I guess I qualify under the Non-FBS Alumni rule. I went to W&J and while our football program is solid, we're Division III. Back in the day (mid-to-late 1990s), this only got you on TV if you made it to the national championship.There's a thread on r/CFB about fans who cheer for a school of which they weren't an alumni. And really, that's my problem with college football. I enjoy watching it but I mostly root against schools rather than having my own team. That's what happens when you go to Ohio University and not THE Ohio State University. How do you guys handle that? Do you root for a school you didnt attend? If so, how did you pick a team?
I was mostly a Michigan fan from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but I started following Pitt in the early 1990s when I was in high school because a couple of Erie guys went there. I got into Pitt for undergrad but went to W&J instead. I really started following Pitt more during Walt's first year in 1997; some friends at W&J were Pitt fans and that helped rope me in a little. They surpassed Michigan as my favorite program. In the late 1990s, I got into Pitt for law school and while I didn't go there (oops), a number of friends did so I was on campus there quite a bit. When I started working at my current job, one of my coworkers was a friend from college who was a Pitt fan. Our boss was a Pitt grad, a season-ticket holder for football and hoops, and his brother-in-law was one of Wanny's assistant coaches, so we went to like 3-4 football games a year for a while.
Over the last several years, I've become friends with a number of others in the Pitt fanbase. Pitt Twitter is honestly one of the best communities of fans I've been a part of in any sport, probably because we're very aware of the program's ridiculous struggle with mediocrity. There is no insult you can throw at a Pitt fan about the football program that we haven't already thought of ourselves.