Well boys and girls, it’s that time of year again. The leaves are starting to turn, the Cyclones are starting to lose conference football games (or are they just continuing?) and the chill in the air is starting to make your hooded sweatshirt useful for more than just shielding your eyes from the harsh glow of PowerPoint slides as you try to sleep through class.

It’s October, which means that it’s officially dental hygiene month (except in England, I’d imagine), healthy lung month (except for in a five-block radius around a chain-smoking Britney Spears) and clergy appreciation month (which I’m not even going to touch). Unofficially, it’s also playoff month. WNBA playoff month, that is.

So, for sports fans with a discerning eye and a low pain threshold, WNBA playoff month also makes October feel-a-little-less-sorry-for-the-visually-impaired month. But it’s not that every reasonable sports fan across the globe has arbitrarily decided to dislike, disparage and ignore the WNBA. It’s just that it has given us no other choice.

There’s a lot to hate about the league, but there are few things to despise more than the WNBA-players-are-sexy-too ad campaign that has been driven down our throats for the bulk of the league’s existence.

The WNBA should’ve known that constantly reminding its viewers that the league’s players have sex appeal is the surest way to make them doubt it. It reminds me of the moment when, while reading the 20th men’s magazine that featured a Serena Williams pictorial and an accompanying article labeling her a “unique and unconventional beauty,” I stopped believing she was one.

Overexposure and the overt pressure to view Williams as sexy made this “unique and unconventional beauty” suddenly look a lot more like “Ben Wallace with a better backhand” and left me thinking that the last time I had seen so much muscle packed into a dress was when Hulk Hogan wore a tutu in “Mr. Nanny.”

No legitimate sport clings solely to the sex appeal of its participants to market itself, which is why the 1993 Phillies’ National League Championship poster didn’t include John Kruk and Lenny Dykstra dressed up as Chippendales and why Tony Siragusa is typically asked to keep his shirt on during press events. Similarly, making Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird assume artificial poses, sporting makeup they hate and wearing dresses they feel ridiculous in, won’t make people think that they’re sexier, and it won’t bring credit to the league.

But the WNBA didn’t stop with just making a mockery out of its players and harpooning the credibility of women’s professional sports through its ads. It pushed the envelope.

The league decided to adopt a salary system in which the No. 1 pick in the 2004 draft (Taurasi) made less than every player in the WNBA with at least four years of experience. That’s like mandating that LeBron James make less in his rookie year than Olden Polynice because Polynice had proven himself to be a horrid NBA player since 1987, while James had not yet proven anything. One small consolation is that at one time Vin Baker was making more money than every player in the WNBA combined. Or is that even more depressing? Moving on …

What “We Got Next” in the long list of lousy WNBA decisions was the league’s puzzling selections for naming its teams. The WNBA, possibly hoping to attract the inmate demographic, inexplicably picked team names most readily associated with pain and discomfort. The names of the Charlotte Sting, Detroit Shock and Indiana Fever seem to form a list of symptoms stemming from an allergic reaction to a bee attack, which is an appropriate summary of the feeling one gets when actually watching the teams play.

But the most egregious sin the WNBA has committed is the poor quality of the product it puts out on the court. The WNBA game is just not exciting. Players take set shots from the top of the key that wouldn’t fly at seventh-grade boys’ games. Battles under the boards are about as fierce as Tupperware parties, and drives through the lane are executed with all the conviction and fervor of a Sunday night teen drama on the WB.

WNBA players compete below the rim, below the radar and below the standards of most sports fans, making labeling WNBA players as professional athletes just about as inappropriate as presenting the Guys Gone Wild DVD as a Mother’s Day gift. But maybe someday the league will improve (doubtful), evolve (questionable) or even disband (probable). Until then, October will always be auto battery safety month, pickled pepper month, and cross-your-fingers-hoping-that-this-WNBA-offseason-will-be-the-one-that-lasts-for-about-four-decades month.