Notre Dame Football: Introducing TailHating — A New Past Time

Football in Los Angeles

There are many certainties in my life.....but the most certain, no matter the situation is Football > Not Football. This is a mantra I live by and has honestly taken me to some wonderfully strange places. The one that stands out the most is my time living in Los Angeles between 2014-2016. As a displaced Midwesterner.....I was....you guessed it....missing tailgating at any and all college football games. In Chicago, I was able to easily travel to ND, swing up to Evanston to catch a Northwestern Wildcats game, or even head out to my local high school. In Los Angeles, I was a fish out of water. I’ve never been a fan of Pac 12 football in general, which limited my options.

At first....I thought....I am in LA, I can enjoy nature and be ok without going to an official tailgate for a couple of years (I have blocked out 2015 USC from my memory so don’t bring it up). I went on hikes, went to the beach, hopped on a scooter, and all other sorts of LA shenanigans.

This lasted through the first week of September and I was CRAVING tailgating and a football environment....but was left with very few options....so what was a man to do?! My friend David was in the same headspace and we put our dumb brains together and thought up the perfect plan...

Introducing Tail Hating.

David lived just off of USCs campus, which we found funny because we hated the USC Trojans to our absolute cores. After that first week of not being able to tailgate, we thought about tailgating at USC and that just felt...gross. However, we were poor and didn’t want to sit in LA traffic to get the UCLA, leaving us with with very few options. We put our heads together and suddenly came up with the perfect crime.....We could.....wait for it.....A Tail Hate.

We then decided we would get our football tailgating fix in by throwing on our Notre Dame gear, grabbing a football and a backpack full of beers and head to the dreaded USC campus. While we definitely felt gross in enemy territory, we felt great about sporting our ND gear in a sea of Red and Yellow. It honestly turned into a great tradition and something I looked forward to each and every time we did it. We also had a deep rooted fear....Would this tradition soften our hearts to USC....Would we start to enjoy that annoying fight song....Would we we wooed by a sea of blondes around campus?!??!?!

Short and Long answer: Nope.

Turns out we are just two guys who love tailgating no matter the environment. We made the most of a weird situation and loved every second of it. You too can follow our lead and head to a tailgate and just enjoy it....because Football > Not Football.

Unless it’s Michigan....because.....Gross.

Question For You!

Have you ever tailgated in an environment where you did not care an ounce about the game. Are there any places you could not get yourself to tailgate at? Let me know in the comments and as always, GO IRISH!!

PS bonus pic of my brother and me tail hating against Stanford during my year I lived in San Francisco. Tough to necessarily call this tail hating....because...well Stanford just isn’t that hatable IMO.