Rob Anthes was an assistant sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns will no longer appear. -The Daily Orange, May 2, 2006

OK, so I lied.

I promise I won’t fib again. No, really, I never intended on coming back. It just kind of happened.

Yes, this means the fine readers of The Daily Orange are in for at least eight more weeks of that wondrous mug shot and my equally astounding ramblings.

But wait right there. Before you flip to the Sudoku or (for our Web-version friends) jump to a different site, just wait a minute. This could be your big shot.

You’ve always wanted to be a Daily Orange columnist, haven’t you? You know more than the hacks that dirty these pages each day, right? Right.

So let’s see how smart you really are. I’ll let you, the reader, call the shots for a few weeks, and we’ll see where it takes us.

Before an anxious horde forms, I must set some ground rules.

– This is a family column. Let’s keep it clean and mature.

– You provide the topics. I do the writing. Sorry if that’s harsh, but I’m doing the best I can here. It is my name on the column.

– The topics need to pertain to sports and interest more than just a few people. If the Brew 3 intramural broomball team totally destroyed those clowns from Haven by 20 points, congrats but it’s not column material. And, no, a 21-point win won’t get you a mention either.

But if there’s any topic The D.O. has ignored, misrepresented or completely flubbed, send an e-mail to the address at the bottom of this column and I’ll look into it.

In this space, I hope to address issues that sports sections, and newspapers, don’t always delve into. Sports journalists often wrap themselves in stats and figures, but I’ll try to resist temptation and avoid listing Orange guard Eric Devendorf’s free-throw percentage in road games played on even-numbered days.

Instead let’s look at the people, issues and events that affect Syracuse University, the United States of America and the world through the lens of sports. There’s a lot there.

We’ll talk about issues surrounding the Syracuse athletic department, such as how SU can use its Big East brethren as models for improvement, and broader social issues like sexism and racism in sports. Maybe we even can chat with a Syracuse athlete bound for the professional level of a sport that doesn’t receive much recognition on The Hill.

These are just my ideas. A few thoughts from readers will make this space more colorful. The goal here is to find the story beneath all the other stories in the paper.

Maybe readers prefer columns with stats or clichs or even fabricated nonsense about the marching band. But I want to believe readers are smarter than that and they want more from the media than the surface of a story.

In the past, you’ve been at the mercy of the columnist and whether he felt motivated to do more work than spew 650 words onto a page and turn it in. That’s not fair. (On a side note, The Daily Orange hasn’t had a female sports columnist for at least the past four years. Just wanted to defend my pronoun use in the first sentence of this paragraph.)

OK, back to the point. Beside the five or so weeks of this column I’ve already budgeted, I am at your mercy. Send me your ideas. I can’t promise I will use all of them, but every idea will be considered.

Oh, and if I don’t receive enough ideas, I’ll be forced to write columns recounting the Rutgers football team’s glorious run to the Texas Bowl and the great quality of life in central New Jersey. Really.

Don’t delay. With your help, this could be a great and rewarding experience for all of us. Otherwise, it will only be rewarding to Brian Leonard fans.

Rob Anthes is an assistant sports editor emeritus at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear every Wednesday. E-mail him at rmanthes@syr.edu.

Published on January 15, 2007 at 12:00 pm