A gifted few of us are great sportsmen. A slightly nerdier (but only significantly less marketable) few of us are great sports journalists. I, however, am a transcendentally great sportswatcher. You only haven’t heard of me because no awards have (yet) been created to celebrate my achievements in sportswatching. Though certainly unjust, this glaring omission from my trophy shelf is bearable because my satisfaction from great sportswatching is in many ways its own reward.
Fortunately for you, my skill and its consequent keys to success are much easier to learn via blogpost than Michael Jordan’s or Mitch Albom’s. Today, I wish to share with you the first key to my greatness in sportswatching with the hopes that you will be able to incorporate it into your own practice.
So what is the first step in becoming a great sportswatcher? It’s having a side to root for during any match you watch. While this may sound daunting when you consider the number of athletes, teams, leagues, and sports in the world, I will present the guiding principles that help me know which side to root for in any context. Although it may be overwhelming at first, don’t be discouraged if you forget how to apply these principles in practice. Over time they will become second-nature and your sportswatching experience will become far more enjoyable. Let’s get started.
Principle -1: Gamble to Create a Rooting Interest
This is not properly a principle of sportswatching but rather a principle of economic self-interest. You prefer having more money to less money. Many sports you can watch, you can also bet on. When you place a bet on the outcome of a sports match, you will get more money if your bet is correct. Obviously, you root for whichever side will make your bet correct and earn you more money. Therefore, placing a bet on a match is a sure-fire way to have a rooting interest and the rest of this blog would seem irrelevant.
However, I want to caution against relying on gambling to create your interest in the outcome of a match. It’s the sportswatching equivalent of a drug-induced high: It’s artificial, it’s an expensive habit, and, it can lead you to watching Chinese table tennis qualifiers on an illegal internet stream at 3AM if you’re not careful. By watching sports only for money instead of the love of the game, you’re depriving yourself of the joy of many great (and potentially less stressful) sportswatching opportunities. The crux of this blog will thus focus on how to pick a team to root for independent of gambling interest.
But, I would be remiss to not mention the “happiness hedge.” The happiness hedge is where your gambling-created rooting interest runs counter to your gambling-independent rooting interest, thus minimizing the total possible devastation from the result of the match. For example, if your favorite team is playing in the championship final, you could place a bet on their opponent to win; that way either you make some money OR your favorite team wins, instead of both losing money and dealing with the disappointment of seeing your favorite team coming up short. I have no opinions on (read: punchlines for) the happiness hedge, except that some South African “economist” wrote a paper justifying the happiness hedge after South Africa choked in the 2011 Cricket World Cup.
Outside of the happiness hedge, an analysis of the complex interactions between “happiness from sports rooting” and “happiness from risking money” is outside of the scope of my blogpost. But if you’re interested, I recommend calling 1-800-522-4700 or visiting the National Council on Problem Gambling for more information.
Principle 0: Have a Favorite Team*
*Note: For the rest of the blog, I will be discussing rooting interests using the context and language of North American team sports that are typically played in leagues with postseason tournaments, such as Baseball, Basketball, Ice Hockey, Association Football, American Football, et cetera. Unless otherwise noted, I believe that these same principles are adaptable to individual sports such as Tennis, Golf, Boxing, et cetera. “E-sports” are not sports you nerd.
In the words of Tom Hanks, “If you don’t have one, get one!” Having a favorite team really makes things easier to decide who to root for in an individual game (sneak peek of Principles 1 and 2). Also, it’s fun to be a fan of a team and to communicate and interact with fellow fans by screaming “Let’s go!” or by landing partial high-fives with 2–3 of the people nearby after you watch your team score.
“Now JMB,” you might be asking, “there’s so many leagues
and sports, how can I have a favorite team for each one I might watch?” First
of all, don’t question me. Second of all, if you’re really this lost I don’t
expect you to be watching too many non-mainstream competitions. Surely you can
manage to have a favorite team in each of the ~10 leagues that you’ll actually
watch most of the time. If you can remember 151 original Pokémon then you can
remember your preferred pronouns pro
teams.
How to choose a favorite team from scratch is easily worth its own blogpost. But I can already tell this blog is too long, so I’m gonna save some words and simply give you a bulleted list you can walk through in picking a favorite team.
- Are you employed by the team?
- Did you live or grow-up in the same metropolitan
area that the team plays in?
- BUT for national team competitions, (e.g., FIFA Women’s World Cup): Does this European country’s genepool represent at least 1/32 of your genetic heritage and are they still in the competition?
- BUT for college sports (e.g., the NAIA Men’s Bowling Invitational): Did you study there for two semesters before transferring to be closer to home?
- Do your close family members root for that team?
- Does the team tend to play in a style that you find more interesting to watch than other teams?
- Is the team nickname something cool like “Wildcats”?
- Do you like the team colors? Do you have the right crayons so you can draw the logo and put it on the fridge for mommy and daddy to see?
I’ve omitted other possible considerations, but this should give you some loose guidance in picking a favorite team.
Principle 1: Root for your Favorite Team
If you have a favorite team, you should root for that team. I know it sounds too easy, so there’s two small things to clarify. First, even if your favorite team isn’t playing, you can root for them indirectly when the result of the current game impacts your team in the league standings. The starkest case of this is when your favorite team doesn’t “control its own destiny” in getting to the postseason and must rely on another team to lose. This can even justify you rooting for rivals (Principle 2), such as what happened when the United States Men’s National Team beat Panama to allow Mexico into the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Again I have no punchline, so have this terrible article on someone being triggered by the phrase “control their own destiny.”
The second twist is that the Big 4 North American professional sports leagues have a draft system where teams who finish at the bottom of the league one season get the first picks in the next year’s draft to secure better talent. Some teams will thus purposefully try to lose games in the present season so that they get better draft picks and win more games in future season. Depending on the details of the league, this might actually be a successful strategy, unfortunately. I do not recommend factoring this into your rooting calculation. If you start rooting for your team to lose games in order to win games then you start to confuse pleasure with pain, which all too often leads to you or your team stuck in the basement with no hope of escape. In short, just remember that you play to win the game.
Principle 2: Root Against your Rivals
In many ways, this can be viewed as corollary to the first principle: if your team’s rivals win anything of value, then you and your team suffers from hearing about it instead of your team’s success.
Now there are slightly different rules if you root for a rivalry. In essence, you can root for a meta-team which consists of two teams who are rivals, and then you can hope that your meta-team (rivalry) is better than all other meta-teams (rivalries). For example, the Ohio State Buckeyes and Michigan Wolverines are in a mutual rivalry (as opposed to a one-sided rivalry, which exist and are pitiful). Former Ohio State quarterback and current Home Depot pitchman Kirk Herbstreit, however, roots for Michigan to have an undefeated season save the annual rivalry game because it is better for Ohio State to beat a more respected opponent (podcast at 3:22 on). Certainly, it is better for your team to be part of a rivalry of great teams than for it to be part of a rivalry of terrible teams. I’ll concede reasonable minds can differ on the extent to which you want your rival to do poorly.
Where I draw the line, however, is at conference pride. (For international sports, switch to country pride or continent pride). The patient zero in America is the Southeastern Conference in NCAA Football, where teams have been known to actively boast and cheer for their conference before their own team. This is nothing short of cuckoldry. Given the fact that NCAA Football postseasons are determined by the whims of human voters who can give undue weight to conference affiliation, there is an argument that rooting for a conference is good because it benefits your favorite team down the line, supporting Principle 1. (In European football, the UEFA coefficient does the same thing just with statistics instead of journalists). I reject this argument out of hand on the basis of pure emotion because it disgusts me. Sports themselves are made up of arbitrary lines and conference pride is one I’m not willing to cross as a sportswatcher.
Principle 3: Trophy’s Choice
Oftentimes though, a game will be completely irrelevant to your favorite team. Perhaps you foolishly didn’t follow my advice in Principle 0 to have a favorite team in the first place. Or perhaps your team has been eliminated from the postseason already. Who do you root for now?
In these cases, much like Meryl Streep having to choose whether to publish the Pentagon Papers in The Post, there is no obvious right answer. Instead, I’m going to provide you two different reasonings that you can apply to any game to come up with a team to root for. One, the “Underdog Story,” is fairly straightforward. The other, the “Happiness Minimization Principle,” is more in the spirit of INTBQ.
Principle 3A: The Underdog Story
In it’s most naïve form, the Underdog Story is a story that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. You’re a good person, because you root for the poor team who was valued at +135 odds to win this game instead of favored at -110. It’d be good if those plucky underdogs win because it shows anything is possible with a can-do spirit and hard work.
To the intellectual sportswatcher, the Underdog Story is a story about chaos. When an upset happens, it is revealed that the world is not as orderly and deterministic as we thought it was. You know what was the most upset-filled college football season, and thus likely the most upset-filled sports season, ever? 2007. You know what happened immediately at the end of that season? The subprime mortgage crisis. That’s a sign, not a coincidence. Chaos is a good thing when there’s too much order [insert Amazon referral link to Jordan B. Peterson book] and rooting for chaos in sports gives you an escape from rooting from order in every other aspect of your life [insert link to some Joe Rogan Experience episode, probably].
One caveat for the unexperienced adherent of the Underdog Story is that you often have to take account of the bigger picture rather than looking at who is favored to win in the one game you are watching. For example, if the Detroit Lions made it to the Super Bowl, it is possible that they would be favored over whatever AFC Champion they would face like, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers. But it would still be an “underdog story” for the Lions to win after being the laughing stock of their division, the NFL, and the entire sporting world for decades. Rule of thumb: If you could imagine a Disney movie of the team, their an Underdog Story; The Mighty Ducks weren’t trained by the Soviets.
Principle 3B: The Happiness Minimization Principle
The Happiness Minimization Principle is what makes me, and hopefully you, a great sportswatcher. The Happiness Minimization Principle is at its core an instance of sports schadenfreude. Simply put, if you can’t be happy from your sports team winning, then you want as many people as you can to feel the same. Misery loves company.
At first blush, it might be difficult to see how wanting more people to be miserable helps decide which team to root for. Someone has to win after all. Do not bother looking up the size of fanbases or cities; I don’t recommend engaging in the “serpent-windings of [dis]utilitarianism.” For non-championship games, I believe the simplest application of the Happiness Minimization Principle is to root for the home team to lose. Everyone who’s been to a baseball game knows to root, root, for the home team. So if you’re watching a game, you should root for a whole crowd’s fun to be spoiled. You should be glad Casey struck out. (It has been argued that the sound of a stunned home crowd is on the Mount Rushmore of sports sounds.) Whenever the home team is favored, this will align with the Underdog Story.
It is for championship games that the Happiness Minimization Principle and the Underdog Story clearly diverge. By the nature of annual competitions, some sports teams, or sports towns, have won championships recently. The next championship will still make those fans happy, but probably not as much as that championship would for a team that’s never won it or hasn’t won in a while. So what you root for is to isolate the sports happiness into as few fanbases as possible.
When the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team won 7 national titles in a row, no one outside of Westwood was happy about their college basketball team. This is exactly what you want. If you minimize the number of champions, then your non-championships aren’t as bad. It’s once other teams start winning that they proceed to look down on your team. You know what happened to David after he slew Goliath? He became king and rubbed it in everyone’s face. Would have been better for everyone else if Goliath just won all the trials by combat and then everyone would have agreed that that was a dumb way to fight a war.
The real-world counterpoint to the Happiness Minimization Principle is the city of Boston in the 21st Century. It seems possible that allowing one fandom to have so many championships in a short time has increased the output of smugness and derision that it outstrips the schadenfreude gains from every other city having less championships. I leave it to the readers and scholars of INTBQ to devise methods for testing this principle and measuring the effect of current games. After all, I am merely a great sportswatcher.