NASA funding threatened after computer picks Villanova to win championship

HOUSTON, TX — Encouraged by Villanova’s improbable advancement into the third round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, NASA announced yesterday that a specially designed supercomputer had predicted “all along” that Villanova would end up winning the national championship.

Barry, as the supercomputer is affectionately known around NASA headquarters, was constructed in late 2007 with the sole purpose of determining the outcome of the 2008 tournament. While the exact cost of Barry remains classified, estimates of the machine’s price tag range between two and three billion dollars.

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“We were pretty nervous back in November when we flipped Barry on for the first time and saw ‘VILLANOV’ on Barry’s old-timey, all caps, eight-letter-maximum LED readout,” said Dr. Michael D. Griffin, chief of America’s space agency. “We thought we had another… well, another anything else NASA’s ever done, frankly, on our hands.”

When twelfth seed Villanova defeated fifth seeded Clemson last week, the deathly pall that usually typifies NASA morale began to lift slightly. As Villanova went on to an 84-72 victory against 13-seed Siena, Griffin and his deputies breathed a collective sigh of relief. They quickly met and decided they could no longer remain silent.

“Even if Barry ends up being wrong, at least he wasn’t totally wrong,” said Griffin. “At most this is going to be an ‘oops, wrong planet’ kind of mistake. I think it’s safe to say we’re past the point where it could turn into an ‘Oh my god, the flaming wreckage is falling back toward Los Angeles’ type of scenario. Which, as with anything our bumbling organization attempts, was far from clear at first.”

Friends and foes of NASA were united in questioning the wisdom of the announcement’s timing.

“Villanova? What the fuck?” said Rep. Robert “Bud” Cramer, Jr. (D-AL), whose Alabama district is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, a major recipient of NASA-related pork-barrel spending. “They could blow three billion dollars on robotic girlfriends for all of NASA’s pimply-faced engineers for all I care, but they’ve just got to keep their mouths shut.

“Villanova is clearly not going to make it to the Final Four, let alone win it all. Wisconsin’s going to have a field day in that region.”

Former astronaut Col. R. Michael Mullane (Ret.), now a fierce critic of NASA, said that he had spoken with at least a two dozen lawmakers who were displeased by NASA’s latest gaffe enough to sponsor a bill to halve the space agency’s budget.

“These boys get billions of dollars to jerk off to each fiscal year, and in a good year – a good year, mind you – they don’t build a flaming death trap that gets some doe-eyed teacher killed,” said Mullane. “I don’t care how much heart you think Scottie Reynolds is playing with right now, that half-cocked computer they’ve got down there is gonna seriously injure somebody if we don’t act quickly.”