This story is part of the Fall Travel issue, which is on sale here.
I’ve conducted a deeply scientific study and the results are clear: People travel for a lot of reasons in the fall, but the best one is football. By far. If you’re not a football fan, you probably think planning a season’s lone non-holiday vacation around grown men playing a game is juvenile. And you’d be right. But you’d also be missing the point, because as strange as it sounds, traveling for football isn’t about the destination at all.
Here’s an example. Ask any New York Giants fan who doesn’t live in the tri-state area if they’d rather spend one fall Sunday in America’s culture capital, New York City, or nine miles outside the city, standing on a repurposed New Jersey landfill (the Meadowlands) attending a game with their friends. The former trash dump beats Broadway every time.*
Anyone who’s ever boarded a plane in a brand-new NFL jersey, the ones with the league’s sewn-on logo shield at the collar, and gotten a high-five from a similarly dressed (yet total) stranger, already knows this. Football travel serves a couple of important purposes, none of which have anything to do with traveling. It’s especially important for men, not because sports aren’t for women, but since guys are so bad at making new friends as we get older. Men are also pretty bad at staying in touch with old ones. Football travel is an answer to all this. It’s how much of that adult friend work gets done. When you go to a game, whether in your team’s home stadium or away, it’s a chance to be around others who share a common interest. An identity, even.
In my group of friends, I’m “the Bills fan,” yet I live in Miami. You see the issue here. The Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins are division rivals, which puts me in a bind in South Florida. Aside from the handful of people I see at the local Bills bar every Sunday, none of my Miami friends are Bills fans. Zero. And most of my friends see my Bills fandom as a strange eccentricity, at best. At worst, it’s a reason not to talk to me on Sundays.
But then, I make my annual fall pilgrimage to Buffalo — or to another city to see the Bills play on the road — and suddenly I’m “the Bills fan.” I’m around my people, no longer strange, eccentric or hated. I’m swigging Labatt Blues and eating wings without ranch. There’s a sea of us in red, white and blue singing “Heyyy-eyyy-ey-ay!” and jumping through tables. And even though I’m not from Buffalo, somehow it still feels like home.
The fan base begins to feel like family you’ve never met. When I’m traveling, I’ll occasionally spot someone wearing a Josh Allen jersey — the absurdly great Bills quarterback — and give them a hearty “Go Bills!” across the airport terminal. I might seem like another lunatic unexpectedly yelling in public, but me and my compatriot both smile all the way to our gates. I once watched a Bills game in a sports book in Barbados and met the only other Bills fan on the island. We still text on game days. This isn’t just a Bills thing, either. I’ve even seen Jacksonville Jaguars fans — equally as impossible to find in the wild as the animal they’re named after — yell “Duuuuu-valll!” in New York City bars if they spot another fan in black and gold.
I realize that screaming in public isn’t necessarily a thing everyone strives to do. Let me explain it differently: Have you ever flown on a plane when two-thirds of the people are going to the same event and everyone is equally as excited as you? There’s an undeniable energy, a giddy sense of anticipation. No other travel experience comes close, when an entire plane can feel like a reunion with people who’ve never met.
That’s why football fans look at our teams’ schedules the way some people read travel magazines. It’s a four-month list of cities we can imagine ourselves traveling to, surrounded by this family of like-minded individuals who’ll either share in our euphoria or be our companions in misery. But unlike leisure travelers, for football travelers the destination is always secondary to being with your crew. You gotta try it.
*This can also apply to Jets fans, though most of the time they’ll opt to keep standing on said repurposed landfill as it’s generally more enjoyable than watching the actual game.
