I was fascinated by it. I didn’t understand it, but I liked it. I liked the camaraderie. I liked the excitement. I immediately identified that it was an adult thing, that it was a guy thing. I sat down on the floor in front of my dad and watched the rest of the game with wide-eyed amazement. I know it was the Miami Dolphins, but I don’t know who won the game that day. I don’t even remember if that unique play that drew me in was ruled a touchdown or not. But I was immediately hooked.
From that point on I watched football each and every Sunday that it was on television, with the only exception being a Sunday in 1990 when I spent the entire day flying in airplanes and running through airports. Other than that, an unbroken streak of complete obsession exists.
But over the past few years something odd has happened. I can feel my interest starting to wane, and in some ways I feel like I’m “keeping the streak alive” just so I can say that I did. So, lately I’ve tried to figure out what happened – tried to figure out what could cause this decades long love affair to be in jeopardy.
When I first got married I can remember being at my in-laws’ house on a Sunday afternoon and NASCAR was on TV, not football. I was just stunned. Shocked. I couldn’t fathom that anyone would watch ANYTHING over football, let alone NASCAR. It was one of those life-altering moments when you realize that not everyone lives the same way that you do. On both sides of my family, if a game was being broadcast, the TV was on and the men were huddled around it.
Just a few years later I found myself switching the channel from football to baseball, hockey, or even, gasp, soccer when the game got too uninteresting.
Is it just a process of aging and the shifting priorities that come with your participation in a different life situation? A few years back I sacrificed Jaguars tickets to attend the baptism of a friend’s child. Obviously, any decent human being would choose a friend over a football game, but in my younger days I’d have probably done it begrudgingly. If something similar were to happen today I probably wouldn’t even bat an eye at the prospect of missing a game. Am I just more mature, or has my opinion of football changed?
Hopefully I have matured, but truthfully I have started to lose interest in football and there are multiple reasons why.
First and foremost, the teams I follow are horrible, so it’s simply not very fun anymore. I don’t know if this makes me a bad fan, but I just don’t enjoy watching my team lose every week. In the last NFL season, 2016, my impatience with the Jaguars reached personal milestone levels that led to progressively less time with the game on. For the first few weeks I would turn the game off in the 4th quarter once the game was already out of hand. After a few weeks of that, I found myself changing the channel or turning the game off at halftime. And then by the last half of the season I literally would not turn on the game at all. Until last season, I had never intentionally missed a Jaguars game, and had almost never turned a game off before the final whistle. But last year, I just found that I had better things to do.
The college team I follow, Florida Atlantic, has been equally woeful. My alma mater started playing football in 2001 and has been to only two bowl games (both very low-tier) in their 16 year history. They have had a winning record only once (one of their bowl seasons they went 6-6) and have gone 3-9 for three seasons in a row.
I can still remember the first time the Owls were on TV. It was some high-numbered cable channel that I’d never heard of, but, by-God we were on TV just like a real school. I popped a beer and reveled in the wonder of watching my alma mater on TV. It was surreal.
Last year the FAU game versus Miami was on national TV. By halftime I had turned the game off. In the last game of the year, FAU gave up 77 points to Middle Tennessee, my wife’s alma mater. Thank goodness she doesn’t follow football.
The flipside of my teams being so bad is the fact that the two teams that have dominated football for the past decade have been so unlikable. The New England Patriots are led by Bill Belichick, the most unlikable coach of my lifetime and Alabama is coached by the pompous and irritating Nick Saban. They are both extremely unlikable men, and their respective successes only adds to their already overflowing egos.
I’ll probably be accused of simply being jealous over the success of these two dynasties, but that’s simply not true. I’m not jealous of the success of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the only team with more championship rings than the Patriots. In fact, I’ve pulled for the Steelers in more than one of their recent Super Bowl appearances. And I didn’t hate the 49ers who dominated the 80s or the Cowboys who ruled the 90s. In other words, my hatred of the Patriots is based on their jackass coach, intolerable fans, arrogant prima donna players, and their documented history of cheating. And Alabama? I used to own an Alabama T-shirt and I’ve pulled for them in literally hundreds of games. I’ll probably become a genuine fan again once Satan finally retires. That’s not a typo, I refer to him as Satan.
Another possibility for my waning interest is that the players are just becoming so difficult to identify with or even like in any way. As fans we always talk about who we like as a player, but liking someone as a person is a vastly different thing. As a teenager I liked Dan Marino. I liked him a quarterback and I liked him a guy. Now he’s a 55 year old television commentator and guess what? I still like him.
Maybe it’s just because I’m older that I can’t identify with these younger players, but I can barely think of any current NFL star that I’d want to have a conversation with or would want in my house. There are, of course, a few exceptions, but those would be guys at the extreme end of their careers who are closer to my age like Phillip Rivers, Eli Manning, and Drew Brees.
I can say that I like current players Blake Bortles, Allen Robinson, and Allen Hurns, but if I found myself forced into a conversation with any of them I’d just stare blankly into space with absolutely no common interest to draw upon. And with Hurns’ public anti-police stance in 2014, I would probably walk out of the room when he walked in.
I belong to the generation of Brett Favre and Mark Brunell, and Drew Bledsoe. They are of my generation and even though we led starkly different lives, we still have some common cultural similarities. We could identify with the same music, TV shows, and historical events that shaped the years that we grew up in America. But is that really that important to being a fan of a professional athlete?
I believe it’s not just the age-difference that makes it harder to identify with, or even tolerate, the current crop of NFL prima donnas. For the most part they are a bunch of spoiled, arrogant, self-obsessed jerks who have no solid sense of reality. From Ndamukong Suh to Tom Brady to Richard Sherman the NFL seems to have more jerks per-capita than any other subculture in America. And the advent of social media has made it much easier to know which players suffer from the highest levels of jerkitude (just made that word up). How often have you just assumed you liked a player only to realize through his comments on social media that you actually can’t stand the guy? I used to like Colin Kaepernick, for goodness sake. Maybe in the 80s and 90s the NFL was full of jerks too, but we just didn’t know it because each one of them didn’t have a smartphone in is hand ready to insult you and your personal beliefs.
So here we are two weeks from the start of NFL training camp and one month away from the start of another college football season. The Jaguars and Owls have new coaches – a seemingly annual event for these two horrible programs I’ve been burdened with. If the two teams miraculously find success in 2017 will I be reinvigorated in my love for the game that’s literally been a part of my life since I was 8? And if they continue to remain two of the worst football organizations in America, will my interest fade to the point that my glorious viewership streak is finally broken? And will I even care if it is?
I truly don’t know. And I don’t know if it even bothers me if I’m called a fair-weather fan. Life is hard. Life is hectic. Life is challenging. Professional sports are supposed to be a source of entertainment and a diversion from the toils of everyday life. But when it ceases to be fun, I question why I’m so loyal to organizations that have no real loyalty to me.
I remember those first few years of football when it was so new and exciting. I remember how fun it was when I found kids at my elementary school who followed the game also. I remember playing fantasy football back before the Internet when my buddies and I would huddle around a newspaper and add up the stats with a pencil and paper. I remember the excitement I felt when I attended the inaugural Jaguars and Owls games (both losses, of course). I remember the days when just having a team was enough, when just being on TV was enough. I remember all of these things, and I miss them.
I guess I’ve got that 37-year itch we’re always hearing so much about. But my mistresses of baseball and hockey aren’t exactly holding my interest anymore either. Of course, that could be because the Marlins and Lightning aren’t any good either, but I digress.
