During the final two months of the ‘05 season, every Ohio State Buckeye fan within 150 miles of Cincinnati who did not actively support another NFL team suddenly decided they’re a Bengals fan. If you’re not familiar with Ohio State football fans, imagine Kentucky basketball fans without the chill; imagine St. Louis Cardinals fans without the humility; imagine New England Patriots fans without the firm, vice-like grip on reality. And now we have to put up with these fucking people at every game.
Bandwagon Ohio State fans remain the majority shareholder of the Bengals fanbase to this day, whether we like it or not. If Bengals fans have the reputation of being delusional crybabies with an undeserved sense of entitlement, well, it’s because that’s an accurate assessment of the current composition of our fanbase. January 2006 was like living the worst episode of the Twilight Zone ever, one where a bunch of alien lifeform shape-shifting douchecanoes come to Earth on the night of your first playoff game in 15 years, morph into humans wearing the exact same orange and black as you, and spew whiny bullshit like ‘WAAAH!!!! THE STEELERS CHEATED!!!! THEY ONLY WON BECAUSE THEY’RE CHEATING THUGS!’’ for the better part of the next fucking decade.
Who would have ever imagined that Ohio State, a fanbase with six losing football seasons since 1925, would be thoroughly incapable of processing the emotions required to be a Bengals fan? I hope every one of them eats five postgame bowls of Skyline Chili and gets stuck in traffic on the interstate.
Unsurprisingly, our fans are among the most difficult, intransigent, hyper-defensive individuals on the planet. I would say talking to them is like talking to a wall, but walls don’t interrupt. I would say it’s like talking to a child, but children have the capacity to learn. No, the only way to encapsulate the frustration is to picture a horrifying chimerical future in which some rich asshole develops and markets the Telepods from The Fly, only to see swarms of 8-year-olds around the country getting trapped inside them while clutching samples of drywall. The undesirable traits of child and wall then fuse into an unapologetically ill-tempered abomination of God, and presto, another Buckeye Bengal is born.
Seriously, the stadium should have been razed at this time last year with Steven Adler’s Guns N’ Roses reunion as its final chapter because that’s a hell of a lot better than whatever the fuck the Bengals plan on writing. Paul Brown Stadium consistently houses the most embarrassing fan behavior I’ve witnessed, and this is coming from a guy who regularly attends games at Rupp Arena. Considering the average fan, it is nauseatingly apposite that this franchise’s last playoff win is chronologically closer to the 1964 production of the first Ford Mustang than it is to the present day. Sometimes, I find myself secretly yearning for the 1990s Riverfront Stadium days when Kordell Stewart would come to the line for the Steelers, flap his arms, and successfully hush the crowd. In the away stadium.
Preseason opener in two weeks. Come for the football, stay for the PTSD. I’ll be there, as always.