Ten Things You Should Never Say As A Sports Fan If You Don’t Want People To Think You’re Stupid
If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely because you’re a sports fan. If you’re a sports fan, you likely know others who share your passions. The trouble is that also usually means you know sports fans who are stupid. What worse is stupidity is common amongst sports fans, and the passion for sports can turn the stupid level up to “11.”
This begs the question…are you a sports fan who is stupid? Like high-blood pressure and diabetes, stupidity is the “silent killer” for sports fans. Far too many sports fans are brain-numbingly stupid and don’t even know it. That’s why we here at Dubsism are offering this list of things you should never, ever say to another sports fan if you don’t want to be seen as an idiot.
10) “Our Season is Over”
This one is most common amongst NFL fans, especially those who have unrealistic expectations of their team. The best example comes from last year’s New Orleans Saints; it caused former coach/current TV type Jim Mora to win a Dubsy Award for yet another of his epic rants aimed at an idiotic TV doofus.
What I said upon giving Mora his first Dubsy also really explains why you should never say stuff like this.
There’s a bit of importance in this rant. It takes the confrontational feel of Herm Edwards’ prototypical “You play to win the game!“ rant and sharpens it’s point for dick-wacks like this blow-dried talking head. By even asking such a question, it’s clear this guy does not understand the fundamental component behind competitive sports…WINNING.
Let me put it another way. Athletes at levels beyond high-school don’t get scholarships or get paid to play. They get paid to prepare. You could find no shortage of guys who would love to play on Sundays, and the thrill of playing would be enough for them. But when you tell those same guys they have to spend hours in the weight room, running wind sprints, and sticking to strict nutritional guidelines, and that they wouldn’t get paid to do it, you’re suddenly going to come up short on bodies.
That’s why winning matters; it’s the pay-off for all the hard work and time spent preparing. That’s why I’ve always said that I can tell the difference between somebody who played sports and fans and/or media types who didn’t within seconds of listening to them. They almost always give themselves away with statements which make it clear they don’t get it.
Nothing exemplifies that better than digging a grave for an NFL team three games into the season. Specific to this case, could you possibly tell me this media nut-whack could look at the New Orleans Saints of last season and say “Yeah baby…this team is going to the Super Bowl!” He can do that only if he’s smoking mushrooms and drinking varnish.
The moral of the story: a cardinal sign of stupidity is having unrealistic expectations.
9) “Good Loss” and/or “Moral Victory”
Until there’s a column in the standings for “Good Losses” or “Moral Victories,” never say either of these…NEVER. Shit like this is how we ended up with “participation trophies.” If you say either of these terms to another sports fan, it should be legal for them to hit you in the face with a shovel.
8) “On a Pace”
Baseball fans are the most guilty of this one. At the beginning of every baseball season, some guy somewhere has a freakish start, and invariably there will be some choad-swallower in the sports media will make a reference to that guy being “on a pace” to rack up a ridiculous number. Just because some dude knocks ten dingers in the first week of the season does not mean he’s going to end the season with 250 round-trippers. Nobody has ever done such a thing, so nobody will ever be “on a pace” to do so. Just don’t say it…ever.
7) Using “we” when referring to a team
There is no “we” in “team” UNLESS YOU ARE ACTUALLY ON THE FUCKING ROSTER. Let me say that one more time. You cannot use the pronoun “we” to refer to any team of which you are not actually a member. Never. Not once, not even by mistake. It shows you are probably delusional, and you should have your reproductive bits removed with a WeedEater.
6) “Posterize”
Purely a product of the NBA, this term refers to the guy getting dunked on in the “poster shot.” This is largely a term of derision because nobody got “posterized” more than journey man NBA circus-freak Shawn Bradley. Yeah, he sucked, but at least he bothered to play defense, which is why he ended up in so many of these pictures. This term came from the same kind of dilcues who said Kristaps Porzingis was “just another Shawn Bradley,” which tells you all you need to know about the validity of the term and the vapor-brains who coined it.
4) “______ is the next _______”
This won’t be the last time a previous comment leads to another list entry. There was a time when I actually heard people say “Kristaps Porzingis is the next Shawn Bradley.” Those people were retarded. Not one of them ever saw Porzingis play, otherwise they would have never said that. Sure, they were both gangly, bug-light-white guys towering over seven feet, but Porzingis could drive the lane, create his own shot, and a whole host of other shit Shawn Bradley couldn’t do in a game of drive-way ball against the neighborhood kids.
That’s the really fun part of this. These comparisons are usually monstrously racist. Porzingis got compared to Bradley because they were both white guys built like a radio antenna; their playing styles are about as similar as sandpaper and Swiss cheese. You know, kind of like how Cam Newton incessantly was likened to fellow black quarterback Michael Vick, despite the fact one was 6’5″, 250 pounds, and the other was 5″10″, 190.
3) “Home Field Advantage”
NFL fans are the one most obsessed with this, and theirs is the sport where it matters the least. Think about it. Hockey and basketball feature arenas where the fans are right on top of the playing surface, which is why having Game 7 in your building matters. Baseball is the only major sport where the fields are not identical, which means there are always ground rules to which the home team is accustomed; not to mention the huge advantage of having the last at-bats. But the NFL has really become a collection of quasi-sterile dens of boring where stadium design and pricing has really eliminated a great number of truly rabid fans.
When the Raiders make their initial appearance in Las Vegas, Oakland’s infamous “Black Hole” won’t be there. Sure, there may a feeble re-creation of it, ergo the ersatz “Dawg Pound” in Cleveland, but this will be yet another example of the NFL’s “gentrification” of it’s stadium experience. Don’t get me wrong, I understand exactly what the NFL is doing, you can’t expect people paying upwards of $150 a ticket to put up with beer-throwing hooligans.
The down side is that “stadium sanitization” comes from the same mindset that brings you “parity.” It also has the same effect. Sitting through an NFL game in person is three hours of really nothing punctuated by fifteen minutes of actual action. It sucks…and it terms of fandom, the average NFL stadium is filled with the kind of fans who don’t know when to cheer and wonder when Tim Tebow is coming into the game.
Not to mention, if playing in front of rabid, drunken, violent fans made a difference, the Philadelphia Eagles would be the greatest franchise in the history of the game.
3) Quoting ANYTHING you heard from a mainstream sports media personality
One of the only things ESPN does right is it’s “30 for 30” series. The most recent episode featured New York sports radio legends Mike Francesa and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. WFAN was the first all-sports talk radio station i n America, and “Mike and the Mad Dog” were it’s first stars. As a rabid sports fan, you would think I would love that. Much like ESPN, at first I did.
But then the degradation happened.
That was a phenomena not unique to sports media. MTV was really cool when it still actually had music. The proof is in most of what lives on popular non-country FM radio today comes from those days. Moreover, there was a day when you could get an actual forecast from the Weather Channel. Now, it’s little more than the “Climate Change” propaganda network. In much the same way, the evolution of “Mike and the Mad Dog” represents everything wrong with sports media today.
At first, as a sports fan, I couldn’t get enough of the “all-sports, all the time” format. I loved it so much that I didn’t even notice that this much sports-talk media was a scourge on sports fandom because it lowered the bar for intelligent debate…and by “lowered,” I mean completely fucking destroyed.
Now, every major market and most mid-to-minor ones have a sports radio station filled with “Loudmouth and the Shit-Head”-style pairings, and they are fucking identical. One guy has what is supposed to be a “hot take,” but it’s actually something made for a about a sixth-grade comprehension level because you need legions of “Eddie from Mount Laurel” to flood the switchboard at 690 K-SUK Sports Radio so that when “Loudmouth and the Shit-Head” aren’t trading insults, they’ve got a host of intellectually defenseless types upon which to heap abuse.
The arguments “Loudmouth and the Shit-Head” use are meant to troll people who would score sub-retarded on any accepted IQ scale, because stupid people say the stupidest things, and the real fuel for such programming are the listeners willing to become so much electronic cannon-fodder. But the biggest morons aren’t just their listeners; they’re the blow-cocks who want to tell you what they heard on “Loudmouth and the Shit-Head.”
First, these schmucks have no idea they are being trolled, and worse yet, they don’t have the foggiest notion they are being used to spread the electronic sludge today’s sports media has become.
Second, these morons can’t seem to understand the concept that if I gave a shit about what was on 690 K-SUK, I’d be listening to it. I’m not, and there’s a reason for that…because it’s usually a completely idiotic waste of time.
The only bigger shit-headed time bandit is that guy we all know who wastes your day telling you all about what you’ve been trying to avoid. I can’t tell what’s worse about these guys; the fact they think they are interesting to ANYBODY or the crushing obliviousness to hints. Nine times out of ten, this guy is at your office, so you can’t tell him to fuck himself or throat-punch his ass. Worse yet is even after you tell that guy you don’t listen to “Loudmouth and the Shit-Head,” all he does is preface every fucking he says with “I know you don’t listen to this, but…”
It takes a special kind of brain-death to keep talking after you’ve said that, because you’ve already established that the person you’re talking to doesn’t give a frog’s watertight ass about what you’re saying AND YOU FUCKING KNOW IT. We all know that guy, and we all have to tolerate that guy. Saying “don’t be that guy” doesn’t work, which is why if you are “that guy,” know that the rest of us pray you get run over by a truck full of frozen chickens.
2) “Game Manager”
This one is particularly prime, because 99.9% of the time it is applied to quarterbacks who don’t throw deep down field or don’t rack up big “fantasy” numbers. If you hear somebody use this term, or it’s usually interchangeable le mot stupide “checkdown artist,” you know the person who said it has a knowledge of football roughly equivalent to that of a butter knife.
First of all, the days when quarterback called their own plays are long gone. That means the crushing majority of NFL quarterbacks run offenses in which reading options for ball distribution are built into the system. There’s a precise, scientific term for quarterbacks who ignore a team’s offensive scheme: released.
Secondly, if you listen to all the blather which precedes the NFL Draft, one thing that always gets discussed with quarterbacks is their ability to “read progressions.” That means NFL coaches and scouts value guys who can look off from guys who aren’t open all the way down to the “safety outlet” dump-off. In other words, they aren’t keen on guys who stare down their primary receiver or try to force the ball into double-coverage. That’s why guys from “small schools” or who played in “single-read” offenses always get talked down by dim-wit “fantasy stat” fans and the draft-nik pointy-heads who rival your local weatherman in terms of accuracy.
Now for the best part. Terms like this originate in the very same mouths which spew the discussion on Tom Brady being the greatest quarterback of all time…completely ignoring the fact that Brady’s road to Canton is paved with three-yard passes.
1) “Greatest _____ of All Time”
Speaking of Tom Brady, that last comment leads me to the absolutely My last comment led to this entry. The whole “G.O.A.T.” discussion is almost always carried on by mouth-breathers with room-temperature IQs. This pseudo-debate is a sucking vortex of stupid which can swallow up even the savviest sports fan. The problem is that you will invariably have this debate with somebody who thinks the entirety of sports history is based solely on what they personally saw. That’s how we get nonsense like the never-ending debate on “LeBron vs. Jordan.” Worse yet, even smart fans fall for this shit and completely forget there’s a list of guys who rate ahead of either of them (that’s a debate for another time…)
The point is the guys who think all “G.O.A.Ts” come from within their time lack either the desire to learn about previous eras and/or don’t possess the cranial capacity to do so. That’s why they concoct intellectual cop-outs like “you just can’t compare guys from different eras.” That can be done, but it requires things which aren’t easy like actually comprehending a sport beyond the “stat-geek” phase. This means you have to know the difference between a fundamentally solid player versus a “human highlight reel.” This also means you must understand that regardless of the sport and the era being discussed, the underlying fact is at any given period in any given big-league sport, those guys were the best in the game at the time. What it comes down to is your starting point fro any such discussion is how much better any potential “GOAT” nominee was stacked against his contemporaries. No matter how much “stat-geekery” one infuses into this conversation, it’s never going to be anything more than a subjective battle of last-wordism.
What it boils down to is that the “”G.O.A.T.” is truly the epitome of troll-bait. Right now, there’s a guy sharpening his crayon to write me about LeBron, Jordan, Tom Brady, or any of whichever “G.O.A.Ts” they fancy. Those screeds are almost unreadable; their arguments are almost always pedantic, and sadly many of dive to the level of “If you don’t agree with me, you’re a (insert your favor slur here.)”
Heed the warning, smart sports fans…the only way to win that battle is to avoid it.
There’s one exception. Subjective last-wordism is what drives our Point-Counterpoint series. Want to take your shot on whichever topic you fancy? If you’ve got a solid opinion and have the guts to share it, all you need to know about contacting us is right here…
Email Dubsism at dubsism@yahoo.com, and follow us @Dubsism on Twitter, or on our Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook pages.
About J-Dub
The Man Behind Dubsism
Dubsism on Pinterest
Click On JoePa-Kenobi To Feel The Power Of The Jedi Photoshop Trick. Besides, you can get the best sports-related recipes ever. This is the sports-related content you are looking for.
Blog Directories
Dubsism 
What The Dubsists Thought…