This Week’s Obsession: That Team You Hate
[MLive]
The Question:
Brian: So that Mike DeBord quote I posted in UV reminded me that I now root against Tennessee in just about every game they play because they hired a coach who I think is not good at coaching. That's a pretty weird reason to wish pain and demise on a program. What is your weirdest reason you hate on a CFB program?
Seth: Other than Scott Frost’s mom you mean?
Brian: Some people want to hit Scott Frost's mom with a shovel for obscure reasons. Can't be helped. Mmmbop.
Seth: Michigan fans will cut you.
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The Responses:
no no no no no no no no no no just stop making these
Ace: In the conversation that led to this question, Brian mentioned rooting against Stanford because of David Shaw’s crimes against game theory. I have an entirely different reason. When I was checking out colleges after my junior year of high school, my dad turned a Bay Area business trip into a college tour, and at the time I really liked the idea of going to Stanford.
We joined one of their campus tours. The campus was gorgeous, the university essentially sold itself—and then our guide started talking football. Specifically, he brought up The Play—yes, this play—as a selling point for Stanford, saying some hogwash about how it was really the best reflection of Stanford football since they lost but their band did something wacky. (Notably, this was pre-Harbaugh.)
This offended me to my core. Whenever I’m watching Stanford and I think back to this moment, I hope David Shaw takes his criminally bad game management to new lows. The fans won’t care, anyway.
(I still applied to Stanford. I did not get in. That _totally_ doesn’t play a role here.)
[After the JUMP: screw you and your whole coast]
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Is this real? You don’t know, do you. You think it’s a joke but it might not be. |
This is for the weirdest of reasons. In 2007 the Big Ten Network/Fox were having their great pissing match with Comcast, which meant having to go to the bar for Michigan games and never seeing the rest of the conference play. After the Horror, my friend James came up with a solution: we would all become Pac10 fans. We all picked teams and got super serious--like work was suffering because we were on early Pac10 blogs and message boards trying to soak in the talking points. I got Stanford (Harbaugh!), which in 2007 meant mostly gallows humor until WHAT'S YOUR DEAL.
The guy who got Oregon apparently found the RCMB of Oregon web communities, because he was awful. He's the kind of guy who will go off on something and you don't know if he's really into it or really good at pretending he is while playing some sort of meta joke (it's both). So when Oregon trounced Stanford it was the same week-ish that Harbaugh made that comment about the classes Michigan's players take. The Oregon guy and I got into this heated argument that started only half role-played, and touched on everything wrong with college football, which was, in a nutshell, "Oregon."
The joke has been over for almost a decade and I don't believe half of what I was arguing anymore, but every time I see Oregon I remember how much I hated them that year.
The duck, though.
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Brian: I feel like I should explain the Tennessee thing a bit more. I already had some general antipathy for Tennessee for obvious 1997-related reasons. Marcus Ray's bizarre Butch Jones fixation incremented that a bit further, and then Jones hired DeBord.
David P. Gilkey, The Freep |
At the time DeBord had been out of coaching for a number of years and was working as a mandarin in Michigan's athletic department. Even though I hate on Al Borges a bunch, he got a job after he left Michigan. DeBord got a sinecure. Strike one. DeBord's never been a QB coach, and Tennessee does not have a separate QB coach to make up for that fact. Strike two. And Mike Debord did nothing but run outside zone his last two years at Michigan. Strike three. I think the reason it drives me so batty is that now I'm looking at the Harbaugh offense weekly and the vast possibilities of manball are opening up before my eyes. Every run game tweak further emphasizes the years I wasted charting this yob's brain dead offense.
I also have significant personal animosity towards DeBord because he failed utterly at CMU, literally quit, literally said he wasn't a head coach kind of guy as he quit, and then wormed his way back in at Michigan to the point where he was Carr's recommendation to take over.
Bill Martin didn't buy that, and even if Rich Rodriguez was a total bust it was still 100% better than anything DeBord would have delivered.
DeBord more than anyone else still in coaching is the living symbol of why Michigan had to eat itself alive for seven years before Harbaugh came in, and I'm holding the hell out of that grudge.
(Tennessee's status as Baylor Lite also fuels my disdain for that program, but that's not a weird reason. That's a reason everyone should agree on.)
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Adam: Ace alluded to Stanford's admissions decision playing into his hatred for their football program. I won't allude to it: Michigan State could be a MAC school (yeah, there's a joke there) and I'd still feel unfettered bitterness toward the institution.
As an only child, I relied heavily on a family friend's advice when applying to colleges. This person was a Michigan State student at the time and said that no matter where I went, I'd want to get into that school's honors program or I'd get lost in the shuffle of a big research institution and be adrift without a community to call my own.
Fast forward a few months and admissions letters start to come in. I get into State. I get into Michigan. I find out in relatively short order that I got into Michigan's LSA Honors Program, which is exciting because there's Honors housing; remember that I'm worried at the time about feeling isolated at college. I haven't heard anything from State's Honors College, so I contact them. They tell me I've been rejected. From State's Honors College. After getting into Michigan's LSA Honors Program. Seriously.
I figure this has to be some kind of mistake and ask if I can reapply or have my application reconsidered or send in final semester grades or something, anything to fix this oversight. I tell them that I'm confused, as I've already been admitted to the LSA Honors Program. Looking back, I don't think that went over the way I thought it would. State tells me that there's nothing I can do except apply again after my first semester at MSU which, uh, hard pass.
It all worked out for the best. I enrolled in the Honors Program at Michigan and made some friends that I still keep in touch with. I took some cool classes and did find that community-within-a-community that I was looking for. In the end, Big Brother took good care of me.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:17 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 3:24 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 3:30 PM ^
The more I look at Oklahoma and Ohio State beating them, the less impressed I am. OU gave up 46 to TCU and 40 to Texas.
Ohio State MAY not be that good.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:34 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 3:53 PM ^
OU's offense is legit, and OSU went into their house and beat them by 3 TDs. But as we've seen from OSU's last few weeks, hanging 45 on OU is like hanging 30 on an average B1G defense.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:33 PM ^
Difficult to argue that OU's offense is legit when they haven't put up good numbers against teams with respectable defenses.
November 1st, 2016 at 5:11 PM ^
Plus OU's fight song is the most repetetive, annoying fight song out there. I don't like them.
November 1st, 2016 at 9:42 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 11:23 PM ^
November 2nd, 2016 at 12:33 AM ^
None of those compare to that horrible, hick southern thing that Florida or Tennessee play. Weee weneeeweeneee.
November 2nd, 2016 at 9:46 AM ^
Say what you will about the Vols but Rocky Top is awesome.
November 3rd, 2016 at 8:35 AM ^
I actually never paid close attention to FSU's song until they came to Ann Arbor. And then living through that constantly playing almost the whole game pretty much causes me to twitch every time I hear it now.
November 2nd, 2016 at 5:21 AM ^
November 2nd, 2016 at 10:58 AM ^
Was at the '76 Orange Bowl and I still can't get that damn 'boomer sooner' song out of my head!
November 2nd, 2016 at 7:37 PM ^
Oklahoma's "boomer sooner" is an adaptation of Yale's fight song, "Boola Boola," composed in 1900.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYu6UkED45Q
The lyrics go:
Boola boola, boola boola
Boola boola, boola boola
When we rough house poor old Harvard
They will holler, "Boola boo"
Oh Yale, Eli Yale! Oh Yale, Eli Yale!
Oh Yale, Eli Yale! Oh Yale, Eli Yale!
November 2nd, 2016 at 4:42 PM ^
Yes. I just had this conversation with someone the other day. OU's fight song is one that you hear just once and it leaves you with that nail-on-chalkboard feeling the rest of the day. Worst song there is.
November 3rd, 2016 at 8:36 AM ^
OMG Yes! But the weird thing that makes me hate Oklahoma's fight song so much is how it just...ends. It's like whoever wrote it had no idea how to bring it to a graceful finish, so they just stopped. It's always bugged the hell out of me.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:14 PM ^
You must not like MSU very much
November 1st, 2016 at 3:23 PM ^
I hate alabama because I don't like dynasties that aren't michigan
November 1st, 2016 at 3:26 PM ^
I'm unsure why you would even open the MSU letter or bother with a phone call. At that point you hit the ceiling for instate institutions.
Can you, looking into the past, really say that if you had been accepted into Honor's at Msu you would have accepted that?
Thanks
Concerned interest
November 1st, 2016 at 3:30 PM ^
You have a very apropos username for this comment.
Additionally, I kinda wondered the same.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:31 PM ^
I would not have accepted it, no. I was just curious about what happened.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:44 PM ^
But now you understand why recruits want an offer from all the big names colleges, even if they have already decided on one.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:47 PM ^
But now we all know you got rejected from MSU's honor college, and I don't see any way of living that down.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:17 PM ^
on your application coloring book?
November 1st, 2016 at 5:01 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 5:05 PM ^
mindblown.gif
November 1st, 2016 at 4:38 PM ^
But did you even GO to Michigan? Huh? Huh?
-says every Sparty fan ever
November 1st, 2016 at 5:18 PM ^
I'm glad you were able to accept Defeat With Dignity, proving that you were worthy of Sparty Honors all along.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:25 PM ^
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November 1st, 2016 at 3:30 PM ^
because they play complete joke schedules. And then all that stuff happened, giving me legitimate reasons to hate them.
Also hate Texas Tech. Their fans are the Big 12 equivalent of State's, without the comparative level of recent success State has had (lol excepting this year). And they ran off Mike Leach because Craig James is a big baby who kills hookers.
Finally, I hate every team that looks to the sideline for audible calls. This is irrational, but it's how I feel (yes, I know Michigan did this in the RR years. Shut up).
November 1st, 2016 at 3:27 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 3:55 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 5:58 PM ^
I used to play softball with a bunch of KU grads and my god every year they would talk constatnly about KU hoops and how they are the greatest thing and were going to win the NC. They didn't care that every other sport sucked. One other thing that blew me away about these guys is they loved Nebraska football and I was like they are a rival why would you like them and basically it was because they were good. Combine the fact I hate Nebraska football as much as any other team and it got me to the point where I always want to see Kansas basketball loose no matter what.
November 5th, 2016 at 12:28 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 3:28 PM ^
Ace hates the Tree?
::shakes foliage::
LIVE TREE OR DIE.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:49 PM ^
...is very much exempt of any ill will I hold towards Stanford. Seth chose the photo/caption.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:24 PM ^
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November 1st, 2016 at 4:52 PM ^
LOVE the Stanford Band. Own what you are--and they certainly do it.
Also see: Rice.
November 1st, 2016 at 5:17 PM ^
dun da dun dun, dun da dun da dun dun, Rice. Rice.
November 2nd, 2016 at 12:38 AM ^
That gif of that insane chick in the stanford band totally ruined it for me.
I despise them and their tire fire of a football team now.
I hate Alabama. I would watch Alabama lose at badminton.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:50 PM ^
I was at a Rose Bowl tailgate and the Tree was hanging around (no pun intended) while the Stanford pep band was playing. The band began playing Rubberband Man by The Spinners. The Tree went into dancing overdrive, and had everyone staring in amazement as he spun and danced like a crazy person for the whole song. How he stayed upright, I have no clue. Have loved the Tree ever since.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:28 PM ^
I dislike UCLA because of their strange thorn in the side of Michigan's recruiting recently. I think Brian has mentioned this recently on WTKA and here as well. Also, for some reason Jim Mora irks me.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:30 PM ^
UCLA is still a thorn btw. They're the other school that Michigan's top QB target for 2018 is looking at.
Idk how the hell Jim Mora will convince Dorian Thompson-Robinson, the top dual threat QB in the nation, that his system (Maybe the Vick Atlanta years?) is somehow better than Jim Harbaugh's given his Kaepernick stint with the Niners.
Oh and not to mention UCLA went from underachieving to tire fire this year.
November 1st, 2016 at 4:38 PM ^
Marques Tuiasosopo is UCLA's QB coach and can easily talk about developing a dual threat QB in a pro-style system.
That being said, UCLA's tire fire is based on an absolutely shit interior O-Line and we all know how much time that takes to fix. I wouldn't expect UCLA to be much of a threat for Thompson-Robinson when it comes down to it.
I said this earlier, the only way UCLA is a serious contender in a recruiting battle as long as Mora is there is if a kid REALLY wants to stay home, given UCLA next year is going to look like what Hoke's fifth year at Michigan would have looked like.
November 2nd, 2016 at 5:27 AM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 5:50 PM ^
I dislike all of the pac 10 but mostly UCLA and USC because I grew up in Los Angeles and the only time I got to go to a Michigan Football game was every couple years when we'd go to the Rose Bowl and lose. I did however love my ASU plush football that was clearly a USC one with the letters torn off and replaced (they were out of Michigan ones).
November 2nd, 2016 at 12:39 AM ^
In the same vein, I really dislike Washington.
I'd watch them lose their car keys.
November 1st, 2016 at 3:28 PM ^
November 1st, 2016 at 3:32 PM ^
You'd think they've won every national championship ever. And that A&M is America's version of Oxford. I root against them every week.
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