“Life is nasty, brutish, and short.”
Most of life is mundane, punctuated by brief moments of excitement and meaning.
One of the most prominent areas where we experience these fleeting moments of excitement and meaning is sports. We forget all the drudgery and pain of the day and place our expectations on our favorite sports teams to win.
We see extreme examples of this in playoff events and other championship events, such as the ongoing MLB playoffs. The extreme reaction by certain fan bases can be explained by the crushing weight of expectations that fans put on men they will never meet in order to find some temporary excitement and meaning in life.
Most people wonder why Yankees fans lash out against their team when the Yankees have had so much success compared to other teams. After all, you can’t complain about 27 championships and a playoff appearance every year, when most teams are lucky to even get over .500, right?
While Yankees fans can be extreme and over the top, permanent satisfaction goes against the very nature of fandom.
Fans expect more and more from their team and project their own desires and fears on a group of multimillion dollar athletes. If fans of every team suddenly became satisfied, what would be the point?
Since sports exist as a way to break free from the mundane, how could sports work if they too became mundane? Like them or hate them, sports needs crazy fans with unreasonable expectations.
Just remember that next time you hear a Yankees fan whining about A-Rod’s poor performance or the Yankees “only” making the ALCS.
I use the Yankees as a reference point since I’m a Yankees fan. But you can find examples of the gradual “unreasonable” expectations of most fan bases.
Frank Solich was fired after a period at Nebraska that would be considered extremely successful now. But Nebraska fans burdened Solich with oppressive expectations after Tom Osborne’s legendary tenure.
Red Sox fans promised an arm and a limb for a World Series championship before 2004. Only seven years later, manager Terry Francona, the skipper for the 2004 and 2007 championship teams, was fired. Expectations shifted rapidly after two chamionships, and missing the playoffs two consecutive years became unacceptable.
The same thing can happen with individual players.
LeBron James has played at a high level in every year of his career. Even as a rookie, it was clear to fans that his body type and physical talent would allow him to become one of the all-time greats. Yet despite the fact that Lebron put up great stats and led his teams deep into the playoffs, fans became disappointed with him.
Fans viewed him as a sports icon and the successor to Michael Jordan and it was no longer enough for him to just be a talented player that won multiple MVPs, as that quickly became “mundane”. Lebron James had to win a championship and take his game to the next level because of the constantly shifting expectations of sports.
I could list examples from every sport and almost every team but the point is clear: expectations are different for every team and they can shift rapidly, sometimes within a matter of weeks.
We can’t view team success rationally because that would conflict with the fundamental nature of fandom.