Each time I hear the utterance of a cliché, it’s like a lead pipe to my head, followed by a straight, line-drive kick to the groin, mixed in with hard body blows to the stomach and chin. When I hear sports commentary I feel like I’m getting jumped in an alley by Agent Smith with Neo standing in the background pointing and laughing at me. It’s infuriating. Clichés have ferociously taken over the sports culture, and somebody better stop the bleeding soon or we’ll all get sucked dry and become walking, cliché-spouting sports zombies. Either that or we’ll start sprouting strings out of our backs that initiate automated replies like: “I really stepped up today. I needed to be a warrior in there and I got the job done.”

Yet you’re referring to the calculus test you just finished.

Believe me, the overuse of certain phraseology within the sports culture is nothing new. But it is as saturating as ever, and there is a definite trickle-down effect. All you have to do is pick up last week’s Ithacan.

The sports section displayed 27 clichés in just over three pages. Twenty-seven! Not just players and coaches, but writers are guilty as well, especially with the war clichés. Jim Hawver wrote that the field hockey team “began a heavy offensive assault” against Brockport after dropping behind 2-0. Football coach Mike Welch was quoted as saying after the Hobart game: “That was a battle.” Those war ones mostly emanate from football. Perhaps we can coronate the incredibly intelligent Kellen Winslow, Jr. of the University of Miami (Fla.) as president of the brand new CSM — Cliché-Speaking Machines.

“It’s war,” the tight end said after Miami lost to Tennessee this weekend. “They’re out there to kill you, so I’m out there to kill them. We don’t care about anybody but this U. They’re going after my legs. I’m going to come right back at them. I’m a … soldier.”

Aside from the obvious, although unintended, disrespect towards all soldiers fighting wars, he did issue an apology, that, ironically, was even more cliché than his original statements.

“I cannot begin to imagine the magnitude of war or its consequences,” he said.

Really? I never would have known.

I’m not asking for Hemingway here, but leave the battlefield be. In fact, let’s flush the other ugly sports phrases down the drain too. Sound byte garbage like “taking it one game at a time while making sure to focus on the task at hand but we’re still not taking them lightly because defense wins ball games so we need to just go out an compete,” needs to go.

God help us if this gets any worse.

The list of mainstream cliché violators is endless. Coaches and players from all sports, Stuart Scott, Billy Packer, Dick Vitale, Dan Deirdorf, Phil Simms, Stuart Scott, Sean Salisbury, Mike Golic, Stuart Scott, Michael Irvin, sideline reporters, John Madden, Barry Melrose, etc. are all card-carrying members of the CSM.

It’s an infectious pattern of speaking and thinking that spreads like a virus.

We’re just gonna have to put forth 110 percent to stop it.