Many times, it’s easy to be a Pacific Northwesterner – We live in a beautiful part of the world, surrounded by trees and majestic mountains. Sometimes, our favorite sports teams make it even easier with magical playoff runs, inspirational seasons, and championship wins.
Other times, it’s difficult. Like when it rains for weeks on end, the sun barely peaks out from behind the clouds, and every sports team you root for seems to be stuck in a catastrophic rut.
For me, right now is one of those latter times.
I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve rooted for the Seattle Mariners and Seahawks all of my life (except for a brief spell of bandwagoning the Dallas Cowboys in the mid-90s, but let’s not talk about that). I adopted the Trail Blazers and Timbers after moving to Portland. Having grown up without strong allegiance to any of the Pac-10 (then 12) schools, I tended to hope for the best for all of the Northwest-based teams. Right now, being a fan of almost all of these teams does not make for warm, fuzzy feelings.
The Mariners broke a 21-year playoff drought in 2022 and came within a game of the playoffs again in 2023 while setting franchise attendance records. However, their ownership, which brought in record profits along with record attendance, decided now was the right time to cry poor. The team is shedding salary left and right and doesn’t figure to be in play for any significant additions this offseason, meaning that the team will have to rely on hopes and dreams to fuel a return to relevance.
The Seattle Seahawks started off the season on a great note. I even went so far as to dub their secondary the “Legion of Doom 2.0.” That take held up as well as a newspaper left outside in the rain. In the last six weeks, the Seahawks are 1-5, are rapidly free-falling out of the playoff picture, and that vaunted secondary forgot how to cover or tackle.
The Trail Blazers are young and oozing with upside. However, they are also built to lose now in favor of being good in the future, so that will likely mean more double-digit losing streaks than double-digit wins this season as the Blazers try to secure a top draft pick.
The Timbers fired their coach, missed the playoffs, hired a new coach with a history of making derogatory remarks toward women, and have a major rebuild ahead of them. Somehow, Merritt Paulson still owns the team.
Finally, in the Pac-12, Washington is playing in the college football playoff. That’s basically where the good news ends. Once the Huskies are done, Pac-12 football will no longer exist. The Ducks, Cougars, and Beavers will all likely be playing their bowl games, minus the quarterbacks that got them there. The Cougars and Beavers are just trying to keep enough of their roster together to be competitive in the Pac-West, Pac-2, Mountain 12, or whatever the Oregon State/Washington State + Mountain West combination will be called.
So how does one who is a fan of all these teams keep their sanity in what is close to the darkest timeline for all of them? Here is how I manage:
- Lower expectations: If you expect nothing, you can’t be disappointed! This has kept me going as a Mariners fan for decades.
- Realize sports teams don’t owe you anything: Billionaire sports team owners don’t owe you or the fans as a collective anything. If they want to own a team as a point of pride and dump money into it, they can, if they want to penny pinch and use the team as a profit driver, they can do that too. And neither my opinion nor yours will change it.
- Realize you don’t owe sports teams anything: On the other hand, you don’t owe a team your support, especially when it comes to your feet and your dollars. Don’t like the direction a team is going, don’t spend your money to support the team.
- Reassess success: After watching the Seahawks get annihilated by some of the better teams in the NFC over the past month, I’ve reassessed what a good season for them would mean. Would making the playoffs be nice? Of course. But so would a nice top-10 draft pick with the chance to improve that leaky defense, the offensive line, or take the franchise quarterback of the future. Similarly for the Blazers, seeing the young team win is nice, but also, so is knowing that every loss brings them closer to a great draft pick to make them better in the years to come.
Now I can’t promise all of the techniques will keep you from becoming irrationally angry when your team decides to be cheap, whiff on easy tackles, blow a lead, miss the playoffs, or leave behind over a hundred years of tradition to chase a quick payday, but it can at least help keep you somewhat level headed. And if you root for a whole bunch of different teams, opening day for another sport, and with it the dawning of hope perpetual, is always just around the corner.
