Head coach Paul Chryst took a rather unorthodox approach to practice this week, bringing in UW’s top scientists to help prepare the Badgers to enter the mystical realm of Evanston, Ill.
After losing in 2014 at Northwestern, several Wisconsin players reported weird, extraterrestrial-like circumstances in Evanston that contributed to their poor play.
“I remember it was like walking into an episode of the ‘Twilight Zone,’” said former quarterback Joel Stave, who was a magician at making Badgers drives disappear into thin air. “Everything was fuzzy and slow and I swear I had this eerie music stuck in my head all day.”
Chryst watched some game film from the 2014 game and noticed oddities throughout, including some of the Wisconsin players wandering aimlessly on the sideline, zoning out for entire quarters and eating clumps of the Ryan Field turf.
The coach as a result has turned to some of the leading scientists at the university, including Dr. Jerri ‘the powerhouse of the cell’ Johnson, a biochemist and Dr. Neil DeGrasse Neilsen, an astrophysicist.
“They basically confirmed my wildest suspicions,” Chryst said. “They said Ryan Field is, in fact, a mystical realm and has adverse effects on opponents playing in Evanston.”
So Chryst decided to pull out all the stops in game preparation this week, collaborating with Johnson and other scientists to develop antidotes to counteract the effects of the realm.
The first trial didn’t go so well for the Badgers, as the medicine proved to have the opposite effect that it intended. Quarterback Alex Hornibrook decided to take a nap during the middle of a drill and linebacker Vince Biegel refused to do anything but look at clouds and imagine a half-decent Wisconsin offense for 30 minutes.
Johnson determined that the medicine would only work under mystical-realm-like conditions, which is why Chyst turned to Dr. Neilson.
Widely-recognized for his work on wormholes, black holes and the like, Dr. Neilson visited Ryan Field in an attempt to determine what was going on there, but was unsuccessful.
“I don’t know what the hell kind of devil magic spell that place is under,” Dr. Neilson said. “But Chicago’s Big Ten team’s field has clearly been cursed for the last 108 years.”
Chryst made the bold decision to put his players through Dr. Neilson’s “wormhole simulator” to see if that would help the medicine take effect. It proved to be a disastrous mistake, as the players experienced even worse symptoms during practice after going through the simulator.
Wide receiver Robert Wheelwright danced uncontrollably throughout practice. Wide receiver Jazz Peavy sat crisscross applesauce while eating a gogurt and singing nursery rhymes. The entire defensive unit refused to listen to anything the coaches said and instead began kicking field goals for 30 minutes, which might have actually been helpful to the Badgers, considering Andrew Endicott’s most recent performance.
Chryst, unable to control his team, cancelled the rest of the practice and told his players to sleep off the meds.
“I don’t think we are going to try using those antidotes Saturday,” Chryst said. “I don’t think our players will have the grit they usually have.”
After talking with Stave about how he felt that everything was moving slower, Chryst said he talked with his coaches about utilizing medicinal marijuana during practice to simulate those effects, but decided against that for “moral reasons.”
“We are just going to have to go in there with our hard hats and lunch pails and play blue-collar Wisconsin football on this business trip,” Chryst said.
At press time, Biegel was still experiencing the effects of Dr. Johnson’s antidote and had apparently been cuddled up with a blanket and warm milk for the entirety of Wednesday.
He has been listed as questionable on the Badgers injury report.
