Legal Commentary

With the NCAA basketball tournaments getting under way, I wanted to post about an issue that comes up this time of year: who's your team?  Most of us have multiple teams we could root for: we've been to college and law school; we have friends and relatives from various schools; and there are also hometown teams to consider.  Many of us profs have sports teams at the schools where we teach.  So how do we rank our various loyalties?

Here's my take.  I've ranked loyalties from 10 (complete attachment) to 1 (tepid enthusiasm).  These are not my personal ranks -- they are how I think these loyalties should rank.  (It's normative!)

• Undergrad institution (9).  This should be your primary team -- so much so that it blots out the others.  After all, it's college sports -- you should root for the college you attended.  Division III folks may claim some mitigation here, as it's harder to follow your teams.  But I think you should root for your college over any other team on the list.  This ranking becomes a "10" if combined with another factor (your parent or spouse also went there, or it's your hometown team).  This could drop down to a 5, I suppose, if you really hated your college experience.
• Current employer (7).  You might say that you don't have "loyalty" to your employer.  But I think it's natural and good for your institutional capital to have loyalty to the school where you teach, and enthusiasm for sports teams can be part of that.  This jumps to an 8.5 if you are the dean.  
• Hometown team of your youth (6).  Often, this will be the local state school -- or you may have a choice, in which case you'll side with one or the other, or even a local city team (Fla vs. Fla State vs. Miami, for example).  The sentimentality of childhood is what puts this so far up the list.
• Spouse's or relative's team (5).  Again, this is often a childhood thing -- you root for your parents' teams because they are rooting for them.  But this is easier to grow out of, I think.  You also root for your spouse's team, but you never root for your spouse's team over your own college team.  And this ranking can drop down to a 1 if it's the school where your mean older sibling went.
• Close friend's team (4 or less).  You only hit four if a really close high school friend went off to a big time sports school, and you spent a lot of time rooting for this team because your own college didn't really offer much in the way of sports.  Schools of ex-boyfriends and girlfriends should be 1 or lower.  (Sports hate is an entirely different category, which is beyond the scope of this post.)
• Law school team (3).  A lot of folks may disagree with this one, but I just don't think you accumulate much sports loyalty in law school.  If you did, you were longing too much to return to undergrad.  Or perhaps parlaying a D3 undergrad into a D1-A law school team.  Again, I don't really buy it.
• Current hometown team (2).  The sports media in town probably have generated at least this level of enthusiasm in you, even if you have no other affiliations with the school.  But let's not get carried away.
• Past employer (1.5).  Some residual loyalty remains, but absence generally does not make the heart grow fonder.
• LL.M. school (1).  I'm looking at you, Georgetown LL.Ms!

I've tried to be exhaustive, but perhaps I'm missing something.  Feel free to chime in with your own take.