The Woes of Fandom

I was literally born a Chiefs fan. I grew up wanting nothing more than to watch my team. I could spell names like Tony Gonzalez and Priest Holmes long before I ever figured out how to spell my own middle name. Even before I understood about Quarterback Ratings and Division Standings, I knew that when Dante Hall touched the football you had to hold your breath. The voice of Mitch Holthus on the radio meant it was a good Sunday, an autumn Sunday. I began to love the game so much that I was often torn between playing my beloved Pokémon games or studying statistics on the NFL website. I made time for both, and I eventually became an extremely aware football fan. Some might rephrase 'extremely aware' as 'extremely obsessed' but that wouldn't be completely accurate. I'm only somewhat obsessed. And that obsession is under severe threat. This threat is not endangering my love for the Chiefs, nor is it endangering my hope for them. But, as any somewhat obsessed fan of any somewhat dismal sports team will tell you, watching them is sometimes more akin to self-inflicted torture.

When 'experts' say a team is 'rebuilding' that's basically code for: they're not going to be good any time soon. Well, the Chiefs started officially rebuilding way back around 2007, and, as expected, they did rather horribly over the next four seasons. When they won the division in 2010 and went to the Playoffs for the first time in a long time, things seemed to be looking up. Sometimes life would be easier if things were just bad consistently, that way your expectations wouldn’t be skewed along the way.

Expectations are funny things. They dictate the way we think about things, what we assume the outcome of an action will be. Foreknowledge and assumption are fundamental pieces of our psyche, they dictate our decisions based our what outcome we want. Expectations come for football fans according to how your team is performing, or more importantly, how you think they're doing. And frankly, expectations of modern sports fans are far removed from what they were 15 years ago, when fandom was a pastime, not a religion. In today's world, we have a lot more time on our hands. We’re pelted with analysis and opinions from 'experts' who think everyone should adopt the same point of view as their own or risk being banished to a deserted island with no shade, no wi-fi, and a repeating Berry Manilow record stuck on a cliff just out of reach. Ok, maybe not all of them think that, but seriously, I've read some pretty wacky things from sports writers, and I use the term writer generously. Opinion is often touted as fact. Bias and familiarity start to blur reality not too long after exposure. If it gives you any idea about the irony of the whole situation, the most popular football broadcaster (The NFL Network) is literally owned by the NFL. That goes for the NFL website too. We're being fed football 'news' from the hand of the NFL itself.

The reality is that the game of football, is just that, a game: a visceral, often brutal game, that is sprinkled with just enough glam and glitz to pass as an acceptable form of mass entertainment. I know these things, all football fans do, but that doesn't stop us from watching. I realize that football is played by human beings, whose livelihood I, and anyone else with a computer and an ego, regularly criticize. It's easy to forget what's behind the curtain when your team is doing well, you can just ignore the griminess of the whole thing. I could talk on end about why the Chiefs are doing badly, and what they could do to be better, but what good would that do? The fact is that I'm still going to watch their next game, and it may very well be another three hours of misery. But what if they win? What if all of a sudden they become the best team ever and they win all the rest of their games? That still won't change the nature of the beast, all it will change is how I assume they’ll do. I'm trying to learn to expect nothing from my team, that way I'll be able to enjoy it no matter what happens. But trying to not care what happens is proving to be difficult. 

I am emotionally invested in my team.  

Josiah Bell, Teen Blogger