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How to be a Football Fan

Jenny Johnson has learned a few things from her fellow football fans. Here’s her guide on how to be a REAL fan:

If you follow me on Twitter, it will come as no surprise to you that I’m a huge fan of the Houston Texans. I frequently show my support for the Texans by going to their practices, games, tweeting my support, texting well-wishes to my Houston Texan friends on game day and posting Texans pics on my Instagram. I started observing other sports fans while at games, while watching the team play from my local neighborhood pub and reading people’s @ replies to me following one of my supportive Texans tweets. Then it occurred to me that I’ve been doing it all wrong. When the Texans lost the playoff game to the New England Patriots, I congratulated the Patriots on my Twitter page like some kind of idiot, I should’ve been talking shit! Well I won’t make that mistake twice. Here are a few things I’ve learned from my fellow football fans on how to be a REAL fan.

• Always call the opposing teams quarterback something homophobic. “Stupid faggot” or “Cocksucker” seem to be popular names for whoever is taking snaps against the team you love. Also say things like, “I hope that cocksucker [insert player’s name] is ready to be raped by my [insert team name].” It really proves your undying love for a group of muscular, sweaty men who have no idea who you are.
• A great move when at a game is to simply roll your game program up into a tube and shout plays at the coach from your nose bleed seat. Who cares if the coach can’t hear you? You want him to get his head out of his ass, and by god, you are gonna let him know. The people seated around you will love to hear your knowledge of football screamed through a $15 magazine of players’ names and stats.
• Get drunk, then begin explaining the rules of football to whomever is next you.

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The Violent Femmes of Football

They paint their faces, they grunt and swear and down Jell-O shots before 10 A.M., and they never go a Sunday without their team jerseys. GQ’s Lauren Bans spends game day with one of the NFL’s fastest-growing fan bases—female superfans. Here’s an excerpt:

At the count of three, we all slam back tequila—Patrón, the good stuff—out of Dixie cups. I’m looking for a place to discard my empty when, by way of introduction, a Snooki-sized older woman wearing a huge Raiders jersey as a makeshift dress, plus shoulder pads and false eyelashes, jabs her finger directly into my left breast. This is Raider Gloria.

“What is going on here? I liiiike this.” She’s referring to my rather unremarkable gray crewneck T-shirt, not my left breast. “Only it should go”—and now she begins to make light-saber noises (“phhhshu! phhhshu! phhhshu!”) to indicate where she would make cuts in the fabric, which is basically from the neck down in a big swoop to the middle of my stomach.

Before I can respond, a man squeezes in between us and accidentally grazes Gloria’s chest in what can only be some kind of karmic molestation payback. Only, Gloria is delighted. She calls out to the man’s son, who’s leaning on the bumper of a Ford SUV and looking bored: “Hey, take a picture of your dad touching my titties!”

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Would an Openly-Gay Player be Accepted in the NFL?

This year’s surprise hothouse of social liberalism: the NFL. It began in August when Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo (above, right) donated a pair of tickets to a gay-marriage fund-raiser—and got blasted for it by Maryland politico Emmett C. Burns, who told Ayanbadejo to shut his yap and stick to football. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe roared to his fellow NFLer’s defense, sending a scathing, hilariously profane letter to the sports website Deadspin in which he called Burns, among other gems, “a narcissistic fromunda stain.” (For those wondering, “fromunda” is basically, well, groin stank.) We called up Ayanbadejo and Kluwe for a joint GQ interview.

Goodbye, David Beckham

In Their Own Words: The Replacement Refs

What did it actually feel like to go from total obscurity to blowing your first NFL whistle to realizing “WOW, this is real” to getting terrorized by enraged coaches and 300-pound linemen to becoming a national punch line to returning to total obscurity—all in just three short weeks? Nathaniel Penn sits down with six replacement refs (including a couple who worked the infamous Seahawks-Packers game) and gets an earful:

Elliott: In the replay booth, you could definitely see the Green Bay guy controlling the ball first and the Seattle guy getting his arms in there, and it was an argument for a simultaneous catch. The replay guy said, “We’re gonna have to go with ‘The play stands.’ ” I never knew life could be the way it was for the next week. I got, I would guess, 2,000 calls and texts on my cell phone from Wisconsin: “The best call you could make right now would be suicide.”

Peek: For probably three hours of that game, we had been doing a bang-up job, in my judgment. We wanted to bowl a 300 game. We got close to that 300 game, and then, in the last frame, we threw a gutter ball.

Brasuell: At San Francisco during halftime, when the security guys stepped out and faced the crowd, I said hi to one of them. He asked how I was doing, and I said I was thankful and blessed to be here, and he said, “Amen to that.” That had a huge impact on me. If the seven of us officials weren’t doing this, this man is out of work. It was a lot bigger than football.

Read the Full Piece at GQ.com

Self-Loathing Fanbase of the Week: The Dallas Cowboys

Is this the end of Michael Vick?

NFL in the Era of RedZone

Introducing RedZone to a regular football addict is like giving a gravity bong to a long-time joint smoker. In other words, it is possible now, and easier than ever, to actually OD on football.

One Week of Football Destroys Everything

Welcome to the Ball Baron, where Drew Magary breaks down the finer points of Sunday’s NFL action:

UGLIEST LOSS: Your preseason expectations.

The incredible thing about preseason NFL predictions is that, when they’re relatively uniform, they can begin to feel like fact. Take the Bills, for instance. It was assumed that, since the Bills have a soft schedule and a decent roster on paper, they were clearly the #2 team in the AFC East behind the Patriots. It was also widely assumed (by me!) that the Jets were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then Buffalo came into the Meadowlands yesterday and received a curb-stomping so thorough that it rendered all of those seemingly concrete assumptions worthless in a matter of minutes.

This happened all across the NFL in Week 1, as it does every year. After Week 1, we now know the Jets are, like, PISSED. We now know the Bills are still bereft at quarterback, and if you don’t have a quarterback, you don’t have anything. We now know the Cowboys have two nasty corners who will let Wolfman Rob Ryan call the defense he wants to call, which may actually make them good enough to get to the playoffs and collapse in hilarious fashion. And we now know that RG3 is a god.

Recapping NFL Week One

We Are! Still! Penn State!

Drew Magary went to Happy Valley to experience Penn State post-Paterno. What did he find? A lot of pissed-off people:

The only visible difference at this tailgate was the slogans. I saw so many slogans that I wished everyone at Penn State had sat down on Friday prior to gametime and settled on just one. But they didn’t, and this was the resulting word soup:

• “Penn State Forever”
• “Joe Knows Football”
• “We Are”
• “We Care”
• “Those who stayed may not be champions, but they will forever be legends.” (I thought this one was the stupidest of the bunch.)
• “Roll up your pant legs. This is JoePa’s house.”
• “Still Proud”
• “Success with honor”
• “Coach Paterno, only one thing: Thank you!”
• “NCAA” (with a hammer & sickle replacing the C)
• “Restore the roar”
• “Hey media… we know the truth” (Somehow I doubt that Bobby from Delta Upsilon knew more about the Sandusky case than Sara Ganim)
• “O’Brien’s Lions”
• “We Are… Pissed Off” (It’s worth noting that no one who rocked this slogan looked all that pissed off)
• “More than a man, more than a coach, you touched our soul”
• “One Team”
• “Those people” (???)
• “Billieve” (referring to PSU head coach Bill O’Brien)
• “We are… because he was”