Every sports fan has been in this situation at least once with a team that they love. The team has either taken a hit or has never really been good. To many, the situation seems hopeless but there are ways to get around this mini depression when it is time to watch your team.
The first method would simply be acceptance, going into each game or match understanding the team is not good and simply will not produce. Knowing it is probably going to be rough and not fun but setting the bar low in case a surprise comes and the team can get a win. That way, if and when your team loses it was expected, but if they can pull off a win it surpasses your expectations and will put you in a great mood. So you will either have expected the loss or the win will mean even more since you thought your team wasn’t going to win.
Another method is looking at the bright side. In most sports, when a team is not good they will usually receive a high draft pick. So looking at the prospects that your franchise will get to potentially completely shift the direction of the team is something that gets fans very excited. Hope is incredibly powerful, especially in sports, so when the team is so bad that the thought of a talented rookie coming to change things gets almost every fan ecstatic.
The other method for not losing hope in your terrible team is that the reason the team may be bad is because the team simply has no talent. In this case, odds are the organization should be good financially and that means they should have good cap space. This “good cap space” means fans can look towards free agency during the off-season for their team to make a splash and acquire some exciting new players for the franchise. Again, another aspect of hope in sports that weighs lots of power and influence for fans of the bad team and organization.
A method many fans always beg for is for the team to get new management, whether that be firing the General Manager, head coach, offensive or defensive coordinator or even chanting for the owner to sell the team. This is often a result that will happen most of the time with new head coaches and coordinators coming in and out of teams very rapidly where there are usually five to eight new head coaches each season in leagues like the NBA or more specifically the NFL.
Obviously, a team cannot drastically change overnight, but it is nice to look at the future in an optimistic mindset.
