Civilized Hatred: Hating the Team and Not the Fans

I hate Michigan. 

Being a fan of Ohio State, this is expected. 

I also hate Penn State, Illinois, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan State, and Purdue.

Yeah, they’re in “my” conference, but on any given Saturday in autumn, they play “my” team.  As notoriously pessimistic as I am about the Buckeyes, there is no other school I would consider rooting for in college football.

By that logic, I also hate the Gators, LSU, and USC, just for spending five years in the Trojan bandwagon hell that is Orange County. Trying to find a Trojan fan in Orange County that doesn’t just like the team because “they win a lot” is like trying to ask Lee Corso to stop picking winners by wearing the foam heads of mascots on “Game Day.”

Does that mean I hate Gator, Tiger, Wolverine and Trojan fans that passionately follow their teams through all their respective ups and downs as much as I do with the Buckeyes?

Hell no.

As a matter of fact, some of the most intelligent sports discussions I’ve had have been with Trojan fans when I lived in Southern California, and even a couple of Gator fans at the Phoenix airport after that embarrassing 41-14 slaughtering the night before in January 2007. 

I’ve even gone so far as to congratulate Wolverine fans for doing what we couldn’t a year earlier—defeating Florida, which they did in the Capitol One Bowl last January. 

However, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t take a perverse delight in watching Michigan (also known to Buckeye fans as “SCUM," “That School Up North,” or "TSUN") fall to Appalachian State and Oregon earlier in the 2007 season. 

The Buckeyes lost to both Florida and LSU in embarrassing fashion, and everyone outside the state of Ohio was drinking Buckeye—flavored Haterade.  We were “too slow” and “couldn’t keep up with the SEC speed” and whatever other examples were rubbed in our faces to explain the slaughtering in back-to-back championship games. 

For what it's worth, the rest of college football nation had every right to hate the Buckeyes, watching those teams fail as miserably as they did. 

It’s when unfounded criticism and harassment of fans, either at the hands of some classless LSU fans in the Superdome, or when Buckeye fans harass fans of opposing teams when they visit the Shoe, that bothers me. 

It may look hypocritical on the surface, but there is such a thing as hating the team (and doing so in a respectful manner) without acting like an obnoxious jackass to the opposing fans. 

Maybe I have skewed ideals of how a sports fan should behave in regards to rival teams, but there’s a fine line between harassment or assault, and some good-old fashioned ribbing. 

Let’s face it: If it weren’t for sports rivalries, why would any of us bother following the teams we love?  What would Ohio State strive for if we didn’t have Michigan?  Or if Auburn didn’t have Alabama?  Or any other historic rivalry in any sport for that matter?

Of course, I use college football as my primary example only because it’s the one sport I follow religiously. I have other sports teams I follow. 

For instance, I’m also a fan of the Los Angeles Angels, and hate the Oakland Athletics. However, most of my friends in college are from Northern California and live and die by the A’s. 

I’d be lying if I said we didn’t have some heated discussions about our respective teams, but nothing that ever resulted in overly-offensive language or physical assault. 

Then again, most of my friends in college who followed the A’s were peace studies majors, so it took a lot of work to get them riled up.

I’ve left comments before explaining how I don’t understand for the life of me how or why fans in the SEC defend each others’ teams. 

Where I’m from, you’re more likely to see Woody Hayes’ zombified corpse rise from the dead and take control of the football team away from Jim Tressel than see an Ohio State fan root for the Michigan in any scenario. 

Some may argue that strength of schedule and rankings depend on how well the other teams in your conference play, and while that’s a valid argument, I can honestly say I’ve never entertained the notion of rooting for Indiana to beat Purdue, or for Wisconsin to beat Iowa just to make the Buckeyes look better. 

In a perfect world (one that probably only makes sense in my head), all those teams would lose to each other, while the Buckeyes continue to win the games they’re scheduled to play, regardless of how strong or weak the Big Ten conference is in any given year. 

Since this is reality though, you can’t have it both ways. Forced to choose, I’d probably root for the Hoosiers and Iowa, just because I’m a sucker for underdogs and in turn, sacrifice my team’s chance at looking stronger in the national spotlight.

With that said, we could all probably benefit from being more civil towards each other when it comes to posting comments about our favorite teams. 

Some of us need to be more optimistic (I know who I am…) and some of us need to lay off the ad-hominem attacks of other fans just because we don’t like their school or conference (i.e. “The Gators suck because there’s nothing but inbred hicks living in Florida.”). 

God knows you get a lot of (ignorant) hate from other fans at places like ESPN or CBS Sports, but part of the reason that Bleacher Report has thrived thus far is because it’s a site where fans of every team and sport have a chance to objectively state their viewpoints on the teams and players they love or hate.

Being civil results in interesting discussions, even if you don’t agree with the writer, or another commenter’s viewpoint.  There are numerous examples of such discussion in the articles on this website, which is a testament to the way we’ve avoided of the type of hyperbolic hate you see on other sports websites.  To our benefit, the people who come here just to troll usually don’t last very long.

But for what its worth: I don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.  I’m from O-hi-o.