Sports post

As a sports fan, I’m a relative newcomer. I really didn’t care much about sports outside of Arkansas football and the St. Louis Cardinals until I started going to Florida State. Within three months, I was bleeding garnet and gold. And that gave way to an eventual interest in the NFL and a smattering of other sports as well. At its best, I think any sport has the potential to be high drama of the best kind.

Recently, FSU was ranked #5 in the preseason coaches’ poll, an absolutely useless survey of the most biased group of sports experts around. If anything, ten years of being a Seminole fan have taught me to expect lofty aspirations, followed by soul-crushing disappointment. But it’s been a while since so much has been expected of my team, so I got a little excited. More so when I saw that we will be playing the #1 team in the poll, Oklahoma, in week 3 of the college football season. It has the makings of a marquee match-up, with big (albeit temporary) bragging rights at stake.

So I took to my Facebook page to do a little prideful boasting, basically saying that the Seminoles would send the Oklahoma Sooners home crying like little girls. Roughly. As I should have expected, one of my high school friends, an Arkansas Razorback fan, pounced on my post like an expectant mountain lion, saying:

“I’m sorry, have you confused this with 1993??? GO HOGS!!!!!!!”

This is what I don’t get about a lot of sports fans, particularly those in the South. Why must your team be better, to the detriment of all other teams in every organized sport? FSU doesn’t play the Razorbacks. We’re not even in the same conference. And yet, my friend breaks a five-year silence to say, basically, “Your team isn’t good anymore and mine is and you can never have any success ever!”

I’m still an Arkansas fan. I root for them heartily. And I certainly dislike many other college teams for a variety of reasons. But I’ve never felt like I have to justify my love for my team by making myself an exclusive fan. It’s like telling someone that your favorite movie is “The Godfather,” only to have them reply that “Citizen Kane is the best ever and The Godfather sucks and Francis Ford Coppola can burn in Hell forever! Welles!” Maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I haven’t been a fan long enough to understand. But it just seems a little ridiculous to feel like the only way to prove you’re a fan of one team is to immediately discount all other teams in the history of ever.

That being said, the Florida Gators can burn in Hell forever.