Someone writes a post like this, we go cross-eyed, and our blood pressure shoots through the roof.
One of the reasons our writing kind of tapered off the last year or two was a general frustration with the attitude displayed in the linked article – an attitude that seems to be prevalent among many who write about sports, even from a fan’s perspective. There seems to be a desire among many people to delineate which fans root for their teams properly and which need re-education in The Proper Way To Cheer Your Team.
Yes, some fans can be negative nancies. We would almost certainly fall into that category, to be honest. Maybe we have a reason to be. Maybe that’s just the way we choose to follow our team. Our negativity does not impact anyone else’s enjoyment of the game beyond the people who make a deliberate choice to read what we write or be in our physical presence as the game goes on. And those people probably associate with us because of our insightful takes and- no, sorry, we couldn’t finish that sentence because we were drowning in BS.
In the grand scheme of things, every team has mega-asshole fans who couldn’t find reason or perspective if it were their ass and they had both hands and a flashlight. But those fans are a tiny, tiny minority* – even in State College – and spending more than a couple paragraphs wringing our hands and wishing they weren’t mega-assholes is affording them more attention than they’ve really earned.
* – for example, early in the baseball season there was a minor flap when Mat Latos’ wife @DallasLatos received a couple Tweets from idiot fans telling her Mat sucked, etc. etc. Everyone was wringing their hands over this boorish fan behavior, so out of curiosity we checked her timeline and saw the following. Maybe two Tweets everyone was in an uproar over (no exaggeration) and thousands of Tweets from Reds fans saying some form of “we’re not all idiots like that”. So, much ado about nothing? 2 idiot fans, 10,000 rational ones. Who gets the attention? Yeah.
Did you like that Posnanski-esque aside? We thought you might.
The point is that we believe people would be happier if they’d ignore the way other people cheered for their team. Sure, report the Nittany Lion fans people who lob bags of urine at opposing team’s fans. Mock the idiots – like we did at the Nebraska game – who yell obscenities at visiting fans that are just minding their own business trying to cheer on their guys. But getting on your own fans for voicing their opinion or being too negative/positive? That’s going too far, in our editorial opinion.
THUS HAS IT ALWAYS BEEN, THUS SHALL IT EVER BE.