As football bowl season enters its twilight, football’s wildest fans are preparing for six months of sideline hibernation — yet some fans never put sporting spirit to bed.

At games, they line up like painted emblems of team pride, spelling out phrases and waving their arms. Tom Fell was born to be amongst their ranks — to be a superfan.

“You got to have a little bit of a wild hair,” said Fell, a recent University graduate and retired superfan. “You got to have a wild hair to be a maniac paint-up crew. There are guys who’ll just go halfway or whatever, but to have a solid Speedo paint-up crew, just wow.”

Fell graduated from the University in May and now works as an event planner in Chicago. He said he has since moved on from days of “painting up on the sidelines,” but the personal memories are “unforgettable, and I wouldn’t have them any other way.”

Fell and his superfanning friends embraced a self-imposed nickname, The Front Row Freakshow.

“Everyone in our crew was a maniac, and it had to be that way,” he said. “We made it that way. That’s how we got the nickname the Front Row Freakshow.”

While the UGA Athletic Association has no official position on the legality of superfanning, Fell said he has always suspected he may have been bending the assocition’s rigid rules with such extreme fandom.

“Like I said, you have to be a maniac,” he said.

EVAN STICHLER/Staff

Between the hedges and beyond

Definitions of superfandom vary from school to school and freakshow to freakshow. Sarah Cook, English major and Atlanta native, has seen plenty of superfans in her two years at fellow SEC school Auburn University.

Cook said the superfans with whom she’s personally acquainted manage to keep their painted-up gameday personas separate from their everyday appearances, something with which Fell admitted he struggled.

“I mean, I’m just a bold personality in general,” Fell said. “So I can’t really help it if I get painted up at a game on Saturday, whoop and holler all day long and then wake up Monday to take my classes with the same intensity.”

Cook said Auburn fans may flounder in the same psychological quagmire — where are the lines drawn between superfan life and real life? Is there a line at all? How does a superfan leave such gameday intensity on the field?

“The guys I know who do it, though, they’re not super crazy when you just see them on campus,” she said. “But then again everyone is already a little crazy about football at Auburn.”

It’s about tradition

Fell’s typical paint-up gameday begins early — at the very latest by 7 a.m. for a noon kickoff.

“You know, you got to get to the stadium, you have to stake your territory, you have to paint up, you have to rally the fans as they walk in and take their seats,” he said. “It makes for long days.”

Fell said this time commitment is essential to “doing it well.”

“You see any game on ESPN and a lot of people, like, you’ll see guys who are painted chest only,” he said. “Painted up not good. They don’t look good. They look like a bunch of scrugs, you know? It’s definitely an art. They’re definitely good paint-up crews and there are bad paint-up crews. There’re a lot of bad ones out there but there are a lot of solid ones, too.”

Cook said she notices similar dedication in the paint-up crews at Auburn.

“Oh my God, they’re out there so early,” she said. “Especially if it’s an early game. I mean, it seems these guys just jump out of bed on Auburn mornings, pour a bucket of paint on themselves and then stake their territory while it’s still bright and early.”

There are rules to playing the superfan game — and Fell said he looks down on anyone who openly flouts them.

No. 1: Preparation is key.

“Just really full-body is something I would see as not a good paint-up crew,” he said. “If you’re not going full body you don’t need to bother painting up. I mean, we put a lot of time into it,” he says. “People think we’re just a bunch of wahoos, you know, just ending up drunk and hungover in the stadium, but it’s not. It requires a ton of energy. A lot of coordination. I mean, it’s a lot of money.”

Legacy of wild hairs

Stan Jackson, a 2006 University graduate and active member of the Alumni Association, said he judges superfandom to be common amongst all fans, not just 20-year-old students.  Jackson and others made particular mention of Mike Wood, a graduate and superfan legend who paints his bald head with different designs or logos for each gameday. Search football galleries and a shiny bald pate jumps out every few photos, decorated with a rabid bulldog or giant Georgia G — that’s Mike Wood.

“It’s definitely a visual expression of their passion for their team, using their own bodies as the medium.  I think some of the expressions are more artistic than others,” Jackson told The Red & Black.

Referring to himself as “your typical class clown, rebel-without-a-cause type,” Fell said he was originally inspired to paint up as a way of bucking typical football tradition.

“It was a way to do our own thing and to be creative and to express ourselves and to have a fun time at the games instead of just putting on a friggin’ cocktail dress and a bowtie and sweating our butts off just looking like everybody else,” he said.

Fell and his roommates started the Front Row Freakshow in late 2008 after admiring other paint-up crews his freshman year. He said he remains inspired by that original glimpse of three guys spray-painting their bare chests years later, when he was painting up for his last game as a student during the fall 2010 football season.

“They just looked so cool,” he said. “But I knew I could do it better if I put my mind to it and just unleashed that fan maniac inside myself. And I did.”