When a 6-foot-2-inch, 240-pound linebacker plopped down in front of me, I wondered if it was all contrived.

A girl familiar with the football team said earlier that day the players were pissed at an author of a column in the campus newspaper.
The column was met with a flurry of criticism — from athletes, from fans, but not from me. Nope. I was the one who wrote it.

“The play-uhs are upset. You really should know ya’ audience bett-uh,” the girl told me with an East Coast dialect.
She was right. I didn’t know the team read my articles. My astonishment upon learning football players could decipher text gave way to paranoia when I remembered I had class with four of the brutes later that evening.

“S—-,” I thought to myself. They were going to snap my legs apart like a wishbone. Then they’d twirl the rest of me up like a damp towel to pop each other in the butt with while showering — a fitting revenge seeing as I’d been a pain in their asses.
It’s OK, I thought. It would be traumatic, but it would also be real go-to stuff for a column. Stuff that would make my editor’s pants swell.

Head up, shoulders back, I entered class and sat in my usual seat, two desks behind the quarterback and Neil Spencer, a defensive tackle. They weren’t there yet but Spencer’s backpack laid in his seat and on his desk was a copy of The Daily Aztec with my column.

“S—-,” I thought again. Maybe the rumors were true; maybe football players really could read.
Spencer was a quiet type in class, a doodler. He’d stare at his standardized sheets of notebook paper and scribble random, elaborate stuff. On the ridge of his nose he carried a gash that told tales of battles with other men equally bestial. He seemed cordial in previous encounters but even poodles can turn heinous in a pack.

That’s why coaches don’t allow players to sit together in class, because they’ll get infected with the pack mentality — a fear and desperation that attaches itself to the threat of being a group’s lowest-ranking subordinate. It prompts a roughing up of the most vulnerable runt, establishing superiority for the victor. The savagery often ends with a few puncture wounds, or an all-out ripping and tearing maneuver through a columnist’s jugular. I was preparing for the latter.

Before class began, in walked the quarterback and then finally Spencer and another football player. Only a few feet separated me from them as they sat. Though it was against team policy for players to sit together, this wasn’t abnormal.
Abnormal was later when a 6-foot-2-inch, 240-pound linebacker walked straight toward me, stopping just short of my desk to sit. He had The Daily Aztec scrunched in his right hand and the first thing he did once settling himself was open the paper to my column.

Were his actions coincidence, or was it contrived? Was he toying with me? He wasn’t in his usual seat.
The linebacker was reading my story line by line. It was a weird feeling: I’d never actually witnessed a football player in the act of reading. But really, it was a weird feeling. My corner of the room had become the hold of ravenous wild things content with chewing through my innards like chum. I sensed they knew who wrote it.

I needed to say something. So poking over the linebacker’s huge left shoulder as he read, I blurted, “How you like my article?”
My mind was quietly pissing itself.

He acknowledged me from the corner of his eye with a monotone response, and said, “Oh, you wrote this?” Whether he was genuine in his proclaimed ignorance, I couldn’t be certain. One thing I was sure of, he seemed very bored by my article, which was also weird because that never happens.

Upon announcing to my corner of the room that I’d authored the column, the linebacker had a few questions to which I obliged. I then looked at Spencer, whose large jawbone had cinched. He didn’t look at me, but I got his side profile and the gash on the ridge of his nose seemed to glare back at me.

“He don’t know s—- about s—-,” the quarterback said to Spencer, reassuring him the column wasn’t true and that I was full of it. Whether or not this pale, scrawny kid sitting two seats behind him was an intended receiver of the quarterback’s words, I don’t know. My ears caught them anyway.

Truth is, I’d have said the same thing if I were the quarterback, only louder and with a fist punch behind it. I wrote in my column that his leader was a leaver.

It was an absurdly accurate prediction. I wrote four weeks through the season that head coach Brady Hoke would depart SDSU, and Rocky Long, the secret coach-in-waiting, would be his successor. Sure enough, Hoke recently wiped his hands clean of the Aztecs with a mass text message to his players. My column turned from lunacy to prophecy. Everything I predicted happened.

I’m a genius.

I never died the day my column ran. Despite a heightened sense of tension, or paranoia, my legs were never snapped like a wishbone, and my body wasn’t twirled into a towel for ass-popping. Even my jugular remains well intact, entirely capable of saying I told you so to those who criticized me, and my column.
But I did endure one physical change that day: I left that classroom with much bigger balls than when I’d entered.

—Matt McClanahan is journalism senior.

—This column does necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.