Friday column: Some things you expect; others ...

You’re the Cincinnati Bengals (God help you).

You have a history of drafting athletes with “issues,” which helps explain your 46-49 record under Marvin Lewis. So you draft massive Alabama lineman Andre Smith, who has both character issues and weight issues.

Smith sits out all of training camp and most of the preseason before inking his contract, then shows up this week — all 335 pounds of him — and promptly fractures his left foot in a simple drill.

Surprise.

* * *

You’re a teenager in the little, nowhere town of Noosaville, Australia (pop. 6528), and you’re up to no good. You and a buddy enter a house at night and accidentally awaken what you take to be an old biddy.

No problem.

You just grab her by the throat and threaten her — that’ll keep her quiet, you think.

Only this biddy grabs you by the ear and strikes you in the groin — with her titanium knee, no less — then other people in the house show up and sit on you and your pal until the police arrive. Now you’re facing charges, as well as the ignominy of being taken down by a 72-year-old grandmother.

But this, you discover, isn’t your run-of-the-mill grandmamma. It’s Aussie swimming great Dawn Fraser, who won gold medals in three — count ’em, three — Olympic Games. And she appears to have taken umbrage at your actions.

“I was threatened by the way he spoke to me and I’d never been spoken to like what he called me,” Fraser said. “I think I lost it.”

Yes, it seemed like an easy score, but in life there’s always the unexpected.

Surprise!

* * *

You’re Michigan athletics director Bill Martin, the man who hired Rich Rodriguez to be the Wolverines head football coach, spiriting him away from West Virginia. (That's Rodriguez in the photo above, assuring somebody of something back in his Mountaineer days.)

When you employed him, you knew he’d once agreed in principle to coach Alabama, only to pull out at the last second, leaving the Crimson Tide red-faced.

You knew he’d promised Mountaineer recruits he’d be in Morgantown the rest of his career and had even signed an extension at West Virginia four months — count ’em, four! — before quitting to come to Ann Arbor.

You knew in West Virginia he’d agreed to pay a $4 million buyout to the Mountaineers if he broke his contract to jump to another school, then tried to weasel out of paying.

Now, your coach is flatly denying the charge by current and former players that he cut corners with the NCAA rules that limit the number of hours the student-athletes spend on football-related activities.

But the NCAA is investigating, and if it turns out Rodriguez’s word on this — as in so many other things — can’t be trusted …

Surprise?