True fans have their favorite team, and they live and die by how it does from game to game.
Some people are fans of teams for different reasons. Whether it is fantasy football or betting in Las Vegas, people can root for teams for personal gain.

Nothing’s wrong with that. Heck, it’s fun to win an office pool for making better guesses than everyone else and winning a few bucks to pay for that day’s lunch.

Where the problem comes into play is when a person starts rooting for players, results, teams or whatever else when it directly goes against what that person should root for as a fan. In other words, under no circumstances should someone root against his or her own team. Period.

Real fans root for their team both when the times are good and when the chips are down. That is top priority. If your team’s season is lost, it doesn’t matter. You still root for it. You secretly should not want your team to lose just to get better picks in next year’s draft.

Fantasy sports have compromised this standard quite often these days. With fantasy teams, which are created with players from many different teams to form the supposed dream team, there are many possibilities in which fantasy owners are faced with a dilemma. Should they root for their real team or their fantasy team?

The answer is that your real team always trumps your fantasy team. It should never seem right to root for a player to do well against your team because you started that player and need him to score two touchdowns to get you points for your fantasy team.

Fantasy owners usually have problems with loyalty. Every week, they have different lineups, pick up different free agents off of waivers or make trades for a player who really did well the previous week. And then that investment doesn’t pan out the next week, and that player gets benched. No loyalty in fantasy sports.

When you bet on a Vegas score line or make your weekly picks for the office pool, you eventually have to pick for or against your team.

The first difficult part about this is being unbiased, or at least pretending to be. Betting against your team says you don’t have faith in your own team. Betting for your team to win every time means you’re a homer. So the smart thing to do is make as unbiased a pick that you can.

Just remember, as consolation, if you pick your team to lose and it wins, you can still be happy. If you pick your team to win and it loses, you lose twice.

You have to stay loyal to your team. There’s nothing more rewarding for fans than watching a game like this week’s highly anticipated game between No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 5 Texas. That’s a rivalry that can define those teams’ season, regardless of how they do the rest of the year.

Even if the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders are having terrible years (which has been common lately), fans care about their team winning those games. That’s loyalty.

Whether it’s face painting at a game, a tattoo, credit card, poster, car bumper sticker or any other memorabilia, when a fans’ favorite team is on display, it is to show loyalty to that team. And nothing should make you cheer otherwise.

It’s not like your team knows you are a fan, but you know. So be careful what you cheer for.