It’s no great secret that Stony Brook University is lacking in athletic fervor.

This has never been a very sports-centric school. Expensive stadiums aside, the collective history of Stony Brook athletics isn’t much to gawk at. We’ve managed to earn a few championships, we’ve sent a handful of student-athletes to professional leagues. But beyond that, our fandom is basically Wolfie and that Madwolf guy on 94.3 The Shark.

From the outside, our athletic apathy is something of an enigma. Despite our Division I status, despite our teams bringing home three America East conference titles and three NCAA tournament berths this year, most of the student body just can’t be bothered to care. Whatever the quality of the on-field product, the stands at Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium remain largely empty.

College sports are stupidly popular across the country. College football and basketball games are broadcast nationwide to millions of people. Top-class programs routinely draw in billions of dollars for their universities from ravenous fans eager to see the physical exploits of the super-toned, the living Adonis…es that take to the court for schools like Duke and Ohio State.

So why not us?

Forget the implicit sexism in disregarding our highly successful women’s athletics programs for their lack of Y chromosomes alone — let’s blame the players.

Our players just can’t match up. Sure, they might be skilled, but what’s all the skill in the world worth if it’s packed into a decidedly human-sized frame?

There’s a simple solution to all of this: we just need to give all our student-athletes steroids.

Steroids have gotten a bad rap these past couple of decades, but their impact on the sports world has been immense.

Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens, the entire NFL — America’s athletic past is littered with steroid-fueled success stories. Something as simple as amphetamines helped propel Mickey Mantle to an all-time great baseball career, while Barry Bonds (allegedly) has HGH to thank for four MVP awards and the career home-run record.

Steroids have won trophies, lifted up entire nations, even slowed the march of aging itself. Imagine what they could do for our student-athletes.

You think you like Kylie Ohlmiller now? Well, imagine if Kylie Ohlmiller was eight stories tall and had biceps the size of California Redwoods.

I’d pay money to see that. I would pay all the money to get a chance to witness the feats of a women’s lacrosse team shot full of every bodybuilding chemical mankind can manufacture.

We would kill in football and basketball too. And by kill, I mean we would literally kill opposing players until our teams stood as national champions atop a pyramid of limbs and torsos. After all, who among us isn’t big enough to admit that contact sports are great because they feed off bloodlust?  

The financial incentives alone are too good to resist. Even if those pretentious moralizers in the NCAA find out and come down on us, it’s not like we’ll have to forfeit our winnings or our newfound prestige. You know what makes Barry Bonds feel better about not being in the Hall of Fame? Literally tens of millions of dollars.

We might not ever get to see the Loch Ness monster in person, but if we could just stuff our rosters with athletes that are closer to being Klingons than human beings, then that’s good enough.

So let’s stop pretending. Let’s give the campus something to be proud of, something to rally around. Let’s take the best and brightest biochemists Stony Brook has to offer and put them to work juicing our players all the way to the halls of Mount Olympus.

Let’s push the boundaries of human evolution and let’s have some fun in the process.