Understanding the Psyche of a Broncos Fan: Why We Need to Stop Judging Our Fellow Fans
I’ve become accustomed to “the look.” It’s a mixture of bafflement, pity, and a hint of condescension. It’s the look that people who don’t care about sports give to those of us who do, whenever we talk about our team, or yesterday’s game, or the most ridiculous britches ever donned.
The look is often grounded in the assumption that sports fans lack intellect, rationality, impulse control, sound judgment, or goal-directed behavior — at least on Sunday afternoons. And while I’m not about to debate any of those characterizations…
…I do believe there are unique merits to fandom.
Supporting a team creates bonds that otherwise might never form. An instant camaraderie that bypasses culture, gender, and age — even political differences — with an unparalleled equalizing and connecting force. A force that could bring together a 7-year-old girl and the father she idolized for a few hours on Sunday. A few precious hours of paternal acknowledgement that helped her get through a childhood in which those didn’t exactly abound.
Sports also provide for genuinely unscripted experiences of suspense, excitement, joy, and disappointment. This is in direct opposition to the majority of “entertainment” choices we are repeatedly fed.
With these virtues in mind, I’ve always been able to disregard any disapproving look cast at me by someone who has inexplicably managed to find meaning in life outside of sports. People who actually spend Sunday afternoons productively or view the Super Bowl as a time to catch up socially…
Sure, they may have accrued an almost incalculable number of hours in pursuit of noble tasks like hobbies, home improvement, and backcountry hiking. Hours that I’ve spent on my couch hanging out with fictional gaggles of beautiful and ethnically diverse people jubilantly drinking Coors Light or with the consummately rugged, Sam Elliot voiced over, F-150 drivers and their Sisyphean hauls up mountains of dirt.
But non-fans have missed out on pure, unadulterated, memory-inspiring, premature-birth-inducing thrills that, perhaps most importantly, can be shared with family, friends, and complete strangers dressed in orange and blue tuxedos.
When you’re a fan of a team, you automatically inherit that team’s fanbase (for better or for worse). You suddenly have an inherent support network that will celebrate your wins, empathize with your losses, and staunchly defend you in arguments with opposing fans, regardless of the integrity of your arguments. (Like when you may or may not find yourself in a heated Twitter war despite being an otherwise rational, 40-something-years-old mother of two, with an advanced degree in the study of human behavior.)
So the joke is on those productive, rational folks who eschew sports for silly things like self-improvement, because what they’ve really passed up is a chance to share some of life’s most authentically spontaneous moments with like-minded comrades with whom they can instantly — if often irrationally — connect.
Or is it?
I’m starting to think maybe not.
It turns out that fans are no different than any other human collective. They are just as susceptible to forsake one of their own should that individual deviate from the implicit pact of blind allegiance. Your once loyal cohort will turn on you faster than Eddie Lacy at a buffet line, pointing their foam fingers at you in denunciative fashion if you dare question your own team.
I know this because I have questioned my own team repeatedly this year and in doing so have been called the greatest insult one can receive in sports: “a bad fan.”
Now I admit that I have a tendency toward negativity — or as the case may be when discussing the 2015 Denver Broncos — perfectly reasonable skepticism. Having no interest in being left behind to farm potatoes in my own excrement on planet delusional, I have voiced legitimate concerns about our play all year and our chances against the Carolina Panthers this Sunday in Super Bowl 50.
Legitimate concerns that were born out of watching the most excruciating games ever played, week after week. Games in which our none-dimensional offense would somehow manage a tenuous lead, only to go on furlough for the second half, leaving us holding our collective breath and praying that we wouldn’t turn it over, give up a big play on defense, or commit a moronic penalty — all three of which happened with alarming frequency this year.
Legitimate concerns about a Super Bowl matchup in which we’re facing a top-ranked defense that led the NFL with 39 turnovers forced, resulting in 148 points off those takeaways, with a QB who ranked just behind Blake Bortles in interceptions thrown (despite playing 6 fewer games). Not to mention needing to somehow contain the league’s latest darling, inevitable MVP, and self-anointed “best player in the history of players to ever play any kind of sporting game, blah, blah, blah…dab.”
Legitimate concerns that are also born out of a lifetime of following the Broncos and the resulting PTSD it has caused. I am old enough to remember — vividly — the Super Bowls of the late 80s and early 90s. Super Bowls that we not only lost, but lost in spectacularly humiliating fashion. Getting blown out on the world’s greatest stage — not once, not twice, but three times in short succession. Those are the kind of scars that are indelibly etched in ones consciousness. Scars that live in the primitive recesses of the brain, where they compete with other perennial nightmare content like showing up to school in underwear or forgetting to study for a final exam.
It took a long time to recover — decades, in fact — with two back-to-back Super Bowl victories antiseptically sprinkled in to aid the healing. And then the unthinkable happened again just two years ago. Another incredible team, bad memories of past performances successfully repressed, and in my case a once in a lifetime trip to witness first-hand what was soon to be more Super Bowl carnage.
A massive orange and blue turd deposited in the middle of MetLife Stadium — and one we were forced to inhale until the bitter final seconds because homeland security forced everyone to take shuttle buses to and from the game. Buses that from the opening over-the-head snap, we longed would return to spring us from our ironically cruel hypothermic hell, and transport us back to the relative utopia that was the Newark Holiday Inn. Talk about a full-blown PTSD trigger — a brutally reminiscent indignity that essentially amounted to a multi-thousand dollar Bruno Mars halftime concert.
And so I ask you, my otherwise passionately supportive cohort, instead of calling me a “bad fan” when I lament about potential mismatches this weekend and express trepidation about another disastrous defeat, why not take a moment and try to understand the context from whence this understandably apprehensive perspective comes.
There is a concept in psychology called Locus of Control. It describes the extent to which we believe we have power over our lives. We all exist on a continuum of internal vs external attribution: a person with an internal locus of control believes that he or she can influence events and their outcomes, while someone with an external locus of control blames outside forces for everything.
In general, psychologically healthier folks tend toward internal attributions of control, because it doesn’t take a doctorate in clinical psychology to understand that helplessness is a huge risk factor for depression. And so when one considers fandom — or any emotional connection to something that is completely external/out of their personal control — it makes sense that there would be variation in how we all approach a potential depressive episode.
Every perspective we form in life has an entire body of history behind it. A history that is defined by unique experience and personal narrative.
So let’s cut each other some slack. Whether you’re the eternal optimist who finds hope in any scenario (even one that involves facing an agile, 245-pound, rocket-armed man god) or the emotionally guarded pragmatist, who worries about her heart being ripped out again, we share the same passion and connection regardless of how our fandom is manifested.
Even when that fandom is manifested — ironically and painfully — as my own Seattle-Seahawk-supporting 8-year-old progeny. Talk about the ultimate test of motherhood.
My only hope is that she — in true Seahawks fan fashion — will jump off the bandwagon come Monday, and exchange her green and blue for orange and blue in support of the next Super Bowl champions.
Katie Levisay is on Twitter, where she will likely be posting updates of her Sunday ups and downs.
