*Real world to follow.
Forced to watch 6 straight hours of Big Ten basketball.
A team of philosophers, historians, and sports psychologists have found that the world of sport is, in fact, caught in a terrifying hellscape of distorted reality.
In a new report published in the journal Nature, the group finds that sometime in the past 10 – 12 years, the sports world slipped through a rip in space-time, landing in an alternate universe of cruel ironies. A plane where, as she hypothesized last month in a Boston Globe op-ed, “a football program touted for shaping young men in all likelihood has a serial child rapist in their ranks.”
The group’s chair, Dr. Alexandra Black, began her research after the Boston Red Sox won their first world title. “I knew something was very wrong,” she recalls now. She sought to gather a team to investigate patterns and anomalies. Her first partner is now the current research group’s vice-chair, Dr. Francis Upp.
“It was slow going for Frank and I those first four years or so,” says Dr. Black, who is white. We only had scattered, anecdotal evidence– a massive, unexplained solar event in January ’04, Barry Bonds’ denial of steroid use.” Black sighs. I got discouraged,” she admits. In 2008, however, Black’s colleague, astrophysics professor Wilhelm Frumt, returned from a sabbatical in Austria and agreed to join her team. That, of course, was the year Brett Favre was pushed out as quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. “I had always known that Upp was down; once Frumt was back, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing some really disturbing things,” Black says.
"'Tiger Woods crashes car?' Pshhh, nbd."
Indeed, Black’s conclusions seem obvious now, considering the hyper-dramatized NBA lockout and Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos being kidnapped (then sprung amidst gunfire) in Venezuela. And, of course, there’s Penn State. Plots all disorientingly cinematic, but with no director to yell ‘cut!’ But, Black says, there are implications for non-sports fans as well; sports, she reminds us, have always been a bellwether for the rest of humanity. “Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in the 1950s, and the Civil Rights movement followed. Why should we assume that the rest of the world won’t follow sports again– this time into the teeth of the abyss?”
THIS IS THE SPORTS 
