By Austin Perry
Copyright outkick
If you have read my work for any amount of the time I have been at OutKick, you will know I don’t hide my fandom. I am, among other things, an unabashed fan of the Florida Gators football team, and if you aren’t presently aware, they are going through some hard times. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that head coach Billy Napier, who is 20-20 in his time at UF, isn’t the guy for the job. With rumors swirling about Napier’s job security ahead of a crucial two-game stretch against top-five opponents, it got me thinking: should you be considered less of a fan for rooting against your team if it means getting rid of the current problem? I know, that seems like an oversimplification of things. Firing Billy Napier doesn’t guarantee Florida’s success, sure, but ask yourself this: does a different, more competent coach of your choosing lose to USF with a five-star quarterback, a freshman All-SEC running back averaging 7 yards per carry on the season, multiple first-round draft picks along the lines of scrimmage, and one of the fastest wide receiver rooms in the country at their disposal? A lot of fans will tell me I can’t root for my team to lose because these are college kids, and while I agree with that theory in principle, the majority of these “college kids” are making hundreds of thousands of dollars to play the game. In my eyes, they’re professionals, and there are some strategic advantages to losing in pro sports. It’s called tanking, of course. I’m old enough to remember campaigns like “Suck For Luck” or “Tank For Tua” being quite popular in South Florida, but as a younger and a little more myopic/less jaded fan, I could never bring myself to root against my Dolphins. The Philadelphia 76ers molded their entire franchise around “The Process,” losing big in the short term to set themselves up for future success. While the execution didn’t work as intended, the formula was foolproof. The Gators will travel to Baton Rouge tomorrow night to take on the third-ranked LSU Tigers, and while I will be rooting for them between the hours of 7:30-10:30pm purely out of some Pavlovian conditioning, I would be lying if I said a loss would devastate me. As fans, we have to be able to see the forest for the trees. Yes, losing sucks in the moment. But I would rather lose now and rid my beloved college football program of the very sickness that ails it than let it fester and become worse than it already is. That sounds like a “true fan” to me.
