You guys are as smart as Eagles fans.
I’m saying the way your fans and players operate within your organizational culture are symbiotic and reflective of different expectations than the rest of the league has or expects.
I’m saying quite clearly: your organization tolerates and encourages unethical behavior from everybody associated either directly or tangentially with it and that the collective rotten behavior spreads its stink to the West in Pennsylvania and into the north in New Jersey.
Other organizations don’t tolerate toxic fans, players who thrive on rule breaking and ethical lassitude, and have leaders who do not tolerate either by using their hierarchical positioning to tell a fan never to come around again and who look out for the sanctity of processes that keep the NFL honest and from becoming a playground of ME! MINE! I WANT!
No, the Bills are acting in their own self-interest even if they lost a player.
But Terpman22 has it wrong. They cut the player to claim Slay (who did not report) and did not lose him because they put Slay on the retired list
Once again, the tribalism and reflexiveness that permeates this sick fan base and thread prevents any real knowledge of anything.
This is the kind of analysis one would expect from a Terpman22 who cheers injuries
And if you think my problem with your “franchise” sounds personal, then you’ve hit on a truth. You’re right. It’s existential because I think and believe concepts like "ethics," "decency," morality," "people as ends unto themselves," "propriety," and "upright solidity," are important. You might not agree and approach things from a vantage point where winning at all costs for Filadelfia is fantastic. I happen to disagree and will continue writing exactly what I think until the cows come home, as they say—and if this is too much of a sermon that is really causing discomfort because it acts as a mirror to the self or as the window to your friends and fellow fans, then make the most of the look inside or the reflection to do the same.
I wouldn't read all that if you paid me, but I love that you took the time to type it all out. lol Man, being the champs really pisses people off.
I also love that a Cowboys fan liked it.
Most everyone I know hated the eagles when they were ringless also
Yup. Hated since Reggie, Randall, and Jerome. I cheered for the Raiders when they beat Harold Carmichael. I wasn't even seven yet. Hah. You lost.
The only reason people think that people hate something because of titles is because they are bandwagon fans, or are self-conscious they are or might be perceived as bandwagon fans (chances are that you indeed are a bandwagon fans), or can't conceive of anything but bandwagon fans. "Hey Papale, every cloud has a silvery-lined playbook, but it's bandwagon fans and these DeSean Cripwalkers all the way down!"
I'll just say that I've been here since 2012 and posting regularly since 2016 and the bandwagon is so freaking big one is hard-pressed to explain it. So I'll try. A bandwagon has many manifestations. It's not that it's just a vehicle for fandom or identity; I mean, yeah, you have people who now put on the Eagles hats in the suburbs or nicer, gentrified parts of a city that looks and feels suspiciously like Baltimore except for the civic design genius of parking lots in the middle of the street (and the sheer terror of trying to buy drugs off a guy named Ricky who looks like Michael Jackson and winding up two blocks down and where am I . . .) but bandwagons often manifest in other ways. They feed the tertiary economies in the area; often times there's an increase in civic pride; people revolve just a bit more around a team as it were a new heliocentric enterprise; and the team becomes discussed.
Mass media is the communication to which most people turn. The papers are the first medium of discussion; they've moved online and are a shell of what they once were, but they still manage to scrape up the money to pay the only real conduit between fans and team; the "insiders" who can flip sentence or two and can exercise their critical faculties a bit so you get the residue of their opinion, but if they're a football guy at heart then it's pretty solid on facts and analysis, and you'll nod your head now again at their insight. Then it creeps towards network television, and you get these "after the game" half hour broadcasts with old players brought who pass some version of Q rating and away they go. And so you have the immediate top-down topography of how this works.
After mass media the communication is small in scale and more local. The first step down in market size and scale is local talk radio. You're likely familiar with it. There was plenty of air time devoted to the team to begin, but now there are new listeners to advertise to and regale with (generally) how hardened and cynical the hosts are with an identity signal of a man who filters life through this franchise, and one cocks one's head to the side, wondering if this act, schtick, or both. One thing is for sure: religion and meaning have been replaced by something and the something might be the team, but whatever it is isn't adequate for the void left, nearly disembodied in a voice that sits nowhere near the neat sine wave frequency of the FM toggle on the dial.
Pardon me. I find the whole unique. Ah, yes, discussion and comms. They are discussed by the children who look up to their heroes at school. There is a mother asking her son how school was and after a "fine," she realizes his teenage years are about 1/4 of the way to kicked in and changes the subject to Zach Baun, the linebacker who thrilled him while he was still free of any self-consciousness just a year ago and she silently pauses, knowing it will embarrass him somehow or worse, make her seem clueless and inauthentic, but she sees the new storm clouds troubling him as he sleeps an hour later on Sundays than he did just yesterday (or nine months ago, jeez will ya) and she has the thought that she hopes as he matures that he'll find something in life that thrills him like last year did.
And these discussions go on in other, less sentimental ways with not as much probity and mawkishness, but they become perfunctory exercises. They're the painful office banter with that dolt who offers pretty objectively bad opinions about the team, the guy down the hall who is on about the Philly scene is some weird way you don't care about, all the way to the guy who regales you with how Philly's defensive coordinator is responsible for the league-wide implementation of the modern defense, a Cover 2 tweaked to a Cover 4 at times (wat), which was designed to stop Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City back in 2019; a defense that swept through the entire NFL like a low-level virus that doesn't kill you but is more of a long Covid, one the league is still so sick from that it changed the kickoff rules . . . but you know that guy.
But the talk of the true fan, the real fan—not the lamestream press, not that dead cynic on talk radio, not anything to do with mothers and sons, but the single (maybe married) 22-45 year old male, the adopter of digital technology and social media and intensity about football finds its mark. The need to be expressive about this team, this town, these fans. Who pays for more than 140 on character on Twitter and how toxic is that. Amplify what? Yeah, forget that. I need to discuss what this team is to me. With other people who will take my words at face value—no family, no background check, no "your girl is hot/ugly/domineering/cool" judgments. Just me and a keyboard and my digital crusaders of team and ideology. "And I've been here forever! You? 2016, dude! Way before Big **** Nick! I had three posts until then!"
So yeah, you see it everywhere. These bandwagons of expression that filter all the way down to public forums. I don't necessarily begrudge it; but there was not a huge Eagles contingent before the titles. It was nothing. I could pull the threads but don't want to undertake the effort. And you certainly won't see me bothering other than to cheer when you all beat the Patriots, another despicable franchise that was a stain on all things decent. And I know you won't find me in those Eagles threads writing chapter an verse because the fans weren't as numerous nor as obnoxiously spilling over to root for injuries and generally earn their reputation as morally challenged and conscience-free beings, floating through space, time, and ether; untethered to anything but a wireless internet connection, voiceless selves with no background to speak of (and where it doesn't matter), no family present (it's the format), just all on the bandwagon of expression with each other, and there is a song to sing communally and seeing how this is now a community of other bandwagoners of expression, right here right now, I'll just say Fly Eagles, Fly and see if that hits the bandwidth.
So yeah, in a way you're all coattail riders and bandwagoners. Make the most of it.
Do what you want with that.
Love and rockets.
and I try not to lump all cowboys fans together. If I ever do otherwise please call me out.
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