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OREGON DUCK FOOTBALL LONELINESS IS REAL

September 25, 2016 by
oregon duck football loneliness

A dark cloud over Autzen. Image via DG Studios

Oregon Duck Football loneliness grows after Colorado loss. What’s next?

“Winners do what losers won’t do.”

That’s the saying all winners fall back to in victory, the other team did more to win.

It’s also an excuse for bad sportsmanship since time erases all but the final score.

Winners celebrate, dance, sing. They party and toast and run their mouths as winners do.

What about the losers?

How do fans used to winning prevent Oregon Duck football loneliness?

After the second close loss in two weeks, Oregon Duck football fans are feeling something new.

And it’s bad.

I didn’t know how bad until reading a slate.com post on my facebook wall.

Writer Jessica Olien says loneliness is deadly, as bad as smoking.

She didn’t mention how lonely sports fans feel after a PAC12 doormat like Colorado comes into Autzen and smokes the Ducks.

Yes, it was a close one, just like Nebraska the week before, but close doesn’t count. Blowout losses leave no doubt, the close ones just alienate.

And that’s not good.

From slate:

Loneliness is not just making us sick, it is killing us. Loneliness is a serious health risk.

Tell us about it, Jessica.

Sixty thousand people left Eugene feeling sick on Saturday.

You could see it in the crowd, in the pictures, and on the giant video screen.

The increased mortality risk is comparable to that from smoking. And loneliness is about twice as dangerous as obesity.

What sort of behavior does an Oregon Duck football loss promote? For all the eating and drinking and tailgating happiness before the game, a loss leads to more eating and drinking.

Alone.

Amped up fans grind their guts the whole game. A win is a release, a loss is more grinding. Letting games slip away at the end creates isolation.

Was it a bad play call with bad execution and poor clock management? Was is going for the win instead of a tie for overtime?

Fans rewind the game in the minds and come up empty. What’s not empty is their beer cup and plate of football food and a feeling of comfortable numbness to deaden their feelings.

Loneliness is breaking our hearts, but as a culture we rarely talk about it.

Loneliness has doubled: 40 percent of adults in two recent surveys said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s.

Ms Olien didn’t point to sports fans, and certainly not Oregon Duck football loneliness, but she might do a followup article to investigate.

BoomerPDX talks about loneliness. It happens when you feel ignored, rejected, passed over. Loneliness shows up when a dark cloud descends on the hopes and dreams you care about.

College football fans across America came to love or hate the Ducks when they showed up with innovative offensive schemes and a new take on traditional football uniforms.

Winning made it all fun.

After the winning stops, after other teams copy the system and run it better, after coaches come and go, it stops making sense.

Oregon fans react to being out of the running, out of the top five, top ten, top twenty five, by retreating to to the tailgate parking lot and moving on with what’s left of their day, their lives.

A recent study of Facebook users found that the amount of time you spend on the social network is inversely related to how happy you feel throughout the day.

In a society that judges you based on how expansive your social networks appear, loneliness is difficult to fess up to. It feels shameful.

Shame works that way, but first you need to accept the feeling.

Do you feel shame when your favorite football team loses; shame when you feel like you’re a better coach than the guys in the game; shame that you have no voice to articulate those feelings?

You just spent fourteen hours prepping for a game played live in front of sixty thousand, with millions of fans across the nation doing the same.

Those are your people, those who you share the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

Go ahead and feel that shame, sports fan. Just know you’re sharing it with half the football fans whose teams play on Saturdays.

Your people understand those feelings, so don’t hide in the closet, don’t pull the blinds.

When we are lonely, we lose impulse control and engage in what scientists call “social evasion.” We become less concerned with interactions and more concerned with self-preservation, as I was when I couldn’t even imagine trying to talk to another human.

Oregon Duck football loneliness doesn’t include that, where they can’t imagine talking to another human.

They talk and talk and talk. Fire the coach, the offensive coordinator, the defensive coordinator. Kidnap Chip Kelly and force him to come back.

We talk to each other and think no one hears.

That might be a good thing.

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About David Gillaspie

I am a writer. This is my blog story day by day.