In the past several days"" I've received several letters telling me to fire our sports editor and a senior sportswriter. I've been told that I should step down as editor of this paper. A Student Congress representative even came into our office to complain on behalf of his ""constituents.""
I've witnessed some of the most passionate responses from our readers in my almost four years here because The Daily Tar Heel picked Duke to beat UNC in Wednesday's matchup between the Tobacco Road rivals.
Hundreds of you have gone online and contributed to message boards" and I've received at least a dozen letters to the editor.
I'm here to tell you that the paper made the right call - and not just because of the outcome of the basketball game.
Some readers have commented that because we are a student newspaper we should have some kind of slant in our coverage that favors the home team.
One of the most personally disturbing comments that I came across online was one questioning whether the DTH was upholding its journalistic integrity with its prediction.
Yes the DTH is a student-run newspaper. But that does not mean that we do not hold ourselves to professional standards.
Not all of our staffers want to be journalists after graduation but our newsroom serves as a learning lab for them to gain the skills they will need if they do decide to.
Many of our sportswriters hope to write professionally.
In that vein" they take their jobs very seriously. DTH sportswriters do not wear UNC apparel or colors when they attend games. They aren't permitted to be fans of the teams they cover. They can't join Carolina Fever.
I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to our sports desk to ask them if ""we"" won a game only to be corrected that" yes" ""they"" won the game.
That's professionalism.
Picking Duke to win wasn't a popular choice. Giving Coach K the advantage in that game over Roy Williams was even less so.
However" those decisions were made by people who have to put aside any personal affiliations they feel for UNC to give our readers a realistic analysis of the game.
Picking a Ty Lawson-less Tar Heel team to lose to Duke was hardly a stretch" as much as any die-hard fan hates to admit.
You wouldn't want a Hillary Clinton supporter writing laudatory things about her in an objective DTH news story. So why would you want a sports piece to discard studied analysis in favor of what's popular?
I'm not going to try to tell you that ""this was just a game"" because I know many of you feel much more strongly than that.
But while we respect and often honor school spirit" the DTH's role on campus must go beyond that attitude.
Admittedly complicating the DTH's coverage was the fact that you picked up the paper Thursday after the loss to see our masthead in Duke blue and a Blue Devil on the opinion page a result of a loss of our traditional bet with The Chronicle Duke's campus paper.
While I'm sure that served as a frustrating reminder of the team's loss for many of you it was not intended to rub the defeat in anyone's face.
That wager is a traditional one made between the editors-in-chief of the two student newspapers and is completely separate of our sports desk's coverage.
It was my personal duty to deliver copies of our newspaper to Durham last week not exactly a task that I relished.
And who knows? Maybe come March The Chronicle will pay us a return visit with their papers carrying a Carolina blue masthead.
