What’s GQ got against booze and burning couches, anyway?

Hey, college football fans! Do you love drinking, verbally abusing opponents and setting inanimate objects on fire? I know, right: What kind of pantywaisted killjoy doesn't?

The pantywaisted killjoys at Gentlemen's Quarterly Magazine, for one. In a (successful) attempt to generate cheap hits and links, GQ compiled its "heavily researched, highly scientific" list of the 15 "Worst Sports Fans in America" for its April issue, a compendium that goes heavy on college football with disapproving nods to Wisconsin ("Boozehounds"), LSU ("Deep-Fried Lunatics"), Penn State ("Urine Tossers") and West Virginia ("Mad Arsonists"). In fact, WVU fans come in behind only the heartless Philly misanthropes that root for the Eagles and Phillies as the worst in America, mainly for their traditional affinity for immolating couches, chairs and/or effigies of their ex-coaches:

… what really defines the West Virginia University faithful is their devotion to celebratory arson. The school led the nation in intentionally set street fires from 1997 to 2003, lighting up an unmatchable 1,120 blazes. That includes 120 in a single night to celebrate a football win over Virginia Tech in 2003 and sixty infernos set to celebrate advancing to the second round of the NCAA basketball tournament in 2005. When school is in session these days, the local fire department reports that it extinguishes as many as twelve Dumpster fires in a week.

You can tell that comes out of an uppity East Coast swank organ that thinks of college football as a quaint-yet-corrupt flyover distraction, because anyone who actually gets college sports would have written the same paragraph to describe West Virginia fans as some of the best in sports. Their passion for the Mountaineers is literally burning. Wisconsin requires breathalyzer tests for previously expelled fans because they have to have some way to keep score. LSU fans don't hurl unspeakable insults at young girls in Alabama gear to make them feel bad; they do it as a rite of passage — Welcome to the family! Penn State fans … well, actually, Penn State fans can be pretty bad. But it's only because they care.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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