Charlotte paper calls out weak, fair-weather Panthers fans

Charlotte is a little light on professional sports. There’s no MLB team, and no NHL team. The Charlotte Hornets literally moved away to New Orleans in the early 2000s. Their other professional team, the Carolina Panthers, wouldn’t even name their team after Charlotte. Instead, they just mixed together South Carolina and North Carolina together in the name.

Charlotte just isn’t home to many die hard sports fans. Well, the die hard sports fans are just fans of other teams. Just a few games after their Super Bowl run, ticket prices had already bottomed out. In fact, local news site Charlotte Agenda included fair weather Panthers fans on their list of most annoying people.

In August and September, they bleed Panther’s blue. Their house is covered in black and blue flags, they own the perfect Panther’s tailgate RV and even their license plate is a constant reminder to ‘Keep Pounding.’ But after a series of losses and a sexist press conference, the Fair-Weathered Fan claims they never thought the Panther’s were going to be that good anyway. This is about the same time they start rooting for their original home team from whatever city they lived in before Charlotte.

There’s not much to argue with in this article, except somehow bankers didn’t make the list. The city is basically a giant Bank of America branch. The darkest moment of my life was being stuck in an unending conversation about banking with someone from Charlotte. I’m 80 percent certain Charlotte added a football team just so bankers could expense another event.

Atlanta faces off with a Panthers team dealing with a ton of self-inflicted problems. They just traded away their top wide receiver Kelvin Benjamin for nothing, and now have one of the league’s weakest wide receiver groups. They paid Matt Kalil $55 million, and I still have trouble believing it. Their cornerbacks have been a disaster since they let Josh Norman leave because they didn’t feel like paying him. It all starts at the top, and Jerry Richardson is barely one step away from a comic book villain with the superpowers of being rich and awful.

The Panthers will need some help to win on Sunday, and they probably aren’t about to get it from crowd noise from their weak fanbase.