As Los Angeles Rams fans remain confident, many fan bases losing faith in their team

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse — a survey of fans across the NFL, powered by SurveyMonkey. Each week, we send 32 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Los Angeles Rams fans, sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

• Week 1 FanPulse
• Week 2 FanPulse
• Week 3 FanPulse - confidence
• Week 3 FanPulse - game prediction
• Week 4 FanPulse
• Week 5 FanPulse
• Week 6 FanPulse
• Week 7 FanPulse
• Week 9 FanPulse

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The NFL is an annual exercise in disappointment.

Fans of 31 teams see their team fall short every year. Fans of 20 teams don’t even get to see their team in the playoffs. But the nature of the parity the NFL provides a wellspring for excitement and optimism to refill every offseason.

Going into the 2018 season, every SB Nation NFL team site for NFC teams except for one (that would be the Arizona Cardinals fans over at Revenge of the Birds) predicted their team would end with a winning record. Of course, that’s obviously not how reality works.

So what we’re seeing in this week’s FanPulse is reality beginning to hit a lot of fan bases square in the nose.

Not so for Los Angeles Rams fans. At 8-1 and having gone toe-to-toe with the New Orleans Saints on the road, fan confidence is still incredibly high:

Yes, our fan confidence dipped down to 96% this week, but that’s good for second-highest in the NFL behind only Kansas City Chiefs fans at 98%.

What’s been more interesting is how the confidence of fans of so many other teams in differing circumstances has responded to reality.

Consider that 30 of 32 teams had fan confidence of 80% or higher going into Week 1; only Washington Polltakers fans at Hogs Haven and Detroit Lions fans at Pride of Detroit were below that 80% mark.

Check out Jacksonville Jaguars fans at Big Cat Country:

Or Green Bay Packers fans at Acme Packing Company:

Or Baltimore Ravens fans at Baltimore Beatdown:

Or Denver Broncos fans at Mile High Report:

Or...ok, you get it.

Those were all fan bases who went into Week 1 with fan confidence above 90%. There were plenty between 80% and 90% who have been similarly disappointed despite having lower expectations for their team.

This is the nature of the NFL annual cycle. The media environment props up every team and every new player every season. Every rookie looks great! Every free agent looks great! Every returning player looks greater except the ones who were already great and they still look great and older players don’t look less great at all!

Then reality shows up and kicks about ²⁄₃ of NFL fans in the tucchus.

Thankfully for Rams fans, 2018 has been able to stand up to the wildly positive expectations for the team. But as FanPulse results show,fan bases around the NFL are coming to terms with reality. And for most of them, reality isn’t all that great.

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As always, thanks as always to the TSTers who are voting to give us the data each week! The only reason FanPulse works is because of all the fans at each of our sites who continue to give us their opinions. For those of you interested, you can sign up here to vote.