East Coast Bias (ECB) is traditionally the ascription by fans throughout the Midwest and West Coast of the national media's predilection to favor teams from the East. The general reason given for this phenomenon is the time-zone difference that makes games played on the West Coast largely irrelevant to denizens of the Eastern Seaboard, or perhaps a remnant of a time fifty years prior when no West Coast professional franchises existed.

Like most demographic definitions of this day and age, ECB has gone from a black-and-white description to something completely media-driven and significantly more nebulous. Twenty-four hour-a-day sports coverage, ratings-starved networks and the on-demand revolution have allowed the previous incarnations of ECB to fade into the mists of time, but have left us with its bastard child - the ECB Fan.

The ECB Fan is a much more difficult creature to define than one would initially imagine. Is it someone that cares just a little too much about their team? Yes, but that definition applies to fans nationwide. There are dedicated Brewers fans and Mariner fans - I live in San Diego and have a neighbor who keeps his Chargers flags on his pick-up twelve months a year, and yet no one would ever refer to the San Diego fan-base as anything remotely resembling ECB-like. Could it then be the lack of bandwagon fans? Not possible. Every team has bandwagon fans. For Christ's sake, everyTHING has bandwagon fans. It is (or should be) the understood goal of any organization providing any type of goods or services to create bandwagon fans. Why would a sports franchise be exempt?

After a staggering amount of reflection, I finally stumbled upon my own formula, not unlike the discovery of Buffon's Needle, to judge whether a fan, and by extension, a franchise, may be considered part of the ECB phenomenon. (If it's not clear to any non-ECB fans at this point to whom I refer, I offer a definition in your terms - "An obnoxious, self-entitled sports fan, who discounts the merits of any other team's fans' POV while conversely inflating one's own understanding of the game to the point where they actually believe that they could step in as GM tomorrow and achieve wild success." A little clearer? Good.)

I will spare the reader all of the feverishly scrawled statistical calculations used in developing my formula and keep it as simple as possible: A true ECB fan's interest in "their team" wanes and intensifies in an inverse relationship with said team's fortunes on the field or court. When the team is performing poorly, these fans take to the sports talk airwaves and egg on the media in demanding blood atonement for the crimes that they are being made to suffer by management/ownership. The media, in turn, have no choice but to play out the string. I mean, when these fans get together, what do you think they discuss? The great times? The prospects for next year? The past championships, perhaps? No, they revel in being able to recite the litany of players from the leanest of years - guys who had no business on a big-league roster. To take my colleague's "Battered Person" syndrome hypothesis in a different direction, I propose instead that the reason behind this behavior is to serve as a reminder that "they were there" during the lean times. They have suffered and if/when fortunes ever turn, they should reap the most reward.

Aha! But there in-lies the rub. Remember that I previously referred to an "inverse" relationship. Say this ECB club does turn it around. Maybe they become a perennial contender, win a championship even. In come streaming the hated band-wagon fans and the large-scale national media attention. The ECB fan, incredibly, becomes slightly embarrassed. Are people mentally lumping them in with the band-wagon jumpers? Will anyone notice that they're wearing a give-away jersey from three years ago? Most importantly: What if they don't?!?

On to geography: Notice please that the geography of ECB takes a backseat to mindset. That's not an accident. Personality takes preference to location in this discussion, as you will soon see. First, I will state the obvious: ECB does not refer to the entire East Coast. I have yet to hear anyone rave to me about the intensity of Carolina Panther fans (when you don't even use the name of your specific state in the name of your franchise, let alone the city, you know you're reaching - and I'm looking at you too, Pats fans, but we'll get to that in part II). Similarly, I've never been warned not to wear my team's gear to a Marlins home game in order to avoid an inevitable beat-down. Let's not forget the most blatant case: Atlanta is an East Coast city, but calling Braves fans band-wagon would be an insult to band-wagon fans. They don't begin showing up when the team is winning, they wait until the fucking NLCS!!

Part II - SO WHO THE EFF ARE ALL THESE ASSHOLES ANYWAY?

ECB can generally be quarantined to the megalopolis otherwise known as the Northeast Corridor, which stretches from Boston to Washington D.C.

Yankees fans, of course, consider themselves to be the end-all and be-all of ECB, which is actually kind of cute considering that they have the greatest number of johnny-come-lately partisans of any franchise in any sport world-wide. A good rule-of-thumb is this: When a given team has contended for over ten years, it becomes nearly impossible to separate the bandwagon fans from the ECB-ers. Hell, the Yankees have fans that don't realize and may never find out that they aren't hard-core. A $300 million payroll will do that for a franchise. The Mets have an ECB fan-base in the more conventional sense as someone who has perused the hate mail generated by SandJ's "Met fans as Battered Spouses" column can attest. (One twenty-year acquaintance of the author's actually threatened to "pop a cap in his ass".) As a ten-year Manhattan resident, I can also personally vouch for Jet, Giant and Knick fans, although the Knick and Jet variety are understandably easier to spot these days.

Moving northward on I-95, we head to Boston. It's not even worth getting into the merits of Red Sox fans. We get it. We all witnessed what happened, okay? It took a long time to win the World Series, blah, blah, blah. Now you have a nationally despised franchise and nothing left to whine about. Enjoy. By the way, is it just me, or have they run a pink hat give-away promotion at Fenway for every game since 2004? Because it sure seems that way.

Now, to preface my next point - please note that the email address is phil@sportsandjokes.com. Please direct any and all hate mail accordingly. Boston is NOT AN NFL TOWN! THE PATRIOTS ARE NOT AN ECB TEAM! To whit: Remember the national media shoving the Pats down our throats during the Pete Carroll era? Yeah, neither do I. How about that signature fan intensity when the best player in team history was a fucking offensive lineman? Don't get me wrong, New England (not even part of a state's name in there BTW) currently has a great ownership group, good management and is enjoying a nice run, but they are a bandwagon team with no ECB factor at all. Take it for what it's worth. (I'm giving you the Celtics by the way, so take it easy with the bitching.)

So, New York, Boston (MLB and NBA), and... Philadelphia. Philly is probably the most perfect example of ECB fandom. These people genuinely seem to prefer that their teams suck. When any Philly team has a modicum of success, they have no idea what to do with themselves. Thankfully, in recent years, they've had Donovan McNabb, Allen Iverson, and Mitch Williams to save them from actually having to deal with success. Let's face it, Philly fans pride themselves in their endless reserves of energy when it comes to being able to piss and moan. "Fuckin' Iggles!" "Fuckin' Phils!" Fuckin' Sixers!"  What a bunch of assholes.

Full disclosure: During my younger years, I once shared a summer house with some Philly fans. One Saturday, we're heading down to the beach and one of these tools actually brought along a boom-box so they could listen to a fucking pre-season Eagles game down by the water. This may explain some of the enmity apparent in the last paragraph. Thank you for listening.

Many argue that ECB ends in Philadelphia. I disagree wholeheartedly. Baltimore is in the club for baseball based upon the fact that they have been effectively ass-raped by the current owner to the point that one of the most talented and classiest baseball writers in the business (Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post) called him out for purposely sandbagging in order to prevent a team from relocating to Washington. In addition, mass walk-outs during games have been organized to protest the Peter Angelos regime and one of the best play-by-play announcers in baseball history (Jon Miller) was shit-canned for vaguely criticizing the handling of a franchise which went from one of the most respected in baseball to one that can't attract a competent GM or even a decent free-agent for that matter. If Met fans can be compared to battered wives, then it would be more than fair to compare Oriole fans to Nicole Brown Simpson.

Balmer also gets the NFL nod from me for two reasons:

During the last NFL expansion, when Baltimore was passed up despite having the strongest ownership group and stadium financing in place (not to mention that little matter of having its collective heart ripped out by Bob Irsay), they didn't say "Oh well, maybe next time." They went out and got a fucking Canadian Football League team. No shit. They even named it the Baltimore Colts and, when threatened by the NFL with a lawsuit, they changed the name to... nothing. They just allowed the fans to keep calling them the Colts and selling bootleg merchandise. The Baltimore, umm, club played for two years, went to the Grey Cup twice, won one championship, sold out consistently and supported the team to the point that Cleveland owner Art Modell, realizing that the expansion package was still on the table, was all but forced to move the Browns there.

Reason number two? When author and Baltimore native Tom Clancy was asked in an interview why, after the Colts left, he hadn't simply switched his allegiance to the Redskins, he responded: "I would rather sell my children to gypsies than root for the Washington Redskins."

This segues us nicely to the nation's capital. Verdict: NFL yes, NBA no (try telling someone that you're a Wizards fan and five will get you ten that the response is - "Really?"), MLB no (I mean, they've already lost two teams. Forgive me for exercising some restraint.) As far as the Redskins go: You know how I know that they're an ECB team? Simple, they are owned and run by an ECB fan who acts like any other guy my age (with a couple of billion dollars) would act if he bought his favorite team:

Dan Snyder: Who can we sign? How much? I wanna win the Super Bowl this year. How can we win the Super Bowl this year? You know what would be awesome? Getting Joe Gibbs back! He's awesome! He'll know just what to do.

Voice of Reason: Um, sir? Mr. Gibbs is retired and has actually already been inducted into the NFL Hall of Fa...

Snyder: How much? How much?!? I'll pay him anything he wants. Do you think I can get my picture taken with him?

So there you have it. No other franchise falls in this particular geographical and, more importantly, mental stratus. I'd like to stress the point that the intent of this piece was not to somehow denigrate fans Mid-West or West Coast fans. Fans in the Mid-West and Northwest generally do it the right way. They root for the home team, have less interest when their teams are bad, and more when they are good - the way it should be. Fans in the Southwest and West Coast simply have better things to do. The weather's too nice to be cranky over a sports team and the beaches are always open. In other words, they have lives. Baltimore loses a team, and they get one from Canada. LA, the second largest media market in the U.S., lost their last NFL team thirteen years ago and don't seem to have noticed yet. There are some other exceptions, to be certain. I'm not sure I understand the dynamic of Chicago fans well enough to wield any authority on the subject, and the Mid-West teams with national followings like the St. Louis Cardinals and Dallas Cowboys just seem like regular non-ECB teams with an outsized share of bandwagon jumpers.

Fully realizing that there is much more to this subject than I could get to given the constraints of the site, I'd love to hear from anyone with anything to add or dispute (or to launch a vicious personal attack perhaps).

phil@sportsandjokes.com