Nothing But Iron: Hoot’n and Wallowin' September 16, 2005 by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. Oh, the hangovers felt by the Big Ten’s elite football teams last Sunday. The up side for Iowa, Michigan and Ohio State is that each still has a shot a the NCAA title. All they must do is finish well enough to make the playo . . . sorry, the hallucinations must be back. We all know there is no playoff and there won’t be one for at least a thousand years, because college presidents, charged with the task of teaching logic and reason to college students across the nation, think the current system is better. What I meant to say is that if, at regular season’s end, there is just one undefeated team, and a bunch of teams with only one loss, and excellent computer karma, then Iowa or Michigan or Ohio State could still be arbitrarily named to play USC in the Rose Bowl Alleged National Championship reality television show, or the AP voters could buck the system and name a co-champ from a lesser bowl. The problem is that three of the conference’s best teams have a loss and computers hate losses–yours or your opponent’s. As almost any UW student in section O will be able tell you after four years of weekly education on the subject, the only way to avoid a hangover is to stay out of the bar. That’s precisely what the Badgers did playing Temple, one of the worst football programs in the country. Using the same word in a different analogy, if the bar is set low enough, its easy create the perception that you jump really high. Could be that the Badgers really do jump high, but few conclusions can be drawn yet. In a day, as the Badgers visit Division I North Carolina to avenge last year’s basketball loss in that sport’s actual post-season tournament, we will gain a bit more insight. In a week Wisconsin hosts once-undefeated Michigan in the Big Ten Opener. By then we will know our team pretty well. Not news: Brian Calhoun failed to gain 300 or 200 or even 100 yards rushing against the Owls. Had he stayed in the game he might have broken Ron Dayne’s career rushing record in a span of three hours, but Alvarez made the right call benching him. As a pragmatist I have always liked his philosophy of letting the events, not streaks or records, dictate the use of personnel. I am sure Calhoun wanted to get back on the field, but what a waste it would have been to suffer a fluke season-ending injury against the likes of Temple. Was there value in such a game? Sure, I suppose maybe there might have been. Reserves got to practice. One never knows how soon that seemingly small detail might prove valuable. No starters were injured. You can’t put a price on health. Constant UW scoring helped distract us fans from the heat and humidity. There were many no shows, and hundreds of people left at halftime, so we weren’t sitting on each other’s laps like we will be a week from now. Pollsters or computer programmers confusing Temple with Texas or Tennessee might now vote for Wisconsin as worthy of top-25 status. There is another possibility, you know. It could be that Temple is an excellent football team. It could be that Wisconsin and Arizona State, which beat the Owls 63-16 in week 1, will square off in the Rose Bowl on March 9th, or whenever the so-called championship show is televised this year. It could be that the Badgers will win that game 18-0 (65 minus 63, plus 16, for those of you who don’t get math). A perspective that won’t be lost on purported experts, especially those lacking capacity for original thought, is that the Big Ten is down this year. I am sorry to inform you that one weekend’s worth of games has bought us this designation for the entire season, but no more often than five times each College Game Day telecast. I just hope the Buckeyes can keep their Division I status until the Badgers play them again in 2007. I might get a "Big Ten Down" tattoo so I won’t forget. You do-it-yourself tattoo artists probably noticed that’s one letter on each finger. I admit that it is disconcerting that the Big Ten’s projected best lost without leaving their respective home states. (Iowa’s away game was played at Iowa State.) If I thought it would matter, I would emphasize that the Big Ten was "down" in basketball, until it sent three teams to the Elite Eight, but football is to basketball as the Land of Oz is to Kansas. In other words, football’s Elite Eight is the stuff of fantasy. Lastly, a word about Owls. I find the Owls, and bird mascots in general to be offensive. In fact, I think the use of animal figures and parts of animal figures (eyes of hawks, for example) to be similarly offensive. How would you like to be a real badger or a gopher or a lion or a spartan (some kind of insect, I think) coming out of your hole or burrow or den or hive one day and you see a cartoon of yourself painted on some guy’s chest? You’d feel downright degraded. Granted, you might not feel downright degraded at first, but a plain-colored professor from Illinois, home of the Fighting Illini, would remind you that you are supposed to feel degraded, and then you would, even if at first you thought it was kinda cool to be somebody’s mascot. If we are truly a sensitive, sensitive, sensitive society, we must not allow our mascot outrage to stop at mascots resembling Native Americans or caricatures thereof. We must ban all mascots, or at least those which are in any way identifiable. The only way we can be certain nobody is offended, and the surgeon general has stated clearly that being offended can be hazardous to your health, especially if you smoke, drink alcohol and drive at excessive speeds while being offended, is to embrace only nameless mascots in the forms of amorphous blobs. Yes, it would be harder for amorphous blob mascots to do push-ups after touchdowns, but it would be worth it. Speaking of downright degraded, one of my coworkers asked my opinion, as a guy who is generally optimistic, of the Green Bay Packers. I told him I had a less common perspective of the game, because I didn’t watch it. I was helping load metal railings onto a truck after the completion (by other people, not me) of the bike segment of the Iron Man Triathalon. Incidentally, I did this for a half hour, and I was exhausted, so I did not cap off my evening with a quick marathon. After the railings were loaded, I shuttled members of my son’s football team, who had volunteered their afternoons for the event, to their homes. I heard enough of the Packers-Lions broadcast on the way to Stoughton to know that I would not have to bother with the TiVo replay. Ever. I told my coworker that I would not give up on an entire 16 to 20-game season after a single failure, even one as foreboding as this. Fourteen penalties was the theme of the week. I agreed that Coach Sherman should tell the players to "stop doing that". Last week I watched two freshman high school teams play each other in their season opener. My son’s team, made up of players who had practiced together for just three weeks, had one penalty. Sure that’s comparing watermelons to cherry tomatoes. On the other hand, football is football. Same field. Same ball. Same rules. Part of me says that players drawing six- to eight-figure salaries ought to be able to follow those rules. _____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column written by the above author, a member of the Fighting Filipinos Alumni Association, henceforth known by the non-offensive title, Passive Conglomerates of Nothingness. PCoN’s new motto, written to replace the old one based on a Filipino war chant, is "Hmmm. What exactly does it do?" This issue is dedicated to the following members of the author’s family who celebrated birthdays this past week: Patrick, 15, and Mike, Char and Ken, who are a bit older than Patrick, but would never admit that fact publically like I just did for them. ©2005 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.