Reflections on Being a Fan
Our Trip to the College Football National Championship Game
January 12, 2024
Do you consider yourself a fan? Are you sure? Most people think of themselves as fans of particular sports teams, but their subjective definition is not necessarily reliable. They mean no harm. It’s human nature to want to belong to something, to be part of what appears to be a community, especially if that community is centered around something as harmless as a game.
People throw around the word “fan” all the time, but it’s thrown around carelessly, applying to a broad spectrum of allegiances. Having a favorite baseball team doesn’t automatically make you a fan of the team, it just means you have a preferred team. Good for you. No, “fan” is short for fanatic. It’s supposed to be something more. It is by definition supposed to be irrational.
Let’s say you moved to New York five years ago, you don’t follow hockey every night, but you go to a few Rangers games at MSG each year, always have a blast, you watch a few regular season games and catch most playoff games on TV. You don’t follow or watch any other hockey team and you sometimes wear a team cap. Does that make you a Rangers fan?
Possibly, but there’s one piece of critical information missing. The answer depends on one question above all others: How did you feel when they lost?
I just returned home from a trip to the College Football National Championship game in Houston. The team we were there to see, the Michigan Wolverines, won the game, securing their first national title in 26 years. I was there with my oldest son (current Michigan student) and my 11-year-old son. When the Uber arrived to take us to the airport, my wife looked us all in the eye and told us that when we got to the stadium to make a mental note of the location of the nearest defibrillator. She was not joking. She’s seen too much.
Everyone’s relationship with a team is rooted in a story. It might be your first game at a particular stadium, or the distant memory of watching games every Sunday with your grandfather. The experience usually happens in childhood, but it’s not a rule. You can become a true fan of a team for the first time as an adult. When it comes to college sports teams, it’s natural and appropriate to become a fan of your school’s team. You are at an impressionable and critical period in your life (let’s face it, college students aren’t yet fully formed adults), and college sports is so immensely appealing, it can grab you in an instant. It can also grow over time. I didn’t become a fan of Michigan football until I was in my 20s, and it’s taken me another 25 years to solidify that relationship, sealing the pact by adding another generation into the mix and making it a family affair.
Growing up in New York City in the 1980s, I did not follow college football. I knew no one who did. I don’t remember any of my friends or family having a college team. From time to time, I would watch Rutgers football on regular network TV because it happened to be on. There wasn’t even ESPN yet (?!). None of it stuck.
The team at my actual college was at the time in Division III, which means there was not even a college team for me to root for when I was in college. When I showed up in Ann Arbor for law school, I had no college sports baggage whatsoever. I was therefore a clean slate when I first stepped foot into the Big House, the most sublimely imposing sports venue I experienced before or since. I like to think of myself as my own person, an individual, but the 110,000 other people at the stadium were pretty convincing, drawing me into a tradition and rituals that were irresistible. The die was cast the following year, 1997, 26 years ago if you were doing the math. We went undefeated, beat Ohio State, Charles Woodson won the Heisman (only defensive player to win the award), and we won the Rose Bowl for a share of the National Championship. Shut it down.
(If there is any team in any sport with a more aesthetically appealing uniform, helmet, and logo than Michigan’s, I am not aware of it.)
Back to the original question: think about the last time your team lost an important game and ask yourself, how did it make you feel?
There’s no right answer. Did you get angry? Depressed? Did you have to walk around the block a few times? I believe that the level of negative emotions – sadness, anger, and yes, downright trauma – that you experience when your team loses, especially when your team’s season ends, is directly correlated with how much of a fan you are of that team.
Since only one team can win in any sport in any given year, every team but one will lose, which means that every other team’s fans will experience that pain in some way or another. Cruelly, the closer a team gets to winning it all, the more the disappointment of not doing so will sting. Those negative emotions are real, they are palpable, and for better or worse they get banked. They don’t necessarily make you stronger, but they can kill you.
You don’t have to go tearing off your jersey, wandering the streets at night boiling with rage, starting fights, or writing lengthy diatribes and mailing them to referees—those are my things—but if your team loses and that loss hurts something in your soul, you are probably a true fan. My 11-year old son also does not handle losing well, but at least has an excuse. For the time being, at least.
The lesson for me this week is that there is a flip-side, and I just experienced it. The level of negative emotions banked over the years is directly correlated with the happiness you feel when your team eventually wins it all. I’ve always told my kids after each heartbreaking Mets or Cowboys loss (our other two teams), that one day we would win it all and it would be that much sweeter when we did. My own trauma had been compounded exponentially by wiping away my kids’ tears year after year. But who knew I was actually right?
Winning is a joyous exorcism.
For this particular Michigan team, winning it all was not merely the act of being the last team standing and having its name entered into the book. It was a moral comeuppance years in the making. For almost a decade, we lost to Ohio State in the Game every year. They beat us time and time again, sometimes in humiliating fashion. It began to feel like overcoming that hurdle, let alone entering the four-team college football playoff, was just never going to happen. Combined with zero titles for my other two teams for multiple decades, it was so demoralizing that there were several times when I wondered whether this was all worth it—fantasizing that I actually had a choice in the matter.
Three years ago, things started to change for Michigan. The team started to believe, and we could feel it. And then we started to believe. And then on a snowy Saturday after Thanksgiving, at the Big House, we did what we knew we were capable of, but didn’t think would actually happen. We (#5) beat Ohio State (#2, favored by 8 points). More specifically, we actually beat the balls off Ohio State.
That was a blessing and a curse. We had overcome the seemingly insurmountable hurdle, the one that had plagued us, but now the team had to finish the job. This meant we would now be thrown into the wolves of the rest of college football, most notably the juggernauts of the SEC. That first year we failed, badly, getting routed by Georgia in the first playoff round, and ruining New Year’s Eve. Happy New Year, now go fuck yourself.
The next season we came back strong, beating the balls off Ohio State (#2) again, this time in Columbus, but we lost again on New Year’s Eve in the first playoff round (to TCU and the officials). Happy New Year, now go fuck yourself. That was the real kick in the dick. I coped by writing about it, but I was not over it by any stretch. It just went into the bank like all the others. That ruthless bank of pain. It was getting so crowded in there, we had to build an extension.
Coming into this season, my heart was hopeful, but my brain was skeptical. Would the team be able to overcome the pain of last year? It’s asking a lot of any group of people, let alone a group of young adults, to put trauma aside and just resolve to do better next time. Do you know how hard it is to win a national title in college football? There are 133 Division I programs and only one winner. As we moved deep into the season, still undefeated, we all knew we were setting ourselves up for either devastation or glory. There was no alternative.
It’s worth mentioning here the pseudo-scandal that generated a lot of ink late in the season, specifically the advance “sign-stealing” that Michigan was accused of and that a lot of people chose to talk about. In my opinion, biased but honest, that was all manufactured noise. I know this, because I’ve seen it before. Everyone hated the Patriots and everyone hated Tom Brady, so they thought the moral equalizer was going to be to show that Brady and the Patriots won by cheating. That Tom Brady deflating footballs was the secret behind it all. But this was never real. It was a small story that was inflamed by haters. I know because I was one of those haters. Believe me, there were so many genuine reasons to hate Tom Brady, Bill Belichek, and the New England Patriots without relying on drawing causal connections that don’t add up. We should all just deal with the reality at hand.
The reality here is that this year’s Michigan team was an inspiration. It was as beautiful as it was ferocious. Their defense was historically great (10 points allowed per game!). There was not a nanosecond this season when I questioned the will or intensity of the players. When you watched them, they were merciless, most recently turning Washington’s Heisman-finalist quarterback into a crash test dummy in the fourth quarter of the championship game. In the preceding game, the first playoff game that derailed us the last two seasons, we faced off against the SEC champion, the Alabama Crimson Tide, the undisputed king of the College Football Playoff era. Down by seven with 3:19 on the clock, Michigan went for it on 4th and 2 at our own 33-yard line. We won in overtime.
After each game, all 15 of them victories, the players and coaches were effusive with unbridled love for each other. This was a team destined to win for one another, and that meant stomping on the throats of everyone else. If you love football, even if your brain doesn’t get there, your heart has no choice but to respect this team.
The icing on the cake for me and my boys: we were there to experience it in person. Together.
When we got into the Uber on the way to the airport, I was far from excited. I was nervous. Not only was the defibrillator comment ringing in my ears, but the prospect of trekking home after a loss was inconceivable. I was also secretly concerned that the people showing up for this game wouldn’t be the same kind of people showing up to be part of the 110,000 in the Big House every other fall Saturday. After all, I knew what this trip was costing dollar-wise. We could have flown first class on Emirates to hunt camels in the desert for that kind of money. Were we just going to be hanging around with a bunch of wealthy pseudo-fans?
When we got to the departing gate and saw a sea of Michigan maize and blue, I started to feel a little better. I knew that whatever we were about to experience, it was going to be a group experience. In our two days there, I don’t believe I encountered one person who wasn’t a real fan. From either team. They had come from all over, rented buses and drove, stayed in dumpy hotels, taken their kids out of school, flown into airports hundreds of miles away. Some didn’t have any travel arrangements for the trip home.
Wearing my unwashed Charles Woodson Jersey, my sons wearing theirs (also unwashed), we settled into our seats. The atmosphere at the game was electric. The game started out great for Michigan, but then got perilously close and stayed that way until the fourth quarter, when we eventually went bananas and pulled away. It made the experience all the more satisfying, and no defibrillator had to be deployed. Not once. When the final seconds ticked away and the streamers and rockets were unleashed, I was literally in disbelief. That’s what 26 years without any championships will do to a person. Coach Harbaugh embraced his brother and father, and I got chills. Those are men who know what it takes to lead others to the pinnacle of human achievement, and if you don’t think that’s embedded somewhere deep in the souls of that family, you don’t understand anything. I embraced my sons.
I also hugged the strangers next to me, as did all of us (for like the tenth time that night). I even almost felt bad for helping to inflame tensions with the Washington fans around us all night, a legit impassioned group, only because I could only imagine how bad they were feeling when the game ended. I hope the memory of my earlier taunting isn’t now part of their pain banks, but alas, I know it is. And so it must be. And remember I said almost.
The next day, hungover with Victory, we embarked on our trip home (taking an Uber to the Austin airport, three hours away, to literally save thousands of dollars). I looked forward to getting home and finally washing that jersey. After multiple delays, our plane finally took off, which was filled with the maize and blue of fellow Wolverine fans, much like on the flight down to Houston. There was a major storm battering the East Coast, and there was ridiculous turbulence for almost the entire flight. The plane was a-rocking side to side, and the raindrops were flying sideways, and the plane emerged from the clouds so low that we were immediately upon Mother Earth ready to land. It wasn’t quite a “we’re all going to die” feeling, but definitely a “I hope we make it” moment. In what could only be described as masterful aviating, the plane touched down with just a few bumps and arrived at a complete stop. At that moment, everyone on the plane, showing their preference for being alive, gave the pilots a round of applause.
And then one lone voice yelled out, “Go Blue!”
Postscript:
Right before the game started, we all went to a Michigan tailgate next to the stadium. My roommate from law school was with us, and the tailgate was mostly a bunch of guys standing around drinking Bud Light. In other words, it was just like law school. Then the clouds darkened and the wind staring whipping around. The tents started to fly in the air. I checked my phone and it said there was a tornado warning. We started heading towards the stadium, not confident that the make-shift tents would provide adequate shelter. I said something to the effect that it was crazy that there would be a tornado right at the start of the championship game. My 11-year old checked his phone and said, “Dad, it says here that the last time a tornado struck Houston was January 5th.” “What year?” “No, January 5th. Literally three days ago.” What the fuck is it with this city?
Post Postscript:
How’s this for irrational: during the fourth quarter of the championship game, while it was still a one-score game, the screen in the stadium showed a famous celebrity in attendance at the game: Derek Jeter (who was hanging out with Michael Jordan in a luxury box). My sons and I immediately booed him. Even though he was wearing a Michigan sweatshirt.
Let’s go Mets!
