On Sunday afternoon, I was watching football and eating pizza and trying to share SB Nation's fine work on the Internet. One of these pieces of work was an in-game story about how the Green Bay Packers had been ravaged by injuries and were down to just one running back. This left them with just Johnathan Franklin, which was noteworthy since he ended up fumbling and costing the team the game.
The most useless sports-related fact on Wikipedia
I believe I have found the most inane sports-related fact on the Wikipedia. I defy you to best me (or at least tell me the results of Samkon Gado’s second attempt at taking the MCAT.)
Grant Halverson
This person, who pays at best modest attention to football, uttered four fateful words, as a joke about the team's plight: "Somebody call Samkon Gado!"
This got me looking to recall things about the career of Gado, who was an OK running back for the Packers for a few years in the mid-2000s. As I do for many sports-related inquiries when I just need the basic framework of a person’s career, I turned to the Wikipedia.
On his page, I found everything I needed to know, such as that Gado was the NFL Rookie of the Month in November 2005. I also found much, much more. The depth and breadth of Gado's Wikipedia page is immense. It details specific moments in games Gado played, and his free agent trials and travails, ending with the Tennessee Titans in 2010 training camp.
It also included what, by my estimation, is the most useless fact I’ve ever encountered on the Wikipedia.
Gado received a bachelor's degree in health promotions while taking pre-med courses at Liberty University; he has already taken the MCAT and plans to retake it on July 13, 2007.
Not that Gado is interested in becoming a doctor. That’s a modestly interesting biographical fact. It’s that once upon a time, somebody thought it would be useful to let the denizens of the Internet know that Samkon Gado intended to take the MCAT on a specific date. Not that he actually took it. That he had plans to take it in the future.
I wanted to take a picture with a newspaper as proof that this piece of information was still on the Internet, unaltered, in 2013. So I took a screenshot of Gado’s Wikipedia page, SB Nation’s home page from today, Sept. 24, 2013, which shows my Spotify listening to a Drake song on the album he released today.
Six years have come and gone, and nobody has thought to fix this cliffhanger. Gado remains stuck in time, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, Samkon is constantly peering into the future, but never able to reach his goal, a modern-day Sisyphus, Samkon is forced to inhabit the brief period of time after he planned on taking his MCAT, but before he was able to take it.
The suspense is killing me. Did Gado ever take the MCAT again? Did his scores improve from the first time he took the test? Did his hours and hours of rigorous study cause a downturn in his play, leading to the Houston Texans releasing him in October of 2007? The Wikipedia leaves these crucial gaps in our knowledge of Samkon Gado’s life experience unfilled.
Dear world: If you have information on Samkon Gado’s MCAT, please tell us. No, not his first one. We know about that one. We want to know about the one he took on July 13, 2007 -- if he ever did take it. (Alternately: find a more inane fact on the Wikipedia.)
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