Being a fan of any team is sure to have drawbacks. For some, it’s that you lose all the time — fans of the Clippers, Cubs and Cleveland in general, you understand this. For others, the (strange, but real) concern is that you win too often — fans of the Yankees, Red Wings and Lakers, you realize that this makes most other fans hate you.
For some teams, it’s that you find the most interesting ways to lose — Mets fans understand this problem. It isn’t just losing, but losing because players do goofy things like miss easy pop-ups that somehow make runs score. Still other teams can complain about management always messing everything up — fans of the Trail Blazers, Warriors and recently the Red Sox, you’re nodding along.
But as a fan of the New York Giants, I have perhaps the strangest complaint of all.
We play exactly like our opponent on any given night.
Think about that for a second. Look at our games so far this season—we stunk it up for most of the game against the Bucs and the Browns (two lousy teams we should have trounced), and had to rely on huge comebacks to pull off wins. Against our not-looking-great division foes so far, we’ve looked terrible in two and needed a last-second drive to salvage the third.
Put us against a hot Panthers team with half our guys injured? We blow them away. We play the looking-like-Super-Bowl-favorites 49ers? Another easy game.
Why, you ask, is this a problem?
Because just like any other fans, we Giants fans love our team. We sit on the edge of our seats in tricky situations, forget to breathe during intense plays, our hearts pound madly with every game-changing pass.
And frankly, it’s exhausting. We don’t have any games where we have even an inkling of who’s going to win. None. Every week is a potential trap game, or a potential upset. We’re never quite sure.
Sure, we’ve won two Super Bowls in the past five years playing this sort of crazy, “We’ll play to the level of our opposition and be a super-dangerous dark horse team” style. But I can guarantee that every die-hard Giants fan has had at least six mini-heart-attacks during that stretch.
I guess what I’m asking the Giants to do is decide whether they’re really good or not already. Seriously, this flip-flopping is getting old.
Plus, defibrillators aren’t cheap.
