Welcome to the Fan Misery Ladder, where we set our watch to Pitt.

FML 19.0: Preseason

FML 19.1: Rocky Bottom

FML 19.2: The Pac Delivers

It’s Streak Week! The first couple weeks of the FML are opportunities for the truly morose to make their cases for the Taggart Trophy, but come Week 3 everyone gets a piece of the action. The rules for win and loss streaks have kicked in which means the board really gets moving. Also, for some reason the Pac 12 and Big 10 teams in Level 4 have banded together to spell “Wario”. Why did they evoke Nintendo’s undisputed king of greed and avarice? This is just another mystery we will unravel in our research.

We have a new leader [sic] in UCLA, who took a 34 point loss right in the Boomer this weekend. The Pac continues to have amazing diversity in their sadness (as dictated by their HR policies). The Big 10 and Big XII finish their perfunctory relations and have fallen asleep before the Pac has even started to get buck wild. If you miss #Pac12AfterDark, well, you’re a vanilla football fan.

Here’s the big board:

MISERY OF NOTE

YOU CAN’T SPELL WTF WITHOUT WF Congrats to the Deamon Deacons who polished off a 3 game win streak by reminding Mack Brown what it was like to lose to a rival. Don’t think that basketball schools don’t care about football rivalries just because they don’t show up in the stands. It’s just that they don’t have enough melanin in the entire student body to expose a single middle finger before November.

NOT SO MERRYLAND SEND TWEET I called out the Terps last week on their shit and man oh man did they deliver. Maryland lit up scoreboards for weeks to earn a Top 25 ranking only to fall to a Temple team that couldn’t beat Buffalo or Villanova last year. No one cares how well you practiced your dance moves to Uptown Funk after you fall into the wedding cake, Terps.

IOWA STATE CONTINUES TO DISAPPOINT this time by actually losing. The 2019 El Assico was intensely meta, but somehow the missed opportunity for the birdies to knock off a ranked in-state rival is mitigated by just how Iowa State that lost was. The FML is not nearly granular enough to have a rule for when you lose to your rival because a punt ricochets off the back of a player’s helmet who isn’t the punt returner, but damn. Would that it was.

LOOKING AHEAD

IT’S THE THIRD SATURDAY IN SEPTEMBER which means it’s time for Florida to prop up Tennessee’s corpse and finally film that Weekend at Bernie’s / Necessary Roughness mashup we’ve all been asking for.

MY DAD OWNS A DEALERSHIP The only other rivalry game going on this weekend is Horned Frogs vs. Smustangs. Finally, an opportunity for the children of the idle rich to have their day in the sun. Winner gets the 8-ball in the center console of this leased 3 Series.