Absurdity
NCAA Condemns Controversial Michigan Call While Quietly Hiding Rest Of Its Criminal Record
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (BSN): A heavily disputed officiating call during Saturday's game at Michigan Stadium has sent shockwaves through college athletics, threatening to tarnish the NCAA's reputation as an organization that has never done anything questionable in its entire existence.
Officials from the governing body released a statement Sunday morning expressing deep concern, calling the incident a troubling departure from the standards of fairness and transparency that have defined the NCAA since its founding in 1906, a year in which seventeen football players died and nobody from the NCAA's founding committee thought that was worth stopping over.
"We take the integrity of competition very seriously," said NCAA Senior Vice President of Competitive Oversight Gerald Phipps, reading from a statement that appeared to have been written by a man who has never had to mean anything he has ever said. "This incident will be reviewed thoroughly through our established review process, which is a process we have."
Phipps declined to take questions.
Sportscasters, fans, and a retired referee named Dale who called in to three separate radio programs described the call as either obviously correct or obviously wrong, depending entirely on which team they grew up watching with their fathers.
"I've never seen anything like it," said one Michigan fan outside the stadium, who had clearly seen many things like it. "This is supposed to be the pinnacle of amateur athletics."
The word "amateur" hung in the air for a moment.
The NCAA's communications office worked through the weekend to contextualize the controversy against the organization's broader legacy of integrity, a task that required a staff of eleven and a shared understanding that nobody in the room would be googling anything.
Among the accomplishments the NCAA did not mention in its integrity statement: a 2021 Supreme Court ruling finding it had violated antitrust law, decades of systematic enforcement that fell almost exclusively on athletes rather than administrators, a licensing empire that generated over one billion dollars annually from the likenesses of young men who were not permitted to buy their own groceries with that money, and at least four separate instances in the past decade where the organization punished schools for violations that the NCAA's own investigators had actively encouraged.
Sources close to the organization confirmed that none of this came up during Sunday's emergency call.
What did come up was the play in question, a fourth-quarter decision that may or may not have affected the game's outcome, depending on simulations run by people with too much time and the right kind of software.
A graduate student in Ann Arbor named Tyler said he had filed a formal complaint with the NCAA, because he believed in the process.
His complaint was received by an automated system and assigned a case number. The case number begins with a letter.
The NCAA says it expects to have preliminary findings within sixty to ninety days, after which a secondary review panel will determine whether a formal review panel is warranted, at which point the season in question will have ended, the players will have graduated, and Gerald Phipps will have issued a statement expressing confidence in the outcome.
At press time, the NCAA had updated its mission statement on its website to include the word "accountability."
The story we are making fun of: https://babylonbee.com/news/michigan-announces-own-time-zone-where-clocks-are-always-one-second-behind/