What Does Your Favorite NFL Team Say About You?

Picking your favorite NFL team isn't merely an exercise in geography. It's a study of who you are as a human being, and indeed is functionally a comprehensive psychological analysis. Who you choose to follow can tell the world everything they need to know about who you are.

Do you identify with the agony of rooting for the Browns or Bills? Do you revel in the smugness that comes with cheering for the Patriots or the Broncos? These are powerful questions that everyone must wrestle with at some point in their lives.

Sure, we could give you a rigorous to pick which team should be yours. However, the best way to pick your team is actually to allow your team to choose you. As result, this choice also identifies for the world what kind of person you probably are. We took a look at all 32 teams in an effort to answer the question: What Does Your Favorite NFL Team Say About You?

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You believe that Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are quite possibly the two smartest people ever to walk planet earth. Even though your team hasn't won a championship in over 10 years, you still carry yourself with the swagger of someone who is never more than a year or two removed from a ring. This type of misplaced confidence probably leaks into your everyday life, where you're completely oblivious to how other people perceive you. You think you're always the smartest guy in the room, and aren’t afraid to show it.

While you have absolutely no reason to be, you let Rex Ryan's endless supply of confidence become your mantra for everyday living. You may not actually ever succeed, but you're always going to act like you are the next big thing. While losing and comical failure follows you everywhere you go, that will never stop you from showing up. Which is admirable in its on the way, sort of.

If you're a Dolphins fan, you probably don't ever actually go to the games. There are so many other far more attractive options in Miami than sitting in the baking sun for 3 1/2 hours as Ryan Tannehill struggles to throw the ball more than 15 yards. Why watch your team haplessly try to score more than 17 points when you could just go to South Beach? That sounds a whole lot better.

The doom and gloom of four consecutive Super Bowl losses still haunts you. You begin every season with just a flicker of hope, but within an hour quickly resign yourself to another 8-8 finish (at best). Your raging pessimism is likely an integral part of your very existence, regardless of whether circumstances actually give you cause for hope. Also, your newfound love of Kyle Orton has likely caused you to make sure all your shirts have incredibly baggy sleeves.

Your life is one never-ending string of disappointments. No better how good things look or how high your hopes get built up, there's always a “Fumble” or “Drive” around the corner to bring you crashing down. Like your team’s never-ending quarterback carousel, the solution to your problems always feels like it's right around the corner, but never actually pans out. While you've come to expect this disappointment that follows you everywhere, you remain optimistic that maybe, just once, things will go your way. Sorry, they won't.

You have blind faith in your favorite players, overlooking their often obvious faults and giving them a collective standing ovation anyway. In life, this means that you are wont to give anybody a second, third, fourth, and even fifth chance to win back your good graces. You're willing to look the other way if someone can help you get to the top, whether it's your middle linebacker who obstructs justice in a murder investigation, or a coworker who may also happen to be a terrible human being. After all, the end justifies the means.

You're a staunch believer in tradition, and that at the end of the day everyone will bow down to you because of your history. It doesn't matter if the reality of the situation means that you don't actually command nearly as much respect as you thought; what matters is your own perception. You've also likely taken after Troy Polamalu and haven't cut your hair for the last 15 years, which looks intimidating on him but probably pretty terrible on you.

Every year, you think that you have finally arrived among the elite. And every year, when it comes time to prove yourself, you come up woefully short. For the Bengals, playoff failure has become a tradition unlike any other; for you, it could happen when you finally land date with the man or woman of your dreams and totally blow it. You also put a lot of faith in gingers, a decision that haunts you year after year.

It's tough to imagine being in Jaguars fan, which is probably why so few people go to the games. Life is pretty awful; you live in the much less nice part of Florida, your team is an atrocity, and there really is no sign that things are going to get better. Hope is something you abandoned around the time when Maurice Jones-Drew stopped being a productive running back. Your ability to suffer through the Blaine Gabbert era and remain a fan, however, speaks to your high character and ability to endure terrible punishment. After all, there are rumors (unconfirmed) that the United States government uses footage of Gabbert's Jaguars tenure to torture detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

You have basically zero experience with what it's like to root for a bad team. After all, you hopped on the Peyton Manning bandwagon and suffered through just one terrible season before you got Andrew Luck and immediately became a top team again. You believe that Marvin Harrison is a simple car wash and bar owner, and nothing more. You trust people, perhaps a little too much. While this may ultimately hurt you down the road, right now you're just enjoying the ride too much to notice.

You pray at the altar JJ Watt, and in doing so overlook many of the other holes on your roster. This means in your everyday life that you're distracted by flashy things, and let them cloud your judgment when looking at the big picture. While you haven't been a Texans fan for a long, you have probably been a football fan for your entire life, which in a weird way makes you deserving of a more competently run team. Enduring the Matt Schaub-Gary Kubiak era has made you stronger, although it also has probably taken about 10 years off your life and caused you to gain about 15 pounds by stress eating barbecue 16 times per year.

You long for the days of “Air McNair,” when your team was a perennial playoff contender and always looked competent at the very least. Having suffered through the Vince Young era, you are inherently skeptical of the next big thing, whether it's on the football field, a piece of technology, a potentially great new job, or anything else. While being careful will allow you to avoid suffering and not be disappointed by safe choices such as turning your team over to Ryan Fitzpatrick, it also means that you essentially have no hope of ever reaching the top.

While you may sometimes be too baked to notice, you love watching your team zip the ball all over the field and put up all kinds of points. You're always ready to move on to the next cool thing; be honest, how long did it take you to trade in your Tim Tebow jersey for a Peyton Manning? You firmly believe that regular season success guarantees championships, regardless of what history would say. You also likely have selective memory, choosing to completely ignore last year’s Super Bowl and simply pretend that it never happened. When you get smoked 43-8, denial is your best friend.

Between your city’s beaches and beautiful weather, football is very much not your priority. You lived through enough of the Philip Rivers era to know that you should never get too high or too low; winning 12 games in the regular season is great, but all it means is that it will make your inevitable playoff defeat hurt that much more. You have already kind of forgotten about LaDainian Tomlinson, which is okay because you never won anything with him anyway. You have the perfectly calm, laid back temperament to deal with someone like Norv Turner, whose maddening playcalling and late game meltdowns would have gotten him run out of nearly any other city.

Since the 2002 Super Bowl appearance, things have not gone well for you. You care about your team more than almost anything else, but your passion goes unrewarded year after year. This makes you angry, and probably bleeds into your everyday life. Your energy and drive for success is great, but the frustrations you encounter along the way probably make you incredibly unpleasant to be around. The idea of being a renegade pirate really appeals to you, a prospect that is mildly terrifying for anybody who knows you.

Win or lose, you love your team. You're the type to stick around through thick and thin, through Romeo Crennel and Todd Haley, to finally see your team succeed. In your family, you're the one that people can rely on to be there and support them even if it is a complete trainwreck. While your unflinching support is certainly a noble quality, it also subjects to you to a lot of pain and emotional trauma. Your hope that your faith might someday lead to the ultimate reward clouds your judgment, unfortunately, causing you to make decisions that inadvertently make your life much, much worse.

Basically, everything is Tony Romo's fault. Short on your mortgage payment this month? Tony Romo. Got turned down for a date? Tony Romo. Suffering through another disappointing 8-8 season? Tony Romo. Okay, that last one might actually be his fault. You also likely have a crazy uncle much like Jerry Jones, one who is fun to watch from a distance but becomes a lot less funny when his decisions begin to impact your everyday life. Like that uncle, you really want to find a way to take away his main responsibilities, but there's no good way for you to actually pull it off. Sadly, you must ride shotgun as his shoddy decision-making ends up hurting you time and again.

Your life is a constant push and pull between extreme euphoria and extreme anger. Often, these two opposite emotions bleed together. One minute you love someone, the next minute you may hate them, but often you exist somewhere in the middle. You, more than anybody else, treat your favorite players like your family; you get explosively angry with them when they disappoint you, but will defend them to the death when anybody else outside the family insults them. The only thing that made you angrier than Donovan McNabb's play on the field is when somebody in the media went after him.

Hail! You're feeling pretty badly about your team these days. You've been a diehard for your entire life—loyally supporting them through a lot of lean years—but so far it hasn’t gotten you much. Your loyalty and ability to endure heartache are admirable traits, but it gets harder each day to overlook the things going on around you. Your horrible owner likely makes you skeptical of people in positions of authority, and with good reason. Even these so-called smart people somehow manage to avoid using their brains to make easy decisions. You still shake your head at the Albert Haynesworth and Donovan McNabb contracts, and are constantly waiting for the next dumb thing to go down. And that doesn't even touch the fact that many feel your team's name is a racial slur.

You love Eli Manning. You hate Eli Manning. You love Tom Coughlin. You hate Tom Coughlin. You never know when the Giants are going to win the Super Bowl, and when they're going to go 6-10. It's a roller coaster of emotions, with huge peaks and valleys that could happen at any point. Your regular life is probably very similar, where constant change and uncertainty is what keeps you going. It's exhausting, frustrating, and terrifying, but at this point it's the only way you know how to live.

You've put memories of 0-16 behind you, and now you're focused solely on how many times you can get Calvin Johnson the ball. The gaudy offensive numbers and promise of a strong defensive line make you think every year is going to be the year you finally break through. And yet, for one reason or another, it never quite happens. Detroit is a city where comebacks and defying the odds are a way of life. Whether it's realistic or not, you believe that the same is true for your football team, even though the Jim Caldwell thousand-yard stare should be enough to make you flee for your life.

You value tradition, hard work, and above all else, defensive of excellence. Your memories of 1985 and the Brian Urlacher era make you think that dominance on one side of the ball will get you to the promised land. You watch Jay Cutler and think every year is going to be the year he makes the leap to become one of the top quarterbacks in the NFL. When it doesn't happen, like a proud parent with an underachieving child you make excuse upon excuse for why it didn't happen. You also remind yourself that it could always be worse: you could still have Rex Grossman.

Football is the center of your existence. There are Sundays, and then the other six days of the week which serve only as a precursor to the main event. Brett Favre was your leader, and has now ceded that title to Aaron Rodgers. The only things you value more than the Packers are bratwurst, beer, and cheese, in some order. On a related ote, you may or may not also have a minor weight issue.

To say the last few years have been frustrating would be an epic understatement. You attach your hopes to people who seem worthy, only to see them disappoint you. Whether it's Brett Favre throwing a huge interception in the 2009 NFC championship or Adrian Peterson getting arrested for child abuse, your stars always seem to let you down. Your enthusiasm and optimism are admirable qualities and allow you to get excited every year, but you also simultaneously brace yourself for the inevitable fall.

You are extremely wary of franchise quarterbacks, but the milquetoast Matt Ryan has helped you recover from the Michael Vick disaster. You are tantalized by flashy talent, but in the end are frustrated by the lack of tangible results that it gets you. Your favorite dance is still the Dirty Bird, even though it hasn't really been in fashion for over 15 years. That doesn’t matter, though; when it makes its inevitable come back, you'll be ready.

You may often wear the same surly expression as team owner Jerry Richardson during games, but you can't deny that the Cam Newton era has filled you with an optimism that's been lacking since losing in the Super Bowl over 10 years ago. Even when half your defensive line gets suspended, you still believe in your team's ability to keep on winning. You're not someone who gets easily discouraged by reality or what experience tells you to be afraid of. You shake off traumatic events like the Jake Delhomme five interception playoff game, always ready to move on with your life.

The festive atmosphere of New Orleans makes every Saints game a party, but that doesn't mean that you don't get worked up over the way the league mistreats your team. BountyGate has left you jaded, feeling like you are constantly a target even when that may not be the case. You can no longer hear the phrase “affect the head” and not immediately go into the fetal position. If your name is “Greg,” “Gregg,” any other variation, you've probably begun legal proceedings to change it.

Since winning the Super Bowl, it's been a lot of up-and-down (but mostly down) for you. You never really recovered from losing Jon Gruden, with the Raheem Morris and Greg Schiano eras answering the question: what's the worst that could happen? This has led you to become a skeptic, seeing any potential answer to a problem as something more likely to be a disaster than an actual solution. You also likely constantly worry about your competition, which because of its quality prevents you from ever really building anything.

Often overlooked because of your peers, you don't necessarily get the respect you deserve. It isn't always pretty, but you get the job done and at the end of the day find yourself compared favorably with the most successful teams and people. No matter what, you manage to piece together something good out of basically spare parts. You are the MacGyver of football teams, taking some paperclips, bubblegum, and Drew Stanton, and turning it into a useful piece of machinery capable of making the playoffs.

Perhaps nobody is more a victim of circumstance than you. Despite your apparent talent and solid support system, your competition constantly beats you down and makes you look way worse than you actually are. You have some serious strengths, but fall just short of your competition enough that nobody will really notice you. Like Chris Long and the Rams' defensive line, your borderline-elite skills sadly don't really get you anywhere.

Discipline and power. Those are your two biggest strengths, but are also two tenuous pillars that make your decline almost inevitable. Momentary slip ups and transgressions are as constant as gravity, and when they happen to you, you go to pieces. You also don't always mesh well with your superiors, feeling like they treat you more like a child and less like an adult. While that may have yielded you some success in the past, when things start to go wrong you immediately question whether this is really an effective leadership tactic.

You fancy yourself invincible, a force unlike anything the world has ever seen. You've probably given yourself a nickname, and are unafraid to share it with others and talk about why you deserve such a self-aggrandizing moniker. What annoys the living hell out of everybody else, however, is also your greatest strength: you back up your big talk pretty much every time.