Outside

There are two things you can be sure of when you begin penning a sports column, even if most of what you write, like in this column, is intentionally childish, mostly ridiculous and deep-fried in sarcasm. The first thing is, a few people will really like what you write, and maybe a few of them will tell you so. Secondly, a few people will really not like what you're writing and all of them will tell you about it.
For example, here's what happened on Thursday:
First the phone rang in our office, as it does at least 10 times a day. Then, someone told me I had a call. I answered jovially, because that's how I greet the people kind enough to call me.

For all of you who started paying attention to college basketball sometime at the end of February and are getting all pissy because there are two teams from outside the sacred circle of the BCS fraternity in the Final Four, you really need to shut up. Stop calling into sports talk radio shows (no one listens to that stuff anymore), don't bitch about your bracket in public (everyone is screwed, so don't act so special) and if it's that damn hard for you to believe that both Butler and Virginia Commonwealth universities are in the Final Four, you shouldn't be watching college basketball.

Can you believe these unions? They're ruining America, y'all! First it was those greedy teachers, who literally make thousands of dollars every year and had to be smacked down by the brave governors of Wisconsin and other states with large amounts of farmland and underarm fat. Then it was cops and firemen and all the other evil people I heard about from that Hannity guy, who literally makes 40 million dollars each year, mostly because he's not in a union, I guess.
There was one good union in this god-forsaken country, but now that's been decertified. Go figure. That union, of course, is the National Football League Player's Association, which has been entangled in a dispute with team owners over the collective bargaining agreement between the two entities. Those owners want to make the NFL schedule two games longer, making for an 18-game season (full of exciting injuries and lackluster back-up quarterback play, no doubt) and the players are all like, “Hells to the no! We ain't going to smash our brains into each other for two more games. Did you know that some us only make half a million bucks a year? And Peyton Manning only makes $15 million a year, and has to do Oreo commercials to make ends meet.”

Let me clarify one thing before we get started with the NCAA Basketball Tournament: A lot of the stuff I predict won't happen… or won't happen how I want it to. Or it will happen, but I'll miss it because I have a stupid job that makes me sit at a stupid desk without a TV or ample bandwidth to stream four games at once. I'd quit, but I'd probably regret that sometime in mid-April… or when the sweet sixteen is occupied exclusively by boring zone-playing, top-seeded state schools.
So yeah, we got that out of the way, thus preventing you from sending me one of those “you were wrong” e-mails in the coming three weeks.