A word of caution for the euphoric early season football fan

Over the weekend, the BYU football team defeated Kansas State 38-9 at LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo. Based on my social media feeds and the all-around jubilance in the air, this was an unexpected and thrilling victory for the Cougars.

Now, in the warm, rosy, euphoric glow of that unexpected victory, some BYU fans are gleefully predicting a smooth path to a championship and beyond.

I love that for them. We don’t have enough hope in this weary world, and I appreciate it when people in my life have reason to believe in something special. Many people I’m close to now believe in the 2024 BYU football season. Which is beautiful. And I hope it works out for them.

But. I feel compelled to advise those fans to exercise caution. Because I’ve seen this pattern before. I see this nearly every year, to be exact.

A single win early in the season infuses the fanbase with optimism and enthusiasm. Then, for whatever reason, the season goes south, much like migratory birds, and the optimism and enthusiasm are replaced with a spiral of disappointment and heartbreak. It’s hard to witness.

This is not a phenomenon specific to the BYU fans, of course. Most people who follow sports are well acquainted with disappointment. I just happen to have attended Brigham Young University and grew up in Provo near the university campus, so I know and love a lot of BYU fans and am familiar with their pain.

It’s important to note that I have never been a football fan. I don’t dislike football — I just don’t feel any sort of emotion toward the game or one team in particular. Aside from the rare occasion when I’m writing about it, football takes up no space in my brain, and everything I know about it I have learned by accident, through overhearing conversations or ingesting pop culture adjacent to the sport. For a while last year I knew exactly who was in the Taylor Swift box for every Kansas City game, but I couldn’t tell you what a third down means.

So what do I know? It’s very possible that I — a football idiot — am wrong about this BYU team’s prospects. Maybe their 4-0 record is just the beginning of an undefeated season and their position at No. 22 in the AP college football rankings will continue to rise. Maybe this season will match or even surpass the 2009 season with its finish in the top 12 and a Las Vegas Bowl win. Maybe we’ll witness a winning streak so historic that we speak of it in hushed tones, as residents of Utah County and BYU fans the world over speak of 1984. And I will be happy to have been wrong.

But it’s also very possible that my emotionless distance from the team allows me to have an outsider’s perspective that makes me something of a football fandom anthropologist. I am able to observe and study the way in which the football fans in my life interact with the teams to whom they are loyal. And my anthropological field notes show that BYU fans have experienced a lot of disappointment over the past 20-plus years, with the occasional OK season sprinkled throughout. Those OK seasons offer just enough hope to keep those fans strung along.

It’s not dissimilar to how I’ve felt when friends reunite with someone from a past relationship and at the start of their fresh relationship they report how good things are. With a twinkle in their eye they tell me how different it feels this time and how happy they’re sure they’re going to be for the rest of their lives.

I usually hold my tongue for the first reunion, and even the second, but when a friend tells me they’ve reunited with their ex for the third or fourth time, it becomes incumbent on me to gently point out the destructive patterns of their relationship that are so obvious to the rest of the world. I would be a bad friend if I didn’t.

And so it is incumbent on me now to point out the destructive patterns of the relationship that BYU fans, and all sports fans really, have with their beloved teams. I would, after all, be a bad friend if I didn’t.