Sports dynasties are good

I *am* biased, but I still think I'm right.

Here’s the thing: The Chiefs are in the Super Bowl again (duh). And a lot of people seem to hate the Chiefs.

I get it. When you watch a team win for seven years straight, and you are not a fan of said team, it gets old. You’re angry. It’s unfair. It feels like watching billionaires get richer. If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan — a team that has lost to Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes & Company at least thirty thousand times in the past seven years, most recently last Sunday — you are probably apoplectic.

But hear me out: Sports dynasties are good.

Seeing as I am a fan of Boston sports teams with recent histories of victory, you might be inclined to shove me in a locker when I present my argument, but I hope you’ll hear me out. I even drew a couple graphs and stuff to try to convince you.

On this week’s episode of The Sports Gossip Show (please subscribe!) with Madeline Hill, I said that I believe most people’s experience of sports fandom involves misery.

And, contrary to how it sounds, that is not a bad thing!

The whole point of being a sports fan, in my opinion, is that fandom becomes its own language within its own melodramatic soap opera. If you’re a fan of a team, you can speak the same language as other fans — maybe those people are your family, your friends. Maybe those people live in the place you used to live, and talking to them about your team makes you feel closer to home.

Maybe those people are strangers, and you stumble upon a point of shared connection. One of the reasons I love working in sports is because you can drop me anywhere in the country and I can find something to talk about, sports-wise, with the people there.

[Bear with me — I know this sounds corny, like the whole woefully misbegotten Sports Can Fix Our Divided Country theory. They can’t, but they can make you feel closer to people, and right now, I’ll take it.]

So, back to misery.

At the end of the day, your team probably won’t win a championship. It’s just statistically unlikely. Every league has many teams, and when the season is over, only one of them can win. It’s pretty cruel, actually. I get very excited for big games with high stakes — I love that sports are completely manufactured events that feel hugely consequential. When I report on championships in person, I feel like I’m at the center of the universe, and when I watch them on TV, I feel like I’m a part of a conversation that becomes a whole universe in and of itself.

And then I watch one team lose, and it really bums me out. When it’s my team that loses? The closest feeling I can equate it to is actual heartbreak. Breaking up with someone and watching your team lose elicit the same pangs in your left chest area, bring up the same feelings of “what if?”

But this is where the beauty of fandom comes into play: misery loves company. There are few things that make you feel closer to someone that commiserating over the fact that your team once again turned into a flaming pile of garbage at the end of a game. You say stuff to each other like, “They should fire ____insert coach name here____ and hire me” (they definitely shouldn’t) and you both agree.

Being a fan of a losing team is, at its core, romantic. You love this thing that doesn’t really know you exist, will never love you back, is capable of bringing you intense joy and misery, and is usually loaded with nostalgia. The longer your team goes without winning a championship, the more romantic your fandom. Extra romance points if your team has recently gotten close and lost (Bills, Lions) or has just totally sucked for a very long time now (Jets).

I actually did some math here to illustrate my concept. I call it the Fandom Romance Index (FRI).

My handwriting got weird at the top there, ignore it please

You might be thinking, right about now, “Hey, Charlotte, I thought this post was about dynasties?” We’re getting there. Before we do, however, I have to familiarize you with the Fandom Hatred Index (FHI), which is the inverse of the FRI.

Simply put, the longer a team wins, the more intense other fans’ hatred. Think the Patriots post-Deflategate, when the rest of the country would rather have eaten seventeen bowls of clam chowder in one sitting than watch Tom Brady hoist another trophy.

Which brings me to the Chiefs. While their fans are riding high right now, their fandom is no longer romantic. The romance of fandom matters because, at its apex, it is the most pure form of loving a team, of being a fan. You’re hanging in there without much reason for doing so. You’re allowing yourself to hope despite all the evidence telling you not to — I think it’s beautiful and resilient.

And the higher the romance index, the more gratifying it is when that team finally wins.

Where do you go from there, when the FRI resets to zero? There is no yearning, no wistfulness. There is only pure, capitalistic demand for more wins, higher growth, even better returns. Winning is fun (not to brag), but its effects are hardening. It is not something to write poetry about (something I’m sure all sports fans do in their spare time). I have never felt fandom as gratifying as I did right before the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 after 86 years of losing, when my FRI was at its highest. I would get myself shoved into aforementioned locker very quickly by a fan of a bad team if I dared say that I miss having a high FRI, so I won’t (but I do).

I am, however, aware that not everyone gives a rat’s ass about the romance of fandom.

So let me offer you this: If you hate the Chiefs, and you dig deep enough into your soul, you might actually secretly be grateful for their dominance.

Please stick with me here — you know how I said earlier that shared sports fandom is a language you can speak with other fans of your team? Shared sports hatred is something you can share with everybody who isn’t a fan of that team. It widens your potential for connection and allows you to wallow in your disgust with other people all across the country. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, etc.

Dynasties also, as my co-host Madeline rightly pointed out on our show this week, make for better television.

Admit it: it’s more fun to know the characters, even if you hate the show. When the Golden State Warriors beat my Boston Celtics in 2022, I was devastated, but I had to admit that there was something pretty cool about knowing the ins and outs and ups and downs of the Warriors. It made watching the playoffs that much more interesting before the guys on Golden State won their fourth championship together.

So, as you watch the Super Bowl next weekend, your teeth clenched, your fists balled, your mouth yelling things like, “the refs made sure the Chiefs would be in the Super Bowl,” remember that at least you’re feeling something. Something that can bring you closer to other people. Something that creates community. Something that, at the end of the day, doesn’t really matter at all and is all the better for it.