Growing up, I lived in a "little" town East of Lake Washington named Bellevue. For those who didn’t know, Bellevue High School pretty much whooped every opponent it ever encountered save for a total of about five games my entire high school career. We won the state title all four of my years and boasted a top 10 football program. Now, they are in hot water for running a “diploma mill” and not following practice regulations. Whoops.
Don’t get me wrong, it was nice being on a winning team, but I doubt Bellevue really learned much from destroying Interlake or Sammamish by 45 points, and that’s if we were having a bad day. The reality is, that losing keeps people grounded. When I got to college a lot of people asked me about how packed the student section was a football games. To their surprise I often answered empty. If you were to ask most students why they didn’t go they would say “because I already know we’re going to win.” The sad fact is, they were almost always right.
Last year, there was huge excitement surrounding the Seahawks. We just won our first Super Bowl (sorry Broncos) and were favored to go back again. It got to our head and honestly, last season when the Seahawks began the year 3-3 many people counted them out, said they were all hype and no fire mixtape to back it up (mine is dropping soon I promise). This fired them up and caused them to go 9 for 10 for the rest of the season. While they weren’t so much an up-and-coming team, they were still an underdog story that impressed critics.
Being an up-and-coming team is nice because it allows you to experiment as a team. What else do you have to lose? Many people didn’t expect much out of the Huskies this year in terms of football. We were planning on starting a true freshman quarterback and we lost 4 defensive stars to the NFL draft. But last Thursday, something clicked and our defense rose to the occasion and intercepted Kessler twice in the first half, which is twice as many times as he had previously been intercepted all season. We again, were the underdog and we pulled off a huge away game win and with Oregon’s embarrassing 60-20 loss to Utah we should be looking to come away with possibly an additional big-ish win.
When you win every game, it becomes expected and many times fans become apathetic and arrogant. Additionally, you get bandwagon fans, yuck. Losing sucks, but it keeps teams grounded and allows them to have a higher ceiling for excitement. When UW upset USC in 2009, the enthusiasm surrounding the Huskies was at the pinnacle of its growth and fired up a fan base. Winning that game was nearly unheard of until it happened. Of course, we want our team to always win, but I truly think up-and-coming teams have the best fans and the greatest atmosphere.
