LEXINGTON, Ky — Kentucky could be losing nine players this Spring and many fans are concerned that some could be leaving for what they assume to be the wrong reasons.  For Darnell Dodson, one pivotal encounter with a teammate was the only reason he needed.

In big time college basketball programs the players are afforded every conceivable perk allowed by the NCAA.  Unfortunately for some of the more fun-loving players, downtime isn’t one of them.

Josh Harrellson witnessed first hand how serious a little extra down-time could be when he witnessed Dusty Mill’s expulsion from the team in 2007.   Billy Gillispie sent Mills back to Indiana on the turnip truck when he thought he overheard some bad mouthing of Buck Owens during a game.

(Ed note: To this day Mills claims he was merely joking about the “overrating” the Milwaukee Bucks on NBA Live but admits it was “not the right time to do so.”  For his part, Gillispie’s claims to have no knowledge of the years 2003-2009, “among other times and matters of dates and such”.)

After the firing of Gillispie, Harrellson was thrilled with the hire of John Calipari. He knew the coach’s reputation as a “player’s coach” with  ”work hard, play hard” and “team as family” philosophies. As the team’s resident practical joke artist and best “locker room guy,”  Harrellson relished the opportunity to “play hard” and in the end, for better or worse he did just that.

With the slim odds of an NBA contract, Harrellson had more downtime than other players who were putting in extra practice in hopes of becoming a lottery picks.  The 6′-10″ senior took it up on himself to act as what he dubbed the “Lodge’s Liaison of Leisure,” and even made up a sign saying so to hang on his door.   He organized the Madden tournaments, ordered the stacks of Mad Mushroom, and kept the players up on the college basketball chatter about the team on Twitter and the message boards.  He was also the first to discover Chatroulette and introduce it to the rest of the team.

“We thought it was pretty good, funny stuff,” said Freshman guard Eric Bledsoe. “But Josh thought it was real funny – like real real funny.  He was always off watching it, and we just let him do his thing.”  Eventually there were less ad-hoc ping-pong brackets on the dry erase boards and more novelty costumes on the laundry room floor.

Harrellson’s roommate, Perry Stevenson assuaged the fears of Josh’ motivations by assuring that it was, “Just clowning around – no sex or gay stuff.” He summed up Harrellson’s webcamming of strangers by saying, “He’s a goofball, that’s just what he does.”  As the season progressed, Harrellson’s teammates spent more of their downtime in the gym as their draft stock rose. Josh Harrellson’s was left with more downtime, which he spent, “just looking for someone to clown on,” Stevenson said.

Last week, as Kentucky’s Elite Eight loss to West Virginia was embroiling the fans in a state of disbelief and sadness, and it was no different for its players. They had been working together for months, day in and day out, for a goal that was now unattainable and they had all the downtime they could imagine to think about it.

Some players went back to the gym to prepare for the draft, some spent time with girlfriends or family members, and a couple decided to surf the web.  On a lark, to take his mind off the big loss and lingering pressures to play professionally, Darnell Dodson clicked on the bookmark that his goofball teammate had placed in his browser months ago.

It opened Chatroulette and against all odds, it matched him with a recognizable face.  It was his teammate, from down the hall, and in the video frame he was wearing nothing but a hard hat and a smile.  From that moment on, Dodson decided that maybe college wasn’t for him anymore and he should think about moving on his to career in basketball.

A few minutes later, Stevenson convinced him to stop shrieking and Harrellson offered to let Dodson wear the Richard Nixon mask and participate in that night’s session.  Dodson confusedly and politely declined.

As of press time, Dodson is still undecided on future.  He claims that the vision of his teammate’s character, whom is dubbed “Hard Hat Harrellson” by Stevenson and Harrellson, makes it difficult to spend time in the Wildcat Lodge without night terrors.

Harrellson seems unphased by the incident and spent the rest of the night of “the incident” break dancing on flattened Mad Mushroom boxes as his character “Poppin-Papa-Nixon.”

With even fewer teammates to entertain as some leave for pre-draft conditioning, he has been on a self-proclaimed binge as the “glue guy of Chatroulette,” he said.  Throughout the world, an appreciative audience of various German penises and vehemently racist American middle school children have “made a lottery pick of their own,” said Harrellson. “I can hear the commissioner now:

“With the first pick in the 2010 Chatroulette draft, the Internet picks  a 6′-10″ Shirtless Breakdancer from the University of Kentucky, ‘Jive-Alive Fifty-Five.’”

When Kentucky’s first year coach John Calipari landed this year’s top recruit it was lauded by fans as the start of a dream come true  Now, before so much as a scrimmage has been played, it has plunged most of the state’s economy into an ever worsening nightmare.

Witnessing them has been described as “transformative,” “mesmerizing,” and “awe-inspiring.”  If you’ve gotten an email from anyone in Kentucky in the last four months, you’ve already been forced to watch them at least once.  And you have experienced visceral power of the John Wall mixtapes, even if you didn’t want to.

Whether it’s the body control, court awareness, or “just” the crossovers, the showcased basketball feats of 6′4” freshman PG John Wall have been dazzling college basketball fans since the moment they appeared online.

For the final phase of his recruitment, Wall narrowed his choices to the the Memphis, Miami, NC State, Baylor, Kansas, Kentucky, and, as a goodwill gesture, both of the Asshole Schools in his home state of North Carolina.  All of their hardcore fanbases spent the post season enthralled with the mixtapes of the Raleigh phenom.  As his selection was repeatedly postponed, next year’s season lay in the balance, and the view counts only grew.

Only now are officials realizing, that for UK’s fanbase, they grew far too much and spread far too wide for our own good.

Lunch hour in downtown Louisville – The city streets are typically a backdrop for bustling street traffic and vapid ladies filming third tier cable reality TV shows.  As of Monday however, the only activity to be seen was the only thing most here have seen for weeks.  The streets were full of basketballs, being dribbled by or rolling away from adults and children, of all persuasions, everywhere.

Beyond the jarring vista of tens of thousands dribbling, attempting to dribble, and mostly tripping over basketballs on every hard surface in the Commonwealth, apparently the sound is also arresting.  According to out-of-towners,  the din of hot rubber and synthetic leather bounces punctuated by occasional screams from ankle twists and knee ligament pops are, in their words “disgusting and unbearable.”

In the North, residents of Cincinnati actually thought constant, fluctuating noise was that of a new Kentucky-specific brood of cicadas.  “We sent our best entomologists over there to check things out,” said Suzy Einhaber, Head of the Cincinnati Zoo Botanical Garden’s Etymology Department.

“Then I pulled out my safari costume, red bug eye glasses and cute fuzzy antenna headband, just in case I had to work the local morning news circuit that evening.” she told us.

“But we quickly realized it was just all those basketballs bouncing… and the screams of course,” she continued. “Oh God, those horrible screams,” she whispered as she wiped a tear from the inside of her clearly overused novelty insect sunglasses.

“That’s why I rushed the team over there so fast.  We thought it might some type of super cicada that stung real bad. But it wasn’t, so that’s good.”

No, it was not “some type of super cicada” but it wasn’t good and for Kentucky economy, it had indeed “stung real bad.”

Normally “blue and white” is a jovial moniker for the Wildcats.  But now it was routinely being used as a harrowing descriptor of the totality of the workforce missing days in the Bluegrass.  All type of workers were skipping out to “get some dribs in,” with collars both “blue and white.”

“At first I just really was like, wow this guy is really good,” said one man middle-aged man we spoke to in Hardin County.  “But then, I was like wait, how is he that good?” He paused and then genuinely asked again, “How is he that good?”

At this point in the interview, he became agitated with our refusal to watch the “just one” mixtape on his smartphone.  For the next several minutes he repeatedly told us he was going to be “crossing us over” into watching it and then failed to do so.

He implemented what, to him, was a deceptive sleight of hand and shoved his sweaty phone screen in our face.  He shamelessly did this for at least fifteen minutes, all without breaking intense eye contact,  before he eventually tripped over himself and broke the phone.

He continued, “There’s this one time, he does this thing and the defender passes in front of him, so you can’t tell what’s happening.  But then I watched it enough that I don’t believe I could tell what he did if he was out there by himself and it was in, like Mythbusters-type slow-mo. He’s so good.  It’s the sickest!”

Later we learned that this man ran a formerly successful regional bank.  Now his wife is burning their furniture nightly to boil their pool water and wash his ace bandages and wraps.  As of press time, the bank exists in name only.

The earliest affects of this phenomenon merely left economists puzzled as Kentucky’s unemployment rate rose more than national trends and norms indicated it should have.  But by late July the state GDP had dropped to less than 12% of the previous years’ and the Governor (actually a Vandy Alum Governor’s aide) finally declared a state of emergency and desperately tried to enact plans to create new jobs.

But, by that time it was too late.  As everyone in Kentucky already knew, it wasn’t the jobs that left the people. Even in this time of already economic uncertainty, it was the people that left the jobs, in droves.

Some stilled believe there is hope to be found and it that it will start with finding the root of the problem.  A precious few doctors, not the ones who’ve been spotted playing Nerf-Hoop 21 and blaring instrumental anthems in what was formerly Central Baptist’s ICU, certainly hoped so at least.

Luckily, as all indicators pointed to most of Kentucky’s medical personnel swept in a surge of the epidemic by mid-August, some doctors and public health officials had the foresight to escape to Evansville to continue working on the problem. Last night, they think they made a breakthrough.

As of 2:45AM, they were announcing their theory on dribblehelpky.gov.

“When the transformative experience of witnessing these moves mixes with the delusional sense of sticktoitiveness, brazen devotion, and desperate lack of significant success of Kentucky fans something’s got to give.  In this case, it was everything in their lives that didn’t involving living out the excitement of their newfound hope.  For this particular season, that hope is best embodied by John Wall and his all of his “sick” moves.” they claimed on the homepage.

Unfortunately, like all great tragedies Kentucky’s fans were brought down what was once thought to surely be their greatest asset.

The explanation continued, “After years of relative mediocrity, the fans had too much ill will built up inside and had lost the most of their fun of college basketball, to them: dominating all of it.  The more they watched the mixtapes, the better they felt about it.  Eventually it reached a point for everyone where they couldn’t help but be inspired to do it themselves and then they couldn’t stop.”

“The most extreme cases have been reported Benton, KY.  At this stage of development, the fans reached a level of questioning the execution of the moves as  humanly possible.  After a pondering this for a few days, they would inevitably question Wall’s existence as a mortal human.  We do have the foundations for what has been called a church, but it is no way a church.  For that size congregation, it would actually be technically considered a cult.”

Thankfully, John Wall and Coach Cal have been secretly working with media outlets and the state government since Monday.  They will be collaborating to stage a demonstration of all of John’s mysterious techniques and there is no fear of “giving away secrets” since there is only one man in the world able to pull them off, and Kentucky already has him.

They believe this will over-indulge the masses and thereby satiate them until at least Big Blue Madness.

It is estimated that by Tuesday of next week, everyone will be able to pick up where they left off.  State officials are confident they will be able to prepare for this situation if it were ever to arise again.

At his press conference this afternoon Coach Calipari was quick to calm everyone down, and tactfully tried to shift the focus of John Wall as soon as possible in hopes of alleviating the problem.

“John is a very special player,” he said, “so I don’t think we’ll have to worry about at situation this again for a while.  Hey speaking of special players though,” he continued, “you guys should have seen Brandon, Knight, at the Elite camps last months. Oh. My. Goodness.”

He concluded, “That kid is going to be very special and he’s already so smooth, I’ve got some very special free videos of him on my website, CoachCal.com.  You guys should definitely check him out over there. It’s crazy!”