So I spent Thanksgiving week with a horde of Penn State college football homers — my mom's from Pennsylvania — and it reinforced a truth I've always known, but whose importance seems to have slipped my mind: No sports fans are more narrow-mindedly provincial than college football fans.
The chief characteristic of the college football homer is a ceaseless belief that the style of play chiefly used by his or her favorite team or favorite team's conference is not just the best employed nationwide, but is somehow fundamentally and morally superior to those of other conferences. Especially if that other conference is the Pac-10 or a non-BCS conference — or maybe even the SEC if you're in Big Ten country.
All the lame stereotypes about the uninformed college football diehard are sadly true. In my specific case, the worst offenders were my uncle and my cousin, a Penn State alumnus and current student, respectively. Both propagated the silly and lame idea that the "Woody Hayes three yards and a cloud of dust" style of football played in the Big Ten is, for some reason, the best football being played anywhere in the nation. Never mind that almost none of the current Big Ten teams actually play this style — Wisconsin, one of the three co-winners of the conference and currently Rose Bowl-bound, is the one obvious exception.
But the effectiveness of the style of play wasn't what was up for debate here. Instead, it was the mentality or purity of the style that mattered. It was as if the Big Ten had (in its mind) discovered the one right way to play the game, and the rest of the world needed to open its eyes, even though "three yards and a cloud of dust" was played out decades ago.
My uncle also responded to my claim that Oregon was clearly the best team in the country with a derisive, "Yeah, if you believe in the BCS." While my BCS faith is up for debate, I think he might be right. Yep, that godforsaken set of polls and computer rankings is the ONLY reason Oregon beat the fourth- or fifth-best team in the country, Stanford, by three touchdowns back in October. It's all one sinister conspiracy theory out to get the Big Ten!
In all fairness though, it's not just my uncle and it's not just Big Ten fans who are insanely overprotective of their conference. In particular, Auburn fans, remembering their exclusion from the 2004 National Championship, have lashed out with vitriol at those who would exclude them from this year's championship.
For most of the season, this venom was directed at Boise State and Texas Christian, whose schedules Auburn homers have constantly derided, never mind the fact that there is no way an undefeated Auburn team would be left out of the national championship game in favor of a non-BCS conference school.
But this perverse logic is what resides at the back of every college football homer's mind. For these fans, the more they insist on the superiority of their home team and conference, the more true the superiority becomes. And in a weird way, they're kind of right. If you tell the world the same thing over and over again in a loud voice, eventually people are going to start to believe it, whether it's true or not. Which means poll voters are more likely to vote for your team. Which means they're more likely to play in the national championship game.
And so the only conclusion to this problem, like seemingly every other one in college football: Eliminate the poll voters' influence by eliminating BCS and going to a playoff.
Yeah, I know I argued exactly the opposite two months ago. Shhh.
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Ethan Frigon is a senior majoring in economics. He can be reached at Ethan.Frigon@tufts.edu.
