In the midst of a freezing winter day, Appalachian State’s football teams endured a gut wrenching loss to the Montana Grizzlies, 17-24. It was December 12, 2009 and the chance to play for the FCS (Football Championship Subdivision) title game was up for grabs. Montana drove seventy-three yards in two minutes and fourteen seconds to score a touchdown with a minute left. Appalachian countered with its own drive down the field but was unable to score. However, the most amazing part wasn’t the game itself; it was the fans. The was an assortment of Most of the fans in the sports world fall into the category of the die-hard fan, the bandwagon/ fair-weather fan, and the casual fan.
The camera pans overhead at the sea of maroon and silver to find a diverse field of spectators. Then as the camera zooms in, screaming and crazed fans capture the attention of the viewing audience. Men and women in a variety of ages are clapping, yelling, taunting, all to show support for their team. They come plastered in team colors ready for any battle or challenge that awaits. An easy way to spot a di...
Abstract: High school football in the state of Texas has become out of control. The sport is no longer played for the sake of the school but rather has become a Friday night ritual to these small towns in Texas. The players are no longer just high school kids inter acting in school sports but have now become heroes to these small town communities. Communities simply no longer support their local high school team but rally in pride of their hometown rivalry against another team. School administrators and coaches no longer are teachers and mentors for the kids but are the equivalent to what in professional football are team owners and "real coaches". Parents have become agents and sacrifice their jobs and homes so that their child may play for the right team. Finally the fans, the fans have lost the sense that it is just a high school sport and changed the game to a level of professional sports. I plan to prove and show that for all these reasons Texas high school football has become out of control. It is no longer the game that it was originally meant to be.
The Odessa football players couldn't be objective about criticisms of football. Their total self-esteem depended on how they did on Friday night. This was the glorified culmination of their football career: wearing the black MoJo uniform in the stadium under the big lights. Football was more than just a game to them; it was a religion. It "made them seem like boys going off to fight a war for the benefit of someone else, unwitting sacrifices to a strange and powerful god" (Bissinger, p.11). Because football was so meaningful in their lives, to criticize it was to criticize everything they'd worked so hard for and lived for.
the wild antics of the die hard fans. In my essay I will try and attempt to describe as
Sport fans, sometimes also called sport devotees, followers, or supporters, are persons who are enthusiastically devoted to a particular athlete, team or sport. They may show their enthusiasm by often attending sporting events or watch on television, being members of a fan club, follow sport news through newspapers, online websites, and creating fanzines. Their disposition is often such that they will experience a game or event by living through their favored players or teams. These behaviors manifest itself in different ways. To enable better understanding of these behavioral patterns, we have to classify these sports fans into groups based on their devotion to teams: fair-weather fans, bandwagon and the super-fans.
There is one sport’s rivalry that is known as the greatest of them all. It isn’t the Tobacco Road Rivalry, it isn’t the Iron Bowl, and it isn’t even the Red Sox against the Yankees. According to ESPN at the turn of the century, the greatest sports rivalry is Ohio State versus Michigan in college football. While many Wolverine fans claim that the Michigan football program is the superior one, there are a variety of reasons that show otherwise. Statistically, in the modern era of college football, Ohio State has been the better program. This can be supported through simple head-to-head records and championships, as well as complex systems that rank football programs. The main counterclaim by many Michigan fans in this debate will revolve around two things: the number of national titles they claim, and the overall series record of 58-45-6 in favor of Michigan. These claims might seem to be valid, but upon further review the claims have little validity in today’s modernized version of college football. In addition, the Michigan program is rampant with elitism that was destructive for other programs and has harmed their current program that is not present in Ohio State’s program.
In order to determine the current success of the Nashville Sounds I surveyed fans of the game. I used the “snowball effect” to get responses from fans I knew and then had them refer me to fans they knew for responses to my questionnaire. I also submitted my questionnaire to a local blogger who discusses Nashville Sounds baseball. Garnering 38 responses, I feel I have gained knowledge of the typical fan as well as differences in the appeal of the game to different types of fans.
College football is a major part of many peoples' lives, especially here in the South. Whether we or someone we know is an alumni, we plan to go there in the future we think the uniforms are cute, or whatever reason, we always have one favorite team we cheer for. sometimes fans of a team will wear a shirt with the team's logo and that is as far as their loyalty goes. Others may attend a few games a season, but there are also those die hard fans that never miss a game or always tailgating, screaming at the refs, and have the team's fight song as their ringtone. While all that may seem a little overboard, there are people believe it or not, who take their team devotion as far as killing to show their devotion to their favorite team. Having team spirit is one thing, but when lines are crossed and people begin causing major problems, security should be tightened at games, even if colleges have to change a few things to pay for the extra help.
From the first two national champions, Rutgers and Princeton, to last year’s debateable Auburn national championship winning team, college football has always had difficulties deciding national champions. The BCS National Championship game was thought to give a less prejudice opinion on which teams play in the championship game than humans did. However, it has stimulated more controversy in college sports than Cal-Stanford “The Play.” The problem with the BCS teams is, it chooses two teams that are based on profit, popularity, and record. The BCS is in need of replacement by a playoff system because with a playoff system college football teams have more of an opportunity to show themselves.
McMurtry, a former football paper, utilizes comparison, hyperbole, and juxtaposition to effectively develop the idea that American society accepts violence and brutality within sports, which reveals the sadistic side of the world. To repair this attitude, however, all of the violent aspects of sports cannot simply be removed. For example, if the tackling part of football was eradicated, the sport would change completely and, consequently, lose much of what gives the sport its redeeming qualities and entertainment for the audience. Tackling does not make the sport violent; it is the violent characteristics of the players and the coaches combined with the constant encouragement stemming from the audience. Violence is a terrible thing, and it will never be completely removed unless each person works together to suppress their behaviors.
Nowadays clashes between elite powerhouse teams are subject to extensive media coverage: footage of events replayed frame by frame, in context of a constant media envir...
Even though the Permian Panthers had won a state championship the community wasn’t fond of black people. They wanted a state title but not all the recognition to go to Boobie Miles because he was a black running back. “He responded without the slightest hesitation. ‘ A big ol’ dumb nigger.” (Bissinger, 49) There are multiple accounts of harsh and unneeded racism thought the book. “ They started chanting something. Some said it was ‘Oreo Oreo!” The expectations of how the season will go is a huge conflict in Friday Night Lights. Two weeks before the season starts there is a watermelon feed for the players and families to come support. People would come to the Watermelon Feed with their children as if they feel it’s important for the little ones to see this spectacle at a young age and be awed by it. Even though people struggled financial and economic hardships, the lights of a Friday night game ignite their hopes and dreams of a better
Building on turn-of-the-century passions for the game among college alumni, no American sport better capitalized on the opportunities provided by new electronic media than football, in both its professional and collegiate forms. The annual Super Bowl has become late-twentieth-century America's single-greatest televised sporting event—indeed, its single-greatest television event, period, with workplace water-cooler talk the following Monday as likely to concern the new advertisements debuted in 30-second, one-million-dollar advertising slots as on the game itself. Like the Thanksgiving Day college games in New York during the 1890s, football today is as much a spectacle as a sporting event. Football is not just a televised marketing and entertainment vehicle, however. While it trails other sports as a recreational activity for youths and adults, football is the cornerstone of extracurricular life at high schools nationwide as well as college. In some areas, local "football fever" is so prominent that entire communities' identities seem to be wrapped up in the local football teams—places like Stark County, Ohio, where the legendary Massillon High School Tigers draw more than 100,000 spectators per year, or Midland-Odessa, Texas, where the annual Permian-Lee rivalry draws more than 20,000 partisans. Football's popularity helps make the sport a symbolic battlefield in American "culture wars." For it...
“Sports are for fun, but they also offer benefits and lessons that carry over into all aspects of life”. This well-known anonymous quotation conveys the message that sport is the game which has some rules and custom. It is not only for fun and entertainment, but there are also some benefits of playing sports and which gives some important lessons for life. Every kind of physical sports is healthy because it involves running, jumping, stretching, mind skills and much more. There are so many sports available in the world nowadays, but we can categorize them by the numbers of players, the three main categories are individual sport, dual sport and team sport.
Doing so establishes a sense of admiration and curiosity that otherwise would have been lost in the excitement and clamor of the crowd. This, in turn, allows Faulkner and the readers of this essay to resist being swept up from the frantic crowd and instead focus on the beauty of the game.
When one is a fan of a sport, they want to do everything in their power to make sure that their sport team wins. For example, in 1945 when a Cubs fan named Billy Sianis was ejected from Wrigley field after many people complained about the smell coming from his goat, he was infuriated and put a curse on the team proclaiming, "Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more." After decades of losing, Cubs fans would result to detach a goat's head from it’s body to hang on the Harry Caray statue or send it to the Cubs owner. This obsession results in the desperate need of a sports fan for their team to win that they become blindsided by the superstition and don’t think of the inconvenience this could have caused to people and the consequences one might