PAT FITZGERALD, NORTHWESTERN EMBARRASS NEBRASKA, FROST, IN 3-POINT BLOWOUT WIN.
On a game where one coach dared the other to do that which he hates most: be a winner.
There is an extremely rich cinematic vein of characters loading a gun, placing it to their head, and asking/daring/begging someone to pull the trigger.
For an action that has surely almost never happened in the real world, it’s shockingly common. Choose your favorite moment. Is it in Narcos when a portly Pablo Escobar lights a stick of dynamite in his basement?
Maybe you prefer a scene where the mania is more on the surface, like in Jarhead (one of my favorite books, honestly), where Jake Gyllenhall completely loses his entire mind in the desert of Kuwait.
There’s also the funnier option from Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little gets himself out of a jam by pretending to take himself hostage, while horrified onlookers comment that he “just might be crazy enough to do it.
There’s Denzel Washington in Malcolm X.
There’s basically the entirety of The Deer Hunter. The list goes on. Either to show a character’s detachment from reality or their stoicism in the face of danger, directors simply love to put a gun in their main character’s hand and have him place it against his own forehead.
In the most recent iteration, our scene is in Dublin, Ireland. Our hero, Patrick Fitzgerald, is stalking the sidelines at the Aviva Stadium. After his team inches ahead behind a 4-yard plunge into the end zone with 11:34 to play in the game, Pat Fitzgerald approaches Scott Frost and places a revolver in Frost’s hands. He asks Frost to aim the gun in between his eyes and pull the trigger.
Northwestern never looked especially interested in scoring after taking its lead. Of the 12 offensive plays ran after the Hull touchdown, 12 were rushing plays. The air wasn’t just taken out of the football, it was hydraulically pressed out.
While Northwestern fans groaned and chewed their fingernails and begged for one, just one, just please one time throw a pass, Fitzgerald and offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian stood steadfast in their truth:
Scott Frost is not a bad enough dude to win a football game.
All Frost had to do was to take his offense, which seemed darn near unstoppable for the first 30 minutes of football and had Northwestern’s linebackers in the deepest realms of hell, and score one time. All he had to do was get about 70% of the talent out of his roster for 10 minutes, and his team would win a game. Northwestern was daring him to do it. Begging him.
He couldn’t do it.
Pat Fitzgerald and Mike Bajakian knew he couldn’t do it. They knew that Scott Frost is weak and afraid of winning, and that knowledge was the entire basis for the entire strategy, a strategy which was always going to work.
Scott Frost’s stench is that of a True Loser, and winners like Pat Fitzgerald can pick out that scent from a mile away. The fourth quarter Northwestern played is what Pat Fitzgerald dreams of every night. His team would execute, because they always do, and his opponent would crumble, because they have to.
This is a Northwestern blowout. It’s not that Pat Fitzgerald doesn’t want to win by a thousand. It’s that he wants to win by enough points that the margin is comfortable, and not a single point more. Against Frost and Nebraska, 3 points was enough to salt the game away. Fitzgerald knew it, even if almost no one else in the world did.
For Northwestern, this game confirms my read on the season which is that 6 wins is a tangible goal. Northwestern is not a Big Ten West Contender, even if the Big Ten West is a conglomeration of jamokes and busters who are afraid of scoring points. The first half passing success feels like an aberration, and the second half crash feels more like what should be expected week to week. The linebackers are confirmed now to be far too slow to compete with athletes on the better teams in the conference. But the offensive line rocks, the running backs kick ass, and Cam Mitchell appears to be an absolute stud. That’s enough talent to win enough games to go to a bowl in December.
It’s hard to explain just how bad a loss this is for Nebraska, a team that simply cannot get out of its own way. Every single year under Frost, people point to the Metrics that say the team is good, and every year Nebraska finds a way to lose every single game of consequence they play. At some point, if the math can’t quantify the Loser Effect, the math is not worth listening to. After losing 9 consecutive one-score contests in the last 13 games, Occam’s Razor suggests Nebraska loses and will continue to lose forever because they are coached by The Ultimate Loser who dreams of nothing but losing and has forgotten what winning means. All is losing, and losing is all, and this is how life is in Scott Frost’s world, and there is no saving him from it.
I hope Scott Frost coaches Nebraska for a thousand years.
BYCTOM’S REVIEW IN A TWEET OF THE WEEK:
HERE ARE A FEW SPOILER FREE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT AN ANIMATED JAPANESE TELEVISION SHOW, I PROMISE I’M NORMAL
As a child, I am told that my sister and I would watch Lion King, or as we pronounced the name of the film “YIGH-yun King,” every single day for the better part of two years. We would cry if the movie was not played. We were tyrannical.
In my late 20’s, that tic of watching things I’ve already seen over-and-over has stuck with me. There’s a pretty deep literary reservoir about what that behavior says about your mental state (spoiler: it’s bad), but that’s a discussion for another day.
The current object of my fixationis Episodes 12 and 13 of Cowboy Bebop, which, yes, is an anime series.
Bebop, from what I understand, is in the tier of Hipster Aesthete Favorites of anime alongside Neon Genesis Evangelion (the only other anime series I have ever watched), and, like, Samurai Champloo. If any true anime heads, which I am extremely not, feel that read is unfair, do let me know.
I won’t waste too much time explaining what the series is about, but it gets my highest of recommendations as a cyberpunk-ish pessimistic look at a high-tech, interplanetary future, a delicately crafted artistic universe, and a repository for some of the dopest jazz bangers you can find.
Episodes 12 and 13 (Jupiter Jazz parts 1 and 2) function almost as a series finale when the full 26-episode series is binged, and while the actual finale is hailed as a seminal piece of animated cinema, these two episodes have it lapped in my eyes.
I’m generally not one to seek out sad things to watch. When I watched all of Scrubs, I chose not to watch the last episode, because it bummed me out too much to think of the show as over. But the way Bebop deals with death throughout the series is simultaneously raw and oddly comforting. For a show that takes on a bunch of Big Topics with incredible deft, it’s death that’s the constant theme throughout the series, starting with the very first episode, where a character kills their partner and commits suicide by cop moments later, and getting bolder from there.
The series has more disturbing and stronger statements on death, but Episodes 12 and 13 stick out as special, especially with that final OST hits in Episode 13.
If you know, you know.
ODDS AND ENDS
This week’s “shopping cart I am keeping open in a second chrome window until I get the self confidence to pull the trigger on it” are some Negro League hats. But where are the Homestead Grays, Lids.com? Help me out!...This piece in The Ringer is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. Really bizarre prose, literally can’t get past a few paragraphs. Not sure why it exists. It starts by calling the Lisfranc joint “one of the lamest in the land” and gets harder to read from there...The Woodstock ‘99 documentary on Netflix is surreal, and great, and weird, and harrowing, and worth your time…The US Open promises to be one of the weirdest tennis tournaments imaginable with a grand total of zero good players in either draw. If Rafael Nadal doesn’t win, it’s a waste of valuable natural resources to host this tournament and the USTA should cancel it in the spirit of sportsmanship.