Mizzou Fans: What’s it like to be a fan

Makes drinking more enjoyable

If you’ve been a Mizzou fan for a while, this is child’s play.

I enjoy rooting for my alma mater and discussing the oddities of college football, the coaching personalities, trends and performance. It’s a lot of fun. Even when your team sucks. We don’t get bandwagon fans from other states. We don’t get national hype. But it’s our team and we’re stuck with it.

In short, yeah. I enjoy it. I had a great time at the game yesterday and I may even go back for Tennessee.

It's comfortably numb. Though that could be from the amount of whiskey it takes to get through most of their games.

Being a Mizzou fan is awful, if I'm being honest. You know you're never going to compete for a national title due to the landscape of college athletics and due to the university's historical ambivalence towards winning athletic programs. You haven't won a conference championship in football in 50 years. No conference championship in basketball in 25 years. Despite this, you continue holding out some sliver of hope that the stars will align and you'll have a magical run. You know logically what the end result will be, but you can't just "change teams". Mizzou is ingrained in your sports fandom whether you like it or not. Even in those seasons where the stars align there is always a painful nutkick at the end that only Mizzou could achieve (being screwed out of any BCS bowl in 2007 despite being ranked #1 going into the championship week, showing up to the 2013 SECCG with a literally catastrophic defensive gameplan, 2012 basketball losing to Norfolk State as a 2 seed, 2017 basketball losing Michael Porter Jr. 2 minutes into the season, etc).

Despite mediocre athletics, many schools can fall back on academic prowess, a solid "brand", or an excellent fanbase. Mizzou really can't claim any of these. Our #1 achievement is being the best journalism school in the world. Go figure, journalism is a rapidly deteriorating/watered down industry.

I could go on and on about what makes being a Mizzou fan awful, but I'll leave it there.

TL;DR: you know you'll never win the big one. Even when things are going well, you know there's some unimaginable twist coming to ruin everything. You can't help but keep getting your hopes up.

I remember the Woody and Bob Stull reigns of terror, so this is nothing. There was no talent on those teams, and I mean none.