Hello RRS Brethren,
I come to you with a frustrating story of a feud with a casual fan and wanted you all to weigh in.
The story:
In a group chat discussing with a Buffs fan my surprise that CU is a 21 point dog to Oregon this weekend. I offer that using the transitive property, which is unreliable in CFB, that would make CU a 14.5 dog to Tech in Lubbock. Then I offer up more respect for CU than that and say I think the line would be something like Tech -2 in Lubbock and +1 in Boulder.
At this point, another Tech grad weighs in and says "Tech is terrible this year." This isn't the first time he's expressed horrifically uninformed opinions on Tech football.
After pushing back the conversation devolves into a spat. What really irks me is that the guy is clearly uninformed. He knows nothing about our roster, our schemes, why some things work, why some things don't. He just continuously doubles down, and uses his experience playing football in the 8th grade and that I have never played football as reason why he knows more than me. Then he mocks me for reading the forums and actually knowing things about our team.
He then offers a bet. I say sure, O/U 5.5 wins. He refuses to take that. I say why not? 5 wins would be "terrible." If we win 6 games, that would be disappointing for sure, but that would also be a 5-4 conference record, something we've only done once (last year) since we moved to a 9 game schedule. It's hard to see how a winning conference record could be construed as "terrible." He tries to move it to 6.5, but that would mean a team has to have a .66 pct winning conference record (6-3) to not be terrible. That seems like a dumb bet to me. If he is so confident that we are terrible, he should be willing to take a bet that has us ending with a truly terrible record.
Then he tries to turn the table and attacks me for playing semantics. But he is the one that used the word terrible and wouldn't budge from it. Then he also brought up past years records as if that was somehow relevant to his statement that *this year's team* is "terrible." I would say he is the one playing semantics by arguing that a mediocre or decent team is the same as "terrible."
Ultimately what's frustrating here is how clearly uninformed this guy is, but then questions my knowledge of the team and the sport, using his experience playing Jr High football as for why he knows more than me, when he also admittedly doesn't even watch all our games. It's like, ok, you want to be wrong, be wrong, but don't double and triple down on being wrong and telling everyone else how wrong then are, then backtracking and insisting that a winning conference record would still be "terrible."
I know I'm overreacting bigly, and not fully encapsulating the rage I felt in this post. But the whole exchange really irked me. He's basically mocking all of us, those who actually care about and follow the team, but he probably can't name more than a handful of our starts and certainly doesn't know our two-deep.
TL;DR casual Tech fan calls us terrible and refuses to put his money where his mouth is by taking the under on 5.5 wins and accuses me of playing semantics when I argue that a winning conference record isn't "terrible." Who's right, him or me?
I come to you with a frustrating story of a feud with a casual fan and wanted you all to weigh in.
The story:
In a group chat discussing with a Buffs fan my surprise that CU is a 21 point dog to Oregon this weekend. I offer that using the transitive property, which is unreliable in CFB, that would make CU a 14.5 dog to Tech in Lubbock. Then I offer up more respect for CU than that and say I think the line would be something like Tech -2 in Lubbock and +1 in Boulder.
At this point, another Tech grad weighs in and says "Tech is terrible this year." This isn't the first time he's expressed horrifically uninformed opinions on Tech football.
After pushing back the conversation devolves into a spat. What really irks me is that the guy is clearly uninformed. He knows nothing about our roster, our schemes, why some things work, why some things don't. He just continuously doubles down, and uses his experience playing football in the 8th grade and that I have never played football as reason why he knows more than me. Then he mocks me for reading the forums and actually knowing things about our team.
He then offers a bet. I say sure, O/U 5.5 wins. He refuses to take that. I say why not? 5 wins would be "terrible." If we win 6 games, that would be disappointing for sure, but that would also be a 5-4 conference record, something we've only done once (last year) since we moved to a 9 game schedule. It's hard to see how a winning conference record could be construed as "terrible." He tries to move it to 6.5, but that would mean a team has to have a .66 pct winning conference record (6-3) to not be terrible. That seems like a dumb bet to me. If he is so confident that we are terrible, he should be willing to take a bet that has us ending with a truly terrible record.
Then he tries to turn the table and attacks me for playing semantics. But he is the one that used the word terrible and wouldn't budge from it. Then he also brought up past years records as if that was somehow relevant to his statement that *this year's team* is "terrible." I would say he is the one playing semantics by arguing that a mediocre or decent team is the same as "terrible."
Ultimately what's frustrating here is how clearly uninformed this guy is, but then questions my knowledge of the team and the sport, using his experience playing Jr High football as for why he knows more than me, when he also admittedly doesn't even watch all our games. It's like, ok, you want to be wrong, be wrong, but don't double and triple down on being wrong and telling everyone else how wrong then are, then backtracking and insisting that a winning conference record would still be "terrible."
I know I'm overreacting bigly, and not fully encapsulating the rage I felt in this post. But the whole exchange really irked me. He's basically mocking all of us, those who actually care about and follow the team, but he probably can't name more than a handful of our starts and certainly doesn't know our two-deep.
TL;DR casual Tech fan calls us terrible and refuses to put his money where his mouth is by taking the under on 5.5 wins and accuses me of playing semantics when I argue that a winning conference record isn't "terrible." Who's right, him or me?
