SissyBoyFloyd
Pawnee, Skidi Clan
Maybe I am feeling old and sentimental tonight and maybe I am wrong, but didn't long ago fans supported their whole team year after year. By whole team I mean the coach, players, front office, everyone. I don't remember much anymore, but one thing I certainly don't remember from the '50s, 60's, 70's is fans calling for new coaches, qbs, gms, etc every couple years.
We seemed to get behind our teams of old fully and all the way. Maybe I was just lucky to be a fan of teams that did well enough that coaches stayed with a team for a decade (s). Even during the bad years, I just don't remember fans regularly wanting a new coach to solve their immediate problems. And I never remember the GM ever being in the discussion. Guess I wasn't very sophisticated back then.
Maybe it was just a different time before we all became so impatient and began to want everything immediately, showing no loyalty to anything that doesn't give us instant satisfaction. Having so many choices and it being so easy to go from one thing to another seems just as much a part of our sports.
Do 20, 30, 40 year olds still like to sit down and watch a whole movie anymore, or do most just watch you-tube, tiktok, & twitter, where things are in 15 second to 15 minute snippets. I sometimes wonder if younger generations ever experience the joy of shutting down to listen to a great musical album as the artist intended. Or do they just have individual unrelated songs downloaded from the internet playing while they multitask.
Not to judge, maybe brains are just wired differently today do to all the tech changes in society. Maybe it is all about speed and multi-tasking now. Have our brains evolved to where we now can actually appreciate things just as much in micro-time? Get us a new coach and new players this year. We will like them and root for them just the same as the old ones. Put them in our team's uniform and we won't know the difference, as far as our loyalty is concerned.
Or is it statistics and the ability to instantly analyze everything to the nth degree that have changed things? A qb with this rating or stat is not as good as that guy so get rid of him, cut or trade him. Same with each position and player. Without the stats would we be as quick to judge and quick to want change? I remember my 60s & 70s favorite team, the Rams, and their QB, Roman Gabriel. I knew he wasn't heralded as one of the best at the time, but I wouldn't had wanted anyone else to be the Rams QB. He was a Ram, and that is all I knew or wanted to know.
Let's take baseball for an example for a moment. You have a player that hits .300 compared to one who hits .240 or .250. Looking at stats, that is a huge difference, even to the degree of HoF material possibly. But as a fan years ago, devoted to all the players on his team, we would have never not wanted our guy, no matter which one he was. Why, maybe because over 6 games that week, we wouldn't have even noticed, without the stats, that one player got 6 hits in his 20 at bats and our guy only got 5 hits out of his 20.
I remember in high school how much we appreciated the new Beatles' album, or the Byrds, Beachboys, etc. And how we would many nights just sit playing one or another, appreciating, analyzing, and discussing each song on the album. (Of course getting stoned while we did it surely didn't hurt in that appreciation.) I am not blessed with grand-kids, so don't know. Can kids today sit quietly appreciating their musical artists for hours at a time as we used to? I find it hard to imagine seeing what little I do of them today.
I have watched some you-tube influencers listening to one track of an old artist like the Beatles, Righteous Brothers, or the like, and their astonishment of what they are hearing being so good. That is nice to know that all the past is not lost to them.
But I regress. Getting back to football, is the love of the team, simply a thing of the past? And I am not talking about just the Cardinals. Is it all just win now, ship him out, get someone better, he is a bust after 2 or 3 years, so good-bye nice knowing you. Or, is it just that we are one of the teams seemingly destined to never be perceived as very good. Even during winning years it seems just too little and too late. Are we so thirsty for a championship that we have become more transfixed with the image of what winning it all would be like, than the fun and satisfaction we would get from complete support and loyalty to all of our players and coaches as a team, win or lose?
We are the Cardinals, which in football terms is synonymous with bad to mediocre. Still, being Cardinals doesn't feel as whole or satisfying as it could or should be when we support and back only some, instead of all, who wear our colors. They won't and can't all bat .300, so to speak. Some will always be just .250 hitters or below, but aren't they all still our guys, players and coaches. Or is 'our guys' simply a thing of the past now? We seem, way to often, to be engrossed by and to the stats of each player, more than the players themselves.
Maybe technology is to blame. Has the capability of dissecting and analyzing everyone eroded some of our human touch and feeling? Whatever the reason, being a fan today doesn't have the same feel and satisfaction that came with 'family loyalty' that it once had.
We seemed to get behind our teams of old fully and all the way. Maybe I was just lucky to be a fan of teams that did well enough that coaches stayed with a team for a decade (s). Even during the bad years, I just don't remember fans regularly wanting a new coach to solve their immediate problems. And I never remember the GM ever being in the discussion. Guess I wasn't very sophisticated back then.
Maybe it was just a different time before we all became so impatient and began to want everything immediately, showing no loyalty to anything that doesn't give us instant satisfaction. Having so many choices and it being so easy to go from one thing to another seems just as much a part of our sports.
Do 20, 30, 40 year olds still like to sit down and watch a whole movie anymore, or do most just watch you-tube, tiktok, & twitter, where things are in 15 second to 15 minute snippets. I sometimes wonder if younger generations ever experience the joy of shutting down to listen to a great musical album as the artist intended. Or do they just have individual unrelated songs downloaded from the internet playing while they multitask.
Not to judge, maybe brains are just wired differently today do to all the tech changes in society. Maybe it is all about speed and multi-tasking now. Have our brains evolved to where we now can actually appreciate things just as much in micro-time? Get us a new coach and new players this year. We will like them and root for them just the same as the old ones. Put them in our team's uniform and we won't know the difference, as far as our loyalty is concerned.
Or is it statistics and the ability to instantly analyze everything to the nth degree that have changed things? A qb with this rating or stat is not as good as that guy so get rid of him, cut or trade him. Same with each position and player. Without the stats would we be as quick to judge and quick to want change? I remember my 60s & 70s favorite team, the Rams, and their QB, Roman Gabriel. I knew he wasn't heralded as one of the best at the time, but I wouldn't had wanted anyone else to be the Rams QB. He was a Ram, and that is all I knew or wanted to know.
Let's take baseball for an example for a moment. You have a player that hits .300 compared to one who hits .240 or .250. Looking at stats, that is a huge difference, even to the degree of HoF material possibly. But as a fan years ago, devoted to all the players on his team, we would have never not wanted our guy, no matter which one he was. Why, maybe because over 6 games that week, we wouldn't have even noticed, without the stats, that one player got 6 hits in his 20 at bats and our guy only got 5 hits out of his 20.
I remember in high school how much we appreciated the new Beatles' album, or the Byrds, Beachboys, etc. And how we would many nights just sit playing one or another, appreciating, analyzing, and discussing each song on the album. (Of course getting stoned while we did it surely didn't hurt in that appreciation.) I am not blessed with grand-kids, so don't know. Can kids today sit quietly appreciating their musical artists for hours at a time as we used to? I find it hard to imagine seeing what little I do of them today.
I have watched some you-tube influencers listening to one track of an old artist like the Beatles, Righteous Brothers, or the like, and their astonishment of what they are hearing being so good. That is nice to know that all the past is not lost to them.
But I regress. Getting back to football, is the love of the team, simply a thing of the past? And I am not talking about just the Cardinals. Is it all just win now, ship him out, get someone better, he is a bust after 2 or 3 years, so good-bye nice knowing you. Or, is it just that we are one of the teams seemingly destined to never be perceived as very good. Even during winning years it seems just too little and too late. Are we so thirsty for a championship that we have become more transfixed with the image of what winning it all would be like, than the fun and satisfaction we would get from complete support and loyalty to all of our players and coaches as a team, win or lose?
We are the Cardinals, which in football terms is synonymous with bad to mediocre. Still, being Cardinals doesn't feel as whole or satisfying as it could or should be when we support and back only some, instead of all, who wear our colors. They won't and can't all bat .300, so to speak. Some will always be just .250 hitters or below, but aren't they all still our guys, players and coaches. Or is 'our guys' simply a thing of the past now? We seem, way to often, to be engrossed by and to the stats of each player, more than the players themselves.
Maybe technology is to blame. Has the capability of dissecting and analyzing everyone eroded some of our human touch and feeling? Whatever the reason, being a fan today doesn't have the same feel and satisfaction that came with 'family loyalty' that it once had.