T&T! T&T!

Wooooooo!

If you're as good as the Flags of the World sporcle quiz as I am - unlikely, punks - or you're up on your NUsports.com press releases,  you probably already guessed that this is the Trinidad and Tobago version of this post I wrote a few days back. 

Kyle Rowley, NU's resident seven-footer, will be representing his native homeland of the T and T at the Carribean Basketball Confederation championship starting today in the British Virgin Islands. 

First off - this is great for Kyle. My viewpoint on Rowley is thus: I'm not quite sure why he came to college last year, considering he had the opportunity to return to high school. He's got all the requisite skills and body type to be a major college center, what he doesn't have is enough playing experience to put it all together - he only started playing as a freshman in high school, and he left high school after his junior year - for starters, he travels more than your average pickup baller, and despite being 7 feet tall, has shot layups that hit the backboard above the square. The more he plays, the less we'll see of these follies, so it's good to see him playing competitive ball in the summer. 

Kyle has experience playing for the basketball version of the Soca Warriors - he participated in a U17 tournament two years ago, and it's good to see him moving up to the senior national team, because that level of competition was beneath him. Rowley led the competition in rebounds and blocked shots (look at the graphic on the right side) averaging 9.8 points, 9 boards, and 4 blocks. Those stats are all you need to know about the competition in that tournament - in his play last year, Rowley wasn't a dominant rebounder or shot-blocker when playing against guys his own size, only averaging 1.8 boards and recording nine total blocks all season long, 11 less than he had in that five game U17 tournament. But those stats are definitely a glimmer of potential, regardless of whether they were against guys half his size. 

Later today, he'll be playing his first game in this tournament, and facing stiffer competition in a Jamaican frontline of Louisville's Samardo Samuels and ex-training camp Clipper and Purple Drank favorite (ffavorite?) Kimani Ffriend (no typo, he's just really a really ffriendly guy), which goes to show that not all Jamaican centers end up wearing the uniforms of other countries. In a surprise move, recently graduated NU walk-on Marlon Day, who hails from Jamaica, was not selected for the Jamaican team's final roster by head coach Sam Vincent.  

As much as we want Kyle to succeed, don't hold your breath expecting Trinidad and Tobago to do much winning. If you have ever spoken to someone from Trinidad and Tobago for more than five minutes, you will probably hear about their excessively cool soccer team, who qualified for their first ever World Cup in 2006, causing the entire country to stop caring about anything else for several weeks, and causing me to briefly contemplate getting a Shaka Hislop tattoo on my right bicep.

But you won't hear about their basketball team - the country has essentially no basketball heritage, as evidenced by the fact that Rowley's U17 team went 0-5 in the aforementioned tournament, and that the squad at the 2007 rendition of this tournament finished in ninth place out of nine. But remain optimistic - if the team manages to be in the top three teams out of 8, they will qualify for next year's Centrobasket tourney, which probably means as little to you as it does to me. It's not like the Bahamas and Barbados are basketball powers, and, hey, if Northwestern lost 34 straight football games and only 15 years later, went to the Rose Bowl, who's to say the T&T can't change their losing ways and go all the way with a little bit of Rowley?

One Less Day til Football Season, Post 2: Running Back

(Author's note: I've decided my posts are too overwhelmingly long, after my QB thing clocked in at 1700 words. They say Medill is supposed to teach you to be concise, but then again, they also said it would teach me not to mercilessly mock sub-par kickers, and it took me a preposterously short amount of time to do that, so, shows you what they know.

Unfortunately for fans of conciseness, I've already written this 1600 word piece on running backs - enjoy it, but henceforth, there will be more, shorter posts.

Also, I hope you enjoyed the irony of these hundred or so words about how long my posts are.)

Days Left Till Kickoff: 66

Who did it last year?: Tyrell Sutton won't be a Wildcat next year, and that's probably the definitive difference between this year's team and last. It probably seems weird that I open up these preview posts with a recap of last year, but, first off, crank up the cliché-o-meter, but, you have to know where you've been to know where you're going. But in some cases, it serves a much deeper purpose: I need to eulogize these people who we're losing who have been major figures in Wildcat football history.

With Tyrell, we're losing our superstar.

Tyrell has been our running back for four years, which is just about as long as you can be a college starting running back. He was dominant as a true freshman, dominant as a sophomore, dominant when healthy in his final two seasons.  Flashy, yet workmanlike, Sutton's story of how a record-setting high school running back, managed to slip under the radar of major college dynasties due to his size and ended up killing them for it for four straight years in Evanston is pretty much the embodiment of Northwestern football. (Apparently, it's such a touching story, it requires a soundtrack of Creed.) Long story short, Sutton was the guy you associated with our football program, and he had a truly amazing career.

Let us remember Tyrell with this poorly edited seven-minute highlight reel, which, despite the sub-par editing, has truly tremendous musical choices. (Gladiator and Godzilla, yo.) (Also, everybody who thought I was never going to use my "P Diddy" label again was dead wrong.)

My favorites: the cutback against SIU, the two where he just merks Northeastern linebackers, and the 2nd-and-21 run for 17 yards against Mizzou that prompted him to jump up and start celebrating.

I will always remember Tyrell, for his great running talent, the thousands of unverifiable rumors people told about him - another thing which made him a true college superstar was that he was probably the one dude on the football team able to inspire folkloric tales of his off-the-field exploits that may or may not have been true - and for his impressive ability to turn in his test in my Geography class a good 15-20 minutes before anybody else, then walk out of class remarking about how poorly he did on it. (By the time I'm a spring quarter senior, I'll probably be pretty good at this too, although, I won't be moonlighting as a Green Bay Packer while doing it. I'll just be being lazy.) And of course, for his memorable return from injury in the Alamo Bowl, where pretty much every senior played their hearts out and had ridiculously great games, yet we managed not to win, resulting in a preposterously tragic moment for Northwestern sports.

We also lose Omar Conteh. He was serviceable when called upon, busting out some 100 yard games when Tyrell was out, and, to be honest, I'm not sure why Omar never redshirted. He was never going to start with Sutton there, and it would've made more sense for the program to have him around next year. His career ended badly - after being thrust into the spotlight, he was second fiddle to Mike Kafka in the Minnesota game and suffered an injury in practice that ended his career before three games in which he truly could've helped the team. 

Stephen Simmons started the last three games, and was not Tyrell Sutton. His total yards and yards-per-carry increased in each of the games he started, so that was a good sign. People were down on him as a back, but, remember, we beat Michigan and Illinois with him as our back, so, chill out.

Who's got next: Tough to say, for sure. Stephen Simmons obviously played last year, but in spring ball, he was just part of a three-headed running back monster. Not to keep jacking things I wrote for the Daily and giving shameless plugs, but, as relevant articles go, this one is a pretty relevant one. 

The guys say it best themselves: each of them has different skills, and they sort of like going at it by committee. Steph actually endorses that approach in the article, saying he didn't really like being the lone guy last year. 

Pardon the esotericness, but all I could think about when Steph gave me the quote I used first in the article was that interview you hear at the album version of the end of Protect Your Neck, where Method Man and Ghostface describe the various things each member of the Wu-Tang Clan does, why they got their name, and how they contributed: Stephen Simmons, Jeravin Matthews, and Alex Daniel each have different running styles. Stephen brings experience, and seems like a more patient runner, Jeravin is overwhelmingly speedy and, since he played wide out last year, might be able to replace some of Tyrell Sutton's recieving skills out of the backfield, and Daniel is the more powerful of the three. If they were a boy band, Simmons would be The Shy One, Jeravin would be The Young, Brash One, and Daniel would be The Moderately Introverted Guy With Unnecessary Tribal Tattoos. (Even if none of those descriptions fit their personalities whatsoever.) 

Earlier in the spring, I had spoken with RB's coach Matt Macpherson, or, as I quickly found every single person involved with the team calls him, Mack. I thought he was feeding me coachspeak when he told me that yes, although they had made Jeravin the starter the year before, everything was new coming into training camp, and that everybody was getting equal reps, and everybody had a shot to start, and that they hadn't named a starter yet. Turned out this was less coachspeak and more of an actual representation of the way everything was going: we might be looking at a committee approach come September, and that's not necessarily the worst thing, because all three running backs looked good in spring. 

So I'm a proponent of the RB-by-committee setup, but, who knows. We could get all Simmons or all three, all we know is that at the least Simmons will be a major factor in the running attack.

Is this an improvement on last year?: No. It's much worse. But like I said earlier, we're losing a superstar, and, there's nothing you can do about it other than be glad you had him in the first place. Remember: NU won two of three games with Stephen Simmons as our premier back last year. Now, he has experience, and he has Jeravin Matthews and Alex Daniel there as either his backups or as his running mates. (In a literal term, not as in a vice presidential one.) Also, the way we used Simmons was extraordinarily conservative. Most of the time, he was running delayed draws back up the middle, and most of the time - with one touchdown against Michigan as the exception - he was getting stopped three yards or less past the line of scrimmage because the defense was expecting it. So, to elaborate on my one word answer at the beginning of this paragraph, it's worse than the Tyrell/Omar setup, but probably will be better than Simmons was in his few games last year. When Simmons played last year, it was almost like NU was trying to cut losses by giving Simmons low-risk, low-reward plays, this year, we're going to try and win with him and whoever he brings along for the ride, which could be both or neither of the other two guys at this point.

Who else we got? In addition to Simmons, Matthews, and Daniel, there are four running backs who don't look to factor in much - then again, we said that last year about Stephen Simmons, who, at the time, was a third stringer, so you never know. At least look for these guys to get some late game reps, especially if we do plan on using all three of the aforementioned backs in steady RB rotation.

Scott Concannon is either a redshirt sophomore who has been playing special teams, and of whom I know nothing. His nusports.com profile shows that he had a high school game with 320 yards rushing on 8 carries, including 3 90+ yard scores, presumably because the opposing kicker was kickoff specialist Mike Vanderjagt or because their kick returner averaged -23 yards per return.

Jacob Schmidt is a walkon, also a redshirt sophomore. He's the only one of these four to have carried the ball in a game, and managed to block a punt AND recover it against SIU, which is pretty impressive, although I seem to remember it bouncing off a few other guys before he got to it because it was so rainy. He is most famous in my mind for making special teams tackles, and promptly being confused with linebacker Stone Pinckney by announcers because they wore the same number, which is funny not because Pinkney was redshirting last year, but because the two look sort of different. He says a song that describes him is "Go Getta" by Young Jeezy, probably because of Jeezy's verse about special teams tackles. 

We feature two incoming running backs who will probably redshirt, but, then again, Sutton and Conteh came in the same year and they didn't, so you never know.

Mike Trumpy was ranked the number one running back in Illinois last year, so he was probably a good land. He was also a track star in high school, as opposed to Schmidt, who is best described by a song by a guy who also released a song called "Trap Star". Subtle difference. 

Arby "RB" Fields has a great name for a running back, and, like Evan Watkins in the last post, will have some big shoes to fill by being assigned the number 19. He will join Quentin Williams as a football player/outfielder for the baseball team, as he will play centerfield for the Cats. 

So there we go. 1500 words later, you know about our running backs. We'll do wide recievers on wednesday - different type of post tomorrow. 

And yes - I do plan on having a label for every athlete I mention. What now?

USA! USA!

Woooooo!

So, there's a reason for the flags. This summer, starting tomorrow, three of our boys in purple will be representing the red, white, and blue: football pre-froshes John Plasencia and Brian Smith will be on the USA team at the very first Junior World Championship, and John Shurna will be a member of the USA contingent heading to the U-19 Championships in New Zealand. I'm excited about this, because I'm a sucker for nationalistic sporting events. (YEAH CLINT DEMPSEY!)

Today, I'll post about football. In the name of saving up things I can write about as long as possible, Ill discuss Shurna when his tournament starts. But Plasencia, Smith, and 43 other kids who have never smelled a dorm hallway before will kick off their tournament Saturday in Canton, Ohio, against France. 

First off, let's welcome Plasencia and Smith. Plasencia is a superback (quoth Fitz: a super person who does super things), and Smith is an offensive lineman. Both, as previously noted, are incoming freshman, both will most likely redshirt, and both probably won't start a game at Northwestern for at least three years. But for some reason or another, they've been selected as part of the US Junior National team. 

But what does that mean? Are these the best players in the United States? What's the history of this tournament?

The answers: I have no idea, nope, and there is none. 

Since this is the first rendition of the tournament, there's no historical context for me to tell you what sort of a harbinger playing in a competition like this is for how good the players are, how they got selected, why they got selected, or any other amount of questions. What I can tell you, because I read the press release, is that 45 players attending 33 colleges next year were selected to play in Canton, and that, according to NUsports.com, Plasencia and Smith aren't the cream of the crop - rather, Plasencia is the 86th best tight end in his class according to Superprep and Smith is the 70th best tackle. 

But enough with the parade raining. It's damn impressive that these kids were selected, and it can't hurt that they get a few weeks of extra training, practice, and game experience, which they'll probably get, considering there's only 45 guys on the team. Not to mention that I doubt whatever mysterious entity involved with putting this team together probably wasn't searching for scrubs: they must have seen something about these two dudes out of the thousands of D-1 tight ends and o-linemen that they liked. (Although, considering the preponderance of Big Ten guys, geography and the logistics of holding a tournament in Ohio might have had something to do with it, especially considering that Smith is actually from Ohio.) I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally not picking top-flight players so that opposing teams had a chance, figuring closer games, and maybe a USA team losing a game or two would allow for the sport to grow on an international level.

A way to make sense of all of this might be a brief primer on the history of international American football competitions, which, surprisingly, exist.(figure out which adjective modifies what there.) The wikipedia tells me that the IFAF (International Federation of American Football) has been held three times, with Japan winning twice and the US winning in 2007, the first time they sent a team.

You'd be surprised to find that they didn't completely dominate. After winning their group stage games against South Korea and Germany 77-0 and 33-7, respectively, the team had a serious battle against Japan, winning a 23-20 double overtime game. 

I doubt there will be close games like that in this competition. As far as I can tell, the USA team there was a Frankenstein-ish hodgepodge of inactive ex-collegiate football players with an intense series of regulations on who could be picked: no players who had ever been professional, multiple players had to be selected from D-I, D-II, and D-III, and none were allowed to have been active players at the collegiate level for 12 months prior to the tournament. They played against international teams that, despite lacking the football pedigree and infrastructure that the United States has, had probably been playing together and practicing for longer: after all, it was their one time to shine, while for the USA players, it was just one last fling and attempt at capturing glory after finishing their mildly successful careers and getting an education out of it. 

Here, in the first Junior World Championships, the USA squad makes more sense and is probably going to be more cohesive as a result. There's no draconian restrictions on who could be picked: it's just 45 guys who the USA Football people liked, and they're not rusty, since they just finished with high school and are moving on towards college, not completely finished with their careers. And their competition is probably the same level of skill as in the last tournament: that is to say, bad. 

Let's be real: they're playing France in the first round. France. I'd like to mock the french as weak and cowardly, primarily because of four years of B-minus speckled high school french, but despite never having been mugged in nearly 20 years of living in New York, I managed to get mugged, and, rather violently so, in five days of being in France, so, they officially earned the right to not be called snivelling cowards. Instead, I will talk about how unlikely it is that they are good at football. 

I will paraphrase from the biography of their starting quarterback, Maxime Sprauel, I repeat, whose name is Maxime Sprauel, which is a french name, even though the sport is called American football. (And no: LaDanian is not a french name, if you were wondering.) Maxime plays for the Thornon les Bains Black Panthers (good choice of team name, folks, probably considerably less controversial in France), and recently led the French junior team to a third place finish at the European Junior American Football championships. Other teams in the tournament include Japan,(I guess they were good in those other weird international tournaments I just wrote about), Canada (makes sense, CFL and all), Mexico (okay, getting weird now, although I guess they border us), Germany (NFL Europe, maybe?), New Zealand (really? I mean, this is getting silly), and Sweden (hahahahahahaha). So, yeah, the competition isn't great. Maybe a well-established team like Canada or Japan will give Plasencia, Smith n crew a run for their money, but odds are the two will come to Evanston with some hardware in pocket.

The games, obviously, are not on television, although they will stream from the USA football website. (In other news: I will not be watching.) If anybody does watch, first off, please, leave your house, go get some fresh air, do something else with your life. Second, tell us how the Wildcats involved do. Even though probably, they'll be doing nothing more important than blocking, and it will be really difficult to judge how good they actually are, considering they'll be going up against frenchies. 

If I can find anything out about how the tourney goes, I'll give you a report when the tourney is over. Until then, wish them luck, but for now, just know that the bottom line is that it's great for the program that two of our guys have this cool experience. Next week, I'll discuss Shurna's US experience before his tournament kicks off on July 2nd. 

Oh, and if you're still reading (highly unlikely,) peep the poll on the right side! Make it look like I got readers!

A NU Fans Guide to Watching: The NBA Draft

From time to time, a seminal non-Northwestern sports event will come up, and some of the truer NU heads - the ones who wouldn't shut up about how we beat MSU while watching the championship game with friends, until halftime, when they started talking about how we beat FSU, who beat UNC, making us transitive property national champions once removed, and who made Youtube highlight reels of Super Bowl 42, except the only play featured is Barry Cofield's one unassisted tackle - might have trouble sitting through non-Wildcat sports related events. Well, that's what I'm here for. I'll be guiding you through seminal sporting events and providing them with a purple tint. Today, the NBA Draft.

The NBA Draft is like a holiday of sorts for me, and, considering its essentially all I've been able to think about for the last... oh, two weeks or so, I figure I had to somehow integrate it into this here blog I started during that time frame. Regardless of how tangential it is to NU sports.

Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against Northwestern. A Wildcat has never been selected with a first-round pick, and only one has been picked since 1986 - Evan Eschmeyer, the 34th pick in 1999. This year, nothing looks much different: in fact, although you can reach a page featuring Craig Moore's statistics on draftexpress.com if you try hard enough, attempting to reach his player profile ACTUALLY brings you to this page. But, forget those fools. 

Let the haters hate. Sure, the draftexpress folks are experts in their field, highly respected, and think about the NBA draft for a living, but there's a lot of things they don't know. For example, last time I saw him, Craig Moore was not a massless void lacking physical characteristics, nor was he a gaping expanse of nothingness. And I doubt he's changed that much since March. And if the draftexpress people got that wrong, what can they possibly get right? The answer, of course, is very little. Be optimistic. Maybe the question the draft experts should ask isn't whether or not Craig will be drafted, but whether Sterling Williams, Pat Houlihan, and Marlon Day will follow suit.

Here's a guide how to enjoy a purple-tinted draft night, featuring two equally fun ways to watch the draft.

Craig Moore

Northwestern-themed NBA draft-watching experience t:

A tip: invite guests over. Buy each one a customized Moore jersey from a different NBA team. Whoever gets the right jersey wins a prize! Burn any jerseys from teams which do not draft Moore immediately after the draft ends.. A truly devoted fan would do the same for Williams, Houlihan, and Day, but we're not all perfect.

If it's getting late in the draft, and no Northwestern players are getting picked, a good way to entertain your guests will be uncontrollably weeping.

Most mock drafts only project one pick out of the Big Ten, OSU's BJ Mullens. Make sure to tell everybody within earshot about how dominant Mullens was against NU, recording double-digit points in each of his two games and dropping a double-double in a losing effort against the Cats. Neglect to mention how bad he was in most other Ohio State games, how he's almost universally considered to be a likely bust candidate, and how a list of people guarding him in those two games contains, but is not limited to, Jeff Ryan, Davide Curletti, and Kyle Rowley.

Don't allow any of your friends to leave until the draft is over. People routinely stop watching after the first round, or sometimes the first 10-15 picks. Make your friends stay the entire time. Lock the door if you have to. Also, make sure not to stop uncontrollably weeping the entire time.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket, in the unlikely scenario that no NU players get drafted, we should hedge our bets. Very few people outside of NBA circles have heard of the French point guard (via Guadeloupe) Rodrigue Beaubois, and very few people who aren't NU fans watched Wildcat games last year  - we had what, 4 national TV games, including the NIT? - point being, if we all simultaneously pretend that Beaubois attended NU instead of playing professionally in France, who's going to contradict us? Beaubois? He speaks heavily accented english. Ric Bucher? Doctors recommend that he stay away from a poorly ventilated arena like Welsh-Ryan within 36 hours of his most recent Botox injection, and I'm pretty sure he gets one every 38 hours or so. And Chad Ford probably hasn't seen an NU game since he realized he would get paid the same amount to take European vacations, say that some 7 foot tall dude from Eastern Europe has what it takes to make it in the league, and hope nobody notices he's borderline unable to walk. So, what I'm saying, is I think we're in the clear on pretending Rodrigue Beaubois is from NU. 

If you choose to serve hors d'oeuvres or cocktails at your Northwestern-themed NBA draft party, make sure not to uncontrollably weep into them. Doing so is a common Northwestern-themed NBA draft party faux pas. 

Worst case scenario: the 60th pick passes, and its not any of our four ex-Cats. Remind everybody about the success our undrafted NFL free agents had signing with good chances to make rosters, and talk about how many opportunities there are for players to make NBA rosters: summer league, training camp, etc. etc. 

Eventually, after the draft ends let your friends leave. Make sure that you are still uncontrollably weeping at this point to make a lasting impression. Remember to wish them a good night as they leave!

Northwestern-themed NBA draft watching experience 2: 

Don't watch the NBA draft.

One Less Day til Football Season, Post 1: Quarterback

As previously noted, it was a truly terrible call on my part starting a blog in mid-June, the exact dead point of any college's sports calendar, but I guess you could think about it as me having a few months to tune up, or something. Whatever. 

Anyway, I'll be dropping fire on weekdays I don't have other posts planned in the form of these posts previewing how our football team looks at various positions. (That should eat up, like, two weeks.) Today, we take a look at quarterback.

Days Left til Football: 72 (Mad props to Nusports.com for doing the math!)

One Less Day Til Football Season, Post 1: Quarterback. 

 Mike Kafka (13) becomes the first human to actually use Madden's "juke stick" function in a real life situation, as he did for the entirety of a Minnesota-Northwestern football game.

Who played last year: CJ Bachér. Familiar, yes? CJ, the quarterback for three relatively successful seasons, was a generally solid QB. Pretty good, but nothing to write home about. What I'm trying to say is that CJ wasn't really a bad QB, but the one common thing linking most male Northwestern students was the ability to jokingly crap on CJ Bachér's throwing ability. It made for a great party ice-breaker. Anyway, CJ has moved on to be the star QB for my hometown franchise, the creatively named UFL New York, where he and star wideout Noriaki Kinoshita will combine what I believe to be the first 3/4 asian battery in professional football history. (correct me if I'm wrong, japanese football scholars.) Anyway, it's sad to see the end of the Bachér era, especially for enthusiasts of the letter "é". He will be remembered by a simple Bachér memorial plaque on a bronzed Hundo barstool. (But seriously, folks: all kidding aside, CJ was a really dependable player and a beacon of consistency. He will be missed.)

Who's got next: Mike Kafka. You're also familiar. For a refresher, watch this. (By the way, best part of this blog so far for me: rewatching highlights of games we shouldn't have won but did.)

Mike is one of the best running quarterbacks... well, I've ever seen. His skill at eluding people in the open field is preposterous, better than the stuff you see from some of guys who only run,  and when he's got room ahead of him, he's got wide reciever speed. People fear that he can't throw, but that throw to Ebert was just perfect. I've watched Kafka play in games and in spring practices (for my article in here - mine's the one on the centerfold on the left side where the words meander around Andrew Brewer's crotch) and from a technical point of view, he's got the tools to be a good passer. I've seen him put touch throws over the top to guys on flies and fades three times I can think of. Meanwhile, the only pick I saw him throw in three practices and the spring game was a dump pass that bounced off of Steph Simmons' hands into those of a waiting defender. I'm sure he threw more, but from what I saw, he's become a better decision maker. People will remember his hideous throw for a pick 6 into the flat to a waiting Minnesota DB, but his picks aren't really bad throws in that they're poorly thrown, they're just stupid throws. He should've seen that guy waiting to pounce on that quick pass. In spring camp, he wasn't even making those throws. So here's my thesis on Kafka: he's got the tools. He can do anything we ask of him. He might not actually be able to put them all together for 60 minutes: even against Minnesota, he dug NU a major hole with two silly picks. Kafka has tremendous potential - let's hope he comes through. At the very least, he'll be fun to watch. My only fear is in the way we call plays for him - last year, after the "Oh sh*t" game at Minnesota, the coaching staff wanted to keep playing him even after CJ came back, but absolutely would not let the guy throw the ball. The key to any success from Kafka is going to be his ability to mix it up. As a runner, he needs open space, like, three or four yards worth. And designed draws won't give him that open space. What will are a few pass plays, establishing his arm, and then either one of those designed draws or a good ol pass play he decides to bust looses on, after all, that's how he got most of his yards in that game. But what won't work is the way we utilized him late last year, where he'd come in, run two draws and an option and then ride pine the rest of the way.

Is that an improvement? The jury's definitely still out. I'm not sure Mike Kafka will be a better QB than CJ, as impressive as I find his skill set.  If the public eye is any indicator, while CJ was the occasional butt of those ice-breaking jokes I mentioned earlier, people talk about Kafka in hushed tones. (You could probably tell by the hushed tones that previous paragraph was written in.) For a dude who played two games, lost one of them, and needed a Minnesota missed chip shot field goal and a dramatic finish to bail out him throwing an inexcusable pick six, people talk about Kafka like he's an NU football messiah. Everybody, including me has a harebrained scheme about how best to use him. Mine is the essay-length space above me, some people think he should be a wide out, running back, people say he shouldn't be allowed to throw, everything under the sun. He's achieved cult hero status at Northwestern, and while CJ was by all respects a good QB, he never got the love that Kafka got immediately after that Minnesota game, and to the current day. I've got my fingers crossed that he'll prove he deserves it.

Who else we got? Well, there's redshirt sophomore Dan Persa, whose defining characteristic so far is his willingness to play special teams, even returning a squibbed kickoff last season, much to the confusion of the announcing crew and the delight of coach Fitz, who loves his Fitzian desire to randomly throw his body at other people and do whatever it takes and do things that are easily defined in coachspeak such as "grit", "determination", "hustle", and "flow". His days as a special teamer, however, are over, he's now our backup. He performed satisfactorily in spring games and practices, completing pretty much every pass he threw in the spring game if I remember correctly, although almost all of them were dinky little things nobody cared about.

There's junior Joe Mauro, who may or may not actually exist.  His player profile says that the one person in all history he would like to dine with is Dirk Nowitzki, which sets off all sorts of alarms in my head, because Dirk is probably not in the top 150 current professional basketball players I'd like to eat dinner with. He is famous to me personally for getting into a fight in practice in my NCAA Football dynasty, getting suspended for three games, then getting into another fight in practice the week after he was allowed to come back, getting suspended for another three games. If my Playstation 2 is to be believed, QB # 14 needs some serious moral conditioning. 

There's new recruit Evan Watkins, who, according to those people who pay attention to high schoolers, is good at quarterback, which is swell for all the people hanging around Northwestern after I graduate. (Unless I take a redshirt year for journalism, which doesn't exist yet.) Watkins is tall for an NU quarterback at 6-6, and is the heir to CJ Bachér's number, meaning he will presumably be the only mortal allowed to sit in the aforementioned Bachér stool at Hundo. (Metaphorically. Not in an underaged drinking way.)

To end, I have a bit of a sad note about the bottom of our quarterback depth chart. During the practices I attended for my spring article, I noticed all the quarterbacks pretty easily. (They had purple jerseys.) Every time I went, one boy in a purple jersey didn't get to play with all the other boys in purple jerseys. He played the dummy quarterback in the defensive line drill.He yelled hike, pretended to hand the ball off, or, sometimes handed the ball off, and then stood around for a few seconds, then repeated. Every other player in the drill was a lineman, and they would recruit some linebackers to come and put on red pinneys and play pretend running back, and they would run pretend plays. I always wondered why they needed a real quarterback to do a job which a linebacker in a pinney, a lineman in a pinney, a coach, a sports reporter, or, quite frankly, anybody with arms could have done. (Legs: optional.) I became quickly aware of this quarterbacks plight, and looked him up in my media guide. His name was Harrison Scott, #16. He threw for 5,700 yards in high school, was an all-state quarterback in his class, and, yet, somehow ended up as a walk-on at Northwestern, playing with all the defensive guys in a drill where he wasn't really allowed to throw or do quarterback things. I thought to myself: this quarterback deserves better. What harm could letting him throw occaisonally possibly do? When I wrote this article, I went looking for Harrison on the roster page, but he wasn't there. Only the other four quarterbacks were listed. Maybe he transferred to someplace he could play. Maybe he gave up on football to pursue his academics. Maybe Joe Mauro kicked him into a bottomless pit, 300 style. All I know is that it appears Harrison is no longer a member of the Wildcats football team. 

The Purple Drank is sure he is in a better place, where he can participate in non-contact passing drills from dawn til dusk. You'll be missed. 

Meanwhile, it's a good thing the Daily has editors, because otherwise, every article I wrote would be, like, this long. 

Also, as you might have noticed, I'm overly enthusiastic about labels. And somehow, every post I've made so far has a different font, which is disconcerting, because I haven't tried to change them. 

Pat Fitzgerald will be our coach until 2015

My reaction:

A Really, Really, Really, Really Naive Dude Generically Previews Major Northwestern Sports, Part 2: Basketball

The weekend of the generic previews rolls on, homies! I figure for this blogs inaugural weekend, I'd hit up both our money sports, so here goes. 

So, let's be real. I love basketball. Like, I think more about it per day than you probably do in a year. If anybody in the future days of this blog ever, ever questions how much I care about basketball, I will send them to this post. And more specifically, I will forward them to this picture of my Les Paul.

GAME OVER. I win. I ATTACHED FREAKIN STICKERS OF PAT HOULIHAN AND MARLON DAY TO MY GUITAR. EVERY TIME I PLAY IT, ANYBODY WATCHING MUST REMAIN TRANSFIXED BY THE CONSTANT SMILES OF WALK-ON BASKETBALL PLAYERS, BECAUSE THEY'RE FREAKIN ADHERED THERE. PERMANENTLY. Point being, I like Northwestern basketball. 

(Full story: senior day, they printed up stickers of every Northwestern senior. I decided to take one of each as I entered. Then, I thought to myself: hey, why don't I take three or four more of the walk-ons? Is there really going to be that high of a demand for the smiling face of Pat Houlihan? 

It turned out, there wasn't. I was satiated with the five Houlihan heads I already had, but on the way out, on a whim, my friend and I decided to see if there were any stickers left. The Sterling Williams and Craig Moore piles were gone. But there were two industrial-sized rolls containing smiling face after smiling face of Pat n' Marlon, just waiting to be picked up. So my friend and I ripped off about 15 a piece, and started applying them to any and every surface that we felt needed walk-on heads, including but not limited to the University of Iowa team bus parked invitingly outside the arena. It gave me great pleasure knowing that they would have to spend the entire ride with Marlon's eyes staring victorious bullets into their bus all the way back to Iowa City. [Full disclosure: I also slapped a magnetic schedule on the Minnesota Golden Gopher's bus. I have a bad habit.] Anyway, I still, to this day, have about five stickers of each left. And I decided my guitar would look badass with some Pat Houlihan attached. I was wrong, but the sticker remains as a testament to his silly looking jump-stop free throw motion.) 

Anyway. I have a funny feeling older NU fans probably won't consider me a true fan. I was a freshman last year, and, well, in my first year, the football team went to a bowl, and the basketball team won the first EIGHT games I attended, a record sure never to be broken. (I had journalism class during the Purdue game. Had to wait till Illinois to get my dreams smashed.) Traditionally, Northwestern fandom is all about pain and sorrow, and I've had little of it. And they look at me like I'm crazy when I say that I expect good things from our team. Now, Northwestern fans can be optimistic short-term - they go into every game thinking we can win - but when you put out big projections like "tourney", they brush you off. Nope. Not with Carmody. Not at our school. Never. Not without Craig Moore, Carmody needs shooters! No! No no no!

I'm not going to predict a tourney berth this season. I'm far too superstitious to say anything that jinxy. But I will say this: if not this year, when? 

Northwestern has never, ever been to a tourney. We all know that, we all know we're the last BCS school, we all know the sad, pathetic facts. But everybody at the school dreams of a hypothetical Selection Sunday where we're sitting around, watching the brackets pop up, and there - at like the 12th, or 13th seed, maybe - Northwestern? Northwe-NORTHF***INGWESTERN? And Evanston bursts into flame or something. We don't even need to win. Jim Phillips said it best in that Yahoo article, which I can't find right now: I can get hit by a bus that monday, I just need to see us in the tourney.

And this year is going to be our best chance for what looks like a long time. Now Craig Moore was a ridiculous shooter - he shot a lower percentage than Juice, and Juice has comparable range, but the shots Moore could get up successfully and get in were amazing, he barely needed any room - but I think that skill is replaceable. Next year, NU will be able to run out a lineup of something like Juice-Crawford?-Shurna-Coble-Mirkovic where every player has a damn good chance of hitting a threeball. (Obviously I've never seen Crawford play, and we might opt to start somebody else, and will probably start Rowley, but I'm a big Mirk fan.) We can, and will, be able to spread the floor. No one guy can replace Moore, because there just will never be a player who can camp out beyond that line all possession, waiting for his guy to give him just the right amount of room for him to catch and shoot, or come off screens like him - although rumors are that Fruendt is a lights out shooter, and that recruit Marcotullio is too - but we can have lineups where any one guy is capable of popping out behind the line for a three, and I think in a Princeton set with all sorts of guys constantly moving and setting screens and pick-and-pops, that could be as scary as it was lasat year.

So that's why I feel we lose relatively little. But as for why I feel this year is one of them now or never joints, well, it's obvious. Kevin Coble is one of the best players we've had in a while, and will be for some time. John Shurna is not Kevin Coble, and although Drew Crawford is supposedly all that, Kevin Coble is all that and a bag of chips. (Sweet Spicy Chili flavored Doritos, at that.) Coble can turn busted possessions into buckets. He can do this:

"No, please don't shoo- WHAT?"

He can do this:

Heh. Go ahead, watch it again. I know you want to. (Also note the absolute cojones performance from Juice. I mean, Christo. That one shot from the upper peninsula of the floor marker might have made me happier than anything in the history of things.)

So let's be real. For NU, Coble is a once in a long-time scoring talent. And, hey, also leads our team in rebounds. (He's not as good a rebounder as some of the other, less minuted heads like Luka, but with Coble, he's tall and he literally can't afford to take him off the floor.) Without him, our team would be, well, hideous. So, to sum up this super-long post in one, annoying sentence, here it is: NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL: NEXT YEAR IS NOW.

Oh, yeah, and we should fire Bill Carmody, but that's 43 posts for some other time.

The Metamorphosis

Yeah, yeah, yeah, enjoy the first and last Mike Kafka pun in the history of this blog. I needed to have at least one, and I needed to do it fast. Unless dude gets arrested, and I have to bust out "The Trial", there ain't gonna be no more, so, let's get this out of our system. Hey, everybody! I  got jokes! We're smart and go to Northwestern, and we like high-brow philosophy humor! 

Anyway, moving on, I needed to bust out my Kafkaesque humor in a relevant fashion, and I don't think there's anything more metamorphos-y than a generic preview of a football team losing a quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, and like, our long snapper. (Pour some drank out for Phil Brunner, folks.)

I mean, change happens constantly in college football, we all know that but NU loses a ridiculous amount of experience, and it just so happens to be at the three positions where your average casual football fan can judge talent: we lose our third-year starting quarterback, and his entire corps of starting wideouts, and our senior running back who had been busting out 100-yard days since he got to Evanston as a true freshman. (And his backup, but, nobody really cares.)

And now? Well, some people are worried. NU optimists are getting to the point where they're starting "NU should expect a bowl game every year" talk, and, to be honest, in a world where the top 7 teams in the Big 11 go south (or to Detroit) every Christmas, and all you need is six wins, and folks like Towson be showing up on the schedule, we probably should be talking like that. And these same people see a huge blip on the NU bowl radar in a team missing veteran experience at the most noticeable positions on the field.

I, for one, am not worried. This post is going to be really vague, because, damn, I just founded a college sports blog in June, and have three months of detailed content to come up with and can't use up all my good analysis in one post, but, I'm optimistic about this season. I think this team is bowl bound, fingers crossed, pencil us in for 7-8 wins. As the summer goes on, I'll break down the schedule, and go position by position, but for now, let's just keep it basic. 

We return 8 of 11 from one of the better defenses in Northwestern history, and the fact that one of them - Kevin Mims - is leaving just means that Vince Browne, who, for the record, is a freakin monster, will be unleashed full-time upon opposing front lines. This leaves us with returning talent at the corners, the safeties, a speedy, young linebacker corps, and although our defensive line loses two of its four, including likely Detroit Lion John Gill, we still have, like, Corey Wooton and Vince Brown at the ends. What I'm saying is, get your weight up, Miami of Ohio.

As for offense, if nothing else, Mike Kafka will be way more entertaining to watch than anybody in recent Wildcat history. I mean, come on. He's got a stronger arm than CJ Bacher, runs like a mofo, and plays with approximately 8 times the reckless abandon that anybody should. If we use him as a true, dual-threat quarterback like we did against Minnesota, and not like a "HEY HEY EVERYBODY HE'S THE QUARTERBACK AND HE'S TOTALLY NOT GOING TO RUN A QB DRAW THIS TIME LIKE HE DID THE LAST SIX PLAYS" like we did against OSU and in bits against Michigan and Illinois, I'm tentatively excited about our chances. Sure, Steph Simmons/Jeravin Matthews/Alex Daniel is a big dropoff from Tyrell, but, that's not going to be the most integral part of our offense anyway. And, for the haters, you have to remember that a team without Bacher and Sutton beat a ranked Minnesota squad last year, and a team without Sutton womped on Illinois. And although, yeah, Steph Simmons didn't bust out 140 yards in any of those games, nobody complained, because, you know, we won. 

This year, we have a ridiculous defense, Mike Kafka and whatever happens on offense, and our out of conference schedule consists of Syracuse, Miami (OH), and rumblings from inside the athletic department tell me that we've replaced Eastern Michigan and Towson on the schedule with home dates against the surviving members of the XFL's Los Angeles Xtreme and a lucky co-rec intramural flag football team to be named later. Not to get cocky, because as NU fans, we really should never go into a game expecting a win, but, we really shouldn't drop any of those games. If we hold our own against our Big Ten opponents, or even do a little bit less than holding our own, this team should end up with 7-8 wins. 

Welcome to The Purple Drank!

Ladies, gentlemen, Amado Villarreals, welcome. This is the Purple Drank.

If you're here, you're probably a fan of one of two things: either Northwestern athletics, or the promathazine-based hallucinogenic drug widely referred to as purple drank. (Really, Wikipedia? You have a purple drank page? Anyway, back to the post.)

In this inaugural post, I will poorly summarize both by providing a brief primer for people who came here looking for one of those things, but know little about the other.

First, drank fans: Northwestern University is a proud academic institution founded in 1857, that, for some reason or another, decided to give a rats ass about athletics from its founding until roughly 1995. Somewhere along the line, its administrators had the bright idea to join an athletic conference with nine ten other schools, all of whom give multiple rats asses about athletics, are literally all at least three times the size of Northwestern, are named after states (with the exception of whatever the hell Purdue is supposed to mean) and who carry tremendous amounts of civic/state pride in their taxpayer funded athletic teams. Northwestern, on the other hand, is, like, really small, named after some directions which the location of the school really doesn't represent at all, and, the fanbase consist of approximately 1/3 of the already small school and it's alumni. You don't have to be one of the uncomfortably studious athletes to figure out how those matchups went for the vast majority of the school's history.

Now, NU fans: Purple Drank is a mixture of cough syrup, Sprite, and generally, Jolly Ranchers popular throughout the southern hip-hop community. Sizzurp influenced music is generally really slow, repetitive, and awful as all hell. Syrup gave rise to the screwed-and-chopped music scene, which involves taking normal songs, slowing them down, and randomly repeating some words over and over again so that nobody could possibly enjoy it as much as the original. Obviously, I'm highlighting some pretty bad examples - full disclosure,  I love me some southern hip-hop - but for better or worse, drank has given creative aide to every rapper from Weezy to UGK to all these clowns.

Now that that's over with, we come to the question I'm sure both syrup and Wildcat fans alike have upon coming to this blog: what do these two things have in common? What is the possible connection between Pimp C and C.J. Bachér? (besides a love of chinchilla fur coats and Pimp C's 14 touchdowns to 18 interceptions in his final year at quarterback before his tragic and sudden drank-related demise.) (Oh, and, R.I.P. Pimp C.) 

At face value, not much. In fact, I went ahead and cross-checked the database of all people who have ever attended a Northwestern football game and all people who have ever sipped purple drank and made a Venn diagram, the results of which are below.

(My guesses as to the two: rapper Young Dro and outgoing president Henry S. Bienen.)

Anyway, here's where I finish this post and wrap this convoluted, terrible metaphor up nice and tight. To me, the similarity is this: both the purple drank scene and NU sports have come a long way - chopped-n-screwed music used to just be a couple of dj's in Houston dicking around with records and getting overwhelmingly messed up by cough syrup, now it's a friggin youtube cottage industry, with random heads from Houston with approximately no talent going platinum. The phrase "doormat of the Big Ten" has been used in approximately 42,000 articles about Northwestern sports, yet I think anything below mediocrity from an NU football team would be considered a major disappointment. 

Yet, for every great Northwestern sports moment or objectively well-done youtube chopped-and-screwed video (they even slowed down the pre-video dialogue! and smart not to really mess up andre's verse too much), there's too many terrible examples.

So, basically, sipping the purple drank is about slowing down and enjoying those moments. For southern rap songs, the slowing down is literal - its sort of the side effect of all the codeine in your blood system - but with NU, you need to slow your roll and force yourself to savor the good times. Right now, we're in the midst of those good times - like I said earlier, people expect mediocrity, at least, from our football team, and with Kevin Coble graduating, we're looking at a now or never year for our basketball team, and, truth be told, I'm feeling now more than never. So, that's what this blog is about. Northwestern fans have to accept our place in the sports universe, and that, plus the Sprite and jolly ranchers, can make the good times so much sweeter. So sip some sizzurp with me and enjoy it. 

Oh, and the color. Purple drank is purple, kinda like the uniforms our team wears. I hope you got that.

Anyway, posts in the next few days look to be way less convoluted, more relevant, better written, and less depressingly unfunny, so stick around.