Rooting For No One: Sports as Religion

NOTE: This is not meant to be insulting to sports fans. This is just an explanation of my perspective. I've told plenty of people that I am not into sports and yet every now and then, when presented with a game or sports discussion, people often seem genuinely surprised when my reaction ranges from disinterested to incomprehension. 

I don't get understand sports. OK, on a practical level I understand the games. I don't understand fandom. I've really tried. Many of my sports-inclined friends have tried to explain it to me, I've tried rooting for teams, I've tried caring about the camaraderie. I don't get it.

Not only do I not get it, I don't get it on the deepest of levels. Any reason I have been given for sports fandom doesn't stick. Liken it to something else and it comes across as a flawed metaphor. Show me a psychological paper on it and it becomes all the less appealing. It doesn't just not click with me, it sets off warning signals.

Part of the reason is that it fills a lot of roles that religion usually does but it does it far too close to religion for my comfort. At services and sporting events you have a large number of people come together to revel in the fact that their group is right regardless of statistical evidence. In both situations fellowship is conveyed through constant affirmations of being correct and unified clapping and sometimes chanting. The people espousing their belief in something larger usually come to their affiliation arbitrarily, by birth or geography, rather than through deep analysis of facts. I know this last one to be true because I asked for clarification when some of my friends complained that many recent fans of a team only rooted for them because they had been winning a lot in the bast couple of years. I asked them what the problem was, as I would assume one would want to support the best team. Apparently this is not so and I was told that loyalty (faith?) was valued more.

I listen to the Sklarboro Country podcast because I like their comedy, not for the sports. They sometimes try to sell the nerd aspect of fandom. I can see where they're coming from as far as statistics go but too much about fans seems completely  arbitrary. While the mechanics of fantasy football mirror Dungeon's and Dragons I find sports nerds and any type of classic nerds aren't the same. A music, movie or comic book nerd is a fan of the content. A sports nerd seems more a fan of the medium.

The closest comparison I can think of to break down fandom into something I get still makes it come up wanting. So here I go.

Sports are kind of like movies. The players are the actors. The coach is the director. The teams are the production companies. On that level I can understand certain things. It's obvious why someone would be devoted to a player; they are the ones who are out there performing and if they're good then you can reasonably expect a good performance from them on a regular basis. I get respecting a coach. Their job, like a director, is to be able to teach meaning to the players and give them a big picture to play into. But what I'm left with is team fandom. Essentially a team is nothing more than a company. The players change, the coaches come and go. A team is a production company. And while there are fans of George Clooney and Steven Spielberg there are no fans of Universal Pictures. There is no reasonable person who says, "Oh, 20th Century Fox has a new movie coming out. I bet it's going to be good." I can't comprehend how a team represents a consistent enough set of variables to logically be a fan of it.

Unless you really like their colors.