There is a disturbing — perhaps politically correct, if you want to call it that — trend floating around the sports world right now that says, “Just root for your team.” What it means is this: Don’t root against other teams, just root for yours.

And I say, no, no, no. Here is why.

Sports encourage a certain type of greed. The greed doesn’t involve money — the public chides $200 million athletes and teams (the Yankees) that “buy players.” It doesn’t involve trades or free agency, either, proved totally and completely by the LeBron-to-the-Heat fiasco.

Basically, it does not apply to the bad stuff — business, money, lockouts, etc. This greed is only at the pure heart of sports — the games, the wins, the championships. Call it “Victory Greed.”

Michael Jordan has six rings. He’d rather have 16. Jack Nicklaus owns 18 major championships. He wishes it was 80.

If you win 25 straight games, you’d have preferred 26. Or 27. Score 60 points? It could have been 70. Hit four home runs in a game? Five would have been even cooler.

This greed especially applies to the quality of each victory. Beating the No. 1 team in the country is sweet. Beating them on a buzzer-beater is even sweeter. Our victory greed tells us the sweeter the win, the better the experience, and the greedy want the best experience possible.

And it is this greed that tells this whole “just root for your team” garbage to curl away in a corner somewhere and die.

Rivalries are nothing more than Victory Greed. When a rival takes the court, field, ice or diamond in hopes of defeating your team, the quality of the game reaches its peak. The pressure of each moment is amplified because you don’t just want to win. You want to watch the other team lose.

The game means more. Thus, the victory is sweeter.

Go back to the previous example. Beating No. 1 — sweet. Beating them on a buzzer-beater — sweeter. Beating No. 1 on a buzzer-beater and it’s your archrival — oh, man.

Mount your high horse, trot along the high road and disagree with me if you wish. But then you just aren’t being honest with yourself. You’re saying when you watched Tyler Griffey lay in that buzzer-beater, and you didn’t enjoy watching Indiana sulk off the floor with their heads down? I sure did.

If that game was against No. 1 Florida, the victory would have been sweet, but not as sweet. We don’t hate Florida.

I traveled home to Peoria — home of Illinois shooting guard D.J. Richardson — this weekend and watched my high school alma mater, Peoria Notre Dame, play its archrival, Richwoods. (D.J. played at Peoria Central.) The place was bumping. Both schools were represented by impressive student sections, each yelling at each other with hostility, each screaming with each made basket and each totally and completely hating one another. It was fantastic. The players fed off of the energy and played with urgency. The atmosphere was electric. That’s just the way it is with rivalries, with hatred.

Further proof lies in the professional ranks as well. When Chicago Cubs tickets go on sale, the matchups against the St. Louis Cardinals will be the first to sell out because if a dad is going to drop a few hundred bucks to take him and his family to Wrigley Field, he wants that trip to be as sweet as possible. He wants to see them beat the Cardinals.

Same goes for Bears fans (Packers), Blackhawks fans (Red Wings), Duke fans (North Carolina) and any other fan.

The call to “just root for your team” is a call to abolish the hate, to abolish the wish to watch certain teams lose, to abolish rivalries. That’s not a call I will answer. A world where the Cubs don’t hate the Cardinals, the Bears don’t hate the Packers, Illinois doesn’t hate Indiana and everyone just gets along handsomely, patting each other on the back with a Good Job! after every championship…

That’s not a sports world I want to live in.

Jack is a senior in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JCassidy10.