Tis the Season

Football season is the time when people support whichever team or player they most enjoy by wearing jerseys. Watching sports fanatics react to one another, whether they support the same team but especially if they don't, is highly entertaining at first. As someone who is not a fan of football, I look at those who do as the same, I do not classify them as one thing or the other, like they seem to do, but rather all as one group. In Las Cruces, many people are either Broncos fans or Cowboy fans with every other type of team sprinkled in here and there. 

It is easy to see who is a bandwagoner through the hype however, they aren't as loud and expressive about their teams like everyone else is. People who have been fans for years talk about their team like they are personal friends to the players, maybe even like a coach does, including discussing plays and stratagems. While newer fans (bandwagoners) are more physically supportive rather than verbally. Many new fans wear jerseys often and also other memorabilia such as hats and lanyards but don't discuss the games religiously. 

At the table over there are a slurry of people from all walks of life, there is a Sodexo worker, a man with a beard and jersey, and a few more athletic looking men along with people moving from table to table discussing football. The more athletic fellows are not wearing anything that would indicate that they are fans but are talking about players like they would their first cousin, saying things like "Tommy should have ran left, I don't know what he was thinking, it was common sense, You know (coach's last name) should have made him sit that one out." To this, I am bewildered because the other bandwagoners are just sitting there quietly and listening, nodding and interjecting with irrelevant phrases from time to time or changing the subject altogether. 

Meanwhile, everyone surrounding us is watching college football on the television and ranting about similar things. There is no doubt that this is not my environment of choice, but feigning interest in the sport by watching, makes others approach me and ask questions about what I think about what is happening to which I have to admit that I have no idea what is going on.

As the table next to me raves and rants, one of them is getting upset about the opinion of one of the other guys there. One of them said something about how a player sucks and he stood up to defend him on a personal level, referencing something from his Twitter account. It amazes me how people keep up with these things. The other man did not stop there since he also referenced his rookie year and his exact rushing yards and other statistics that I was even more unfamiliar with. For the rest of the time, people would occasionally scream at one another and the television.