If you take a moment to observe your surroundings while in the student section of a college football game, several things are guaranteed to be there: students screaming and stomping, a fight over a free T-shirt, spilled food and that one heavily imbibed guy who definitely graduated several years ago. Even with all this, college football is still well-known for being a good time.
Your preliminary thoughts might be that it’s fun because you can win. Who doesn’t like winning? While that is part of the reason, it is really not the main allure of the event. If it really was the reason people came, the Chicago Cubs would have fewer fans than a Little League game. The real reason that Faurot is packed every home game is because everyone can act like an imbecile without consequence.
Going to a sporting event is truly a beautiful, unique experience. Where else can you cuss someone out for being from a different state than you? Take our old rival, Kansas, for example. Most of the time, no one minds Kansas. It’s actually not even that bad of a state. It’s one of the nation’s largest producers of wheat, and it won the most beautiful license plate award in 1981. Pretty awesome, right? Nope. If you say you’re from Kansas during a game against MU, you may as well have just kicked a puppy.
The reason most people feel this way about the opposing team during a sporting event is due to deindividualization. This is when people lose personal accountability while in large crowds. Think about it: We chant, we scream, and we even don war paint in the colors of our school. If we did this any other day, we would be seen as insane or probably drunk.
Take this, for example: I had the pleasure of standing next to an exceptionally tipsy gentleman at the game against Eastern Michigan. At some point during the game, the opposing team threw a pass and the wide receiver reached for it, bobbled it a bit and finally caught it. It was a fine play, an excellent display of hand-eye coordination. However, this prompted quite a different response from the man next to me. The response was a string of curse words directed at the wide receiver’s mother, a fist punched in the air in front of him and chuckling at his own wit before vomiting a little. In what situation is this at all even close to acceptable? If this same response was triggered while you were at a grocery store and someone caught a box of cereal that was knocked off a shelf, the person shouting would likely be kicked out and potentially arrested for public intoxication.
The deindividualization that takes place during sporting events is the same kind of thing that happens in riots. People do things that they would never do in any other situation because they are totally lost in the group. Everyone is just part of the crowd. There is only one group mentality, and that is that there are no consequences. Everyone from the computer science nerd to the person crushing Natty Light against their forehead is likely to be a complete and total raving idiot. That is why football games are so fun.
