A Fan’s Tribulation: Why Do You Love or Hate the Oakland Raiders?

I must preface this article with a few seemingly unrelated points, but they accentuate the purpose of this article

This is a question that has been bubbling (or effervescing) in my mind for quite some time, especially after a derogatory blog from an "unbiased" reporter at ESPN named Jay Mariotti.

I have made quite a stink about ESPN ever since then, but not solely for that reason.  I had been hard-charging that ESPN has been selling the sizzle of racial bias (i.e. Pacman Jones) without selling the steak—to use a maxim from the sales industry.

 

Nada Nada Limonada

Simply put, that maxim means to sell what the product does, not what it is.  You can sell a car made from "40 bucks of steel" for $10,000, so long as the buyer wants the car badly enough.

Just as you can sell the "greatness" of a player (lemons) with arbitrary and manipulatable things such as statistics, which can be manipulated with PEDs and even the rulebook.

Before you get confused, I like sports stats as much as the next sabermatrician, because I think stats are a good way to evaluate a player.  Nevertheless, the stats don't always match the spatial (what you will see), or even the story (how the player got there, which affects his or her desire to be there and care about winning).

Before I started blogging, I worked primarily in sales (namely in selling credit cards). 

In many ways, I use The Bleacher Report to educate (or at least try to) people on how they are being manipulated to want something that is not worth what they are told it is worth, or what they think it is worth.  The first rule of mental conditioning is this: Make the person think that it was their decision the whole time.

Problem is that people often think that manipulation of others will make you a genius.  At that point, people convince them...

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