Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. Apathy is the last emotion you want to evoke in others. If you evoke hate, at least people care enough to feel something. When you evoke apathy, you basically don’t exist.
Enter the Jacksonville Jaguars. If you’re still reading this, you’re more interested in the Jaguars than the common NFL fan. No team in pro football evokes more apathy than Wayne Weaver’s club. How does a team get to this point?
maurice-jones-drew
A big part of the Jaguars’ problem, obviously, has been poor attendance. Duval County, a college football hotbed, is lukewarm about the pro game. Factor in an economic downturn that rocked Northeast Florida as hard as any area in the nation (unemployment hovering around 13 percent) and you get losses of 17,000 season ticket holders in ’09 and weekly television blackouts. This past offseason, another 6,000 fans chose not to renew their Jaguar season tickets. In short, the organization’s days in Jacksonville could be numbered.
But let’s focus on between-the-sideline factors. In football, you don’t evoke apathy through repeated failure. The Detroit Lions might not have many fans these days, but few people are apathetic towards the team. The Lions have been so bad that they’ve become interesting. The Raiders are the same way, to an extent. Apathy might be the worst scenario for an NFL franchise, but it’s not achieved by being the worst NFL franchise. Rather, it’s achieved by being resoundingly mediocre.
