DISCLAIMER: The following article is an April Fools’ Day article. Though it may relate to real people or events, it is not factual.
Photo courtesy of skitterphoto.com
During the 2015-2016 academic year, Montclair State University has been host to a significant number of important discoveries by professors — and now, Zacharias House provides his own contribution with his finding that the sport of football is fake.
It all started when House, a professor of wacky inventing, was rifling around in the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, looking to see if somebody else had come up with a similar design to his “macaroni synthesizer.” One of the papers that caught his eye corroborated with a theory regarding professional, collegiate and even high school football that has been floating around for a while.
“All football players performing on the field are animatronic,” said House. “There has not been a real human being playing the sport of football since 1961 — the year that this patent was taken out. The company that manufactures the animatronic substitutions — Japanese corporation Ballfriend Ltd. — sends them out to any institution that has a football team and even performs delivery on the same day as the human players get officially drafted.”
The idea that football players on the field are robotic in some capacity has existed among both conspiracy theorists and football enthusiasts since 2009, when Rutgers’ running back Biff McBean started emitting sparks from his neck after the customary Gatorade bath that comes with a victory.
“Gatorade is what fuels the ‘players’ and they’re typically completely waterproof. McBean’s animatronic stand-in must have been improperly sealed or was malfunctioning in some other manner,” said House.
None of the institutions involving the sport of football have officially stepped up to the podium to admit that their players are animatronic. When the subject was broached to the athletics department at Montclair State, the representative sent from The Montclarion was laughed at in his face.
“Nobody’s going to admit to it yet,” said House. “Investigations by government officials into the matter will be the only thing that changes everybody’s minds.”
Football enthusiasts are not a fan of House’s controversial discovery. “There’s no way the sport of football is fake,” said Tom Beaux, a junior television and digital media major who runs a sports news website that denied Deflategate. “All evidence points to the contrary, including there being a record of McBean having a rare condition where he visibly discharges electricity once a day,” said Beaux.
Beaux is familiar with Ballfriend’s work as a manufacturer of footballs and jock straps, but he doesn’t believe that they were able to make realistic imitations of human beings. “The players sustain real-life injuries on the field to the point where they sometimes bleed. How can you possibly fake that?”
Advancements in technology have paved the way for near-perfect deception of the public. “According to another patent taken out by Ballfriend, on June 6, 1996, an artificial skin was perfected for the players. They can sweat and even bleed,” said House.
Despite the importance and controversy of the discovery, House believes his best work is yet to come. “I’m still working hard on that macaroni synthesizer,” said House. “You put fresh wheat into the wheat canister, and macaroni comes out of the machine in perfect, uniform shape in concordance with the golden ratio – the most beautiful macaroni you will see in your life. It’s going to make me a millionaire, I tell you – a millionaire.”
