Skip Bayless in "The Dark Knight Surmises"

The Dark Knight sat, ready to save Gotham from itself.

For days, the hyperbole had been absent from the city's quotidian morning discussions. Analysis across the sporting world had been largely rational as football began to creep back to the top of the mountain, looming in the days and weeks ahead. With the world's eye turned, the Dark Knight slipped into the shadows ready to save us from ourselves.

Now, the ball was rolling. He needn't mop up every corner of the room. There were an array of writers and pundits and opinionators and a mass of fools ready to follow them down every darkened hallway who could finish what he started. With his sidekick Stephen "Robin" A. Smith there to help accelerate the ridiculousness of their discussion with equal levels of stupidity and baseless emotion-laced verbal diarrhea, the Dark Knight had opened the door the world would walk through.

He smiled.

That evening, the outdated, unnecessary media behemoth from decades ago didn't walk through that door. They jumped through it, leaving their pants on the threshold as evidence of their momentary support of the Dark Knight.

The world gasped.

We wondered how that outdated, unnecessary outfit could be outdated and unnecessary. We cried out to the citizens to stop bowing at the altar of the Dark Knight, making him more and more powerful than ever.

It was too late.

We had taken a hero and used him to create a monster we could neither contain nor ignore.

There were places where rational thought, admission of ignorance and sane deliberation took place. The Leader, Worldwide, however, could not be felled.

So we followed the Dark Knight into the depths of our stupidity, the lowest common denominator, to reach as many people as we could. To isolate and multiply. To amplify. To simplify.

We had to chase him. Because he's the hero sports fans deserve, but not the one we'll ever, ever, ever need.