The last 24 months have been rough for the fans of the University of Tennessee athletic teams. Some have even called it historically dramatic and depressingly declining.
And when supporting your college team seems like work — something you have to do or feel obligated to do, rather than something you want to do — that makes it seem exponentially worse. We need our distractions, be it 18 holes on Saturday or checking recruiting message boards or reading and commenting on Internet columns or making PowerPoint presentations about how Washington is awesome.
This is one of the hidden gems of college fandom — the underlying truth that following your team is as much a release as it is a religion. It’s a pastime that helps pass the time. It’s a sideline even from the sidelines.
It’s an emotional connection that frequently carries too much weight emotionally no matter how loose the connection. Such is the state of the fan, which is not coincidentally is the root of the words “fantastic” and “fanatical.”
But when that release brings more angst than energy and more embarrassment than enjoyment, it’s doubly detrimental. When the fan base gets to the point that you feel hopeless or are afraid to pick up the paper and see today’s headlines — and know that my second junior year at Auburn was 1993, when the Tigers went 11-0 on probation, which was the ultimate “Hey, this is great; hey, this stinks because we can’t win the whole thing” scenario — it’s tough.