Marketplace of Ideas Blog

This is New Year’s Day, which in the Prestegard households traditionally meant college football, particularly the Rose Bowl.

Throughout the 1970s, that meant watching Michigan or Ohio State every year against a representative of the Pacific 8, and then Pacific 10, conference. By the 1980s, someone from the Big Ten’s old “Little Eight” — Iowa a couple of seasons, Illinois once, Michigan State once — would occasionally interrupt a “Big Two” appearance.

These were in the days when Wisconsin was blasted each year by Michigan and Ohio State during their regular seasons. By “blasted,” I mean scores like 55–2, 56–0 and 59–0. And yet, for some reason my father would always, if not root, then want the Big Ten representative to win the Rose Bowl.

I didn’t understand that, and for the most part I still don’t. In the particular case of Michigan and Ohio State, I was convinced that respective coaches Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes were bullies and tyrants who deliberately ran up the score to make my favorite college team and my father’s (and, later, my) alma mater look bad. (I later found out that Schembechler once was a candidate to be the UW coach, but he didn’t take the offer because he was unimpressed with UW athletic administration. That fact certainly would have added to my conspiracy theory.) It didn’t occur to me that had the Wolverines or Buckeyes really wanted to, they probably could have put up three digits on the scoreboard against some of those UW teams. How someone could root for a team that had embarrassed your team earlier that season was beyond me.

The same rationale applied to the dominant NFC Central team of the 1970s, the Minnesota Vikings. (Between 1968 and 1980, the Vikings won all but two divisional titles.) The Vikings didn’t destroy the Packers like Michigan and Ohio State throttled Wisconsin, but again, why root for a team that regularly beats your team? My father wanted the Vikings to win the four Super Bowls that they lost; other than possibly Super Bowl IX, won by Pittsburgh (a team I hated as a child, although I can’t really explain why), those Super Bowls had good outcomes as far as I was concerned.

Flash forward to 1980, the year my high school, Madison La Follette, got to the state basketball tournament. After a quarterfinal win over Oak Creek, the Lancers faced their Big Eight Conference archrival, Janesville Craig, and lost. The next night, Craig played in the Class A championship game against Milwaukee Tech, which created a conundrum between my ears: I didn’t want Craig to win, but I didn’t want a Milwaukee team to win either. (No one outside Milwaukee roots for Milwaukee high school teams.)

One year later, the crosstown rival, Madison West, got to state. The day West played, my geometry teacher, a big sports fan, informed her class that we should usually root for our conference rival when they get past us, but this year was an exception. (As I recall, the reason was some legerdemain involving West’s best player, whose mother lived in Sun Prairie, which meant he should have played at Sun Prairie, which didn’t have a very good team. West did, and so the player’s official residence was with his father, who lived in the West attendance district, even though said player supposedly live with his father. Or something like that.) West lost its first game at state.

The whole rooting interest thing applies more to fans than to players of the sports in question. Players can appreciate the effort and skill of their opponents, and wish them well after their final meeting of a season. But for fans, it should feel unnatural to root for your rival.

The logic of rooting for your rival is that if your rival goes on to do great things, the fact that your rival beat your team makes your team look better in retrospect. I don’t really buy that. Did fans of the Buccaneers, Eagles, Chargers, Seahawks, Bears, 49ers, Lions, Rams, Broncos, Vikings, Panthers or Patriots feel much consolation that they lost to the Super Bowl XXXI champions? Other than possibly Panthers or Patriots fans, probably not. Fans of the Vikings, Chiefs and Cowboys might have felt some pride in beating the eventual Super Bowl XXXI champions, but the team that counts is the team holding the Vince Lombardi Trophy at the end.

It is nonetheless easier to root for a rival if you have managed to beat that rival that same season. Michigan won the NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1989, several weeks after Michigan lost to Wisconsin 75–72. The supreme irony is that the game-winning points in the title game were on two Rumeal Robinson free throws with three seconds left in overtime. Earlier in the season, Robinson went to the free throw line with Michigan trailing Wisconsin 73–72 with nine seconds remaining, and missed both free throws.

(This concept can apply in reverse as well. Michigan beat Washington to win the 1981 Rose Bowl. Eight months later, Michigan strutted into Camp Randall Stadium as the nation’s preseason number one team, having outscored Wisconsin 176–0 in their previous four meetings. Three hours after that, Michigan left a 21–14 loser in what may have been the biggest upset in the history of UW football.)

While one shouldn’t root for one’s rival in most cases, there is the matter of, to use an economics term, enlightened self-interest. Wisconsin’s 1994 and 1999 Rose Bowl berths are thanks to Michigan and Ohio State, respectively. The Big Ten had (and may still have, although bowl criteria have changed in the Bowl Championship Series days) a rule that if two teams tied for the title, the Rose Bowl berth would go to the team that had been away from the Rose Bowl the longest. Through the 1970s, the winner of the Michigan–Ohio State game went to the Rose Bowl, which made a rooting interest difficult since I wanted both teams and their despised coaches, Schembechler and Hayes, to lose.

For Wisconsin to go to the 1994 Rose Bowl required, chronologically first, that Michigan beat Ohio State. The evening of the traditional season-ending Michigan–Ohio State game, the ABC-TV affiliate in Madison had no narration to their Michigan–OSU highlights — only video of the Wolverines’ 28–0 win over the Buckeyes, accompanied by Michigan’s “The Victors.” A couple weeks later, Wisconsin beat Michigan State in Tokyo to tie for the title and clinch the Badgers’ first Rose Bowl berth in 31 years.

Five years later, the opposite result was needed — an Ohio State win over Michigan followed by a Wisconsin win over Penn State. So my father and I watched in a campus bar as Ohio State finished off Michigan, then went to Camp Randall to see Wisconsin beat Penn State and clinch their Rose Bowl berth.

Another example was the famous ending to the Packers’ 2003 season. Recall that the Packers lost to Arizona earlier in the season, but needed a win over Denver and a Cardinals win over Minnesota to get into the playoffs. The Packers did their part, and as for Arizona, well …

The flip side is the danger of switching allegiances from one week to the next. Recall when Packers fans were pleased that the New York Giants beat Dallas in the 2007 playoffs because (1) Packer fans generally despise the Cowboys and (2) that meant the NFC championship would be played at Lambeau Field. The NFC championship game didn’t turn out well, to say the least.

The Rose Bowl this afternoon features Ohio State and Oregon. For whom will I be rooting? (Hint: Not the team that wears scarlet and gray.)