The college football season is upon us. It’s an important year for my alma mater (Aren’t they all? Yeah. But this one particularly so.). Of course, about half of the attention directed at college football has to do with things taking place off the field. Possible SEC expansion. The NCAA’s flirtation with the Death Penalty with regard to Miami.
I was about to make a comment about the NFL’s offseason never being so eventful, but I suppose this year was an exception to that.
I know that this is more a political blog, but who all out there will be watching? Who will you be rooting for? You don’t have to give the exact team (I’m not), but does your alma mater feel a team? If not, do you root for your home state team? Or did you pick a team from a dart board?
My school has not been in contention for a national championship for quite some time, so historically I’ve rooted for the schools where my father and brother went. Some seasons I will root for a non-BCS team to have a good run. But this year? This year I am just hoping that a team that is not from the SEC wins a championship for once.
My alma mater is in the very unusual position of being ranked in the pre-season top ten, with an outside chance of competing for the BCS title. So after being pleasantly surprised by their success last year, I expect that this year will hold more in the way of dashed hopes.
One of the things that I like about college football is that different schools have different levels of expectation. Some are happy to make a bowl game. Some want to be ranked. Others to win their conference. Some want to be ranked in the top ten and/or make a BCS bowl game. I mean, I’m sure everyone would *like* to be contenders for the national championship, but it’s not like the NFL where everything is so geared towards that one, big game. That’s my (admittedly not-very-popular) opinion.
Watch out for Sconnie. But i say that every year.
Here is a ridiculous piece of persuasion appealing to your system of values rather than your place of residence or birth or school attendance making the case for rooting for Oregon.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/09/why-you-should-root-for-oregon-football
My counter? Quack. If these kind of arguments succeed in recruiting you to “root” for a given team, then from what I can tell, you’re not doing the kind of rooting that I conceive of when I think sports partisanship.
“Fan” stands for “fanatic,” by the way.
As a Wisconsin alum, I mostly follow the Badgers, but I don’t rise and fall with them the way a real fan would. As a resident of an SEC state, I do sorta pay attention to them as well but I certainly won’t root for them. And I find their fans obnoxious in a special way that outclasses those of most other teams/leagues.
Sports don’t carry the thrill for me the way they used to, video games provide the excitement and conflict while allowing me to, you know, actually be the one winning or losing.
The unbearability of SEC fans is one of the reasons I’m hoping some school somewhere else wins the championship this year.
As a Wisconsin alum, you should probably be rooting for the Iowa Hawkeyes since most of your coaching staffs end up being former Hawkeyes.
But I’m biased and bleed black and gold. : )
So, Mark, do you have a stake in the Utah/BYU game? I traditionally root for the Utes because it’s the University of Iniquity (at least, compared to BYU and USU).
Absolutely. I pull for the Utes but more out of anti-BYU feelings than pro-Utah feelings.
But I gotta give BYU credit for benching the basketball player who was boinking his girlfriend in violation of the honor code. They could have easily mealy-mouthed their way into exempting him from penalty or swept it under the rug to the benefit of their basketball team, but they stuck to their principles regardless of the importance of the guy to their team. Do I think the honor code is whack? Yep. But at least they’re consistent.
Although there was that McMahon guy that somehow managed to evade the long noose of the honor code. Funny, he still isn’t in the BYU hall of fame though. Coincidence?
Couldn’t agree more with regard to Davies. They put their money where their mouth was on that one, even when it hurt.
This post is actually coincidental to our discussion on sports fandom (though maybe having written this post put the thought in my mind). I wrote it on a plane and had to track it down.
I half-heartedly root against Oregon for rather frivolous reasons. Namely, they were one of the trailblazers of the uniform-of-the-week trend. I also have a mild preference for landgrants over flagships. If we end up relocating to Oregon (a possibility) my perspective might change.
I hope it was clear this comment was tongue-in-cheek. I enjoyed our discussion, Will.
It occurred to me that there is one factor that unaffiliated people considering making affiliations in both arenas most definitely do take into account in each, to varying extents: Am I Going With A Winner?
It’s all good. I do actually plan to broach the subject again soon, I think. This was just kind of a weird coincidence.
You have to be careful about going with the winner, cause you don’t want to be one of *those* people. But going with a loser is painful and only recommended for the masochist.
Oddly, Facebook decided for some reason that I am a fan of the St. Louis Blues. I barely even know the rules of hockey and have no connections with St. Louis. Facebook was successful in discerning my position on gay marriage. So I wonder what it is about my worldview that says “Go Blues!” 🙂
I’m still a college football fan (though in a watered down ACC/Big East way) but man, it gets harder every year.
There’s no way a system can remain ‘clean’ when you got millions of revenue coming in, but are only permitted to pay your basic labor force at most 10’s of thousands of dollars a year. That money’s going to flow somewhere. (and then there’s the stories depending on how one does the accounting that a good many programs lose money)
Last year I did a statistical analysis of the conferences, looking at OOC games and controlling for conference record (so Ohio State beating Duke wouldn’t count for much, but the other way around would help the ACC and hurt the Big Ten), opposing conference strength, and home field advantage (when applicable).
The results were that the ACC and Big East have a bad rap. The ACC was virtually tied with the Big 12 for #3 (the Big 12 came out ahead on 9 metrics, the ACC on 7) and the Big East did better than the Big Ten and Mountain West.
This was primarily looking at the BCS conferences plus the MWC (which I included because I wanted to see how they stacked up). It didn’t include last year, though, which would have dragged the BE down.
On the upshot for the BE, it’s starting to look like they may be getting some good teams from the maybe-dissolving Big 12.
I live in a SEC state and would like all of you to know that what we lack in brain power we more than make up for it in stupidity. Please have pity on us, not only did our quarterback get punted off the team because of a bar fight, we are facing a slow moving tropical storm that might give us as much a two feet of rain.
The quarterback had the cops search his apartment for DNA evidence and they took forty-nine pairs of shoes from his place. Does anybody know what a male would do with that many pairs of shoes? To me, that sounds more like a rich Filapino than a quarterback.
not watching. no tv. will read paper. paper will cover steelers.
My alma mater voted its football program out of existence in my senior year, and was never worth much anyway. So my college experience didn’t have football as a prominent part of its culture. I’ve always been at something of a loss as to how to pick a team to follow as a result. I could follow Cal or UCLA as ‘sister schools’ or I could follow a program through a friend as I’ve done with USC or Oregon in the past. But it just doesn’t seem natural or comfortable.
When it comes to a lot of the franchise schools, I really think that they should have foregone having their own athletics program and teamed up with a sister school. I would think that a lot of people who go to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs would probably rather have a good deal on CU Buffaloes tickets than Division II athletics.
I should have added, “But it just doesn’t seem natural or comfortable or durable.” I have a durable fandom for the Green Bay Packers, but lacking the roots of a college team to root for, my fandom at that level is transitory and unintense.
With that said, if there were a tradition of sister schools with some sort of apparent relationship, as Will suggests for Colorado Springs and the University of Colorado, I might find myself enjoying the Bruins or the Golden Bears a lot more than I tend to.
I am just getting to this post now, and that’s a good thing. If I had seen it earlier today before the LSU game I would have talked some pretty serious Oregon smack.
Now, though…
Looks like we’re back to our historic comfort zone of rooting for a top three spot in the Pac-10.
Pac 12!
This season of football will be the greatest season on record, because it will be the only one with twelve teams in the Big Ten and ten teams in the Big 12. No-one can resist a little inward chuckle at that.
It’ll change after this season; the Big 12 will dissolve once Oklahoma makes the decision in a few weeks to move to the Pac 12, and Texas, Texas Tech and Okie State with it.
But, ahh, for these few months . . .
I missed this post originally, and that makes me sad. I think we need some high-profile front-page spats about college football.