Why It’s So Hard To Quit NFL Fandom

No one’s saying it’s easy. I’ve spent years trying to quit football, trying to view the game as a childish retreat from the world’s real crises, a callous endorsement of authoritarian thinking, and so forth. During my post-collegiate Diaspora, I spent years wandering from one city to the next, searching, it seems to me now, mostly for a TV upon which I could watch the Oakland Raiders.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, where I arrived in the mid-nineties to become a writer and alienate everyone on earth, I hiked up to campus every Sunday looking for an empty student lounge. The Raiders themselves were never on. Still, I’d stand there for three hours watching teams I didn’t even like, games that meant nothing in my grid of devotion, refusing to sit because I needed to believe I was going to be there for just a few minutes.

What kept me hooked was the limbic tingle familiar to any football fan, the sense that I was watching an event that mattered. The speed and scale of the game, the noise of the crowd, the grandiloquent narration and caffeinated camera angles—all these signaled a heightened quality of attention. The players dashed about, their bodies lit in a kind of bright funnel of consequence.

There are all sorts of laudable reasons people watch sports, and football in particular. We wish to reconnect to the unscripted physical pleasures of childhood. We wish for moral structure in a world that feels chaotic, a chance to scratch the inborn itch for tribal affiliation. Sports allow men, in particular, a common language by which to converse.

When we root for a team, the conscious desire is to see them win, to bask in reflected glory. But the unconscious function of fandom is, I think, just the opposite. It’s a form of surrender to our essential helplessness in the universal order. In an age of scientific assurance, people still yearn for spiritual struggle. Fandom allows us to fire our faith in the forge of loss. Because our teams inevitably do lose. And this experience forms the bedrock of our identification.

Backing a team helps Americans, in particular, contend with the unease of living in the most competitive society on earth, a society in which we’re socialized to feel like losers.

That’s the special sauce that capitalism puts on the burgers. It’s how you turn citizens into efficient workers and consumers. You convince them that they are forever falling behind.

Losing time. Losing money. Losing status. Losing hair. Losing potency. Losing the edge. We feel that we’re losing all the time, simply by failing to win it all. We squander our talents, we mismanage the clock, we choke in the clutch. Our teams enact public dramas that we experience as struggles to transcend our own private defects.

We need look no further for evidence than to the proliferation of sports talk radio. Anyone who’s listened to this format will tell you that nothing lights up the phone lines like a crushing loss. And what one hears in the callers’ voices, beneath the bluster, is actually quite moving: an effort to preserve belief amid the tribulation of defeat.

I’m afraid that brings us back to the Raiders, and to the single play I have thought about more over the past decade than, for instance, the births of my children. (Please know that I am as disgusted with myself as you are right now.)

In January of 2002, the Raiders flew east to face the Patriots in a playoff game. My friend Zach had stupidly agreed to let me watch the game at his place. I can still remember the color of the sky that morning, the dense gunmetal of a looming storm. By game time, huge, Hollywood-styled snowflakes were twirling down. They blotted out the yard markers and made traction nearly impossible, which lent the game a slapstick air.

The Raiders dominated, but the Patriots rallied late, led by a rookie quarterback named Tom Brady. Down three points with two minutes left, he dropped back to pass and found his receivers blanketed.

If I close my eyes I can still see Brady there, hopping about in the snow like a sparrow. He cocks his right arm as if to pass, thinks better of it, then pulls the ball down and pats it with his left hand. At this precise moment, Raiders cornerback Charles Woodson, deployed on an impeccably executed blitz, crashes into Brady and rakes away the ball.

The ball lands in the snow, where it sits for an excruciating half-second. It is one of those enthralling moments, unique to football, where nobody knows what the hell is going on. At last, Raiders middle linebacker Greg Biekert falls on the ball. The Raiders can now run out the clock. The game is over.

I rose out of my chair and made animal sounds. Then I turned to Zach and said something gracious, how the Pats had played a good game, the kind of thing I can summon only when my team has won. Zach was still watching the TV.

Zach was still watching the TV because the referee had announced that the play would be reviewed. Two minutes later, the referee clicked on his mic and explained that Brady was attempting to “tuck” the ball as he was stripped and was therefore, by some malicious metaphysical logic, still in the act of passing, rendering his fumble an incomplete pass. The Raiders never recovered from the shock. They lost the game in overtime. New England went on to win the Super Bowl.

If you were to plot the fortunes of NFL franchises on a graph—something I have come close to doing in dark moments—the Tuck Play would mark the spot where the Pats began their dynastic arc while the Raiders stumbled into disgrace. This play should have marked the spot on the map where my devotion waned.

Just the opposite happened. I spent the next hour (read: five years) trying to get Zach to admit that Brady had fumbled the ball. I argued with strangers, too. I nearly came to blows with a guy at my gym. And I tracked every phase of the Raiders’ ensuing swoon, the carousel of inept coaches, the bungled draft picks, every senseless, drive-killing penalty.

A saner human being would have jumped ship years ago. Instead, I am that one sad asshole who quietly roots against the Pats every time they have a big playoff game—games, incidentally, that I often have to plead to watch at the homes of my friends, who hate having me there. But I am not a saner human being. Which is why I have watched the highlights of the Patriots losing their perfect 18–0 season to the Giants in Super Bowl XLII no fewer than twenty times.

This essay is adapted from Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond, published by Melville House.