Three Days.

A different Youtube video every day, just to get you sufficiently pumped.

Boy, it's sure going to be exciting to see all those guys... in action... this year for the Wildcats... oh crap.

PS: I will be revealing the results of the poll to the right directly before gametime, so I suggest you vote now. It's getting heated, as one person has manned up and voted for Towson, so, vote. It's your civic duty.

Presidents to Represent Me.

I, like every other Northwestern student, received an email from a guy named Morton O. Schapiro today. The gist of the email is that he's the new president of Northwestern University, and he's replacing Henry S. Bienen, whose last day on the job was yesterday. (For some reason, I was really picky about middle initials in this paragraph.)

I think it's safe to say that Schapiro immediately becomes the second or third most important figure in Northwestern sports, behind Pat Fitzgerald and Jim Phillips. 

To understand why, look at Northwestern sports under Bienen's administration. Bienen took over the job on January 1, 1995, and Northwestern sports was an elaborate joke at best, with a few NIT teams, and really, nothing else since the 1960's. 

Exactly a year later, the team was in the Rose Bowl. (This had nothing to do with Bienen, but, still.) Bienen quickly realized something no other Northwestern administrator ever had: sports teams seem irrelevant to the school from an academic standpoint, but they breed more than school spirit. The increased exposure from the Rose Bowl appearance led to an increase in applications, which allowed NU to be more selective of who they accepted academically and earned the school money. Yes, having good sports teams is fun, but it's also great for the school's image at large, and I'd say NU has improved overall due to our team's on-field improvements. He devoted himself to improving the school's sports teams, and the coaching hires he made show it. Although he can't take credit for the Rose Bowl win, our football teams, plus our teams in other sports such as lacrosse and softball have seen much more success under Bienen than under any previous president. And that's probably not a coincidence.

On the flipside, Bienen is supposedly Bill Carmody's biggest fan, and the main reason he's still employed. Bienen loves himself some basketball, enough so that he brought it up for no apparent reason at a speech to the parents of incoming students last year, and he's good friends with Carmody. There's a lot of speculation that the end of Bienen's administration will bring the end of Carmody's if there isn't major improvement this year. We'll see how it all actually turns out, but, remember, the athletic director and all the coaches are employed by the school, and the final decisions as to who keeps what job are made by the president. 

Schapiro comes from Williams College, which is somewhat of a sports powerhouse on the D-III level. The Ephs have won 13 of 14 Division III director's cups, which are awarded to the school that has the best all-around performances in NCAA championship events, with points awarded based on team finishes in every sport the NCAA sanctions competitions in. (On the D-I level, Stanford has won the Director's Cup 15 of the 16 years the cup has been awarded, with their only second-place finish coming in the trophy's inaugural 1994 season. This makes me a little suspect, as Stanford doesn't seem like a sports powerhouse, but I guess they're definitely a program NU can look up to, even if our football team is way, way better.) Long story short, Schapiro knows how to run an athletic department. If it's worth anything, Williams recruited the best player in my high school's basketball history, and he comes off the bench there.

So, the Schapiro era starts today, and its impact will be felt in NU sports. I think we'll be in good hands, and I think the bottom-feeder days of NU sports are fading fast. 

Bienen, oddly enough, has accepted a position as the chairman of the Board of Directors for the UFL, which is the same football league that CJ Bachér is currently quarterbacking in. So good luck with that, ex-Prez/CJ.

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. 

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.