Sports
Arizona Leads USA TODAY Sports Poll, Triggers Apocalyptic Fax Jam at State Capitol
State officials confirm that the only known fix is a surprise loss to Arizona State.
The fax machine in the Arizona governor's press office began its latest possession at 3:17 PM local time, precisely when the USA TODAY Sports Top 25 poll update was released, confirming Arizona's lead. Instead of one clean sheet, the ancient device shuddered to life like a dying animal and began ejecting a continuous stream of paper bearing nothing but the phrase 'ARIZONA LEADS' in 72-point font.
A junior communications aide, tasked with retrieving a routine press release about highway funding, was immediately buried under a waist-high mound of paper, his muffled cries for help drowned out by the machine's demonic whirring. The incident marked the 47th consecutive week the cursed device has reacted violently to the school's poll position, a phenomenon officials have code-named 'Operation Consensus Signal.' Governor Katie Hobbs, upon being notified, allegedly shrugged and muttered, 'If the poll leads, we lead,' before directing her entire staff to treat the fax stream as the state's new governing document.
This led to immediate bureaucratic chaos. The Department of Transportation, interpreting a particularly smudged page as a literal command, began painting 'ARIZONA LEADS' in fresh asphalt on all major interstate on-ramps.
The State Parks division, meanwhile, started aggressively relabeling all hiking trail difficulty ratings from 'Easy' or 'Strenuous' to 'College Basketball,' leaving families stranded on Camelback Mountain, confused but allegedly surging with school spirit. The situation escalated when the fax machine, seemingly dissatisfied with its output, began transmitting rankings for sports that do not exist.
Pages emerged detailing the top 25 rankings for 'Competitive Cactus Watering' and 'Sonoran Desert Shade-Throwing,' with Arizona naturally leading both. A team of IT consultants from Tempe was summoned, but they could only confirm the machine was 'operating with a composite momentum score of 71.3' before one of them was hit in the face with a paper jam that smelled faintly of burnt hopes and nacho cheese.
Just as the National Guard was being placed on standby to handle the paper avalanche, the climax arrived. The machine emitted a single, final page.
The entire cabinet held its breath, expecting a prophetic decree. The page read: 'Illinois Surges.' Then, with a pathetic gurgle, the machine ran out of toner.
The anticlimax was palpable. The Secretary of State immediately proposed a bill to move all future governance to a more reliable platform, suggesting a national poll to rank states based on their ability to operate a voicemail system.