Yep…I’m with you and the earlier post about their fan base being completely ambivalent to their basketball program unless they beat Michigan. There’s a couple of obnoxious OSU fans in my life that are intolerable about football and when I even try to engage in a reasonable conversation about basketball they don’t even care…until/unless they beat us. So they’re toward the top of my list.
I hate Chris Collins, but I can’t hate their trash program. Living in Illinois for the last 25 years I’ve mostly tried to be positive with their program (UofI)…but lately they’re overtaking Indiana (who I despised for a long time) on my list. Their fans are obnoxious because they are so quiet most of the time and then when they get a hint of being good they come out of the woodwork and claim to be everyone’s rival.
As a Michigan sports fan, it is my god-given right to complain endlessly and irrationally about circumstances I deem to be unfair. Purdue can go to hell if they think they’ll be spared.
I know we benefited from scheduling and anything could have happened in those games we didn’t have to play. But do you really think we came out like bandits last year on the schedule? As far as the karmic scale is concerned, I think we got screwed and then the fair thing happened and righted the scales.
If Purdue gets a bunch of home-and-homes with basement dwellers and we play a gauntlet so they have a game on us at the end of a season, I don’t think last season’s Covid shenanigans precludes us from complaining or disliking Purdue.
Yeah, if we had played those games there’s a good chance we would have finished 18-2, and probably no worse than 17-3. The annoying thing to me is that doing this gave Illinois a talking point. I would have rather just played those three bottom-dwellers and be done with it.
We needed to beat Sparty at home. It was that simple. That loss really stings. Should have swept Sparty and maybe could have even kept them out of the postseason with that win. Bad, bad loss.
Really? How on earth can a regular season loss sting when you won the conference anyways? Once Eli went down that game was just about getting out safe, I really don’t think the outcome mattered much to anyone aside from whiny Illinois fans.
MSU always matters to me. Perhaps it was meaningless in the standings, and losing Eli took any Michigan momentum away and made winning a lot more difficult, but it was still painful to me when we lost.
I mean it sucks to lose, but what did it change? They still won the Big Ten and got a one seed. It didn’t change the trajectory of the programs or affect recruiting. The game literally only mattered for bragging rights. When you clearly had the better season than your rival, what does one game of bragging rights mean? Cool congrats on your win, I’ll just be over here raising my Big Ten banner and reminiscing about my tournament run that took us one shot away from the Final Four.
I mean sure, it was frustrating when it happened, but that’s just sports. If you’re still pressed about a loss that happened a season ago that meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things (in which we lost one of our most important players to injury,) you might just want to take a step back.
You and the other commenter you’re agreeing with are saying very different things. I do agree that it was a tough loss when it happened, but Michigan fans were able to dry their tears with a championship banner. To still be bothered by the loss is just odd.
You just suggested that nobody outside of Illinois cared about the outcome of a M/MSU basketball game, and yet also think it’s odd that someone is still frustrated about that loss four months afterward? I can’t stop you from attempting to gatekeep what’s normal and what’s odd, but if you think that’s a reasonable activity for you then at least start with a sense of the normal range of approaches to rivalry.
I’d argue quite the opposite. As Superfan I was tasked with keeping things positive even when things were at low points. Having a downer leading the student section would be pretty tough tbh