Let say Ohio State is playing Alabama, and you don’t feel any loyalty or affection for either one, but the game would be more fun if you had a team to root for. When I was a grad student at Penn State, Bernie Hennessy, the Pol. Sci. Dept. Chair, had a rooting system that I want to share.
Summarized, it went like this. Root for Eastern teams over Western teams, Northern teams over Southern teams, secular teams over religious teams, and public schools over private schools.
Sometimes you have to weigh more than one factor. Say, for example, Notre Dame is playing UCLA. Notre Dame is religious, eastern, private. The north-south dichotomy doesn’t really fit west coast teams. So, you’d root for UCLA because it has two out of the remaining three--public and secular.
For pro teams, the system breaks down because the private-public and secular-religious dichotomies don’t apply, and the north-south and east-west pairs don’t really mean that much. So, on Superbowl Sunday, just root for Seattle because you are tired of hearing about how great the Patriots are.
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