The Hater’s Guide to the College Football Playoffs

As any astute reader of Splinter can tell by now, I am a proud hater. I hate the Democratic Party. I hate the Los Angeles Lakers. I hate the Kansas City Chiefs. I still kind of hate Sean Payton after blowing that eminently winnable game last night. I admittedly love to hate hate hate. In politics however, you do have to come up with some solutions for your hatred, as being a total hater is generally unproductive to the cause of building a better world.

But in sports? Hell naw, hatred is half the fun of it.

The first-ever expanded College Football Playoff starts in South Bend tonight, and to echo everyone else in America: boy am I excited. This is everything that college football fans have dreamed of for decades, and the first-round matchups at home campuses are going to create some of the loudest crowds in human history. It’s going to rule so hard.

But who should you, the casual fan, root for? This is where I am happy to help. Sure, you could just watch and enjoy the beauty and chaos of college football, but you can still do that AND enjoy the trollish fun that comes with being a hater. Let me show you how in this Hater’s Guide to the College Football Playoffs.

Indiana at Notre Dame

This is a pretty straightforward hater’s game on its face: the mighty and righteous juggernaut with history as long as college football itself versus the plucky underdog state school having its greatest season ever. Raising the ante with an in-state rivalry played in front of Touchdown Jesus makes this an all-timer of a setup for Cinderella. If the Hoosiers can walk into South Bend tonight and kick off the College Football Playoff with an upset they are very capable of producing, all of America will rejoice.

Hater’s Guide: You fool. You pea-brained simpleton. You think rooting for what will make 330 million people happy makes you a hater? You get absolutely no hater points for backing Cinderella in the most made-for-TV-movie setup ever. Someone is playing us here and I suspect they are located in the Big Ten offices. This is literally the galaxy brain meme unfolding in real time and you’re on the first frame of it. Join me in the last one, where the real haters know that rooting for a delusional relic of the 20th century to succeed in the 21st is where real haterdom is at. The Irish are such haters to modernity that they are willing to ensure they never get a first-round bye or a seed above the SEC and Big Ten Championship Game losers so long as they still get to pretend they’re a bunch of fancyboys who are too precious to join a conference. They are hating on a level few can truly comprehend, and I cannot help but stan.

Southern Methodist University at Penn State

This is, frankly, a hater’s dream: the opportunity to be a troll and be morally justified in doing so. If you are not aware of the entirely legitimate reasons outside of football to hate Penn State, just Google Jerry Sandusky. There is no such thing as ironic hatred here, only real.

Hater’s Guide: Thankfully, SMU allows this guide to veer back towards trollish fun. The Mustangs of the 1980s are infamous for exposing the rot at the root of college football, as they took the widespread corruption around paying players to a truly depraved level, receiving the so-called “death penalty” and having their 1987 season canceled, destroying their program for decades. That they find themselves in the first-ever expanded playoff 37 years later when the NCAA has accepted reality and finally begun to give players what they have earned is true poetic hater justice. Go ‘Stangs.

Clemson at Texas

This is some nuclear-grade hate, folks. You should probably put on one of those lead bibs they give you at the dentist to watch this game if you are going to follow me down the path of haterdom. As a rabid Colorado partisan, I was instructed to hate Texas as a child and learned how to as a young adult after Vince Young taught me that 70 to 3 was possible. Not to mention how these greedy Bevos helped destroy the Big 12 with their boondoggle of a Longhorn Network before fleeing to the SEC, all so they could play in the safe space of Georgia and Alabama’s shadow.

That said, “fuck Dabo Swinney” is the first commandment of college football haterdom. This is a man who is the second-highest paid coach in college football and has fought tooth and nail to try to make sure his players at Clemson never see a fraction of what he makes, all while being the most condescending asshat you’ve ever seen. Swinney once said he’d quit coaching if players got paid, yet here he is traveling to Austin with his professional hopes and dreams pinned on the arm of a college student reportedly making $568,000 in NIL deals. Fuck Dabo.

Hater’s Guide: Can both of these teams lose this game? No? Then is it possible to make the horns down symbol in the titular photo, but in support of the Longhorns?

Tennessee at Ohio State

Sweet Mary and Joseph there is some primo haterdom to be had this weekend. A road team sweep would mean that we’d kick off the College Football Playoff with home losses by four of the most widely despised fanbases in the land. As Barney Gumble once famously said, hook it into my veiiiiins!!!

Hater’s Guide: If Ohio State, Texas, Notre Dame and Penn State all lose at home this weekend I will call out of work on Monday so I can spend all day reading and laughing at every single college football forum on the internet.

Teams on Bye

The four highest-rated conference champions do not play this weekend, but that doesn’t mean we can’t align our hatred with their spot in the bracket. I will rank these teams from most hate-worthy to least.

Arizona State

Yes I am this petty. This should be my beloved Colorado Buffaloes’ spot if there weren’t so many Buff haters in this world, and I still am waiting on most of you to apologize to both me and Deion Sanders for doubting his ability to turn around my moribund college football program. Some Deion haters may think they’re being clever by making fun of CU just missing out on the Big 12 Championship Game in a four-way tiebreaker, but imagine going back to the beginning of the season and telling yourself that’ll be your biggest dig at Deion! Apologize now!

Arizona State plays the winner of Clemson and Texas at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, and while they have an extremely fun Marshawn Lynch clone with a cool name in Cam Skattebo who all of America may be about to fall in love with, I will only see a missed opportunity when they play, and I want the Sun Devils off my TV screen post-haste.

Hater’s Guide: Horns down in support again, I guess. But if the worst is to happen, I am not one to violate the first commandment of college football haterdom. Fuck Dabo.

Oregon

Oregon is stolen college football valor personified. They are a corporate behemoth previously not opposed to child slavery slipping inside a cute duck costume and saying “how do you do fellow kids” with shiny new jerseys every year. Imagine rooting for these frauds. The Ducks have never won a national championship despite Nike’s sweaty and desperate efforts to buy one, but they strut around pretending like they’re Alabama. Oregon historically looks like a juggernaut right up until the eyes of the nation fall on them, and they are returning to the college football playoff for the first time since 2015 with what looks like one of the best teams if not the best team in program history.

Hater’s Guide: Oregon plays the winner of Tennessee and Ohio State at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and what better way to continue to torment Nike’s Eugene subsidiary than to watch them lose to a team who has actually won a national championship or two, with a fanbase who is more than happy to tell you all about it for 28 hours a day?

Georgia

At first it was fun watching the Dawgs unseat Nick Saban’s crotchety Alabama dynasty, and I was very happy for my Paste Magazine co-workers who I remember watching that brutal overtime loss in Atlanta with when the legend of Tua Tagovailoa was born in 2018, but honestly it’s getting kind of annoying now. No one who wins a National Championship 65 to 7 should have anyone outside that fanbase root for them. Georgia plays the winner of Indiana and Notre Dame at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, setting up a truly legendary Cinderella run for the Hoosiers. Some Georgia fans may try to trick you into thinking they deserve sympathy because they likely won’t have star quarterback Carson Beck for their next game, but you shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of gaslighting from a self-described football factory school. Just pull another five-star recruit out of the hedges like you always do you jerks.

Hater’s Guide: While the counterintuitive pro-Irish hater logic is unique to this seemingly rigged set of circumstances to film a Big Ten-themed Hallmark movie in South Bend tonight, that goes out the window should they advance to play college football’s current boogeyman. The Hoosiers are the hater’s pick here if they win, but if we get Irish vs. Dawgs, this is a test for you on your personal journey as a hater. Follow your heart. There are no wrong answers.

Boise State

The problem with being a hater is at some point you do have to root for someone. We can try to whittle this down as much as possible, but if we are to achieve our hater dreams, that means someone has to win the National Championship. What better team to pick than the only one who the College Football Playoff wasn’t really designed for? Just imagine the ocean of tears that would flow from these storied programs who finally got the tournament of their dreams, only to watch some guys who play on a weird blue field in Idaho steal the whole damn thing from them.

Hater’s Guide: Indiana is a poser’s hater team. Oh you’re rooting for a team who lost one game in one of the two conferences swallowing college football whole? Cool story bro. Boise are the original renegades, actual haters who sent the mighty Oklahoma Sooners down a spiral they still haven’t quite recovered from. If you love to hate the powers that be in college football like I do, Boise is your proxy. They play the winner of SMU and Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl, and should the Nittany Lions win this weekend, that sets up a bigger good versus evil battle than the original that made Boise State college football’s premier Cinderella. Go Broncos baby.