Should Penn State fans cheer for the Florida Gators football this season?

If a season actually happens in the SEC, only time will tell whether Gators fans will accept the now teamless Big Ten fans into their ranks.

With the Big Ten and Pac-12 postponing their seasons, the last shred of hope for college football this fall rests with the SEC, ACC and Big 12.

But in the event that those leagues do play, what are fans of teams in the former two conferences supposed to do this season?

Often, the Big Ten and the SEC are the deepest and most talent-rich leagues in the country. Without their teams competing, will fans from the Midwest migrate south of the Mason-Dixon to find a new rooting interest for the short term?

Mike Griffith, a Georgia writer and Heisman voter, put out his list of teams Big Ten fans should adopt, and notably, he thinks fans of the Penn State Nittany Lions should be cheering for the Gators this fall.

It’s certainly possible to see some parallels between the two. Though neither program is the top-dog in their respective conferences, each has had historical periods of dominance and recently bounced back from down periods.

Under coach James Franklin, PSU won a conference title in 2016 and is coming off an 11-2 season in which it won a New Year’s Six Bowl and finished ranked in the top 10, just like Florida did in 2019.

In the Saturday Down South article Griffith quote-tweeted, Connor O’Gara instead argued that Michigan was more comparable to Florida, which I personally find more agreeable.

O’Gara argued his case as follows.

When these 2 schools inevitably meet again in a bowl game in a year or 2, it’d be nice if their fans could have the common ground of talking about the time they rooted for the same team. Lord knows there are already plenty of Michigan graduates in the state of Florida. Actually, Michigan graduates are everywhere. And why do they always feel the need to wear multiple pieces of Michigan apparel at the same time? We get it, guy. Also, if this is the year that Florida beats Georgia, Michigan fans can just tell themselves it’s like they finally beat Ohio State.

If a season actually happens in the SEC this fall, only time will tell whether Gators fans will accept the now teamless Big 10 fans into their ranks.

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