The Football Fan's Manifesto (16 page)

Indeed, no claim is a closer friend to the hater than that of being overrated. Every fan presumes that his team is, at best, correctly appraised by the general population. The function of the hater is to show the flaws in that perception. The weapons are subtle, but many. For starters, if the hated team is a Wild Card making a run to a championship, surely they lost to some embarrassing squads in the regular season. Why, how good could the team be if they lost to the Bears in Week 16? It’s important to point this out to their fans ad infinitum, even over their fans reasonable objection that the loss only came when they were resting their starters for the playoffs.

If all that fails, there’s always the refuge of insulting the stereotypes of a team’s fan base. Is it the Packers? Then they’re fat, ugly cheesebilly Favretards. The Steelers? Unemployed mouthbreathing rag twirlers. The Patriots?
Pfft. Boston’s really a baseball town. A racist-ass baseball town. And everybody has AIDS. And their AIDS stink. Don’t forget the Cowboys. You’d have to take a pestle to my frontal lobe to make me as dumb as a Cowboys fan.

The levelheaded fan who doles out respect to a successful team doesn’t exist. No team is unobjectionable in the eyes of a fan of a losing squad. This is the trap that ensnares fans of successful teams. They assume that other teams’ fans will embrace the positive qualities of their team as they make their run at history. Boston fans, in particular, are guilty of this. It’s a fundamental fan fallacy. No one wants to give another team its due. That’s simply the nature of fandom. Expecting any different of rival fans, no matter how sympathetic you may think your own team is, is the height of douchieness. Stow that shit and enjoy your title run. Don’t look for validation from other fan bases. You aren’t gonna get it.

The key to hating is not to let the people know that you hate them. This takes a bit of loathsome finesse. Otherwise you come off looking like an irrational curmudgeon who is out to piss on the parades of others. Even if that is exactly what you are doing, you can’t let them know that, or else it lessens the effect of your slurs. Proper hating takes years of practice to master, but once you get it down, you can apply it to fields independent of sport. Coworkers, in-laws, strangers who make you feel bad about yourself. All of them can be the focus of your burning disgust. You’ll find hatred’s the best coping mechanism
you can’t get from a doctor. Unless you finagle a medical marijuana prescription. That can help you deal with anything.

7.4 When “Wait ’Til Next Year” Is an Annual Mantra, or the Fan Bases of the Damned

Either through the unfortunate vagaries of inheritance or through the grievous impulsiveness of youth, you may find yourself linked to an ineffably, monstrously inept team. How this happens is one of the confounding mysteries that fate likes to stir in the stew of life with its unwashed pinky finger.

Sure, on some level you can enjoy the league as a whole, as a beleaguered student of the game, but you are condemned to view the NFL from the bottom up. You are but fools, doomed forever to the caste of losers. A wretched band of untouchables bound to serve the good teams the wins they desire. Their seasons begin with inflated hopes, flying in the face of reason, and terminate well before the actual season is over with crushed dreams and crying jags.

While there are many teams that are marked by pitiful performance on the field, there exists a fetid threesome that tests the mettle of their fans in ways only war refugees can understand. Despite fielding a team throughout the entirety of the modern era, they have yet to reward their faithful with so much as an appearance on the grandest of stages, the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the Panthers and
the Ravens made it to the big dance in their first decade of operation. Nobody said fandom was fair.

The New Orleans Saints, the Detroit Lions, and the Cleveland Browns. If ever there was a three-headed hell-hound of fail, it is they. Fans of the Lions and Browns gripe that their teams won championships prior to the Super Bowl era, but that’s like saying you’re rich because you have fifteen million drachmas. Championships won before the advent of the Super Bowl are a trivial footnote of history.

On a side note, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Houston Texans also belong on the list of teams that have failed to reach the Super Bowl; however, considering that these franchises are respectively fourteen and seven years old, it’s a bit unfair to hold them to the same standards as these three perennial tonguers of cornhole. Additionally, they have it rough enough living in Jacksonville and Houston without more ribbing.

One could also include Chargers fans, even though the team has made one Super Bowl appearance, seeing as how no pro team from San Diego has ever won a major sports title. But then again, the weather is too nice for anyone to really be miserable there. Nuts to those lucky, well-tanned jerkwheats.

If there’s any glimmer of deceptive hope for these teams, it is that a longtime member of their circle of futility, the Arizona Cardinals, has recently be expunged from their ranks with an appearance in Super Bowl XLIII. Naturally, the sudden success of a fellow eternal NFL punch line
should give them cause to believe in their own chances, but no, it’s only a bitter reminder that even the Arizona Cardinals can win and they can’t.

Here is a breakdown of their collective woes. Don’t skip past. It’s not too sad. They’re still slightly less depressing than the latest Holocaust drama you got from Netflix.

New Orleans Saints

Despite having the Superdome famously ravaged by a hurricane, the NFL continued to force this team to play what were considered home games on neutral fields after the stadium was fixed. So it’s not only fate that hates them. Meanwhile, owner Tom Benson would just prefer all their games be played in Los Angeles. And of course, they had the privilege to root for Papa Manning rather than his Super Bowl–winning brood. Punch yourself in the nuts again, Saints fans, before the universe has another chance to.

Relevant Fail-toids

• The team was in operation for thirty-three years before winning its first playoff game following the 2000 season. They then won their second following the 2006 season, so you could say things are looking up.
  
• Has had two quarterbacks named Billy Joe (Billy Joe Hobert and Billy Joe Tolliver) start games for them. One is one too many.
  
• Had grating “Who Dey” chant stolen by the lowly
  Cincinnati Bengals. Still seeking restitution or government aid.
  

Suggested additional self-torture (because once you get a taste for it, you can never have enough) for Saints fans:
Change your name to Billy Joe. Wait for next hurricane. Stay put.

Detroit Lions

Not only do the Lions administer unspeakable pain to their own fans, but they do harm to the rest of America with their shitty play by being one of two teams, along with the Dallas Cowboys, that tradition demands always have a game on Thanksgiving. They are spared from being the most embarrassing team in all sports only by the illogical devotion of their fans.

Relevant Fail-toids

• Where to start? There’s always the matter of them losing all sixteen of their games last season. That’s a good jumping off point.
  
• In twenty-one attempts, the team has never won a game at Washington. Their last victory on the road against the Redskins came in 1935, when the franchise was the Boston Redskins.
  
• Went three consecutive seasons (2001–2003) without a victory on the road, a first in NFL history.
  
• Barry Sanders, the greatest player in the history of this or perhaps any team, opted to retire at the age of thirty—when he could have played several more years and only needed about 1,500 yards to surpass Walter Payton’s career rushing record—rather than play any longer for such an utterly impotent organization.
  

Suggested additional self-torture for Lions fans:
Wear a throwback Matt Millen Raiders jersey to Ford Field.

Cleveland Browns

Like Detroit, enjoys a base of masochistically loyal supporters. Possessed an inopportune dynasty with Jim Brown, likely the greatest player ever, prior to the modern era. Better way too early than never, eh, Cleveland?

Relevant Fail-toids

• A key contributor to the forty-five-year Cleveland sports title drought. Admittedly, the squalid town doesn’t bear the fertile soil needed for a championship yield.
  
• “Red Right 88” and “The Fumble.” While other teams give names to their successes (“The Catch”), the Browns memorialize their bitter failures.
  
• Lost the franchise to Baltimore in 1996. The Baltimore Ravens proceeded to win a Super Bowl four years later. Browns fans still picture Modell laughing at them when trying to have sex. Hopefully this prevents breeding.
  

Suggested additional self-torture for Browns fans:
Jump in the Cuyahoga River, light it on fire.

VII.5 The Week Between the Conference Championships and the Super Bowl Is the Tool of the Devil (as Well as the Networks, Which Are Run by the Devil)

Among the more odious phenomena that blight the football landscape—besides the ever-present scourge of bandwagon fans and the fact that there are timeouts after scores and kick returns—is the two-week break between the conference championships and the Super Bowl. What purpose does this serve other than to dull the excitement that’s been building to a fever pitch throughout the playoffs? To hype the Super Bowl? Because surely the hundreds of millions of people who tune in to this cultural institution wouldn’t bother unless they had two full weeks of soft-focus player profiles and puff pieces crammed down their gullets. Nope. Not a one of them.

Not only does the two-week break impose a needless calm in the middle of the frenzied postseason, it destroys any momentum a team may have built up through January, bores fans to tears, and hurts the quality of the Super Bowl itself. Only seven times in its forty-three-year history has the Super Bowl been held the week after the conference title games, with the margin of victory being noticeably smaller during the one-week games than the standard two-week ones.

Of those seven Super Bowls, three of them were decided
on the final play: Scott Norwood’s kick-starting four years of Bills Super Sunday suffering in January 1991; Kevin Dyson getting tackled a yard shy of the goal line in the Rams’ 23–16 victory in Super Bowl XXXIV; and Adam Vinatieri’s winning kick to complete the Patriots upset of those same Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI.

The one-week games also give a fighting chance to the underdog, who, coming in with a full head of steam, has a legitimate shot against a daunting opponent. The Redskins’ 27–17 comeback win over the Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII, and Kansas City’s 23–7 upset victory over Minnesota in Super Bowl IV were examples of this. In fact, only two of the one-week games have been blowouts: Dallas’s 30–13 bludgeoning of Buffalo in Super Bowl XXVII (though the Bills led at halftime), and the last Super Bowl played with the one-week interim, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 48–21 victory over the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII (though the Raiders were four-point favorites entering the game).

After holding three of the four Super Bowls between the 1999 and 2002 seasons with the one-week break, the league reestablished the two-week layover beginning with the 2003 season. There are plenty of rational arguments as to why the two-week break is detrimental to the big game, but none more so than that it’s excruciating torture for fans, an echo chamber of unsubstantial hype that political conventions could only ever dream to be.

Moving the Pro Bowl to fill this gap, which will begin
starting next year, does exactly nothing to alleviate the dull that settles in the lull. It just means even more players will opt to take the game off. And that the Pro Bowl, as devoid of meaning as it already is, will somehow become even more pointless.

A two week buildup is an agonizing dog-and-pony show that’s nigh on unwatchable. For the first week, neither team has even arrived in the host city, forcing bloviating pundits to fill the vacuum with the sickliest scraps of rumor and warmed-over analysis to ratchet up the hype to obscene heights. Is a starting linebacker being limited in practice one day? Best sound the doomsday siren! Has a reserve player said in an interview that he’s confident in his team’s chances? Ooooooeeeee, that’s bulletin board material right there! Sounds like somebody’s guaranteeing a win! Will he be the next Namath? It’s enough to make you watch hockey.

Eventually the second week rolls around and the teams make their arrival, an event which, in keeping with the shitshow nature of the two-week break, is breathlessly covered by the media. Footage of people walking on an airport tarmac has never been so captivating. Yet no network will refuse to show it like it’s massive breaking news, as though the prospect of air travel suddenly became doubly perilous with the coming of the Super Bowl.

At some point the mayors of the participating cities (or, in the case of Jacksonville, sparsely civilized midden heaps) will wager items that are symbolic of their home-towns. If it’s Philadelphia, it’s probably a cheesesteak. If
it’s Baltimore, it’s spent casings found at a crime scene. What’s most galling is that everyone looks the other way during this brazen disregarding of gambling laws. I should be able to wager foodstuff if I so choose. And if I instead substitute the money used to buy food in my bets, so be it. Innocent fun!

On Tuesday of the second week comes Super Bowl Media Day, where the players are made available to the press, but only after they’ve been strictly admonished by their coaches not to say anything remotely interesting. Even the most charismatic player won’t do much more than taunt desperate reporters in need of a juicy quote. Every possible human interest story will be mined for copy, regardless of the player’s spot on the roster. Does a player have a crazy hobby or a sick relative? Well, they’re getting a fifty-inch profile in a Sunday paper somewhere around the country. To the relief of all involved, inevitably some wacky female foreign reporter will spice things up by showing up in a wedding dress and trying to propose to one of the quarterbacks. The QB politely demurs with a chuckle before taking her from behind in the hotel an hour later. Unless it’s Kurt Warner. He’ll just take her to Bible study.