The Fighting Irish show up as the top hated team in 8 states — more than any program in the country. Alabama is second with 6. Ohio State is third with 5.
That ordering looks wrong to anyone who’s lived through the SEC’s championship dynasty. But Notre Dame’s villain status works differently than Alabama’s. The Tide are hated intensely by a smaller geographic footprint — basically the rest of the SEC. The Irish are hated broadly, across a corridor stretching from California to Maine, for reasons that have nothing to do with conference standings.
In California, Notre Dame is USC’s defining national rival — the cross-country game in late November shaped Trojan fandom for nearly a century, and that resentment seeped into the largest college football fanbase in the state. In New York, Syracuse fans built up a decade of Big East–era ND grudges, and the Eastern media’s love affair with the Irish has kept the eye-rolling alive since.
Throughout New England — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont — Notre Dame’s institutional gravity as the Catholic football program creates a strange dynamic where its biggest local fanbases are also where its loudest detractors live.