College Football: Stop Defending Your Conference

When it comes to college football, I am as passionate as they come—so after more than a year of hearing about which conference is the strongest and all that nonsense, I couldn't take it anymore.

First of all, how someone can "root" for a conference as a whole is beyond me.

I am a fan of both USC and Ohio State, so I will always hope UCLA and Michigan lose every game—but I really don't care about any other team in the conference unless it means something for the team that I root for.

If the rest of the Pac-10 or Big 10 goes 0-for-every-game-they-play, I wouldn't even think about them if the team I root for goes undefeated.

Yes, it's easy to ignore the whole "our conference sucks" or "our conference is the best" arguments if your team is a world-beating, BCS-bound, Juggernaut of the gridiron.

The problem begins when the team you root for doesn't perform the way you hoped.  Then the whining begins.

Enter the Ole Miss and Alabama fans—among others—with their petty arguments.

"If the team I root for played in (insert conference here), we would go to a New Year's Day bowl game and not go (insert bad win-loss record here)."

The truth?  If your team struggled in its conference, it would struggle in any other major conference—so just drop the charade.

Your team had a bad year—get over it, focus on next year, and don't blame it on scheduling or how tough the conference is.

On any sports talk website such as this one, when this argument comes up, its biggest backers are the fans of teams that had bad years.

If the problem ended there, things wouldn't be so complicated.  But wait—there's more.

As annoying as fans of bad teams are, fans of teams that "should have gone to a better bowl game" are probably worse.

Last year it seemed that half of the Top 25 was in the running for the national title game, and most fans used the argument that their conference was tougher than the other conference, or that the out-of-conference schedule of Team A was better than of Team B, and therefore Team A should go to a better bowl game.

For you BCS bashers out there, I just provided you with some more ammo for your never-ending quest for a playoff in college football (it ain't happening, but that's another article).  Without "strength of schedule" and other silly calculations, fans wouldn't care for the record of the rest of the conference.

Week in and week out, fans root for other teams that their own team has played already or that they will play in following weeks because it will "make our schedule look stronger."

Others even root for their own rivals becuse the conference will look stronger.

And don't get me started on the whole "Conference A is faster than Conference B" issue—that just doesn't make sense, and you look stupid saying it.

So if you're keeping score at home—fans of good teams complain, fans of bad teams complain, and fans of "slow" teams complain.

You can see where my frustration comes from.

To try and prevent this from happening next year, I have come up with a few guidelines.

Rule #1. Worry about how your team is doing this week and let the rest of the conference worry about themselves.

Rule #2. Do not blame other teams or other conferences if the team you root for is not doing well.

Rule #3. Follow rules #1 and #2.

Simple isn't it?

So the next time someone starts going off about how their team would be much better in another conference, tell them that the 4-8 team they root for better get a new coach that can recruit—or soon they'll be playing in the Sun Belt Conference.