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.

On "On American Soil"

The times you see someone using the phrase “on American soil” in 2023 are in a Congressional hearing where a representative named something like Ladd Hacklin gets incredibly angry about children’s toys and after Northwestern’s big win over UTEP last Saturday. It is true that Northwestern had not recorded a win since last year’s opener against Nebraska in Dublin. It is also true that the Wildcats had not secured a victory within the de jure sovereign territory of the United States of America since October 16, 2021, a 21-7 victory of Rutgers. That distinction is meaningless in college football but it is important to point it out because winning a weird one-off Week 0 game overseas against Coach Scott Vomit and then getting absolutely roasted by every other team is very funny. It is also disingenuous to count the nearly 700 days between Northwestern wins “On American Soil” because they were only able to play games on 20 of those days, although to be honest I prefer not to think about what Northwestern Football is up to off the field.

Another milestone from that game is that is the last time fans were able to watch Northwestern football with subsidized beer

The notable thing about this game is that Northwestern looked so awful and discombobulated at Rutgers that UTEP, a team that managed five wins last year in Conference USA, emerged as a slight betting favorite on the road. And for the first half, it looked like that was the right call. The Miners’ opening drive looked like a pretty good facsimile of how Rutgers gradually ran over Northwestern in a way reminiscent of the gag in Austin Powers where a very slow-moving bulldozer runs over a guy who screams frozen in terror for several minutes. The game was tied at the half only because UTEP missed a field goal in the waning seconds. But then, in the second half, the defense starting getting stops and turnovers, the run game got going, and Mike Bajakian began feeling himself and rotating through quarterbacks. The result was a strangely dominating Northwestern win in front of 55 people.

It has been mildly fascinating to see how the Big Ten Network would deal with the ugliness surrounding Northwestern's football program. I have been watching the interviews with David Braun to see if he will ever say something interesting or even to identify anything about him beyond existing as NCAA Create-A-Coach Young 2. The interviewer alluded to the hazing scandal but never broached it, mastering the type of subtle courtly etiquette one would expect from the retainers surrounding the Sun King Louis XIV and the Big Ten Network. I do not expect a sideline reporter to ask Braun “how do you feel Northwestern can have success without organized dry humping rituals” but the interviewer never mentioned it other than referencing a difficult offseason. After the game, an elated Braun and the team celebrated. Braun got to frame it as the team triumphing over adversity. What was the adversity? Uh, gotta go.

Head Coach David Braun remains a mysterious Vest Cipher.

A convincing win over UTEP does not necessarily mean that Northwestern is now good. Even in 2021, the Wildcats managed a big win over Ohio as well as over FCS Indiana State and then went on to win the famous Victory Over Rutgers in the United States that Wildcat fans had clung to and cherished lo those 693 days. But the win managed to show that Northwestern was still up to the standards of a struggling Big Ten team, and had, at least for one season, managed to stave off a 1980s-style football apocalypse season where they would just get effortlessly clobbered by all comers until they lose 34 consecutive games and then throw the goal posts into Lake Michigan. 

It is not surprising that Northwestern football has faded from the news the second that the college football season began actually playing games and can now function as a team that essentially no one cares about and that television broadcasters will have to spend 30 seconds awkwardly discussing why Pat Fitzgerald is not in his normal Ozymandian position on the Wildcat sidelines in case there is an as-yet discovered human being who is watching a Northwestern football game but is not aware of the hazing scandal. That will likely change when the lawsuits begin and more ugly news leaks out, but for now Northwestern can remain tucked safely and anonymously into Big Ten Network regional action playing in front of the smallest Big Ten crowds imaginable. The announced attendance for Saturday’s game was less than 15,000 people, a miniscule crowd even for an early September non-conference game at Northwestern, and one that was padded by hundreds of local high school band members.

The rest of college football media has turned away from Northwestern and to topics that actually affect the football part of college football-- laughing at Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney eating shit in early-season games or breathlessly reporting on everything that Deion Sanders does and says. The Deion controversy du jour involves Colorado State coach Jay Norvell attacking him for wearing sunglasses indoors, which is a serious charge; the documentary film They Live taught me that the only answer to another person demanding you put on or remove sunglasses is to suplex them into a parking lot dumpster for seven minutes. Woe be to the program that levels the ultimate football insult at Sanders: calling his players “rece davises.”

While Deion Sanders does not seem like a person I would personally want in charge of anything I cared about, the one thing I can't knock him for is being a flamboyant weirdo.  Above, please take a look at the greatest sports manager in the world, the NPB's Tsuyoshi Shinjo who goes by the nickname BIGBOSS, designs his own team's weird uniforms, and is shown here entering the stadium on opening day on a hovercraft.  Now try to imagine what would happen if a Major League manager  tipped his hat too extravagantly.

DUKED ONCE AGAIN

Saturday, Northwestern will take on apparently perennial non-conference bete-noir Duke. Unfortunately, the programs seem to be going in opposite directions. Duke won nine games last year and opened this season with a home win over ninth-ranked Clemson in what was by all accounts a ridiculous game where Dabo Swinney kept putting on the ACME bat suit and falling off of cliffs. Swinney is, even in the unhinged world of college football coaches who are all professional maniacs, a particularly ridiculous person who combines the berserk intensity of a football guy with the desperately oily flop sweat of a traveling nineteenth-century revival preacher. He looks he goes from city to city on one of those hand pump rail cars. It is always funny when his team, which is one of the very few to regularly travel in the juggernaut echelons of college football, gets completely smoked, but Duke's victory augurs poorly for the Wildcats attempting to prove they can actually be competitive.

Duke comes into the game ranked #21 in the country. They have an NFL prospect quarterback and a stingy defense. The Wildcats have their work cut out for them. One of the most dangerous developments from last week was having a Mike Bajakian offensive adjustment actually work, when he went deep into his workshop and discovered that he could use a running quarterback to run. Years of experience shows that it is nothing short of an emergency when Bajakian decides to get creative and decides to do a double jet sweep that leads to a 45 yard loss or some sort of wide receiver pass play that accidentally opens a portal to another dimension and looses an ancient, primordial evil upon the world that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons.

The defense, unable to get a stop against a Rutgers team slowly moving across the field like liquid spreading through a paper towel, fared better against UTEP.  David Braun is still calling the defense while also functioning as head coach, which has raised some other questions about the coaching staff.  Most pressing is where Assistant to the Head Coach Skip Holtz is during games.  Is he there physically or is he calling in from Birmingham Stallions Headquarters with one eye on the game and the other devouring game tape against the Memphis Showboats while moving players around on a giant map of the football field while using those little tank-pushing sticks?

Northwestern may be using a heavily modded version of NCAA 2004 in order to get Skip's advice

A Northwestern win under these circumstances seems unlikely. But who would know? The game has been taken off normal television and sequestered to the ACC Network, a mysterious channel that can only be accessed in this area by making a yellow mark in a certain park and then waiting to exchange precious metals with an underground cable operator who will come to your home and either install the ACC Network or perform some sort of devious bait-and-switch and leave you stuck with the PAC 12 Network, unable to watch Wake Forest or Louisville and left without redress to the authorities. Presumably there are some people in Chicagoland who will rig up giant antennas or call up a streaming service that instantly infects your computer with something even worse than a Northwetern-Duke game or people who are able to watch the game but only by constantly driving around the city in a van, and they will be rewarded with access to a game where the home team is favored by nearly twenty points.

Braun and Northwestern can be glad that they can retreat to the comfort of a win against a program from a smaller conference and getting televised on a network that no one has.  But should they somehow manage to pull of an enormous upset on the road, they may once again run into an opponent that the entire university and its athletic program cannot ever handle which is increased attention.

Northwestern Self-Imposes Walking Death Penalty

There was a time when watching/fast forwarding through Sunday’s game when it looked like Rutgers wouldn’t punt. Normally a person who has ascended to the level of derangement where they are watching a Northwestern/Rutgers game could expect punting– good punting, bad punting, exotic and perverse levels of punting heretofore unseen. The majority of the game could be spent watching Greg Schiano and Pat Fitzgerald standing on the sidelines performing some anime guy-style screaming and shaking as they order their punt teams onto the field for the fourteenth consecutive series because some fool has asked their quarterback to pass and they instead are grievously injuring the dial-a-down crew. But on Sunday, Northwestern’s defense allowed an unending series of backbreaking third- and fourth-down conversions over and over again and it looked like the Rutgers punter would stay safely ensconced in his Punting Chalet feasting on rare meat and listening to the growling type of metal music not needing to be unleashed and ready to don his cape and run onto the field under the roar of the punt-mad Rutgers crowd. Finally, with about two minutes to go in the second half, Northwestern got a stop and Schiano summoned his punter. The game was already functionally over. 

  

Greg Schiano calls for a punt on 4th and 6

I am uncertain of which vat of chemicals a television executive fell in before putting a Northwestern/Rutgers game on national television in a time slot with few other options. This decision must have expanded the game beyond its usual viewership of beleaguered Rutgers and Northwestern fans and several dozen degenerates and weirdos who would usually watch this unfold on a juddering Big Ten Network feed with Matt Millen oscillating in and out of the broadcast like he is the Fugitive Ben Richards revealing the stunning truth about Captain Freedom. I assume at least a few rubberneckers tuned in to see how Northwestern football would look after its time in The News. The Wildcats appeared to continue where they left off from the death throes of the Pat Fitzgerald era getting scraped off the field after being flattened by a not particularly good Big Ten team.

Northwestern played like anyone with a passing knowledge about college football could have guessed. I am no college football expert but if you asked me how well do you think a team that won four total games over the last two seasons and is coached by a guy who has never done it before because the forever head coach was fired in the middle of a grotesque hazing scandal leaving players to deal with the national media paying attention to the program for the first time since Darnell Autry was getting Heisman votes I would guess they would not look particularly sharp out there, on the ol’ ballfield. The future of Northwestern football looks bleak. They are betting underdogs to UTEP at home.

The last few awful seasons and the program’s grim-looking future have seemed to instantaneously erase the fact that Northwestern was actually pretty ok at football for about 25 years. Few people seemed aware that the Wildcats were not the same team that lost 34 consecutive games in the early 1980s even as the team started regularly going to and even sometimes winning bowl games, though that was helped by the addition of approximately 98 bowl games sponsored by military contractors, corn thresher companies, and those mobile games that advertise on television by paying Arnold Schwarzenegger an obscene amount of money to run around for ten seconds screaming “YOU’BVE GODT TO FIUH DA LASUH NOOOOOWWWWW” and then they cut to the game footage and it’s like a blurry circle shooting dots at various ASCII symbols. It took about three years of losing to make it seem like Northwestern has gone 4-1,274 since 1983.

 

With 12 consecutive losses dating back to last season, we're about 35% away from The Record, which I'm keeping track of with the Lake-O-Meter.

The fallout from the scandal and the administration’s bumbling response to it and the increasing number of odious reports repeatedly surfacing from other athletic programs do not signal a particularly encouraging future for Northwestern football. The team is coached by group of hapless lame ducks some of whom already have other jobs in football, and it seems likely that the offseason will see an exodus of players through the transfer portal and difficulty convincing recruits to play football at Shrek Torment University. 

But the largest threat to Northwestern football as a going concern comes from the summer’s ridiculous realignment bonanza that has moved conferences into a frenzy of backstabbing, greed, and ruthlessness that somehow seems rapacious even for a sport based entirely on the idea of shameless grasping. Right now, the conferences seem content to gobble each other in an orgy of additions that make no sense except as shiny trophies to display to a television executive. At some point, though, I have to imagine that the schools will start to wonder why they earn the same amount (or, in the case of the new erstwhile PAC 12 members, less) as Northwestern, a team that has no fans, no television audience, no outside interest beyond the very small pool of alumni that care about football, and a stadium that boasts the Big Ten's dirtiest tarp. Northwestern, along with its AV Club peers at the ass end of power conferences, would always be faced with this reality, but the fact that the program has completely immolated itself at this very moment is not likely to help Northwestern remain within the top echelons of college football as throttling fodder for the Big Ten.

Maybe I am wrong and the team will upset a Big Ten team or two this season. Maybe the administration will suddenly become capable of managing an athletic department and will hire an incredible coach or maybe David Braun is somehow that person and Northwestern can go from psychologically scarring its football players to merely ravaging them with vague “lower-body injuries” like a normal football team. Maybe the Big Ten in its maximalist imperial phase just sort of likes having the Wildcats around. Maybe Northwestern doesn’t really need to be in a superconference or in top division football at all. But now that the conferences have gleefully ripped of the very thin fig leaf of tradition that they pretended to care about when it was more lucrative to sell to fans than a spot on a streaming service called something like ESPN EDGE that is available only at the Antarctic McMurdo research station, it seems to me that all of this realignment is not working with Northwestern football in mind.

The numbers don't lie and they spell disaster for Northwestern in one of the Superconferences

GO FOR IT AND DIE

The Chicago Cubs spent most of the first half of the season looking like the Cubs of the last couple years: a flailing, mediocre outfit that would fall out of contention at the all-star break and then immediately trade any player vaguely worth anything so they can spend the rest of the season filling the team with a bunch of minor league oafs to waste everyone’s time for a couple of months while I checked minor league box scores. To complicate things further, the Cubs did not only have their usual assortment of bargain-basement relief pitchers that had managed to pitch competently enough to exchange for another team’s fourteenth-best pitching prospect, they had Cody Bellinger, a baseball superstar who had spent the past couple years hitting like a post trade deadline Cub and then inexplicably resurrected his career in Chicago to become the most valuable trade chip on the market. And then the Cubs won a few games in a row and the front office decided they were sick of watching a parade of Ildemaros Vargas and Johneshwies Fargas and wanted to try to make one of the now 55 available playoff spots and they’ve saved the summer.

The Cubs’ decision to hold onto Bellinger, trade for Jeimer Candelario, and try to cling to a Wild Card spot are in the long run likely bad decisions. The Cubs will not win the World Series this year. Assuming they actually manage to secure a playoff berth, they will likely get immediately escorted from the tournament like pajama-clad children found sneaking downstairs into their parents’ dinner party. On the other hand, the baseball playoffs are the stupidest system in pro sports where some mediocre horse shit team like the 2023 Cubs can inexplicably win multiple playoff rounds. And, more importantly, the Cubs have decided to actually play games that count into September; even if maybe the small chance of stumbling into a superprospect from yet another teardown would probably be worth sacrificing a doomed wild card campaign, it is far more fun in the short term to stare at Milwaukee's box scores every night and white knuckle through Jameon Taillon starts than to go to the ballpark hoping to see the next Frank Schwindel.

The Cubs are not a juggernaut this year.  Their rotation outside of Justin Steele consists of Kyle Hendricks, who looks like Eddie Harris from Major League’s accountant, a bespectacled rookie lefty who resembles a Stanley Kubrick character who is seconds away from staring into the camera from an unsettling angle, and a variety of untested young players and washed-up veterans. Every day, David Ross keeps trotting out delightfully miniature slap hitter Nick Madrigal at third base who has to take these delicate little steps like a friction car revving up in order to successfully throw a baseball to first. The team is relying on Mike Tauchman, a 32-year-old fifth outfielder who last played KBO, as its leadoff hitter. 

 

The Cubs somehow unearthed a Third Reushcel Brother

But somehow, the Cubs keep winning. The ballpark is humming. The former players from good teams are showing up. I was at a game this week where the Cubs came back multiple times for a delightful, thrilling win, including a rally that happened right after Carlos Zambrano commanded them to get some runs after singing the seventh-inning stretch; I assume the Cubs immediately started mashing dingers because they were terrified that Zambrano would otherwise pummel all of them with bats.

The pro sports scene in Chicago is otherwise a bleak wasteland.  The White Sox have gone from a promising contender filled with exciting young players to a dysfunctional junk yard fire where the season highlights involve Tim Anderson falling down like Von Kaiser from Mike Tyson's Punch Out! after getting smacked in the face and somehow losing a game on a walk-off balk.  The Chicago Sky, which had saved the previous two summers, lost all but one of their key championship players and saw head coach/GM James Wade leave the team for an NBA assistant coaching job in the middle of the season and now the team is, like all other Chicago teams, flailing to make the last playoff spot.  The Bulls remain a calcified mediocrity that I am deluded enough to think will actually be pretty decent next season but that probably means maybe getting the last playoff spot if enough Eastern conference starters get hurt.  I am not emotionally prepared to talk about the Chicago Bears, which are due for a psychologically devastating loss to Jordan Love tomorrow after finally seeing Aaron Rodgers use the powers of his mind to telekinetically teleport out of the NFC North.  

The bitterly divisive Chicago baseball scene means that the Cubs' mini-resurgence cannot be embraced by the whole city.  Instead, the baseball rivalry means that city's drunkest doofuses can only understand the sport by getting into embarrassing asscrack fights in the bleachers of both parks.  But for those of us who do enjoy the Cubs, it's at least a salve from our floundering pro sports scene-- until they are somehow once again knocked out of playoff contention by the Florida Marlins.

Somehow A Northwestern-Rutgers Game Is Even More Of A Catastrophe

The college football calendar is harsh and unyielding so when Northwestern football spends the past two months mired in an escalating series of shocking, grotesque, and embarrassing scandals that resulted in the most entrenched 1-11 college football coach in the country getting fired, the program has no choice but to limp into Piscataway on Sunday and somehow attempt to play football in order to collect its Big Ten television check.  I have no idea what that is going to look like.  I don't know how the announcers are going to try to talk around the scandal or somehow elide the putrid details of the hazing incidents or, if they bring it up, then explain why Northwestern is taking the field.  I am pretty sure that the entire thing could potentially be such a debacle that it will somehow make television producers yearn for the excitement of a normal Northwestern-Rutgers game.

Here's a brief overview of some things that have happened since Northwestern fired Pat Fitzgerald on July 10: Fitzgerald retained a law firm presumably to sue Northwestern; several former players filed lawsuits against Northwestern, each of which has corroborated previous allegations or brought about new ones about sexual harassment or racism; a reporter decided to read athletic director Derrick Gragg's Leading Leaders The Leadership Way: A Story of Leaders and the Leaders Who Lead Them book and found some vaguely embarrassing Steve Harveyous passages about women being distractions; new coach David Braun talked for fifteen minutes about how he's not talking about anything at Big Ten media days; several coaches and players showed up to the first open practice wearing "Cats Against The World" pro-Fitzgerald t-shirts; Gragg blasted the t-shirts in the media; Northwestern hired Skip "Skip" Holtz as a sort of consigliere for the football program while he insists that he will continue to coach the Birmingham Stallions USFL team.  

Holtz coming up with a Two Hat System where he alternates head gear if he is answering questions as a Northwestern assistant or as a Birmingham Stallion

The very stupid t-shirt incident proved that years of apathy has left the university athletic department completely unable to deal with any sort of scrutiny.  But more importantly, it highlighted that even though Fitzgerald is gone, the program remains in his image.  The ostensible reason that the university fired Fitzgerald was because he was ultimately responsible for the puerile hazing even if its investigation (according to university president Michael Schill-- the university will not publish it and it remains under lock and key) did not uncover a damning piece of hard evidence that proves he knew about it or orchestrated it.  But the university stopped there.  All of the coaches who had the same responsibility to the players remain in place and, presumably, there are players currently on the roster who participated in the hazing.  It was apparently impossible with two months until the season to find someone other than Mike Bajakian to design the most doomed trick plays humanly possible; that is why it was crucial to retain him so that he could show up looking like an out of focus thumb wearing a t-shirt about how the sick media was very unfair to Pat Fitzgerald about Shrek.

 

Mike Bajakian pictured after the result of 87% of his playcalls

Does anyone else feel completely insane that after reading what seemed for a time like daily updates about fucked up things happening in Northwestern's football program that they're just going to show up and play Rutgers, with uniforms and everything?  How does it make sense that after all of the lawsuits and allegations that David Braun is just standing up at the podium and saying he's here to talk about football and then when someone asks him a football question like who will be the starting quarterback he just says that's classified, for football reasons? And how are we supposed to know if Skip Holtz is acting in his capacity as Assistant to the Head Coach of the Northwestern Wildcats and not Head Coach of the Birmingham Stallions?

Northwestern was excited when Skip Holtz said he had experience giving the offense a "Peyton Ramsey" flavor without asking enough questions

For years, I have joked about Northwestern football as a grim proposition mainly because of the gruesome and disgusting brand of football that Pat Fitzgerald preferred to play.  In a normal year, the idea of opening the season with Northwestern playing Rutgers would seem decadent or even debased.  But it is impossible to even think about what Wildcat football will even look like on the field.  The roster is cobbled together from the remains of a one-win season, thinned further by transfers.  The fact that the scandal broke in early July is probably the only thing that prevented a mass exodus; Pat Fitzgerald's son is still on the team.  It is difficult to believe that a team that is led by a first-time head coach at any level who was unexpectedly thrust into leadership solely because he was slightly less tainted by scandal than his colleagues in a program that has spent the past two months marinating in dysfunction and who apparently requires the counsel of Skip Holtz could possibly be better than last year's team that was merely bad, but it is almost impossible for the team to play worse than they did a year ago.  And what is the best case scenario here: a team rallies together and inexplicably wins several upsets with the players proclaiming that they have triumphed over adversity without mentioning that the adversity was the humiliation of their own teammates with rituals that seem to have been imported from 1920s British aristocrat schools?

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Anyone who writes about a college football team as a fan knows that they are on borrowed time until the Bad Thing happens.  The rottenness and corruption at the heart of the sport means that it is only a matter of time.  The same pervasive lawlessness in college football is on the one hand one of the things that give the sport its energy when boosters are gleefully handing out sacks of cash in front of the NCAA's legion of Bufords T. Justice but when something actually bad happens and it is a result of systemic institutional failure, you would hope there would be someone in charge other than hapless university bureaucrats whose main job is telling rich people they'll put their name on a building and the sports' theoretical governing body that is so oafish and incompetent that it is stunning that actual NCAA officials are allowed to run around in society in suits pretending they are important instead of being outfitted like colorful Swiss Guards that tourists in Indianapolis can gawp at and try to bother by making weird faces at them.

I believe this simple change in NCAA President Charlie Baker's wardrobe best expresses the dignity of his position.

This Northwestern football season is a disaster before ball has even been snapped.  It seems unlikely to me that we've seen the worst of the revelations that will come from the numerous lawsuits, and the university's response seems to me to show that its priorities are not with the safety and dignity of athletes but instead the department is laser focused on making sure the football team finds a way to lose to Iowa 8-5 but this time in a billion-dollar facility called Pat Ryan's Northwestern Football Stadium and Robot World.

There is no amount of football that they can play that will make Northwestern's season about anything other than the hazing scandal and the firing of Pat Fitzgerald.  And I admit that I am somewhat at a loss on how to write about it, even if my way of "covering the team" traditionally involves writing three run-on sentences about football, making a few sophomoric jokes about the opposing coaches and then throwing in a 3,000 word review about books on eighteenth-century shipwrecks or whatever.  It makes no sense to ignore what has happened in favor of trying to pretend that I am going to break down some All 22 linebacker coverage.  At the same time, I cannot imagine it will be fun to write or for the 35 people who consume this blog to read ten to eleven posts that are about Northwestern football but feature several throat-clearing paragraphs about how it's bad.  

This will certainly and unfortunately be an extremely interesting football season, and I will try to write about it in a way where I feel like I have something to say about it without feeling disgusting.  For example, I have not yet determined the specific ways that David Braun is deranged.  I will also be monitoring Skip Holtz's allegiance to the Birmingham Stallions.  But perhaps most importantly, it will be fascinating to see how this season plays out while continuing to learn about the various ways that Northwestern's athletic department appears to be deeply fucked up.  

There is one thing I can tell you about a season-opening Northwestern-Rutgers game though and that as a pure football spectacle it will absolutely suck shit.

College Football's Spite Season

The big story in college football this offseason has been the rapid rearrangement of conferences.  It looks like a small child has shaken out a bin with action figures and all of a sudden there is an unexpected summit that appears to be happening between go-bots and a few ninja turtle villains.  Ask any random bystander what conference a middling and unexceptional Power Five program is in currently and they will not be able to tell you.  But that would be a fiendish trick! Because the funniest part of the realignment, one marked by rapacious raids by other conferences for plum programs, erstwhile conference-mates stabbing each other in back, hasty midnight meetings involving provosts, and apparently zero consideration whatsoever for non-football athletes who now will spend a large portion of their college experience in various regional airports is that none of that realignment has happened yet.  

 

The Big Ten and SEC carve up the college football landscape

For one glorious year, the programs that have just spent the past several months in a Hobbesian battle over television revenue are all stuck with the other programs they have fucked over, been fucked over by, or attempted to fuck over and failed in the same conferences they have been in more or less for one football season of grinning through gritted teeth and handing over championship trophies to teams that are already on their way out while boosters either jump up and down firing guns in celebration or jump and down firing guns in gutted agony.

College football anger is usually based on normal and understandable things such as the results of a game that was played 45 years before 99% of the undergraduates in either school were born or the way that people from a certain part of the state park like this while people from the other side of the state park like that.  But there is possibility for real animus at a conference game for the first time among high-level university and conference bureaucrats who will have to look each other in the eye after their colleagues had just secretly conspired to cost their athletic departments millions of dollars and even cost some of them their phony-baloney jobs.  Imagine George Kliavkoff, the (extremely) current president of the still for this year extant PAC 12 conference, having to hand over a trophy to USC or Washington or one of the other programs that will leave the conference a smoldering nub.  I am not saying it is likely, but there has to be a small possibility that Kliavkoff shakes Lincoln Riley's hand and then hits him with a folding chair while the president of Oregon State's music hits before she puts a UCLA dean through a table.

Conference realignment is not anything new in college football.  As long as the sport has existed, conferences and schools have contorted themselves into whatever configuration could make them an extra buck or two.  The only reason why this summer's feeding frenzy feels more grotesque and perverse than college football's business as usual is the matter of scale.  

Conference alignments at least before the 2010s seemed to at least attempt to gesture at regionalism, rivalry, and, at least in the case of the Big Ten, some sort of academic credential, which was important to the conference for reasons I have never been able to fathom.  But then the big money started rolling in from proprietary networks and the Big Ten and its constituent university presidents all immediately turned into the first half hour of Requiem for a Dream and before long they added Nebraska, invented something called "Legends and Leaders" and then the second half of Requiem for a Dream kicked in and Rutgers and Maryland were now in the conference.  These Big Ten moves caused the entire college football ecosystem to go insane.  Texas attempted to strongarm its own conference and then ended up creating its own college football cable network, a 24 hour network dedicated to one 12-13 football games and then 20 hours of Mack Brown's Slacks Wardrobe and Do You Remember Vince Young programming.   

 

Classic Longhorn Network programming. Unfortunately, the Longhorn Network is another casualty of realignment, and Texas fans will have to get their Bevo content on the internet.

The Great Realignment of 2023 is an extraordinary accomplishment in our Age of Disruption: it is a massive change that no one wants, done for reasons that no one cares about, and is being celebrated by bureaucrats who made it possible like they have split the atom for the first time by making it harder to know what channel a football game is on.  Fans do not care about whether a game is on the Fox or ESPN suite of networks and increasingly arcane streaming services-- they do care about playing the same teams they have been playing for more than a century.  The concept of "conference identity" is admittedly a very stupid and nebulous idea to attach to an arbitrary grouping of college football programs for purposes of revenue enhancement, but then again attaching empty signifiers to sports teams is pretty much the entire business model of big money college athletics.

I doubt enough many people will be so pissed off about conference realignment that they will stop watching the games.  In the end, the games are what people care about, and next year they will just start happening in odd and unexpected configurations.  By now, most people realize that "tradition" is something for the TV packages and the glossy mailers asking for donations, a phony marketing canard not unlike the infinite number of roadside hamburger stands offering "world famous chili" and not anything that anyone in charge considers real.  Most people consider the Michigan-Ohio State game the most glittering prize in the Big Ten, but quietly take aside one of the conference's head honchos in their meat restaurant-adjacent Rosemont citadel and watch what happens when you tell them you could kill it in the name of an annual Ohio State-Alabama game that only airs on phones with special exclusive Big Ten data plans and they will build a warehouse to house the very strongly-worded "you, sir" letters from Michigan alumni.

And yet in 2023 none of this has happened yet.  Everything is exactly where we left it last year as sour teams attempt to either play out the string in doomed conferences that they have themselves doomed or are on a team that's about to be shunted to some lesser run conference or left completely in limbo.  And I'm not sure how much the players on each team care about it or what effect it will have on the games, but I can't imagine the amount of money that realignment is costing certain programs will not result in something incredibly funny happening.