SHARPTON CITY, D.C., Feb. 28, 3002—Researchers studying the treasure trove of early 21st-century football player fossils recently found beneath swampland in New Jersey have concluded that the players could not, as popular lore has long held, run rapidly and collide with one another. “These primitive men had so little muscle tissue, it’s a wonder they could move at all,” anthropologist Jane Hutchinson of the University of California at Proxima Centuri told a news conference. “Some of these 40-yard dash times you hear mentioned in sports mythology, it’s completely impossible.”
Hutchinson unveiled diagrams—see illustration of Linebacker bellicosis—demonstrating that the legs of football athletes were far too short to have supported any speed greater than a few centigorns per dremple. “These primitive body types must have been confined to plodding movements,” said Hutchinson. “Our calculations show that no human being standing less than 8 feet tall would have sufficient leg length to run rapidly.” Additionally, estimates suggest that football players of the period before genetic engineering were so weak, they could only leg-press around 500 pounds. This would seem to rule out any aggressive or predatory sports behavior on their parts.
Hutchinson, who herself is 9 foot 2 and can leg-press 3,000 pounds, looked smashing at the press conference in the latest transparent illuminated gown. She is a distant descendant of Professor John Hutchinson of Stanford, who in 2002 proved that the Tyrannosaurus Rex could not have run fast. Her study, published today in the technical journal Nature,relies on analysis of bone fragments unearthed in the remains of an ancient training room found underneath the old Meadowlands sports complex, which was torn down centuries ago when swamp moss and common lichen became protected organisms under the Endangered Species Act.
The new study sheds no light on the continuing controversy regarding whether football players of the early 21st century were warm-blooded or cold-blooded or whether they cared for their young. Nor were researchers able to determine anything from the fossil discoveries about long-rumored post-game orgies between players and cheerleaders. This, Hutchinson pointed out, was during the period when mating rituals between individuals of the opposite gender were still legal. “So it might have happened, but thinking about non-same-sex mating just grossed me out so much that I had to stop the study on that point,” Hutchinson said.
After announcing her findings, Hutchinson took time out to visit the imposing Sharpton Memorial that sits on the city’s fabled Mall and dwarfs the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. (Formerly known as Washington, D.C., the capital changed its name in 2136 to expunge any reference to the disgraced Europeanist George Washington, whiling honoring former President Al Sharpton.) She also met with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who, owing to longevity drugs, has begun to celebrate his second millennium on the bench, amid calls by critics to review the Constitution’s creation of lifetime judgeships.
Researchers also said they are continuing to analyze the Meadowlands dig area hoping to understand the Tuesday Morning Quarterback fad that swept the United States beginning in the fall of 2002. “It was an amazing sociological phenomenon, an entire cult based on a football columnist who could predict the exact final scores of NFL games and who, according to legend, wrote his column surrounded by naked mega-babes,” Hutchinson said. “But they were of the opposite sex. How could he stand it?”
