I have the sweetest job at The D.O.

All I need to do is write a few hundred words of opinion once a week and I get my face on the front page of a few thousand sports sections. The only requirement I need to meet is to entertain you and do it in about 1,000 words.

There’s no reporting here, no real research. Honestly, I wrote at least half of my columns this semester – including this one – in class.

But working for this sports department in any other capacity is neither easy nor always fun, and I think a lot of readers have misconceptions about this section and the kids that put it together.

So in this last week I write to you, I feel like giving a behind-the-scenes look at what it means to work for D.O. Sports.

First of all, this paper is a completely independent thing, an actual corporation. We have no faculty advisor, no legal or financial commitment to the school and certainly no obligation to write rose-colored stories that only focus on the good things about SU.

Luckily, that’s the case, because sportswriters and positive stories don’t get along. Sportswriters may be the most cynical people on Earth, mostly because while you get to act like a drunken fool at football games, we have to sit in a shirt and tie keeping track of Perry Patterson’s interceptions.

And the only way we even climb the ladder to get to cover the big sports like football is by covering the sports nobody cares about. Believe me, it’s not fun watching SU women’s soccer in the driving rain, just to write a story only the team, myself and everyone’s respective mothers will read. And that’s only if Mom can get to www.dailyorange.com.

We get perks though, for sure. Where students have to pay a comical $97 for football season tickets, we get in for free and get a free buffet lunch in the press box. Instead of waiting hours to get student basketball seats on the floor, we can show up a half hour before tip-off and still have our courtside spots reserved. Oh yeah, we get free food and drinks there, too.

The best part may be the travel and the people you get to meet. I’ve been to Florida, Connecticut, Pittsburgh and New York City twice on The D.O.’s dime. It’s a fierce competition among the beat writers over who gets to cover SU games at prime locations.

Last year for example, my editor had to put me in a Boston crab before I’d let him go to Notre Dame over me.

The name-dropping is nice, too. I’ve talked to Jim Brown about his acting career, complimented Rick Pitino on his stylish ties and spent 10 minutes in an airport terminal chatting up Mike Tirico. That’s all fun and games. It’s when we’re back on campus that this job really rags on you.

For instance, so many kids go crazy when they see athletes at Augie’s Pizza or Shaw Dining Hall. We writers don’t even give these athletes a second look because we’re so used to their clichd responses during interviews and watching their performances much more analytically than most students to spend hours of our personal time coming up with new and creative ways to tell their stories.

So while you might feel the need to buy Eric Devendorf a shot when you see him on Marshall Street, we don’t place him on any more of a pedestal than our Psych 205 teacher.

It’s probably this celebrity disconnect that irks student media the most. We put in similarly long hours at our craft as athletes do, except we at best get our name on a story you flip past on your way to Sudoku. Our GPAs plummet and our sleep cycles stink and Nike doesn’t sponsor us or give us free gear, no matter how many awesome headlines we write.

Same goes for all the student media sports outlets. Nobody watched Citrus/Hill TV until the ‘Over the Hill’ fiasco last year. Kids don’t listen to WAER’s great broadcasts. Z89 gets legitimate listenership, but that’s when it plays Chamillionaire, not when it broadcasts SU women’s basketball.

So I guess the thing you need to know about students covering sports is we do it for the love of the game, as strenuous of a relationship as it may be. And I don’t necessarily mean love of the games we cover; I mean love of the game we play, the one where our goal is to tell awesome stories and hope somebody writes a letter to the editor saying, ‘This article kept me gripping the page for every second I read it.’

Because honestly, we often could care less if Syracuse wins if it’s not interesting. The football team going 1-10 last year made for compelling drama – they were historically bad. The team going 6-6 a year before that just to get blown out in a bowl game? Not so entertaining. We’d much prefer epic futility than maddening mediocrity.

If we turn into fans, it affects our balanced coverage. So yeah, we’ll root for the basketball team – root for them to do what will make for dramatic, action-packed stories or root for them to make it to the Final Four so we can get free tickets to the biggest spectacle in college sports while we cover them for you.

Cynical? Yeah. Heartless? In a way.

We love sports and hate them at the same time. The Orange isn’t our team, it’s our job. Sometimes that’s for the better and sometimes for the worse.

My job allowed me to watch SU retire the No. 44 while Floyd Little put his arm around my shoulder and told me how awesome he felt.

My job also means I hate getting into debates about Orange athletics because I don’t want to talk about my job any more than a stockbroker wants to talk mutual funds over dinner.

So putting this section together is fun but not easy. It’s not as simple as, ‘Hey, you write well, go watch this game.’

But it is fun and very much worth it. You learn to wallow in your jadedness with fellow writers or laugh every time someone comes up with an absolutely hilarious headline for a story that can’t be printed because it’s too inappropriate for a family publication.

And if you’re lucky, you go through the symbolic hazing and crazy workload, hope your GPA doesn’t take a hit of more than a point or two and in the end get a space like this, with your face appearing in a faceless publication and tons of groupies flocking to admire your nut graphs.

That, by the way, is newspaper lingo for the thesis paragraph of a story.

And no, I don’t get any groupies.

That my friends, is sports at the Daily Orange, in about 1000 words.