Your college football team lost: A guide to dealing with schadenfreude

Week 1 may not have been good to you or your team. It wasn’t good to a lot of teams. FCS teams knocked off eight of their FBS opponents. The American Athletic Conference has a losing record. All in all, 21 BCS-conference teams (about a third of the BCS teams that played in Week 1) already have a loss on their ledgers, and even with a weak Week 2 slate, there are more of those bad losses to come soon.

So let’s say your team had a rough go of it. Some hotshot FCS school came in and left with a win. Your expected MACrifice went sideways. Maybe your team won, but looked so bad in the process you’ve already told your boss you won’t be needing time off in January to go to a New Year’s Day bowl.

And then to top it all off, some punkass punk who’s a fan of an inferior team that your team didn’t even play in Week 1 has the nerve to start talking smack. Made his day to see your team lose, it did! Best game of the weekend, it was! A bunch of losers, y’all are! Some call this “little-brother syndrome,” but that’s not even fair to little brothers.

You’re going to have to deal with this situation, and if not today, soon. Very soon. Here’s how to do it.

This is fun, right? Some schmo you’ve never heard of (or worse, someone you know) with an avatar of a team that barely qualifies as a conference rival and hasn’t been to a bowl since 2007 cocks off with a snide comment about how your team lost and that was a lot of fun. Your retort should be simple: a picture of the scoreboard from the last time your two teams played, your own team obviously victorious. That should finish the discussion in swift order.

“Ah,” you might protest, “but this fellow’s team beat mine the last time we played.” If that’s the case, your next move is equally simple: block the fool, because the type of fan that kicks other fans when they’re down, unprovoked, is the worst kind of fan.

Here, you’re not constrained by the 140-character limit, so you can actually put together a cogent argument as to why this third-party smack-talker has better things to do than worry about how your own team did in Week 1. The temptation is to talk back about their rinky-dink team. DO NOT DO THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. This is a conversation hijacking, and it’s infuriating when people do it in a non-sports situation. You know the type. You’re halfway through an anecdote about a near-crash you had on the way to work or some medical situation with your parents or what have you, and this interloper interrupts you to start talking about how they’ve had a similar experience and here let’s talk about that instead. C’mon.

What you do instead is simple: talk forever about your team. Spend 500 words talking about your team. Say exactly what frustrated you about the quarterback or the play-calling or that free safety and how you knew this whole time he was a bum. Flood that fool’s inbox with everything you could ever care to say about your team and only your team. The other party will quickly lose interest in you as a target for ridicule if you’re not susceptible to getting your conversation hijacked.

Here’s where you can really go about solving the problem. The critical thing to understand is that when a fan of Team A talks smack about a game involving Team B and Team C, that’s not a jerk move... it’s a cry for help. This poor fan is self-medicating with other team’s losses. Some call it schadenfreude, but a good rule of thumb is that if there’s no word in English for it, it’s not healthy.

So when the fan tells you your team’s no good compared to his, repeat these four words as much as necessary: “it’s not your fault.“

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

Hug. Be insistent. Wait for the tears. Keep repeating it. “It’s not your fault.”

Then, of course, finish it off with “it’s not your fault THAT YOUR TEAM SUCKS SO BAD YOU GOTTA TAKE IT OUT ON A REAL PROGRAM LIKE MINE SUCKAAAAAAA”

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