This Sunday, my beloved Denver Broncos will take on the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 50 and I'm very worried that their Super Bowl record will fall to a depressing 2-6. But I'm also growing increasingly worried about what that first sentence says about me as a person and my mental health.
In November, a life-long friend offered me a ticket to what turned out to be an epic confrontation in the snow between the Broncos and the New England Patriots that ended the Patriots' season-long undefeated run in overtime. I drove five hours from my home, picking up a new Broncos wardrobe to wear along the way, and stood for three hours in the freezing Denver winter to shout horrible obscenities at Patriots cheater quarterback Tom Brady until I was hoarse.
Of course, there was no way Brady could hear me, let alone be affected by my behavior, which might have earned me a beating or a conversation with the police in just about any other social context. As the game ended, though, I noticed that one of the seats in front of me had been occupied by a young girl roughly the same age as my own daughter who had been in earshot of my whole tirade.
What insane Jedi mind trick has the game of football and the NFL used to drive me to such normally shameful, atypical actions? I spend my introverted days writing about science and trumpeting the virtues of reason, yet I also indulge in the guilty pleasure of obsessing over a game in which grown men are paid an irrational amount of money to engage in a barely controlled battle before an audience of millions.
Fortunately, science and football are not incompatible, and there is a growing body of research into the psychology of fandom and the emotional connection between fans and their teams. I decided to take a look at the science to figure out if I really should be worried more about who hoists the Lombardi trophy Sunday evening or what my own level of anxiety over that meaningless moment says about my state of mind.
Let's start with where my indoctrination as a fan began. Loyalties to our favorite teams are often tied up in childhood experiences and watching games with friends and family who we formed our earliest and most important bonds with. The fact that teams are usually a fixture of cities that we might also have a long history with is like a double whammy of attachment.
The Denver where I grew up in the 1980s was not the hip city of 2016 filled with young urbanites, microbreweries and a marijuana dispensary on every corner. It was more depressed, a little dingy and dangerous in places, but on its coldest and bleakest Sundays, it always rallied around the Broncos. Going to school the Monday after a Broncos win was full of joy; when they lost it was sometimes morbid.
For me personally, my love of the game and the team came to me through chess, which my eccentric but awesome late grandfather taught me to play around the same time the Broncos were starting to dominate the AFC. Football has always seemed to me to be the closest thing to a modern, real-life game of chess.
My first checkmate against my grandfather was a rare thrill that I now assume he either gifted me or perhaps I half-earned through his being a little more than half-drunk. Watching John Elway engineer the legendary "Drive" of 98 yards to lead the Broncos to their second Super Bowl appearance in 1987, I saw a chess master at work and I felt the same thrill of that first checkmate.
"Sports hold a particular interest, I think, because they touch on the muscular part of being, which is how we started exploring the world and developing a sense of mastery,” explained Dr. Howard Katz at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2012.
Holding on to that thrill of accomplishment and to the connections to others with the same desire led me to obsess over the sport in my youth -- watching countless games, tracking even the most esoteric statistics, amassing a huge collection of trading cards and even playing on my rather terrible high school team for four years.
But the connection to a game and to my favorite team of rotating strangers might be about something even deeper than just a simple reminder of friends and family (and teammates). One study found that reminding people of their own mortality actually increased their dedication to their favorite sports team. Psychologists call it Terra Management Theory, and the basic idea is that we look for things that will outlast us when faced with the inevitability of death. The Broncos made their first trip to the Big Game before I was born, and odds seem decent they might still be making those trips after I'm gone.
This actually helps me understand why I seem as anxious (probably more, honestly) for this Broncos Super Bowl as I was in 1987 at age seven. I stopped following football for about a decade in my twenties when I moved to Alaska and then became more concerned with drinking, women and starting what seemed like a very important career (since abandoned) writing about politics. When my daughter hit school age a few years ago, I started to think more about my own past and conversely about all of our futures.
If the theory is to be believed, then it's not a coincidence that I've jumped head-first back into Broncos fandom over the past few years as well. In fact, I've been thinking a lot about death the past few months as my emotional involvement in my team's latest march to Super Sunday has reached an all-time high -- I've actually been working on a science fiction novel that's all about the afterlife. Nothing like my nerd and jock sides both pushing each other to new heights.
I've been a little surprised to learn that much of the research out there seems to suggest that all this energy dedicated to an objectively meaningless series of contests is considered to be pretty good for my mental health. Being a fan is beneficial for the sense of community it fosters alone, which is probably pretty good for a freelance writer who could get by without leaving the house for several days at a time.
“Once you’re bonded to a team, and you experience all the benefits that come from it, then the relationship actually makes a lot of sense,’’ says Eric Simons, author of 'The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession.' “It’s quite rational to keep that relationship.”
Research has also shown that following a team, even when they're losing more often than not, can help a fan foster a healthy sense of optimism, because there's always next season to look forward to.
Of course, being a fan isn't just warm fuzzy nostalgia and building up faux self esteem through the exploits of some massive millionaires. There's the darker side of fandom that led me to publicly defame Tom Brady, a man I've never met, in front of impressionable young children; and without even a disapproving glance from their parents, by the way.
Social scientists refer to my behavior as "disinhibition" and "deindividuation," which are basically polysyllabic ways of saying that fandom allows us to get away with things that would otherwise be considered socially unacceptable.
There's also evidence that fans whose teams come out with a big win or suffer a tough loss can actually experience hormonal surges and other physiological changes in response. This may also help explain other research that shows incidents of domestic violence spike after favored teams lose, and fans whose team loses the Super Bowl can even be at increased risk of heart attacks.
Fortunately, I shouldn't have to worry about having 911 on speed dial during Sunday's game since the Broncos will surely pull off the upset. Right? Right??
Even if it turns out to be the Panthers' day, I can ease my suffering in the knowledge that there's always next season and I should feel free to indulge guilt-free, since the science seems to say football might even help keep me sane.
