When someone I follow on social media professed her love for the USC Trojans, I came to a realization. I don’t like college sports.

I did when I went to her school’s arch-rival, UCLA. I took the RTD bus down to the LA Memorial Coliseum where the Bruins played at the time. We did all the arch-rivalry things, like publish a parody version of the Daily Trojan, wore buttons like “Trojans burst under pressure,” waved dollar bills as they entered the stadium, and made so much noise during their audibles that Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times scolded us in his column.

When I couldn’t afford to continue at UCLA (thanks, President Reagan!), I finished my undergraduate degree at Cal State Northridge. CSUN had a football team that played at Devonshire Downs. I went to those games when I could. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday night, especially when the band made funny and sarcastic cheers.

CSUN cancelled its football program years ago, as had many Cal State Universities. The only place to watch college football locally is at a junior college, like Saddleback. My son would rather spend Saturday nights with his girlfriend and his daughter than watch a team for a college he will graduate from in May.

As I’ve become decades removed from college, I’ve become increasingly “bah, humbug” about college sports. It has become a minor league for the pros, where players jockey through transfer portals for the chance to get drafted by the worst team that season, have a career-ending injury before their first game, and be labeled a “draft bust” the rest of their lives. And with all the shifts in conferences, nine-figure TV deals, and private equity firms looking to dig their claws into the business, college sports seem to have little to do with college. USC Trojans is as much a brand name as the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Also looking back, lots of things about college sports give me the ick. The biggest was the thing that made them the most fun, the rivalries.

Over the years, I’ve had many friends who graduated from USC, not to mention doctors, dentists, and other professionals I worked with. Why does it matter that they went to a different university than I did? With the exception of law, medicine, and some other businesses where your degree is part of your marketing, how you perform at your job is more important than where you graduated from. Unless I check LinkedIn, I can’t tell you where most of my colleagues graduated from. A number of them didn’t even go to school in the United States.

In 2025, we should be especially wary of anyone who tells us to hate someone who is different from us in any way. Especially when they’re using this type of manufactured hatred to make money for themselves. (And let’s face it, rivalries were invented so schools could sell more tickets for certain games. Check ticket prices and availability for the next USC-UCLA game and see for yourself.)

If I want a dose of school spirit, I’d go to a high school football game. I plan to go to Reseda Charter High School’s 70th anniversary homecoming next month. Reseda hasn’t had winning football teams in recent years, but they didn’t have winning teams when I went there. We were winless my senior year. It didn’t matter. We were there to have fun with our friends and cheer on our classmates. And we kept cheering even when they were down 38-0 in the fourth quarter.

Nearly all the kids who are on the field will never play another down after their last high school game, but they play their hearts out for family and friends. Those are the type of players you can root for.

So, if you want to know what alma mater I root for, it’s the Reseda Charter Regents.