Mondays After Wins Are For Not Working
I’ve never found the “guy who spends all day after a loss being shitty and grumpy” to be a terribly common reality. They do exist, but they aren’t a plague. Every one of them that I have met has been an asshole to begin with, so the sports part is really just how some of that stuff is expressed. They are also the types to be really obnoxious upon victory. I think this guy is blown out of proportion as a media trope or a problem by people who don’t like sports in the first place.
In my experience, and certainly in my own life, losses mostly roll off the back because losses are frankly the norm. Most of us will see our team mostly lose. Few of us will experience the perfect ending to a season. Watching your team lose is as natural as breathing. A normal loss, and you are over it within 20 minutes if not less. A bad loss and you might be annoyed for a few hours, maybe the rest of the day. A loss has to be monumental for most people to get caught up in the emotion of it for more than a night. I think the Giants’ historic choke job to Denver last year was the only time in the last 6 years that I felt any real annoyance the next day. It was mostly brought on by opening my favorite various sports websites and seeing headlines about it and deciding I wasn’t going to read about football that day.
One stereotype I do fall into, and see far more often than the negative one, is how Mondays (or any day after a big win) ends up with you spending most of your day just vibing on the sports news. Victory Mondays are so sweet. You can read every article about your team. You browse the team socials for clips and locker room speeches. You read every reaction piece by team blogs. You even occasionally sneak into the spaces of your opponent to drink the tears. You better believe I spent much of this past Monday just lapping up Cowboys fans crying about their terrible defense. The Giants have been ass for over a decade; I gotta get my nourishment where I can.
To be honest, even after losses, Mondays are usually just about reading sports news. Football has always been the perfect watercooler sport. Everybody watched The Games yesterday. With how the NFL schedule works with weekly appointment viewing on mostly one day, and with fantasy football, it is remarkably easy to have a pulse on the entire league at once. That’s not really something a casual Baseball or Basketball fan can have. Too many games, too frequently. You gotta be a sicko to pay attention to everything going on at all times. You end up just occasionally checking in on other teams, or noticing when some drama occurs. Football? You can watch Boomer do his fastest 3 minutes on MNF and have locked-in takes ready to go the next day like an honors student.
When people talk about football’s dominance over American culture, I really think that the accessibility of discussion is overlooked as a major factor why. Football is a complicated sport to actually understand compared to Baseball or others out there, but because every team has so few games at such designated times, you can casually tune in and get a whole slew of easy-to-digest results and opinions with little effort. A casual fan who pays no attention to his obligatory family fantasy league and barely knows players on his own team can still end up comfortably holding conversations with the sicko who is grinding all-22 tape in his free time. It’s beautiful.
Or maybe I’m just in a good mood because the Giants made the Cowboys eat shit on national television. Losses are easy to get over. Wins are like catnip. That’s probably it.
Have to agree. Being a Vikings fan for nearly 60 years hardens your heart, removes your dreams and stops you getting your hopes up. I wouldn’t be optimistic about our chances if we were 30 points up with 2 minutes to play in any game. I was doing the Monday thing after the unexpected Peckers game win, including going on their fan sites and bathing in the stream of meltdowns and guzzling their tears about how awful LeFailure is and how the referees are terrible and the NFL has a conspiracy against them that will prevent them from ever winning another SB. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, tragedy is when my team loses, comedy is when our most hated rivals open a sewer, jump into it and die.
I don’t get grumpy per se after a Steelers loss, but I do try to avoid anything about that game for the whole week to not think about it. Loss weeks are usually about my other teams, like the panthers, rams, bills, lions, and giants.
I usually hold on to desperate hope for my team until the math no longer math’s to make it work. I am a classic homer who usually thinks my team is better than they really are.
With that said what I saw out of Stefanski for the Falcons on Sunday appears to be a coach willing to throw the season away. Unsure if by design or out of cowardice but I have never had my preseason hopes dashed so soon. I hope I’m wrong is really the only hope I have now.
RIP to Bijan, I love that man, but this year is going to break him.
You can have Ste-sham-ski. I’m still sore about him dipping out on Vikings playoff prep to go interview and you can’t tell me that didn’t contribute to the loss.
Well your life has been relatively charmed in that regard. I’ve had a ton of coworkers who embodied the stereotype. My dad used to be that guy, but he eventually learned to chill. Nothing quite like getting zero things accomplished on a Monday (thus wrecking the rest of the week) because half your team AND your boss don’t have the capacity to process negative emotions and work at the same time.
I’m lucky. My dad would get it all out of his system during the game, grouse for about an hour and be fine the next day. Except with the Gary Anderson miss, then he was mad for days. So was I for that matter!
Feels like we might need a CarCrashComics for the Cowboys Week 1 game
And as a Cowboys fan, I say Heeeeeere We Gooooooooooo
Why, the Cowboys have spent most of the last decade beating the Giants in week one, this was not the expected result
What you SHOULD do is have the GIANTS driving down the road like Mad Max’s War Boys. And they say, “OH NO, it’s a Week 1 Cowboys game!” and then Skat can jam the pedal to the floor, let out a crazed whoop and shout “Witnessed!” and just flatten them like roadkill. Would be a nice twist on the template. X’D
Love that idea!
Can you imagine how the fans of the Jets must feel? This is the first time they’ve had a positive record in forever.
The ones I work with feel nothing after that win. They are so beaten down from years of suffering that they know, deep in their souls, any victory is just a fleeting thing, serving no purpose but to force down their guard for the greater punishment to come.
I can’t imagine what that’s like. Im not a Jets fan by nature, but I’m here for them. I love an underdog.
This is exactly the reason I follow football. It’s something that I can casually rib people about and take my own jabs without anyone feeling sore about it in the long term. My favorite coworker is a Packers fan, while I bleed purple and gold and we still had fun rehashing the game on Monday. Debate without hard feelings is something we sorely need MORE of these days.
I have gotten emotional/pissy at those close SB losses the 49ers have had to the Ravens and Chiefs tbf. But to slip on a banana peel on the verge of titles like that does indeed suck.
I was the “grumpy post-loss guy” at one point, but I’ve calmed way down over the years… possibly a side effect of having the team owner actively sabotage the team…
At times, I used to be both, now I am neither.
As a Bears fan I’ve been enjoying a virtual buffet of football content this week.
You avoid work because you’re happy or sad about your football team.
I avoid work because I like stealing from my company.
We are not the same.
I’m… complicated.
If my team had a great game, I will absolutely obsess about it on the days after.
If my team is being real shitty, I will avoid it as much as possible. I’d avoid stuff that I’d normally avoid, because I don’t want to seethe about that stuff. BTW, I’m a SF Giants/Rams/Sharks fan, so you bet your ass I’m counting the days until hockey comes back >_<.
But yeah, I'm not going to take it out on anyone. That's not being a super-fan, that's just being an asshole, if you're caring about these games that much, you've really gotta rethink things.