Terrible Basketball Column Sends Us Through The Looking Glass

Writing parodies of a terrible sports columns is a thing that all the cool kids on the internet like to do these days. On Sunday, our friend @FanSince09 wrote one such column at Zoo With Roy about the Philadelphia 76ers' decision to hire the analytics-driven Sam Hinkie as their general manager. It was a fun piece of satire that fit the genre perfectly. This morning, Philly.com's Marcus Hayes wrote what was essentially the exact same column, only he was being serious. Shit is getting weird.

Thankfully, Zoo With Roy went ahead and pointed out all the similarities between the two columns so that we don't have to read through Hayes's drivel. The resemblance is remarkable:

FS09 wrote: "Suddenly, nerds in their mom's basements who have never stepped foot on a baseball field believed they had unlocked some secret that made them more knowledgeable than scouts, broadcasters and journalists with years of experience in and around the game."Hayes wrote: "Pacers GM Kevin Pritchard was a panelist at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March, where the ComicCon alumni who now work in sports administration meet to plot their revenge against the jocks they employ."Hayes also wrote: "Hinkie will be given a sledgehammer and a smartphone by Harris, a fellow geek."

I'm not really sure where we go from here. We now live in a world in which sports columnists have become imitations of parodies of themselves. Or maybe Hayes is just trolling us, and his column was actually a parody of a parody and that could mean that he actually whoops shit my brain just melted.

[ Zoo With Roy | Philly.com]