On social media, nothing is sacred and, sometimes, that's okay.
One of the unique perks of watching live sports is that you get to celebrate (or commiserate) with millions of other fans all at once. But what if you could process those extreme emotions about 30 seconds before everyone else at your watch party?
That’s essentially what I do anytime I sit in front of the TV, shivering with anxiety about a football game. No, I don’t have supernatural powers of prognostication; if I did, I’d probably do a lot more sports betting. I'm just an all-digital guy without a cable subscription, so I have to rely on a variety of streaming services — and that means any live game I watch comes with a delay of about 15 to 30 seconds.
Naturally, since I follow a lot of sports fans (and beat writers and even official team accounts) on Twitter, my timeline is a minefield of spoilers during any big game. Whether they’re watching with a comparatively shorter delay or they’re at the game in person, a bunch of these people are tweeting reactions to things I haven’t seen yet, and I simply can’t resist a peek. I will literally refresh my timeline repeatedly before any important play just so I can know what’s going to happen next. I do this to protect my emotional well-being, of course.
Take January's playoff game between my beloved Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills (a thriller that would instantly be deemed one of the best ever when it was over), for example. In the first quarter, the official Chiefs account posted this cogent piece of unbiased analysis.
(In sports terms, “QB1 HAS WHEEEEEEEEEELS” means the starting quarterback is good at running and not just throwing.)
At this point, the Chiefs were already down 7-0 against a team they got steamrolled by earlier in the season, and my nerves were all the way on edge. If they couldn't score a touchdown here, then my superstitious mind was ready to declare the game over, even with three full quarters to go. (This is what happens when you hand your emotional well-being over to a team that once went 50 years between Super Bowl appearances, like I did many years ago.)
Thankfully, I saw that tweet right before my team's superstar quarterback ran into the endzone to tie the game. Armed with the knowledge of what was about to play out on my TV, I was able to take a deep breath, relax, sit back, and enjoy the action like an emotionally healthy person would. This happens to me probably about a dozen times during every Chiefs game.
Writing this out for you, dear readers, makes me realize just how weird it is that I do this to myself on a weekly basis during football season. Any football game I watch is now a two-screen experience, requiring both my TV and my iPhone in hand with Twitter open. In 2019, when KC won the Super Bowl, I was surrounded by friends at a big watch party, and regrettably spent a good deal of that night refreshing my timeline.
The fact that they’re all still friends with me means I hang out with the right people. But if they asked me to change that habit, we'd have a problem.
While I wouldn’t recommend anyone else do this, I will defend my actions. Sports give us an opportunity to care deeply about things that don’t matter, and that’s great because it's a handy distraction from all the horrors of everyday life. But caring a little too much about something with such low stakes also carries the risk of severe disappointment, especially when you have no control over the outcome. Even if you personally choose not to take advantage of this digital precognition, surely you can see the value in knowing what’s about to happen during the most unpredictable, uncontrollable moments in your life. Think of it this way: If you can’t change the outcome, at least you can emotionally steel yourself for it.
I can only hope that, as big tech companies like Apple and Amazon fight it out to take control of live sports streaming, neither figures out how to reduce the delay. If that does happen, though, I'll have to learn how to cope with results in real time, and I'm not sure my pessimistic, broken-too-often-Chiefs-fan heart could take it.
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