It's a rare athlete who's able to perform at the very highest levels without caring about winning and losing. But the same temperament that drives them to compete and work hard probably has helped them evolve a successful next-play attitude about competition. Getting angry is natural. But it doesn't help anything. Staying angry for hours and writing a three-page screed to work out complex feelings after losses that happen one out of three games in even successful seasons is something else. It's non-productive. But there are a lot of people walking around with non-productive tendencies in all sorts of areas of their lives.
For a lot of fans, though, maybe all of us, football is escapism. It's frustrating when you don't have that comfortable place to escape to after a win each week. We're not winning or losing personally. We're rooting for a pleasant distraction. So when that gets taken away because Terrence Williams didn't get out of bounds or Dez dropped a catch, we internalize it and then project. It's tempting to do.
Those emotional reactions can get in the way of an accurate analysis of what's going on with the team. To some, that's probably not a big deal because they don't watch primarily to try to figure out how the team can improve. They just watch for the action and the wins. For some of us, building a football team is like a puzzle, and it's almost more fun to watch the tweaks and to test theories over the course of a season or seasons than it is to get wrapped up in the individual games. If you're looking at it like a puzzle, the games are the experiments and the temptation to get angry over a failed experiment in series just isn't the same.
