Fan Pain

All sports fans have felt pain. Fans of the New England Patriots have even felt pain. An undefeated season in 2007 eneds in a Super Bowl loss to the New York Giants. That's painful. They experienced another Super Bowl loss to the Giants four years later. Pain. It comes with being a fan. I've often thought about this pain. I'm a Minnesota Vikings fan. I've thought about it even more recently due to NFL.com's End Around writer, Around The NFL podcast host Dan Hanzus. This all-around chuckle-head sought to determine the most pained NFL fan bases in 2015. That resulted in his "Pain Rankings." Those rankings looked like this.

7. Kansas City Chiefs

6. Cincinnati Bengals

5. Minnesota Vikings

4. Detroit Lions

3. Buffalo Bills

2. New York Jets

1. Cleveland Browns

It should be pointed out that Hanzus is a Jets fan. He's definitely experienced some fan pain over the years and this offseason hasn't been fun for those fond of the Jets. It's probably what prompted Hanzus to revisit and revise his rankings this summer. 

8. Cincinnati Bengals

7. Minnesota Vikings

6. Detroit Lions

5. Atlanta Falcons

4. Buffalo Bills

3. New York Jets

2. Cleveland Browns

1. San Diego/Los Angeles Chargers

As with anything subjective there's really no right or wrong to these rankings. It's a fun/painful way to pass the time before a new NFL season. It triggers debate. This particular debate is a painful one. If a person's a fan of a team then she/he has experienced pain. It comes with being a fan. Every NFL team has lost a game. The 1972 Miami Dolphins won every game. Including the Super Bowl. Happy fans. They lost two games on the way to winning the Super Bowl the following year. Continued happiness. The early 1970s were a blast. They haven't won a title since. Painful. Especially painful because they thought that they'd get a bunch of titles with Dan Marino under center. Every run of tremendous success comes to end. The 1960s were a great time to be a fan of the Green Bay Packers. Five titles in seven years. 1961, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1967. Fun times but 1963 and 1964 were painful. So was seeing Vince Lombardi in Washington. Even worse, his tragic death. It's mostly been smiles for fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers since the 1970s. The Steelers have played so much solid football over the last five decades that it's stunning to recall that they were a league joke for their first 40 years. Those were painful years. Every team has lost games and will lose games. Big games. Little games. There will always be pain for a sports fan. 

Losing a team to another city has to be the most painful thing that a fan can experience. The fact that the team is usually lost to greed makes it worse. That's why the Chargers shot up Hanzus' rankings. The Cleveland Browns played in ten consecutive title games from 1946-55 (4 in the AAFC and 6 in the NFL). They won seven of those title games (4 in the AAFC and 3 in the NFL). That's an unprecedented run of professional football success. They added another NFL title in 1964. The Browns were a flagship NFL franchise with one of the league's best fan bases. That wasn't enough to keep the team from bolting to Baltimore in 1996. Cleveland got a Browns team back in 1999 but it was an expansion team. A team that's still looks much like an expansion team 18 years later. The team that they lost has won two Super Bowls as the Baltimore Ravens and the coach that they lost has won five Super Bowls with the Patriots. Very painful. 

Many have argued that true fan pain can only be found in those fans that see few wins, fans of teams that lose most of their games, that rarely make the playoffs. The perennial losers. They say that's real fan pain. Who knows? Feeling pain is as personal as the team a person picks. There's no way to judge it. There's certainly no way to quantify it. The Vikings have been relatively successful ever since I discovered them in the early 1970s. Three Super Bowl losses in that decade were painful. So were the losses short of the Super Bowl. The 1975 loss to the Dallas Cowboys was brutal. So were Conference Championship losses in 1987, 1998, and 2009. The 11-year cycle that started with 1976 Super Bowl loss to the Oakland Raiders. The Vikings last Super Bowl appearance. The Vikings have fallen a play short so many times. A missed pass interference call, a dropped pass, missed field goals. Too often it's been one thing, one play that prevented happiness and left only pain. Those that say that only the fan bases of teams that rarely win can feel real pain might be right. I only know that being a fan of a team that has never won it all, that has fallen just short in big games several times is pretty damn painful. The funny thing about that pain is that I wouldn't change any of it. That pain has made me the Vikings fan that I am today. Being a fan is a journey. I've enjoyed this journey. The highs, the lows, the joys, and the pain. All of it. It's part of being a fan and I absolutely love being a Minnesota Vikings fan. In the early 1990s a 49ers fan told me that if her team couldn't guarantee a Super Bowl she wouldn't renew her season tickets. A quarter-century later that comment still stuns me. I think that the four titles in the 1980s had spoiled her. There might not be any pain when there's no risk of a loss but is there really any happiness?