Well to be fair I hated and attacked UK far before the scandals and will when they are nothing but a memory.
on this board I’d say it’s pretty close, But in real life it’s UK fans’ passion/crazy by a mile. I doubt anyone on this board has made death threats towards anyone over UK nor attempted to run a referees side business into the ground bc he made a bad call in favor of uk. Nor harass kids on twitter for choosing another school etc.
But with that said the UK hate is definitely real, and for me personally it has more to do with the “fanatic/arrogant” portion of the fan base than hate towards any uk player or coach. But again you have to realize I live in a small town in wky that’s probably 90% uk fans, so my bias is stems from the fact that every average asshole, dumbass, racist, liar, thief etc that I know has a 90% chance of being a UK fan, just bc where I’m from. And don’t get me wrong I have more friends in my life that are Uk fans, than people I dislike, but in my mind it doesn’t make up for the “assholes”. I know that’s not fair to the average UK fan, or the fan base as a whole, it’s just my life experience.
I chose to be a Louisville fan mainly just to be different, but also bc UK sketchy history regarding racism. But mainly bc I was tired of hearing how great UK is/was 24/7 365 from people (like 60 year old women at church) that don’t even know all the rules of the sport of basketball. The same fans that will tell you the refs cost UK the game, but when asked which call or calls they didn’t agree with have no clue besides, “we were getting mugged all game long and we would get called for a foul for breathing on the other team”
Also, and I might be way off base, but there seems to be a fragment of the UK fan base that thinks they are better people or better at life because they are a UK fan, especially when UK is good, which is way more often than not. Like they tie the success of the basketball team together with their self worth or with the personal success in life, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with the program other than being a fan.
my two biggest pet peeves are people that brag all the time and people that think they are better than other people whether bc of race, wealth, social status, whatever. And that fits the bill with many UK fans I know personally.
But honestly I think all the bad pub the UK fan base receives is a bit much, bc they are basically getting blowback all the time bc there are sooooooo many uk fans. Every fan base has their fringe lunatics, but when u have arguably the largest fan base, statistics show you will also have more fanatics/lunatics. And then social media came along and made those type of fans the face of bbn bc they are fun to point and laugh at, imo.