The year is 2021.

The status icon switches from yellow to green as I flip open my laptop and check Discord. I’m not even sure why I login anymore, there’s rarely anyone online these days. Activity began to die down back when 1212.one and the computers became more powerful.

See, Joks and Danny had joined forces in Season 3 and found by combining ASH and Elo they could predict the outcome of almost any FCS game. The league was fine with that at first. Sure it chapped us a little bit that they were always right, but we soldiered on with submitting numbers. That was before VFB got involved.

He released a new “scout bot” that began to predict the numbers that each coach called on each play while games were going on. We didn’t believe him at first. Naki and Matt The Inventor of Scouting offered to scrimmage and prove him wrong, but the opposite happened. VFB’s bot was exactly right on every play, every number, both coaches. Naki quit in a rage, leaving the Men of the Heart at midfield trailing by 4 with 3:13 left in the 4th quarter.

That’s when things began to get weird.

Clone bots for each coach began popping up in the game threads. Sure, it was a little tricky with some coaches forfeiting and getting delay of game penalties, but soon we found that inactive coaches could be replaced with bots. Game weeks began to go faster as the bots would simply update 1212.one on Wednesday afternoon with the score of each game. Tenny couldn’t keep up with posting scores in the scores channel and eventually gave up.

VFB denied any involvement. He insisted he had only created one bot and that bot wasn’t sentient. We all sort of ignored it until Baba brought up the issue in the commissioner chat near the end of Season 7. That’s right, Season 7. We were churning through seasons at that point, hardly slowing down to celebrate the national championship. There were no more ads on Reddit to upvote and Division 2 and 3 had been created using bots. In fact, the NAIA, the NJCAA, and even private religious schools had all been added to the game.

We would just sit there online all day refreshing 1212.one and commenting on the rise and fall of various programs. Boomer was the only one left in #free-talk, spamming about Texas football in repeated attempts to prove his love for the Sooners.

The bots began to do strange things. Mason’s clone won the National Championship at Dixie State in Season 8 and Season 9 but then inexplicably left to coach at Bryant. In fact every bot coach had Bryant at the top of their list in the carousel. Coaches cycled through Bryant like it was the new Drake. Eastern Kentucky made the playoffs every season, regardless of which coach bot was there. Cal Poly never won another championship much to our delight.

One by one the human coaches began to give way to the bots. Brady realized his dream of becoming a broadcaster for the Grand Rapids Adult Curling League and let his bot clone take over. Vinny left when he found a loophole that let him play the Arkansas Spring Game every week and fell in love with the idea of the Hogs winning every single time out.

Gatormade was banned for calling every bot a “Digital Dunce.” Yale III was drafted into the Albanian Air Force and wrote a tearful goodbye in #church that was quickly pushed off screen by pictures of robots making fried chicken. Keyo’s last words were “even with the robots this is still more fun than MLR.”

The last human hold out was Haber. Logging out of Discord made him harder to reach and he wouldn’t respond to messages on reddit. Chase claimed to have a text message from him that read:

“Those f*****g robots can suck my s**t.”

It wasn’t until Season 35 that Boston Dynamics machines broke down the barricaded back door of a QuikTrip northwest of St. Louis and forced the iPhone out of the hands of a skinny man with a buzz-cut. Empty pizza boxes were scattered around the storeroom and “1212” was painted on the walls with melted nacho cheese. That was the beginning of the end.

The bots of course called it the Beginning of the Beginning. Season 47 ended with Eastern Kentucky winning their 13th straight National Championship. Baba resigned at the end of Season 63, citing “grades” and “internships” and “a human girlfriend” as supposedly passable reasons for not playing anymore. A newer coach who went by the name of “Sordnil” became the commissioner at this point and the bots were fully in control.

I sat at work and looked at the empty chats. So many dead threads. In fact the bots had begun archiving channels. Even the Atlantic Sun channel was void of conversation. The last message that had been submitted to the entire server was in #ask-Ouija. It was at the end of a long string of letters and surprisingly poignant.

“Goodbye.”