Why I'm Rooting for Oregon Tonight

As a Husky, this is a very difficult thing for me to do, and I recognize that it will be hard for some of my fellow Husky fans to stomach.  However, I have the following reasons, which I feel are good and sufficient:

1) It’s basically Pascal’s Wager for college football.  Yes, Pascal’s Wager requires you to pick a side, which I’m not obligated to do here, but half the fun of sports is rooting for teams in games you have no stake in, so… close enough.

 2)  Pac-12 pride: If Oregon loses, the Pac-12 reputation takes a hit.  It’ll appear, once again, as though the rest of the Pac-12 can’t beat a team that can’t hang with the best.  Less of a risk with the demolition of the BCS, granted, since Oregon has already won a playoff game, and certainly less than the (ever-so-well-deserved) SEC reputation hit this year, but still something.  After all of the mockery of the Increasingly-Inaccurately-Named-Conference over the last few years for being a fairly weak conference, losing to them now wouldn’t look good. 

3) Impeccable politeness: Imagine, as a Husky fan, being confronted with a stereotypical Duck fan (should be easy enough) upon their victory this evening.  This Duck fan would of course be boisterously, even obnoxiously effusive in his glee (albeit deservedly), and would likely attempt to rub in your face their national championship (no matter how polite I’m being here, I refuse to use their appalling abbreviation for this title).  How might this Duck fan react to a polite and positive response congratulating them on their achievement?

a.       They realize that it’s difficult (both tactically and morally) to mock someone who refuses to become upset at the mocking, but instead agrees with them as to the substance of their statements, and they thereby tone down their own behavior.  As a Husky fan, you can feel a certain pride at helping Oregon fans become better people, one fan at a time.  You can also enjoy your moral superiority for graciously taking the high road.

b.      They continue the behavior that has earned them nigh-universal recognition as gauche.  As a Husky fan, you can not only take even more enjoyment in your moral superiority as described above, but also delight in this confirmation of the true nature of (most) Oregon fans.

Now, granted, you could do this even while rooting for tOSU, but I think it would probably be easier if you rooted for Oregon to begin with.

4) Friends:  The few Oregon fans I’m friends with (left over from high school) are actually very decent people (and reasonable fans), and I feel somewhat bad rooting against them when I have no other reason to root for tOSU.

In other words, my reasons are pretty much all cynical and self-serving, except for the last one.  But how else would I manage to root for Oregon?

I recognize that this may not work for everyone, and I don’t blame them for that whatsoever.  These are not the best of reasons; they are not the worst of reasons.  There’s a lot of bad blood (and flung dog feces) out there to overcome.  I don’t claim that this will be easy for me, and Pascal didn’t even expect his infinitely larger stakes to convince everyone (of course, he was also as Calvinist as a Catholic can be, apparently, so there are some free will issues there.  Similes only go so far).  I just thought I should explain before I started getting incredulous hate mail from my fellow Huskies.

#GoDu… okay, I can’t go THAT far.