When I was a little kid, thumbing through the pages of Sports Illustrated on Saturday mornings, I used to be genuinely shocked by the magazine's weekly "Sign of the Apocalypse." Fan decides to eat nothing but pudding in protest of island NFL broadcast schedule? How ribald! You get the point.

As I got older, though, I realized that, yeah, you know -- those things really aren't that bad. Not nearly as bad as war, or genocide, or starvation. Those are all way, way worse than the fact that the U.S. has to send more soldiers to the Olympics than it does athletes. That's just sort of ironic, or quirky. Not really apocalyptic.

It is with that perspective that I present to you a genuine, real-deal sign our world is collapsing before our very eyes: Eighth-grader Michael Avery -- who, I might mention, IS IN EIGHTH GRADE -- has accepted a scholarship from Billy Gillispie and the Kentucky basketball program. Eighth grade, man. Eighth. Grade. Not a junior in high school. Not a sophomore. We're talking 'bout ... eighth grade. We're not talking about a senior. We talkin' bout eighth grade.

Whether or not this is a smart decision for either party is almost beside the point, but it bears a thought. For the kid, who may or may not be at his peak, I think it makes sense. To an eighth-grader, a scholarship offer is a virtual guarantee (though it's not written in blood), that regardless of what happens over the next four years, you have a place to play basketball. That sort of security is the thing most basketball-playing families dream of. For Kentucky, it's not outlandish either, because Gillispie wins a recruiting battle before it really begins, lines up talent for the future, and builds a player-coach relationship at a creepily young age.

Of course, that's the problem with all this. It's creepy. And exploitative. Think about when you were in eighth grade -- you were most definitely too busy playing Playstation to think about high school. Nevermind college. I worry for young Michael Avery, and not only because I fear he'll be dropped like a bad habit if Gillispie sees fit, or because this sets a pretty awful precedent for the future. I worry, because if I had to live with every decision I made in eighth grade for the rest of my life, well, yikes. I'd still be an (even more) uneducated glut, still thinking everything I saw in Sports Illustrated was a genuine sign of the apocalypse, when that title is worthy of far more unbelievable things.

Like, oh, I don't know ... when Billy Gillispie SIGNS AN EIGHTH GRADER. Stuff like that.

Related: Peculiarity, SEC Basketball