You asked for it, and now you are going to get it!
Angloesque wrote an article a few days ago called "What's a Tepid fan to do?" in which she detailed how she picks who she wants to win in games that don't feature her favorite team, the Denver Broncos, and I stated that my system for picking which team I want to win in any given college game is a lot more complicated than hers for the NFL, and I was asked to post it... and while it has taken me a few days to get it all down, I will try to present it in its entirety.
Here we go.
1. The Iowa State Cyclones (I don't live in Iowa, I don't even live near Iowa, but somehow this has become my team for some strange reason... it is a complicated story which I may tell some day, but not here.)
2. Wisconsin- They appeal to me on some level… maybe because they produced Ron Dayne… it is hard to say.
3. Stanford, Oregon and Cal- Steve Prefontaine went to Oregon and the 1982 Stanford-Cal game was the best finish I have ever seen in a game(both Elway’s drive and “the Play”)- simple as that.
Now it gets a little more complicated.
-In order of general interest in terms of conferences(meaning if two or more games are on at the same time, the order in which I generally rank them if both opponents play in the same conference)
Big 12
ACC
SEC
Big 10
Pac 10
Conference USA
MAC
Mountain West
WAC
Sun Belt
If you are a team from a smaller conference and you are playing a powerhouse team from a "good" conference, I want to see them win it. (A MAC team vs. Michigan or Purdue or Nebraska against some little team from the Sun Belt Conference who just started playing football at their college 3 years ago).... the bigger the underdog, the more I root for them.
If you are the perpetual doormat in your conference, like Temple, Rutgers, Wake Forest, Duke, Vanderbilt and similar teams… I have to root for you to win. If two of these teams meet, I root for the one that has had the longer streak of suckage.
If you are a non-BCS conference team, and you are undefeated and have a shot at getting into a BCS bowl... I want to watch you win and take your place at the big conference table, especially if it is over an opponent from one of those bigger conferences.
I want to see Clemson, Nebraska, Kansas St., Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Florida State, BYU, the Washington teams and Virginia Tech lose especially bad.
Mitigating factors: the length of time between your last bowl bid and this season, the number of bowl bids they’ve had in the past few years, how likely one of that team’s players was to get a Heisman(if you are less likely at the beginning of the season, and that player is making a run for it, I sort of root for said team more), the record between those two schools and their respective records at the time they play(if a school dominates a series or is superior in record, then I want their opponent to win)
If I start watching a game late and all other things are equal or negligible, I root for the team that is behind. And because these little rules are cumulative, I can find myself in situations were I may root for a team other than the ‘Clones if the situation was right(like if Temple suddenly made a run for the national championship with a surprisingly good walk-on senior HB who is second in the Heisman polling, and Iowa State was their last obstacle before the big game).
Of course, if you present me with situations, I can tell you who I’d root for, because I don’t know if this all makes sense to anyone else.
The original article that inspired this is linked below.