Most people think sports fandom is about hope. They’re wrong. It’s about learning to function under conditions where hope is actively dangerous, and Frank has been running that training program for decades without meaning to.

Most bad franchises bottom out and rebuild. The Falcons found a third option: stay just good enough to never actually fix anything. It’s a more sophisticated kind of broken.

I’ve been a Braves fan long enough to know the difference between a bad year and a broken organization. What I’m still working out is which one this is.

Fifty-five years old, lifelong Atlanta Falcons fan. I have earned the right to tell you exactly what this franchise does to a person over time, and it is not pretty.

UGA football isn’t a hobby for me. It’s closer to a calendar system. Here’s what that actually looks like after five decades of bleeding red and black.

Spencer Strider is rehabbing his way back to a mound that nearly swallowed him whole. Everything in the pattern recognition says this ends one of two ways, and only one of them is good.

UGA at home is a different organism than UGA on the road, and my cardiovascular system has the receipts. This isn’t about talent. It’s about something uglier.

The 2021 Braves were 44-45 at the All-Star break and I had already mentally moved on. That was a mistake I’ve been making my whole life, and apparently baseball had to be the thing to finally break the habit.

I stopped hoping for a clean ninth inning somewhere around 2023. What replaced it was something more useful than hope.

I’ve watched the Masters from a barstool, a hospital waiting room, and a recliner with a dog on my lap. The course never changes, and somehow that’s the whole point.