I hate being a Fan. A Capital “F” Fan. The guy who lives and dies on the outcome of every play, perishing a thousand times before rising from the ashes a thousand more….and that’s in a good game. Bad games increase the disparity between the first and second numbers, while simultaneously decreasing the overall life span and the number of hairs on the head. Bad games make your head hurt, your mouth and throat dry and, when they’re really bad, bad games make you consider becoming a small “f” fan.

              Unfortunately, I have spent a good deal of my adult life as a Big “F” Fan of a team in a sport I don’t particularly care for: the Maryland Terrapins men’s basketball team. And college basketball Fans may be the worst of all, of course.

               Big “F” college basketball Fans don’t care that their shooting guard can’t shoot, their point guard can’t dribble and their frontline looks like the cast of “Little People, Big World.” They don’t care if the coach would prefer the company of 19 year-old coeds at a chicken wings shack to that of 17 year-old recruits located 15 minutes from campus. They certainly don’t care that their team’s tempo-free stats suggest a mediocre defense AND a terrible offense. All they care about is the win, and getting the team to return to the glory of yesterday, or yestermonth or yesteryear. They care about beating their rival, and will resort to chants, taunts or rhythmic swaying to effect some positive change on the game. They want a reason to run across the court after the final buzzer, to run across campus when the season is over, to run across the country when the police are looking for them for their riot-related actions.

               Approximately one team per season can make its Fans happy. All other teams force their Fans to feel that familiar frustration from middle school: some combination of anger at losing, insecurity of station in the broader scheme of things and jealousy for those who know their place. Most days between one year’s Midnight Madness and the next are spent staring at those above and hoping they fall, and staring at those below and finding a place for your boot on their neck. Johnnie may be the class president, but he’s in remedial math. UNC may have beaten us, but at least Marcus Ginyard is injured again. Susie may have a boyfriend in high school, but I hear he has bad back acne. Duke may have beaten us with excellent outside shooting from J.J. Redick, but I feel compelled to point out that he too has terrible back acne.

               Middle school was my personal Lodi, and the only thing I hated more than middle school was who I was in middle school. Thus, going back to that place every year come tournament time* is deflating to say the least. Yet, I can’t help it. I am a Fan.

               How did this all start? Well, a lot of this ground was covered in my article on Len Bias, but suffice it to say that I am a Maryland boy who enjoyed basketball, and whose only local team was the Terps after the Bullets left town. So I grew up with Walt Williams, Joe Smith, Keith Booth and the Franchise for his one outstanding year. Come college time (enrolled in September 2000), the state school offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse, and I was a Terp. My time at the school coincided with the greatest run in team history (longer and more esteemed than most would realize) and I had all the free tickets I could handle. I lived and breathed Terps, and while I was working for the school’s Orientation Staff, I was able to meet the entire Class of Miserability (more on these guys later), as well as a future wife with perhaps an even greater love for the team. The stars aligned and I went from fanhood to Fanhood, not yet to return.

               Two Final Fours and a National Title for a school not located in Lexington, North Carolina or Westwood is a pretty good decade, and should usually sate even the biggest big F’ers around. So what’s so bad about Big “F” Fandom?

               The first problem with Fandom has nothing to do with Maryland at all. In fact, it has everything to do with Syracuse University, former home of Philadelphia pariahs Donovan McNabb and Marvin Harrison.** A few months ago, I was lucky enough to visit Springfield, Illinois on a work-related project with one of my colleagues. My colleague is a great guy, good to talk to and generally respectful of the fact that I can be a bit of a jerk at times. He usually makes a very good travel companion because in the endless hours in some far away nowheresville, he can carry a conversation, he likes a good non-chain meal and, most importantly, he knows when to leave me alone. Underrated skill set, if you ask someone that travels with workmates often.***

               Soooo, after setting him up as a far more bearable version of myself, I will crucify him for being the most annoying Fan in the world. We were in Springfield starting the ides of December and stayed for the entire week.***** Unfortunately for me, that week contained two Syracuse games, one of which you might remember.

               On Monday, December 15^th, Syracuse attempted to defend their home court against the Vikings of Cleveland State. Prior to the game, I warned my colleague that Cleveland State was better than supposed and matched up well with the Orange. Unworried, my colleague agreed to go to dinner during the meat of the game. This led to, in no uncertain terms, the WORST MEAL EVER.

               We sat down immediately, as Monday night crowds don’t exist in Springfield, and I prepared my order. In vain, it turns out. The game was tied at the half, which meant that my colleague needed to have a 15 minute conversation with his friends about what the ‘Cuse could do in the second half, and assuring each other that everything would be better. The start of this conversation directly coincided with when we sat down at the restaurant and the end directly coincided with my finally getting to order my meal.

               It only got worse. As the game progressed and remained close, my colleague received no fewer than 103 text messages (I know because he told me the number the next day), updating him as to score, possession and what colour Jonny Flynn’s headband was. He interrupted multiple conversations with me, as well as stalled our waitress, in order to take these and comment on them. After each, he would apologize and attempt to rationalize his rudeness away. Yet, with each buzz of his phone on the table, he was back to the game.

               Finally, he decided that he couldn’t keep receiving updates this way. Knowing that I have a nifty little smart phone, he asked if I could give it to him, so that he could follow the play-by-play in a more efficient fashion.

               Now I mentioned above that I can be a jerk at times. One of the primary areas where my jerkishness comes through is personal property. Especially electronic personal property. I trust very few people with my electronic goods, fully expecting them to break them or mess them up in some fashion. When I do relinquish control, I frequently stand over their shoulder and wince every time they do so much as hit the space bar or the call button. And here was my colleague, so recently and frequently rude to me, directly asking me to give up the one piece of equipment I love more than any other.

               I did so, because to refuse would have been to ruin the trip, and four days in Springfield during an ice storm is already long enough. However, I did hold it against him, and probably still do somewhere in the subconscious portion of my brain. It took all I had not to reach across the table and strangle him to death when he read about the 72-footer that beat his team and proceeded to slam his fist (containing my precious phone) to the table. I was probably only calmed by the fact that his team had lost and I sensed an injury I could apply salt to all week as comeuppance.

               So, just a bad meal, right? Chalk it up to a bad night and move on. Except I couldn’t, because HE couldn’t. He moped all day Tuesday, even during working hours, which is no small annoyance when your entire job is interviewing and entertaining clients. He also decided that we needed to double-down and really focus on the next day’s game against Canisius. He wasn’t going to be caught out of touch for this one. God knows, his absence on Monday night was likely the reason his team lost.

               So I don’t know where you live, but I imagine that, in any place but upstate New York, a midweek game between Canisius and Syracuse just doesn’t say “barn burner.” Turns out national television agreed, and the game was only televised on ESPNU4 or something. And it additionally turns out that there was exactly one place in Springfield, Illinois that broadcasts that channel. I’ll be damned if we didn’t end up there, staring at the tiniest of 30 TVs, watching a lopsided game and eating Beer Battered Brat Bites and Chicken Cordon “Bleu Balls.” I strongly considered quitting my job.

               Big “F” Fans are forced to put up with a lot of things. They are unconditional lovers in a world where conditions and qualifications are the only things that protect our sanity and our hearts. Being a Fan can be painful in ways that normal fans cannot understand. Unless they have the worst love lives ever, and manage to get dumped 7-12 times a year.

               Post-national title Maryland has been a wild ride. As mentioned above, the first class of players to join the program after Juan Dixon, Steve Blake, Lonny Baxter and Chris Wilcox cut down the nets were sprinkled throughout my Orientation groups, sticking out as much due to their attitude as their height. Only Blake remained behind to watch Chris McCray, Travis Garrison, Nik Caner-Medley and John Gilchrist excite the campus, only to slowly grind away any goodwill the previous 3 years had created.

               The first three members of the recruiting Class of Miserability were arrested for, respectively, disturbing the peace, smacking a woman in a bar and being a complete and utter asshole. That last one probably isn’t exactly what NCM was charged with, and the other two faced additional charges, but you get the gist.****** Gilchrest, meanwhile, pretty much single-handedly destroyed the 2004-2005 season after three great days in the 2004 ACC tournament made him believe he was the best damn PG in the country. He declared for the draft after his junior season, went undrafted and has played various spells in Israel partitioned by trips to the NBDL, France and Latvia. This is the first time I have ever felt sorry for Latvians in my life.      

               The final potshot from the class was McCray’s failing out during the second semester of his senior year. A Terps team ranked 18^th at the time finished the season 5-7, and won one game before bowing out in the ACC tournament. They lost their home game in the first round of the NIT to national powerhouse Manhattan. That was four years of my Fandom (and my life) wasted.

               And it wasn’t just the players. Gary Williams, never an easy man to get along with, gave his assistant coaches plenty of reasons to leave for head coaching jobs, which were now open thanks to the 2000-2002 successes. Unfortunately, those same assistants were the true recruiters, and the lines to local talent dried up. Gary, never a big recruiter, was forced to do something he detested, and was singularly incapable of locking up guys who lived minutes away from College Park. Just over the past seven years, top college players from the Baltimore/Washington corridor include Michael Beasley, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Rudy Gay, Ty Lawson, Joe Alexander, Jeff Green and DaJuan Summers.

               Gary blames the AAU system and refuses to take part in that sordid underbelly, which is commendable. Except he’s not the only coach to take that stance, and some of those coaches are rather successful. Additionally, recruiting is not the only way to create a good, or even watchable, college basketball team. The early decade Maryland teams were not good because of natural talent, at least not exclusively. The best pro player on the team turned out to be Steve Blake, with Juan Dixon and Chris Wilcox being marginal rotation guys. They won because they played hard and they were coached within an inch of breaking. They rarely made silly mistakes, took terrible shots or allowed one bad trip down the floor turn into three or four. In fact, outside of one extremely famous example (that pains me to even acknowledge), I don’t remember that set of guys squandering a single double-digit lead.

               I don’t think that Gary has given up teaching his players, or coaching. However, his modern teams lack focus, discipline and the ability to dribble without putting their feet in the way of the ball. They also bleed leads away in the fashion that depresses an entire fan base. Just this season, Maryland has squandered three games where they led by more than 15 points. My wife and I both dread when we are able to watch the team play a similarly average team on television. We know that the best case scenario is a close win that tears up your insides for the full 40 minutes, and that the best case scenario is not the most likely.

               Gary also has a problem with personal responsibility, which many of you might have read about on the four-letter, or anywhere else you get your sports news. After a particularly crushing loss to Boston College (one of the three come-from-aheads mentioned above), a spat over two released recruits erupted between Williams and an assistant Athletic Director. Gary claimed the assistant AD was just acting under the guise of the Athletic Director to undermine his job and that he is the only one in the situation who has won a national championship. This would seem like the normal, childish bickering of a coach who has always been at odds with the athletic department if the AD in question, Debbie Yow, wasn’t in North Carolina burying her sister.

               Most people would be galled by their own insensitivity, especially when the lady in question came back to Maryland and interrupted a press conference to assure the world that you were going to be the coach through your entire contract (2011 with some fuzzy times around the edges).  Gary was no such thing, and took the rest of the press conference to talk about how confident he was in what he has achieved. He then managed to list all of his accomplishments from his 20 years at Maryland, making a case not for the job for which he had just received a vote of confidence, but presumably for the next job, the one that might make everyone happier.

               These squabbles get tiring, and they have become more and more frequent as 2002 fades in the minds of alumni and the athletic department. The fact that players are leaving Prince George’s County for Manhattan, Storrs, Syracuse and Austin is bad enough; the fact that many players are driving through College Park to play at a program that Gary won’t even schedule for personal and stubborn reasons is galling. Georgetown can thank Williams and Maryland for a large part of its revival.

               And this is what the last 6 years of being a Fan for Maryland has looked like. Like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson, I am getting too old for this (Nik Caner-Medley deleted).

               More than anything else, being a Fan is hard for me because it embodies everything I am not. I am ultra-rational, and I prefer to take a back seat in any argument, allowing the sides to make their points to me before coming to any conclusion. I collect facts, opinions and contexts and then make my choice. I write for this site, and believe in most of its sabermetric principles. To be a Fan is largely to reject ALL of that, to accept heart over head and emotion over thought. And I know that.

               Useful basketball statistics have exploded over the past few years, and the work done by people like David Berri, Ken Pomeroy, John Gasaway and Kevin Pelton (to name but a few) mirrors the advances made a decade or more ago in baseball. At times, being a Fan interferes with my ability to enjoy and benefit from their work, and can even assure that I am a less knowledgeable basketball “f”an, generally. What’s the point of being a Fan if it means knowing less about the sport? If it means sticking up for prima donnas so long as they show up to class and play well in the games? If it means interrupting a dinner to check a text message from a friend detailing a missed free throw?

               They say the first step to dealing with a problem is to recognize that you have one. My name is Sean, and I am a giant, capital “F” Fan. And I’ve tried to work on my Fanness. I don’t think it’s possible, or particularly heroic, to go cold turkey. Quitting a team altogether, if it’s possible, suggests that maybe you weren’t a Fan to begin with.******* So how do you wean yourself off the big “F” and settle into a calmer and safer small “f” fandom?

               I tried forgetting the schedule. I found that, if I didn’t look at the upcoming games, I could almost forget to watch them, or listen for them on fading radio, or get the play-by-play coverage on national sports sites. When you don’t live and die with every turnover or missed three-pointer, you tend to have a healthier view of the team and sport as a whole. You can gather what is good and bad about the team from larger sample sizes, rather than thin-slicing your team every chance you get.

               This isn’t to say that you should work actively to miss games, or stop watching your team on television. Rather, I think it’s healthy to be surprised and happy to come across your team’s game on television while flipping around, as opposed to turning down dinner dates with friends to watch your team beat up on East Alabama A & M on the local college television station.

The rest sort of came naturally. As my desire to micromanage the team from afar faded, so too did most of the unsavory characteristics of the Fan. I had the distance necessary to stomach reading about my team’s flaws from unbiased sources. I was able to take a joke about my power forward’s womanly physique without being incarcerated for Travis Garrisoning the jokester. I found that, when I DID sit down to watch a game, it was far less stressful, I could digest food normally and I would enjoy the time, instead of fretting about the end from the very beginning. My inner Fan became a ghost, and my far more agreeable fan shown through.

That is, of course, until some referee totally screws my team over in the final minutes of a close game against our rivals. Then it will all come roaring back. Naturally, those moments are still why I watch sports, why I love sports, and I wouldn’t lose them for all the peaceful dinners in Springfield.

* Or, in my current predicament, National Invitational TOURNAMENT time.      

** Sure, one has played at just below a HOF level for the home team while advancing to five NFC championships and one very possibly shot a man for disrespecting him, but I guarantee you as a person who lives in Eagles country, 99 out of 100 Eagles “F”ans would take Marvin Harrison every day.

*** Worst chain restaurants that people on per diems love to frequent: Texas Roadhouse, Applebees and Olive Garden. These are not restaurants, they are abominations.****

**** Unless it’s a game day and you’re sitting at an Applebees’ bar watching it.

*****The ides of March are on the 15^th, as they are in May, July and October. In other months, the ides occur on the 13^th. Do with that what you will.

****** Now, James Gist, there was a man worth cheering for. He grew as a player, he stuck around even when his athleticism seemed perfect for the pros and sorely wasted in college and he seemed to actually enjoy the game.

******* There are exceptions to this rule. If your team is embroiled in a rape or murder scandal (La Salle and Baylor, I am looking at you here), then I fully understand and support cutting any and all ties with the team. Otherwise, you are stuck with, at the very least, defending your team's honour during Rivalry week, and cheering them on when they appear on televion. You are also responsible for taking crap from your rival's fans if the game is a blowout, which I will personally classify as any game where your team loses by 42 or more points.