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Did Your Team Lose The Super Bowl? Blame Pete Carroll -- And Your Dad, Too

This article is more than 9 years old.

After the Seattle Seahawks dramatically lost Sunday's Super Bowl, coach Pete Carroll became a convenient scapegoat — or as Deadspin's Kevin Draper put it, in a link to video of a postgame interview, "Pete Carroll Tries To Explain What The [Expletive] He Was Thinking."

(ESPN.com wasn't any kinder; Carroll's decision was the "worst call ever," read one headline on the homepage.)

But if you're a Seahawks fan, you may want to lay the blame a little closer to home: Namely, get mad at your dad.

Let me explain.

Daniel Wann, a Murray State professor, has spent decades studying the psychology behind being a sports fan. And in his work, Wann's noted all the usual factors that play a role in your fandom — where you live, or whether a team has a winning record, or even how much media coverage a certain star or franchise gets.

But above all, Wann says, if there's one reason why you became a fan of a team — it's because of your dad.

Wann's found this consistently, from nation to nation, sport to sport. And one survey in the book "Sport Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators" illustrates this well: Wann and his colleagues asked adult sports fans to name the "greatest single influence" behind becoming a sports fan.

For men, the top five reasons broke down as:

  • Fathers: 38.7%
  • Brother(s): 10.7%
  • Friends: 10.1%
  • My school: 8.0%
  • Media: 6.9%

Women reported a somewhat different breakdown; for instance, "school" accounted for almost 15% of their greatest single influence when become a fan.

But just like with sons, dad always came first for daughters, too. "Fathers" were the greatest single influence for 31% of adult female fans, while "boyfriends" represented 6.9%, and "husbands" represented just 1.7%

(For men, wives didn't play a role in their fan decision.)

Of course, fame, location, and winning matter a ton too.

Just think of the national allure of the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys, two classic franchises with generations of loyalists. One 2012 analysis found that the Cowboys had about 12 times more fans than the St. Louis Rams — a gap that can be partly chalked up to Texas's population, but not entirely. (Texas has about 4.5 times the population of Missouri.)

And up-and-coming teams can ride championship seasons to waves of new fans. You can see how Facebook data suggests the Seahawks fan-footprint expanded in the Northwest between 2013 (map) and 2014 (map and below), after the team won a Super Bowl.

Facebook in 2013 also reported that the average NFL team gained a mean 1,400 likes on weeks that it won a regular-season game, and more than 7,000 likes on weeks it won a playoff game.

(On weeks when the team didn't play a game during the season, the average franchise gained several hundred likes.)

Also See: How Facebook Can Predict When You'll Fall In Love

But the power of a few wins is easily trumped by the power of family bonds.

As Robert Krulwich reported for NPR in 2011, "sharing a team with your dad is a point of connection for both sons and daughters."

"Dads are more emotionally remote than moms, except when they're watching sports, and that's the crack in the ice that kids naturally choose to exploit," Krulwich added. "If Dad laughs, cries and high fives about the Red Sox, his kids are going to use the Red Sox to laugh, cry and high-five with him."

Understandably, a shared team becomes a lifelong social lubricant. "When you grow up in a sports family, a lot of memories are sports-related," Wann told the Washington Post in 2012. "Vacation, Christmas and sports memories are what stick."

And we get this, on an instinctual level. You can see it in how Boston Celtics super-fan Bill Simmons, despite living in Los Angeles, programmed his daughter to hate the rival Lakers, or at least the color purple. I've felt it in my own rooting interests, and read it in dozens of stories from other fans.

(Anecdotally, Yankees fans seem to be especially distressed that their children might grow up to root for other teams — at least one advice columnist had to talk a father down.)

Of course, some families are suffering more than most on this Monday.

Nate Carroll — a 27-year-old Seattleite — gets to blame both Coach Carroll and his father: They're one and the same.

Steve Belichick, presumably, is having a much happier morning: His 62-year-old dad, and boss, just won his fourth Super Bowl.

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