1LDTFS, Post 13: The Punter.

I bring you: the most boring post you will ever read. First off, it's a preview post about a position which will not undergo any changes, most likely. If you're not bored yet, it's about punting, which is the most inherently boring position in any sport, besides maybe first-base coaches. 

But, look: there's college football in 20 days. When I first started doing these posts, there were 72 days left. If you're not excited, even if it's to read about punters, you're not a friend of mine.

Days Til Football: 20. (Can you read, son? Look, like, two lines above here.)

Sad Demos face.

Who did it last year?: Wildcat #1, Stefan Demos. As far as I can tell, everybody's favorite rugby-style punter made three mistakes last year: twice, he punted the ball into the end zone, and one time, he punted a low-lying ball directly down the middle of the field to a guy who was probably the best kick returner not being paid large sums of money to return kicks. Like Amado Villarreal, he made a big boo-boo at the worst time possible, and like Villarreal, his blunder ended up being one of the contributing factors in our Alamo Bowl loss, ruining what was a pretty good season for Demos.

Demos downed 26 punts - 40 percent of his total punts - inside the 20 with only 2 touchbacks, and averaged 39 yards a punt. That's pretty good. The year before, he was arguably better, with 40.1 yards per punt with 42.5 percent of them landing inside the 20. This, folks, is a good punter.

Who's got next?: Same bat punter, same bat channel. Stefan will probably be punting again, in addition to his field goal and kickoff duties. A pretty steep load, but he'll have to handle it: although Jeff Budzien could be competing with Demos for the role of placekicker, nobody else on the NU roster is listed as a punter, although Brandon Williams has punting experience. 

Song this unit reminds me of: "Frontin'" - Pharrell.

Never mind that I'm show-owin off, I was just puntin? A bit of a stretch, but I was out of ideas.

I hope this makes up for the fact that I didn't last long enough to show up at Pharrell's performance on Dillo Day. 

Is that an improvement: This segment of these posts... kinda pointless in this one, right? Demos will return, so, no improvement or dropoff, here. 

Welp. There it is. I've covered every position on the football field, from the QB to the holder. That being said, we still have 20 days till kickoff vs. Towson, and I plan on posting every one of them, twice or more some days, so keep checking back every day. I've got some surprises in store for you, so, seriously, keep coming back.  

NU Fan's Guide To Watching: NFL Training Camps.

From time to time, there are non-Northwestern sporting events. But some of the truer NU heads - you know, the ones who wouldn't shut up about how we beat MSU while watching the championship game with friends... until halftime, at which point they started talking about how we beat FSU, who beat UNC, making us transitive property national champions once removed, the ones 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, NFL training camps. 

* - these fans do not actually exist

So, NFL training camps are underway. Some view it as a more awesome version of spring training, with people getting into fights while wearing helmets. I view it a lot like, well, any other NFL event that isn't actually a game. (sorry) 

However, as a Northwestern fan, you've gotta take notice. We've got 14 guys on NFL rosters, which, compared to every school in the country, isn't half-bad. Compared to other Big Ten schools, it makes us... wait for it... tenth in the conference, ahead of Indiana. (Who didn't see that coming?) Of those 14, I'd say about nine or ten are locks to make their respective rosters, which is a pretty good ratio. John Gill and Tyrell Sutton seem to have pretty good chances of sticking, and, well, if I was Marquice Cole, Eric Peterman, or Noah Herron, I'd try not to get too attached to any of my new teammates. (As a Jets fan, I'm pullin for ya, Marquice.)

So, just like I did with the NBA draft, I'm here to provide a guide to watching your favorite team's NFL training camp, but with a purple tint. And no, I've never actually been to one (unless you consider the Wildcats open-to-media spring practices an NFL training camp) but as an NU blogger, this is how I would approach attending one of these things. 

• First off, you're going to want to go to the training camp facility of the team of your choosing. Sadly, only 12 teams have NU grads on their training camp rosters. If you're not a fan of one of these 12 teams, either a) pick a new favorite or b) sit outside your local GM's office both night and day with a sign making it clear that you won't eat or drink until he signs CJ Bachér. 
• Good. Now you're a fan of a team with an NU alum on the training camp field. For the NBA draft, I advised you buy a jersey of all 30 teams with Craig Moore's name and number on the back, just to be safe, but for this, it's easier: you only need one jersey, and you already know the name and number, unless you're a Bears fan, in which case you need to go buy three jerseys and bring two friends with you to training camp. Unfortunately, friends are not sold at the Bears team store, so you'll have to bring your own.
• As previously noted, some of our ex-Wildcats don't have great chances of making their rosters. If you're unlucky enough to go to practice on the day your Wildcat gets cut, make sure to console them. Then, go to the office of the highest ranking team official you can find, rip your jersey off - preferably Hulk-style, but any violent removing of the jersey should do - and throw it at the ground, stare the guy in the face, and say "I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU". Pause for dramatic effect, and as you're leaving, spit at his feet before turning your back on him.
• Make sure the recently cut player hasn't spent all his per diem already, because you'll need him for bail money.
• In all his years playing football, nobody has ever started an Ike Ndukwe-specific chant. And although he doesn't let on, especially with his hulking physical demeanor, sometimes, it hurts, to see all the legions of fans showing up, but never even bothering once to cheer his name. "Always the bridesmaid," he sometimes mutters under his breath as he leaves the huddle, and sullenly decides that deep inside, he really doesn't want to block for Chad Pennington if nobody's ever going to even remember who he is. What I'm saying is, be the first.
• If you're at Bears training camp, and Brett Basanez completes a pass to Eric Peterman, who then gets tackled by Nick Roach, you're morally obligated to make out with the closest person to you, regardless of gender or any other mitigating factor. They'll understand. 
• If you see John Gill or Tyrell Sutton, ask them how they did in Geography last quarter. As someone who was in that class, I genuinely want to know what grades someone can get if they're under contract with a professional football team.
• Also, try to recreate this photo I found google image searching "noah herron" with Tyrell Sutton, since Tyrell is also #23 for the Packers: 
  I imagine the difficult parts will be: a) finding a bike small enough to make the smaller Tyrell look that comically big and b) getting a Wisconsonian child to don a Brett Favre jersey.
  
  
• But most importantly, remember that you're not trying to out yourself as an NU-only fan. Engage some random guy in conversation about last season. Heckle a starting quarterback. Know everybody's uniform number. (No, #96 is not Amado Villarreal.) 
  

1LDTFS, Post 11: Field Goals and the people associated with them.

Today's post is oddly titled, because it's really 1.5 posts. You see, we didn't just lose Amado Villarreal this year. We lost every possible human being associated with kicking field goals: the kicker, the backup kicker, the holder, and the long snapper. It's very similar to what the Mayans predict will happen in 2012. Since I wasn't sure where to place a post about the more marginal positions, I'm lumping them in at the end of my Amado post. Enjoy.

Days left til football: 31. (This number is guaranteed accurate: I'm no longer going off math, but off of HailtoPurple's countdown to kickoff counter and this site, which alternates playing a different song every time I go to the page, luckily, the songs it picks are pretty much the only songs I could ever want to hear: Young Jeezy's Put On, Kanye's Homecoming, Zombie Nation, Mo Greene's Go U NU bowl game remix (why haven't I ever heard this song before? He name drops EVERY SINGLE OFFENSIVE LINEMAN!), and other classics.

Who did it last year?: Surely you remember Amado Villarreal. I've been deading Villarreal since this site's very first sentence, but, truth be told, he was a pretty servicable kicker for his two-year career, even briefly earning nickname "Amado-matic." 

Don't get me wrong: Amado Villarreal was far from a great kicker. A great kicker wouldn't miss any PAT's, and would be able to hit 40+ yard field goals, which Amado essentially couldn't. But he was, without a doubt, an alright or better kicker. He gets a pretty bad rap for a few reasons: first off, kickers ALWAYS get bad raps. People remember even the great kickers for the one time they missed one that could've won a game. Just hitting a field goal or extra point doesn't seem that impressive - it's expected, so fans get mad whenever a kicker misses one. Secondly, Amado didn't have any positive defining moments - no game winning field goals or anything, his only game-winning attempt came at the end of the 2007 Michigan State game, and he missed from 36 yards. 

And third, Amado's failures couldn't have come at worse times. Villarreal missed three extra points this year, four in his two year career. The first came in the aforementioned MSU game, which ended up being a 48-41 NU victory in overtime, but could have had a final in regulation of Amado hadn't missed an extra point attempt. The second came in last year's Iowa game, when NU scored a touchdown after being down seven and had to watch Amado shank one to leave the score 17-16. (We won eventually, in case you forgot.) The next came in last year's Indiana game. The final score was 21-19, but if Amado had hit all his PAT's, NU would've had the opportunity to tie it up at 21 with a two-point conversion. The most painful, of course, was a shank job in last year's overtime Alamo Bowl lost, which prompted people to get very angry at our kicker, because another point would've won NU the game.

But until the PAT - a really, really, really outdated aspect of football - is eliminated, very good kickers will always miss them once in a while. They'll plant their foot wrong, the snap will be high, or the hold will be an inch too far to the left, and it'll get shanked, and there's nothing you can do about it. Long story short, Amado worked hard for five years, kicked relatively well for two of them, and it's sad that he'll be remembered for his propensity to shank.

(Oh, and, what a bad idea to write 500 boring words about PAT's a few days after I get linked to because I'm "witty." I think I just lost all my readers.)

Song this position reminds me of: Posting "Can I Kick It" would be too cliche, so until somebody writes a song about Amado Villarreal, this section of this post goes barren.

Who's got next?: It's a toss-up between our good friend/punter Stefan Demos and incoming recruit Jeff Budzien, who's like an All-American or something. There's two options here: we could let Budzien and his golden leg get to work right away nailing 50-yarders, or we could let Demos swing double-duty as a punter and a kicker at the risk of his leg falling off but with the reward of keeping Budzien around the program another year. Chances are Demos would be servicable as a placekicker, but to be honest, I the upcoming year is one of the more important ones in franchise history. Kicker isn't a position which requires an adjustment period. If Budzien is a better kicker, just shove him in the starting lineup. We've got more to lose this year than we do in 2013, when he'd be a senior if we redshirt him, so I say set him loose. 

It should also be noted that Brandon Williams, a freshman kicker on our roster, played quarterback and wide receiver in high school. For some reason, that reminds me of that one Bugs Bunny cartoon where he was playing baseball, although odds are Williams' method of getting in the end zone probably wasn't unfurling posters of 1930's pin-up girls to defenders about to tackle him.

We also have Steve Flaherty, a walk-on kicker who played wide receiver in high school, and Mark Ison and Tim Weak, who were listed as kickers on last year's roster but have moved to wide receiver and cornerback, respectively. Point is, our kicking corps could totally demolish any other kicking corps in the Big Ten in a footrace. Not sure why our kickers need such great hands, though. 

Is that an improvement? With Demos, maybe, with Budzien, probably. Dude's a high school All-American. What more can I say? 

THE OTHER POSITIONS

We also lose a long snapper and a holder. These are two positions that you forget about, but, which, well, you need somebody to do. I remember the first game I saw at Ryan Field, against Ohio. I had read something about how Ohio's long snapper was suspended or injured or something silly like that, and as a joke, I said to a friend that this would totally change the course of the game.

Three hours later, NU had blocked two field goals and Ohio had missed it's only other opportunity, because the backup long snapper kept bouncing it back to the holder, and Ohio couldn't get off a good punt because everything back to the punter was a two-hopper. It totally ruined what could have been a winnable game for them. 

Kyle Daley had been holding for two years and Phil Brunner had been long snapping for three. And they were pretty consistent, I guess, I don't remember them ever messing up. Replacing Brunner will be a guy named John Henry Pace, who transferred from The U (slang name used here to avoid confusion with Miami (OH), who we're more familiar with, for some reason), and replacing Daley, we don't know yet, although several wide recievers and safeties have "might be a holder this season" on their player profiles. 

If you read these last few paragraphs, you're a trooper. Sorry this post was so long.  

Happy Fourth of July!

Enjoy your holiday, and if you're around E-Town, go split some uprights at Ryan Field. Supposedly, it's a "marketing promotion", but let's be real: Amado Villarreal ain't gonna replace himself. So try to win some tickets and a potential spot as our official extra-point shanker. 

Anyway, have a happy holiday, thanks for reading the blog in its first few weeks. 

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.