The Hater’s Guide to the College Football Playoffs
Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images
As any astute reader of Splinter can tell by now, I am a proud hater. I hate the Democratic Party. I hate the Los Angeles Lakers. I hate the Kansas City Chiefs. I still kind of hate Sean Payton after blowing that eminently winnable game last night. I admittedly love to hate hate hate. In politics however, you do have to come up with some solutions for your hatred, as being a total hater is generally unproductive to the cause of building a better world.
But in sports? Hell naw, hatred is half the fun of it.
The first-ever expanded College Football Playoff starts in South Bend tonight, and to echo everyone else in America: boy am I excited. This is everything that college football fans have dreamed of for decades, and the first-round matchups at home campuses are going to create some of the loudest crowds in human history. It’s going to rule so hard.
But who should you, the casual fan, root for? This is where I am happy to help. Sure, you could just watch and enjoy the beauty and chaos of college football, but you can still do that AND enjoy the trollish fun that comes with being a hater. Let me show you how in this Hater’s Guide to the College Football Playoffs.
Indiana at Notre Dame
This is a pretty straightforward hater’s game on its face: the mighty and righteous juggernaut with history as long as college football itself versus the plucky underdog state school having its greatest season ever. Raising the ante with an in-state rivalry played in front of Touchdown Jesus makes this an all-timer of a setup for Cinderella. If the Hoosiers can walk into South Bend tonight and kick off the College Football Playoff with an upset they are very capable of producing, all of America will rejoice.
Hater’s Guide: You fool. You pea-brained simpleton. You think rooting for what will make 330 million people happy makes you a hater? You get absolutely no hater points for backing Cinderella in the most made-for-TV-movie setup ever. Someone is playing us here and I suspect they are located in the Big Ten offices. This is literally the galaxy brain meme unfolding in real time and you’re on the first frame of it. Join me in the last one, where the real haters know that rooting for a delusional relic of the 20th century to succeed in the 21st is where real haterdom is at. The Irish are such haters to modernity that they are willing to ensure they never get a first-round bye or a seed above the SEC and Big Ten Championship Game losers so long as they still get to pretend they’re a bunch of fancyboys who are too precious to join a conference. They are hating on a level few can truly comprehend, and I cannot help but stan.
Southern Methodist University at Penn State
This is, frankly, a hater’s dream: the opportunity to be a troll and be morally justified in doing so. If you are not aware of the entirely legitimate reasons outside of football to hate Penn State, just Google Jerry Sandusky. There is no such thing as ironic hatred here, only real.
Hater’s Guide: Thankfully, SMU allows this guide to veer back towards trollish fun. The Mustangs of the 1980s are infamous for exposing the rot at the root of college football, as they took the widespread corruption around paying players to a truly depraved level, receiving the so-called “death penalty” and having their 1987 season canceled, destroying their program for decades. That they find themselves in the first-ever expanded playoff 37 years later when the NCAA has accepted reality and finally begun to give players what they have earned is true poetic hater justice. Go ‘Stangs.
Clemson at Texas
This is some nuclear-grade hate, folks. You should probably put on one of those lead bibs they give you at the dentist to watch this game if you are going to follow me down the path of haterdom. As a rabid Colorado partisan, I was instructed to hate Texas as a child and learned how to as a young adult after Vince Young taught me that 70 to 3 was possible. Not to mention how these greedy Bevos helped destroy the Big 12 with their boondoggle of a Longhorn Network before fleeing to the SEC, all so they could play in the safe space of Georgia and Alabama’s shadow.