The Football Fan's Manifesto

by Michael Tunison

  There are several important qualities one should consider when choosing friends at a young age. First and foremost is that your prospective friend won’t snitch you out for your gambling pools. Secondly, that they not be one of those football-hating mutants that make the outside world the joyless near-uninhabitable place that it is (we’ll cover them in all their loathsome detail later). Beyond that, there’s always loyalty, shared experiences, compatible personalities and that other piddling crap you can hear all about on the Hallmark Channel.

  Of course, don’t discount the wholly valid option of choosing someone who owns the best stuff. You’ll find that disagreeable people with big screen TVs are much easier to get along with than those without. And don’t worry if you have nothing to give in return. Half the reason people get great stuff is so that they can show it off to peers. By exploiting them, they’re really exploiting you. They should buy you a beer.

  Looking exclusively for friends who share your favorite team is another intuitive move. But it’s the wrong one. Variance of team allegiance among friends is a highly underrated asset. It heightens the quality of humorous shit talking, which is the foundation of any lasting human bond. Who wants a social group composed of entirely supportive people? If you and your friends are not constantly busting each others’ balls, what’s the point of interacting at all? Having said that, don’t go and do something nuts like befriend a fan of a direct rival. Those are the type of relationships that only end with knife fights on rooftops. Ultimately, at the center of every good friendship exists a powerful undercurrent of resentment. Having friends who like different teams also means your buddies probably won’t try to nab your team’s players for his fantasy team, allowing you to make all the regrettable homer draft picks you want.

  Sooner or later, your two teams will be forced to play one another. This makes for tense times. It also makes for tantalizing bouts of gambling. Though fanhood is a many splendored thing, one of its few downsides is its power to act as a blinding force in making wagers. With its influence, one will always overestimate the fortunes of their team. Even if your boys are clearly inferior, it shouldn’t be difficult to get your cocky friend to grant you the Vegas line. If it seems unlikely that your team can even cover that, then it’s time to dip into your psychological bag of tricks and question his manhood until he spots you three touchdowns.

  That doesn’t mean you should go out of your way not to have friends who pull for the same team. Far from it. Instead, space them out. After all, you’re going to want a season ticket holder in your social circle to mooch off of. Ideally, this would be the person who you befriended for the kickass TV. Simplifies the ol’ contact list on the cell phone.

  Don’t think it’s all big screens and roses, however. Friendship doesn’t come without sacrifice. Unless you are Jared Allen or Leonard Little, once in a while you will be entrusted as the designated driver for your chummy chums. This is an important responsibility, likely of life-or-death significance, and one, naturally, you should try to get out of whenever possible. The question is how. This might be the one instance where finding an acquaintance who doesn’t like sports or drinking comes in handy. Though phoning a cab could keep you from muddying the friend pool.

  II.8 Learn to Deal with People Who Actively Dislike Sports While Somehow Resisting the Urge to Strangle Them

  It may come as something of a shock, but there lurks a puzzling breed of people who don’t much care for football. Oh, it’s true. Some even go out of their way to actively avoid it. And then there’s an even smaller, sinister, possibly terrorist subset that hates sports entirely.

  As a matter of course in a warped time, you will be forced to interact with these people on a regular basis no matter what it is you do in life. In some cases, you will be compelled to get along with and trust them. You may even have one in your own family. But make no mistake, these people are diseased and should be regarded as such. Because of the baffling restrictions imposed by modern-day society, you will not be permitted to physically harm these people, though their every action and utterance screams that you should. Just keep in mind: There is no NFL Sunday Ticket in prison.

  The best approach is to simply humor them as long as possible until they grow disinterested in dry banter and leave you alone. Adopt a polite, but disinterested tone. Answer their non-sports questions with a maximum of three-word answers. “Yeah,” “okay,” “that’s nice,” and “I don’t know” are effective, time-tested examples. Unfortunately for you, you may stumble into a position where a non-sports-fan is your professional superior. They may not understand why you show up Mondays, if at all, wearing sunglasses and blowing the vomit bits out from between your computer keys. And leave work early on Wednesday to prepare for Sunday’s game. This is indeed a terrible predicament. If someone has managed to reach adulthood without developing a love for football, there’s little you can do for them, so you’d be wasting your time trying to make them see the error of their ways. They’re beyond yours or anyone else’s help. Regard them as a professional athlete would you, affecting a dismissive air tinged with mild disgust.

  Another smart thing you can do is spend as much time around your fellow football fans as possible. This means regular interaction hours during the week and practically every day during the off-season. Don’t construe this as a mandate to be close-minded and eschew other forms of culture. It’s important to be a well-rounded individual so that you can accuse fans of other teams of being drooling single-minded idiots. Just remember when you’re tooling through the museum or art gallery to engage as few people as possible. They’re only going to chastise you for wearing a throwback jersey in their hallowed institution of culture.

  If all else fails, become a teacher. They seldom work weekends and have much of the off-season off, ensuring they are less often forced to spend time with non-football-fans. Better still, a large quantity of impressionable minds that you can mold to root for your favorite team. Sorry kid, no gold stars for Dolphins fans.

  ARTICLE III

  The Formative Years of Fandom

  3.1 Matriculate into College (So You Can Learn That Word Doesn’t Mean Advancing a Football)

  Coming in at a distant second to choosing your team is the choice of which university you will be indebted to for most of your adult life—all so that you may have a few glorious years of justified casual sex and alcohol dependency. Play your cards right, and you might learn to enjoy those magical Saturday afternoons of college football, though never as much as Sundays, unless you live in the South.

  Your first consideration should always be price. If it’s in an area with a low cost of living, booze is probably dirt cheap and plentiful. Again, the South is good for this, if not much else.

  Second is how the school is ranked in athletics. If you plan on playing a sport, you probably already have an obsessive parent to guide you (and to accept illicit gifts on your behalf). And by athletics, I mean football and men’s basketball. Men’s hoops because you need something for the two months following the Super Bowl. Cling to it like the comfort drug it is. It will stave off the horrors of ordinary life, at least a little, until the NFL Draft. Ideally, you can find a school that exceeds in both sports. And that’s in Division I, lest you be foolish enough to think any differently. If you happen upon a university with hot girls and nice weather that isn’t the University of Southern California, apply without further consideration. Remember: no USC. You do need a soul, after all. And the chance of getting out of debt following graduation.

  At the very least, you need a school that is dominant in one sport. And that one sport had better be football. Having to take pride in a championship lacrosse program is akin to a parent gloating about weeks of unsoiled sheets in their children’s beds. You’re usually safe taking the flag-ship big state school. Mind you, attending the community college near the state school does not qualify you as a fan of that school. If you’re smart and careerist enough to get accepted by an Ivy League school, good for you. Championsh
ip fencing has its moments, I’m sure.

  One good thing about college football is that it gives you a deceptive sense of how athletes will fare in the pros. That’s important information when filling out mock drafts. Another perk, especially if you go to a powerhouse school, is to be able to take credit for opposing NFL teams’ star players. You may hate the Patriots, but you can take credit for Tom Brady, having watched him ride the pine at Michigan.

  No matter what university you choose, there is a stuffy climate of anti-physicality you must make sure to avoid. Because you can’t afford to blow these formative years on things as trivial as comparative literature.

  III.2 The Liberal Arts Agenda Against Fandom

  Outside the confines of frat row, the world of academia is not hospitable to the fan of pro football. Even humble state schools can contain stuffy social climates largely hostile to the idea of committing precious mental and emotional energy to following a team. Only at community college will you find students and faculty so disinterested in the act of learning that you are able to let your fan flag fly in the classroom and not be met with derision.

  Indeed, college is no place to be a NFL fan. But attending is a necessary evil if you want to avoid having a shitty retail job that will make you work Sundays. You’ll be shocked how little your professors want to discuss the results of Sunday’s games or how many points you need out of your two remaining starters on Monday night to win your fantasy matchup for the week.

  And for a place that prides itself on discovering basic truths about the world, college can be a hotbed of dangerous myths and convincing-sounding falsehoods. Talk to any white feminist with dreadlocks in the student union and among the claims you’ll hear about our oppressive androcentric culture is the supposed direct link between days when football is being played and spikes in domestic violence and child abuse. Though this claim will be couched in the most smugly righteous tone, it has absolutely no basis in fact, as you’ll be hard-pressed to find any study that finds a statistically significant link between sports broadcasts and violence in the home. Nonetheless, you’ll be made to hate your penis more than usual for a few minutes.

  To be fair to the ladies, they’re not the only ones that college morphs into self-serious insufferable lords of pretension. Try to shoot the shit about the playoff outlook with the average dude at the library and you’re bound to get the most askance look this side of the high school parking lot you’re still scoping out.

  Ultimately, it’s a two-way street. Football fandom tends to have an anti-intellectual bent, while intellectuals have a bias strictly in opposition to the awesome. This is a divide that needs reconciling. Not that tomes on Heisenberg belong in the stands or people with replica helmets belong in corporate boardrooms. Still, an understanding can be reached. Though a massacre of the gridiron disinclined would produce a raw, animalistic charge, we need people capable of rebuilding civilization after it’s burned down in post-title riots. Therefore, let us conclude that football fans can stand to be a little more intellectually rounded. And intellectually rounded people can stand to be down with a few rowdy tailgates. It’s all about the breadth of experiences. This is how we’re going to strike a happy-clappy balance among all peoples. I can feel it happening, can’t you, drum circle brothers? Let’s get a quick Namaste.

  III.3 Attend a Game a Week and a Class Per Semester: A Fan’s Guide to Higher Education

  Football fans really begin to come into their own during the college years. It is then that you learn to structure the social calendar around daylong benders in front of the TV, followed later by hookups heavy with future regret. And to build an alcohol tolerance that will last you a lifetime.

  To excel in college—an excelling defined by doing just well enough to skirt by—you have to be able to budget your time effectively. Because Saturdays can be chewed up by time spent with the college game during the day and chatting up slumpbusters in the evening, not a lot of studying gets done. Sundays are a total washout, for obvious reasons. I mean, you could take a crack at getting work done before the early games start, but best of luck with that in the midst of a hangover. Studying with a hangover will give you a nuanced appreciation for how the Bears run their offense.

  Mondays will be spent nursing Sunday’s hangover. Tuesdays are a nonstarter because of the boozing concentrated during Monday Night Football. That leaves Wednesday as your lone full day of study before the college weekend begins in earnest on Thursday night. So if you’re industrious enough to cram a week’s worth of work into that brief window, you’ll do just fine.

  Where college can best assist you in your fandom is with the critical incorporation of boozing into cheering. You may not realize this during your teenage years, but watching the game majorly sucks when you’re sober. Especially before an important game, you’re a jangly bundle of nerves that feels no relief until a win is secured or defeat is certain. And then what have you to soothe yourself with during a loss or to catapult yourself further into Flavor Country after a win? Getting blackout drunk can greatly ease the nerves and jettison those pesky inhibitions. If you want to be able to remember what happened during the game, well, that’s what DVR is for.

  For many, tuition might be a hefty price for a lesson in inebriation you could cheaply get on your own. No arguments here. College, like personal seat licenses, is a colossal rip off, one for which the spendthrift and the foolish among us will gleefully shell out. Say, however, you are serious about doing some learning, building a career, and all that claptrap. Then you might want to consider sticking exclusively to spring semesters for enrollment. The fall simply isn’t conducive for the football-inclined to get much else accomplished.

  III.4 Befriend NFL Prospects Now, While They’ll Still Let You Do Their Homework for Them

  An understated boon to attending a large state school that doubles as an athlete mill is there’s a decent chance that at least one of these players will share PSYCH 100 with you, thus enabling you to supplicate to them shamelessly in hopes of gaining a potentially famous friend for life, or at least until they get their first signing bonus. Play your cards right and you could work your way into their already teeming entourage of hangers-on and extended family members. That’s potentially one sweet gravy train.

  Being a dude puts you at a distinct disadvantage for the football player’s sympathy, as you possess staggeringly low quantities of vagina, leaving them with little motivation to even acknowledge your presence. Proving you’re more sycophantic than the rest is gonna take a Smithersian effort of favor-currying.

  Do not be deterred by little things like plunging into moral bankruptcy by compromising your dignity at the feet of athletes, at least when it’s done in the interests of football. College is the only chance you have for gaining the friendship of a professional athlete. Once they get to the pros, the protective bubble they’ve enjoyed as athletes all their life gets impossibly insular. Rare is the time they will even have to pretend to interact with the public.

  Of course, earning the trust of future NFL players is no small task. They understand that everyone wants a piece of them now that they’re on the verge of attaining great wealth and notoriety. Excessive though it may sound, just keep in mind that you could find yourself on the list of fifty friends he gets tickets for when his team makes the Super Bowl.

  III.4. A THE DUTIES FOR THE ASPIRING HANGER-ON

  Ability to have several jars of your own clean urine at the ready at any point in time.

  Limitless capacity for reassurance.

  Willingness to place fingerprints on guns, knives, steel briefcases, corpses, stores of uranium, no questions asked.

  Personal bodyguard. Or even body shield. (Taking a beating or a bullet gives the athlete precious time to flee danger.)

  Facility with telling reporters to fuck off.

  Sufficient parenting skills to raise one or more of his illegitimate children and maybe one of his agent’s.

  A proficiency with Photoshop (to superimpose his fa
ce on Batman’s body).

  A keen aversion to snitching.

  Enough writing chops to ghostwrite the biography he puts out during his rookie year.

  Promptness in calling the Cheesecake Factory in advance for reservations.

  Keeping player’s cell phone ring from becoming out of date.

  Spamming blogs that report on his misdeeds.

  Leveling up his Call of Duty online gamer ranking.

  Writing threatening letters to Jim Rome.

  Acting as designated driver, no matter how much they want to pull a Donté Stallworth or Leonard Little and mow down pedestrians under the influence.

  Picking the banana-shaped candies out of his packages of Runts.

  Throwing off the public by posting misleading updates on his Twitter page.

  Protesting outside Electronic Arts headquarters because of his skill ratings in Madden.

  Carrier of extra cell phone for when he forgets to charge the first one.

  Campaign manager and speechwriter (for post-NFL career congressional run).

  III.5 Watch Football While Tripping Balls: Drugs and Gameday

  Just as Christianity is its de facto religion, alcohol is the mandated intoxicant of the NFL, despite it being one of the principal causes of the violence among fans that outsiders persistently bemoan. But other drugs can be added to the mix to enhance your viewing experience.

  While we hate for our favorite players to get caught with drugs because it leads to suspensions that jeopardize the team’s prospects for winning, using them ourselves may add to the gameday experience. With no rigid moral codes in place for fans, we’re free to test out any substances we like without fear of public condemnation. Legal issues are another issue. Not having drug charges automatically thrown out because we’re not famous is a minor concern, however.