Earlier this week HoCo blogger Duane St. Claire took issue
with Raven’s fans behavior during the nationally televised Sunday night game
against the Patriots. He wrote that he “couldn't help but think that this isn't
something that I would want my kids to experience.”
If his kids weren’t in bed when that chant started late in the
fourth quarter then they are likely old enough to have heard
much worse in their own schoolyard, or even in the current presidential race.
It isn’t like this happens all the time either. Ravens fans
are hardly the most rowdy fans in the NFL. A ranking of rowdy fans earlier this year by
Bleacher Report put the Baltimore
crowd at nine out of fifteen. It takes a lot to provoke us to profanity and after three plus quarters of bad calls by the NFL's replacement officials we were simply pushed over the edge.
I suspect that all football fans watching all across the
nation empathized with the Baltimore
fans late Sunday night too. The bad officiating in this game was merely a prelude to the debacle
on the Monday night game between the Seahawks and the Packers.
Perhaps this just isn’t Duane’s sport. That’s okay but his
criticism of the Baltimore
football fan behavior is simply unfair. After all, you’ll never see me complaining about
the smell of patchouli at a hootenanny.
