Good morning, good afternoon, good night.

The alacrity with which Good Good’s Callaway partnership came crashing down around their feet was staggering. In a matter of days, Good Good posted an insane video, apologized badly, apologized a second time and made it worse, lost a television show, lost aisle space at key merchandisers, lost a PGA Tour sponsorship, then lost their Callaway partnership.

Callaway apologized once, then apologized a second time in a better way and announced a sizeable charitable donation.

I will admit that I was wrong in a number of ways about this story. Never did I think it was going to spin out of control the way that it did. At the start of the story, I figured this would end with a groveling apology and a standard self-imposed social media hiatus for Good Good while they Do The Work and Listen To Their Audience. I would have bet a big portion of my paycheck that Callaway wouldn’t cut ties.

But Good Good’s continual beclowning of themselves throughout the process probably made it a necessity. A failed apology the first time around is a problem. Screwing up the second apology with a rambling video that still failed to demonstrate any real remorse probably made it clear to Callaway that Good Good couldn’t be trusted to not make the situation worse, and at that point, you have to cut and run.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The above was written before Good Good’s CEO decided to post a series of tweets that are decidedly making the situation worse.)

For people parachuting into the golf world for this story, I think they should be aware that Good Good getting its wings clipped has genuine negative repercussions they should be aware of. Good Good Girls is a channel that doesn’t deserve to be collateral damage from this story, but they probably will be. Most of the biggest names in the golf influencer space who are women have more male followers than women followers. There is a very notable gap in the YouTube space for content by women, for women, a gap I think Good Good Girls was on its way to helping close. Hopefully, the creators in that group can keep their momentum going, but that’s not an easy task.

The dust is starting to settle, though I expect some aftershocks to continue (I do not expect the Good Good Boys to stick the dismount of a PR catastrophe). Callaway will lick its wounds. The wider world will take its eyes off the Golf YouTube. The golf world will try to figure out what the hell happened. And golf brands will try to figure out what the hell is next.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Salute to Good Good’s CEO on proving the above correct between the time this post was written at 11 PM and scheduled to deliver at 7 AM.)

If you asked me 3 or so years ago which golf brands are doing bold and interesting stuff with influencer partnerships, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say that TaylorMade, Callaway, and Titleist, the big 3 brands, all were doing really cool things.

When No Laying Up moved to Titleist, the big three OEMs had 3 fitting headliners for their brand. Titleist had the older, more buttoned up, more serious influencers who could produce the kind of high-minded aesthetic videos that a legacy brand prides itself on. Callaway was going all in on its youth/YouTube movement, and Bob Does Sports and Good Good felt like they were on the cutting edge of something, even if it was something I didn’t care for. TaylorMade, ever the everyman brand, proved adept at combining its tour talent with its sponsorship of Barstool’s Foreplay into content that felt surprisingly alive.

All the brands knew what they were and knew what partners could speak to that.

I don’t think that any of those brands are doing anything particularly interesting now.

Callaway is obviously going through its stuff, but Good Good aside, they just seem to be sloppily throwing itself behind and elevating too many people. Titleist sponsored ex-Good Good member Micah Morris, who is in no way a brand fit for Titleist, and has since dramatically walked back how visible their talent is on their pages. TaylorMade scooped up their own ex-Good Good golfer, Grant Horvat, but both TaylorMade and Titleist would be improved swapping Horvat for Morris for brand fit reasons. TaylorMade’s Foreplay partnership feels more-or-less juiceless considering the most visible Foreplay golfers are either genuinely bad players (Trent Ryan) or guys who the public really dislikes who also are genuinely bad players (Sam Bozoian).

It seems like everyone is doing the same thing now, just in a slightly different way.

I think the OEM space could use a refresh of what it thinks talent can do for them. The below is some free advice.

Media > Content

The ability to make engaging short form and long form video content should remain the primary output for any talent partnership as long as every platform prioritizes the “infinite scroll.” But video only isn’t where the juice is.

One of the reasons I think No Laying Up is such a golden goose in the golf influencer space is because they have legitimate media bonafides. They can do just about anything. They can interview a CEO as easily as they can riff with a random jamoke. They can do live coverage of the biggest events in the game, on network television, and hold their own. They can podcast, and, yes, they can make social media catnip videos.

Diversity of content outputs is valuable, but so is the editorial mindset of a company that prides itself on covering the sport and the culture in a thoughtful way. NLU is never going to post a video that’s completely out of touch because they’re a group of smart people who care about their standing and are uninterested in disruption.

The Fried Egg fits into this group as well.

Brand safety will be stronger with groups like this, and the content can go deeper, get smarter, and be more diverse.

The Craft, The Craft, The Craft.

The sub-culture in golf right now that’s doing actively interesting stuff is the one that is doing the opposite of Good Good style influencers. It isn’t making the sport look inclusive and attainable. It’s highlighting golf as something that is exclusive and carefully crafted.

This doesn’t always make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, especially as someone who believes the number one issue with golf is how inaccessible it is. But I also have taste. And it’s clear that it’s this group who are doing things you should pay attention to.

@manorsgolfPOV: Your brand makes films not ads. For our AW25 collection the team travelled to Iceland to put our Foulweather collection to the ultimate test. On that barren monochromatic coastline, golf persists through freezing winters, brutal winds, and even volcanic eruptions. But what left a lasting impression wasn’t the drama of the conditions or the landscape, but the quiet, no-fuss resolve of the people who played through them. We hope the same substance runs through this collection. Perhaps it will help to steer you through the winter. For it is here, and it is unrelenting.

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The brands who are leaning more into this part of golf, celebrating the artistry of its courses, its fashion, and its equipment, are the ones who are elevating themselves off the background of the space. Manors gets social media in a way that very, very few brands do, in any space. Holderness & Bourne has basically turned their social media pages into a running list of Top 100 golf course logos.

Both are great.

Would it make total sense for TaylorMade to flip its branding on its head and start posting glossy shots of clubheads shot on 35mm film? No. But should they look at people who take their golf more seriously? Absolutely. Faking being relatable is infinitely less valuable than authentically being aspirational. An off-the-rack driver is $650. These brands are not selling things anyone can buy.

Youth Is Still The M.O.

The dollars and cents of a golfer’s consumer lifecycle tell one clear story: getting someone early is always going to be the goal.

Let’s say drivers are $650, fairway woods are $400, irons sets are $1,200, wedges are $200 a pop, and putters are $300. For a serious golfer, new wedges every 3 years, a new driver every 5 years, new fairway woods every 7 years, and new irons and new putters once a decade seems fair. You can play golf until you’re 75. Let’s assume you get a new golfer into the game at age 20. That’s 18 sets of new wedges (let’s say 3 each), 11 drivers, 7 sets of new fairway woods (let’s say 2 each) 5 sets of irons, and 5 putters.

That’s $31,050 worth of equipment in a lifetime.

The clubs that someone learns to play with will always inform the type of clubs he is drawn too the rest of his life. It’s why I still prefer triangular-looking driver heads over more traditional rounded models. Getting a brand loyalist early in this space is worth a ton to your bottom line.

It’s because of that that I am surprised that golf equipment manufacturers are not more free-spirited in gifting clubs to prospective talent.

It does not seem to me, an outsider, that a driver here, or a set of wedges there would be particularly missed from an Acushnet storage facility. If it were me, I’d juice the amount of inventory earmarked to give away. If someone with 12,000 followers is doing something consistently interesting, get them some gear. Fly someone in to get a VIP tour of your testing facility. These don’t strike me as particularly big expenditures, but getting into influencers’ golf bags should have long term benefits, especially if you can get into their bags before they make it big.

I don’t think TaylorMade is getting the most out of their relationship with Grant Horvat from his dedicated ads about their new milled-face technology. They get the most out of Grant Horvat fans knowing that Grant Horvat is with TaylorMade. You don’t need an influencer regurgitating your product differentiators to get the halo benefit of declaring to an influencer’s audience that your brand supports that person’s creative vision.

As the baseline quality of content across social media continues to devolve in our AI slop age, influencers should become more valuable than ever. But it requires forward-thinking and creative thinking about all the ways influencers can be valuable. Anyone can give an influencer a product, tell them to hold it, and film a “can I break par” video. But does anyone really want to see it?

As golf charts out its post Good Good Fiasco Influencer Future, I would look towards inverting the traditional ask. Influencers should not be tapped to do content that most easily features brands, they should be tapped to do the least predictable content. Give me DIY influencers building their own golf bag nook. Give me recipe creators packing their bag with lunches or drinks (WHY isn’t someone loading up @codytriesstuff with whatever gear he wants?). Give me 30-minute travelogues that can be cut into sexy five-second beauty snapshots to juice a paid media campaign. Put your CEO on a podcast for an hour.

Good Good’s catastrophe doesn’t mean golf brands should retreat from risk taking. It means they should be looking to be the first ones to break from the pack and dare to chart a new direction.

It is rare that the LinkedIn topic of the week intersects with my primary off-the-clock interest (golf) and rarer still when it also intersects with my on-the-clock gig (influencer marketing), so I find myself drawn to putting some words on the page on what about the incident is worth paying attention to beyond the obvious.

Let’s talk about the golf ad heard round the world.

It should go without saying that the piece of content Good Good put out was in extraordinarily bad taste, reprehensible in its content, and an extremely, extremely stupid thing to script, shoot, edit, and post without taking a half step back and thinking through whether the best way to highlight the “Tri-Force Face” and “next-gen AI face mapping” of the new Quantum Max Driver By Callaway™ is to say that it’s so good, you should assault anyone who touches it without your permission.

What it means for Good Good is pretty obvious, and none of it’s good. Golf Galaxy has reportedly yanked its support for Good Good’s Golf Channel show, The Big Break. Retailers are apparently pulling gear off the shelves. Their sponsored Fall Series tournament is “fluid.” Whether or not Callaway walks away from the group, other brands certainly will, and for a creator collective that was already losing speed in the world of YouTube golf, it’s hard to imagine this being anything other than the beginning of a downslide, likely a precipitous one.

Callaway should have been aware that for as many fans as Good Good may have, there has always been a significant portion of the golf space who has had their knives sharpened for a YouTube golf culture that they see as annoying. The cottage industry of “shrink the game” style golf micro influencers couldn’t have been happier to, to quote Lyndon B. Johnson, “get a coonskin on the wall” and tee off on Good Good. If you’re a serious company with a serious investment in a social media sub-community, you need to know where the wind is blowing. The mini-discourse moment around YouTubers filming their USGA qualifying rounds this summer was a sign that a meaningful portion of the golf community was already pretty fed up with YouTube’s influence.

That isn’t why this story blew up (though you better believe those guys were more than happy to get torqued up about the post for less-than-altruistic reasons). The insane video is why. But there was never going to be any meaningful amount of conversation defending Good Good. And that should have changed the risk matrix for Callaway’s relationship and the level of skepticism with which they should have reviewed Good Good’s creative.

Where Callaway goes from here is more interesting and harder to chart than where Good Good goes.

In the near term, Callaway has to deal their competitors taking pot shots at them. To me, posts like the ones from PXG and Wilson feel shameless. I’m not sure it’s particularly tasteful to treat this as an opportunity to get a dunk off. If brands wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the work they do in the women’s game (or better yet, step up their investment in it!), that would be laudable. Regardless, Callaway is going to be the deserving butt of these dunks for a while. The game is the game. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Callaway is deep into the YouTube Golf space. Take a cruise through their social channels and it’s darn near a 50/50 split between their influencer talent and their professional talent. The other major OEMs, namely TaylorMade but also smaller brands like Mizuno, Cobra/Puma, and Wilson Golf, have significant influencer representation, but no brand has leaned further into YouTube golf than Callaway.

Beyond Good Good, they signed a major deal with Bob Does Sports (1.5M YouTube subscribers, 1.2M Instagram Followers) before that group switched to Takomo and with No Laying Up (188K YouTube followers) before they moved to Titleist. They support Cailyn Whitmer (392K Instagram Followers, 192K TikTok Followers), founder of Fore The Girls (193K Instagram Followers, 111K TikTok Followers). Gabriela DeGasperis (1.3M Instagram followers, 290K TikTok followers, 277K YouTube subscribers) is a Callaway sponsored athlete. So is Joshua Kelly (692K Instagram Followers, 149K YouTube Subscribers), Martin Borgmeier (348.1K Followers, 209K YouTube Followers), Cassandra Blaney (459K Instagram Followers), Chaz Bowker (177K Instagram followers), and Chance Taylor (271K TikTok followers, 70K YouTube followers). Roger Steele (269K Instagram Followers) hosted a recurring YouTube series on Callaway’s channel.

TL;DR, Callaway is doing a lot. Will Callaway dial back their investment into other influencers? It certainly would be the world’s most defendable decision to pack their bags, lean into their more professional talent, and take the rest of the year to chart out what influencer marketing should and shouldn’t do for them before they go back to the well.

I doubt they take that step. And I don’t think ratcheting back their overall dig-in to the influencer space would be a smart strategic move. What would be smart would be to remind themselves of a simple but forgettable fact about the role of influencers that keeps popping up again and again.

Influencers work best when you keep them in their own lane.

Most of the time, Callaway’s social media talent stays on social media. There are exceptions for the occasional cameo in a television spot or event appearance, sure, but Good Good stood alone in the Callaway talent ecosystem of creators who they have consciously put in front of a mass audience. No one else was getting specially produced clubs with their logo on it.

The failure of the Good Good partnership seems to be a case of treating a creator collective like an in-house creative agency and trusting that their audience would resonate with whatever they put out (which reminds me of that horrible Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad). That is way too much rope to give a group of immature, not terribly bright men. The mushroom cloud that’s taking up Callaway’s every hour now is because they stretched a group of influencers way outside of where they should be and now have to unwind a laundry-list of over-investments.

Callaway chose to make Good Good’s problems their problems when they made them central figures in out-of-home advertising campaigns, threw their weight behind Good Good television shows and helped them secure sponsorship of a whole-ass PGA Tour event (who the HELL is that for?). The Good Good story could have just been a social media story (though potentially a big one) if Good Good were in the same “friends of the family” basket as the rest of Callaway’s influencer fleet. It broke contain in large part because of the business-interest angle of “Oh shit, what does Callaway do with all these brand extensions they signed up for?”

That concept of stretching influencers past where they work isn’t a golf-specific story. Vanity Fair’s decision to have influencers work the red carpet at the Oscars this spring was widely panned. Musicians who blow up first on TikTok or other social media first before becoming stars/pseudo stars seem to fall out of favor quickly (see: bbno$) or are more likely to get thrown aboard the nepobaby discourse rollercoaster (see: Stella Lefty). Sean Evans’s Hot Ones got a game show on TruTV (I’m not bullshitting you, this is a real thing that existed) that made it one season before getting dumped by the network.

For as ubiquitous as social media is, it has become almost unfathomably segmented. You can earn millions of views and millions of followers without Joe McAverage American having any clue who you are. Joe McAverage American is probably upset that you think he should know who that random TikToker is. And when someone doesn’t know who you are, they are extremely unlikely to have even a moment of hesitation before throwing you into the garbage can when you bore them, confuse them, or, in the case of Good Good, upset them.

Influencers are effective. I do truly believe that. But they aren’t celebrities. They aren’t built to be the face of your brand if you’re going to put them in front of normies. They are going to screw up eventually. Callaway is paying the lesson for that now.

They won’t be the last one to do so.

Americans love few things as much as visiting a place and speaking about it as though no one really lives there, that there are just puppets in their play flittering around the edges of their scene.

It’s a tried-and-true practice of travel writing to smush the people and the place and the experience and the excitement of being far away from home all into two-dimensional side characters into the real hero of the story, naturally, the author.

Ireland is a place that lends itself to such a flattening exercise. It is a comically beautiful place. Its verdant greens, its sheer rock faces, its lapping ocean swells and gurgling rivers and brooks that pierce through towns whose charms bleed from their roofs onto their half-open windows.

Everything fits together here. When you are in its towns and cities, the world feels small enough to hold in your fingers. Sitting in a café over a morning coffee, you’ll invariably here one local check in on a large handful of passersby asking the kinds of knowing niceties that go a step further than the box-checking we do stateside. It all feels solvable, should you have the time to get inside its nooks and its crannies.

When sitting on its seaside, the world feels crushingly large. Here, in a bed and breakfast nestled beneath overhanging cliffs outside of Killybeggs, I am distinctly aware of how finite I am and how infinite the space around me is. The shadows of hills across the ocean, the looming rain clouds rolling in, all of it feels bigger than anything that can be imitated, try as the skyscrapers of metal and glass I know might.

If I’m allowed the writer’s leeway of a little shameless homogenization, it must also be said that the people here are beautiful. Everything sounds better in an Irish accent, too, and its colors paint what roguishness there may be with a charming patina (the young caddie I had telling a story about how he was first in a nightclub at age 12 felt like a bit of lovable scampishness, where I can imagine the same story being told through a Chicago-soft-a-accent being extremely alarming).

We are staying in a bed and breakfast where my grandmother, before her downcycle and death from dementia, and her partner visited. We were greeted first by the owner’s daughter, who without a moment’s hesitation peeled off a story about my grandmother buying her ice cream and baubles in the trips they would take around the neighborhood. The owner too dropped in to check on my mother, to check on everyone’s health, and to again relay stories about my grandmother, who stayed here only twice (or three times, we’re all not sure).

It is certainly possible that stories like these just paint a picture of an especially lovable pair, and certainly anyone can have a similar experience anywhere in the world. But everyone who has gone to Ireland has the same story, or several stories, and at a certain point the sample size is big enough that you can say, yes, it is just different and it is just better here. And maybe, if you stayed here long enough, you would become better, too.

It certainly was better to my grandmother, who despite being as English as they come, felt as though she was probably from Ireland, really, and someone somewhere must have made a mistake and misfiled a form. Sitting looking through the same windows she would sit at and watch the sun go down, it isn’t hard to see why one would like to think so. And, certainly, it is not lost on me how fitting it is that an English person would visit Ireland, love it, and declare it to be their birthright.

This trip to Ireland is in remembrance of her. But hammering out this blog in the late hours of the night in “her place” is the first time it really felt that way. Soil seems to have that effect on people, I suppose.

But this trip was also a golf expedition. Not a pilgrimage in the way trips to Scotland are, but a chance to see the game in its more wild, aboriginal state.

Looking out from the oceanside holes at Ballybunion, Strandhill, Lahinch, and County Sligo, I was taken by how the other seafront land looked. From vantage points from peninsula greens and exposed fairways, you can see farms that reached up to a cliff. Or fields that followed the curve of a hill down towards a rocky beach.

The windswept, jagged dunes that make links golf so great must be useless for anything else beyond perhaps a goat pasture. Partly because of that, there is no wincing about what could be there if not a golf course. It’s impossible to imagine anything else other than a rolling valley to whack a ball through.

The great courses of Ireland are not meticulously well-kept in the way they are in the United States. They are scruffy, and the don’t always make sense, and they are often unserious. People tend to go overboard with their belief that golf is especially democratic in the UK and Ireland, which says far more about the comparative failings of US golf than anything else. My $500 greens fee at Ballybunion, for example, did not feel like it was a revelation of open access.

But I am here, and not locked out, and there are locals on the course, one threesome of which I saw on the 2^nd hole of Lahinch at 915 PM, and they do not have 8 famous golf course logos on their bag, and they are not regaling me of stories about unapproachable private clubs, and they are pushing their own bag on a trolley, and you can imagine yourself having a weekly game on courses that are among the very best in the world.

The golf is of the land, which is of the sea, and all of it is of the people.

In the states, that is almost never true. The golf that is the most of the land is almost never of the people, but is either locked behind the gates of a country club or behind the doors of an obscenely expensive resort. When the golf is of the people, it is almost never of the land, it is slapped atop of it. And if by some miracle it is, it is never also of the sea. The few courses that are of the land, and of the sea, and of the people are the courses that serve the richest and most elite of New York’s upper crust, and the only problem there is that the people are the most individualist dystopics of American exceptionalism that calling Bayonne Golf Club “of the people” is an insult, not a commendation.

I do not know when I will be back to Ireland, or in truth if I ever will return. But it is a place that gets inside of you, however annoyingly cliché that may be. It’s stuck to my ribs. And I am replaying the dedication WB Yeats wrote for Thor Ballylee in my head over and over again.

I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.

I like the NBA.

Not in the way that I suppose most fans do, where they pick a team and fervently follow each game. I sprung for League Pass, ostensibly to follow my Philadelphia 76ers, but on balance probably watched as many Nets and Blazers games this year for reasons that are pretty hard to articulate.

But I watch a lot of it. I listen to podcasts. I read more-or-less everything The Ringer writes about the league. And I pore over the spreadsheets it creates because, unfortunately, that’s the kind of person I am.

In the afterglow of the wonderful and exciting Thunder/Spurs series, I find myself extremely angry and disappointed at the direction of the league. And as a wise man once said, don’t tweet about it, blog about it, so I wanted to take the time to get these thoughts on paper.

A QUICK ASIDE ABOUT DISCOURSE.

I do not want this to be the focus, but I do want to quickly acknowledge that, more so than any other league, the information ecosystem of the NBA is completely, inescapably horrible. The lion’s share of the blame goes directly towards its biggest rights holders, namely ESPN/Disney. But there’s more than plenty to go around amongst its takesmiths, and, especially, its fans.

Never have I ever seen a sport where people overreact to one game more wildly than the NBA. With the potential exception of the New York media’s fascination with Aaron Judge’s postseason “struggles,” it’s impossible to imagine any other sport reacting to an all-pro having one bad game (which makes up exactly 1% of the season by the way) the way the NBA discourse has reacted to Chet Holmgren’s game seven stinker. Two weeks ago, Chet was a 24-year old third team all-pro, defensive player of the year runner up, and one of the three best U-25 bigs in the game. Today he’s…in trade machine screeds that aren’t even possible to pull off?

Copy and paste the above paragraph for Jalen Duren, Shai Gilgeous Alexander, Austin Reaves, Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, or any of about 5-10 other players this postseason who, after having an off-night, had their entire body of work questioned.

The Nerds won the battle of baseball discourse, and now you have to be math literate to not look like a complete boob. It wasn’t always pretty, but its emerged with an incredibly informed discourse.

The NFL playoffs are a one-and-done format so you don’t have the same dredging of bullshit. The discourse is better for it.

The NBA discourse is a nightmare and will continue to be until its media/fans/everyone else understands the concept of sample size and isn’t finding new excuses to flip out.

ON HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED.

There is a very simple concept that game designers, consciously or unconsciously, try to follow when building a game: the thing that is the most fun should be the thing that is most important to the game you are playing.

Games where sweaty, annoying, grindy tactics are the optimal way to play basically always suck.

To take an extremely simple board game as an example, the most satisfying part of Settlers of Catan is getting resources. The optimal way to play (assuming you’re playing normal humans) is to spam cities that grant you two resources every time your number is rolled. That’s fun!

I would assume that for most people, the most exciting thing about basketball is seeing someone throw a ball into the hoop. Perhaps a vanishingly small percentage of people prefer to watch people try to stop opposing players from putting the ball into the hoop. But it’s not many.

I think the most exciting brand of basketball the NBA ever put together were the peak Warriors vs Lebron Cavs playoff battles of the late 2010s. The numbers, to a certain extent, bear that out with the 2017 Warriors scoring the most points per game in finals history and the Cavs scoring a whopping 137 in their lone win of the series that year.

An explosive leap forward in offensive strategy that wildly outpaced defensive innovation coupled with freedom of movement changes in the rule book allowed the generation’s most talented offensive players the space to create unbelievably free-flowing, exciting action.

The NBA has made the decision to go away from that as much as possible, especially in its playoffs.

To watch a modern NBA playoff game is to watch two teams foul each other on every possession while the officials decide which 40 plays at random will earn a whistle. The “foul baiting” that people abhor isn’t happening because the referees are especially likely to blow their whistle. It’s because they’re so unlikely to blow their whistle. Of the 80 NBA playoffs ranked by free throw attempts to field goal attempts, this year’s season, where grifting became public enemy number one, was…62^nd. 2025 was 70^th.

I don’t think people want to see Lu Dort fling himself to the ground when trying to run over a screen, but maybe the reason why he does it is because the NBA has decided that illegal screens are not real, except on the .5 plays a game where they are, and your best bet to try to force the screener to follow the rules is to simulate a car crash. Look at the rulebook for illegal screens and then watch an NBA game and see if you can find literally one solitary screen that is actually textbook legal. You cannot do it. I promise.

The NBA, desperately, needs to take the time to sit down, figure out what the most exciting part of their game is, and then figure out a set of rules and a method of enforcement that maximizes the importance of those parts of the game. If people want to watch a game where strength is more important than speed and agility, it should continue to allow perimeter defenders to chuck ballhandlers into the fourth row. If it wants to encourage more rim attacks, it should widen the lane to make it harder for rim protectors to lurk. If it wants to encourage more threes, it should make the court wider. If it wants fewer, change the arc. If it wants to curtail shooters seeking contact, it should enforce the rules about unnatural movements it already has in its rulebook, and its officials should call fouls when people commit them, not just when people react to them.

I don’t know what most people want. But I do know that the NBA currently doesn’t give a shit about whether the action it presents is what people want to see.

(Not included in this screed is the fact that the unique physical challenges of the NBA unrelated to its rule book have put a time bomb on every player’s Achilles, calf, and hamstring and the playoffs are more about who can stave off a crippling soft tissue injury the longest and less about who the best team is. This is also a serious problem, solvable only by shrinking the length of games or of the season.)

ON HOW THE GAME IS MANAGED.

On-court quibbles pale in comparison to the clusterfuck the NBA has created for itself in its team building rules.

Adam Silver might be the world’s foremost talent in “being unable to predict second order outcomes to rule changes.” Every change he has made has been, or will be, catastrophic to the league’s product, and the problems are only getting worse.

One of the great advantages the NBA had in decades past was its hot stove was genuinely hot. While baseball commissioners were busy colluding with each other to not pay free agents and while football seemingly never saw top players at premier positions switch teams in their prime, the NBA had incredible player movement.

Then Kevin Durant decided to join the Golden State Warriors, everyone flipped out, and the league built a free agency system focused on making it easier for teams to hold onto their talent.

But it was cool when LeBron James hit unrestricted free agency! It was really exciting when Kevin Durant ended up in Brooklyn! Shoot, even Jalen Brunson hitting the open market out of Dallas is something that is unfathomable in the current CBA. Deandre Jordan was held hostage at his house! Why wouldn’t you want more of that?

Besides, how many actually good, home-grown players left a team that was well-managed? Other than Durant, it really isn’t many. The new machinations to give teams financial advantages in retaining talent was a solution in search of a problem.

In “solving” the non-problem, not only did the hot stove freeze over, but the CBA made team building more about math and sacrifice than identifying and developing cohesive pieces.

All sports’ cap rules are byzantine and impossible for the normal fan to crack, but the NBA’s is especially opaque. For as crucial as Bird Rights are to understanding the league, what percent of NBA fans could even begin to explain what they are?

The era of the second apron, instituted to curb against the super teams everyone loved to hate (which was good for the league and, again, didn’t need to be fixed), has in effect forced good teams to stop being good on purpose. That’s the number one unforgiveable sin of league management.

The Boston Celtics were forced to slough off still-very-useful-players like Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis after winning a title. The Oklahoma City Thunder’s second and third best players are in their third year in the league and they will STILL have a fire sale of rotation players this summer to get under the apron. The San Antonio Spurs will soon be in the same exact spot when Keldon Johnson, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper are owed new contracts.

It is fucking insane to watch extremely talented teams tear themselves apart simply because the cap is so restrictive. There is no basketball fan on the planet who wants to see teams title windows slam shut because of budget sheets. If this Thunder/Spurs series was played 15 years ago, we’d all be stoked about how this was going to be part of our summers for at least the next 5 years. Now, we’ll be lucky to see it twice more.

No matter how well you draft, no matter how savvy your free agency moves on the margin, no matter how many good trades you make, you will still need to chop apart your team every 3-4 years strictly because the CBA is just that restrictive.

Oh, and the NBA in its infinite wisdom has also decided to make it harder to build your team through the draft by flattening the lottery odds and penalizing the worst three teams in the league.

We’re left with a system where you cannot make moves in free agency, you cannot build through the draft, and teams are less likely to trade than before. It seems to be designed to encourage mediocrity. At least you can afford to build a 41-41 team.

FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU WANT TO BE.

The NBA is blessed with so many natural advantages as a league. Its audience skews young, there’s a game on every day, it’s fast, you can follow it without watching every game, it has an exciting international group of young stars with personalities that range from GTA6 Main Character to French Terminator.

But, as a league, it cannot help itself from shooting itself directly in its own penis over, and over, and over again.

Over the past decade and change, the league has continued to make slapdash “fixes” that are duct tape solves to a sinking foundation. It continues to exacerbate the very problems it seeks to solve.

The NBA is not a league in crisis. It is a league that is being sorely mismanaged. It desperately, desperately needs to take the time to figure out why people like it. And once they figure that out, they need to figure out how to make those the things that run the league. Not overreaction to media moments. Not what its gambling partners decide are important.

It can’t be as hard as they’re making it look.

Rosh Hashanah is one of my favorite holidays. It’s not Thanksgiving, though truly what is, but depending on the direction of the wind, I’m pretty comfortable putting it in the 2A/B slot alongside Passover.

Some of that is the competition. The Jewish calendar is full of holidays that are either sad (Yom Kippur), hardly celebrated (Purim, Sukkot), or unimportant (it remains funny that Chanukah is seen as an important part of the Jewish-American experience by the goyim, we really faked them out on that one). Some of that is the time of year (a crisp fall early afternoon coming back from services is pretty delightful). Some of it is the ancillary stuff that goes into any holiday: the menu, the company who attends the family function, and so on.

But most of it is the torah portion.

I remember my mom being asked the question “if you could only bring one book with you on a desert island what would it be?” and answering The Bible because surely you can read that forever and still find new things each time. I think I was in middle school or something at the time, and it hit me as a classic Mama G goody-two-shoes answer. Very childish response to a very thoughtful answer.

The Akedah is the proof point as to why her answer was so good.

I am not a fervent reader of scripture. I think I’ve read just about all of the interesting narrative parts of the Bible at least once, most of which were for a “Bible as Literature” class in college, so most of my experience with the stories told are breaking it down from a literary perspective and less so from a religious one. I do think knowing what’s in the books of the Torah is an important part of being Jewish, and I do feel like I would be more spiritually at ease if I spent a little more time engaging with the text of my faith rather than just the cultural aspects of it.

But the binding of Isaac is a story that captures me every year. There’s so much meat in the text, so many midrash to explain what’s in-between the lines, and endless interpretations that open up the more and more you read the passage.

I go to a reform synagogue. 99% of the time, I’m happy I do so. There are trappings of other, more (serious? traditional? not sure of the right word choice here, so pick your own) traditions of Judaism that bother me. That portions of Judaism still pray with men and women physically separated kind of blows me away. On a simpler, more base layer, I’m not especially excited by the 3-4 hour services that you can find if you want to seek it out.

But that 1% of the time is generally when the service feels not serious enough. It bothers me how much of our service is choral music. It bothers me how much of the service is in English. It bothers me that the torah is read with the intonations of English conversation rather than the traditional chanting of the trope. The power of communal worship isn’t in the trappings of the day, it isn’t even in understanding everything that’s happening. It’s in doing the same thing that’s been done in similar places in similar groups of people for thousands of years. Sometimes, the service of accessibility cuts against what I personally see as the cornerstone of what religion serves. 

The interpretations of Genesis 22 that are often given in synagogue provoke a similar kind of dissatisfaction.

So many speeches from the bimah on the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his child Isaac claw at finding some positive lesson to be learned from the story. So many of the midrash serve to make Abraham more understanding, to make God seem more empathetic. None of that feels right to me. And beyond that, none of it has ever felt productive to me.

The challenge of being a modern Jew reading the Akedah is not in seeing the story as a fearsome warning about the dangers of blind faith. The challenge is not in trying to understand the story from Isaac’s point of view. The challenge of reading about the binding of Isaac is in knowing that the Torah is saying that this horrifying story is actually a good thing.

By doing this horrible thing, Abraham is blessed and his ancestors are blessed, because he did the right thing. That’s the lesson.

What does it mean to practice a faith in modern times founded on the ancient belief that this action is heroic? That is what matters.

And that’s why I love starting the year in that way. It forces a challenging internal conversation about the dissonance between the Judaism of the Torah, the Judaism I live, and the Judaism I want to live.

Northwestern closed its meaningful non-conference season with a teeth-shattering beatdown at the hand of Duke, made all-the-more painful by the particulars of the Duke Mechanism. Offensive coordinator, ex-Northwestern assistant Kevin Johns, is one of the last threads to the old, exciting Northwestern offense of the early and mid aughts. Their run game coordinator, ex-Northwestern offensive line coach Adam Cushing, has been name checked in some of the lawsuits and allegations coming out of ShrekGate. I hate Duke in the best of times. Right now, I hate them a little bit more, and after getting the doors blown off in Durham, I hate them as much as I ever have.

Duke is a good team, and is thus not a team Northwestern can dream of competing with this year. This year, Northwestern’s goal is to show just enough signs of life to not abandon all hope in the project and, perhaps more importantly for the program’s future, convince its talented young players to stay in Evanston.

All the things that were written about the Rutgers game remains still true, and while the UTEP game proved a tantalizing reprieve from doomposting, we’re right back to where we were before after another blowout. The challenge for Northwestern fans is to figure out what the endgame is for the fan experience in this era of Northwestern football where the team will be outclassed by 80% of its opponents for the foreseeable future. 

Something I have never been good at as a fan is turning off the analytic part of my brain. There are people who watch sports (potentially you, the person reading this!) who watches their team and believes their team is good and the players on their team are good because they are on their favorite team, and that’s what fandom means. I have always been jealous of being able to engage with sports in that way, but I truly never have been able to do it. It’s part of the reason why I look at Northwestern fans who are wargaming ways for this team to win 4 games with a kind of scientific fascination.

The sober, rational read on the future of Northwestern football is an open-and-shut case. At the risk of litigating things I’ve written 8 times before and that are by no means fun to read, this season will be interminable and then it gets worse next season and then the rebuild begins in earnest. Northwestern will either hit a home run hire and re-establish relevance, or it won’t and will remain mired here for another cycle. It makes watching this season bloodless. This is a going-through-the-motions season even before you get into the weirdness of rooting for Northwestern in the post Shrek Gang season.

I’m not sure I can get into the headspace of someone watching this team who spends a lot of brain space on trying to determine whether Brendan Sullivan or Ben Bryant is the better fit with an offensive line that can’t keep the quarterback upright. My capacity for arguing over whether or not Northwestern’s linebacking corps is good is waning. Everything just feels like a waiting game until the season ends. And yet, I’ll watch all 60-minutes again next week.

My writing is not done to ask that Northwestern fans get completely blackpilled like me and see this season as a necessary bridge to get to The Next Thing. It’s an admission that I can’t get to any other place, at least not yet. I don’t think the team has given me any reason to change my tune. This is a team that is as short on talent as it is on ideas to maximize that talent. Minnesota provides one of the better opportunities for Northwestern to win a conference game. They are an abysmal offensive football team coached by a nautically obsessed maniac whose pores excrete Football Guy. If Northwestern wants to show any signs of life, it needs to be done this weekend. At a certain point, projecting wishes onto a football program that can’t fulfill them starts to look silly.

For those maintaining that shred of optimism, Saturday provides yet another test of faith.

Reports of Northwestern’s demise seem to have been greatly understated.

The Wildcats effort in Piscataway laid bare everything that clear-headed people pointed out as likely fatal flaws. The daring optimists who believed that maybe if things break right Northwestern could find four wins on their schedule? Check on them. They can’t be doing very well right now. 

The front four spent most of the day being thrown off the line of scrimmage. The embarrassingly limited Rutgers offense asked little of the linebackers, who were fine, and less of the back four, who may be very good. Rod Heard might be my favorite player on this team this year.

Northwestern’s offense was somehow worse than expected. There aren’t a whole lot of words that you can really offer at this point. The offensive line is a horror show. Up until the last drive of the game Northwestern had negative rushing yards or close to it. Cam Porter, who may be good, will never get a chance to highlight any of his ability if he continues to get hit in the mouth the second he receives a handoff. 

The passing game is just as bleak, but I will spend a bit of text here defending Ben Bryant. It is true that with an offensive line that is more theoretical than real that mobility is more important, and Bryant is less mobile than perhaps is ideal. He also appears to have a penchant for throwing hospital balls and “intercept me” balls, which isn’t great. But he also is good for a few “holy shit” passes a game, and on a team that has a ceiling of 2 wins this year, a quarterback who is exciting is far preferable to one who is boring, and as such I hope Bryant remains the QB for as long as possible. It’s not the optimal choice for making the team more competitive in the future or even this season, but it is more fun, and that should be prioritized at all costs.

I can’t believe how bad Northwestern looked in their listless ass-kicking walkthrough against Rutgers, who sucks. There is a very big difference between a team that is bad and a team that is hopeless. Bad teams can be fun! If in the midst of a 4-win season, you have some spark on some corner of the team, or play some games where you punch past your weight, or even just make a few big plays, watching a bad team can be enjoyable.

This season will not be that.

One friend told me Northwestern looked like a team that is in year-one of a return back from the death penalty. That was the kindest thing I heard all day.

I don’t think the team lacked effort or came out flat. I think that’s just what Northwestern has to offer, which is to say they have nothing to offer. Rutgers is going to be darn close to the least talented roster Northwestern will play this year and Northwestern didn’t look like they belonged on the same field. Rutgers was faster, stronger, more disciplined, better, more interesting, you name it, and, again Rutgers sucks. This was Northwestern’s chance to win a Big Ten game, and they looked completely and utterly outclassed.

What gets scary, and what the real cause of the angst Northwestern fans are feeling ahead of its home opener, is that things will still get worse before they get better. This team, for as far as it has to go to achieve relevance now, will be the best team Northwestern fields for at least a few more seasons.

There is precisely zero talent on this roster, and the exodus that will inevitably come hasn’t even happened yet. If you think this season is rough, imagine what it looks like next year. Northwestern’s QB is a grad transfer, its top three wide receivers are all fifth years, its entire tight end room are seniors, four of its offensive linemen are seniors of some type, half of its defensive line are seniors, and Bryce Gallagher is a 9th year senior. Those guys are, except in cases of weird Covid years, all gone next season.

And those are just the guys who have to leave.

Watching Jeremiah Lewis make big plays for Duke is an appetizer for what’s to come over the next few years. The only reason Northwestern didn’t have a raft of players transfer out after Pat Fitzgerald was fired was that rosters were already set and scholarships weren’t readily available. This next offseason is when the real bloodletting starts, when players who came to Northwestern to play for Pat Fitzgerald and to win football games are presented more attractive options for their college football experience. If this season is rough, imagine the year following when the roster is emptied out by transfers and the recruiting class, already being hollowed out by decommitments, is barely FCS quality.

All of this gives Northwestern’s home opener the feeling of a funeral. The present is frightening enough, where Northwestern is a deserved underdog against a UTEP team who is projected to finish 6th in CONFERENCE USA. The future is more frightening still. Northwestern’s season is supposed to be the swan song for Ryan Field. If everything goes accordingly to plan, it will be two full seasons before Northwestern is back playing football in Evanston. It’s hard to imagine those years going much better than this one. 

For a program whose vector is pointed directly over the cliff, a sleepy afternoon game against the fearsome Miners of UTEP holds extra weight.

Northwestern needed to find something, anything, to believe in during their opener against Rutgers.

It found nothing. It tries again this afternoon.

Northwestern Football presses inexorably on toward the beginning of a doomed season. Watching fans of other teams drool over training camp reports about how the backup right tackle is looking and clips of 7-on-7 deep balls finding their mark feels like watching a block party outside your window while under house arrest. It must be fun out there. Too bad we’re here, rooting for a team whose fate is sealed and for whom the results matter far less than how it feels to watch them.

I could pay lip service about what the team will look like on the field this season, but I fail to see the utility in that. Here’s a short version: they’re bad. The defensive front seven is still unbelievably thin, and despite the back four being very good, they’re not good enough to cover for the mistakes the front will make. Coco Azema rocks. Not much else to report.

The offense is similarly bereft of talent. I am very excited for the concept of A.J. Henning, someone who I think is good, though not as good as he will likely need to be to overcome the quarterback play around him. I also would very much Cam Porter to look like the Cam Porter he was before the knee injury, at the end of his freshman season. That version of Cam Porter was awesome and intoxicating. The version from 2022 wasn’t the same. Maybe that changes. I hope it does.

I also fear it will not matter. The offensive line is extremely inexperienced and thin. More importantly, the quarterback position is still a howling chasm. Brendan Sullivan played last year and the optimism surrounding his potential far outstrips his measurable results, which were horrendous. A 74% completion percentage is good! A 74% completion percentage when zero passes were thrown more than like 7 yards downfield is irrelevant. Ben Bryant, on the other hand, is a late transfer from Cincinnati. His play there was uninspiring, at best. I generally trust Patrick Mayhorn, who I consider to be the pre-eminent Ball Knower, when it comes to scouting players I have not watched. I had a hypothesis on Bryant and consulted with Patrick.

That’s really all that can be offered in terms of analysis this year. The team is bad, horrible even, and no one with any semblance of credibility would dare to suggest the team could win six games. They won’t, nor will they be especially close. More importantly, they’re a chore.

Since ShrekGate went viral, I’ve been trying to figure out what my relationship to Northwestern football is, trying to figure out what this season is going to look like from a fan experience. It’s a jarring enough story to force that look inward.

When I saw Brendan Sullivan posting the “Cats Against The World” shirts with Pat Fitzgerald’s No. 51 emblazoned on them to his Instagram Story this summer, I was disappointed, but not angry. Northwestern players being upset about the treatment of their now-former coach is the world’s most understandable feeling. Were a father figure in my life to be fired in a manner that I had disagreements with when I was a teenager, I’d be similarly up in arms. That’s what children do. It is the wrong reaction, to be clear, but it is neither shocking nor inexplicable. If players want to, in private, voice full-throated opposition to the firing of Pat Fitzgerald, that does not upset me. I think it is silly; I think it’s something that they will regret when they’re 10, 20, 30 years older, but that’s the privilege of youth, to be given the grace of making that kind of mistake.

Coaches choosing to partake in this behavior, and choosing to do so publicly, is a very different matter. Offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian showing up to an open practice with that shirt on is a flagrant middle finger, one that is extremely unbecoming of someone who is supposed to be one of the mature ones in the room. Bajakian is incentivized to act like that. When he is eventually removed from his role at Northwestern for continuing to produce some of the worst offenses in the sport, he will need to prove to his future boss that he can be a loyal soldier. Choosing to show his ass by wearing the dumb t-shirt certainly does that in spades.

In between table stakes coachspeak about how the team’s message is to “stick together” and mealy-mouthed statements about the “adversity” that the team has faced (adversity, in this case, can be defined as “doing hazing so badly that you are responsible for getting the most powerful person at your university fired”) is the subtext of wearing those kinds of shirts. There is a simple message coming out of Evanston: you’re either all the way in, or all the way out.

How else are you supposed to read “us against the world?” If you do not play for the team, or at least do not agree full-throatedly with the team’s discontent, you are an outsider, and they are not interested in outsiders, and thus not interested in you. That is a choice that the coaches and players have made. A defensible choice and one that a gazillion besieged groups of people from time immemorial have chosen as their defense mechanism. It is equally defensible, then, for me to oblige their request and not root for them.

I don’t believe that this team is worthy of support this season. Maybe it’s not fair to members of the program and the wider Northwestern athletics community who were not party to the hazing and perhaps even did their best to stop it. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take. My support of the other teams at Northwestern remains unchanged. But until the football program has fully taken its medicine, I’m pretty confident I don’t want them to be successful, and the medicine has not been taken yet.

I’m not sure what I would be rooting for if I flipped on every Northwestern game and hoped the purple team would win. If the team feels empowered enough to wear “firing our coach because of a national hazing scandal was bad” t-shirts to practice, that tells you how seriously they take the allegations about their locker room. If the coaches are wearing those shirts in front of the media, it’s pretty clear what The Team stands for, and I, someone who thinks that hazing is bad, don’t stand for the same things. Would I be rooting for the institution? The institution, it seems, is headlined by a nitwit president who digs the university deeper into a hole with every half-baked 750-word alumni email he fires off and an athletic director who has lost the faith of seemingly everyone within a 100-mile radius of Evanston (for the Fitz defenders who happen upon this post, take solace in that you and I agree that Derrick Gragg should be removed via coup). Would I be rooting for Northwestern because that’s what you do in the fall? That feels like a lack of introspection.

I have to look in the mirror and explain to myself why I would want this Northwestern football team to win games. I can’t do it, and I have my answer as to where my rooting interests lie. Maybe you can. I’m not there yet. The allegations are too fresh. The team and its coaches are too irreverent. An indignant letter from ex-players from a decade and change ago about how hazing has no place at Northwestern does not move me. Clearly, from the extensive public reporting and its own internal report, hazing did have a place at Northwestern. If the football program had its way, it seems like hazing would still have a place at Northwestern. After all, “The ENTIRE Northwestern Football Team” signed that internally incoherent letter back in June. Maybe we should take them at their word.

As an angrier, less settled 22-year-old, I asserted that Northwestern basketball was a rotted ship that wasn’t deserving of support because of the allegations regarding Johnnie Vassar. I think that it is fair to say now that was an overstep. I remain disappointed by the lack of transparency regarding those allegations and while I will likely never be able to root for Chris Collins unless he saves some puppies from a burning building, with the benefit of hindsight it was and is possible to root for that program without supporting the actions of its head coach and staff. That team was made up of 15 18-22 year olds who played fun, hard-nosed basketball. That was a good thing, and my concern trolling I think was probably over the top.

I don’t think the football team is similar, or even remotely close to that situation. The hostility from all levels of the program to anyone who wants to see punishment for a decades-long Shrek Hazing Cult is too out in the open to shut my eyes to it. I don’t know how long it will be before it feels right for me to hope Northwestern football wins some games. If there’s an exodus this off-season and a spring cleaning of the coaching staff and athletic department, that would go a long way. 

For now, I’ll be content to flip on the game this Sunday and see if Greg Schiano can turn the corner in Piscataway, imagining the halcyon days of having a horrible football team I can root for instead of a horrible football team that promises little more than a strange fascination.

It bears repeating how unique Pat Fitzgerald’s career arc and standing at his university are. Or were, I guess, in the aftermath of his firing as Northwestern coach on Monday evening.

Here’s the list of people who were both inarguably the best football player and the best football head coach in their alma mater’s history:

• Pat Fitzgerald

Fin.

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It also bears repeating how much the 1995 and 1996 Northwestern football teams meant to the people who witnessed them and even to the people who only saw it on highlight reels. That team went from the lowest of the low in college football to the patented Technicolor sunset above the Rose Bowl. Those moments defined what Northwestern sports could be. You don’t get the dynastic successes of Northwestern lacrosse, field hockey, softball, you name it without the proof of concept of the Rose Bowl team. All athletic investment stems from that genesis.

And you don’t get that proof of concept without Pat Fitzgerald, the best collegiate linebacker of all time.

Pat Fitzgerald is, or was, I guess, that important to the ecosystem of Northwestern athletics. It’s also worth remembering now how his tenure at Northwestern started, in tragedy after Randy Walker’s death. Just as one generation will remember Fitzerald for his neck roll, another will remember him as a bright-eyed 30-something head coach, maybe a bit out over his skis, but learning on the job, clapping, cheering, leading, and winning at a consistent level that no one ever had in Evanston.

And likely winning at a consistent level that will never be seen again.

Now we’re here, in the rubble of the Fitzgerald Era, the most optimistic, winningest, consistent, lasting era of Northwestern football history, after it all came crashing down in the midst of a hazing scandal that continues to evolve and continues to ensnare more of the most powerful people in Evanston.

Extricating Pat Fitzgerald from Northwestern is, or was, I guess, an impossible thing to imagine. The staff discussion I remember most at Inside NU was us discussing how many games in a row Pat Fitzgerald would have to lose before he would be fired. We landed on around 30 straight before the seat got hot. Fitzgerald’s more than part of the furniture, he’s the reason the furniture is there to begin with. Will his name be pulled from the All-American Ring of Honor that adorns Ryan Field’s upper deck? Will 1995 highlight reels in pump-up montages carefully clip out the star linebacker? These are not questions you normally have to ask when you fire your coach.

The crumbs of details that fall out from the as-of-now-not-and-likely-never-to-be-released university report, the far more detailed whistleblower account, and further reporting paint details that are shocking, disturbing, bizarre, and brazen. 

Yet the scandal also feels disorienting for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that we get sentences like “Every single player in this program from 2020 to 2023 knows what Shrek is and knows about the hazing that occurs.” 

For the sake of clarity, the university report confirmed that hazing happened, confirmed that it was sexual in nature, and confirmed this through at least 11 different accounts. The rationale of the whistleblower is irrelevant and the veracity of the reports are not in dispute by anyone tangentially involved with the investigation. To suggest otherwise is more than unproductive, it’s observably wrong, and those who would like to pretend otherwise would be best served keeping those thoughts to themselves.

What remains unresolved is the thinking and conduct of those in charge in Evanston through the past weeks, and namely through the last few days. We know now that the report the administration had in their hands to determine Pat Fitzgerald’s punishment was more-or-less what was reported in the Daily Northwestern and confirmed in other sources. The crucial question is quite simply how did Athletic Director Derrick Gragg, University President Michael Schill, and whoever else was involved look at that report and think that a two-week suspension in the deadest part of the college football season was even remotely acceptable as a punishment. 

Pat Fitzgerald’s fate is sealed. Gragg, Schill, and others’ fates are unresolved. Their failure is total. 

It was total before the allegations regarding Northwesteren’s baseball coach, Jim Foster, came to light on Monday afternoon. It’s hard to lay out all the incredible details of that story succinctly, but they’re shocking in every single way an institutional failure can be shocking, and the blame vector points directly at not only the head coach, but Athletic Director Gragg in a way that beggars belief (pending those claims veracity, obviously).

Gragg, by the way, has not had any public statement other than a few rote lines in a press release on Friday. He briefly appeared on a Zoom call announcing Fitzgerald’s dismissal at a team meeting. Otherwise? Crickets.

Did Pat Fitzgerald deserve to be fired for what happened under his watch? I think so.

I know, with certainty, that following the initial slap on the wrist, the revelation of the full details made the firing necessary and inevitable.

But I don’t know what the response would have been had the administration released the full findings of the report and issued a punishment with teeth before they were forced to. If we woke up Friday to an announcement that Pat Fitzgerald was suspended for half a season or an entire season, was made to pay a significant fine, and the program was forced to enact several meaningful changes, including potential disciplinary action for staff and players, I think that it is likely that Pat Fitzgerald could have held on. I don’t know if that would have been just. I don’t think it would have been. The behavior that occurred under his watch was unconscionable, but I think the veneer of plausible deniability and the overwhelming institutional momentum of Being Pat Fitzgerald would have been enough.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead, the administration took a course of action that only makes sense if they believed that the details of the allegations would never be made public and Northwestern’s status as a private institution exempt from FOIA would provide institutional cover. It doesn’t pass a smell test. Once the story leaked, public opinion forced the hand of the athletic department. And now, it’s the decision makers at the top of the tree who still have to answer what amounts to one of the most staggeringly insufficient punishments imaginable.

Fitzgerald is paying the price for not only his own actions (or lack thereof), but for the strategic hackery that Gragg and Schill have wielded as well.

And maybe that isn’t just to Fitzgerald. Certainly that seems to be his contention as his statement makes it sound like he plans to litigate for the receipt of his full buyout. Maybe that’s part of the reason former and current players have dug their feet in in a way that is hard to empathize with those who aren’t part of that group. Maybe it’s born from their experiences with a father figure who so many of them say is responsible for shaping them into men that they’re proud to be. 

But maybe none of that matters. What we’re left with at the end of the day is a story about a person who was in charge of a group of people who did things you cannot do. Not only should those people who did those things be punished, but the one responsible for them must be as well. The calculus is not complicated. The other numerous factors at play are not important. This is a simple decision, a decision so simple it’s shocking it was made so wildly, completely, and totally incorrectly just 3 days ago.

The fallout, which will continue for weeks, will be sizable. If you asked me to place money on it, I’d bet the Athletic Director will not be in Evanston by the time the football season starts. The football program may well be stripped to the studs. It’s hard to imagine anyone who was involved in the letter claiming to be from “the ENTIRE Northwestern Football Team” would have any interest in suiting up for the school that they clearly feel railroaded their coach. It’s difficult to imagine a world in which several coaches don’t depart as well. It’s difficult to envision a world where Northwestern’s grand plans of a sparkling new football stadium aren’t radically altered by an environment where boosters feel uninspired to support a football program that looks toxic to the touch.

It isn’t even terribly difficult to imagine a not-so-distant-future where Northwestern, a school whose alumni care infinitely more about US News and World Report Rankings than AP Polls and whose dissatisfaction with the professionalizing of the collegiate athletics model is open, decides that this game isn’t for them anymore. Northwestern is a university first, and if athletics bring more scorn than celebrations, it’s easy to picture a world where their athletics rival is the University of Chicago, not the University of Illinois. 

Every passing hour brings another revelation that makes me embarrassed to root for Northwestern football. I am reading every statement from the administration looking to be mad and finding ample ammunition to feel so.

This is as low as it gets to be a fan. And for Northwestern fans, whose solace has long been that we “do it the right way, win or lose” it’s disorienting. Because it seems clear now that we haven’t for quite some time.

Celtics vs Heat in a game 7 is a series that is built to upset me. Two loathsome franchises with two of the most annoying fanbases in sports with rosters full of guys who are annoying who have a tendency to play rockfight basketball, which is annoying. 

Not exactly my cup of tea.

And yet it goes without saying that this series is completely captivating, as almost any 7-game series would be, but surely every 7-game series where both teams have gone on 3-game win streaks must be.

Most interesting to me is the case of one Jimmy Butler and his place in basketball, which may be hanging in the balance a little bit more than is being acknowledged.

The list of Butler Fans is long and the list of his detractors is very short. His story is Disney movie grade, an overlooked high school recruit who had to go the JUCO route before going to Marquette, an overlooked afterthought draft prospect who blossomed into a two-way player who developed into a star who developed into a superstar is an easy script to write. He has the charisma that superstardom requires, a throwback offensive style of game that new school and old school can appreciate, and, of course, that Jimmy Butler Style Of Sociopathy, a manic desire to shut haters up and assert his greatness.

I think I’m in that camp. Butler rocks and occupies a very important role in the NBA as the requisite Insane Person. Despite Jayson Tatum’s hero worship, it’s Butler who wears the mantle of Kobe Brain in 2023. But Butler The Concept is not an open and shut case, and staring down the gun barrel of a historic, unprecedented collapse should cause a step back and a re-evaluation.

One story of Jimmy Butler’s career goes like this:

Butler, the last pick in a first round that included luminaries like Derrick Williams, Enes Kanter, Jan Vesely, Bismack Biyombo, and Jimmer Fredette going in the top 10, fights tooth-and-nail to get into the rotation of the While Derrick Rose Was Injured Bulls, becomes an All-Star and heir apparent to Rose, is disrespected by an organization of front office losers and goes to Minnesota, where he was surrounded by too many on-court losers to have an organizational impact, gets to Philadelphia where he drags End Stage Losers in Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid to within an insane bounce of the Eastern Conference Finals, forces his way to Miami, and becomes the best playoffs specialist of the past few seasons, even dragging an undermanned Heat team to the finals.

With a slightly different color shader, those last 6 years look pretty different. Butler’s time in Minnesota is certainly a failure, though the prevailing wisdom is Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins couldn’t match Butler’s intensity and the failure rests with them over Butler. With what we know now about Andrew Wiggins and his late career renaissance with Golden State, is that still fair? Maybe Butler owns a bit of the blame for a big three of KAT, Wiggins, and Butler combining to be worse than The E’Twaun Moore Pelicans and The Lamarcus Aldrige/Kyle Anderson Spurs.

Butler then spent a half-season with Philadelphia. His lack of connection with Ben Simmons makes perfect sense now, as Simmons has been revealed to be a complete joker, but the top 7 rotation players on that Sixers team were extremely legitimate. Maybe Butler could have/should have taken that team just one shot further. In Game 7, Butler went 5/14 from the floor while the alpha across from him, Kawhi Leonard, dished out 41 and 8.

In Miami, do you give Butler full credit for the Bubble Finals appearance? The Bubble feels more and more like an outlier with every passing year. Elsewhere, the Heat have been extremely underwhelming in the actual season before turning it on for the playoffs. Does it say something negative about the Heat’s best player that the team can’t keep the pedal down for the 82-game season and only excels in the 16-game season?

Butler, at this point, has either earned or been given the benefit of the doubt at every stop. And to be clear, I find it hard to argue against that in general. However, it is unusual how willing we have been to give that to Butler, and to me the best explanation as to why it continues to happen is the optics around what Being Jimmy Butler Looks Like.

Butler has the aesthetic of what NBA Superstars are supposed to act like. He is brash, he is sometimes arrogant, and he is, above all else, and extremely machismo/tough/alpha/whatever-your-choice-of-word-to-describe-that-kind-of-guy. While the NBA has moved beyond the 1990’s in every on-court way, “greatness” is still seen through the lens of Jordan or Kobe’s “And I Took That Personally” ethos. That feels anachronistic, to me. The young superstars, certainly, do not fit that mold, in really any sport (Pat Mahomes, Josh Allen, Giannis, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, Anthony Edwards to name a few who are decidedly more normal people). Heat Culture, if you can forgive me for the eye rolling statement here, feels like some outmoded version of masculinity that venerates weird antisocial anger that wouldn’t fly outside of a basketball arena. 

All of which brings us to Game 7. Win, and win with a big Butler game, and the Heat are an all-time underdog who made the championship as an 8-seed on the back of their best player. Lose, and Jimmy Butler’s poor performances will be the headline act in the biggest collapse in NBA history. Butler is 33, the best basketball of his career is behind him. He will get more chances, but not too many more. 

Game 7 is an all-time legacy game, fairly or unfairly. One wrong result for Butler  and the whole weight of his career could be thrown out of alignment.

Other than that, nothing to worry about.

There is nothing more frustrating to me than when people reach the right conclusion by taking the wrong decision tree to get there.

I have grown to have open disdain for anyone and anything who judges the quality of a decision by its outcome rather than its process. It is entirely too easy, in a world where there are more variables at play in any task than anyone can count, to throw out the thinking that went behind a plan and focus solely on the bottom line. It is linear thinking, and it is for dummies, and it will never not frustrate me.

Rewarding that kind of bad thinking is almost always a mistake. As such, my gut reaction to any hypothesis reached solely by judging the result is to say that it sucks. I will stick to that position up until the point where that position is completely untenable. Even then, I will not move off my opinion without a great deal of hesitancy bordering on obstinance.

As such, it is with great shame, great misgivings, and unyielding frustration that I admit the following: the world’s most annoying Northwestern fans on the internet are right. Pat Fitzgerald is cooked. He’s got to go.

We will begin with The News that dropped ever-so-annoyingly on a Tuesday afternoon. Northwestern fired (or whatever friendly synonym the athletic department is choosing to use) defensive coordinator, Jim O’Neil, wide receivers coach, Dennis Springer, and, most confusingly, defensive line coach Marty Long.

We will begin with the position coaches. This blog does not presume to have elite Ball Knowing credentials, but Springer has been on Northwestern fans’ hit lists for years, and deservedly so. Northwestern receivers the past decade have been bad-to-horrible, with the one notable exception being Stephon Robinson Jr, a grad transfer from Kansas who came to Northwestern as a fully-developed product. Asking that Springer find employment elsewhere is overdue.

Long is a tough one. The defensive line was mediocre this season, sure, but on balance, Long’s done his job fairly well, and the top defensive prospect for the NFL draft on this year’s team is a defensive lineman, for whatever that’s worth. The front 4 were certainly better than the second level behind them. If you want to be charitable to the decision, you could say that there is backroom stuff we don’t know about that makes Long expendable. If you want to be conspiratorial, Long graduated college in the 80’s, is most likely reaching the end of his coaching career, and letting him go as a sacrificial lamb could be an aesthetics play.

Jim O’Neil, on the other hand, is as clear-cut a case of “oh yeah this guy needs to get fired” as you can get.

Earlier this season on this newsletter, I suggested that those who wanted to place the blame for the defense being stinky at O’Neil’s feet did not know ball, so I feel as though I owe a full breakdown of my thoughts on the matter.

Jim O’Neil is a bad defensive coordinator and always has been. Upon learning that Northwestern hired the worst defensive coordinator the NFL has seen in some time, my feelings were “well this is probably not going to work.” There are scheme design issues that have been litigated elsewhere, and I do not care enough to argue or regurgitate them, but the evidence is pretty clear that O’Neil is not a serious ball coach.

My point of contention, a point of contention I still hold, is that the talent on the roster can’t be coached into a competent unit. If Northwestern’s next defensive coordinator is moderately successful, I expect the defense to still be firmly in the bottom half of defenses in the country. The horses are not in the stable and firing Jim O’Neil does not solve that problem.

But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to defend the defensive coordinator of a team that lost 11 games in a row and gave up 30+ points to Iowa (IOWA?!!!???). Sorry, boss. The bell tolls for thee. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

But the name that was most deserving of being launched out of Evanston in a trebuchet, somehow, dodged the firing squad.

There isn’t an argument that can be made for keeping Mike Bajakian. The man has been Northwestern’s offensive coordinator for three years, has gotten worse every season, and was never even especially competent to begin with. He backed into a year or two of fine production in Boston College and was ridden out of Knoxville on a rail before coming to Evanston. He is supposed to be good at run design, and yet the team is incapable of running the football despite having an NFL running back. He is nominally in charge of the quarterback room yet has not landed a single quarterback recruit who has any chance of being a top-half-of-the-Big-Ten starter. It is not clear to me what Mike Bajakian does, and even less clear what he is supposed to do. The idea that Brendan Sullivan’s freshman season showed enough promise to earn Bajakian another year should be taken as a personal attack by any Northwestern fan. Sullivan’s better than I thought he would be, but goodness gracious, what are we doing here?

There is no way to read the Bajakian retention as anything other than a damning indictment of the man who made the decision, head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who appears to have no idea how rotted out his program has become.

Northwestern sits on the brink of losing so much momentum that they may never get it back. The house-of-mirrors-ass Big Ten West is dissolving after next year, presumably eliminating the road of “Be The 40th Best Team In The Country And Still Win 10 Games And Appear In A Conference Championship” that Northwestern rode in 2018 and 2020. Replacing that division inequity will be two new conference opponents in USC and UCLA, both of whom are far closer to the Ohio State side of institutional support than the Northwestern side. The talent on Northwestern’s roster is minimal, and if Malik Washington is any indication, the talent that is present may be looking to the portal. The top class of the sport is strapping on booster rockets in the form of NIL money and transfer portal excellence. Programs like Wisconsin and Nebraska, whom Northwestern shouldered past in the past 5 years, went out and made the two best hires of the coaching carousel in Matt Rhule and Luke Fickell.

Alarms should be ringing in Pat Fitzgerald’s $200 million glittering lakefront office. This is as close as you can get to DEFCON 1 for a program. And he’s bringing back the coordinator whose offense finished 128th of 131 teams in points scored this year.

Make. It. Make. Sense.

The kindest thing that can be said about retaining Mike Bajakian is that Pat Fitzgerald may be a savvy operator who understands that when his team sucks again next year, he can fire Bajakian and add year of safety for himself before the administration starts to think of a world Post Fitz.

If you choose not to read this decision as a shrewd move of someone who is trying to cover his own ass, the only takeaway you can have is that Pat Fitzgerald doesn’t have any clue what offense can be and wants to win games 17-14, which is a loser mentality and not one that any administration should accept.

Ball control offense, while not my preference, is a completely acceptable way to build a program. I am not requiring Pat Fitzgerald to hire Bob Stitt or some hotshot 30-something who thinks that you should throw the ball 65 times. What I am requiring from my head coach is the ability to see that when your offensive coordinator/qb coach can’t get a high schooler with a different power 5 offer to come play quarterback for him and then rolls out absolute dreck week-to-week that can’t score 14 points despite having an NFL running back, a top 5 pick at left tackle, and a very good top receiver, you should get a different coach. And if the head coach can’t see that, there’s no reason that head coach should be allowed to stay in charge of the program.

In the middle of Northwestern’s losing streak, I wrote about how Northwestern’s is not institutionally set up for success, but posited that Pat Fitzgerald was uniquely suited to be the man to fix it:

Just as Pat Fitzgerald’s limitless job security is a source of frustration for Northwestern fans, it also provides Northwestern its best chance to save itself. Pat Fitzgerald is important enough and likely close enough to Pat Ryan (the T. Boone Pickens of Northwestern), that his voice carries legitimate institutional weight. Even after a 1-11 season, Pat Fitzgerald might well be the most powerful employee of Northwestern University, with an Athletic Director and University President who have both been on the job for less than a year.

Pat Fitzgerald…somehow represents Northwestern’s best chance to modernize.

Fitzgerald’s half measure of firing Jim O’Neil (who by every metric was the better coordinator!! Seriously!!!! However much Northwestern fans want to believe that he’s the worst coach on the face of the earth, the defense by every single metric you can use did its job way better than Bajakian’s offense!!!!!!!!!!!!) exposes that not only is he not ready to force the administration to reconsider the restrictions it places on its football program, he isn’t even ready to consider a world where his team tries to score more points than its opponent.

I like Pat Fitzgerald. I think what he has done with Northwestern over 15 years is a miracle. I think he is a good Face Of The Program, and I like how much he cares about his players’ success off the football field. I would very much like him to turn it around, and up until this week, I would have put money on him to do just that.

Now? I don’t know. You tell me, what would the difference be between what Pat Fitzgerald is doing and what a hypothetical coach who is out of touch with the modern game and circling the drain would be doing?

Let me spoil the next 2-3 seasons of Northwestern football for you. Next season, the team will be worse than it was this year but will win more games due to staying healthier longer. The offense will be one of the 40 worst units in the country. They will not come close to 6 wins. The next few seasons thereafter will be spent winning 2-4 games and watching Nebraska and Wisconsin’s new coaches double Northwestern’s win total with ease. UCLA and USC, despite struggling to adjust to their new conference, will look at trips to Evanston as functional bye weeks.

Northwestern will be buried by the rest of the conference.

That won’t be on Bajakian. That will be on the man who decided to keep him around.

The next few years will be marking time until that which must be done at some point will finally happen. Where’s the remote control? I’d like to press fast forward.

I am not a talented sleeper, and I never have been. The general path of my nights involve going to bed, thinking I am tired enough to go to sleep, realizing I am not, scrolling on my phone until my eyes start to hurt, then trying to find something to numb my brain with before I finally drift off. Generally, the thing that my brain gets stuck on before bed is imagined conversations. Conversations I could have about work, about friends, about relationships, about family, whatever, I can keep myself occupied thinking about what combination of words I could use to get one over on someone, or dull some stress I’m feeling.

Those conversations, invariably, never actually happen.

There is, almost without exception, no payoff in giving someone a piece of your mind. There are, almost without exception, consequences for communicating what is on your mind without a filter layered on top of it. Those imagined conversations don’t happen because under the scrutiny of consciousness, those consequences are not worth whatever imagined catharsis there may be.

In the real world, catharsis is not real, really. The amount of times where it is advantageous to actually release repressed feelings are so few and far between, that the moments where you do so stick in your head for years. The longing for those moments remains, but it’s invariably wiser to keep your mouth shut.

I am somewhat confident that what Pat Fitzgerald is not saying what is on his mind when he slumps his way to the microphones after losing in embarrassing fashion every week. There is, I suppose, some possibility that he has self actualized his brand of “trust yourself, good week of practice” CoachSpeak, but the simplest explanation is just that nothing would be gained from telling his team, his coaching staff, and the world that Northwestern sucked this year.

That is, of course, all that Northwestern fans want to hear.

To scroll comment sections and timelines after a Northwestern game is to read comments from a bunch of Investment Bankers from Lake Forest who are seething mad that Pat Fitzgerald “isn’t taking responsibility” or is “being arrogant” by refusing to communicate that his team is bad and the hires he has made have failed.

The worst place to be as a fan is finding yourself looking up press conference quotes. Once you enter that headspace, there’s no way back. And yet, here I am. 

I went scrolling for Twitter feeds that would regurgitate Fitzgerald’s dreary coachspeak on Saturday, hoping for some crumb of admission that things had gone badly, crumbs that in no real world he could provide. What can your answer to “do you feel like your offense is going to be better next year” be other than “absolutely?” You can’t, as a leader of a bunch of teenagers and young adults, say that your team stinks, regardless of how true it may be or how badly your fans want to hear you eat crow. To do so would be to send a torpedo into your own credibility. Instead, after a season of historic ineptitude, Northwestern fans are left with more platitudes that mean nothing and must resort to tea leaf reading about what may or may not be done to course correct. 

The search for catharsis continues.

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There is little that can or should be written about the last few weeks of Northwestern’s embarrassment of a season. When you’re on your fourth and fifth quarterbacks, you lose games in deranged and depraved ways, as Northwestern did by turning it over 6 times and getting pantsed by its in-state rival on its own field. There, equally, is little to add from what has already been written in these parts about how Northwestern can dig its way out of the Dark Ages-sized hole it has dug itself over the past few seasons. I am bored of writing “SPEND MONEY ON FOOTBALL PLAYERS INSTEAD OF SHINY BUILDINGS!” in this newsletter in different ways.

If you are a fan of one of the college football teams who matter, you are relevant every day of every season. Obviously there are the playoff teams and the playoff contenders, but even a half hair down the program totem pole, there are still reasons for neutrals to care, like potentially powerful teams breaking in talented young coaches (Washington, Notre Dame), or teams trying to crack a conference title game appearance (North Carolina, Utah). 

The middle class of college football are forever hunting that relevancy. Fans of teams like Minnesota, or Syracuse, or [insert 5th-to-8th best program in a P5 conference here] just want to be perceived by the rest of the country, to matter for as long as possible. 

Removing the Covid Year (a carve-out I feel comfortable making given how much that year looks like an insane outlier in retrospect), Northwestern has been nationally relevant for two games since 2019, the 2019 season opener and the 2021 season opener, both of which were losses. 

Worse still for Northwestern, they aren’t even relevant for their own fans anymore. 

A normal Northwestern fan should have cared about this team for precisely three days in the calendar year of 2022. Everything else could have, and likely should have, been ignored.

• The season opener, which was a win and signified that the team could maybe be interesting this year

• The second game, which was a loss to Duke and evidence that the team was actually bad

• Whenever it’s announced which/if staff members have been fired

Given that the team will lose Peter Skoronski, Adetomiwa Adebawore, and Evan Hull to the NFL, 3 other starting offensive linemen, at least two starting defensive backs (and Cam Mitchell will have a tough decision to make regarding the NFL or the portal), and its only good receiver in Malik Washington, there seems to be no reason to believe the team will improve next season. It’s early yet, but my assumption is that Northwestern will be relevant to its fans for all of one game next season, a loss in the season opener to Rutgers.

In 2019, offensive coordinator Mick McCall was fired on December 1st, one day after the 2019 season ended. As such, Northwestern fans will likely not have to wait long to discover the fate of their coordinators this week. For a program that has completed the Conference Championship To Laughing Stock Speed Run in record time, anything short of both coordinators being promptly given their walking papers by Monday afternoon would be a failure.

Even still, if both coordinators do depart, Pat Fitzgerald has failed in three of his four coordinator hires thus far in his tenure (Mike Hankwitz was great, Mick McCall, Jim O’Neil, and Mike Bajakian were not), and Wildcat fans would do well to remember that before believing the new boss will be any better than the old boss. 

Northwestern fans will be left clinging to the crumbs of press releases and press conference sound bites, desperately trying to figure out if the administration has realized how deep the rot in the program is.

The search for catharsis continues.

While this is ostensibly a blog recapping Northwestern’s briefly engaging and subsequently exasperating loss to Ohio State, in reality, there’s very little about that game that has any bearing on what follows.

Northwestern did a lot of things wrong in its game against Ohio State. Early down playcalling was formulaic at best, the lack of urgency on 4th quarter possessions was tangible, and the 4th and 1 play call that exploded in Mike Bajakian’s face were all notable examples. They also did enough right by building Ryan Field in a part of the country where you can get 50 mph winds and sideways rain that they competed against a superior opponent and, more importantly, embarrassed their obnoxious fanbase for a few hours. 

That’s a net win for Pat Fitzgerald insofar as the specific events on the date of November 5th.

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Big picture, nothing has changed for Northwestern. It is still staring down the gun sights of a 1-11 season following a 3-9 season last year, with little in the program to suggest that 2023 will be meaningfully improved. The relatively exciting pieces (a top 5 pick at left tackle for the second time in a handful of years, a running back who is, dare we say, every inch as good as Justin Jackson, a freshman QB who has some wiggle) aren’t enough to make a difference in terms of wins and losses. 

The program is reeling at best, motionless on the canvas at worst, and just marking time most realistically.

There is no shortage of explanations that can be offered to describe why exactly the team is as hopeless as it is right now. The most common explanation is that the coordinators are both Jared Leto Jokers who are showing how Damaged and Twisted they are by exposing the population of Evanston to the most radioactive brand of ball the world has ever seen. And this is true. They are both horrible. There is enough data at this point to show conclusively that Mike Bajakian is bad at his job and that Jim O’Neil has never once in his life been good at his. Talent concerns aside, the coordinators have shown precisely zero things in their time in Evanston to convince anyone that they should receive a paycheck next week. 

An explanation I don’t think is offered enough is simple, straight-up bad luck. Northwestern doesn’t get a lot of superstar recruits, but the hit rate it had on those recruits in the Clayton Thorson Era (which I would argue is the high water mark of Fitzgerald’s tenure), was pretty silly. Northwestern’s best ever recruiting class, 2014, had 4 4-star recruits, 3 of whom ended up being legitimate stars (Thorson, Jackson, and Garrett Dickerson). Aside from Class of 2020 stud Skoronski, virtually none of Northwestern’s big signings have turned out to be anything. Genson Hooper-Price (class of 2019 headliner) does not seem able to turn his NFL frame into a relevant Big Ten receiver. 4-star Devin O’Rourke (class of 2018 headliner) is nothing to speak of. Of the 2021 4-star group, you have Caleb Tiernan (OL), currently a backup with plenty of time to grow into a player, Jordan Mosley (WR), who plays for Mississippi State now, and Mac Uihlein (LB), whose lack of playing time is growing desperately concerning given the visible lack of talent ahead of him.

The debate about whether talent development, talent identification, or talent attraction matters most isn’t a debate I care all that much about. What I do know is that who pans out and who doesn’t is, from a bird’s eye view, random, and that randomness has swung back the other way to hurt Northwestern.

As I write this after another Saturday of being embarrassed on national television, the specific machinations of how we got to this place matters less and less to me. What matters far more is how you fix a program that is as self-evidently busted as Northwestern’s is. 

Everyone, including Pat Fitzgerald, knows that changes have to be made to get the program off of the mat. The changes that Pat Fitzgerald feels are necessary will determine whether or not I think he is the man to bring the program back.

The first and most obvious decision is to send Bajakian and O’Neil out of Evanston by stuffing them into a Civil War Era cannon and firing it out over Lake Michigan. But what happens next is every bit as important. Pat Fitzgerald, it seems, believes in a ball-control team that leans on its defense and uses its offense to keep its defense fresh. Is that style of play outdated? It certainly is at the top of the sport, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s outdated in the middle tiers. Has that style of play worked for Northwestern recently? No, if you, like me, believe the 2020 season should be thrown out, it hasn’t worked since 2018, but that isn’t evidence it can’t work again.

What is clear, though, is that Northwestern needs something innovative. You can be innovative and run-heavy. Lance Leipold’s system proves that. Hiring old guys who do boring stuff like Bajakian or nepotism hires like O’Neil is what Fitzgerald has to avoid.

But competent coaching in the coordinator room isn’t going to be enough. With so much ground given up on the field, being pretty good won’t cut it. Northwestern needs to be excellent over the next 2-4 years if it wants to recover its relevance. It is so far behind the rest of the conference in talent and momentum that reaching anything short of that means the program won’t reach the escape velocity needed to get off Planet Suck.

And for that to happen, there needs to be a serious look taken at something Pat Fitzgerald likes to talk a lot about: The Fundamentals.

Northwestern is not built to compete in football as an institution. It’s not built to compete in most sports. It is too hard for coaches to bring in talent that is good enough at sports and who meet the incredibly restrictive academic requirements. There isn’t a great deal of public facing reporting about how much stricter it is at Northwestern than other schools (even other annoyingly snooty schools like Michigan or Duke), but those who know know that’s true. 

This isn’t even taking into consideration how extremely too little, too late Northwestern’s NIL plans are. There were programs who were building NIL infrastructure before it was even legal. Northwestern hired their NIL Guy this year. Northwestern’s recruiting hasn’t really suffered ranking-wise over the past few seasons, but being that late on something that important is something Unserious Programs do.

When your program is cooking, these deficits can be overcome, and when people who push back against this line of thinking point out “well we didn’t need it 5 years ago, the sport isn’t that much different” they’re right. 

But Northwestern isn’t cooking. Northwestern, if it’s allowed to go on the route it is on, will look up one day in 2027 and realize that they are the worst revenue sports program in America. You know who has a brighter five-year plan than Northwestern football? Illinois football. KANSAS FOOTBALL. If this program isn’t on life support, it’s because the body has already been transferred to the morgue.

If Northwestern football wants to get off the doormat, it has its blueprint just down the hall with Chris Collins and Northwestern basketball.

This is not a joke, hear me out.

When Chris Collins was hired to replace Bill Carmody, he took over a program whose fundamentals were light years behind the rest of the conference. Before Chris Collins came to Northwestern in 2013, the team wouldn’t even charter private flights to road games. Collins, who came from a program at Duke who knew what high level athletics requires to function and looks like internally and externally, was able to wrest the athletics department into action to support the program at a level that gave it a chance to compete. 

While Collins now is clearly out over his skis and ready to get the Bajakian/O’Neil Treatment himself, that work cannot be discounted. That work needed to happen for Northwestern basketball to have a prayer.

It’s what Northwestern football needs now. It’s not flashy $800 million stadiums, or $200 million practice facilities. That’s what programs needed in 2008, before NIL, before the portal, before attracting top talent required market compensation and before retaining them was a recruiting job itself. 

Northwestern needs its administration to remove the academic shackles from its athletic programs. It needs an administration who is serious about NIL to bring the program in line with its competitors in the Big Ten. 

Northwestern’s administration will not make that gigantic shift in priorities without being pushed. And why would it? It hasn’t had to, and it is still, at the end of the day, a top-tier school with a Big Ten Athletics Department stuck on with sticky-tack. I find it impossible to argue against the value of the Student Athlete Mission that Northwestern believes in. Providing young people an opportunity to pursue their passions at the highest level while receiving a world-class education is a good thing. 

Northwestern’s also been happy to cash the checks that come with that mission dying and being replaced with the half-professional system we have now. There is blatant and inherent hypocrisy in an administration that spends $1 billion on shiny football buildings and will soon be sending its volleyball team to Los Angeles for a weekday conference match still believing in the relevance of the Student Athlete Mission. That game is cooked.

It needs to be forced to open its eyes. Pat Fitzgerald could be the one to lead that charge.

Just as Pat Fitzgerald’s limitless job security is a source of frustration for Northwestern fans, it also provides Northwestern its best chance to save itself. Pat Fitzgerald is important enough and likely close enough to Pat Ryan (the T. Boone Pickens of Northwestern), that his voice carries legitimate institutional weight. Even after a 1-11 season, Pat Fitzgerald might well be the most powerful employee of Northwestern University, with an Athletic Director and University President who have both been on the job for less than a year.

Pat Fitzgerald, who believes cell phones are evil and run-pass options are “the purest form of communism, somehow represents Northwestern’s best chance to modernize. 

And if he doesn’t want to take that challenge on, Northwestern needs to hire a football coach who will. Everything else is window-dressing. Northwestern can fix the fundamental problem facing its athletic department, or it can shuffle deck chairs on the Titanic that its football program has become and gear up for another 5 years of irrelevance. 

That seems like a pretty easy decision to me.

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Northwestern has signed Ryan Field’s death warrant.

At some point (it isn’t clear when, yet), its doors will shutter and Northwestern will pack up and take its show on the road (it isn’t clear where, yet) while its home is rebuilt from the ground up to bring “cutting-edge technology and modern amenities, accessibility for all, and provide an exceptional home-field experience.”

Ryan Field, in its current iteration, is a dump. It is not a fun place to watch a game. The tarps that cover a section of the stadium that shouldn’t really exist are hilarious, as are the lines of high school-esque bleachers that have two temperature settings: oven broiler or absolute zero. The north end-zone, which has a roof that could be used for something cool, feasibly, but isn’t, is weird, the south end zone is generally 15% full, the video board is smaller than my tv at home, the sound system is an iPhone speaker, and the gameday atmosphere (when the crowd isn’t 50% road fans) is that of a Lyric Opera matinee. 

The grass is nice though.

It is very similar to the Welsh-Ryan Arena of yesterday, but with less charm.

It makes a very fitting tomb for Northwestern football.

The perk of writing these posts the morning of games is that I don’t have to relitigate the things that everyone else has said and you have already read about Northwestern waking up on Saturday morning and making a conscious decision to lose to a mediocre Missouri Valley Conference team with a roster of players consisting of zero guys Northwestern would have any interest in picking up. The con of writing this post on the morning of the Miami Ohio game is that there really isn’t all that much left to say.

We will begin with the offense, which, sadly, sucks in the exact ways anyone who had a clear-headed view of this team could see that it would suck. Evan Hull is good, but it’s becoming evident that it doesn’t matter (plus we may have to Begin A Dialogue about Ball Security Problems). For significant portions of the game, it looked as though Northwestern could have just lined up, ran a power run inside the tackles, gotten six yards every single play, and scored a touchdown on every drive. Then, they stopped trying to do that, then it stopped working, then they lost to SIU.

The passing game is remarkably bleak. As was posited on this blog after the Nebraska game, it was probable then that game would be the high water mark of Ryan Hilinski’s season. That feels more prescient after a game where he averaged 5 yards per attempt against an FCS team while completing 63% of mostly dink and dunk routes. Whenever Hilinski is asked to throw a ball outside the hash marks, it becomes a journey. Arm strength issues are apparent, decision making issues are apparent, and pass-catching talent issues are apparent. There just are not enough high quality football players on the offensive units, not something you want to feel after watching a Big Ten team play an FCS team.

The defense, somehow, is more disappointing, but I will continue to zig where everyone else is zagging. 

Jim O’Neil is not the problem here. 

That’s not to say he is not a problem. It is likely that he is very bad. There are some scheme issues that the All-22 Literati have pointed out. But if you look at Northwestern’s defense and assume that the number one issue is the defensive coordinator, I am putting you On Watch for Not Knowing Ball.

It is natural in college football to blame the adults (the coaches) before you blame the literal children (the players) for your team’s problems. It is in very many ways yucky to put the blame on a 19-year old stranger for disappointing you by losing a silly game. But that does not mean it is wrong.

Northwestern’s defense is bad because Northwestern does not have enough good football players who play defense. 

There are good players, most of whom were unavailable against SIU (Cam Mitchell and Coco Azema were extremely notable absences). But holy guacamole, watch these linebackers and tell me there is a coach on the planet who can make this ship sail. 

Once upon a time, Northwestern had athletes at linebacker. Nate Hall was undersized but fast. Anthony Walker was a sideline-to-sideline nightmare. I remember Drew Smith being freak-ish as well. Of course you can’t always have NFL starter-quality middle linebackers every year. But the lack of speed in the middle of this defense is its Achilles heel, and if even SIU can expose it, there’s no chance it can hold against even the Big Ten West.

I spent the majority of the football game only looking at the way Northwestern’s linebackers played, and it filled me with dread. There are clearly things about this scheme that expose their weaknesses. But what scheme can you draw up that covers for a group of players who cannot tackle, cannot cover, and cannot run?

The O’Neil hire was bad. It was doomed to fail. Were he to be replaced, the problems would still remain. 

The least fun place to be as a fan is where the agency of the coaches and players can no longer overcome the structural inadequacies of the organization. That’s where Northwestern is. The years of coaching alchemy by Pat Fitzgerald and, perhaps more so, by Mike Hankwitz have given way to a team without the baseline talent required in the chemical equations that yields wins.

There are reasons why Northwestern does not have a lot of NFL quality athletes, and most of those reasons are self-imposed. Academic restrictions for athletes at Northwestern are tougher than just about anywhere else. That’s not elitist bluster, that’s not wish-casting, that’s true, ask anyone who would know. For most of the past 15 years, Northwestern has been able to have its cake and eat it too, being able to beat its chest as a Paragon Of Virtue while still winning football games.

Now is the time to start questioning that ethos.

If you zoom out on Northwestern Football, what do you see?  I see a football coach who is paid millions of dollars with a functionally for-life contract. I see a university that gave the most beautiful part of its campus to its athletics department and a several hundred million dollar glittering glass and gold-trimmed box for its football team’s practices. I see plans for a brand new football stadium, one that will be built using hundreds of millions of dollars of alumni donations. I see a school that makes hundreds of millions of dollars from television deals made to broadcast its football and basketball teams. I see a school that is a member of an athletics conference that stretches from Beverly Hills to the New Jersey turnpike and that has eyes on the Space Needle and the Sonoran Desert.

What about that fits with the altruist visions of the Northwestern Student Experience that academic restrictions serve to protect, or the Virtues Of Student Athletes? The blush is so off of the rose in collegiate revenue sports, even if Northwestern’s old-fashioned fanbase clings to old notions. Northwestern has spent too much time and way too much money for it to continue pretending those “values” still matter.

If Northwestern is going to continue to be a part of this game, it needs to jump in with both feet now. Coaching changes are band-aids, they’re treating a symptom and not a cause. If Northwestern wants to spend almost-a-billion-dollars on football facilities this decade like it has, it should at least have the decency to not fucking embarrass me. 

Northwestern can either recruit athletes from high school and the portal who are good enough to win football games at the sport’s highest level, or it can continue desperately trying to cobble together 6-win seasons off Grit and Discipline.

The last two weeks have laid bare how far away Northwestern is from either.

Quick programming note, tough week at the day job, so this may be a bit rushed, and for that I do apologize. Will try to go 1-0 next week.

Every sport likes to claim to be a “game of inches,” and football surely is no exception. Whenever a pass glances off fingertips, or a toe grazes the sideline, or a kick hooks over an upright, some swole necked ex quarterback will bark something about how thin the line between victory and defeat is in football.

Few sports, if any, are less of a game of inches in football. There are 36 inches in every yard, the smallest unit of measurement actually used on a football field. It isn’t like baseball, where missing a spot by 6 inches is the difference between a strikeout and 450-foot turbo dong, or the difference between hitting the sweet spot and breaking your bat into 800 shards of wood. 

Football is a game of yards, and dozens of yards, and gaping holes, and coverage busts. The entire point of the game is to create as much space as possible. It’s when the game becomes close quarters and cluttered when it feels gross and out of place (sorry, triple option lovers, you’re wrong, and you know it).

It’s that reason that makes Northwestern’s loss against Duke hard to take.

Northwestern was not the better team, though they were not so much the worse team that they couldn’t win. Spotting Duke 21 unanswered points to start the game was, in retrospect, not the best way to start the game. But what we knew about Northwestern’s offense remains true: the offensive line rocks, and the running backs rock.

There is nitpickery to be had on the offensive strategy (the outside runs MUST die a quick death to be replaced solely with inside the tackles concepts) and on the execution (another day, another could-have-should-have-been pick-six from Hillinski), but at the end of Northwestern came within 36-inches of having a chance to send the game to overtime, Pat Fitzgerald’s favorite place, with a two-point conversion.

Then Evan Hull fumbled the ball into the end zone and Northwestern lost.

Non-conference football in the Big Ten West is in several ways completely irrelevant to the task at hand. Northwestern has proved, somehow more than once, that you can lose stupid non-conference games, including to the vaunted Akron Zips, and still play in the Big Ten title. Duke, who sucks, are not really all that much worse than Iowa, who sucks more and yet was a trendy top two-or-three pick to win the West this year. Losing this game, while extremely stinky, doesn’t really change the math for Northwestern when it comes to playing meaningful football games this fall.

What it does threaten is the chance to play in the Dave’s Buy My Bitcoin Wallet My Children Are Starving Bowl in Waukesha, Wisconsin if Northwestern is as bad as is feared. Getting to 6 was never a guarantee, and dropping one of the “gimmes” on your own turf puts you back at square one after stealing a game in Lincoln.

Duke, who, again, suck, exposed Northwestern’s worst position group to great effect, though, and therein lies the real concern.

There are two kinds of sports, weak link sports and strong link sports. A strong link sport would be basketball, where one superstar is really all you need to have a fairly successful team (see: James, Lebron; Howard, Dwight; and Iverson, Allen as stars on bad teams who played for a championship). A weak link sport would be baseball, where you could have two of the 5 best baseball players of all time and still be 20-games under .500 because your 7th hitter and your 3rd best relief pitcher are actually all that matter (the Los Angeles Angels should be broken up by the United States government).

On offense, football could, I suppose, be either. That Aaron Rodgers is able to win football games by throwing to mailboxes with wheels on them and having an offensive line made up of rotten barrels suggests it’s a strong link enterprise, but plenty of college teams who fall apart due to horrible offensive lines suggest the opposite.

On defense, at least, it is abundantly clear that you are only as good as the worst part of your defense. Have a bad secondary and a great pass rush? Doesn’t matter, quick hitting routes will kill you. Have a dynamite back-end and no front? No one can cover wide receivers forever, enjoy the 30-piece that’s about to get hung on you.

Northwestern’s defense will only be as good as its linebackers can be, and that means Northwestern’s defense will be Bad.

For the first decade and change of the Fitzgerald tenure, it seemed as though Northwestern would simply never have a bad linebacker. Recent adoptees of the Book Of Fitzgerald will point to names like Paddy Fisher, but you can dig back to names like Damien Proby, Drew Smith, Anthony Walker, and Collin Ellis too as examples of really dynamite players, both inside and outside. Yes, some of those players (Fisher) were athletically limited, but a lot of them were just bad motherfuckers who knew their job, could get to their spot, and then tackle the crap out of you. They had linebackers of all types.

Now, Northwestern’s linebacking corps is not athletic, but what they lack in speed they make up for in being small. They might not out-athletic you, but they will also not out-think you. It is, unfortunately, not a Big Ten level position group. Any offensive coordinator with a lick of ingenuity (in Duke’s case, former Northwestern WR coach Kevin Johns did the trick just fine) can expose that weakness either in making them cover someone in space, or diagnose a complicated run fit and beat a blocker to a spot. 

The group desperately needs an infusion of athleticism and I’m not sure when it will come.

Until it does come, Northwestern is what it has been for most of the past 20 years: a sometimes dangerous, often times toothless team that can frustrate opponents and its own fans in equal measure. In other words, they are going to win the Rose Bowl.

AN IN-DEPTH AND VERY SERIOUS PREVIEW OF NORTHWESTERN-SOUTHERN ILLINOIS

You have to be a sick puppy to watch this game, go find God, go pray about it (see you at the game).

There is an extremely rich cinematic vein of characters loading a gun, placing it to their head, and asking/daring/begging someone to pull the trigger.

For an action that has surely almost never happened in the real world, it’s shockingly common. Choose your favorite moment. Is it in Narcos when a portly Pablo Escobar lights a stick of dynamite in his basement?

Maybe you prefer a scene where the mania is more on the surface, like in Jarhead (one of my favorite books, honestly), where Jake Gyllenhall completely loses his entire mind in the desert of Kuwait.

There’s also the funnier option from Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little gets himself out of a jam by pretending to take himself hostage, while horrified onlookers comment that he “just might be crazy enough to do it.

There’s Denzel Washington in Malcolm X.

There’s basically the entirety of The Deer Hunter. The list goes on. Either to show a character’s detachment from reality or their stoicism in the face of danger, directors simply love to put a gun in their main character’s hand and have him place it against his own forehead.

In the most recent iteration, our scene is in Dublin, Ireland. Our hero, Patrick Fitzgerald, is stalking the sidelines at the Aviva Stadium. After his team inches ahead behind a 4-yard plunge into the end zone with 11:34 to play in the game, Pat Fitzgerald approaches Scott Frost and places a revolver in Frost’s hands. He asks Frost to aim the gun in between his eyes and pull the trigger.

Northwestern never looked especially interested in scoring after taking its lead. Of the 12 offensive plays ran after the Hull touchdown, 12 were rushing plays. The air wasn’t just taken out of the football, it was hydraulically pressed out.

While Northwestern fans groaned and chewed their fingernails and begged for one, just one, just please one time throw a pass, Fitzgerald and offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian stood steadfast in their truth:

Scott Frost is not a bad enough dude to win a football game.

All Frost had to do was to take his offense, which seemed darn near unstoppable for the first 30 minutes of football and had Northwestern’s linebackers in the deepest realms of hell, and score one time. All he had to do was get about 70% of the talent out of his roster for 10 minutes, and his team would win a game. Northwestern was daring him to do it. Begging him.

He couldn’t do it. 

Pat Fitzgerald and Mike Bajakian knew he couldn’t do it. They knew that Scott Frost is weak and afraid of winning, and that knowledge was the entire basis for the entire strategy, a strategy which was always going to work.

Scott Frost’s stench is that of a True Loser, and winners like Pat Fitzgerald can pick out that scent from a mile away. The fourth quarter Northwestern played is what Pat Fitzgerald dreams of every night. His team would execute, because they always do, and his opponent would crumble, because they have to. 

This is a Northwestern blowout. It’s not that Pat Fitzgerald doesn’t want to win by a thousand. It’s that he wants to win by enough points that the margin is comfortable, and not a single point more. Against Frost and Nebraska, 3 points was enough to salt the game away. Fitzgerald knew it, even if almost no one else in the world did.

For Northwestern, this game confirms my read on the season which is that 6 wins is a tangible goal. Northwestern is not a Big Ten West Contender, even if the Big Ten West is a conglomeration of jamokes and busters who are afraid of scoring points. The first half passing success feels like an aberration, and the second half crash feels more like what should be expected week to week. The linebackers are confirmed now to be far too slow to compete with athletes on the better teams in the conference. But the offensive line rocks, the running backs kick ass, and Cam Mitchell appears to be an absolute stud. That’s enough talent to win enough games to go to a bowl in December.

It’s hard to explain just how bad a loss this is for Nebraska, a team that simply cannot get out of its own way. Every single year under Frost, people point to the Metrics that say the team is good, and every year Nebraska finds a way to lose every single game of consequence they play. At some point, if the math can’t quantify the Loser Effect, the math is not worth listening to. After losing 9 consecutive one-score contests in the last 13 games, Occam’s Razor suggests Nebraska loses and will continue to lose forever because they are coached by The Ultimate Loser who dreams of nothing but losing and has forgotten what winning means. All is losing, and losing is all, and this is how life is in Scott Frost’s world, and there is no saving him from it.

I hope Scott Frost coaches Nebraska for a thousand years.

BYCTOM’S REVIEW IN A TWEET OF THE WEEK:

HERE ARE A FEW SPOILER FREE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT AN ANIMATED JAPANESE TELEVISION SHOW, I PROMISE I’M NORMAL

As a child, I am told that my sister and I would watch Lion King, or as we pronounced the name of the film “YIGH-yun King,” every single day for the better part of two years. We would cry if the movie was not played. We were tyrannical.

In my late 20’s, that tic of watching things I’ve already seen over-and-over has stuck with me. There’s a pretty deep literary reservoir about what that behavior says about your mental state (spoiler: it’s bad), but that’s a discussion for another day.

The current object of my fixationis Episodes 12 and 13 of Cowboy Bebop, which, yes, is an anime series.

Bebop, from what I understand, is in the tier of Hipster Aesthete Favorites of anime alongside Neon Genesis Evangelion (the only other anime series I have ever watched), and, like, Samurai Champloo. If any true anime heads, which I am extremely not, feel that read is unfair, do let me know.

I won’t waste too much time explaining what the series is about, but it gets my highest of recommendations as a cyberpunk-ish pessimistic look at a high-tech, interplanetary future, a delicately crafted artistic universe, and a repository for some of the dopest jazz bangers you can find.

Episodes 12 and 13 (Jupiter Jazz parts 1 and 2) function almost as a series finale when the full 26-episode series is binged, and while the actual finale is hailed as a seminal piece of animated cinema, these two episodes have it lapped in my eyes. 

I’m generally not one to seek out sad things to watch. When I watched all of Scrubs, I chose not to watch the last episode, because it bummed me out too much to think of the show as over. But the way Bebop deals with death throughout the series is simultaneously raw and oddly comforting. For a show that takes on a bunch of Big Topics with incredible deft, it’s death that’s the constant theme throughout the series, starting with the very first episode, where a character kills their partner and commits suicide by cop moments later, and getting bolder from there. 

The series has more disturbing and stronger statements on death, but Episodes 12 and 13 stick out as special, especially with that final OST hits in Episode 13.

If you know, you know.

ODDS AND ENDS

This week’s “shopping cart I am keeping open in a second chrome window until I get the self confidence to pull the trigger on it” are some Negro League hats. But where are the Homestead Grays, Lids.com? Help me out!...This piece in The Ringer is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. Really bizarre prose, literally can’t get past a few paragraphs. Not sure why it exists. It starts by calling the Lisfranc joint “one of the lamest in the land” and gets harder to read from there...The Woodstock ‘99 documentary on Netflix is surreal, and great, and weird, and harrowing, and worth your time…The US Open promises to be one of the weirdest tennis tournaments imaginable with a grand total of zero good players in either draw. If Rafael Nadal doesn’t win, it’s a waste of valuable natural resources to host this tournament and the USTA should cancel it in the spirit of sportsmanship.

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First, a programming note.

My hope is, as it was last year, to write something weekly about Northwestern football this season. I also plan to try to write about stuff that isn’t Northwestern football within these blogs, partially because Northwestern football is bleak, partially because I want to figure out if I can write about something other than sports.

I have also opened paid subscriptions for this Substack. I don’t recommend a paid subscription if you are expecting to receive that money worth of content per month. I am not sure I will be able to write enough that I could say honestly that it’s worth that money. But if you think past services rendered are worth that cup of coffee a month, that paid subscription is for you. 

I also will again link the full Northwestern season preview I wrote over at MeetAtMidfield.com. That article is behind a paywall and will not be unlocked. I give Meet At Midfield my highest recommendation if you are looking for an outlet that covers college football in a way that appreciates the seriousness of the sport as much as the deeply unserious parts of it. Also my article is there, so if you want to read it, the trial run of a one-month sub feels like a good investment.

Cheers.

WELCOME TO WEEK ZERO.

College football, unfortunately, is back.

The powers at be looked at the wide world of college football, a deranged sport that becomes more depraved by the day, tried to figure out which game would make the least amount of sense as a season opener, and decided on Northwestern vs. Nebraska in Dublin, Ireland, a city just over 3,650 miles from Northwestern’s campus and just over 4,000 miles from Nebraska’s campus.

Trying to figure out why two teams are going halfway around the world sends one down a very strange rabbit hole of semi-functional websites. Initially, this game was supposed to be played in 2021 and was supposed to include Illinois in Northwestern’s stead. Illinois-Nebraska is, somehow, a combination of teams that makes less sense than the final iteration. With Covid pushing the game back a year, Northwestern slid in, providing the matchup with the only tangible tie to Ireland: Patrick Fitzgerald and his very Irish name and Irish Dad Sensibilities.

Hilariously, the Aer Lingus College Football Classic Pravda claims the game will bring “a massive €63 million for the Irish Economy,” a number too divorced from reality to even be insulting and crosses over to the absurd. That even their rosy prognostication anticipates attendance at 23,000 fans does not bode well for the game day atmosphere.

But even a mostly empty stadium in a foreign country whose apathy for Big Ten West Football is tangible (which, it must be said, is the only sane way to engage with Big Ten West Football) can do little to dampen the mood more than Nebraska’s own head coach, the Petty Tyrant of Lincoln, Nebraska, Scott Frost.

Scott Frost, by the numbers, is a good coach. Depending on what advanced statistical altar you pray at, last year’s Nebraska team was somewhere between the 30th and 40th “best” team in the country by efficiency metrics. Play to play, drive to drive, Nebraska was good. 

The list of games Nebraska played well in was long. The Cornhuskers “second-order wins,” which estimates how many wins a team should have with their production, was 6.8. They lost only one game by more than one score, a 9-point loss against #6 Ohio State. They had a positive point differential for the season.

They lost 9 games. They sucked.

Scott Frost is yet to take Nebraska to a bowl game, yet to have a winning season, and yet to have a single win over a ranked opponent during his time in Lincoln. Nebraska is by the dictionary definition a Loser Program and by extension Frost is a Loser Coach. Nebraska played 8 one-score games last year and lost every single one of them. Scott Frost loses football games. He loses games he should win, he loses games he should lose, he loses games by a little, he loses games by a lot, he loses games with style, he loses games in embarrassments.

He is a loser.

He breaks math. At some point, SURELY, the balls will start bouncing in Scott Frost’s direction. They have to. You can’t keep getting this unlucky forever. The spreadsheet will eventually be proven correct.

Or.

Or maybe Nebraska will stink forever.

Scott Frost’s bloodlust is apparently only satiated by watching his offensive lineman coat his practice fields with a thin veneer of stomach fluid.

It’s a hilarious to imagine the type of brain it would take to describe what sounds like cruel and unusual torture as a Good Football Thing. I am not a health professional but I would think that people throwing up several times every day is, in fact, bad, and not at all good. Frost feels differently.

The most likely explanation for what is actually going on here is that Scott Frost is lying. In a ham-fisted attempt to describe how seriously his team is taking fitness this season, he used a weird hyperbole that led to him describing a Marauding Puking Band of Nebraska Men. It’s hard to say whether the lie would be any more or less damning than the truth.

Frost’s Nebraska team is better than Northwestern. The two touchdown line Vegas has set suggests as much, as does the fact that Nebraska is the second-favorite to win the West (+250) and Northwestern’s odds to win the West (+7500) are about the same as my own. But Nebraska is replacing a lot (farewell, Adrian Martinez, hello Casey Thompson), and Scott Frost’s vomit fascination feels like an equalizer. 

Northwestern lost to Nebraska 56-7 last year in one of the more embarrassing games of the Fitzgerald tenure. Is revenge on the cards this week? The only thing you can bet on is, this being Northwestern-Nebraska, it will be weird and hard to watch.

College football, thank god, is back.

BYCTOM’S PREVIEW IN A TWEET OF THE WEEK

AN INCOMPLETE BUT INARGUABLE TIER LIST OF FRUITS

Because who doesn’t love listicle content? We will be using this list of the top 20 fruits with a few extra additions (cherries, pears and peaches, weirdly, are nowhere to be found on this list).

S Tier: Strawberry, Blueberry, Lemon

Strawberries and blueberries share the rare combination of extremely high ceilings (fresh picked blueberries from a farmer’s market are among life’s truest of joys) and high floors (even the junky fruit cup strawberries you would get in high school cafeterias were pretty good). Both can be put in dishes as far ranging as milkshakes to scones to pies.

Lemon is the wild card here. One could certainly say that lemon is more like a condiment than a fruit when compared to the other players in this list, but if we take it on its merits, it’s an incredibly important ingredient in far more dishes, both sweet and savory, than anything else on this list. Its place atop the leaderboard is well earned.

A Tier: Good Apple (Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, etc), Blackberry, Pineapple, Cherry

The clear winner in the hand fruit category is the apple, but we will make a split between Good Apples and Bad Apples. Blackberries are the first fruit that brings the ripeness window criteria into play. You don’t have long to attack a crate of blackberries before they go bad, but their ceiling may just be the highest of any fruit on this list. Cherries have similarly high ceilings, though the super sweet cherry isn’t an especially enjoyable hang.

Pineapple was the toughest decision here.  I think pineapples suffer from overexposure. If they were a rarer spot like kiwi or even a further off the map fruit like dragonfruit, they may make the S Tier. But too many bad pineapples are on the market. It’s hard done by a lack of scarcity.

B Tier: Banana, Grape, Clementine/Tangerine, Lime, Nectarine

The first three fruits here all share a common trait of Good, But Boring. No one’s ever been excited to eat a banana. No one has ever gone out of their way to eat a clementine. They are serviceable fruits that get a job done. Banana is the closest to moving up a tier list. I do love a banana bread.

Nectarines are the poster child for the tight ripeness window. I don’t think I’ve had more than two perfectly ripe nectarines in my life. Both were religious experiences. 

I do not expect to have one again.

C Tier: Plum, Watermelon, Pear

Plums are ultimately nectarines, but not quite as good. Pears are among my favorites but suffer from being impossible to eat without coating your face and shirt in juice and also have narrow ripeness windows.

Watermelon has the least earned credibility in the fruit space. Watermelon is almost always a little too mealy and the seed situation is a serious problem. The watermelon close to the rind is solid, and watermelon drinks are excellent. But as a fruit? It’s extremely overrated.

D Tier: Peach

I don’t understand what peach brings to table that nectarines don’t from a flavor profile, then you’re left with the too-fleshy interior and the fuzzy exterior, both of which are no good. I think there’s a plot by Big Georgia Tourism to inflate the peach’s q scores.

Non Competitive: Bad Apples (all “delicious” varieties), cantaloupe

Cantaloupe gets by too often on being “not honeydew,” but I don’t see what it brings to the table. Has anyone ever opted for cantaloupe over mango? Or cantaloupe over pineapple? It fails when compared to all its competitors other than honeydew. It stinks.

But not enough time is spent talking about how red and yellow delicious apples are completely disgusting. They’re mealy, have no taste whatsoever, and yet can be found in lunch rooms and grocery stores across our supposedly great country. I think we’re better than that. I hope we’re better than that.

ODDS AND ENDS

The Manti Te’o documentary was really good, though I think they could have shown Te’o more sympathetically. There’s a storyline about being a sheltered, religious kid at 21 who was inexperienced enough that what was in reality a 12-Year-Olds-On-AIM relationship felt like a Real Thing…The Big Ten’s new TV deal hopefully means the end of basketball games on BTN+. I’d be happy to pay for Peacock, I’m not paying for BTN+ to catch the women’s and men’s games that BTN doesn’t cover…I’ve really been enjoying this collection of essays from Amos Oz.

First, some objective facts.

1. The pandemic’s effect on the job market has been immeasurably immense and is still developing. People’s relationship with their work has been changed dramatically by the general dismantling of in-office, white collar work.

2. It is an employee’s market, not an employer’s market. Firms have more open spots than they can fill. For employees of almost every level, but especially those at junior levels, this is a good thing. Leverage is a nice thing to have.

3. Job hopping is good for making money. It’s always been true, but it’s more true now. If you want to make more money, switching firms is one of the best ways to guarantee that.

Second, some subjective facts.

The Discourse about Work is worse now than it has ever been. It’s a hack literary technique to describe anything in the American Cultural Lexicon as becoming increasingly bifurcated, but I don’t think it’s especially wrong to say that Work Discourse is moving towards two poles.

On one hand is the SuccessWin Business Freaks. Gary Vee is the final boss of this ilk. Anyone who’s ever been on an Instagram page called something like “@secretmillionairemindset” listening to someone saying something like “you can make $400,000 reselling couches on Craigslist if you Want It Enough” falls into this camp.

These people are transparently evil and wrong and stupid. GrindsetPorn about how you should work 14 hours a day and keep focused on your wallet and follow Jordan Peterson and Harvey Specter as spirit guides is so transparently a game for hucksters and grifters that dedicating even these two mocking paragraphs to them makes me feel like my brain is leaking out between my ears. 

The hold this Type Of Guy has on certain pockets of population is firm, and it sucks, but the very nature of the genre forces it to be a minority of a minority of people. Its whole ethos is that Only Real Ones Know That A Dinner With Jay-Z Is Worth More Than $100,000 Cash, so there’s no real threat of this thinking really permeating the mainstream. No one, even the most fervent of SuccessWin Believers, would even describe that as a goal.

On the other hand is this man, who is my enemy.

The eponymous hero of the @rod channel, Rod, spends his time cosplaying as a permanently stressed, over-caffeinated, vaguely depressed millennial, doling out wisdom on the ideal balance between work and life between such illuminating windows into the 30-something’s soul like “does anyone else remember this song that was 8th on the Billboard top 100,” or “does anyone else drink coffee,” or “does anyone else realize that time keeps inexorably moving forward?”

The character, beyond being just staggeringly unfunny, loves giving the kind of empty calorie work advice that sounds good but sucks the second you put it into any kind of practice. A sampling at some of his latest Certified Club Bangers:

• Doing work outside of your job description is bad! Good call! Never pushing yourself is a great plan that definitely won’t cause your career trajectory to stagnate before you get so pissed off at being (correctly) skipped over for raises and promotions that you leave your job in a huff after 18 months. Rock on!

• It’s cool to be in a permanent state of fear over whether or not you’re performing well! My brother in Christ, for as much as you talk about ✨toxic✨ work environments, maybe you should investigate whether needing constant validation is more ✨toxic✨ than being normal.

All of this feels cozy to anyone doing a fake email job (for disclosure, I too have a fake email job), and none of it is any good. People have these thoughts and keep them to themselves not because of “stigma” or “toxic culture,” but because everyone in their heart of hearts knows that it’s myopic and while gratifying in the short term, damaging to the firm and to the employee themselves in the long term.

It’s important to be realistic about what careers look like and how you can navigate them. Do you want to protect your leisure time? Don’t expect to be first in line for promotions or pay raises. Every firm will say they value mental health, and most believe it when they say it (after all, burnt out employees are expensive to replace). But they’ll always prioritize a person of similar talent who stayed online an hour longer to get the job done.

Corporate ladder climbing is a zero sum game. Because it’s a business. And that’s how business works.

It makes no sense to me why anyone would even want to resonate with Rod’s character. What is the utility of seeing someone is permanently on the edge of an amorphous mental break due to Literally Just Sending Emails and thinking “wow this is just like me?” Every time I am served a video where my internal monologue is on the screen, it makes me feel silly for ever having thought that way. How embarrassing that I also debated over using exclamation points in back to back sentences. If this guy cares this much, I clearly shouldn’t. Thanks for the heads up, Rod.

Rod’s whole raison d'etre is to absolve employees of agency, to simplify the experience of Work as something that happens to you and that you are powerless to change.

Why would anyone see that and think it’s good?

It makes less sense to me why the character exists to begin with. Somewhere along the journey of “normalizing conversations about mental health” or whatever other comfy spin creators of this ilk would describe their content as, mental health has been trivialized past the point of recognition. Cutesy memes about “being depressed,” which in Rod’s world appears to just mean “being less than ebullient for 5 minutes every once in a while” don’t help anyone. Mental health isn’t cute, it’s serious. It’s not content, it’s a condition.

Just as mental health is cheapened through this content, it’s also redefined. This video, especially, has jokerfied me.

@rodY’all aren’t ready for the breakthroughs I’ve had recently. We are more than our jobs y’all #work #millennial #workfromhome #corporate

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What does this even mean? What does “mental health is first” look like in practice? Is leaving your job actually good for your mental health? Surely in some cases it inarguably is, but isn’t starting from scratch at a new company with new people an extremely challenging environment in which to keep your mental health strong? Why does putting mental health first necessitate leaving your job, even if your job isn’t great? Can you not work to change your firm, or at least your expectations within it? 

It reads, as most content like this reads, like a child throwing a tantrum.

What accounts like Rod, or Corporate Natalie, or Insert “Annoying 20 Second Video About How Zoom Calls Are Like Even Though We’ve All Been Doing This Shit For 30 Months Now And The Novelty Has Worn Off And There’s No New Ground To Cover” Creator Here are always are alluding to but never have the courage to admit is that there is moral value, some societal cache in disliking your job. Or, at least, that there is a job just over the horizon that is perfect and will pay you what you’re worth while letting you work only as long as you want while also stimulating you intellectually.

Reality isn’t like that.

Work is work. It’s what you do between the hours of 9-5 that puts food on your table, a roof over your head, and. if you’re lucky, some money in your pocket to do the things you want to do. Work is one of those “you have $20 to build your starting lineup!” memes. You want Hall of Fame level pay? You’re going to have to settle for role player work/life balance. 

Suggesting you can have it all is, beyond unrealistic, unproductive. Employees should learn how to navigate that world and prioritize their wants, not wish-cast reality away by making content about how saying affirmations over their iced coffee supports their “menty health.”

Or if they have to wish-cast, at least make the content funny. This shit isn’t cutting it.

I find sports more of an intellectual pursuit than an emotional investment. 

There aren’t any other leisure pastimes that come with an unending spreadsheet of data to prove or disprove things that you thought you knew. To watch sports with an understanding of the game as an algorithm is to try to figure out why inefficiencies still exist and to try to figure out the next game design foible can be exploited.

It is, admittedly, a bloodless way to watch.

There is only one athlete who breaks that mold for me.

Rafael Nadal just won his 14th French Open and his 22nd slam, both men’s records. Nadal’s dominance on clay is impossible to translate to any other sports achievement. If he never played a match on any other surface, he’d still have 14 slams (tied for 3rd all time behind Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer) and 69 titles (more than Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, and Andre Agassi). His record in best of five on clay now sits at 137-3.

He wins French Opens at the same success rate as Jayson Tatum makes free throws.

By the time Nadal lost his first best of five match on clay, he had won the French 4 times (Bjorn Bjorg is the only other man to have won the French more than thrice), was 10-0 in Davis Cup matches for Spain, and had won 21 other clay court titles.

He already had one of the greatest clay court careers of all time before he lost his first best of five match on clay to Robin Soderling. In 2009. 13 years ago.

He was only 22 years old. 

He was the same age as Ja Morant is now, younger than Trae Young (23), and younger than Joe Burrow (now 25) was before he was even drafted and was already a legend.

You can still find highlights of Baby Rafa’s first match against Roger Federer (Rafa won 6-3, 6-3) when Nadal was just 15. Nadal dismantled Federer then, but it took a helluva lot of work to do it. Nothing ever looks “easy” for Nadal, especially then, when his serve was toothless and his backhand was more hypothetical than material. 

Watching Nadal during his ascent and then his peak was to constantly ask the question “does anything ever get to this guy?”

He would grind out 40-shot rallies and sprint from alley to alley, net to back wall, and chalk forehands hit at 9,000 mph on a dead sprint, and fist pump, and scream, and it was clear that nothing that was going on was easy. But then he’d do it on the next point, and then do it two points later, and then he’d keep doing it over, and over, and over, and over until he won 6-3, 7-5, 6-0. Maybe it wasn’t easy, but Nadal’s tank never seemed to empty. 

That’s not true anymore.

Watching Nadal on his descent is to constantly ask the question “how much more can this guy take?”

He’s no longer impenetrable. You can tell even by looking at his ever thinning hairline. Nadal spent the run-up to the French losing to no-names like Denis Shapovalov and Taylor Fritz and suggesting to the press that this, at age 36, could be his last ever French Open. It felt like gamesmanship and expectations-setting from a champion looking for an edge, but it turns out Nadal’s injured foot is fucked up to the point of needing injections that numbed it up entirely while he was on the court.

On the court, he can get to most of the same positions he could get to a decade ago, but it’s harder, and it wears on him more, and his level drops more than it used to, and he has to use weirder shots now that he can’t hit through the court the same way he could. The strain looks less like someone who is incapable of fatigue and more like someone who has been redlining his engine for too long.

Nadal’s body is finally breaking down to the point of potentially pushing him out of the sport for good, and yet there he is, crying and holding the champion’s trophy for the 14th time.

Nadal will always be tied to his greatest contemporary, Roger Federer. Nadal vs. Federer has been so commoditized at this point (the documentaries, the charity tours, the Laver Cup, etc.) that it’s lost punch as a Great Sports Metaphor, but now, perhaps more than ever with Federer entering graceful retirement and Nadal raging against the end of his career, it matters again.

Nadal has been the perfect foil for Federer, on the court as well as off.

Roger Federer at full flow does not look like he is trying. He never looked hurried or hassled, he was simply just flowing through a tennis match at a level no one else could ever touch. Now, as a Former Great who is waiting for his last hurrah, Federer is similarly unbothered, showing up at black tie events and F1 pit walls looking like a Normal Guy. He seems like someone to split a glass of red wine with and talk about a book, or a concert, and, maybe, he’ll dispense some pearl of wisdom about how balance in life is important.

Greatness, true greatness, doesn’t work like that. Not usually. 

It is oppressive, and it is uncomfortable, and it is scary to be around. Greatness does not look like Roger Federer. It looks like Rafael Nadal. It requires commitment past the point of reason to become one of the best at what you do. To be around someone with that drive isn’t especially enjoyable. 

Both Federer and Nadal, of course, live this and know this, but it’s Nadal who makes that visible. Everything from the way he trains and plays, down to the completely insane way he organizes his water bottles in the same precise way every time tells his opponent the same story: if you give 99% of yourself to tennis, I am giving more than you, and I will beat you.

Nadal is anachronistic in that way. The modern champion is Naomi Osaka: singularly talented with an endless sea of potential but unwilling to sacrifice her mental health in the pursuit of on-the-court greatness. Osaka is already a historically good player, but when her career ends, it will be a fair question to ask how many titles were left on the table. For her fans, that question is immaterial. She is giving as much of herself to tennis as she wants to, and it is not only irrelevant but unfair to ask that she give any more.

The Culture has evolved past athletes like Nadal, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or Kobe Bryant. The lingering takeaways of The Last Dance or of the hagiographies about Tiger Woods is that these are broken men, driven past a point where anything resembling normalcy can survive. 

Balance, now, is a virtue that holds far more weight than drive, and perhaps for good reason. But it’s hard not to find yourself rooting for someone who observably wants it more, who is willing to grind their body into powder in pursuit of being the best. 

Rafael Nadal will not win very many more titles. Maybe this 14th French Open will be his last one, maybe he’ll use duct tape to keep his body together for a few more runs. The question that lingers is was it worth it? Was the winning worth all this immense suffering, all these hours, all these sacrifices made? Would you do it again?

There seems to be only one person on earth who would say that the answer to those questions is yes. And he just won Roland Garros.

I don’t want to rock the boat or be too controversial, but I think that Northwestern Football is worse, perhaps significantly worse, than they were last year.

2020 marked the apotheosis of Northwestern’s Sicko Brand of football. An offense that was still mostly bad clicked just often enough to be dangerous. They were led by Peyton Ramsey, a perfectly serviceable quarterback. Northwestern surrounded him with perfectly serviceable skill position talent like Ramaud Chiaokhiao-Bowman, Isaiah Bowser, and, at the very end of the year, Cam Porter. 

The defense played an entire season worth of bend-don’t-break mastery, punctuated by a sociopathic devotion to Gap Control and a sprinkling of sauce in the secondary with shutdown corner Greg Newsome II and centerfielder extraordinaire Brandon Joseph backing up a crew of 38-year-old linebackers who’ve seen everything twice. 

The anchor of that defense, coordinator Mike Hankwitz, is gone now, likely enjoying a tasteful early evening sip of brandy after a long day of Being Retired. In his stead is Jim O’Neil. Jim O’Neil to this point in his career has been bad at the profession of coaching football, an unfortunate set of circumstances for a man whose current job is coaching football. 

Mr. O’Neil’s defense is certainly bad right now.

Even before the calamitous and insulting-to-the-soul performance his unit put forward in Lincoln, Northwestern has been deep In The Process quite literally from the first snap of the season. Perhaps we should have known what was coming when Michigan State galloped 75 yards to the crib on a simple stretch play. Duke, likewise, produced a 50-yard chunk play on its first play. Two weeks later, Nebraska went for 70 yards on a deep ball that seemed all too easy. Against real football teams, Northwestern’s defense is Giving Up Average Of Two-Thirds Of A Football Field Level Bad on the first play of the game. 

I do not think that is good.

I have tried very hard to understand the explanation for hiring Jim O’Neil who, again, has been bad at coaching football for about as long as he has been coaching football. I am not a Football Knower but what kernels of truth I can find about what Jim O’Neil is trying to do on defense involves words like “multiple” and “aggressive” and “2-gap,” which to the best of my knowledge means the front seven have a lot of reading and reacting to do. When it works, I guess you can bust up what the offense does, which sounds cooler than just doing a 1-gap system where you do the same thing every time and dare the offense to out-scheme you.

I don’t know any more specifics than that so please do not correct me. Here’s an article that does explain it; I’m too busy to read it in its entirety. 

There are two very disparate reads on what the Jim O’Neil hire means, one very kind, one exceptionally dour, and the read you choose to posit says as much about yourself as it does about your opinion on Pat Fitzgerald.

I recently hit my one-year anniversary at my job, a position I am phenomenally fortunate to have found after six months of Covid induced under-employment. Alongside the congratulations email was an end-of-year review. What negative feedback there was centered around one theme: Ben needs to chill the fuck out. Ben makes mountains out of molehills, Ben needs to think more big picture, Ben could stand to be more even-keeled while managing other teammates.

These are all true. I am wired with a resting heart rate of 195 and a brain designed to imagine the worst-case scenario before considering what could happen if everything goes fine.

This, unsurprisingly, is not just limited to the way I live my life from 9-to-5 five days a week, and the solution is a little more than a set of S.M.A.R.T. goals and check-ins with a manager. It would require real work.

I’ve gone to therapy for one period in my life when I was 13. I now know my reaction to stress is to get nauseous but in 7th grade I Extremely Did Not Know That. 7th grade meant switching schools, which meant nerves, which meant puking every morning. Then I started getting nervous about the puking so I puked some more. It all led to a very bizarre two months where I’d yak in the school hallway or during first period science class. Eventually, I’d go home and spend a lot of time evaluating the pros and cons of waking up if it just meant I was going to spend at least some portion of every day of my life dry heaving.

I started talking to someone, got on some meds (for my stomach not my head), and eventually figured out what was going on. I still find myself upchucking during especially nerve wracking mornings (including before every golf tournament I ever played), but it is essentially fixed at this point.

The more general anxiety that leaks through to my professional life remains unaddressed for a simple reason: I’m pretty sure I don’t actually want to get better.

All the positive things within that review (Ben’s a good project manager, Ben stays organized, Ben can be trusted to deliver tasks on time) are only true because of my neuroses. My coping mechanism for being disorganized and unbothered by missing small tasks in school became to treat every small incident as though the sky was falling. You don’t forget to send an email if you can convince yourself that not sending it could cost you your employment.

And I really like being really good at what I do, even if it does make me insane.

There are other parts of myself where the things I like are tied to the things that are tied to the things I don’t like. I don’t love my cynicism, but I love the sense of humor it fuels. I don’t love how slow I am to share literally anything about what I’m thinking to literally anyone, but I like the way it makes the relationships I have with people I do feel comfortable talking to feel really special. I don’t like my all-encompassing fear of failure that motivates everything I do, but I do like how it makes me good at things. 

When the good comes not only with the bad but from it, it makes culling the bad an extremely difficult proposition.

That personal essay serves to illustrate a point: Pat Fitzgerald hired Jim O’Neil because he wants to get better or because he doesn’t want to get better. The next 16 months or so are going to show which one it actually is.

The charitable reading of the Jim O’Neil hiring is that Pat Fitzgerald decided that bending and not breaking in a vanilla, extremely standard college football defense was eventually going to stop working. For Northwestern to break through, it needed to get faster/more aggressive/more disruptive on defense, and Jim O’Neil knows how to do that. After all, he was an NFL coach, and being bad in the NFL doesn’t mean you’re going to be bad in college.

If Fitzgerald wanted to make a nepotism hire, surely he would have just promoted someone from within. There have to be at least a few current assistants who would be worth a serious look for a coordinator job.

If this is the reason why Fitzgerald went to O’Neil, you’d expect the leash to be short. Not one year short, but short. I imagine installing a new defense when the entire roster and the entire coaching staff has been brought up on one very different style of defense takes a lot of time. Regardless of how horrific the rest of this season ends up being, cutting bait after a year seems imprudent.

The less charitable reading is that Pat Fitzgerald does not want to address his top weaknesses as a coach: his desire for familiarity. 

Fitzgerald, despite being one of the few college coaches who knows fourth down math, feels stuck in his ways. He doesn’t seem to be interested in being inventive, he just wants to be exceptional at what he does. 

He wants to be comfortable.

That comfort is where the unmitigated, unbelievable, runaway success his tenure has come from (I cannot overstate this: Pat Fitzgerald is an amazing coach I hope he stays here for darn near ever). You can’t out-execute people as consistently as Northwestern has without your coaching staff sharing the same brain. Keeping the same bodies in the room had to have been a part of Mike Hankwitz’s success. Teams roll over every four years in college football. A consistent college football staff feels like a huge asset.

Through that lens, Jim O’Neil is in fact the opposite of disruptive. Jim O’Neil has ties to the university and to Fitzgerald. He is young and certainly not a threat to bolt for a head coaching job unless he goes gangbusters. He is someone who can fill a chair for years upon years without rocking the boat Fitzgerald is steering.

If this is the case, the leash for O’Neil is long. It took 10 years too long to cut Mick McCall loose. Results may be sloughed off as the results of improper execution of sound gameplans, or sloppy fundamentals, or the effects of extended exposure to the technological menace of Cellular Phones that Pat Fitzgerald would like to fight in the octagon. 

And should the lean times continue, it would be clear that the desire for comfort has brought about a negative result rather than the positive results we and Fitzgerald have grown accustomed to.

I, for one, think the O’Neil hire was born from good intentions. Fitzgerald was looking to do something different. I also think Jim O’Neil was a bad hire and I do not think DC is the position to take a big swing on (please, for the love of all that is holy, hire an offensive coordinator who likes to score points rather than one who just likes to run plays, PLEASE). 

But squint a little and you can understand the decision. Squint a little harder and you can see why the abject failure this defense has become is probably not Jim O’Neil’s fault. You, the person reading this, are a better college linebacker than whoever is playing for Northwestern right now. While it’s mildly concerning Fitz has not rhetorically broken any 19th-century textile machinery, perhaps he’s avoiding the limelight until that $480 million check from Pat Ryan hits the university bank account. 

Where that leaves us is waiting for 2022 on October 5th, waiting for the excuses to run out of juice, and waiting for something, anything, to go remotely right. Until it does, the fears of The Second Coming Of Mick McCall, This Time It’s Defense will, however rightly or wrongly founded, linger over Evanston.

The word that emerged in my brain while watching Northwestern feverishly sweat and vomit through a hilariously misleading 30-23 loss to Duke was shattered.

For the second time in three weeks, defeat was an inevitability within about 3 minutes. While Michigan State decided to take the first play of the game 75 yards to the crib, Duke took their sweet time, forcing a three-and-out (with help from a Northwestern delay of game on its first play) before taking 4 offensive plays to go ahead 7-0. Then they did it again. 

Everything got worse from there. The only reason Duke didn’t score the first 35 rather than merely the first 27 is that David Cutcliffe is a merciful but naïve soul who opted for two chip shot field goals rather than twisting his boot on Pat Fitzgerald’s very wide and short neck.

[Editor’s note: Pat Fitzgerald’s record while wearing shorts falls to whatever, who cares.]

The offputting vibes of an 80% empty, sticky, humid Wallace Wade Stadium in a sleepy blowout on the ACC Network watched in between packing boxes for an upcoming move made for an unnerving tomb for the career of Hunter Johnson.

There’s no need to be coy or roundabout in saying that barring extreme injury, it is a near impossibility that Hunter Johnson will ever take another meaningful snap for Northwestern. You do not play a game like that, get benched for your back-up, then watch your backup’s backup go in and go on to reclaim your starting job. Pat Fitzgerald’s seething comments to the press suggest a simple truth.

It’s over now.

It’s extremely jarring watching someone who was once observably singularly talented at their job lose the plot. 

If the 18-year-old, ESPN No. 1 high school player version of Hunter Johnson were on Northwestern, I think he would be an above-average Big Ten football player. The 20-something-year-old version looks to be lost in the realm between realms, likely for good.

Quarterback is an impossibly difficult and finicky job, and as such, the rules for progression and development don’t apply. You can be a good quarterback then fall into a weird situation and get broken permanently. Preseason All-Big Ten QB Mike Penix is going through this right now in Bloomington. You can be a bad quarterback and accidentally succeed and then become actually good. Josh Allen was bad forever, now he appears to kick ass. 

The RNG of a sport where every outcome depends on 18 different interconnecting randomalities vibrating in Byzantine ways wreaks havoc on the brain of the one player ostensibly in charge of managing the chaos. Then their failures are the ones any jerk sitting on their couch can point at and wisely say “dude who the fuck are you throwing to, goddammit.” 

That’s a tough situation.

Fair or not, explainable or not, it is abundantly clear now that the once uber recruit from Indiana who completed 90% of his first 20 passes as a college quarterback is no longer that player anymore. Whether it’s the physical wear and tear of playing football for a long time piling up, a crisis of confidence that’s manifesting in increasingly inscrutable interceptions, or just never settling in after leaving the Carolinas, Hunter Johnson appears to be worse now than he ever was before. And I hate that for him as much as for me.

As if playing 20 or so minutes of the worst football of his life wasn’t enough, Johnson got to also see his backup, Andrew Marty, be anointed a potential savior for the team. Marty, who was definitely not a five-star recruit, has started one game in his college career where he went 6/10 for 55 yards with an interception and a touchdown alongside 111 rushing yards on 30 (!!!) carries against an offensively poor Illinois team who were resting multiple key defensive players.

He, from a bird’s eye view, does not appear to have the body of work to inspire hype.  

But it’s Marty who has the juice now. He earned the starting job with aplomb in his relief outing, throwing balls where they needed to be and running with the power and finesse someone who totes the ball 30 times in a game must have, unfortunate fumble aside. Perhaps Marty is one of those players that cannot do anything in practice but dominates in-game. 

Assuming his injury, which has been lovingly detailed by Northwestern to be “not his leg or anything connected to it, but potentially literally anything else,” is not major, he’s now your starter and observably better than either of the ex-stud recruits and Good Get transfers in the Northwestern quarterback room. 

What it means for Northwestern this year is “Whatever man, this is boring, who cares.” 

The team is what it is, a sputtering and weird group who are not this bad, really, but probably aren’t all that much better regardless of who is taking the snaps. Since they’re not going to run the Marty Triple Option, we know what we’re going to get. My preseason fears of the team being smelly are mostly confirmed, yet they can still win 5 or 6 games by accident as much as anything else. They can also go 3-9 again. I don’t think all the fervor over Andrew Marty moving the ball against a team that quit playing with 35 minutes left to play is necessarily well-placed. I think the supplication of Mick McCall with Jim O’Neil as the resident Guy Who Is The Totem Of All That Plagues The Team is the kind of deeply unserious shitposting that should get someone’s internet access taken away. QED. 

What I do care about is how this all makes someone feel.

I certainly won’t get it from the lies players and coaches tell the media about “just needing to trust themselves” and “having a great week of practice out there” and that “we’re all ready to get out there and prepare and do our job.”

For me, a selfish, sicko fan with a desire to get inside the head of a kid who plays a sport I never did at a level I can’t imagine, the answers I want are not available. Jon Krakauer is not going to write a biography of Hunter Johnson. We can only speculate. 

But while we are speculating, I just don’t believe Dabo Swinney, and an entire economy worth of scouts and prognosticators, and the Northwestern coaching staff, and the Purdue coaching staff, and dozens of others of coaching staffs, and most importantly myself were all wrong in their read that Hunter Johnson could be an incredible football player. We certainly appear to be so now. But was that an inevitability? Or did something between then and now go horribly awry? I still think it’s the latter.

I want to know what cracked, and when that happened, and whether or not it was really ever even salvageable. 

I, very badly, just want to know why. And only one person knows the answer.