09/04/25

College football is here once again, and fans are geared up to cheer on their treasured favorite(s). What stokes such ferocious lifetime loyalty to a bunch of guys playing a game for a few weeks every fall, and does it say anything meaningful about us?

In our family—nuclear, offspring, offspring spouses, grandoffspring, and grandoffspring spouses—the loyalties diverge. I’ve conjured a family head count—the total is 17—and Iowa State wins by a big margin, just as the Cyclones did last Saturday over South Dakota. We sport 11 Cyclones, 5 Hawkeyes, and a Cornhusker. Some of us also lean toward a smattering of secondary favorites: Graceland, Yale, Minnesota, Upper Iowa, and maybe others.

In our clan’s case the reasons are clear. Either we attended a college whose team we now support, or a parent or relative did, or that particular institution is our intended higher education destination, or someone we admire favors a team, or that team is located in a state or city where we once lived.

It’s telling that the team to which fans first pledge their troth almost always retains their loyalty to the end of their existence, sometimes more so than to a first spouse, a first church, or a first political affiliation. A fan personally swears devotion to a particular team at some point, usually during childhood or early adulthood, and the investment for some reason instantly becomes a tie that binds for eternity. 

I’m not schooled in psychology, and it’s something of a mystery to me why that magnetism is so enduring. I think it has something to do with the difficulty of letting go. In the 1960s and 1970s the Iowa Hawkeyes and their fans suffered through 19 consecutive non-winning seasons, during the stretch bookended by winning coaches Forest Evashevski and Hayden Fry. The dry spell made no difference – the faithful continued to fill Kinnick Stadium and cheer as loudly as ever.

Letting go is tantamount to admitting a mistake. That’s something most folks hate to do – it’s easier just to keep on keepin’ on, in the expectation that some day, somehow, things will turn around.

I think blind loyalty to a college football team also relates to the fact that the team plays only about a dozen games during the season. Baseball, basketball, and soccer are different – they play dozens of games per season, and it may be harder to stay loyal to a team that loses lots of games than one that loses only a single-digit number in any given year. 

And length of season may help to account for the psychological difference between the respective opening days of major league baseball and college football. There’s a saying that “Nothing bad can happen on Opening Day” of the baseball season. On that day optimism and hope dominate the mind of a baseball fan, with a clean slate, a very long 162-game stretch ahead, and the end of cold winter converging to stir the soul. Your team may have finished last (again) the previous year, but as Chicago Cubs fans learned a few seasons ago, “this could be the year.”

To me at least, the start of a college football season is one of angst, not hope. It’s not like my April enthusiasm for the St. Louis Cardinals. My Hawkeyes, having suffered through injuries during spring training and thereafter, with more unknown physical damage on the way, subject to player transfers to other teams, and unable to compete financially with the schools whose rich alumni bankroll their top players incredibly (legally now, as opposed to former times), are worrisome from the start. 

So it’s a personal challenge, and a sense of achievement, to stay the course with the college team to whom you’ve committed your whole life. Dogged loyalty is usually unrequited, but it has its own worth.

Socrates understood: “There is no solution. Seek it lovingly.” 

We’re gonna fight, fight, fight for Iowa!