Quote:
Originally Posted by JimHalpert
People are the worst LKJ. I've often wondered what it would take for everyone to just say "yeah, that was shitty" instead of having people coming in to do their contrarian/enlightened centrism "both sides" thing, but apparently "taking a full swing with a helmet at some dudes head" isn't that line. Over in SE you have one person showing us "the other angle cause Rudolph actually started it" and another person saying they like this kind of stuff and it's weak to complain to the ref when it happens to you.
I continue to wonder where that line is.
There basically isn't one. Tribalism is a hell of a drug. I like wiper, but I'm decidedly unsurprised to see him taking up for Garrett. I've certainly seen this type of thing with my own team's fanbase too. Seahawks' brass pays phony lip service to caring about domestic violence, and then they go draft Frank Clark late in the second round when everyone else was passing on him due to an ugly DV incident in college. This past offseason, Jarran Reed draws a suspension over a DV incident. In both cases, many of the same people who wouldn't hesitate to high-horse about it if it were a rival team doing these things instead get all up in arms and look for reasons to defend the team since it's theirs. It's pathetic.
I don't expect a team's fans to start rooting for anyone else or anything - a person would cycle through all 32 eventually if they jumped ship at the first instance of scummy behavior - but everyone should at least force themselves to call a spade a spade, even when that means putting your own on blast.
And the people who aren't already dedicated Browns fans badly need to disabuse themselves of the notion that Cleveland sports teams are always some lovable underdog story. They're not. If they ever have been, it certainly wasn't any point in the past 30 years.