The Football Fan's Manifesto

by Michael Tunison

  The Quiet Religious Type—Always eager to preach the lessons of humility and service to God over what occurs on the field, the quiet religious type can be a real buzzkill. But at least he usually keeps it to himself and chooses to lead the life he wants rather than haranguing others, though he will be quick to credit the Lawd for a key victory. It’s important to distinguish the quiet religious types from the overbearingly vocal religious ones, such as Ray Lewis, who use the language of faith to draw attention away from a rather homicide-heavy past. If you’re keen on Jesus, you’re keen on these guys. (See: Kurt Warner, Jon Kitna, Troy Polamalu.)

  The Loudmouth Douchehard—Part douche, part blowhard. If you ask me, the title is pretty self-explanatory. The loudmouth douchehard loves to talk shit, whether it’s to the media, his opponents, fans, homeless people, the infirm, heads of state, the elderly, or really any sentient being capable of being offended. Any objection to this behavior is interpreted as a sure-fire sign of disrespect, which only leads to even sharper increases in douchebaggery. (See: Philip Rivers, Joey Porter, Jeremy Shockey.)

  The Snarling Intimidating Badass—Unlike the loudmouth douchehard, the snarling intimidating badass doesn’t have to shoot his mouth off to scare the people on the other side of the ball. A naturally terrifying dude, he oozes quiet intensity. And is probably coated in an enemy’s blood. You never really hear from him, probably because reporters are too intimidated to stick a tape recorder in his face. This guy is too tough for you to like him, so step the fuck off. (See: James Harrison, Mike Sellers, Albert Haynesworth.)

  The Linemen—Ah, the men in the trenches. They’re the most important players on your team that the fans have no clue about. They do the dirty work and yet you’d be hard pressed to find a single person in the stands who wears the jersey of even the best lineman in the league. However, the problem with having a lineman as your favorite player is that it makes you look like a pretentious cocksnot. See, the majority of fans know the linemen are important but it’s a tacit rule that they can’t be your favorite player. Just live with it. (See: That big fat guy, the one next to him, and the other three.)

  The Dirty-Playing Dickhole—This is the player fans of other teams will express the most contempt for, but it’s the guy on your team you tend to like the most. Because every great team needs a brutish enforcer, someone who’s willing to go above and beyond in order to inflict the maximum amount of pain on the opponent. Everybody loves a villain, especially if he’s on your side. (See: Rodney Harrison, Terrell Suggs, Hines Ward, the Broncos’ offensive line.)

  The Emotionally Unstable Trainwreck—The gridiron can exact a heavy toll on even the strongest of minds, so naturally it totally reams the weak ones. These athletes have a tough time handling the grind and have the occasional breakdown, suicide attempt, or abrupt name change. Should that appeal to a normal person? Probably not. But allegedly normal people don’t exist, so who cares about them? (See: Vince Young, Terrell Owens, Chad Ocho Cinco.)

  The Inscrutable Wackjob—A close cousin of the emotional trainwreck, only without all the messy depression. Their antics are at once bizarre and incredibly disarming. They might don a wacky costume, film a video of themselves belting out a pop hit in their bedroom, or talk about loving a mysterious substance called “construda” or going into “beast mode” on the field. They’re liable to do just about anything, and you’d pay to see any of it. (See: Marshawn Lynch, Laurence Maroney, Clinton Portis.)

  The Tarvaris Jackson—Every team has a conspicuous weak link, and this guy is it. An opponent’s game plan always hinges on exploiting this player, and it works without exception. Of course, all the fans of his own team hate his guts, but he can be quite the hit with backers of other squads. (See: DeAngelo Hall, the Steelers’ offensive line, the Broncos’ defense.)

  II.5 Know Thine Enemies, So You Can Identify Them After Crushing Their Skulls into Powder

  More important than knowing who to love is knowing who to hate. All the best sensations of football fandom flow from the life-sustaining waters of schadenfreude and enmity. What can otherwise be a pedestrian game between non-contending teams can be made instantly enthralling with the simple addition of a little undisguised contempt.

  As a rule of thumb, you should harbor an active dislike for all the thirty-one NFL teams other than the one you have adopted as your own. Anyone who says they have a “second favorite team” probably has a second favorite creature that they like to have sex with. However, there should be a small handful of teams for whom you reserve your most fervid store of hate. The very sight of these teams’ logos or players should invoke murderous urges that would get you jailed forever if you ever acted upon them.

  Most rivalries are based on commonsense reasons, like regional proximity or a history of important head-to-head contests. Others don’t really make any goddamn sense at all, but are still fun to watch. If you’re confused about which franchise is your team’s rival, merely observe which team’s merchandise gets burned the most in the parking lot of your team’s home field. That’s usually a reliable indicator.

  Not all rivalries are created equal. Some teams are just too boring or mediocre to inspire intense loathing (looking at you, Arizona). Here are some of the more notable grudges around the league.

  Washington Redskins–Dallas Cowboys—It’s a standard cliché of the Old West, so it might as well work in football, too. Never mind the fact that everybody in the league hates the Cowboys (justifiably so) and that Eagles and Giants fans probably hate them just as much as Redskins fans. It only matters that the broadcasters get to make hackneyed “Cowboys and Indians” jokes about this matchup. Because those never get tiresome!

  Chicago Bears–Green Bay Packers—The NFL’s oldest and most storied rivalry dates back to 1921, when a meatpacking company employee and a live carnival bear fought each other to the death over a unicycle. In the years to come, it evolved into a football contest between teams named for these two combatants and has thrived ever since. More than fifty Hall of Famers have taken part in the rivalry over the years, and the two teams cannot be mentioned in tandem other than by a stentorian gravelly voice, not unlike John Facenda. The Vikings also intensely dislike both of these teams, but then the Vikings don’t win anything, so who gives a sun-dried shit about the Vikings?

  Pittsburgh Steelers–Cleveland Browns–Baltimore Ravens—The Steelers and the Browns were mortal Rust Belt enemies for generations and all was good. Then in 1996 Baltimore stole Cleveland’s team. The Steelers smoothly transitioned to hating the Ravens. A few years later, the NFL gave Cleveland a new team. Browns fans still hated the Steelers but they also hated the Ravens for stealing their team and winning a Super Bowl a few years later. Ravens fans, meanwhile, are content to hate themselves both for living in Baltimore and wearing purple camouflage every week.

  Baltimore Ravens–Indianapolis Colts—Meanwhile, the people of Baltimore still have an ax to grind with the Irsay family for relocating the Colts to Indianapolis in the middle of the night in March 1984. They’d have much preferred it be done in broad daylight, like many of the drug purchases and murders in the city. If there’s anything Baltimoreans hate, it’s secrecy.

  Denver Broncos–Oakland Raiders—A heated divisional rivalry that’s as intense as any other in the NFL. However, since both teams are located in the western half of the country, East Coast bias prevents most of the country from giving a shit.

  Houston Texans–Tennessee Titans—One might think this is a rivalry because the Tennessee Titans were once the Houston Oilers. But actually the two teams are in a constant disagreement about whether it’s worse to live in Houston or Nashville.

  San Francisco 49ers–Dallas Cowboys—These two teams have met a record five times in the NFC Championship Game, twice in the ’70s, once in the ’80s, and twice again in the ’90s. This rivalry has resulted in such historic moments as “The Catch” and “Remember When Someone Actually Gave a Fuck About the 49ers?”

  Indianapolis Colts–New England Pat
riots—Perhaps the Niners-Cowboys equivalent of this decade, the Patriots beat the Colts in the playoffs in consecutive seasons, two years before allowing the biggest comeback in conference title game history to Indianapolis in 2006. What’s more, Peyton Manning holds the lead in endorsements over Tom Brady by roughly 350,000 products, though the gap is closing.

  New England Patriots–New York Jets—This rivalry intensified in the late ’90s when Bill Parcells defected from New England to coach in New York immediately after taking the Patriots to Super Bowl XXXI, causing the Patriots’ frog-throated owner Bob Kraft to accuse the Jets of tampering. A few years later, Bill Belichick, a day after being named the Jets head coach in 1999, wrote his resignation on a napkin (his usual tactic for picking up married women) and later signed on as the Patriots’ head coach. In 2006, the Jets named buxom former Patriots assistant Eric Mangini as their head coach. The next year, Mangini outed the Patriots for illegally videotaping other teams’ defensive signals. Such fervid drama barely masks the fact that all these teams really want to do is fuck each other. Mangini was recently fired by the Jets, though the teams will undoubtedly find other coaches to swap acrimoniously.

  New England Patriots–NFL Rule Book—The NFL has a set of rules by which they would like all their franchises to abide. The Patriots, however, are above your lousy rules, you narrow-assed National Football League. They’re going to tape all the signals they want. What’re you going to do about it? Sanction one of your most popular, most hyped teams? Then they’re going to hack into your computer and identity theft your ass and use your credit card number to buy some sweet pocket bikes, the kind they’ll use to ride all over your lawn and chew that bitch up. And, hey, if Rodney Harrison wants to take human growth hormone, he’s going to do it smiling while standing in the commissioner’s office and peeing on his desk lamp. Four game suspensions don’t mean nothing to him. Rules? Pfft. Ain’t no rules in our world, Mr. En Eff Ell.

  Seattle Seahawks–Referees—Seattle fans, ever since their team’s unfortunate and not nearly caffeinated enough loss in Super Bowl XL, have been harboring the notion that referees are somehow out to get them. They decry as much in poems they write in lipstick on their bathroom mirrors and in chalk on the sidewalks of college campuses. You would be wise not to deny them their conspiracy theories, lest they find a way to implicate you.

  Philadelphia Eagles–Santa Claus—In a famous 1968 incident, Eagles fans pelted Santa Claus with snowballs during the halftime show of a December 15 season-ending loss to Minnesota. In retaliation, Santa, teaming with Chanukah Harry, has brought nothing but tainted scrapple and heartbreak to citizens of the City of Brotherly Love for forty-plus years. And, oh yeah, no championships. Luckily, they’ve gone to gifting each other batteries.

  Buffalo Bills–City of Buffalo—The Bills are in the midst of an arrangement through the 2012 season that will have them playing five regular season games in Toronto. Certainly this is a source of consternation to the citizens of Buffalo, who’d much rather the Bills be hopelessly mediocre on American soil. Canadians, meanwhile, will be all too content to clap politely no matter how badly the Bills lose. Nothing gets to those people.

  Detroit Lions–Winning—The elusive concept of victory has long bedeviled the Detroit Lions, and they don’t appreciate it one bit. So the team has retreated into even greater depths of losing just to spite it. Victory, however, is unmoved and sits on a beach somewhere with Barry Sanders sipping cocktails and texting other teams.

  Jacksonville Jaguars–St. Louis Rams–Carolina Panthers–Tampa Bay Buccaneers–Arizona Cardinals–New Orleans Saints—These teams are either too new or too inconsequential to have developed any interesting animosity, so I arbitrarily decided they should just hate each other. After all, football without hate is like sex without hate. It’s just no fun.

  II.6 Bandwagon Fans: Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Line Them Up and Melt Their Insides with a Flamethrower

  They lie in wait for the majority of the football season until a handful of dominant teams emerge from the pack. They then latch like a remora fish onto the one that’s getting the most media attention, pretending as though they had been there all along. They can’t recall the bad times that other fans have gone through in the past, nor even what happened in the first few weeks of the season. Most likely they won’t even know who was on the team the previous year. Each season, you’ll see them sporting a different franchise’s jersey. Sometimes they even forget to remove the tags. All they care about is repping a winning team. They are parasites in search of victory, needing only a host team to attach themselves to in order to suck all authenticity from the fan base. They are douchebags incarnate. They are bandwagon fans.

  No other figure in the football world is more worthy of your contempt. You may hate the fans of rival teams, but they are loyal to your enemy and therefore possess at least a shred of dignity. You’d like to choke them, sure, but probably not to death, just as a showing of respect. The bandwagon fan, however, is a lowly scavenger, a leach, an opportunist who follows the prevailing winds of the day. They seek no quarter and none will be given. Rae Carruth would be disturbed by what you’d like to do to them.

  In the 1970s, they clung to the Pittsburgh Steelers. In the ’80s it was the San Francisco 49ers. The Dallas Cowboys had their already painfully obnoxious fan base amplified by the presence of surplus bandwagon fans in the ’90s, bellowing “How ’bout them Cowboooooys?” in unison while doing blow off Michael Irvin’s playbook. This decade, bandwagon fans have mostly found a home in New England. Can you remember meeting a Patriots fan before Tom Brady showed up? There was that one guy with a Red Sox hat who kind of liked them, but that’s about it. Now you can’t go anywhere without seeing the goofy disembodied head they call a logo on the back of someone’s car. If you drive an ambulance, you should interpret one of these stickers as a “Do Not Resuscitate” sign. And what of Cardinals fans prior to January 2009? Just kidding. There still aren’t any Cardinals fans.

  Unfortunately, bandwagon fans are a tragic fact of life, and something we will be forced to endure for as long as the game exists, unless of course Congress finally gets its act together and allows us to forcibly sterilize these humanoid rectal warts.

  II.6. A HOW TO IDENTIFY A BANDWAGON FAN

  This race of netherpeople is so universally despised, they have learned over the years to conceal their identity. Very few bandwagon fans will admit to being bandwagon fans. Attempting to test their knowledge about their supposed favorite team can be a drawn-out, painstaking process. One easy way around this is to accuse all the fans of the Super Bowl champions of being bandwagon fans. This accomplishes two things: it shames the bandwagon filth, and it pisses off the actual loyal fans who deserve to be taken down a peg.

  What is the difference between a bandwagon fan and a fair-weather fan?

  It’s an important distinction. A fair-weather fan can be defined as one who roots exclusively for one team, but only when that team is doing well, whereas a bandwagon fan is free-floating vermin who changes allegiance depending on whatever team is succeeding from year to year. Sometimes even within the same season. They commit the cardinal sin of sports bigamy. Both deserve to be exterminated without prejudice, the difference being that the bandwagon fan’s ashes should to be pissed on, then covered with salt so nothing grows in its place. The fair-weather fan merely merits a fatal bludgeoning with a blunt instrument, but you may leave the corpse alone to be picked at by wild dogs.

  What should I do if I encounter a bandwagon fan?

  Stand your ground. Their first method of attack will be to taunt you with reminders of how many years it’s been since your team last won a title, if they have at all. Remember that they haven’t earned the right to boast about anything because they didn’t suffer during their team’s lean years. They’re sickening creatures and their hollow words should have no effect on you. Bandwagon fans are not known to have a pronounced weakness; however, anecdotal evidence suggests that punching them in th
e dick usually quiets their trash-talking for a while.

  My team is on the verge of winning a championship, which has our fan base beset by bandwagon and fair-weather fans. What can I do?

  You can start by sucking it up, asshat. That’s the price of success. Nevertheless, it’s time to play up your true believer bona fides. The proliferation of bandwagon fans among your crowd means your dedication will be questioned by other team’s followers. Start wearing throwback jerseys of popular players from the past, carry around photos in your wallet of you attending games as a kid and, of course, show utter disdain toward anyone backing your team who came to the party late. And nothing shows disdain quite like wrapping someone’s body in a carpet and beating them about the face with a replica helmet.

  I’m a Chiefs fan and therefore constantly on the brink of suicide. Wouldn’t I be better off being a bandwagon jumper?

  No. Certainly you have been dealt a bad hand in life. No one deserves to grow up as a Chiefs fan. But that’s no excuse for fanhood apostasy. At the end of the day, you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror. Don’t fall prey to the temptations of cheap shortcuts to glory.

  But what if you’re a Lions fan?

  Yikes. I suppose exceptions can be made.

  2.7 Choose Your Friends Based on Football Allegiances—and Maybe Their Parent’s Beach House

  By now you’ve succeeded in picking a favorite team. Unless, of course, you picked the Bills, in which case all you succeeded in doing is consigning yourself to a lifetime of misery. Nevertheless, you’ve made your pick. Congrats. Now you’re going to need some friends, if for no other reason that you don’t wind up dying unloved and alone like Rick Mirer.