Last Tuesday WDR Comrade BMN chimed in with an exhaustive guest post about how Mikey's record setting 200th loss as owner/GM stacked up againt other NFL owners. Now he is back with a post on his take on why Bengals fans have put up with the losing for so long. Enjoy.
Call this a frustrating psychological examination. Frustrating because it sounds like I’m about to go on a wild victim-blaming rant. Frustrating because it sounds a lot like the abused spouse going into a long-winded rant about all the things they have done to let the abuse continue instead of focusing on the douchebaggery that is the abuser. A condemnation of the “sheople” as many of my fellow MBSers like to say. I hope you believe me when I tell you it’s nothing of the sort.
Instead, I prefer to think of this article as a condemnation of Mike Brown’s diabolical (from a football standpoint, anyway) abilities to keep the city of Cincinnati in a stranglehold. Don’t get me wrong, it’s clearly obvious that Mike Brown isn’t exactly going to be elected mayor of the Queen City anytime soon. No one is suggesting for a moment that he’s the darling of the town.
Yet the anger towards him has ebbed and flowed and now it has dissipated to a certain degree. Fans have resigned themselves to helplessness. The recent news that the Bengals’ sellout streak will finally come to merciful end begs the question: how can a team that was en route to helping Mike set such a record of futility get such loyal support? Why weren’t fans boycotting in droves?
There are multiple reasons and if you comb the WDR archives, there’s wisdom to be gleaned from both the articles and the comments. So what you read below is really nothing new: it’s merely a condensation, an articulation, a grab-bag of ideas. If you could boil the motivations of the average “sheople” (ooopps..sorry, said I wouldn’t do that), you’d find five different psychological pieces of trickery courtesy of one Michael Brown.
1) IF I LEAVE YOU NOW (I TAKE AWAY THE BIGGEST PART OF YOU)
If there’s one sports meme I’d like to transform into a human being just so that I could flog it unmercifully to hear it scream, it’d be that of the “NFL Experience.” This ridiculous, trite marketing tool has left slobbering fools out of a pack of people that ought to know better. The meme thrives largely because people love to go to NFL games but usually the choice is very limited. This is where New York/New Jersey sports fans have an advantage: like choosing between two McDonald’s, they have two organizations they can choose to purchase football from.
Mike Brown very effectively waved this meme over everyone’s heads in the mid-1990s: “you can have one NFL team or you can have none. If I leave, you will have none.” There’s really no way to prove this but wow, a lot of people believe it. It scares them to death. Because of it, they complain endlessly about the team but remain convinced their lives would be 200% more miserable if they had no team. Mike used that fear to fleece the taxpayers into the current stadium that houses his definition of “competitive football,” which I’m relatively confident differs from most of the people that voted for the tax.
I’m a consumer and I freely admit that I consume a lot of the NFL. I sometimes hit up sports bars to catch multiple games at once. But if I lived in a one-horse town with only one sports bar in town and they spit in my nachos every week, I wouldn’t go back. I am not addicted enough to the NFL to tolerate something that negative, much less Mike Brown willfully changing nothing about the home organization while it irritates me.
Which leads to…
2) CALL ME ANYTHING, BUT DON’T CALL ME FAIRWEATHER!
