Sometimes it's OK to be a hater.

In my post "Welcome Sports Fans", I mentioned that I am not a Ute hater because I don't believe in being a hater based on rivalry. It's kind of like a relative you don't necessarily like. I definitely want to beat them and beat them good myself, but don't you mess with them. I mentioned that I believed that there are valid reasons to be a hater, but that is a subject for another post. Well... this is that post.
I have long been a hater of two teams, Notre Dame and Washington and for very different reasons. First, let me discuss Washington since it is in my opinion, the lesser of the two reasons. I am a little predisposed to dislike a team whose mascot is a purple dog, so maybe my dislike of the Huskies is a little unfair. But, the main reason I don't like them is that it seamed that, for a while, every time I watched the Huskies, they played dirty. Now maybe I just happened to catch all the bad moments, but it seemed like every time I watched them, they played dirty. I have decided to keep an open mind toward them, because that was in past years. They have all new players and all new coaches, more than once, since the incidents that soured my opinion of them. That's the problem with becoming a hater based on dirty play. These things can change rapidly.
Now, for the Notre Dame bashing. I just got plain ol' sick and tired of Notre Dame being ranked higher than they deserved year after year simply because they are media darlings. Somehow, they have fans everywhere. (I hope it's not Rudy. I didn't like that show.) It's that simple. They get so may votes in the AP poll and are always rated higher than they deserve because they are so popular. Fortunately, they have become kind of a sympathetic figure lately because they have been horrible. I think that Ohio State has been the recipient of a portion of that favor since the demise of Notre Dame...
Hold on! Don't try to use the Fiesta Bowl to refute my point. Nobody doubted that they could score 21 points on Texas. There are many teams that could. I would have predicted it. What I didn't predict was Texas' low score. I would have thought Texas would score 50+ points. McCoy forgot to show up to the game. A quarterback with a season completion percentage of 70+% is lucky if he got 50% in that game. A quarterback who typically gets a lot of yards running had three noteworthy runs. He was horribly below the standard he set for himself during the season. Ohio State, who should not have been ranked number 10 and in a BCS bowl, did not impress. Texas stunk. I'm not saying Ohio State is a bad team. And they are only going to get better with Pryor at quarterback. They were not number 10 though. Boise State and TCU both were better teams in my opinion and neither got to go to a BCS bowl. And why? Because Ohio State gets more credit than they deserve season by season. I understand that it is somewhat earned as one of the top 5 winningest programs in the history of college football, but every four years, they are an ENTIRELY new team. I would argue that in college football, they are almost always a new team every year.
Call it my opinion, but those are logical, valid reasons for being a hater. Hating a fellow conference team and wishing them ill simply because they are rivals is foolish and somewhat self-defeating.