Ruminations on Losing

Well, damn. That kind of sucked, but ultimately was to be expected. No one beats Oregon at Autzen was the general consensus and it proved true, especially when Andrew Luck also has to deal with the officials screwing him over like with that bogus offensive pass interference call in the 3^rd quarter.

Stanford’s always sort of prided itself on knowing enough to not take sports too seriously, always making sure it maintained its proper place. But as the team gets better I’d like to hope that our fan base gets a little more irrational, because what’s the point of following sports if not for it to provide a safe outlet for irrational joy and anger?

There are two main ways to describe sports fandom: how much you know, and how much you feel. The first one is a reflection of how much time in your day/week do you devote to following sports, which is never as much as you’d like to when you’re in college. Unless you’re one of those lucky punks that can afford cable TV in your room, you have to work to remember to follow your favorite teams, which means that ESPN.com is just another site in the rotation of NYTimes.com, Facebook, Gmail and the like. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the difficulty in setting aside blocks of time to watch games. Just like books and art, in order to fully appreciate sports, you have give it your undivided attention. For those of you not in a dedicated athletics spirit organization or haven’t become pros at following Stanford football, this is probably the main reason why you weren’t as pissed off as I was at the end of the game.

The second way is a bit more nebulous, because anyone can go to a football game and get wasted and yell a lot but that doesn’t make you more of a die-hard fan than anyone else, and in general I still have yet to see out here the kind of unbridled irrational passion that is expected from the Ohio State fans back home. Still, when sportswriters talk about cities that love their teams, especially football because of the limited amount of games in a season, they talk about how a win can affect the entire mood of the city for the next week, how the city breathes with the football team. I’m still ambivalent about the state of football fandom at Stanford, but I will say this. All of a sudden, classes have become a hell of a lot harder, and there are more clouds in the sky than there were last week. So, maybe there’s hope for us after all.