Football Fans: The Glory Hunter
One of my commentors made a remark on a previous fan type comic calling these team switching bandwagoners “Glory Hunters” and I want to thank you for that because it perfectly describes this kind of fan.
I’ve been thinking about Bandwagon fans recently, and earlier I did the Fair Weather fan, who I said is different than the Bandwagoner. I’d like to amend my constitution here and now say that The Fair Weather fan, the Glory Hunter, and a fan I haven’t gotten to yet (The Obnoxious Newbie) are all subtypes of the conglomerate of suck that is a Bandwagon fan. They are all bandwagoners. They all stem from the same disgusting ooze.
Glory Hunters are usually referred to as Team-Switchers, and is probably the type of fan that other fans respect the least.
I want to say this before I start the bashing: There are no rules for sports fandom. None. You are free to root for whoever you want, whenever you want, and no one, not me, nor the president can tell you how to root for a team. How you root is your choice and no one else’s. If you want to pick only good teams, go right ahead. You just have to realize one thing: It makes it harder for other fans to take that sort of person seriously as a fan.
I’m sure many of you know someone like this. They liked a team a lot, but that team faded, and years down the road you see them rooting for other teams, for one reason or another. The teams they support always happen to be good, or have been good in recent years. If all you do is jump on the good franchises you seem kinda shameless. Sports fans value loyalty, and will always view team switchers poorly.
ADDENDUM: I do want to point out switching teams isn’t automatically a crime against fandom, there are perfectly good reasons to support someone else after a while. If you aren’t a die hard fan and you move to a new area, adopting the local team and supporting them makes perfect sense. This is specifically about the people who bandwagon only the good teams on a fairly regular basis, especially when they have no family members or local affiliation with said teams.
It’s also forgivable when you are young and haven’t quite had a team grab you yet
It’s kind of funny if any of your teams have won championships in your lifetime, to watch the cycle of these people, especially if you knew them before they rooted for your team. Speaking as an O’s fan, nothing has been more hilarious for me than watching them flock to the Red Sox last year, and now suddenly they’re either A’s or Dodgers fans. Two of them even jumped to the Orioles, which is even funnier.
I’m actually really curious about what happens with teams like the Ravens in 2012 with this. They won the Superbowl, but they nearly blew a huge lead, they were hardly dominant. I should ask my friends in Baltimore how many glory hunters they saw appearing once the Ravens won given they looked fairly vulnerable.
Well, I have friendS that went from Steelers, to Ravens. I think they barely watch any football besides the Super Bowl.
“dat just don’t make sense dawg” — Antonio Gates
When I was about 6 I supported a team in the AFL called Collingwood, why? Because all my friends did, a couple of years later I switched schools and fell out of touch with those friends, and I team-switched, I switched to West Coast, who the rest of my family had supported for years. There was a point to this story when I started typing it, but I forgot what it was, probably something about team switching.
I did the same in the NRL. Didnt really watch it much, but went for the Dragons, and then when I started to watch it and pay attention I started going for the Rabbits. Mostly because my dad had season tickets so those were the games I went to. Tbh I mostly just commented to show some Aussie love…
I get what you’re saying. I didn’t specify in the blog post but I think there are certain times when team switching makes perfect sense. Geography is one, if you aren’t a hardcore fan of a team and you move to a new area and adapt the local team, that makes perfect sense.
This comic is about the people who defy those logic loops and only root for teams that are good and they have no reason to associate with otherwise.
I spent all of last season jumping back and forth between giants and jets.
So basically… Drake.
Also, there’s a lot of people that base their entire sports fandom on what their family likes and nothing else, which I’ve never understood. Sure, plenty of people inherit teams from their parents and that’s fine, but sometimes it gets a little ridiculous. A girl on my Facebook claims to be a huge Jets fan because of her father, AS WELL as a huge Patriots fan because of her brother. Her statuses about how she didn’t care who won because she loves both teams were frequently called out by others, but her only rationale was it’s because these are her father and brother’s teams. I just don’t get it.
I think this comes from being a Bills fan, but I’m an anti-bandwagoning team switcher when it comes to teams I like besides the Bills. I always like rooting for teams that haven’t had recent success (or ever) like the Browns and Lions. I liked Seattle quite a bit recently, but if they win another Superbowl or two I’m sure I’ll stop favoring them over teams like the Cards or Rams. Same reason I haven’t rooted for the Giants, Patriots, or Steelers much this past decade.
If the Bills ever get good again I’m not looking forward to the bandwagoners, but it’ll be worth it to not have games get blacked out.
If the team I usually cheer for has an early exit in the playoffs (or misses them entirely), I then root for whoever has the longest amount of time since their last championship.
I hear you. I have my teams in different sports, and I support them, but I also tend to have a strong liking for underdogs. I was really enjoying the success of the Colts because since I started caring about football sometime in the 80s, they were kind of not really that successful (to put it mildly) and then I like the fans to have their 15 minutes of joy. Even 30 minutes, so I do not immediately abandon ship. But now that they’ve been doing reasonably well (except for the first post Manning season obviously) they dropped down to “meh” for me (I still want them to win their division because for whatever subjective reason I dislike the other three teams in the AFC South). I would love some Bengals or Browns dynasty, but after that they’d probably meh me out as well.
Of course all of that is only second fiddle to my first and back up team. But this “underdog rooting” is also kind of a bandwagon, only it’s going the other way and thus more space for us đ
I kind of used to be a Glory Hunter, I rooted for the Patriots for a year or two and started rooting for the Jets when they made the playoffs the first time in the 2009 season, but now that I’m still rooting for them even though they suck, I’m more of a Jaded Bitter fan.
So what about all those colts fans who turned up in Bronco orange lately? Where do they fall?
Haha Her face at the end is great
The term ‘bandwagon’ even when spewed by trolls on anyone who supports a currently-good team (In my case, the Seahawks) always stings me, because it’s not completely untrue in my case. I didn’t care about sport much until my pre-teens, but I always had a list of teams I liked in different codes. For years, my only real interest was in the Australian NRL, where I had liked the Melbourne Storm after seeing them play in 2001, before I truly turned into a fan of them due to an unstoppable run through the Finals they had in 2006. It’s the same with the Seahawks. In truth, while I picked them up as a team of interest in 2010 when I started conversing more regularly with Americans online, but it wasn’t until I heard about them blowing out the Cardinals 58-0 last year where I truly got invested in them. In fact, I can only laugh at those “Seahawks fan since they beat the 49ers in Week 16, 2012” posts, because that was the first full game of the NFL I actually watched (I had seen a few snippets of games when I was channel surfing, but aside from most of the last quarter against Miami earlier that same year, I don’t think I had ever actually watched a game to the end).
That’s always a part of self-loathing I have as a sports fan. I never really cared about the AFL (Essendon), Union (Reds) or soccer (Wigan) and while Melbourne were rocked with a massive scandal in 2010 which challenged their past legitimacy (and even then they immediately bounced back and won a title 2 years later), I have never actually truly supported a losing team in my lifetime.
Still, I don’t think I would ever change teams because someone else was winning (Jerseys are expensive enough as it is- Shipping them out to Australia is hell), so I’m not sure if this example truly applies to me, but I suppose that’s why you used ‘Glory Hunter’ instead- The term bandwagoner has become so loaded, it probably covers more than a few types of fans.
“One of my commentors made a remark on a previous fan type comic calling these team switching bandwagoners âGlory Huntersâ and I want to thank you for that because it perfectly describes this kind of fan.”
You’re welcome!
“The only time Iâve ever met one of these fans is when theyâre bandwagon fans or as my dad so appropriately calls them âglory huntersâ.” (About The Optimist fan)
Oh and again, I wanna say, I wear Wes Welker jerseys, but the ones I bought in 2009 and 2011, when he was a Patriot. I’m not gonna hang them up or burn them because I paid a lot of money for them. They’re still good to wear and they have the Patriots logo on them, so why the heck not?
I could never EVER wear a jersey for another team(specifically Broncos), I’m loyal to the Patriots and that’s the way I’ll stay.
As a Raiders fan living in Colorado, I’m usually approached by people who ask “Oh, are you from the Bay Area?”. When I tell them I’m from Northeast Colorado, and explain that I watched Raiders football with my uncle on a fairly regular occasion, these are the usual responses:
“What’s wrong with you?”
“When are you going to become a Broncos Fan?”
“You should totally become a Broncos fan like the rest of us.”
As though I should turn in my Colorado flag t-shirt and beanie.
Given the events of the past decade I understand their concerns. However, as a 36 year old man it’s far far far too late to pick sides, even if I wanted to become a POS Donk fan.
My response is usually a raised eyebrow and a quick head shake before I take another rip off of the bong.
I lol’d multiple times. The first was on “POS Donk fan.”
Why are you staring right at her cans the whole comic?
I abandoned my fanship of my team when they moved out of town in the middle of the night.
I moved to New England and didn’t become a Patriots fan until they started getting respectable (the Bob Kraft era) because they were a truly pathetic joke of a franchise.
Does that make me a bandwagoner?
No. But I bet you wish you stayed loyal to Baltimore. I wouldn’t call Spygate “respectable”, by the way. Their is a reason why Belicheat is so easy to photoshop into the Emperor Palpatine. You’re allowed to come back to Bmore if you want. I won’t hold it against you or call you a bandwagoner.
See the thing is, I theorize that nobody in Indiana really gave a shit about football until Peyton came around, (primarily because we were busy watching Reggie Miller beat the shit out of the Knicks).
I just kinda grew up a Colts fan since my parents were watching the Colts all the time, but I always wonder if I would have been a Colts fan if they picked Ryan Leaf and the franchise, instead of becoming the winningest team in a single decade, remained as shitty as they were in the 90’s.
I mean Peyton was drafted when I was 3, so I didn’t really know what the Colts were like before then.
a man who doesn’t finish his drink. a shameful man
I became a 49ers fan for a year. In 1995. And it wasn’t because they won the super bowl either… it’s because the BEAT THE GODDAMN COWBOYS.
Much Bandwagon, So Stupid