Are you all sure about Schanz?

Some people can really get down the rabbit hole when it comes to conspiracy theories.

Sometimes they are thinking too hard about something and finding things that aren’t there. Other times, they are looking at a problem too simplistically, creating a conspiracy theory out of ignorance. Other times problems may have legitimate questions that we simply don’t know the answers to, and the creation of a theory is a way to cope with not having those answers.

I’m not here to judge people who believe in conspiracy theories. Quite frankly, the only person crazier than the conspiracy theorist is the person who thinks nothing ever holds any water.

It is my turn to be the conspiracy theorist.

So here it goes: Chris Schanz isn’t a real person. He does not exist.

I know what many of you who just read that may be thinking. “Andrew you silly goose, Chris is real. I’ve seen him cover plenty of games. I’ve talked to him plenty of times.”

Have you?

Ray Cooney is heavily involved in Jay County Civic Theatre. Did you talk to Chris or Ray in character?

Ray successfully covered both sports and his managing editor responsibilities for 15 months and stayed afloat. He was clearly capable of handling both jobs. Maybe he played as the Chris character for those seven years and it just got stale so he quit the act for those final 15 months.

That has to be the answer.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t something Ray could have pulled off alone. Many people would be coming together to gaslight me into believing Chris existed. Nearly everyone has said great things about him. To make it even more believable, I’ve gotten a negative review or two. 

These communities are really committed to trying to convince me he’s real. It’s insane. But it’s definitely a plot to convince me … it can’t be that he actually was a person that people held different opinions on.

However, it is suspicious that I’ve never seen him or heard his voice before. I haven’t even overheard him on the phone with my coworkers before.

“Andrew, you must have seen him before in a picture.”

Sure I have. But it's weird how none of the pictures include someone from this community. It’s always his wife. When you enter his name into The Commercial Review’s search bar, it even brings up a photo of him and Chrissy.

A picture of him and someone from these communities simply doesn’t exist … or maybe I just haven’t looked for one. Well either way, I haven’t seen it so it obviously must not exist.

But Ray and Bailey Cline are just so determined to make me believe that he exists.

So much so, that they went out of their way to create a fake email address to pose as “Chris” and send me a message. But I’m too smart for that. I saw right through their ruse. They made too many errors.

Firstly, they just simply regurgitated the same old story. They didn’t even go through the effort of creating another layer of depth to the fabricated personality. “Chris” talked about how he had two different stints at the paper, the people who have covered sports for us over the past two decades, the difficulty to finally leave and about some of the teams and athletes from the past couple of years that would have had overlap between me and him.

All of these things can clearly be described by the fact that Ray covered all of these teams and players, as well as repeating the timeline that Ray set without adding anything new.

It gets deeper though. Ray and Bailey knew about the email. That can only be explained by the fact that they were the ones to craft it.

The nail in the coffin was the overall message. It was to not get too caught up and to get some sleep. Ray couldn’t have made it more obvious.

All I’ve heard since arriving in Portland in March was that I need to get on an “adult sleep schedule.” This email was clearly just Ray making a last ditch effort to get me to sleep as opposed to staying up all night watching college basketball. I know your game Cooney.

“But Andrew, what if the story correlated because it’s accurate? What if Ray and Bailey knew about the email because Chris blind carbon copied them? What if he sent that message because he’s a genuinely good guy who is looking out for your health because he’s been there before?”

Well, to that, I have to say: Crap.

Maybe Chris is real.

It is inconsistent how Chris replied to my response to the “get some sleep” message.

My rebuttal was to send him a tweet from CBS college basketball analyst Jon Rothstien that read “We sleep in May.” 

Chris respected the rebuttal.

That couldn’t have been the case if Ray or Bailey sent the email. Ray’s response would have been to tell me to put my head on straight. Bailey isn’t sports literate enough to understand the reference.

Well “Chris” you sure do make a hard case of your existence. Too bad for you, you’ve run into the most stubborn, argumentative human to exist, maybe ever.

So “Chris” if you want to prove once and for all that you are in fact a real person that has lived in this corner of the border of Indiana and Ohio, I guess you’ll just have to come down and prove it yourself.

The ball is in your court. Boy, will it be fun annoying Ray and Bailey with this stance for the next half a year until you make an appearance.