By: Jacob Christner
I make no bones about this little detail, be it on social media or in real life.
I hate sports fans.
Not all of them, mind you. There are plenty of good ones. The kids that have heroes and wear the jerseys, the parents that will work extra hours to be get their kids the shoes and other merchandise, the casual fans that need an escape from the mundane, and even the ones that simply wait for the playoffs and the big game. Those are the honest ones.
The ones I hate speak for themselves.
They are the fantasy football and Madden players that are of adult age and still think fantasy football and Madden is how you run a team in real life. They are the emotional nitwits who will say Brock Purdy is the next Tom Brady, but then question if he should start next year because of what happened in the title game. They are the ones that absolutely don’t care if the team wins or loses if they get THEIR rock star as a QB, as if they are high schoolers hoping the cool kid notices their existence.
Those fans are insufferable. They ruin teams because skittish front offices are afraid of empty seats, and those fans threaten to leave…never mind the seats will fill back up if the team proves the fans wrong and win games. Winning can happen and they search for “prettier”, more popular, more flashy. “Well, we could win, but not with THAT GUY! My friends make fun of me because he’s around”.
Again, like high school.
So what could be done about these type of fans? Unfortunately, not a thing. There are too many of them, they are too loud, and social media is not going away. However, these fans could stand to learn a few things to make them far more tolerable, because at this point, they are like living with children off their meds during COVID lockdown.
- Fans, you don’t know ANYTHING – This is always one of my biggest pet peeves. The absolute worst coaches on any team has, at the least, a decade of experience(outside of Jeff Saturday) recruiting, setting up training camps, determining strengths and weaknesses of each player, determining starting lineups, deal with injuries and game planning for each team. Outside of that, they are also part psychologist, part mother or father, and part motivational speaker.
Put a fan in that position and they wouldn’t last a minute. It takes a
specific personality to be a coach.
2. Fantasy Football and Madden games aren’t real life – Mind you, I play both
from time to time. I play Madden with my nephew and get absolutely
boatraced, as it should be (if I’m dominating video games at 44 years
old, my priorities are mixed up). I play fantasy football with the Sideline Sports
crew. I’m not exceptionally good at it, but I am competitive and love talking
trash with the crew. That said, if I get good at either, it won’t make me
any more ready to be a GM of an NFL team than when I was terrible, and that
is the reality that a lot of fans do not want to hear.
Madden and Fantasy Football aren’t real life. You are dealing with a million
scenarios involving living, breathing human beings. Fans watch football and
see ten percent of the game…pass, run, block, tackle, catch. They see what
they see and determine the choice THEY would make. Put them in a draft
war room and they would die in five minutes. In this Information Age, there
are so many behind the scenes articles on what goes on in an NFL draft. It’s
obvious a lot of these fans aren’t reading these, or they aren’t paying
attention because they wouldn’t be spending their mortgages on billboards
screaming for someone to get fired. Or maybe they would. These are adults
with zero perspective.
3. Bill Belichick and Nick Saban spoiled fans – The amount of winning these
legends have done is once in a lifetime. In a prior generation, Bill
Walsh won that much in football, Pat Riley won that much in basketball,
Scotty Bowman won that much in Hockey, Alex Ferguson in Soccer, and
Tommy Lasorda in baseball. Those legends either retired, or passed on,
or both, and a new generation took the legend torch. It’s 2023 and they
are about to retire also. In a changing world, the one thing in common is that
it is so hard to win, and these coaches sacrificed so much to win.
Vince Lombardi didn’t even make 60, Bill Walsh wrecked his physical and
mental state, Dick Vermeil took years out of the game because of burnout,
John Madden coached ten years and it nearly killed him.
Most of all, Andy Reid’s family is wrecked.
All those hours, all that time at the office, very little family life, very little
social life, and the appreciation is week to week, with the danger of
a few angry fans pooling their money for a billboard expressing
dissatisfaction. They don’t know anything, but ignorance is bliss.
4. Damaging your televisions and $150 jerseys make you look like children –
Nothing more needs to be said.
Maybe I wrote this out of frustration, but it all needs to be said. A lot of sports fans of the latter part of the last two decades are the most selfish, self serving, immature, emotional nitwit, ignorant creatures we’ve ever seen. They don’t know anything and they don’t want to know anything. It’s easier to be emotional and complain than it is to learn and understand. It’s easier to push buttons with no nuance than to make decisions with your mind that can affect lives.
I admit it, I question coaches myself. I also want to coach and learn from the best. I’m not going on Twitter to tell a fifteen year NFL vet, forever in the trenches and constantly in pain, that they don’t know what they are talking about. I have podcasts, but mine start conversations and ask questions.
I’d love to see more people do this, but the collective lowering of IQs makes more money for the wrong people.
And that’s the sad part.
