles, and apologies written on the notes app on their phones and posted to social media.  I was told to turn them all down.  I learned that this was Pfamp's preferred technique.  He had not accepted a pitch for decades.  Instead, the publishers and editors he preferred to work with and those who knew how to handle him all understood how to find him.  Others who didn't know him thought they could win him over with elaborate gestures.  One publisher, desperate to sign him onto an untitled Rony Seikaly project, sent over fourteen singing telegrams.  Another disguised himself as a meter reader from the city in order to get an audience with Pfamp, who then chased him from his apartment with a game-used Mickey Morandini bat.  Others sent elaborate meals, expensive liquor, blank checks.  Every day, I sifted through a pile of proposals and sent pointed letters to them on Pfamp's letterhead telling them to buzz off.

I was tired, frustrated, and broke when I found a small packet buried under some papers.  While Pfamp rejected all proposals on sight, he still read all of them in the off-chance something special caught his eye and also so he could ridicule the book when it was inevitably published by one of his many ghostwriter rivals.  But he had not seen this one.  It had gotten lost among his notes for an abandoned project called A Life In Fifteen Shoves by Charles Oakley that ended in a shoving match. The packet held a proposal for a book to be titled Lock In Success, a life advice manual from a fellow named Mike Locksley.  The offer was a truly astronomical sum.  I began to get an idea.

Because of his elaborate disguise regimen and reclusive personal life, almost no one knew what Roddy Pfamp actually looked like.  I could easily present myself to this Locksley, write down his Business Secrets from sports, and produce a book very quickly.  The money would allow me to quit this job and tell Pfamp where to cram it while knowing that my giant head had outwitted him and then self-publish my masterpiece and even market it to the discerning literary public at various high society functions.  It was a scheme so devious and simple that I chuckled to myself when I first game up with it.  I wrote the publisher and told them that Roddy Pfamp accepted and then detailed instructions for payment to his assistant who handles those sorts of things for him as he was too busy to get bogged down in the details of business (unlike Mike Locksley, I presumed).

I figured that Locksley would appreciate a punctual man, but I my planned subterfuge to get several hours away from Pfamp had not worked.  He had a difficult time getting his VCR to work and he wanted to watch an old Olympic fencing match from 1984 to heckle the participants, but the tape was old and worn and Pfamp kept telling me I was causing "cranial interference" so by the time I was able to pry myself from him and get to Locksley's hotel room, I was nearly an hour late.  

Mike Locksley, I learned, is not a man you want to keep waiting.  He is detailed and precise and busy.  I knew from previous research that he was a football coach, and that implied to me a certain type of disciplinary fetish. I told him I had been detained by car problems and began inventing an elaborate story about a zoo truck that had unleashed two or three irate rhinoceros on the main highway.  "Let me tell you what Nick Saban used to say about excuses," he said.  I took it that Nick Saban was some sort of football personality that I should know about.  "The minute you give me an excuse, you excuse yourself from consideration."  He stared at me and then smiled, so I let out a nervous chuckle as if to say yes that is something Nick Saban would say.  "Well you made it here, let's see if we can work together."

He handed me a a sheaf of papers.  It was an outline based on some motivational seminars he had been given, some anecdotes, life lessons, etc. that would form the basis of the book.  Lock in Success, they were called.  There were a lot of football metaphors.  This was a problem.  Though I worked for a major sportswriter, I had no interest or knowledge of any sort of sport or sporting pursuit.  I despised them and saw them as grunting circuses for troglodytes.  I had no working knowledge of football whatsoever.  I suppose, in my excitement for the scheme, I had not ever considered that ghostwriting for a football coach might at some point require learning about football.  Locksley told me to look over the materials and come back in a week with a few samples so we could see if we were on the same page.  

On the way home, I started to read.  "When life gives you fourth and inches, don't punt."  I was lost.  I tried to subtly get Pfamp to explain football to me, every time I brought it up he said "You, Egghead.  You're blocking the afternoon sun.  Move that melon of yours before I freeze."  I even tried to research football at the local library, but a quick glance at some books made everything seem even more complicated.  The deadline loomed.  

It was four AM and I had consumed several bags of coffee at the time (I had lost my coffee pot in an ill-fated night of gambling with my old peers at an experimental writing workshop that I eventually left after exposing them all as charlatans and at this time I was simply chewing the beans).  I was set to meet Locksley in only two days.  It was impossible to ask for an extension because that would be a dreaded excuse.  I began looking at the pages again, my eyes barely able to focus, when I had a brilliant idea, one so simple yet ingenious that I could not believe it did not strike me earlier.  I would simply make up football.  A parallel system that had its own equally confounding jargon and terminology.  Because Locksley was a master coach and technician, the lay reader would only assume he was talking about stratagems so complex and diabolical that he or she could not grasp it and would simply skim through it to get to the valuable life lessons.

I began writing.  Now, instead of facing something called fourth and short, which I imagined to be some sort of adverse position, the quartered-back would be cowering in Strife Position (as a writer, I could not simply holster my literary weapons altogether).  I assumed one of the appeals of football was its violence and mayhem so I wrote many anecdotes about football players fighting out of dire circumstances by kicking and biting the opposition.  In fact, I enjoyed the concept of sports-biting so much that I invented a designated chomper-back, a strong-jawed specialist who would be lowered onto the field in a cage and then left to set upon anyone in his path with savage abandon.

I became so taken with my own version of football that I quickly abandoned Locksley's materials to elaborate on the astonishing game that flowed from my pen.  Once every thirteen minutes, the visiting team may legally perform a Reverse Oxen.  During the fourteenth period, players may craft artificial limbs to attach to themselves including tails, claws, mandibles, and fins.  In certain conditions, the coach can call for the game to take place entirely within a body of water where both teams must attack each other on skiffs.  There are times when the ball was illegal but it was only possible to figure it out by deciphering an elaborate riddle.  Points are awarded in lengthy arbitration hearings.  

I was very excited to present my new vision of football to Locksley.  As a discerning sportsman, I figured he would easily see the superior qualities of my version of the sport and become an ardent promoter.  This is not what happened.  Locksley was perplexed.  "This was a very simple assignment.  I did almost all of the work.  I know people respond to these life lessons packaged with football because I did these presentation to literally thousands of people.  It's as if you have no idea what you're doing whatsoever."  

I decided to switch tactics.  I told him that I ghostwrote for a lot of people in a lot of sports.  It would be too easy to get mixed up.  For example, what if I was writing a memoir about a tennis player and then a swimmer and pretty soon I had the tennis player doing laps at Roland Garros?  He frowned.  I explained that in order to clear my head in between projects I practiced a mental technique called "shamanic forgetting" where I would attempt to completely rid myself of all information about one sport.  I had just done a baseball book, and had completely cleared it out of my head.  "I could not tell you a batsman from a quickjobber," I said.  He continued to frown and stare.  He said "I'm sorry but you seem like you are really full of shit."

I apologized and confessed to the ruse, telling him of my desperation for money and literary fame.  This did not move him.  Another excuse.  This time he didn't laugh.  I was ruined and humiliated.  Locksley would get word back to the publisher and, though I controlled most communications with Pfamp from the outside world, the ghostwriting community was a small world, and someone would quickly tell him what I had done.  I could not face the browbeating.  I simply stopped going to Pfamp's house with no explanation.

Several months later, I was walking past the bookstore when something caught my eye.  Lock In Success.  Dozens of copies of it in the window.  The sign said "best-seller" and "top book for 45 weeks in the Life Advice With Football Metaphors genre.  I ran in and grabbed it.  In small print, it said "with Reginald Ox."  I knew it immediately.  It was a Pfamp.

The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life

Northwestern emerges from its bye week looking like something nearly impossible to imagine at the beginning of the season: a normal sort of crummy Big Ten West team. The last two games were about sweat. They managed to possibly hospitalize several Penn State fans by taking a 10-10 tie to halftime before the Nittany Lions decided they actually needed to play football in the second half and easily finish the game. Then they made their own fans sweat a fourth quarter comeback in a game against Howard that they controlled for most of the proceedings before managing to hold on to a 23-20 victory.

The Wildcats are 3-3 and the Big Ten West is putrid. In its final year, the greatest division in the history of college football is going out in a blaze of glory with its teams all playing disgusting toilet football distilling a decade of Big Ten West play to its appalling essence. The division's standard-bearer is Iowa, a team whose unwillingness to score points or even move the ball has gone from mere circumstance to a program-wide contempt. Kirk Ferentz has ascended to his obsidian throne over Iowa City throwing out anyone who even dares to suggest they attempt flashy plays like running up the middle or falling forward. Anyone who suggests throwing a ball is immediately thrown in his pit where they can only hold off ravenous jackals by throwing loose stones at them. "If they love passing so much, let them pass," Ferentz says as another graduate assistant is dragged away into the Passing Pit when the Ferentz private guard discovers that he has secreted a play sheet containing a simple five yard out in his quarters.

Someone has called a play that gains more than four yards

It has taken the fall of the Big Ten West from mild joke to national disgrace to open up a possibility I had thought impossible. In a division this bad, Northwestern could possibly make a bowl game. It will not be easy-- as gnarly as the Big Ten West is, the Wildcats will remain heavy underdogs in every game they play this season. But, while it might be at the fanciful end of things, it is no longer impossible to imagine them somehow beating teams like Nebraska, Illinois, and Purdue because those teams are also shitty. It is equally likely that they end the season stuck on three wins. But at the very least they are likely to scare one of these other crappy, flawed outfits and terrify their fans into at least temporary belief that they can lose to this disgraced wreck of a program.

This week, Northwestern travels to Lincoln on American Soil to take on a mediocre Nebraska team. Nebraska seeks revenge after Northwestern defeated them in Ireland to tally the team's sole win in 2022 in a bacchanal of touchdowns and free beer. Things are different now. The Huskers are no longer under Scott Vomit and his disastrous puke-forward regime. Instead, they hired recent NFL washout Matt Rhule to try to once again salvage a Nebraska program that has been fatally infected with Big Ten West and will never rise to its once-great heights. On paper, the Huskers are a much better team and are heavily favored. But somehow, this game tends to sink to its own level; the Northwestern-Nebraska game usually turns into a weirdly close game designed to infuriate Nebraska fans.

One thing the Wildcats bring into the game is quarterback uncertainty. Ben Bryant, who engineered Northwestern's brilliant comeback against Minnesota, got injured in the Penn State game and will not play today. The 'Cats will turn to Brendan Sullivan, who started the Howard game, but also have Ryan Hilinksy, who threw for 314 yards against the Huskers last year and Jack Lausch, a quarterback that Mike Bajakian likes to put in for obvious running situations and Bajakian's beloved gadget plays that instantly fail like when the defense calls the right play in Tecmo Bowl. Perhaps they can confuse the Huskers by putting them all on the field at the same time in a beguiling intrigue.

BEGUILING INTRIGUE

This week in football tradecraft news, it appears that the NCAA is after Jim Harbaugh again. Harbaugh, who already served a suspension this season for Hamburger Crimes is now being accused by the NCAA of running an "elaborate" sign stealing operation where one of his assistants allegedly deciphered all of those dumb looking dorm room posters of Tyler Durden or whatever and walk-on quarterbacks on the sidelines making the Mr. Burns Baseball Signs in order to figure out opponents' plays.

The current state of the art NCAA play relay system

Like all NCAA crimes, this is an obviously stupid thing to investigate and seems like death throes of an organization that no longer has any power now that it is legal for car dealers to give burlap sacks full of cash to football players in the light of day, but it is also true that it is funny that it is happening to Jim Harbaugh because I find him personally very annoying.

Now that I know that Jim Harbaugh was doing Illegal Cheating, I have a satisfying explanation on how he was able to defeat the 2021 Northwestern Wildcats.

The most relevant fact for readers of this blog is that the alleged sign-stealing perpetrator is a Military Man named Connor Stalions. As this blog devolves into an outlet for forcing readers interested in Northwestern football to indulge in my obsession with writing terrible airport thrillers, I should note that the only thing I have been thinking about in college football all day has been the concept of "A Connor Stalions Novel."

Connor Stalions was a man of few words. He only let two things do his talking-- his satellite images of Rutgers's third down packages, and his fists.

The Rutgers secret play vault was big, several feet thick containing big plans and big ideas. But Michigan had something bigger: Connor Stalions.

I can only think of one thing to do with this: The Connor Stalions Airport Thriller Paragraph Challenge. Please drop your paragraph of Operation Disguised Coverage: A Connor Stalions Novel in the comments below or email it to me (no more than 150 words) with your name or handle or however you want to be identified, and I'll put my favorites in a future post. Now here's a 2,500 story about Matt Rhule.

THE MATT RHULES: A GUIDE TO SUCCESS ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD AND IN LIFE

Nobody who leaves wants to return to sportswriting, but the profession has a way of grabbing you and never letting you escape. I had never been particularly interested in the genre, but after one of my freelance pieces entitled “John Daly Has Gout” gained traction, I found myself on the sports interview circuit. “Rod Beck picks baked beans out of his mustache,” I wrote in my lede about sitting with the reliever in his trailer outside the Iowa Cubs ballpark. “Jeff George slices up a steak the same way he slices a defense.” That sort of thing. I signed up for the pro bocce ball circuit. I tried to stop a Greg Ostertag slap shot. In one terrifying evening, I gambled on demolition derby at the Grenlee County Fair with Phil Mickelson and we ended up fleeing for our lives from a father and son team driving a half-totaled Chrysler Imperial that attempted to ram us because Michelson owed them forty grand that he didn’t have because he lost it all on the horse game. And then I stopped.

After a few decades, I lost my interest in sports personalities. Sure, every once in awhile I would get kicked in the genitals by a UFC fighter or get bitten by a professional biting coach that in order to critique Mike Tyson’s technique, but for the most part it was boring dinners with boring people. “Troy Aikman orders the Chicken Kiev.” “Bill Wennington buys his own McDonald's sandwich.” Etc. So I left the magazine and transitioned to novels. Here, I was not bound to what athletes said and did but could finally play in the greatest and most exhilarating literary space imaginable– my own imagination.

It took months of research and exploring my own psyche– I abandoned my family for six months to take a bevy of mind-expanding psychedelics derived from wildflowers and cacti– and fits and starts of experimentation before finally releasing my masterpiece called Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel. The book was a mixture of roman á clef, autofiction, magical realism, and thriller about how distinguished sportswriter Clark Craggler, who is also secretly an operative with an élite government intelligence unit where its members are deployed as civilians until “activated” by their mysterious boss known only as “Magma” in dire national emergency situations. Craggler goes from writing a tiresome feature on a star quarterback’s dreadful diet regimen to stop a catastrophe: catching the sitting president repeatedly cheating at golf. His job is to write an exposé of the president taking too many mulligans and generously giving himself lays and even altering the scorecard, which would be designed to trigger a congressional investigation, but while investigating him, he gets tied up in a sinister presidential plot to destroy the country’s golf courses with a piece of secret military technology that instantly divots acres of pristine greens from low-earth orbit.

Unfortunately, Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel was not the critical and commercial darling I hoped it would be. Reviewers savaged it. One called it a “masturbatory doofus fantasia.” Another had the headline “Hole In One” but the art on the article was a picture of a toilet. The New York Times didn’t even review it, not even a capsule. It was my first book not to make it onto the bestseller list after I had easily done it with Speaking Franch: Dennis Franchione In His Own Words and even Of Weis and Men: Charlie Weis on Leadership on the Gridiron and the Boardroom. My publishers told me in no uncertain terms that Clark Craggler would not return for the sequel Charlatan-in-Jail. If I ever wanted to make money writing again, I’d have to start interviewing sports people again.

It was a soggy, muggy summer day in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pulled up to the elaborate practice facility and a public relations person took me over to Matt Rhule’s office. When I walked in, there was no one in his chair, so I said “Coach Rhule?” He popped up from behind a massive desk and whipped a little foam football-shaped stress ball at my face.

“Think fast!” Rhule yelled as it knocked my glasses askew and nearly made me drop my pen. I looked up, confused and vaguely dazed.

“That’s a Matt Rule,” the coach said. “Number thirteen. If you can’t think fast, you’ll be slow, in life.” He sat down and put his hands behind his head. “That’s the book right there. Matt Rhules. Branding. Writes itself. Have a seat.”

The PR assistant pulled down a screen and started fussing with a computer and then I saw the presentation come up: The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life.

“The Matt Rhules System. We provide these rules and then some examples from my life or from Nebraska football and how they apply to people’s lives. For example, Matt Rhule: Protect Your Quarterback.” The presentation showed a picture of an offensive tackle pancaking a blitzing linebacker. “In football terms, it’s the most important part of the passing game. But people have people in their lives around them that are important. Their 'quarterbacks' if you will.  And you need to stop them from getting blitzed by Issues.”

The next slide clicked over to a black and white picture of Coach Rhule pointing aggressively. “Matt Rhule: Don’t let your mouth cash checks your body can’t cash.”

“You get it, right? We’re going to do a whole book with these Matt Rhules. It’s branded content. That's where the money is.” He handed me a tote bag that has “Matt Rhules” spelled out in training tape stuck to it. “These are just a prototype. Once we get published and up and running, we’ll have it all: shirts, bags, fuck even diapers. Matt Rhule: Don’t shit on me.” He looked at me as I stared at him, bewildered. “That’s a joke. That’s a fake Matt Rhule.”

“Well, that's the pitch,” he said. “I’ve got some rules. You’ve got to tie them together. Get them from football to apply to people’s lives or whatever. Publisher said you do this stuff all the time.”

I tried hard to hide how aghast I was at this comparison. Sure there were some superficial similarities to this and James Dolan: Six Chords to Success but those ignored the obvious literary merit of that project where I explored the craft of songwriting and owning one's one fleet of helicopters. But then I remembered that I had a time share payment and a lease on a Sea-Doo that I purchased from David Cone, so I swallowed my pride. “Yes. I work with famous sports personalities and help put their vision on the page.”

“Perfect,” he said, clapping his hands. “We all have our talents. Here’s a Matt Rhule: From Each According to His Ability, To Each According To His Means.”

“Isn’t that Karl Marx?” I said.

“Then fix it up and make it a Matt Rhule. It's not that hard.” He handed me a thumb drive. "Get started and I’ll see you in a week.”

I drove off into the rain to my Lincoln hotel. It looked like I would be here for awhile.

The thumb drive contained the presentation I just saw (Rhule referred to it as a “deck” for some reason) and a nearly inscrutable word document containing various Matt Rhules or at least jumbles of phrases that I was supposed to shape into coherent Matt Rhules. The rest of the files were various samples of logos and an MP3 of a Matt Rhule theme song that he had made himself, affecting a sort of James Dolanish growl-croon.

Several of the files contained short videos of Rhule whipping his head around to stare at the camera. “Matt Rhule,” he says in one of them. “Give it your all or give it up.” Then there is a short guitar riff as he nods at the camera. That one was not included in the text list. I start to divide them between Canonical Matt Rhules and Supplemental Matt Rhules.

Day two. I woke up in my Lincoln hotel and for several brief seconds I had no idea what I was doing there (I had dreamed that was giving a talk about my new novel to a large panel except in the dream it was called Air Fraud One: A Harold Chuck Novel and it was about how the president was somehow concealing being a bear from the public and was going to eat too many salmon. I was laying into a person who I immediately understood as being my sworn literary nemesis by I think also accusing him of being secretly a bear when the nature of my trip to Lincoln came into depressing focus.

For hours I stared at the Matt Rhules until the bleakness of my job overwhelmed me. I could not for the life of me come up with new Matt Rules, and it was nearly impossible to write stories based on the ones he had. “Matt Rhule: Always try to win, in football and in business.” Instead, I started daydreaming where instead of Matt Rhule winning on the football field, it was Clark Craggler defiantly laying out the president’s Golf Crimes to a congressional subcommittee. That was what winning looked like in life and in literature. But Craggler had been crushed, much like how the Carolina Panthers were crushed by the San Francisco 49ers resulting in Rhule’s ouster from the NFL.

I could not sleep at night and I decided to find something to eat. I got in my car and began aimlessly driving around. Soon, I had left Lincoln altogether. Something compelled me to keep moving. I drove for hours and hours. There was no radio, no music, nothing but the sound of the car and the road and the sight of my haunted eyes in the reflection of the windows,

The sun rose. I found myself at the outskirts of a park, a federal wilderness area. I left my car and hiked for hours, deeper and deeper into an unmarked wilderness. Finally, exhausted, I stopped and opened my backpack. There it was. Wrapped in some foil, the last of my iboga root that I had bought on a retreat from what I was told would be a shaman but turned out to be a man named Daryl who I later learned was on the run from the FBI for a crime described to me as “dojo fraud.” I prepared the powder and ate a few starburst that were in there as well.

The forest floor dropped from under me and I began to float through a miasma of consciousness, not just mine but the very concept of human consciousness. It is very difficult for me to describe in words what happened to me on this journey but I entered a mental plane beyond sanity and beyond the bonds of this physical world and, just as I thought I would never return and be forced to float forever in a cosmic goo, I remembered the Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: I am bound by the laws of the corporeal. I awoke days later from my psychadelic odyssey. My legs ached as if I had walked for miles, but I had not moved from that spot. I gingerly made my way back to the car and drove back toward Lincoln, stopping only to record any  thoughts on the Matt Rhules that materialized in the shimmers of empty highway. It had come to me out there in the wilderness– the Matt Rhules were not a simple marketing gimmick for a football coach, but this goateed oaf had somehow stumbled onto the central organizing principle of life itself.

I arrived back at the hotel. It was no longer enough to think of myself as a literary superstar, but I was now a sort of holy man, a person put on earth to explain the precepts of the Matt Rhules. For the rest of the week, I fell into a feverish trance as I made elaborate notes, wrote hundreds of pages, and added compendia and appendices to the original Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: Do not try to “fold” space time into a single locus, instead try to “layer” it. Matt Rhule: My brain is merely a vessel for cosmic static. Matt Rhule: Organization and preparation will score a “touchdown” for the football team or for your small business.

At last, I felt I had something to present to the Coach. I piled up my manuscript, which I had moved from the computer to a series of coffee filters loosely stapled to together in pleasing geometric patterns and put on my “Rhunic,” a tunic fashioned from hotel bedsheets and left for the practice facility. No one wanted to let me in when I told them I had urgent business to disseminate the teachings of Coach Rhule to the wider cosmos but then when I reminded them I was the book guy they finally let me in.

“Coach,” I said. “I have sat in the forest. I have opened my forehead. I have let the Rhules seep into my primary consciousness and beyond-thought. I am ready to accept them. I am ready to adopt them. I am ready to show people how to apply them on the football field and in the boardroom.” I dropped my coffee filter manifesto on his desk.

“What the heck are you talking about?” Rhule said as he turned to me (he was looking at emails during most of my speech). “Oh that Matt Rhules thing. Yeah, I thought about it and it seems kind of cheesy. Kind of obvious, you know?”

“Hey, you know what I was thinking now would be really cool? Instead of a book telling people what to do, what if it was a novel where I caught the commissioner of the NFL cheating at golf? The Commissioner of Lies, how about that? A Mack Racker novel. You ever think about writing something like that?”

Northwestern Won a Second Game

It sure did not look like Northwestern would win a Big Ten game this season, and the Wildcats did little to dispel that notion as they headed into the fourth quarter down 31-10 in a bleak and abandoned Ryan Field. But college football is a sport with a healthy respect for the absurd, for college students doing the unexpected, and for control freak coaches who spend seventeen hours a day planning every phase of the game to be left sputtering into their special Coach Walkie Talkies as the game slips away. The win was so improbable that the Chicago Tribune was unable to get it into print the next day.

 

If @NUFBFamily doesn't photograph David Braun holding this aloft at Union Station by the end of the day, then what are we even doing here, @BYCTOM pic.twitter.com/P8zJIqDQth

— Off Tackle Empire (@offtackleempire) September 24, 2023

Northwestern's fourth-quarter comeback is one of the craziest in recent memory. The Gophers had no answer for Ben Bryant and Bryce Kirtz, who reminded me of Austin Carr, constantly open. For such a big comeback, Northwestern did force a significant turnover or have a big special teams touchdown or anything like that. Instead, it was P.J. Fleck standing on the sidelines reciting incantations from the Acronymicon in order to get his defense to actually get a stop.  

 

Fleck screams F.O.C.U.S. at his players and then what each letter stands for but accidentally says Smart instead of Steady and the confused players allowed Northwestern to score 21 consecutive points in 15 minutes.

The major play of note involved a Minnesota player in perfect position to down a punt on the one-yard line losing track of his position on the field and downing it in the endzone, giving the 'Cats a shorter field on their minute-long final drive to tie the game. Some Minnesota fans complained that Ryan Field does not have a painted endzone, but simply a line and some grass, and because of that, it was extremely unfair and should be illegal and I think we can all agree that that is the funniest possible reaction to that play.



Northwestern's nefarious endzone is just one of the diabolical traps designed to bamboozle opposing players who have to deal with Roar Ear and Tarp Blindness 

The win certainly seemed to matter a lot for players, a few of whom appeared to be in tears after the winning touchdown. David Braun appeared choked up in his postgame interview. For players, it seems that the win provided catharsis after an ugly, turbulent offseason. Yet, it is difficult to forget the reason why there was so much chaos in the program. The few students who stayed through what looked for most of the night like a humdrum asskicking rushed the field. For others, I imagine it is difficult for them to find anything worth celebrating on the football field this year.

Now, the Wildcats will host juggernaut Penn State. The Nittany Lions are ranked sixth in the country and are one of the very few Big Ten teams that hopes to have a shot at breaking the Michigan/Ohio State duopoly. Coach James Franklin is taking no chances, apparently having his team practice in silence in order to simulate the effect of playing in whisper-quiet Ryan Field. Once again, the Wildcats are heavy underdogs. They've proved they are at least as good as the bottom of the Big Ten West this season, which is frankly a surprise for me, but Penn State is an entirely different animal.

ROAR FROM THE VALLEY: HOW LEADERS WIN THE WINNING WAY: A FRANK JACKMAN NOVEL

I did not set out to become a ghostwriter for sports personalities, but when the publisher has you in purgatory, there’s almost nothing you won’t write in order to get out. You would be surprised to see which towering literary figures of the twentieth century produced worked in the ghostwriting mines; consider You Are Not Loyal, Or A Man by Pat Riley with Marv Grobott (long rumored to be a pseudonym for Don DeLillo) or I Pity the Drool: The Dog Training Secrets of Mr. T (an open secret that it was written and tested by Joyce Carol Oates, who was bitten dozens of times during research). I found myself in the crosshairs of the publisher after my novel I Bet You Philistines Won’t Even Read This and its followup I Guess You Didn’t were both released to deafening silence in the book press. I was crushed and fell into a months-long drugs-bender where I repeatedly claimed that I had written the book Dubliners and spent weeks affixing my name to every copy I could find with stickers. They banned me from 24 New York book stores and thirteen branches of the library. I genuinely thought I had produced the 1914 Irish masterpiece. “Jaysus,” I screamed as the city’s burliest galoots from Library Security worked me over in an alley.

I was told I would have to pay back my advance on my newest essay collection War Crimes and Cigarettes, but I had already spent it on a really cool jacket that had a picture of my face on the back, so I was in no position to fight my editor when he demanded that I write Roar From the Valley: How Leaders Win the Winner’s Way, for James Franklin, the coach of the Penn State football team. “Wait, isn’t that the…” I said, and my publisher said “Don’t bring it up.”

I met Franklin at his spacious office in State College after a long and frustrating interpretative study of various parking restrictions.

“Three minutes late,” Franklin said to me before I could even introduce myself. “We don’t lollygag here at Penn State. We run. You owe me three laps.”

I laughed. I thought he was joking. He was not. “Three laps!” he said. “Of the office?” I replied. That’s when the whistle came out. He tooted at me as I took three halfhearted laps around his spacious office, coughing and sputtering since I had just finished about four cigarettes on the ride over and make it a point to refuse to exercise because of Art.

Franklin told me now that I’ve earned his time, and it was time to talk about his book. 

“You know, I don’t want to just crap out another coach book about lessons for leadership and winning,” he said. Well, I did. I figured that I’d write a few thousand words about being in shorts and yelling at people and how it applied to The Boardroom and I’d be free to finish my essay about how I was sick of seeing this Pynchon guy everywhere, so when Franklin told me he wanted to get away from that idea, I started to get a little worried.

“I think it would be better not to focus on me at all. Or at least not James Franklin, the man, the visionary, the leader, etc. Have you ever heard of myths and legends?"

I told him I had.

“I want to create something beyond myself. James Franklin is a bag of bones, blood, and flesh. But what if I could forge something larger than myself? What if I, if we, made something that could transcend time and space and would be a way to impart the things I have learned as a Coach, as a Leader and as a Man in a way that would go beyond football and live for eternity?”

He got up from the desk and flipped over a whiteboard. On it, he had written the words “Frank Jackman.”

“Frank Jackman. FBI. CIA. An elite unit that no one has ever heard of. A man of action, thought, philosophy. A fighter. A lover.”

He flipped over another whiteboard. It said Roar From the Valley: How Leaders Win the Winner’s Way: A Frank Jackman Novel.

“I need to know right now if you can do this or if you’re wasting my time.”

“Ok,” I said.

Franklin was a busy man, so I fit into his schedule. I spent late nights in his office listening to him tell me Frank Jackman stories or in the film room as he shadowboxed against his imaginary antagonists, uually organized rings of thieves or street gangs that talked like they were in the 1950s. In the end, after several months, the book fell by the wayside. The publisher wanted the standard football coach book that could move units. He was not in the eternal myths business.  I was almost relieved.  I was already planning to work under the pseudonym Tad Craddler, which I had used previously to send abusive letters to the Paris Review, but I could tell Franklin was disappointed.  So, with his permission, here are some selections from Roar from the Valley: How Leaders Win The Winners Way: A Frank Jackman Novel.

I.

Frank Jackman was not usually the biggest man in the fight, but he was always the last man. Jackman had studied every martial art you have ever heard of and several that you haven’t, but he didn’t often need them. First he would talk to the suspect. “There are 27 bones in the hand and wrist,” Jackman would say in a menacing growl-whisper, and then he would patiently explain how he would break each and every one of them. That was enough for all but the most determined henchman to lay down their wrenches and bo staffs and give themselves up. For the most obstinate, Jackman had to give a demonstration, a little presentation that he put together made up of punches and sometimes kicks.

II.

Frank Jackman was the greatest quarterback in the history of Pennsylvania high school football. He was also had three masters degrees in physics, forensics, and classics, and was the first person to own a street-legal ATV. By age 29, he headed up the FBI’s Motorcycle and Ninja Heists Division. His division head, Agent Lou Ryers, wanted to promote him to a desk job, but he refused. He had offers to join the CIA, where they would let him create his own elite unit and also the NSA, DIA, and ZIA, an organization so secret that no one knew it even existed. But Jackman stayed put. He had his team here, in the FBI, and he had a really cool apartment that was also a dojo and it would be an enormous hassle to move all of his swords.

III.

“Only seven, Jackman? Must be getting old and slow,” Moose said after throwing a masked jewel thief into a trash compactor. Moose Pfuncher blocked for Jackman in high school and college and had joined the FBI with Jackman after graduation. That was a challenge. Moose was not built for books, and it took Jackman months of preparation to get him through his entrance exams. In the end, they rigged up an elaborate mirror and semafor system to get him through his final multiple choice test, but no one in the FBI would complain at the results. No one other than Jackman had ever beaten him in a fight, and Moose was also great at intimidating suspects into confession by biting things that absolutely should not be bitten into. Jackman also knew that Moose would take a bullet for him– in fact, he had, three times. Once in the leg, once the elbow, and once in the buttocks. Moose loved to guilt Jackman into doing things by wistfully pointing at his damaged butt, which is how the two of them briefly owned a karate-themed bar and grill until they got shut down by the city because troublemakers kept getting thrown through a jukebox.

A thief popped out behind Moose and prepared to hit him with a priceless antique hat rack, but Jackman threw an enormous diamond and hit him in the forehead, knocking him into a pile of subdued criminals. “That’s eight,” Jackman said.

IV.

Frank Jackman arrived at the scene. Everything was neat and clean. The glass cases were intact and undisturbed, yet he immediately ascertained that they were empty. The prize Jewels of Happy Valley seemed to have vanished. “Eddie what have you got?” he said. Eddie was straight from the academy, constantly writing in his notebook. You have to look up from that book and take a look with your eyes, is what Jackman always told him, but the kid was all right. “Clean as a whistle, Agent J,” Eddie said. The thieves had left not as much as a hair or clothing fiber at the scene. Jackman assessed the room, looking for marks. Anything subtle could be a tell. Once, he determined that a gang of thieves had used fake tracks to make it look like they had driven through the Louvre on motorcycles when they had simply descended from the ceiling, but Jackman had utilized his extensive knowledge of motocross to instantly tell they were not the type of tires that a real thief would use for a museum. The French government had wanted to hire him to to lead their entire art heist department at a time when thieves were hauling off Monets and Manets at a rate of dozens per week. “Non,” Jackman said.

Jackman analyzed the surroundings. “It doesn’t make sense, Agent J,” Eddie said. “It’s like they were never here.”

“Funny you say that, Eddie,” Jackman said, staring at an empty jewel case with a loup. “What I’m thinking is that it’s the jewels that were never here.” He took out his phone and called Walleye Baxton back at HQ. “Get me a list of every train carrying a jewel shipment to the Happy Valley Jewel Museum in the last six months,” he said. These weren’t art thieves, he determined. These were train robbers.

V.

Jackman clung to the side of the train as it careened around a mountain curve going far too fast. He had managed to detach dozens of cars containing shale gas and now only the car with a crate carrying the Lion’s Fang jewel was attached to the engine. He steadied himself and climbed the ladder to the roof. And there they were: the perpetrators. One of the thieves one the roof was crawling toward the engine hoping to slow it down but kept getting knocked back by the wind. Jackman laughed as he got into a tactical crouch. This gang may have been made up of courageous and brilliant master thieves not afraid of committing cold-blooded murders, but they clearly were not versed in Train Combat. But Frank Jackman was. He was certified to fight on thirteen different types of train and one of those carts that you push up and down. 

He quickly advanced on the fleeing thief and grabbed him. “Time to complete your training,” he said. That’s when the throwing star flew up and knocked the tiny sunglasses off of Jackman’s face. He immediately ascertained that there was another hostile on the train, directly in front of him, based on the trajectory and motion of the throwing star. He let the thief he was holding go and he yelped as he rolled across the roof of the train desperately looking for something to grab onto. Then he heard the throwing star thief yell over the roar of the wind and train engine. “It’s a pity you came all this way to die, Agent Frank Jackman.”

The P.J. Fleck Fiction Issue

Northwestern came off the high of its commanding victory over UTEP, an important win that indicated that the Wildcats would be closer to normal bad this season rather than apocalyptically bad. The dozens of fans who were not put off by the program's futility "on American soil" and the scandal that engulfed the program and several of the people who were all in charge when it happened and are still there defiantly standing tall against themselves got to finally celebrate a win at Ryan Field for the first time since 2021. But despite the excitement of vanquishing the UTEP Miners as a home underdog, most people understood they probably would not fare as well against a surging nationally-ranked Duke team, and they didn't.

I am not going to lie, I did not really watch any of this game. I could not because my home does not get the ACC Network, so I to reverted to my pre-cable days and enjoyed the sonorous voice of Mr. Cat Dave Eanet on WGN for a chunk of the first quarter listening to the sound of someone describing a festival of shanked punts. Here I feel the need to make a correction: while last week's post implied that the nobody in the Greater Chicagoland Metropolitan Area got ACC Network, people with certain ubiquitous TV streaming services apparently got it, and I spoke to numerous people with different services who were able to easily watch Northwestern shank punts in real time. Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com apologizes for the error.

Hopefully this correction will prevent Jim Phillips from siccing his personal retinue of ACC goons to attack me for implying that the ACC Network is not available on multiple carriers in the Chicago area market if you want to watch Duke throw Northwestern into a port-a-potty in high definition

This Saturday, Northwestern returns home to an inexplicable night game against Minnesota. I understand that Northwestern must play night games under the terms of its contract with the Big Ten Network and have been playing them more or less at random for years, but they used to almost never play them, so night games to me still feel like Big Games under the trucked-in lights. This one is not. Minnesota looks to be right in the Big Ten West Zone this season, squeaking by over Matt Rhule's Cornhuskers, bludgeoning Eastern Michigan, and then getting wiped out by a ranked UNC squad. But a middling West team should likely not be threatened by this year's Northwestern team. The Gophers are heavily favored, even if stalwarts Mohamed Ibrahim and Tanner Morgan have graduated after several decades of excellent play.

The collapse of Northwestern's football program has conveniently lumped it in with the rest of this city's dilapidated sports scene. The Cubs, who looked poised to earn a wild card berth and get triumphantly swept out of the playoffs, instead suffered a series of embarrassing losses to some bad teams that put them squarely in the crosshairs of the Marlins, a team that has haunted them-- it remains one of the most underrated embarrassments for the Chicago Cubs, a team that is fueled by a history of failure and foundering, that they are continually bested by the Florida Marlins. The White Sox were numerically eliminated from the playoffs and Tony LaRussa has returned in some sort of consulting capacity as Reinsdorf's personal Baseball Rasputin. The Sky were sweatlessly escorted out of the WNBA playoffs by former Sky hero Candace Parker and the Las Vegas Aces.

No Chicago team, however, managed to embarrass themselves more this week than the Chicago Bears. After an unsurprising but embarrassing defeat at the hands of the miserable Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Bears spent the week having football pundits making 45 minute videos of themselves talking where the thumbnail is them making the youtube googly-eyed open mouth face at Justin Fields about how the Bears' offense is the worst thing that has ever happened to the National Football League. On Wednesday, the day began with what appeared like a standard Bears day of press with Justin Fields upbraiding his incompetent coaching staff for being incompetent before claiming that he was taken out of context and actually both he and the coaching staff are incompetent. Then, defensive coordinator Alan Williams, who had missed the game for vaguely defined "personal reasons" abruptly resigned under mysterious circumstances that the Bears coaching staff, which already operates at a level of ridiculous Fake Military Secrecy that Pat Fitzgerald used to use when refusing to say who would be playing quarterback in the home opener against Northeastern Illinois Stage Beard and Mustache Institute, refused to elaborate on. 

Looking to see if maybe I could find a picture of a football player with an elaborately funny fake beard, I stumbled across this artifact from March 2020 where the entire article was someone horrendously photoshopping beards on soccer players because of Covid lockdown, each one with a profoundly stupid caption, I cannot believe this still exists online.

While this was going on, wild rumors began to circulate online about Williams. The rumors escalated to the point that random Bears youtube guys were somberly saying that Halas Hall had been raided by all of the hut hut hut guys from the end of the Blues Brothers and that Charles Tillman who is actually in real life an FBI agent was running barefoot through broken glass and shimmying through vents in order to catch Williams. Then the Bears circulated an odd resignation letter from Williams, and an attorney representing him called into a sports radio show to quash the wildest of rumors but also not say anything else. On the one hand, this information frenzy is the result of the insatiable demand for information now now now now on something that is not consequential-- Williams is a person almost no one who does not follow the Bears closely had ever heard of and his resignation from coordinating a bad defense for an awful football team is not a matter of national importance. If there is some terrible scandal here, it will certainly come out. On the other hand it is hard to imagine the Bears handling this situation in a weirder way.

This clip might contain the greatest set of captions I've ever seen on a youtube video

Sports fans in this city are looking down the barrel of a pretty bleak winter. Boo Buie will have to do some heavy lifting.

AN ACCOUNTING OF THE LITERARY EXPLOITS OF P.J. FLECK

I first encountered P.J. Fleck through my publisher. I had gotten stuck after three years working on my novel, an autofictional account of the time I tried to return an ill-fitting sweater and how I felt it reflected on me in terms of masculinity, the self, the time I let out a massive fart during freshman English and even the teacher laughed at me and everyone called me Professor Rips Von Ass until I had to change school districts, and also Late Capitalism. The publisher was about to demand that I pay back my advance when they decided I could keep it if I took on a job ghostwriting Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat by P.J. Fleck, the head football coach at the University of Minnesota.

I do not follow sports at all, least of all football (an interesting fact about me is that I don’t own a television) and had no idea who this Fleck was or why he was writing a book about boats. Nevertheless, I was determined to try. I was in the midst of another divorce (one thing that kept derailing my autofictional memoir was that I had to keep adding ex-wives, although I combined the second and third into a single composite ex-wife), and was very close to losing my modest apartment and moving in with my other thrice-divorced writer friends onto Dirk’s houseboat. Besides, the agreement did not say anything about actually completing the book. I figured I would show up, let this Fleck character vomit off some incomprehensible hut-hut-hutsmanship gibberish, and then get dismissed by him as a hopeless football ignoramus. 

I arrived at Fleck’s estate just outside Minneapolis. There was a nautical-looking gate and instead of a bell, you pulled a rope and blasted a ship’s horn across the subdivision (later, I was told that the battle between Fleck and the HOA lasted years with Fleck’s attorneys citing his first-amendment rights as well as several sections of maritime law). Fleck answered the door himself. His eyes were ringed and hooded, like he had not slept in weeks. I greeted him as “P.J.” and he told to please call him either “Coach” or “The Admiral.” I smiled and asked him if admirals regularly were concerned with row boats. “Don’t question me about boats in my own home,” he said. We were not off to a good start.

We went into an office. There were legal pads everywhere, and crumpled yellow sheets covered the floor like autumn leaves. One of the walls was covered in letters and numbers. In the middle, he had written the word “W.R.I.T.E.” I asked him about it.

“That’s my writing process,” Fleck said. “WRITE. Waiting for ideas. Ruminating. Imagination. Torment. Editing. Got it?” 

“That’s a pretty good summary,” I told him. I had been stuck on Torment for about eight months after scrapping three chapters where I zinged my third grade bullies with a series of witticisms that my editor discovered that I had borrowed from a website called rejoinders.info. 

I asked Coach Fleck how he envisioned the book. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “The first thing people have to have in order to succeed is vision.” What sort of vision?" I asked. “Vital. Integrity. Smart. Intelligent. Omnivorous. Now.” 

“Oh, ok,” I said.

It turns out that Fleck had a lot of these acronyms and motivational sayings that he believed were the key to succeeding at life the P.J. Fleck way. He was constantly throwing them out and then explaining them to me: T.O.T.A.L.; E.F.F.O.R.T.; V.A.S.T.N.E.S.S.; M.I.Z.Z.E.N.M.A.S.T. Eventually I said to him I think that those are great, but what can you tell me about yourself, about your life. “Oh, you’re one of those,” he said.

He dug under the pile of notebooks and pulled out a manuscript held together by a binder clip and there it was: an outline of the highlights in the life of one Pteranodon J. Fleck (his actual name). It turns out I was not the first to try to ghostwrite Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat. Thirteen others had tried. Six left after two hours of acronyms. Two quit later. Fleck dismissed four more because he said they had no idea what he was trying to accomplish. One died.

The rest of the notebooks, though, had almost nothing to do with his book. They were filled with acronyms. Every time he got to a part he wanted to emphasize he ended up coming up with another acronym, stopping then and there to figure out each word. If it had something to do with the nautical life, he would highlight it and write it in a gigantic tome that he called his logbook for greater consideration. 

I thought we should try an exercise by writing the hypothetical first sentence, which would let him set the tone. “Rowing the boat,” he said. “Rowing the boat is not a slogan. It’s a lifestyle.” 

“That’s two sentences,” I said.

But he had already grabbed a fresh pad and started writing. “R.O.W.I.N.G: Reading Or I Will Never Grow. Now that’s about literature,” he said. “THE.  T.H.E. Do you see it? Do you see it?”

Coach Fleck got up and lifted his hands up in the air (I would later learn this was a Touchdown gesture) and sprinted out of the office, through the manse, and down the driveway to the gate where he began triumphantly tooting the ship horn as neighbors glared at him through their drapes. “This is it! Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

I understood. He was going to write the boilerplate book the publishers wanted but every word, every single word including articles would be an acronym which he would explain in a separate volume, his Master Annex of Acronyms in Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat. I was stunned.  I had not come to Minnesota to be confronted with a new literary form that would revolutionize non-fiction and finally get me on one of those panels where I can talk and chuckle at the same time. 

Publishers ridiculed my first experimental novel, which I planned to write in a not diabolical but somewhat challenging cipher that readers would have to decode. The real innovation would be that not every copy would use the same cipher– readers who had managed to solve it would theoretically be useless assisting their friends, whose copies of the book would present not only an entirely different cipher, but require an entirely different mechanism. Some, for example, would be elaborate pictograms, whereas others would be complex word and number replacements. The reward would be reading a transcendent novel about a code-making novelist whose most mysterious cipher would be his own vulnerability. Every publisher passed. The rejection letters I received were venomous– in one case a letter was actually coated in a rare snake venom but it had gotten lost in the mail and lost all of its potency before it was delivered, and the editor who attempted to poison me had his snakes seized. But this was now the chance to make my literary mark.

The months went by in a blur. The coach and I came up with sentences while crafting acronyms together. It was an arduous task. He put his fist through the wall after running into the third X for the day in the word “axiom,” which he insisted had to be in the book. We never left that office, and I began to sleep in child's sleeping bag in a guest room in the otherwise empty house. Fleck soon realized that his coaching duties were too demanding, and he requested a leave of absence, explaining that he and I were not just writing a book but developing a vital blueprint for life, the Acronymic Lifestyle. The university described it to the press as a leave of absence for mental health reasons, and Fleck agreed saying that he was so sane that it was blowing their minds.

It took about a year to finish the book and the original codex. I told the coach it was time to go to the publisher and release our masterpiece together (Fleck did not know this but I was going to try to get the “as told to” credit changed to the valedictory “with”). He looked at me in shock. We were not finished, he told me. No, we had just begun. You see, he had a vision and it was that the annex itself were all acronyms and they would be put into a third volume, The Appendix. Where was my V.I.S.I.O.N.?

I did not see it. The entire project was beginning to look like it was an exercise in madness. At this point I understood that I had allowed myself to be consumed by an insane task, that the power of turning words into acronyms with vaguely positive messages had taken over my life and the promise of literary fame and glory through working with an innovator like P.J. Fleck had blinded me to the immensity of the task. But I was not yet prepared to abandon the project. Boats and the Rowers That Row Them: A Guide to Winning, Life, and Staying Afloat was mine as much as Fleck’s. I was the one who came up with the second Boat Chapter. I was the one who came up with R.H.I.N.O.C.E.R.O.S. I could not leave simply abandon it and Fleck.

But the project quickly spiraled out of control. You cannot simply just make acronyms into other acronyms. We had to begin revising the master text in order to fit the Appendix acronyms, which affected the Annex acronyms. Fleck had thrown the entire mechanism off. It was at this point I noticed he had stopped sleeping. I would wake up and the light would still be on in the office, with Fleck writing away (he hated typing on a computer. I was the one who digitized everything because it would be impossible to do this without building an elaborate network of interconnected spreadsheets).

It was around this time that I began planning my escape. It was clear that if I did not leave then, it would consume the rest of my life. I had also begun to get tipped off from my third ex-wife that the second had hired the famed literary assassin Vancent Mant to murder me, and he had learned of my whereabouts at the Fleck estate. So one day, while Fleck was stuck pondering what Q.U.A.L.I.T.A.T.I.V.E.L.Y. could stand for, I slipped out and left the country for a decade or so until I had learned that Mant was himself killed by a literary assassin assassin, and I was free to return to the country and finish my own work.

I decided to stop in Minneapolis. The Fleck estate property was overgrown with vegetation. The horn at the gate had been disconnected and did not even let out a single AOOGAH. The front door was ajar and every room of the house was now covered in legal pads, the telltale periods dotting every line. The walls were all scrawled with notes saying “Annex 13” and “Endnotes and Arcana.” I saw the light on in the office but I whatever I had known of the coach would not be in there. P.J. Fleck was rowing his boat out to sea, alone.