Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts about the five major college football conferences, focusing on one conference per week over the next five weeks. We introduced the concept of the series in this post last Friday. Each Monday, our writers will discuss their least favorite teams in each conference, and today we begin with the Pac 12. Also, due to our extreme bias as irrational fans of Notre Dame, we decided that for our least favorite teams in the Pac 12, we had to choose a school other than USC, which would have been the unanimous choice.
As Matt mentioned, we decided to avoid writing about USC because it’d be too obvious. Hating USC as a Notre Dame fan isn’t an opinion, it’s an axiom. So this column is actually more accurately described as Least Favorite PAC-12 Team *non-USC Division, adding another asterisk to the many that surround USC football.
Picking a least favorite team is easy when you have strong hatred for one. For me, this doesn’t apply to any team in the PAC-12 *non-USC division. Therefore, I thought about this question in terms of the team which had the fewest qualities that would make me cheer for them. With that in mind, Colorado Buffaloes, come on down!
Underdogs are always fun to root for, and when you’re arbitrarily picking teams in conferences to hitch your wagon to, teams at the bottom are always appealing. That said, it’s one thing to buy a fixer-upper from the junkyard and another to pick up disparate parts from the scrap metal pile. If you’re an advanced statistics kind of person, Colorado ranked 124th in 2012 F/+ rankings, putting on display the country’s sixth-worst offense and second-worst defense. If you’re not, watch this GIF of CU QB Jordan Webb running a first down QB sneak in a 38-3 lost to Washington. If I had a shred of emotional investment in Colorado football and watched that play live, anger tears and a broken TV would have been inevitable.
Hope springs eternal with San Jose St. savior Mike MacIntyre coming onboard as the HC next year, but to me, the odds on reaping the joys of Colorado fandom just seem far too long. Colorado, for being the team that would be most likely to lead me to a mental breakdown, I award you the title of Least Favorite in the PAC-12 *non-USC division
Commutes 