Screw Your Team

                I have always had trouble understanding sports rivalries.  Not necessarily rivalries between teams, but between the hosting communities / cities.  It seriously boggles my mind.  Trying to figure this out has driven me to near madness more than once, and yet, I cannot for the life of me stop trying to figure it out.

                Let me start off at the combined levels of high school and college sports.  I will use football as that is the most ubiquitous of all the sports in the United States.  Sports team rivalries are in no way anything new to, well, anyone.  But, I just do not get how the rivalry of sports spreads to a rivalry of schools.  Nothing outside the hostilities between the sons of Ishmael and Isaac can compare to the rivalry between schools when sports are brought into the picture.

                Somehow, somewhere, someone decided that a winning sports team meant a winning school.  If team “A” beats team “B” then it is obvious that team “A” comes from an all-around better school, right?  However, in my experience this is simply not the case.  My high school football team sucked.  They were, and still are from what I hear, the worst team in the school district.  Winning on “the grid iron” was as foreign a notion as diving to the Titanic without a submarine and no scuba gear.  It just was not possible.  So does that mean that my school sucked at everything? 

                No it does not.  My school sucked at sports, a lot.  But when it came to academics, well, my school ruled the entire district for more than two decades in a row.  It had more yearly graduates who graduated with higher GPAs, more students bound for college, and a lower dropout rate.  This was my high school.  Still think it sucks?

                I did not attend a single college that had a high rated sports team.  In fact, none of the colleges that I attended had football teams.  One had baseball, soccer, and track and another had basketball.  The university that I graduated from had zero sports relations and I liked that.  It was one of the deciding factors for me choosing that school to finish my degree.  The only really sporty people in the school were those who just liked to work out or were in the Military Reserves.

               

                Now onto the “Big Kahunas.”  Major league sports teams have the wonderful penchant for developing rivalries the second they are thought of.  Dallas Cowboys fans were talking smack the second it hit the airwaves that Houston was getting an expansion team.  There was no team to yet attack, but yet fans of the Cowboys seemed to like “attacking the Darkness.” 

                Since 2002 the Cowboys and Texans have meet three times on the field.  The Texans won the first challenge and the Cowboys have not underestimated them since.  In fact, the Cowboys have bested the Texans in two out of the three games, and by pretty decent spreads both times.  Needless to say, Cowboys fans hold this over the heads of Texans fans almost without mercy.  But then cometh the stupid.

                Not once in the previous paragraphs have I referred to the teams by their city, only their actual names.  This cycles back to sports team rivalries are understandable, city rivalries over sports teams are pointless.  Dallas’ team beat Houston’s team so Dallas must be a better city.  That may very well be true, until you look at facts and not sports statistics. Houston has more jobs, better pay, and a larger population.  When the market fell through in later part of the ’00 decade people flooded into Houston looking for work, not Dallas.  Dallas got its fair share if immigration, but Houston took the cake, ate it and licked the plate clean.

                I am not picking on Dallas, merely pointing out that just because their major sports teams can dominate Houston’s does not make them a better city.  Some aspects of Dallas, like their lower crime rate, do allow for the argument that the Northern city is better than Houston.  But on the whole, Houston seems to have more to offer current and potential citizens.  In my not so humble opinion neither city is really better than the other.  They are cities in a state.  Places of residence, business and commerce.