There’s always a moment. A moment when you say to yourself, “This is MY team.”
For me, it was my first taste of in-person SEC football. The 2014 Florida versus Kentucky game. A 36-30, triple overtime win in The Swamp extended Florida’s winning streak over Kentucky to 28 straight games. It was electric. It was my first taste of what could happen in a night game in The Swamp. And it solidified my love for the Florida Gators.
But we don’t just magically throw away the teams we loved growing up. I went to school with multiple people who grew up Florida State fans, but who went to UF and stood side-by-side with me at Gators games, cheering for the Orange and Blue. Sacrilegious, I know, but the point remains: you can’t just ignore the team you grew up rooting for.
So when is it appropriate to cheer for your “old” team? When can you don the polo of the team that gave you so much joy, or sadness, during your youth? In my opinion, the only time you can root for a team that doesn’t inhabit your resident fandom is when you have a direct emotional tie to a team.
Let me explain. The “direct emotional tie” phrasing is, by nature, subject to being misinterpreted. For me, I define that phrase to be any team that a partner or relative considers as their primary team. In my weekly betting picks The Napkin, I use a set of rules to keep myself on track and level-headed when coming up with my bets. Rule number one is as follows:
Never bet on a team you’re emotionally attached to
For me, this includes Florida (alma mater), FAU (family team), UCF (I have an emotional attachment to someone with an emotional attachment to the soon-to-be Big 12 school), and Oklahoma (my brother’s alma mater).
The parenthesis here is the key point. Obviously, I have an emotional attachment to the Florida Gators (cf. earlier in this post and, well, the fact that I write for Gators Wire and am a UF alum). But the FAU, UCF, and Oklahoma attachment isn’t so much an attachment to the programs themselves, but rather an attachment to the people that consider those teams to be their primary team.
It’s perfectly okay to want your partner or family member to be happy after their team wins. That’s part of the human complex, right? You’ll notice that all three of the teams that I hope to succeed are teams Florida has played over the last three seasons. FAU was [autotag]Anthony Richardson[/autotag]’s highlight reel debut with his dazzling hurdle, Oklahoma was the 2020 Cotton Bowl after “shoe-gate”, and no we do not need to talk about the 2021 Gasparilla Bowl, a game I attended in my Gators sweatshirt surrounded by a sea of UCF friends of mine.
In all three scenarios, I really didn’t have to make a tough decision on who to root for. The Gators are my team, and I will always root for the Orange and Blue when they are playing.
This week, I’m in the middle of a dilemma. I will be at Saturday’s UCF vs FAU game in Boca Raton. The same group of people that I went to the Gasparilla Bowl game with is the same group of people that I will descend upon FAU Stadium with at 7:30 p.m. EDT on Saturday night.
In this unorthodox scenario where two teams that I typically support play each other, the answer to “who will I support” is fairly simple. I am going with the team that I have cheered for since I was a child. The team that my family roots for. I am going to root for the Florida Atlantic University Owls.
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