The Case for A More Transactional Fandom

In 2022, David Roth wrote an article about the Pittsburgh Pirates, but also about a larger issue in baseball fandom that has stuck with me for years. The link above is a gift link so you can read the whole thing - or better yet, subscribe to Defector as they are consistently great - but this is the part that set my Perpetual Rumination Machine off on this particular tangent.

Sometime in the early 2000s, I quit rooting for the Dallas Cowboys. (I don’t recall the specific year, though the smart money is on “a season involving Dave Campo”.) There were myriad reasons; some of it was due to my slow migration away from being interested in the NFL, some of it was fantasy sports warping my rooting interests in a given game, but a lot of it boiled down to a growing belief that this franchise wasn’t going to win shit while Jerry Jones was in charge & that Jerry wasn’t going to have the humility or introspection to hand things over to people who knew better. I have since said, many times, loudly, to anyone who would listen, and to many people who probably didn’t care, that one of the best decisions of my life was ditching the Cowboys.

In the last two decades and counting I have saved so much money, time, and energy not engaging with the Dallas Cowboys. The Dallas Cowboys have played roughly 343 games since I stopped rooting for them; at 4 hours per game that’s 1,372 hours, or 57.166 days of my life that I’ve been able to dedicate to something other than watching Jerry Jones and his failsons produce a total of four playoff wins. That feels like a win for me and my sanity; and with all that free time/energy, I redirected it into

checks notes

mutters to self

double-checks notes

stares at the sky

Texas Longhorns basketball, obviously a much better and more emotionally-rewarding use of my time. Everything is great, this article is great, I am a genius.

Clearly, freeing up your time and energy by ditching an under-performing & emotionally-draining sports franchise is no guarantee you’re going to make better choices with said free time. Maybe you use that time to learn golf, a sport invented by sadists, or maybe you decide to get really into learning bagpipes, an instrument invented by possibly the exact same sadists; maybe you spend those 57.166 days just lying¹ in your yard, watching the clouds roll by. That sounds like the best of the three options, at least until the neighbor you also convinced to ditch the Cowboys starts warming up his bagpipes.

There are organizations out there who have realized they have the unwavering support of fans who are exemplars of the Sunk Cost Fallacy and are lining their pockets with the dollars of people who have conceded that This Is Just What We Do in Pittsburgh. I’m picking on Pittsburgh, but the same could be said for the Oakland Athletics, the Washington Wizards, or any number of other franchises who react to the idea of funding a winning team like a McKinney realtor to a mask mandate. (The Cowboys may not exactly fit this mold as their issues are more along the lines of gerontocratic incompetence than a practiced apathy to excellence, but the frustration it inspires is largely the same.) The owners know that a combination of national TV revenue & fan inertia makes winning incidental to the bottom line, and their franchise valuations continue to rise at an astonishing rate whether they actively invest in the business of winning or not. The incoming push of private equity & what feels like the inevitable entrance of sovereign wealth funds only further divorces the money from wins & losses, and the resultant product sucks for everyone involved…except for the owners. And if you think college sports are immune to this issue, boy howdy do I have some news for you.

(There’s a very good Matt Brown post on the topic of private equity in college sports that’s worth your time.)

Until such time that American sports embrace relegation (hold your breath, any day now, these guys are always keen on the prospect of less money!) there are precious few ways fans can push ownership to give a damn. “Public shame” is a concept that I should probably be referring to in the past tense and I am sorry to inform you that they do not read your tweets - unless they’re Mark Cuban, because he’s got a lot of free time these days - so the wallet is the only real way to speak to these people. If enough people stop consuming their product, the math changes for them. Do I have confidence this is a winning strategy? Reader, I do not, but FFS what other options are there?

Over the last 30 years or so, it seems like the pro franchises have largely transitioned from “guys who became billionaires by running a sports franchise” to “existing billionaires who want another revenue stream” and the change in how they came about owning the team means their aims aren’t quite the same as the previous generation. Would they like to win, sure, but it’s no longer essential to the team’s value increasing. Jerry still has the most valuable franchise on the planet despite not making a Super Bowl in Josh Allen’s lifetime; the Pittsburgh Pirates’ valuation has gone up 50% in the last 9 years despite being above .500 once in that span. Winning is no longer tightly bound to the bottom line, and it shows with some of the franchises.

In a similar vein, there was a time 30 years ago when college football fans could at least maintain plausible deniability that it wasn’t a business; the money wasn’t as obvious or all-encompassing, and schools weren’t swapping conference partners like NYE at the Boogie Nights house. There was a time when a free car helped kill an entire college program, now players are getting enough money to start their own dealerships and athletic programs are pilfering GMs from the pro ranks to sort out their salaries. This is not to say the situation is worse now - players should’ve been getting paid above the table decades ago, this is a positive development - rather that the circumstances around college fandom have changed substantially. How many times during the heavier days of realignment did you hear about the size of a team’s fan base or the strength of their brand before their recent record came up? (Take a bow, Texas A&M!) The business of a college football program has a looser correlation to the wins & losses than it ever has, and it seems unlikely to reverse course any time soon.

I understand I sound like a crank, a thousand-year-old man complaining about How Things Used to Be, which is both accurate and not really the point. Cranky digressions aside, the point here is that you have a finite amount of time on this planet, very little of it unencumbered by responsibilities like work, child rearing, destroying your neighbor’s bagpipes, etc.; it pays to be intentional and occasionally reflect upon whether the things you do during these precious snippets of your life are just habit or actually bring you joy. There’s no one right answer here, the math is different for every person; maybe you’re more about the roller coaster ride than the wins and losses, maybe the games are a pretext to spend time with friends and family and the outcomes are irrelevant, there are a hundred reasons that can make fandom worth it that have little to do with the final score. Whether those reasons bind you to a specific team or not, the point is to interrogate the ‘why’. You don’t need to bind your soul to a program for your entire life for reasons that only made sense a generation ago; as circumstances change, you can change with them. It’s okay to break up with a sport or a team that doesn’t love you back. This is why I’m now a fan of the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Just kidding; I said to interrogate your beliefs, not waterboard them.

Writing tunes provided by..well, me.