Being called an idiot is one of my favorite parts of this job. It happens a lot. Part of this is because I am, in fact, an idiot. That's one of the reasons I find it amusing when somebody goes out of their way to send me a message on social media or via email to call me an idiot, or moron, or my personal favorite, "so-called expert." I know I am! I've lived with me every single day of my life. You aren't telling me anything new here. But thank you for reading.
The other reason it happens so often is that I have a large platform here at CBSSports.com, and part of my job is making predictions about things that will happen -- even though I have no idea what will happen. I'm just making educated guesses based on the information available to me at any given time and trying to figure out the most likely outcomes. Sometimes I'll be correct, and plenty of other times I'll be wrong.
Still, no matter how often I'm called an idiot or a moron, I'm always surprised by the reasons behind it. You can be amazed what sets people off. Earlier this week, I received a lengthy email from a Michigan fan in response to a question I answered in a mailbag last month. Primarily what I wrote was that Jim Harbaugh hiring a new offensive coordinator could be good for Michigan going forward, as they were finally going to modernize the offense and it could help the Wolverines become a legitimate title contender in both the Big Ten and national title picture. In the email, this person insulted me no fewer than seven times, and it turns out he was upset that I implied Michigan wasn't already a legitimate contender in the Big Ten or national title picture. Then he called me arrogant to close out the email. It was amazing. It was also inspirational because it helped me realize I hadn't written one of my favorite annual Friday Fives yet this offseason: the fan bases I angered the most during the previous season.
So, thank you, Angry Michigan Fan, for reminding me what being a sportswriter is all about. Now let's rank the fan bases I ticked off the most last season.
5. TCU: This one was the result of another annual Friday Five I do when I rank the most overrated teams in the preseason Coaches Poll. Of the five teams I deemed to be overrated, I put No. 16 TCU at No. 1. My reasoning for it was quite simple, and I believed logical:
The Horned Frogs have five returning starters on offense. They've lost QB Kenny Hill. They've lost damn near their entire offensive line. Seriously, using Phil Steele's career starts chart, there isn't a Power Five team in the country with less returning starts on its offensive line than TCU's 26. LSU is the closest to TCU with 35. I've always believed that to win the Big 12, you have to have a top defense, as it's what separates you from the rest of the pack. The flip side of that, however, is that you need to be able to keep up with powerful Big 12 offenses as well. I look at this TCU offense right now, and I have a hard time finding the confidence in this offense to be able to score when it needs to.
I think the Horned Frogs are due for one of those "reset" years like we saw them have in 2016. They went from 11-2 in 2015 to 6-7 the following year. Last season saw the Horned Frogs go 11-3, and while I don't know if another six-win season is in the cards, I have a hard time envisioning this team finishing the year ranked as high as No. 16.
I was then subjected to a healthy dose of TCU fans calling me a "so-called expert" because of it. TCU proceeded to go 7-6 on the season and 4-5 in the Big 12, scoring 23.5 points per game. The only Big 12 team to score fewer was Kansas State, which means that Kansas -- KANSAS -- scored more points per game in 2018 than TCU did. For once, I was right. It happens sometimes. I'm also incredibly wrong sometimes, but we'll get to that later in this list.
4. Alabama: Of all the reasons fan bases united against me this past season, this was probably my favorite. While the grudge didn't last long and it was only a small, let's say, naive portion of the fan base, there was a week-long period where some Alabama fans were very mad at me. Why? Well, because I did what Nick Saban wanted.
You see, Alabama had just beaten Texas A&M 45-23 to improve to 4-0, and it had won those four contests by an average of 41 points per game. The world was already crowning it the SEC champion and giving it a spot in the College Football Playoff, which bothered Saban. During his press conference, he literally asked the media to focus on the negative aspects of the team and what it was doing wrong. So I did. In my Monday column, I wrote a very tongue-in-cheek takedown of why Alabama sucked. The headline was: "No. 1 Alabama is actually trash, and the Tide apparently need to know it." Well, you can guess which part of the column a few Alabama fans read, and it was the first six words of the headline. The Twitter mentions and the e-mail inbox were quite fun for a few days.
Alabama fans would later get mad at me for voting for Kyler Murray over Tua Tagovailoa on my Heisman ballot, but they were mad at everybody for that, not just me.
3. Oklahoma: This was a case where I wasn't wrong ... but I wasn't right, either. It wasn't the kind of situation where a prediction was made as much as I just shared my opinion. On Nov. 19 in The Monday After, I wrote that I didn't want to see Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff. It had nothing to do with whether they deserved a spot, nor was it a prediction that they would or wouldn't get there. I just didn't want it to happen.
I wrote this a couple of days after Oklahoma beat Kansas 55-40. It was the last straw for me as far as taking Oklahoma seriously as a title contender. Kyler Murray and the offense were awesome -- again, Murray received my Heisman vote -- but there was no way I could take a team with a defense so porous seriously. There just wasn't a chance that the Sooners could beat two elite teams and win a national title being so bad defensively, so including them in the playoff felt like a waste. That's not to say I thought there were a lot of other teams out there capable of beating both Alabama and Clemson -- there aren't! -- but I just knew Oklahoma wasn't going to; not when it allows Kansas to score 40 points against it. As you can imagine, there aren't a lot of fan bases who would take kindly to anybody writing that about their team, and Oklahoma fans responded the way you'd expect.
Oklahoma would make the playoff and promptly find itself down 28-0 against Alabama fewer than 17 minutes into the game. It made a valiant effort over the final 43 minutes -- thanks in large part to Murray -- to make the score a respectable 45-34 final, but Alabama's offense still averaged 7.5 yards per play and scored on seven of its 10 possessions. The 10th possession was Alabama running the final 4.5 minutes off the clock as Oklahoma's defense couldn't get off the field.
2. Nebraska: It's almost an annual tradition in my Bottom 25 rankings that one Power Five school's fan base will not be familiar with the rankings, nor the method behind them, and upon finding themselves ranked in a poll that ranks the 25 worst teams, lose their minds about it. That was Nebraska this season. When Nebraska made the Bottom 25 after its season-opening 33-28 loss to Colorado, they weren't happy. I was a "so-called expert" who had never watched Nebraska and didn't understand football. I tried to explain that in a ranking system built upon results in a current season (wins, losses, stats), it's hard for any 0-1 team to escape The Bottom 25 after a week, no matter what school it is.
Nebraska fans weren't really up to listening. Then the following week, the Cornhuskers lost to Troy 24-19. The week after that they lost to Michigan 56-10. Then came a 42-28 loss to Purdue, and before you knew it, Nebraska was 0-6. Now, this had nothing to do with The Bottom 25. The system the rankings are based on is not predictive, nor is it designed to be. What was funny, though, was the same Nebraska fans who spent the first week of the season yelling at me then changed their minds and embraced the concept. One week, a Husker fan was calling me a moron, and two weeks later, that same person was in my mentions eagerly asking me how high his beloved Huskers had climbed in that week's Bottom 25. It was a fantastic turn of events, and one that mirrored the second-half of Nebraska's season as it started 0-6 but won four of their last six.
1. LSU: The anger here was based on preseason predictions, and a projection I was very much wrong about. In our SEC picks, I chose LSU as the most overrated team in the SEC. I was one of four people here at CBSSports.com to do so (Ben Kercheval, Chip Patterson, and Barton Simmons were the other three). What I did differently was I tweeted out all my predictions for each conference, and LSU fans pounced on the tweet in which I labeled them as the most overrated team in the SEC. My reasoning wasn't complicated. LSU began the season ranked No. 25 in the AP Poll, and I didn't think the Tigers would finish the season ranked. Therefore, they were overrated. Well, no fan base likes seeing their team called overrated, and LSU is no exception, so they let me have it.
My favorite part of this was there was one LSU fan arguing with me about it saying that I couldn't call LSU overrated because "everybody in the media" was picking them to go 7-5. When I pointed out that "everybody in the media" that makes up the AP Poll had LSU ranked in the poll, it's hard to imagine that "everybody in the media" thought LSU was going to suck. I don't think he ever caught on.
Anyway, as for all the LSU fans who were angry at me for logical reasons, they were all a billion percent correct. Not only was LSU not overrated, but it also turned out the Tigers were quite a bit underrated. They would finish the season 10-3 and ranked No. 6 in the AP Poll, 19 spots higher than they began the season. Their three losses would include an eight-point loss to Florida on the road and an insane seven-overtime loss to Texas A&M on the road. They also got shellacked by Alabama at home in early November, but we can't hold that against them because that happens to anybody not named Clemson. So not only did hordes of LSU fans call me an idiot before the season started, but they had every right to keep calling me an idiot all season long. And they did. And I deserved it. So I'm putting LSU No. 1 on this list. Sure, maybe some will say I'm overrating it, but not me.
Honorable Mention: Illinois, San Diego State, UCF
