The guys on TV don't hate your team. Get over it.

We've just completed college football's bowl season, the time of the year when Americans engage in two time-honored traditions: 1) watching mostly meaningless bowl games and 2) whining about how We've just completed college football's bowl season, the time of the year when Americans engage in two time-honored traditions: 1) watching mostly meaningless bowl games and 2) whining about how much the media hates our favorite team/conference.

I've heard more of it this year than any other I can remember. It's the vicious circle of the victim complex: Big 12 fans complain about the media pushing the SEC's "speed" agenda, while the SEC kvetches about having some combination of schools in Texas and Oklahoma being foisted on them by ESPN every Saturday night. Meanwhile, USC picks up its annual grievance about being left out of the national championship game by the media who forget the Pac-10 exists, while the rest of the country complains about how the media is once again calling a USC team who's played exactly no one since September the best team in the country. And the Big Ten realizes (rightly) that everyone hates them right now, and that certainly doesn't stop everyone else from whining that "biased" ESPN keeps pushing mediocre Big Ten football on them.*

*I think much of this collective pity party stems from our culture's obsession with victimhood in general, but that's a sociological discussion, not a sports one.

The problem is, pretty much all of it is complete crap. First of all, the national sports media (and by this I mostly mean ESPN) can't possibly hate everyone. (Well, I suppose that's possible, but I'm not that cynical...yet.) More importantly, that media has no deep-seated love or hatred for any of those conferences or teams within them. They're biased toward one thing: money. They're in favor of anything insofar as it can bring in more viewers, clicks or advertisers. That means their coverage will be heavy on teams that more people care about. That's most obvious in baseball, where the disparity in size of fan bases is greatest, and much less of an issue in the NFL, where so much of the fan interest is spread league-wide (you can thank fantasy football for at least part of that).

But as regional as college football is, it doesn't make any business sense for ESPN to hold any systemic grudge against any conference, thereby alienating an entire section of the country.* And ESPN controls enough of the sports universe that it has a tentacle--and therefore a business interest--in every corner of the sport.

*Of course, it makes complete business sense for them to favor major conferences over minor ones, so if your favorite team is in a non-BCS conference, then, um, disregard this post's title.

As for the individual announcers/analysts/reporters, I can tell you as a journalist (though many of them are far from journalists) that their only real bias is in favor of good stories. For them, covering games is like when I cover a meeting: I really don't care which side wins; I just want the end product to make for a compelling story. And I'd imagine that the feeling is even greater when your audience has to watch the thing with you. So when Thom Brennaman made his rather ridiculous ode to Tim Tebow on Thursday, it didn't mean he or Fox is in the tank for Florida and the SEC; it just meant he's in love with the story of Tim Tebow.

A final note: Just because an announcer says something negative about your team, it doesn't mean he hates them. (Exception: Billy Packer and mid-majors.) Think about it: You make negative comments about your team or the people on it all the time, and you're a fan of them. So, for the last time, the fact that Kirk Herbstreit said this once does not mean in any way, shape or form that he hates Nebraska. It just means that, like any sane college football fan, he doesn't believe Nebraska has both of the top two teams of all time. Say it with me: There's no cheering in the press box.