Which NFL Fans Have Had the Most Fun?

Dave Fymbo
40 Fathoms
Published in
12 min readMay 21, 2020

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(hint: not these fans)

You don’t pick what NFL team you’re a fan of. But what if you could? And you had a time machine? Well, even you’re not in the market for a new team, I thought it would be fun to rate the experiences of being a NFL fan focused primarily on success over the last 20 years and hope on the horizon.

The world we live in is a “what have you done for me lately” world. So I’m choosing to focus on the last 20 years. The Cowboys dynasty of the 90’s is beyond what feels like recent history, while Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl still feels like recent history in part because he’s still in the league. Hopefully that makes sense. Also, the St. Louis Rams won Super Bowl XXXIV but the Rams aren’t in St. Louis in anymore, so it’s good dividing point as well.

Brutal Division

To determine what’s the worst team to be a fan of you have to weigh a lot of factors: playoff win droughts, Super Bowl losses, even team relocation. Is it worse to get tantalizingly close and then collapse in heartbreaking fashion or is it worse to never even have hope in the first place? Does hope outweigh everything else, considering we’re only talking about bad teams? Amazingly, there’s 10 teams here in this division and almost all of them have a viable case for why they should be ranked the worst.

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Dave Fymbo
40 Fathoms

Top writer in Satire. Published in Slackjaw, Extra Newsfeed, The Ascent, and more. Humor, Politics, Interactive Fiction.