Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Go to South Bend Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame. A lot of the fans who come to attend are alumni who travel the nation from Connecticut to California and come back to Indiana to watch Notre Dame. At LEAST 50% of the fans are locals, people who did NOT attend Notre Dame.
Well, the school is Catholic, and their fans are mostly Catholic. They can't all attend the college (or have their kids attend), so they at least support it, financially and/or otherwise.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
41,936 posts, read 37,016,353 times
Reputation: 40635
Quote:
Originally Posted by ColdAilment
Anyway, I just get tired of and frankly don't understand people being backers of these colleges when many of them haven't even stepped foot inside the halls of that campus.
I spent ten years in Minnesota and one in Kansas, I am aware that those teams are in the Midwest. I lumped them all in the "north" category to separate them from the Northeast because they more or less straddle the Great Lakes/Canadian border and from a Southerner's perspective those states are Northern, anyways. I should have wrote prairie states instead. Official demarcations aside, many in Kansas, Iowa, or even Minnesota do not necessarily agree that Ohio, and possibly Indiana, are Midwestern. That is a topic for another forum, however.
Anyways, my point was that football is a really big deal in the South and prairie states with loyalties to particular teams being passed down from parent to child. Without local teams to root for it made more sense to root for colleges than for the closest team that is over 1,000 miles away.
I don't mean to argue here, but none of those states I listed are prairie states, not even Minnesota. And Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan are the quintessential midwest states, all of which have an NFL team, Ohio which has 2. In this region you're never more than 120 miles from a city with an NFL team.
Grew up in Baton Rouge where everyone is an LSU fan whether they go to college or not. I went to a tiny DIII school with absolutely no football team, so I see no reason to switch allegiances.
Rooting for anything doesn't really make any concrete sense of you analyze it too closely. It seems like a natural human tendency, though, and sports are one of the more innocuous way to express it.
Grew up in Baton Rouge where everyone is an LSU fan whether they go to college or not. I went to a tiny DIII school with absolutely no football team, so I see no reason to switch allegiances.
Rooting for anything doesn't really make any concrete sense of you analyze it too closely. It seems like a natural human tendency, though, and sports are one of the more innocuous way to express it.
Well, the school is Catholic, and their fans are mostly Catholic. They can't all attend the college (or have their kids attend), so they at least support it, financially and/or otherwise.
The religious aspect has nothing to do with it. Most of the people I know who are fans don't even attend church, or are atheists. Trust me, I lived there most of my life. It's not just true in South Bend either, pretty much any decent sized college town is going to have most of the city's population backing the school, whether they attended there or not.
I was told that a person spends a lot of money and effort to get a degree and they don't appreciate the guy from Jiffy Lube wearing the T Shirt and saying "We" when talking about the team. I tend to agree. That same person also told me children were exempt because they may attend the school someday.
When my brother in laws son went to college he bought his dad a T Shirt. My BIL told him he wasted his money because he would never wear a shirt from a school he never attended.
I tend to follow teams because of the coach. This year I am watching Washington. I am not a fan, but curious on how Petersen does. I do the same with Terry Bowden at Akron.
I think it is wrong if people wear and say they are fans of a school they never attended but it isn't that big a deal. I own nothing from the college I attended for 7 quarters since I never graduated.
I think it is wrong if people wear and say they are fans of a school they never attended but it isn't that big a deal.
I would think it would be wrong to say they attended said school when they did not. But nothing wrong with liking it! (IMHO)
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
