rideaducati":t3p56n8a said:
I dislike division rivals MORE than I dislike other teams...as do most people. Most of us pay attention to what is going on in the NFL and tend to dislike or like teams because of certain players, coaches or owners, but the hatred still CENTERS on division rivals. Go look at any team's message boards and you will find vitriol to and from opposing DIVISION teams that just doesn't exist for teams outside their division.
Loyalty to one team does NOT mean we don't pay attention or enjoy watching the happenings across the NFL. Being loyal to one team doesn't mean we are poor students of the game. I don't get how people can watch the NFL, or ANY sporting event and NOT have a rooting interest. Even when watching two teams I don't even care about play, I pick one that I would prefer to win. I don't hate or like either team, but I always find myself rooting for ONE of them. Watching any sporting event without rooting interest would be boring.
I am not an interested in analyzing games or statistics of every team. I am a FAN of MY team through thick and thin. I enjoy the highs of winning and the agony of defeats. I enjoy hating division rivals and talking smack. I enjoy the retorts from hated rival fans. Without the love and the hate, it would just be a game...like monopoly. Who cares about the intricacies of monopoly? Nobody...UNTIL the player across from you has gotten a hold of Boardwalk and Park Place. Now it's "game on". You didn't really know which player you hated before he got those properties, but now that he has them, you hate that player. It's the same with fandom in every sport.
I'm not saying we should give up liking and disliking people in football. I'm saying we should give up the current norms for how we go about liking and disliking players, coaches, and organizations. I'm saying this because how we tend to do this is so presumptuous, biased, tribal, and inaccurate that it's toxic from how overly simplistic it is. We, as both Seahawks fans and as football fans, are a part of a culture that encourages these assumptions.
We don't get to be this ignorant about tribalism without consequence, such as fatalities from violent altercations of sport fan rivalries, people needlessly wasting our time insulting each other online, or somewhere in between these examples of severity.
You enjoy it? Cool! Do you know who else enjoys what they're doing? A psychopath committing a murder! A person who is addicted to heroine after shooting up! A person who is addicted to gambling when they're pulling the lever on a slot machine regardless of how much money has been lost! We are human.
Our perceived enjoyment of something is not a substitute for justifying doing whatever that something is.
No matter how accurate, clever, and enjoyable your smack talk seems to be, a "rival" fan will tend to either be too disinterested in your opinion to care or they will care about what you think but be too biased toward their own team to believe your smack talk is personally true about them.
Our self-serving biases are way too strong to let these kinds of insults change our views. When participating in tribalism, you're playing a game, this game is rigged to be unwinnable, and the whole exercise is a waste of time better spent in the pursuit of broader, process-based goals like learning, the spread of knowledge, personal growth, the unification of culture/society, and all those wonderful things that separate thriving in life from simply surviving it.