How Not to Look Like a Fool In April

So we decided to create a post for April Fools Day. We took the fact that Kentucky had not scheduled any out-of-conference games beyond the 2015 season. We knew that UAB not scheduling any such games beyond 2016 became a clue in the story that was them ending their football program, so we wrote an article to that effect about Kentucky.

The post has done tremendous traffic for us, and gotten a lot of great responses. I would put the division of response types as follows: 90% "ha, that's pretty funny", 5% "nice work/i guess it's a little funny", and 5% "wait, is this real?" (no, it wasn't).

And then, the morning after - at about 5 AM Central Standard Time, when most folks were sipping their morning coffee, this happened on our Facebook timeline:

Well, this is awkward. pic.twitter.com/QkGumi1Zuq

— Underdog Dynasty (@underdogdynasty) April 2, 2015

Good grief.

Shall we take a look at where this poor guy went wrong?

Like, I know that it's not always the first place that your eyes go whenever you visit any web page, but right there in the address bar, at the end, it says "APRIL FOOLS JOKE." Maybe not the easiest thing to notice, but also maybe a good place to look before you go shooting off at the mouth under the assumption this is being presented as fact.

What else is there? Ah, yes:

That line in the middle there, I actually had that very same thought. As I was writing the story I thought "no matter how believable we make this, it's public knowledge that UK is spending $160 million on football facility renovations, so that fact alone makes this story illogical." Clearly I was using backwards logic.

My personal favorite is the part where he says that "clearly, our goal was to undermine 'Big Blue Nation' through slander." I don't know if you noticed, but I mentioned in the first paragraph of the article (the one serious portion of it) that I have no ill will or bias towards the school. Like, I literally do not give a crap about Kentucky athletics, they were just a convenient April Fools target.

Of course, our clever gentlemen decided to toss us one final parting shot, which clearly helped his cause and advanced his narrative as an expert on all things Kentucky athletics:

Ooooooooh, BURN. You got us good, Brent McGinnis, you got us good.