Crooks Succeed, Fail, Drink

K Street Snubbed by Computers as Violet Revolution Ascends Rankings

WASHINGTON - The K Street Crooks fell victim to the system this morning as District Sports announced they failed to successfully defend their title this year. The team successfully defeated the Violet Revolution on Sunday 5-2, only to then be inexplicably leap-frogged by their victims in the end-of-season rankings.

"We weren't confident that we had the #1 spot locked up, " said a team spokesman in a teleconference Monday morning. The prior #1 team, the Wank(ers) fell to Adios Adu 1-0 in play earlier Sunday. This gave them an identical record to our heroes whom they defeated a week earlier. "The league is not clear with their tie-break scenario: we had the goal differential, but they beat us head to head." However, waking up this morning to find that the Violet Revolution had rocketed from worst to first in the rankings was, as one team source put it, "not unlike jumping into the Arctic Ocean in December with Icy Hot on your Netherlands."

District Sports introduced a new computer ranking system this season after spending close to $15 on studies determining the formula. "The pamphlet they sent out had a lot of words and numbers on it," said Captain and Forward Ben Hoefs. When asked if he even bother reading it he replied "can you clarify what your definition of 'read' is?" After El Campo clarified that drawing doodles of Knight Rider and writing "Benjamin Hoefs-Hasselhoff" on something did indeed not constitute reading, Hoefs admitted he did not read the pamphlet and abruptly ended the interview saying that he had to "go reassess [his] life."

League sources told El Campo that the rankings are based off of a Coaches' Poll, a trigonometric equation with four independent variables (wins, losses, average weight, jersey color) and a sophisticated eenie-meenie-miney-mo selection process. "We think that the absence of one Coach's ballot probably screwed this all up. We've tested the eenie-meenie part and proofed the equation using both cosines, Pythagoras and, of course, FOIL." FOIL, a sophisticated method first developed by NASA astronauts for factoring binomials from Mars stands for first, inner, outer, last. "It's pretty close to the Hokey Pokey," as far as its instructions on where to put the operator's right foot, explained goalkeeper and resident math whiz Tim Snyder, "almost too close...."

An exclusive El Campo investigation revealed that the missing ballot belonged to the Crooks. The team still has Mustafa Ekrem Dimbiloglu listed as their manager on official District Sports records. "It was a symbolic gesture mostly, we had no idea it had any impact," said the team spokesman. When reached for comment, Dimbiloglu said "Oh [expletive]! I completely forgot to mail that in. You know what the problem was, Wolf Blitzer didn't tell me to do it." When asked to clarify, Dimbiloglu stated "if it isn't important to the bearded Jesus of the 24-hour news cycle, it's not important to the Ataturk of East Lansing." Aspects of that statement were still being checked for factual accuracy as this article went to press.

The team was inconsolable Monday. "I'm devastated," said defender Amber Lovell, who stayed at a nearby bar overnight. When asked if she was looking forward to next season, Lovell looked confused. "It's going to take these idiots that long to get my veggie burger?!?"