This is when the chart is sorted by the amount of "love" votes that each team received. The Seahawks are the most loved team with 14% of the vote, followed by New England, Green Bay, and San Francisco. I can reasonably see these teams making the top spots due to their large fan bases, but honestly I'm surprised that nationally there is so much love for Seattle. I'm used to being irrelevant, unnoticed, for other fans to be indifferent towards us. In fact, we were the 7th lowest team when ranked in Indifference.
Now, how do we feel about this? Personally, I've always felt a little jaded about the lack of respect given to our team. I was a little jealous of the Packers or Patriots every time I turned on SportsCenter and had to see a clip of their practice or a press conference. Other than the 05-06 season, the only reason the Seahawks could get a spot on the boob tube was if we were playing one of the "powerhouse" franchises or if a player got a DUI (Lookin at you, Jerramy). I know a lot of the local writers and radio personalities publicly say that they don't care about the national perception of our team, that its even better to fly under the radar, to be the perennial underdog. "We all we got, we all we need!" However, wouldn't it, doesn't it feel good to be the talk of the town? To hear the national pundits recycle the same lines about how the Seahawks are the team that no one wants to face in the playoffs? Doesn't that make your heart flutter a bit? I know it does mine.
Possibly the most interesting part of this study was the study of fan's opinions of certain teams. One of the things the study author did was to ask each participant which was their favorite team. He then compared them to the other fans of that team to see what the general consensus is among those fans about each other team. Might sound confusing, so here's an even more confusing chart. It's sort of hard to read, but basically red=bad and blue=good. If you want to know what each team's fans think of the hawks, find the SEA column on the top and read down. The only teams that had a majority of negative responses to the Seahawks were Dallas, San Francisco, and Green Bay. The biggest thing I took from that was that even division foes Arizona and St Louis don't really dislike us, and Green Bay is still bitter about that game winning interception Russell threw.
Now I was curious to see which teams the Seahawks fans favored and which ones they hated. How convenient, then, that the author had also arranged the data to show this! Below is a chart of how the self identified Seahawks fans responded about all other teams.
From this we can gather that our fans really don't mind non-divisional foes and really really don't mind teams that are in the AFC where we don't play them often. The bottom five teams that the 12th men and women really can't stand are Oakland, San Fran, NY Jets, Dallas, and Pittsburgh. Shitsburgh is the obvious choice as the villain, I don't think thats a surprise, and I'm assuming that the disdain for Oakland stems from when the Seahawks were in the AFC West. San Francisco is another obvious choice, and I can only theorize that the reason fans don't like the Jets is because of the polarization cause by Tim Tebow. And Dallas, well the Cowboys were the overall second least liked team in the study when sorted by overall score, so no surprise there.
So, it seems that not only are we starting to garner a begrudging respect from fans league-wide, but are also winning fans in other markets. Is it the players? The coaches? The front office? The style of play? The stats? The location? The media relations? The teams we've beaten? Who knows? And more importantly, who cares?
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