From the Sports Science Desk
The first place Dallas Cowboys will attempt to drive the New York Giants further down the division ladder this weekend when they visit the Meadowlands. The very real prospect of a playoff birth weighs heavily on the minds of everyone in Cowboys nation, but according to a team of scientists it may be all for not. Physicists have suggested that a playoff victory might be so abhorrent to nature that its achievement would ripple backward through time and stop the Cowboys before they could win, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
The theory was a largely overlooked footnote in a series of papers by Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. The papers mostly outline theories regarding the abhorrent nature of the Higgs Boson, the theoretical particle responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass; however, the inevitable failure of the Dallas Cowboys in the month of December and beyond was also evidenced by the research.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message, “but our mathematical models also discovered other phenomena that are seemingly distasteful to nature. A Dallas playoff win appears to be one such phenomenon.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the Dallas Cowboys have seen one inexplicable failure after another, despite millions of dollars being spent on star talent; a pattern so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”
“At first, we obviously questioned the results,” said Masao Ninomiya, “when Romo fumbled against Seattle in the ‘06 playoffs we assumed other, more obvious, elements such as inexperience were at work. In the 2007 season, we got a bit nervous when they just destroyed everyone in the regular season and even won the division. But our theory remained solid after they got lit up by New York - a wildcard team. In 2008, we didn’t even bother to double-check the math.”
The research was predictably met with skepticism and disappointment by Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who was quick to site the Cowboys' multiple past playoff wins. The mathematical models, however, suggest the Cowboys may have reached a “critical mass” of wins in the late 20th century, 1996 to be precise.
Jones brushed off comparisons between the $1.15 billion Cowboys Stadium and the $9 billion Large Hadron Collider as silly and unimaginative.
