The College Football Playoff National Championship is today, with the No. 1 Indiana Hoosiers set to face off against the No. 10 Miami Hurricanes.
The Hoosiers are looking to cap off one of the greatest program turnarounds in college football history, while the Hurricanes are looking to get back to the top of the mountain where they haven’t been since 2002.
It is safe to say that the cities of Bloomington, Indiana and Coral Gables, Florida, will be filled with cream and crimson, and green and orange, respectively, as they have every Saturday this season. But what colors do Seton Hall students fly on Saturdays without a football team of their own to support?
SHU once had a football team before they decided to cut the program in 1981 due to budget reasons and poor attendance after the team never saw any major success, including a 2-7 record in its final year of action. Ever since, sports fans at SHU have been faced with a puzzling question: “What college football team do I support?”
Currently, the state of New Jersey has only one Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football team, Rutgers University—an immediate challenge for SHU students. But surely everyone can’t be Rutgers fans, right? After all, the Pirates and the Scarlet Knights hold a heated rivalry, one which is settled every December on the hardwood to determine who the superior school in New Jersey is (spoiler: it was the Pirates this year). Outside of that, the next three closest FBS schools to SHU are Army at 58 miles, Temple University at 87 miles and University of Connecticut (UConn) at 153 miles, with the closest “Power Four” team being Pennsylvania State University (PSU) at 224 miles.
This leaves many students at SHU, and most New Jersey residents, without a strong college football presence, often leading them to root for teams outside the state for a number of reasons.
For example, sophomore social and behavioral science major Kate Barada said she roots for Indiana because that’s where she spent her childhood before coming to SHU.
“I cheer for the Hoosiers because I grew up in Bloomington, minutes away from the Indiana campus and have a lot of friends and family who are alumni,” Barada said.
“Me and my family have been going to Memorial Stadium since their one-win season [in 2011],” added Barada. “So the fact that we could win it all on Monday is still insane to me.”
In addition to where one’s from, friends and family can also influence who SHU students choose to root for.
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been around Spartan football,” Kennedy Roskopp said, a sophomore elementary education major. “I grew up around the university and a majority of my friends and family are Michigan State fans, so I was always raised to support the green and white.”
Ethan Conrad, junior business major, had a similar reason for supporting the University of Colorado Buffaloes.
“I’ve always been a Colorado football fan because I’m from Colorado and it is the closest team to me, making it easy to watch games,” Conrad said. “I also have a lot of friends who attend the university, so it gives us a lot to talk about.”
But what makes college football fandom different from other sports is that who you root for does not have to be entirely based on where you’re from. Many students at SHU also choose their team based on where their family and friends attend or attended school.
“My dad went to [the University of] Tennessee and is a massive football fan and would always have Volunteers games on the TV in the fall, so I naturally fell in love with the team and all the classic rivalries that came with it,” Jack Smith, a sophomore political science major, said.
Rivalries are often an overlooked aspect of how fans choose which team to support. For many people, including Smith, some of their favorite memories of watching a sports team are their rivalry games. This is especially true for college sports, where rivalries date back hundreds of years and are mostly regional.
“Games like Hendon Hooker vs. Alabama [in 2022], and the annual [University of] Georgia and [University of] Florida rivalry games have given me some of my best memories as a fan,” Smith said.
SHU will never have every student wearing the same colors or flying the same flag on college football gamedays. And yet, that's what makes The Hall one of the most unique scenes in all of college football. It gives students a chance to form their own identity based on their unique backgrounds, providing for a variety of gameday traditions, colors and rituals.
So, with the pinnacle of the season coming up, it will give SHU an exciting answer to our question: Will it be the cream and crimson or the orange and green flying proud on tonight?
William Gilhooly is a writer for The Setonian’s Sports Section. He can be reached at william.gilhooly@student.shu.edu.
