Phony NFLShop.com Ad

So, I have to call B.S. on the ad below from the NFLShop.com guys. I know they need to move product during the busiest shopping season of the year, but c'mon! There isn't a single American household with three adult males in it where each of the three guys supports a different NFL team. And from such different regions of the country, too! It's just not believable to have a Browns fan, an Eagles fan, and a Chargers fan all under the same roof. It just doesn't happen.


People these days might move all across the country after college to take jobs in strange cities, but you can't tell me that someone who was raised on the Eagles would suddenly become a Niners fan if he landed in San Francisco for work. It just doesn't happen. That's what the NFL Ticket on DirecTV is for, so people who find themselves geographically removed from their teams can still root, root, root for the home team on Sundays.

A very good friend of mine from Ohio State lived in the Baltimore area for a very long time post-graduation. Did she ever cop out and buy Ravens* or Redskins season tickets? Not on your life! She was from the Cleveland area, so she was a Browns fan tried and true. She had Browns season tickets, flew up for the games she and her hubby could make, and sold the other tickets to other fans. That's how I was able to take my wife to see a Browns game in the new stadium in 2002.

* Despite the fact that the Baltimore Ravens happen to be the Browns v1.0, when the Devil Incarnate (Art Model) moved the team after the 1995 season, that team became the embodiment of evil and the antithesis of all that Cleveland Browns fans hold dear. The Baltimore fans were done wrong by Robert Irsay, so I can't really begrudge the fans their Super Bowl victory in 2000, even though THAT SUPER BOWL SHOULD RIGHTLY BELONG TO CLEVELAND!!!

All of which brings up some interesting issues of how people decide to support a given team to begin with. For most people, which NFL team to support* tends to be either handed down from parents or a byproduct of geography. I just recently watched the British version of the movie Fever Pitch (1997), in which the young lad becomes an Arsenal fan because football (soccer to us Yanks) was about the only way he could bond with his absentee dad, who just happened to take him to an Arsenal game for his first match. Very interesting movie, that.

* Since this in a NFLShop.com ad, I'm going to skip any discussion of which college football team people support, which usually is tied to familial traditions or alma maters.

My own NFL fandom was an interesting mix of family and geography. My parents and siblings were all born in Ohio, but we moved around a lot when I was a child. Right around the time I was becoming a fan of pro football, we lived in eastern South Dakota. From there, the natural order of things would have been to support the Minnesota Vikings, as they were the closest to us geographically. They also had some very good teams there in the 1970s, so it might have been a natural fit to support the "local" team. However, we were raised on Ohio teams all.

That meant we supported Ohio State at the collegiate level, the Big Red Machine for Major League Baseball (MLB), and the Cleveland Browns in pro football. To a lesser extent, we paid attention to what the Bengals were doing in Cincinnati, but we never much supported the Indians in Cleveland. Ah, but watching the Kardiac Kids in Cleveland during the late '70s -- Brian Sipe at QB, Ozzie Newsome at TE, Mike and Greg Pruitt at RB, Sam Rutigliano as the coach, Don Cockroft kicking -- yes, I even remember clearly that "12 Days of Christmas" song parody that promised a Rutigliano Super Bowl. That sealed the deal for me, and I've been a Browns fan ever since!*

* Being a student of history, I naturally dug into the Browns team history, and love how fantastic it is! Jim Brown remains the best pure runner ever in the NFL, but I'd stack Marion Motley right up there with him. Lou Groza, Otto Graham, Paul Warfield, and too many others to list all played for the Browns, who also won eight NFL championships before the Super Bowl era. Not too shabby!

The following years of hope and heartbreak throughout the '80s with Bernie Kosar, Kevin Mack, Earnest Byner, Webster Slaughter, Marty Schottenheimer, The Drive and The Fumble, did nothing except reinforce my fandom. I'll never forget the Hated One, Elway, and what the Denver Donkeys* did to my team. Although, given Denver's record in Super Bowls during that time, perhaps it was fine that the Browns never had to be embarrassed by whichever NFC team was in the Super Bowl those years.

* Years later, when I was going to college in Colorado, I took personal pleasure in the Broncos' troubles in the early '90s, when it seemed as if Elway would join the ranks of the most prolific QBs never to have won a Super Bowl. I remember the joke circulating at the time: "Did you hear that Elway can't get into his house? Someone painted an end zone in his front yard!" Ah, but I digress.

I'm actually facing an interesting dilemma with my own children, although they are both too young yet to decide which team they will support into adulthood. I always had my birth in Ohio (plus the fact that we never took a vacation anywhere but Ohio to see family; every Christmas break, every summer break from school, we were heading to Ohio on that interminable 16 hour drive!) to cement my fan roots in the Buckeye State. However, my two children were both born here in east-central Illinois. My wife is from Oklahoma, so I get no support from her side of the family, who are perhaps Dallas Cowboys fans if they support any NFL team. **shudder** They really aren't NFL fans, so maybe I can twist my kids into supporting the Browns yet.

However, from here, people can be an interesting mix of fans. We have plenty of Bears fans, to be sure. We also have plenty of St. Louis Rams fans, probably all the more so since the Rams were the "Greatest Show on Turf" there in the late '90s-early '00s. And now that Peyton Manning finally got the Big Game Monkey off his back, and against the Bears no less, there are plenty of Indy Colts fans in this area, too. On TV, the local games usually consist of those three teams before they show nationwide coverage. Given that Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis are all just about equidistant from our city, I can definitely see getting single-game tickets to see each of those teams play in person.

So, at some point, I will need to let go and allow my kids to decide on their own which team(s) they want to support. If they want to be pro football fans at all, that is. Every once in a while, Matthew will say that he doesn't want to watch football on Sundays. And I'm OK with that. Any time he wants to play with his toys in our play room downstairs, I go with him and play with him. But eventually, those games most likely will transition to tossing the pigskin around the back yard. I'll just be happy to throw the skinny post to him streaking past his uncles and grandfather when the time comes.