This was a topic yesterday on Mike & Mike, but I already had a full slate of blog posts. I like the question, though, so I thought I’d put it up here:
If you’re a fan of a team in a sport with a championship playoff, who do you root for when your team is out?
This was brought up because some New York tabloids were calling Rudy Giuliani (a noted Yankee fan who used to avoid scheduling city business in October so he could attend playoff games) a traitor for saying that he was rooting for the arch-rival Red Sox in the World Series. The argument in Giuliani’s favor is that he’s rooting for the team representing the same league as the Yankees, so that’s ok.
As usual, Golic and Greenberg were split, with Golic the ex-player saying that he always rooted for the NFC team in the Super Bowl after his Eagles lost, with Greenberg the fan saying that he would never in a million years root for another AFC East team. A lot of things on that show play out that way, and I think that reflects a real split– many fans take things a lot more personally than most of the players they root for.
Personally, I don’t have much of an opinion on the Giuliani question. The the very limited extent that I follow baseball, I root for the Yankees, but I don’t have particularly strong feelings about baseball in general. The only time I really followed it closely was in 1998, because I was in Japan during the playoffs, and dependent on English-launguage radio for entertainment.
In sports that I do follow closely, I’m kind of split. I’ll generally root for the conference of the team that I follow, but with a few exceptions: I’ll root for NFC teams in the Super Bowl, but not the Cowboys; I’ll root for ACC teams in the NCAA tournament, but not Duke. I’ve also been known to take an intense dislike to particular teams independent of strong rivalries with my teams, so, for example, I rooted for the Titans to beat the Rams in ’99, because I found the Rams incredibly annoying.
The conference loyalty isn’t terribly strong, though– I tend to lean that way, but I can be swayed pretty easily. Kate’s a big Patriots fan, so I’ll root for them against anybody other than the Giants, because we’re all about the happy Kate in Chateau Steelypips. But I’m not as intense a fan as she is– she refused to even watch the Super Bowl last year (and got grumpy when I wanted to watch highlights) because the Colts had beaten the Pats to get there.
So, if you’re a sports fan, who do you root for when your team is done?