What Are The Requirements To Be A Fan Anyway...

After Saturday's monumental match up in men's college basketball between the Michigan Wolverines and the Michigan State Spartans, I saw a lot of hateful comments and stupid ones too being thrown out on Facebook. Some people like to label Michigan fans as "Walmart Wolverines", while others would call MSU fans "K-Mart Spartans". Why is it that because I didn't attend a school I couldn't afford that I can no longer cheer for them? It was acceptable for us to fans of the Wolverines or Spartans while in high school, but because we didn't go to either of those schools we can no longer root for them? Does attending one of those schools make you a bigger or better than those who didn't get a degree from there?

When I first started to attend Oakland University, it would bother me when my friends would label me a "Walmart Wolverine". I cheered and suffered through disappointment, rode the highs and the lows for 18 years before passing on attending Michigan. It wasn't as if I had been rejected from Michigan State and then changed my affiliation, heck had I applied to MSU I'm sure I would have gotten in there too.

Too often today, people want to accuse others of being bandwagon fans, which means you cheer for a team when they're doing well but abandon them for another team when they're doing poor. And yes, bandwagon fans can be annoying but they're apart of sports as much as anything else. The worst bandwagon fans of all have to be Detroit Tigers' fans, I can remember being 18 in 2005 and going to see so many games that year with my friends. We would buy cheap tickets and work our way down to the good seats because they rarely ever sold out or came close to it. Then in 2006 they made it to the World Series and ever since then I think they've basically been close to sold out most games of the their seasons following. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that my Tigers are good and relevant but I just get frustrated with the difficulty I have trying to get tickets to the games I want to see.

Basically what I'm getting at here is having a piece of paper that documents where you went to school shouldn't be the only criteria used when determining who you can root for.