I’m a Steelers guy now but I was a late fan. Where I was young in Pennsylvania, three teams in New York and two in Pennsylvania were the same distance to drive – and we did not drive to any of them. 

So I remained a Cowboys fan.(1) My brother, though, was an Eagles fan of early on. And he’s never wavered.

Ants think that’s the proper way to be. Eagle fans hold grudges and ants respect that, but there is no comparison between the level of grudge Philadelphia has against Michael Strahan or Terrell Owens or Kevin Allen or Jerome McDougle and what ants have against their enemies.

If they could write, it would be the stuff of legends.

A recent paper clearly was not written by epidemiologists, because it is boring compared to the clickbait about Scary Chemicals and Miracle Vegetables that epidemiologists send to journalists at Mother Jones and Science every week. Its modest title is “Associative learning of non-nestmate cues improves enemy recognition in ants” while it actually contains a behavioral thunderclap that football fans can only dream about.

If they even get a whiff on an enemy, ants go into attack mode. And it doesn’t have to be this past season, they hold a grudge for life. Philadelphia will gleefully sign Saquon Barkley when the dumb New York Giants General Manager tries to neg him into taking a lowball offer, and then they love him (as they should) but in ants that could never happen. The Nasty Neighbor Effect is locked in.

And the more times they battled, the worse the hatred becomes.

There are no pre-season games, no joint training camps with light contact, it is Def-Con 1 every single time.

Eagles fans are famed for being the most difficult out there – they hate their coach even though he’s 14-3 this year and locked up his division – but if they really want to let the Giants and Cowboys know how they feel, they need to take a lesson from those who really get in the dirt.

NOTE:

(1) It was over a decade after I’d moved to Pittsburgh that I converted from the Cowboys after over 20 years. I had been a Cowboys fan because I had been a Dolphins fan during the greatest season in NFL history, and Dallas beat the Dolphins the next Super Bowl.

In kid logic, the winner gets the spoils, which was my loyalty. I realized I was a Steelers fan when I was invited as the token Cowboys fan to a Super Bowl party in 1996 and felt bad the Steelers lost. I felt bad the whole time because the game was not as close as the half-time or final score suggest.

My departure had implications. The Cowboys not only haven’t won since, they haven’t even made it to the Super Bowl since I converted to the Steelers. Mr. Jones, I am willing to negotiate.