Spaceman - truthfully there's an element of personal identity in fandom. So your real-life analogies have a germ of truth to them, right? If you just shake off every loss, and just smile quietly to yourself ever so slightly at every win, and never so much as yell at your TV when your team doesn't pick up a 4th and 1... I mean, if there's no real connection... I don't know. At what point do you just say you're not really a fan? By contrast if you are a fan, you get emotional and tied up in how your team is doing, at least to some extent, and maybe buy some gear that (face it) has no other logical justification, especially at the prices that the logo commands for any NFL team.
So since you're using fandom as one of many building blocks of identity... well, the analogies pertain ever so slightly.
Tune, although the situations are not comparable, particularly on a whole-history timeline, we had a pattern for a long time. We were crap (1-15, 2-14)... then we were mediocre... then ascendent... then many, many times we were "always the bridesmaid and never the bride," just on the verge of the playoffs, but not in (at 10-6 and 9-7... years like that.) It felt like we finally "Broke out" of that w/Bledsoe. But it was always one thing after another... some of them better forgotten rather than remembered, and not all of it on the field.
Our fanbase back in the day was scary enough that they banned NE from Monday Night Football home games for a while. Speaking as a transplant out of the area, that pissed me off, because back then I couldn't see the Pats evah that way. I'm all like trying to pick up a Baltimore channel because it's at least an AFC city, so more likely to care about our 4:15 game... things like that.
Now to your point that it's a **** franchise, with a **** owner and a **** coach (the gist of it, though you had admirably varied descriptions of all the above,) I think they're worse than I've seen here, with the possible exception of Kiam. Their fanbase, by and large, is composed of uninformed and querulous douchenozzles, but that does not necessarily hold true for any given individual - the only universal you can apply is hopelessness in reality, and delusional hope in the face of reality. These guys make Don Quixote look like a hard-nosed realist. I don't really credit them the delusional quality, which is unhealthy, and sadder than when they face the reality. And because of the brash NY/NJ personality, they turn their delusional hope outward and make predictive boasts on a regular basis, and blather inept comparisons at the slightest glimpse of success (Pennington > Brady, look where we drafted him... we went to the AFCCG twice, Sanchez is the Messiah, the dynasty begins, etc. etc. etc.) That part truly is annoying, the offseason super bowl stuff. And then that's inevitably followed by their "regular season super bowl," constituted by hoping to beat the Pats.
One of the things about losing to the JEST in week 16 would be laughing as their fans realize they've "won" the right to a less stellar draft pick... another great consolation prize would be that the hope would begin again, and they'd come up with this whole "worst to first" narrative.
When Bill Belichick decided there was no way in heaven, hell or earth that he would play for the JEST, JEST fans looked at it as the one that got away. They never had a shot. He could smell the suck on that franchise a mile away. He probably had a good deal of the skinny on them from his Gintz days, and then got to experience it first-hand under Tuna.
All that said, the particular JEST fan who of late has sought out torment on our little thread has been relatively civil as far as I can tell, so I have no personal thing against him. It kind of stomps my buzz while hating on the JEST to know that someone here is actually taking it all in and possibly feeling worse, but hey, as I said, he sought it out. Sorry - as I have gotten older, I have begun to value empathy.
In any event, we can certainly agree that the JEST franchise is a doomed, rudderless collection of inept management, coaching, and talent evaluation, and that their organization fosters failure at every layer, by every player, and as a team (and I use that term loosely).
As I say, nobody would blame a JEST fan for escaping the gravity-well of the black hole of suckage, but that's the nature of a black hole, and this guy is past the green event horizon.
. Thank You for Being a Fan!
