The strange allure of college football hate
By Stu White
No sport encourages hatred quite like college football. Why is that?
College football hate is an irresistible, bizarre monster, something difficult to explain to outsiders. It is considered inadequate to merely cheer against your team’s rival. Ask a Michigan fan how he feels about Ohio State, or chat with an Auburn fan about her thoughts on Alabama, and you’ll likely receive a response in which the speaker takes unabashed pride in his or her hatred toward the rival team — actual, zero-sympathy hatred, not mere dislike — said uncompromising hatred taken as a given, something unworthy of interrogation. College football fandom is defined — and socially reinforced — as more than cheering for a specific program. It is not enough to love a team. You must detest the team’s rival, no questions asked.
The toxicity of such an expression of fandom is obvious, or at least should be to anyone who is not a full-blown psychopath, yet there is something alluring about basking in hatred for a rival. The hatred creates another vector for satisfaction: schadenfreude. If your preferred team is struggling, trending downward, with little chance of being a conference (or national) championship contender, then you can at least mine some enjoyment out of your rival’s struggles, out of their slip-ups and blown fourth-quarter leads. Your team get stomped on Saturday? That’s frustrating, sure, but your rival got stomped as well, so the whole weekend is kind of a wash happiness-wise. Such is the strange dual nature of being a die-hard college football fan.
This is not to say that hatred of a rival is something unique to college football. Rivalries exist in every sports league –Lakers-Celtics in the NBA, Red Sox-Yankees in MLB, Chiefs-Raiders in the NFL — and those too are always serious, long-lasting, and bitter. But there’s something about the way hatred of foes is expressed and experienced by college football fans that seems different, more grave, than what you see in other sports. A Red Sox fan will probably curse at a Yankees fan strutting through the streets of Boston, and an alcohol-fueled confrontation may arise if both parties are contemptuous enough, but in terms of serious hatred it’s a far cry from Harvey Updyke’s arboreal slaughter. A New York Jets fan crowing about the New England “Deflateriots” is a not in the same league as Ohio State’s Woody Hayes (and now Urban Meyer) refusing to refer to the Michigan Wolverines by name, opting for “that team up North” instead. That’s the sort of hatred that college football not only engenders but encourages — sets as the price of fandom admission.
It would be easy to explain the enhanced, ridiculous hatred you see in the college football as a product of rivalries that have existed for longer than most rivalries in professional leagues. Even minor college football rivalries such as the Civil War, played between Oregon State and Oregon, have been around far longer than, say, Packers-Bears. It’s reasonable to assume that college rivalries are so heated simply by dint of having a century (or more!) to fester, the hatred of a rival being passed down from generation to generation like some sort of ugly but intoxicating heirloom, modern feelings of antipathy positioned as a strange means of honoring the past, as a way to establish age-defying continuity in fandom. It’s hate as a method of connecting to what time takes away, hate as both a function of the long-standing nature of a rivalry and as a way to legitimize past expressions of said hatred. (Ask any elderly Oregon State fans how they feel when it comes to young Oregon fans who hate the Trojans and the Huskies far more than the Beavers. To those lifelong OSU fans, such misdirected hatred seems like a slap in the face, an affront to tradition, a disruption of continuity.)
There seems to be more at play than adherence to tradition when it comes to college football hatred, though. The aspect of youth, of a life open to possibilities, looms large. The team down the highway, or the team just over the state line, is not just a rival because of a shared division or conference. That team — and importantly, that school — represents, perhaps, choices you did not make, opportunities you were not, for whatever reason, afforded. There’s a component of jealousy, of what-if, of the-grass-is-always-greener. Deriding a rival school’s academic reputation is Hatred 101, but there’s perhaps a part of you that wonders how your life would’ve turned out had you enrolled there, at that Other school. (Let’s also note here that attending college is a privilege, not an inevitability, and that discussions of “the college years” or “the post-collegiate life” have an inherent class component. It’s worth remembering.)
The rival school having a sterling academic reputation is not even a requisite for such feelings of hatred and jealousy. It’s easy to see the student section at your rival’s stadium and to write off its population as being dumb and young and obnoxious. But maybe there’s something else bubbling beneath the surface, something beyond simple derision. Those young fans are not merely cheering for the team you hate: they are experiencing a level of personal freedom that you can no longer access. They have classes, not jobs. Their lives are not yet set in the same ways in which your life, due to your past choices, decisions both good and bad, is set. Your life is circumscribed, walled-off, burdened by adult responsibilities: stresses and responsibilities you believe inevitable because that assumption of inevitability is easier to stomach than the cold realization that you’ve dug the holes and built the walls yourself. Those young fans of your rival, then, are not just boorish, childish, entitled drunks: they are unburdened, free to make the sort of drastic life changes you can no longer make, free to screw up and fail and unearth new paths to success without juggling a mortgage and a family.
From this perspective, college football hatred is more than a tautology — you hate this team because it’s the team you’re supposed to hate. It’s a reckoning with aging — a strange and slightly frightening acknowledgement of how the time’s inevitable passage sets limits on what the future can bring. It’s not about wins and losses. It’s not about a trophy and bragging rights. It’s about establishing a comforting narrative for yourself, about using hatred for a bunch of people in matching colors as a mechanism to cope with and ignore the ways in which you are no longer young. The hatred is a psychological salve, not far removed in origin from how insecure children act as the biggest, most vicious schoolyard bullies. The hate isn’t irrational, no matter how much outsiders and non-fans choose to portray it as such; it’s fully rational in a tragic gut-punch sort of way. The hate isn’t just fun (though it is) and it isn’t just a way to make games more exciting (though it does). It’s a way to transpose fears and worries and regrets, a way to forget your age for a few Saturdays each autumn.