GQ Says Phillies, Eagles Fans "Worst Sports Fans in America"
By: Mike Reisman
This month in GQ Magazine, there was a list of
"The Worst Sports Fans in America", compiling who they thought were, well the worst fans. The Phillies and Eagles tied for the worst of the worst, with West Virginia, Oakland Raider, and Maryland fans rounding out the top five.
There are so many problems with this list, it's not even funny. Where shall we start...
First, since when has GQ known anything about sports, other than what suit Derek Jeter happens to be wearing? This is a magazine that posts a list of the most stylish men in the world. Clearly they won't care about which fans actually know their stuff, or live and die with their team, just which fans are the most "stylish". Hate to break it to GQ, but style doesn't make a fan-base good.
Another problem with this list is that seven of the 15 fan-bases on this list are colleges. Really? Because college students get drunk and do stupid things, they are bad fans? What about the alumni, their families, and other fans of these colleges, are they just as "bad" as the students? To call these college students crazy, or stupid is one thing, but to call them bad fans for being normal college kids is ridiculous. In fact, they're probably some of the better college fans for at least showing up to games.
There are so many problems with this list but really the worst may be that this list doesn't take a look at all the great things about any of these fans. Let's start with a team that's not the Phillies or Eagles. LSU, number 10 on this list, has had their football stadium called the hardest place to play more times than countable by just about everyone. Penn State, number seven, boasts sell-outs nearly every week (if not every week) in a stadium with over 107,000 seats, the second most in the western hemisphere.
It's things like these that this list leaves out. The Phillies have had 123 consecutive sellouts, which is one and a half seasons that the stadium has been full. The Phillies were also top in the MLB in home attendance percent with 103.5% of Citizens Bank Park filled on average. The next best was Boston with 100.9%. So yeah, when you have just over 45,000 die-hard fans going to each game, you will have a handful of crazy ones, but that doesn't mean the whole fan-base is bad. Did Phillies fans cheer when those people ran on to the field, or when that man vomited on that girl? No, in fact, most people were outraged at all of these incidents.
GQ's list is not a real evaluation of sports fans, but rather a list of the teams with the most bad press. You want to see real bad fans? Go to a Marlins game, where you can sit in literally almost any seat in the outfield, or a Blue Jays game where less than 40% the stadium is filled on average. These are the bad fan-bases, but clearly, since they haven't had any crazy people go to their games, GQ doesn't know that. So much for investigative reporting.