Angry White (hungover) College Football Hater

Is everybody familiar with the phrase that we as sports fans "root for laundry"? It's usually brought up in a condescending manner such as "With the Yankees signing everyone that used to beat them, you're not rooting for a team, you're not rooting for players, you're simply rooting for laundry." The implication, of course, is that fans show no loyalty to players but only to the uniform; that fans are willing to root for hired guns even as fans don't feel the same attachment to players that they had in the "good ol' days"where players were treated as glorified indentured servants.

Even if that phrase is somewhat accurate, I've always hated it. It cheapens my love of sports and more specifically, my love of my teams that I live and die by for a few hours on a given night. But what annoys me more is that the people who usually talk about the 'rooting for laundry' argument are those who think that pro sports is corrupt and that college sports is the only place for pure, unadulterated sports action. I could go off on a jihad about how college sports is amazingly corrupt, but Blogger only gives us so much space.

No, what bothers me is when these same people who wax poetic about the purity of college football say that watching pro ball is like rooting for laundry. Really? What about the fact that you, dear college football fan, are rooting for a guy for 2-3 years years before the player goes off to greener pastures? How are you rooting for anything more than laundry? How have you been rooting for anything more than laundry since the beginning of your college football fandom?

Hey college football fan, get off your high (trojan?) horse. You're not God. There can't be two of us.