Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters's Guide to Success in Football and Business

When people say college football is predictable they mean that Alabama and Ohio State are in the playoffs every year and the same half dozen programs are in position to win the big championship that ESPN cares about but they do not account for a scandal-plagued Northwestern team going up to Camp Randall against a Wisconsin team with one of the flashiest coaching hires of the offseason and absolutely beating their ass.

I don't recall any Northwestern team ever doing that up there.  Usually if Northwestern beats Wisconsin it is because the referees have nullified several Wisconsin touchdowns while the student section rains snowballs on the field in disgust or because Wisconsin's coaches have seen their metric ton offensive line wipe the Wildcats across the field like a five-man squeegee but then let their quarterback who has been the same guy for 35 consecutive years throw a single pass that is so bad it causes them to instantly lose the game.  I have never seen a Northwestern team go up there and shove the Badgers around like they are the dyspeptic trucker touching up Clark Kent in that part in Superman II when he loses his powers and has no idea how to fight anyone other than by getting repeatedly thrown into a jukebox.  

The boos rained down on the Wisconsin team as they trudged off the field at halftime losing 24-3, and the sarcastic cheers came out when they scored with less than twenty seconds left to pull it to 24-10 and avoid the indignity of their worst offensive output at home since a 3-3 tie with Illinois in 1995, which I have scientifically determined is very close to the funniest Big Ten score line possible.

 

After years of running the data, Big Ten football scientists have determined that the objectively funniest score in a Big Ten game is Rutgers 2, Iowa 1.

Wisconsin has been in a recent tailspin with losses to a putrid Indiana team and a hollowed out Northwestern.  New head coach Luke Fickell is trying something that is on its face completely insane: a transition from the school's proud tradition of unstoppable Oaf Football to a complicated air raid offense while the team is still made up largely of players that were recruited to shove people.  It i like asking the Blue Angels to execute their precision aerial maneuvers except they are now all flying blimps. 

It would seem rational for Wisconsin fans to give their new coach and his radical new system a chance to settle in, but I believe that I understand why they are so irate.  For one, the Badgers have been in a steady holding pattern of boring competence for so long that it remains genuinely shocking for them to get thrown into a dumpster by the Northwestern Wildcats at home regardless of whether they are transitioning to the air raid offense or to Olympic Breakdancing. 

Another reason why Wisconsin fans are so irate is because this is the last year of the Big Ten West and I believe it has driven the entire division insane.  The Big Ten West has been the conference of dreams since its inception because every team in it has ranged from beatable to unwatchable while no one in the East has any hope of unseating one of the two big teams-- no team other than Ohio State or Michigan has ever represented the East in the conference championship game.  Every program is desperate to win the Big Ten West this year before the West Coast teams come in and the easy path to Indianapolis disappears, and in that desperation every team seems to have grown more feral and Big Ten West-like as they develop more exotically repellent offenses and break new frontiers in cowardly punting.  In its final year, the Big Ten West has reached its apotheosis as the most aesthetically disgusting collection of teams in the entire sport and possibly in the history of college football since the forward pass was invented and teams were no longer literally stomping each other to death in the mud.  

Consider that nearly every Big Ten West team has the exact same record and that every game ends on a score of approximately 17-9.  Consider that the division's standard bearer is Iowa, the most absurd winning team in the country that is so allergic to basic offensive competence that it has become some kind of bit in the same way that people in the early 2000s discovered that Christopher Walken being weird was funny and then every one of his roles after that was him performing as a caricature of Christopher Walken; this is exactly what happens when people make fun of Iowa football and its manifold Ferentzes and then you watch a game and they do actually punt that many times and throw passes exactly that badly in a way that is scarcely possible to believe is possible for an FBS team and yet they cannot be stopped.

An Iowa fan watching the team attempt a play on second and nine

Wisconsin didn't lose that game just from playing poorly; Northwestern looked fantastic.  The offense shredded Wisconsin's defense in the first half with pinpoint passing and gouging runs that led to first down after first down.  The defense shut down Wisconsin's run game stifled their newfangled passing attack.  The unexpected and thorough destruction of Wisconsin finally gave the university an opportunity to take away David Braun's interim status and hand him the keys to the program.  The team's performance has been so remarkable that it is almost shocking. I don't think anyone thought Northwestern had any chance of even being mediocre even in the generous confines of the Big Ten West.  Nearly prognosticator before the season pegged them as the worst major conference team in the country.  My posts from August and September still exist, and you can see I thought the future of the team was bleak: they would lose and lose and players would desperately try to escape while it would be nearly impossible to convince anyone to ever play here again.  I thought the combination of the scandal and the fact that Northwestern historically struggles to be seen as a real football team with uniforms and everything would essentially kill the program as it no longer offers anything to the Big Money Big Ten.  That may still be the case, but after the Wildcats wobbled on the precipice in the dying years of the Pat Fitzgerald Imperium, David Braun has somehow managed to keep this group together and has them tantalizingly close to qualifying for the Ahab and Sons Barnacle Solutions Bowl.  

After seeing this graphic, I am crushed that I did not learn the news about Braun losing the interim tag from Dave Wannstedt Tonight

A lot of stories about Northwestern will frame this team as going through adversity and while the circumstances are adverse, this is the most self-inflicted trouble imaginable.  This is not the Big Ten and NCAA coming in and threatening to suspend people because some goofus was going around doing Marine Recon Infiltration Maneuvers against Central Michigan but because the program tolerated an alarming amount of weirdo sadism among players for decades.  We've learned that David Braun has something that players respond to and an ability to keep a team that seemed likely to break together.  We've also learned he is, at the very least, much better at telling defensive players how to successfully tackle someone than Jim O'Neil, who was apparently showing players instructional tapes of hired goons surrounding Jean-Claude Van Damme and then ineffectually attacking him one at a time only to get victimized by The Splits.  What remains to be seen is whether Braun can do something more important than taking the 'Cats to a bowl game which is finding a way for the football team to function without gross Shrek rituals.

NORTHWESTERN ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY PURDUE, OWN STADIUM

Northwestern can do the seemingly impossible and qualify for one of the infinite Dreck Bowl Games by simply beating the team in last place, the Purdue Boilermarkers.  Purdue also has a very young first-time head coach in former Illinois defensive coordinator Ryan Walters taking the reigns after Jeff Brohm went home to Louisville.  Purdue has only won three games this season but two of them have been offensive outbursts.  Last week, they ran over a fading Minnesota team while P.J. Fleck desperately acronymed on the sidelines.   

The records indicate that Northwestern has a pretty decent chance to win.  But nothing is given in the Big Ten West, where records and statistics have no meaning from week to week and games tend to resolve themselves based on what is stupidest and most baffling.  There are no easy wins in this division because every team is almost equally bad; for Purdue, Northwestern is also one of the most winnable games on their schedule.

There is one fascinating subplot to this game is that it is possibly the final game that will ever be played at Ryan Field.  The stadium plan remains stalled in the grinding mechanisms of Evanston city government, but it at least seems likely that Northwestern will get its way and build one of the most inane and pointless stadiums in the history of inane and pointless stadium boondoggles.  If the city approves the plan, Northwestern will spend several years wandering the Earth before they will cut the ribbon on their new football Xanadu for visiting fans.  Of course, Northwestern is not a real sports team flinging its weight around because absolutely no one cares about Wildcat football-- it is possible that Evanston ultimately rejects the stadium based on the school's demands for more events than seven football games and a graduation ceremony, in which case it is important to note that the team being forced to return to a Ryan Field that has decayed into unimaginable decrepitude on the assumption that it would be torn down is in fact extremely funny.

While I would like to see a Northwestern win here, there is one force that it is making me uneasy.  It has nothing to do with anything going on with Northwestern or Purdue or the players or the tactics.  Northwestern and Illinois are both currently 5-5.  If both Illinois and Northwestern lose (Illinois is matched up with the apparently indomitable Iowa Hawkeyes), next week's Hat Game will serve as a Bowl Game Eliminator Showdown.  It seems impossible to believe that a game between Northwestern and Illinois to determine who gets to go to the Quick Lane Bowl will not be the glorious end that the Big Ten West deserves.

JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF MADNESS: RYAN WALTERS'S PLAYBOOK FOR SUCCESS IN LIFE AND BUSINESS

The following is repurposed from the journal and correspondence of film director Wolfram Krenkel relating to his unfinished documentary Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters’s Playbook for Success in Life and Business before his mysterious disappearance in 2023.

Letter to the Institute of Wolfram Krinkel Studies, June 21, 2023 

I was on location in a remote island I am legally not allowed to disclose filming a new picture called “Murders from God” when I got a telegram from the United States. The film was not going well. My entire crew was suffering from an ailment that translated loosely as “the devil’s rivers” that was known around the camp as “diarrhea 2.” Our financing had run out two weeks before when accountants noticed that the eccentric count who had lavished us with funds for the production was declared legally demented and his heirs were preparing to tear each other apart in the legal system.  We were trying to get to the mainland to regroup. The leading man played by the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had been rampaging throughout the set for weeks in a home-made “reverse loincloth” that covered his entire body from the neck down except for his nipples, buttocks, and genitals.  He menaced everyone he encountered after telling us he was beginning an intense biting regimen and was only held at bay with staves fashioned from tree branches. The telegram had told me that an American University in the midwest was offering me a substantial amount of money to make a film about their annual headbutting championship. I was intrigued.

Journal Entry, July 18, 2023
I have arrived in West Lafeyette, Indiana, but quite late. They were anticipating me flying, but I explained that I had instead chosen to travel with a group of steamship enthusiasts crossing the Atlantic in a homemade vessel. The seas were violent, and I spent most of it ill alongside most of the crew. When we were not vomiting, the steamship enthusiasts quarreled among each other about the authenticity of the rivets and whether the food on board was period appropriate. Every night, a particularly irate retired professor of train literature from Italy threatened to mutiny with much screaming and wagging of his elaborate mustaches. Finally, this man managed to successfully pull off his coup after we had arrived in port by getting off the ship first and declaring himself the captain to a baffled customs agent. The crew got into an intense shoving match that lasted four hours until police intervened.  The university bursar who I told about my voyage in order to try to convince him that I had a valid reason for arriving late had no interest in hearing about the debased madness of man at sea.

Journal Entry, July 19, 2023
There are complications with the film. It appears that while I was on my sea voyage, I had missed some budgetary window to secure funding. The film professor who contacted me told me he had found some funds if I was willing to alter my project. It appears the football team was looking to document the activities of the team and had money for a film. I was instructed to meet with Lorenzo “Wayne” Kragg, the chief financier of the football team who somehow had no direct ties to the university but is instead a man who made his fortune selling decorative truck genitalia. I have no knowledge or interest in football but the professor was so apologetic that I felt I had to have a meeting out of politeness.

I was taken to Wayne Kragg’s mansion overlooking the scenic Celery Bog Nature Area. Mr. Kragg (“Call me Lorenzo “Wanyne,” he said) met me at the door and led me into the foyer. Everywhere I looked there were images of trains. On one wall, the famous nineteenth-century film “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” ran on a loop from a projector while speakers blared train noises and whistles constantly. This agitated me greatly. I do not like trains, which I have always seen as the vanguard of man’s violent incursion against nature. Also I was told that my maternal great-uncles were all killed in separate and unrelated train accidents. One of them was bludgeoned to death, but it happened on a train. Lorenzo “Wayne” led me to a room covered in pictures of football players. He told me he had heard that I am a filmmaker of some international renown and he was honored to host me. I could tell he had not seen any of my films, not even my popular bird documentary “Shrieks of Hostility.”

He told me he wanted to make a motivational film about the leadership techniques of the program’s new coach. The coach was young and inexperienced and Lorenzo "Wayne" wanted to burnish his reputation and rally the other rich men who donated their money to the football team around this man. I told him I appreciated the attention, but I do not make those kind of films. I know nothing about football. In fact, I find the spectacle of violence and pageantry disgusting and anathema to everything I think about humanity. I am not opposed to violence, for example if a man is torn to pieces by a large, flightless bird. But the organized, symbolized warfare in American football is something I find odious and intolerable.

Then, I noticed something that changed my mind. In the corner, I saw a gigantic totem of a man wearing a football uniform and a hard hat. He is not quite a man. He is a grotesque caricature of a man, like if a person was drawn by a disturbed child like my school friend Dieter who was taken away and described as Bavaria’s youngest pyromaniac. This totem has gigantic bulging, dead eyes and a swollen, jutting chin. He carries a hammer. It is the stuff of waking nightmares. I asked Lorenzo “Wayne” what is this repulsive creature? He told me it was the school mascot “Purdue Pete” and he prowls the sidelines during athletic contests. I told him I must study this perverse abomination and the unhinged people that worship him. He said great, people here love Pete you can put him in the movie as much as you want. He also offered me enough money to restart my other film and hire a person specifically to restrain Kaspar from his normal course of biting and gouging attacks between scenes.

Journal Entry, July 20, 2023
I met the football coach Ryan Walters in his office. I told him I was there to learn his leadership secrets. I had already decided that my film would include none of the nonsense about leadership and I would instead investigate the twisted iconography of the terrible train goblin that had repulsed and intrigued me, but I needed to maintain the pretense. Coach Walters laughed. He told me that he thought that a motivational film about a first-year head coach was absurd, but he figured it was an easy way to keep Lorenzo “Wayne” happy, and he had to indulge him from time to time. Consider that his first Leadership Secret. I immediately liked him. I understood that you need to occasionally entertain the whims of maniacs in order to secure funding for your football program or film about a man who loses his mind trying to build a homemade spacecraft while you simultaneously try to build a homemade spacecraft as part of the filming process.  Over his shoulder I noticed a smaller totem of the Pete grimacing at him and seemingly peering into my soul. I asked him what he thought about Purdue Pete. He told me that everyone loved Pete. I asked him why because he looked like he was a demon dedicated to murder. Walters’s face changed. “I don’t think it’s a great idea to make fun of Pete like that. People here don’t like that.”

I thought he was joking but he appeared deadly serious so I changed the subject. I told him that I noticed from the pictures on the wall in the facility that many of those who came before him seemed to have large mustaches. Perhaps he should consider growing a mustache. “I haven’t earned mine yet. Not until he says so,” Walters said. Not until who says so? Uh, not he, I meant them. The fans. The fans, he said. Then he told me it was nice meeting me but he had a practice to prepare for.

Journal Entry, July 21 2023
I went to the library to research the iconography of Purdue Pete. The librarian handed me a dusty book on past showing the evolution of the Pete mascot through the years. He told me to enjoy the book and flashed a sinister smile. It turns out that Purdue Pete had gone through several changes dating back to the 1940s. The book showed photos and drawings of earlier, cruder designs where Pete was somehow more menacing and more deranged. In one earlier incarnation, he has broad shoulders and a tiny pin head emanating malice. In another, he has rosy cheeks like an evil California hamburger mascot. I wanted to retch and recoil but I could not look away. I sat for hours staring at these photos lost in some sort of demonic reverie. An unearthly cackle seemed to bounce around my skull. Eventually I threw down the book and ran out as the librarian chased me and scolded me, but I could not bear to touch the book anymore. On my way out I passed a drawing of a Purdue Pete reminding students to return their books and I threw my knapsack at it in disgust, exploding the half a turkey sandwich I had saved from my lunch all over a poster explaining the Dewey Decimal System.

Journal Entry, July 21, 2023
Last night I was unable to sleep. I had a vision that I was trying to move but was unable to because I had ingested some sort of psychedelic or poison that prevented me from using my limbs. I was affixed vertically on some sort of plank like I was standing up and could not see below me but I felt a rattling. I was able to move my eyes enough to see that my plank was mounted to a railroad track. I heard a blood-curdling bellow that sounded like someone trying to make a train whistle. That’s when I saw it coming. A shadowy figure was pumping one of those old time railroad vehicles and heading straight towards me. There was a blinding lantern mounted on it but I could see it also had a battering ram shaped like a Purdue Pete head. As it came closer, I could see the figure pumping was a malformed Pete, a sort of hideous amalgam of all of the historical and discarded Petes. The pump car was increasing speed and coming straight for me. Right when it was about to collide with me, I woke up screaming.

In fact, I had actually faced this exact situation when I was filming "The Grim Melánge" with the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden. We were in the desert and had run out of Kaspar’s favorite sarsaparilla brand. One night, I awoke to find myself lashed to a train track and Kaspar coming at me with a similar hand cart. His eyes were wide and he was singing passages from "Salome" in an agonized shriek. He rammed me thirteen times. My ribs were badly bruised. I could hardly speak and the doctors told me that if I laughed I would collapse into agony but fortunately I never laugh.

Journal Entry, July 24, 2023
I arrived at the football facility to get practice footage. The players are engaged in inscrutable drills and the coaches are bellowing out an indecipherable array of football jargon.  During breaks, I filmed short interviews with whatever players were around. I received very few usable answers. My line of questioning was simple and straightforward: what do you think about nature’s indifference to man’s thoughts and suffering? Most of the players simply laughed or said "I don't know" or asked me who I was and what I was doing there.  One player told me that “I am the indifference of nature to man’s suffering, on the football field.” I was so disturbed I had to leave.

I tried to interview Coach Walters on film. It took me several hours to light his office. The Purdue Pete on his shelf still stared at me, and I ended up covering it with a camera case. But when it was time for him to start, an assistant told me the coach was too busy. I began to pack my things. As I put away my camera equipment I thought I heard something stir at the door. I looked up but no one entered. Then a piece of paper shot under the door with my name on it. I opened it. There was a hasty and careless scrawl that only said “Pete Says Stop.” I opened the door and looked to see anyone who could have slid the note, but the hallway was empty. The door slammed behind me and locked with all of my equipment inside. I had to try to convince a janitor to let me back in, but he had to talk to three different people in the football department to find someone who had heard of me until I found someone who had recognized me as the villain from the action movie "Operation: Cobra Strike: A Jack Kicker Film."

As I headed back towards the hotel, I noticed something strange. A startling number of people I passed had large, blond mustaches. I thought I had noticed a slightly larger number of people you ordinarily see with a blond mustache, but now I was seeing them everywhere. And every person with a blond mustache seemed to look at me, if even for a second, and glare at me. I have only seen that look of pure hatred once in my life, and it was when the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had chased me for three days through the Cambodian wilderness with a homemade nunchuk because I had told him to say “excuse me” instead of “pardon me” in a scene.

Journal Entry, July 25 2023
It is the middle of the night. I have heard a nonstop rattling in my room for several hours. I initially thought it was the air conditioner, so I turned it off and the room immediately became impossibly warm and humid in the steamy Indiana night. I am soaked in sweat. I tried to call the front desk but no one answers and the humidity seems to have swelled my door closed and jammed. A storm has rolled in and the rain pounds on my window while the thunder bellows outside. I pound on the door and scream for help but no one answers. Perhaps I am going mad. But I have suffered from the entire scale of filmmakers’ madnesses in my career: desert madness, jungle madness, and space madness, and this does not feel like any of them.

I look outside the window and see only my own face reflected in the window, but when a flash of lightning illuminated the courtyard I could swear I saw the face. The eyes. The chin. I thought I should

The journal ends there.  Wolfram Krenkel has not been seen since.

Football Leadership Book, by Luke Fickell

Everyone spent all week saying that the Iowa game was going to be repulsive and disgusting and set back the game of football forever etc. and the casinos said I bet you don't think they can score the fewest points we have ever let you gamble on and the TV networks said we will not allow this to be broadcast on the airwaves where it is subject to FCC regulation and instead put it on a streaming service where they can show whatever they want like illegal badger baiting competitions and cooking shows called American Botulist and everyone had a good laugh at Iowa-Northwestern playing their signature brands of shit football at each other in a baseball stadium from the 1910s and then somehow the game was actually worse than that.  

 

Iowa vs Northwestern but it’s a Silent Film pic.twitter.com/tmEGbSMyrY

— Mr Matthew CFB (@MrMatthew_CFB) November 4, 2023

Twitter user Mr Matthew CFB cut the highlights of this deranged contest into a silent film 

It was 0-0 at halftime.  Northwestern managed fewer than 30 passing yards in the first half.  I had thought to myself that there was a possibility that Iowa offensive coordinator and son Brian Ferentz, who had been Future Terminated like he was in a 1980s science fiction movie and therefore had nothing to lose would pull out all the stops and just run the most insane plays possible like double flea flicker reverses and those plays where the quarterback pretends he can't hear understand the call coming in from the sideline and wanders towards the coaches only for them to snap the ball to a running back, or a pass that travels more than 14 yards, but I suppose if Brian Ferentz was capable of doing things like that he would not have been pre-fired.  Instead, the Iowa offense did what everyone expected the Iowa offense to do and fell down a lot and called for the punter and absolutely nothing happened for approximately three excruciating hours.

You said you'd call for the punter.

It's third and three we can get a first down.

It's fourth and two.

I'll call now

The star of the game was the Wrigley Field turf, which continued its mission to maim and devour football players.  Last year, players slipped and slid all over the field like it was a hockey rink.  This year, a few downs of vicious goal-line football produced a gigantic sink hole at the two yardline.  It was if the earth itself had seen and rejected the nauseating attempt at football going on around it and tried to intervene.  The game paused for several moments as the shovel-wielding grounds crew desperately hacked at the hole and did sad little riverdances on it to try to fill the divot.  It was perhaps the most literal interpretation of the Timeout On The Field.   This was the most exciting part of the game.

The game managed to have some juice at the very end, when Northwestern somehow managed to find the endzone and tie the game at 7-7 with fewer than 2 minutes to go.  I thought it would be very improbable that Iowa's towtruck offense could march down the field in time to score, but a few penalties and the one actual pass completion of the game got them in field goal range for a kicker who had already doinked one from similar range earlier.  Instead, Iowa got it through the uprights, won the game, and the kicker made the very rude go to sleep gesture and the Hawkeyes secured their place at the top of the putrid Big Ten West.

Now Northwestern faces Iowa's erstwhile rival for the West crown, a sputtering Wisconsin team.  It's a new era for Wisconsin football under Luke Fickell.  Fickell, who had turned Cincinnati into a powerhouse in the AAC, is trying to do something different at Wisconsin.  The Badgers tended to promote their own and run the same kind of Badger football you remember from time immemorial where the five largest men in Wisconsin are airlifted onto Camp Randall every week and knock over everyone so they can run the ball while three to four times every game a quarterback throws the crummiest pass you've ever seen.  Fickell, though is trying to chanve this.  He brought in Air Raid guru Phil Longo to run the offense and SMU transfer quarterback Tanner Mordecai.  This was a shocking development-- I imagined Wisconsin trying to run the Air Raid like a military trying to form an air force by driving tanks up a ramp.  The results have not been there for Wisconsin this year.

Wisconsin, playing at home, is heavily favored against Northwestern.  But the Wildcats have been managing to hold their own against Big Ten West opponents, and Wisconsin is coming off a loss to an Indiana team whose coaching situation for most of the season could best be described as "death throes."  Both teams face quarterback uncertainty with Mordecai's status in question for Wisconsin and Northwestern potentially bringing back Ben Bryant, who had played under Fickell at Cincinnati.  Once again, the key for Northwestern is to make the game as horrible as possible.  The Wildcats thrive playing in Big Ten West slop conditions much like how the Predator requires a hot and humid climate in order to successfully tear apart Carl Weathers.  If anyone has any fun at all watching this game, it augurs poorly for the 'Cats.

THE NCAA KILLS JIM HARBAUGH WITH DEVASTATING DEATH PENALTY OF NOT BEING ABLE TO COACH THE TEAM FOR THREE HOURS A WEEK

The Michigan sign-stealing scandal continues to take up all of the oxygen in college football media, much to the relief of Derrick Gragg, who is probably sending an edible arrangement to one of Connor Stalions's dead drops.  Last year, my running bit on this blog was a series of short stories about a fictional NCAA investigator named Buck Duckett where the central joke was that the NCAA had no power anymore with NIL and the investigators who spent their time digging in trash cans for P.F. Chang's receipts from illegal recruiting visits or whatever no longer had anything to do.  I did not see the NCAA's investigative wing having a such a major resurgence because a weird guy with a silly name was (allegedly!) doing recon wet work on the Central Michigan sidelines.  

This week, the scandal has escalated on two fronts.  On one, the increasingly Coen Brothers-inflected saga of Connor Stalions took more strange turns when we learned about how his vacuum repair business got him into an argument with his HOA where he legally responded by claiming the entire dispute was a psyop directed by his Michigan State fan neighbor named Jeff who was out to sabotage Michigan's football operations by complaining about the dozens of vacuums Stalions left idling on his porch in a business that also apparently included Michigan's star running back who denies any affiliation with Stalions' vacuum repair operation.

Any Big Ten team that does not use this picture as part of its sideline signals when they play Michigan is not a serious program

The other is that the Big Ten is taking action.  On Friday, the conference swooped in to levy a punishment against Harbaugh by banning him from the team's sidelines during games for three weeks but not suspending him in any other capacity.  The punishment was a masterclass of college football bureaucracy: it did nothing other than inflame Michigan and its fans who claim the conference acted against them without the opportunity to even defend themselves and irritates Michigan's opponents because it's a pointless horseshit penalty that doesn't do anything.  The fact is that Michigan will fight tooth and nail against anything the conference or NCAA will do to it, so they might as well have gone all in and ordered that Harbaugh has to be sent to the international space station or allowed on Michigan sidelines only if he is restrained like Hannibal Lecter.

The Michigan saga unfortunately seems to be turning a corner from a delightful series of increasingly absurd revelations to the tedious arguing in various courts phase.  This certainly pleases Michigan fans who get the benefit of feeling persecuted for being too good, which is the greatest feeling that can ever be accessed by a college football fanbase.  Michigan fans, who fairly or not have the reputation of being pedantic rules-mongers, also now have something even more pleasing to them which is a set of regulations to comb through and the opportunity to compose long-winded briefs about bring wronged.  If this is the trajectory that the scandal is going to move along, which has been dominated for the past 24 hours by an impenetrable argument about the timing of when an injunction can be filed or something, I no longer care at all because that is boring and just need to know whether a Michigan staffer named Jackson Rhinoceros has been spotted hiding under a tarp at Ryan Field.

FOOTBALL LEADERSHIP BOOK BY LUKE FICKELL

Luke Fickell doesn't eat anything.  I'm sitting across from Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell at "Well I Can Eat," one of Madison's trendiest new restaurants and I'm trying to figure out what to do.  I got in the habit of meeting sports people at restaurants when I was profiling them for magazines because it made a great lede: "Marv Albert digs his spoon into the chicken a la king;" "Jeff Van Gundy orders an entire Thanksgiving meal off-menu;" "Buddy Ryan eats a steak with his bare hands;" but if I was profiling Fickell, I'd be at a loss.  He doesn't order anything, not even a glass of water. He is staring at me like he's trying to see through my skin.  "Jeff Van Gundy told me this place has incredible cranberry sauce," I say.  "No thanks," he says.

I wasn't here to profile Fickell.  My magazine writing days hit a speed bump when Man's Man: A Magazine for Men got purchased by thirteen different companies in two years, got spun off into a series of branded bar and grills and a show on the short-lived streaming network "THIS," and then finally got liquidated with the back issues sold to paper magnate Glen Masted, the Pulp King of Michigan City.  After a brief plagiarism scandal (I lifted a chapter from Rick Reilly's Who's Your Caddy* because of a bad reaction to gout treatment) and the recent resurfacing of some profiles of women from the early 2000s I wrote that had these censorious outrage-mavens desperate for an apology even though I have a mother and a step-niece, I was looking for work.  That's how I ended up traveling around the country trying to pitch coaches on leadership books.  They certainly did not exist in the higher literary plane I had lived in when I wrote things like "What's Eating Gordon Ramsay?" and "Rick Fox is Ready for His Closeup" but they were fast and easy and tended to sell well if the person was famous enough.  With enough traction, I could even go around giving lectures in hotel ballrooms.  But I had been having a tough time finding collaborators.  I had already been turned down by Quin Snyder, Dawn Staley, Ben McAdoo, Jim Boylen, and Jim Boylan.   

"So," I say to Fickell.  "If we were to start working on this book, what do you think you'd want to focus on?  "Leadership," Fickell says.  "What elements of leadership? You know you were really thrown into the crucible there with Ohio State, with,  you know the whole Tressell thing."  Fickell got his first head coaching job unexpectedly when his the famed NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett caught numerous Buckeyes players in the grip of a notorious midwestern pants-trafficking ring.  The NCAA moved in to punish Ohio State coach Jim Tressell for the infractions. Tressell wouldn't go quietly-- the result was a thirteen hour siege of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. They took Tressell to a maximum security NCAA facility for three years where he had no access to football or pants.  While locked up, he penned Tressellball: The Art of Integrity- In Conversation with Chad Crad that topped the New York Times bestseller list for 49 consecutive weeks.  In the midst of all of the chaos, Fickell, then serving as the defensive coordinator, got promoted into leading the powerhouse program.  "I don't want to talk about that," Fickell says to me. "That's personal."

Perhaps, I suggest, he could talk about his second stint as defensive coordinator.  After his one season in charge of Ohio State, the university fired him as head coach and brought in the former Florida coach who had retired for health reasons to a TV job but suddenly found himself invigorated by the Ohio State offer.  Fickell stayed on as defensive coordinator under Meyer, which is certainly an unorthodox move in college football coaching. "Maybe you can talk about what you learned about leadership under Urban Meyer." "No," Fickell says. 

(Fair enough.  Last year, I pitched an exposé detailing Meyer's time with the Jacksonville Jaguars as an A Told To with Josh Lambo called Who Kicks The Kicker? He declined.)

"OK, maybe we leave your own personal history out of this and approach things a little more philosophically.  How do you personally prepare a team to win?" I ask, starting to panic a little.  "Winning mentality.  Winning mindset," Fickell says.  "That's perfect," I say.  "How do you instill this winning mindset?"  Fickell's brow wrinkles.  "Winning mindset.  You have to be about winning."  "OK. But how do you become about winning?" I ask.  "Because you want to win. Either you do or you lose," Fickell says, looking as close to incredulous as I can see a person look who does not have facial expressions.  "OK," I say.

I try one last move.  "Look, we can talk about what's in the book later on, but these things really move with good titles.  I was thinking 'A Fickell Twit of Fate.' Or, how about 'Football: Not For The Fickell?'" "No," Fickell said.  "No Fickell puns."  The man had no idea how literature works.  I could have sold a profile on a football coach called "Luke's Not Fickell" to Man's Man sight unseen even though my main sports editor Victor Flugge would have no idea who Luke Fickell is.  He did not even know the basic rules of football and only watched an illegal, combat-oriented version of Jai Alai called "Montserrat."  

"OK then, thanks for your time, Coach," I say.  I pay for my bloody mary that was mainly three full sized sausages and a quirt of tomato juice and start to head for the door.  Thinking I was out of earshot I mutter to myself "Puke Sickell" but I guess I am not.  I don't hear him move.  I don't hear the chair and I don't hear footsteps from anyone coming near me, but before I reach the doorknob someone grabs me.  It is more like being enveloped. My right arm feels like it is being torn from its socket and my left shin seems like it is somehow being thrust upward to stab my own knee.  Fickell, a high school wrestling champion, has me in his legendary trebuchet hold that he had used to subdue 195 consecutive opponents from 1990 to 1992.  Somehow, instead of just screaming out "aaaaahhh and my shin" I manage to blurt out "aaaaaaggghhh trebuchet trebuchet" and Fickell releases me.  

"I see you've done your research," he says.  He's not smiling but he's no longer scowling.  "You know, I like you.  I think we can work together."  He gestures towards the table.  I limp back over there and order another sausage mary.  "It's called Football Leadership Book," he says. 

 --------

*This is a real book

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?”