a.k.a. V.J.

“This (game) is not a must-win; World War II was a must-win.”

– Marv Levy, former Buffalo Bills head coach and master of keeping things in perspective.

NFL training camps are opening up this week. Most years, that fact would activate Football Mode in my brain and I’d start eagerly seeking out as much news as I could find about my beloved Bills and the league as a whole. Not this year.

I am still a Bills fan and I still enjoy the sport of football in general, but for this upcoming season, I have made a conscious decision to limit my consumption of the NFL to simply watching the games and nothing else. I’m foregoing all of the NFL-related podcasts, YouTube channels, power rankings, websites, pregame shows, social media feeds, etc. that have been a big part of my experience as a fan in recent years. Individually, I have no problem with any of those outlets. Collectively, they ruin my enjoyment of the sport.

There are a lot of pretty good Buffalo Bills content creators out there. If somebody wanted to, it would be possible to devote a full-time job’s worth of time every week during the season just listening to Bills podcasts. I would fear for the emotional and mental well-being of anyone who attempted that.

The passion of Bills Mafia is well documented. The flip side to all the table-jumping and hijinks is that the fanbase is emotionally scarred and always waiting for the other shoe to drop. No matter how well the season is going, the narratives propagated in the podcasts and on YouTube are always fretful. When the team wins, they don’t win convincingly enough. When they lose one game, it’s always the most catastrophic thing to happen in Buffalo since the McKinley assassination. I understand why the fans are like that. Hell, I’m like that. But to hear hour after hour of all the angst and doomsaying is exhausting.

Of course, it’s not just the Bills fanbase that’s like that and it’s not just limited to football. It’s very easy for fandom of a sports team to turn from escapism to a situation that needs to be escaped from. There is a Toronto Maple Leafs fan/YouTuber named Steve “Dangle” Glynn who is well known among hockey fans for his video meltdowns after the Leafs lose. He wrote a book about his fandom titled This Team is Ruining My Life. To be sure, a lot of Glynn’s rants are shtick, but in watching his videos, any sports fan will recognize the genuine oversized negative emotional impact that following the daily ups and downs of a team can have on a person. We get trained to care way too much about something that simply doesn’t matter in the broad scheme of things.

A little bit of that caring too much wouldn’t be a bad thing. It might even be healthy for those of us who tend to be overly reserved and emotionally distant. The problem is that the modern media landscape makes it very difficult to limit one’s fandom of anything to “a little bit.” Whether a person is a fan of Harry Potter, Marvel, Taylor Swift, or whatever, there are legions of professional and amateur content creators churning out endless streams of opinions, narratives, manufactured controversies, fan theories, etc. about that thing. The NFL is right up there with the most ubiquitous properties, appearing on multiple networks, including their own. The sheer quantity of it is suffocating.

So, I’ve decided to get back to basics. I enjoy watching the Bills (and other teams) play football, so I’m going to keep doing that this fall. All the rest is noise, and I don’t need it.

Go Bills.