Gridiron Bio-warfare

by dusty on Sep.09, 2009 , under Uncategorized

Bret Bielema, you magnificent, overpaid Hawkeye bastard!

As I perused the eveningside headlines tonight, I couldn’t help but wonder when I read that the UW football team was among one of the first in the nation to be ravaged by the dreaded H1N1 flu. The players are obviously students first (right?!?), and part of a population that has been identified as vulnerable to this particular strain of influenza. Also, a Cap Times story earlier in the day noted that University Health Services has already seen more than 200 cases of H1N1 in the first week of class alone.

This is in spite of the best efforts of students, who have taken innovation to a whole new level to prevent the spread of the virus. This weekend, while enjoying the pre-game festivities in the Camp Randall area, I even witnessed some of the Midwest’s Best and Brightest take cleanliness to a whole new level — for students — with a game of “swine flu-proof beer pong.” It featured not one but two bowls of water per side (one filled with warm soapy water, the other for rinsing), and the plastic cups were swapped out for clean ones between games.

So while one could deduce quite simply that UW-Madison has the misfortune of being one of the early tinderboxes the flu will blaze through this year, I prefer to take a more revolutionary tack. I posit that the UW-Madison flu outbreak is all part of Bret Bielema’s grand plan.

Now, I know my previous predictions about the H1N1 flu didn’t turn out to be completely spot-on, but bear with me here. Bielema’s a reasonably intelligent fellow, as long as the matter at hand happens to be football, playing it or occasionally winning it. He knows that almost every one of his players will contract the new flu bug over the coming months, and he couldn’t risk having one of his star players come down with the illness at an inopportune moment.

The human body develops anti-bodies to a particular flu strain once it’s fought it off. Surrounded by medical experts to tell him this, I think the conclusion is almost unavoidable that Bielema took matters into his own hands this weekend and exposed his players to the flu on purpose. He could very easily have contaminated their Gatorade supply on the field, but Hollywood tells us it would be more practical to use the team’s showers as an airborne distribution system.

With around half the team rumored to be sick right now, it’s a fair bet they’ll have recovered significantly to take the field Saturday. And while the Badgers might be dogging it a little, with a few stragglers coming off the flu and some still feeling the effects of it, it really shouldn’t take a healthy Badger team to win the day against Fresno State.

Of course, those who play through the flu will be highly contagious when they do so, and therein the rough and tumble full contact sport of football lies the brilliance of Bielema’s plan. He plans to turn the Fresno State team into our very own H1N1 sleeper agents. They’ll pass the flu to other teams along the way, with the massive uptick in football player flu cases set to take place right as the season’s competition is heating up.

And of course, within a few weeks, the Badgers will have all weathered the flu and come out stronger for it, ready to stampede division rivals and their accompanying body aches and fevers. If Bielema’s use of gridiron bio-warfare really hits home, the Badgers may even pick up a few wins via forfeit.

Do I have any evidence to back up my claims? No, but hey, it’s a theory! And at this point, I’m clinging to every hope I can get that the Badger football season is going to be any more than mediocre.

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