Football fandom teaches student how to grin and bear it

Jackson Dircks and his fiancée Anna Tindall attend a Bears. Photo submitted by Jackson Dircks.

Hope. Life is all about hope. As humans, we hope for a good job, a long life, a family and so many other things. We all hope for something. Are sports any different? No.

As a kid growing up in Illinois, my father bestowed the burden of being a Chicago Bears fan upon me. If you aren’t a fan of the team, count your blessings. It’s the only organization in the entire National Football League to never have a quarterback pass for over 4,000 yards in a single season. The team is known for being inept at producing a competent offense, a necessity in the modern NFL.

In April, the Chicago Bears drafted Caleb Williams from the University of Southern California with the first overall pick. For a brief, fleeting moment, there was hope. I remember hearing Roger Goodell announce Caleb Williams and thinking to myself, “Finally, we have a quarterback even the Bears can’t screw up.” I was wrong.

In the offseason, the Bears retained Coach Matt Eberflus who (prior to this season) boasted a 10-24 record. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s a winning percentage of 29.41%. That figure is the third-worst in Chicago Bears history. Now, I’m not a math guy, but that percentage is pretty terrible. With this in mind, I should have known not to have high expectations for the current NFL season. Yet, again, life is about hope.

I watched the Bears on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” and saw a team with a fun, exciting dynamic. I watched the NFL Preseason and saw a quarterback with a skillset that looked different from quarterbacks who led the Bears in the past. I watched a team that would win. I began to hope and believe in the Chicago Bears ability to have a competent, modern offense. I should have known better.

I saw signs ahead of time. I knew the Bears had an established losing culture. I knew Matt Eberflus had lost far more games than he’d won. I knew the Bears have never properly developed a single quarterback in 100 years. Somehow, I allowed myself to hope. I hoped because being a Bears fan is like everyday life.

Life is hard. We all want to believe in and hope for something. For some people it’s believing in God. For others, it’s believing in a presidential candidate who can create real change. Regardless of what you hope for, you do so because it is comforting. When life is tiresome, we want something to keep us feeling awake. When times are tough, we need to look for something to make it easier. When life knocks us down, we want a reason to get back up again. Hope does that for us. Sometimes, hope is just that though: something we want to happen.

I want to see the Bears play well and score touchdowns on offense. I want to watch Caleb Williams throw for 4,000 yards in a season. I want the Bears offense to finally look like the other 31 teams in the NFL have looked like at some point, and if it never does and I truly am cursed (like I tell myself after every Bears loss), then I’m going to continue to hope because I want a reason to keep cheering.

Life is often full of more downs than ups, yet it’s the hope and belief in something that makes all of the downs worth it. The Chicago Bears incompetence as an NFL franchise has prepared me for life.

Maybe I am watching a dumb game on TV, but the disappointment is real. In life, when disappointment comes, I know I’ll be prepared because the way I am unwilling to give up hope in a franchise who has disappointed people for over a century is the same way I’ll approach every disappointment in my life.