I have always wondered about your teams. Pretty eclectic.
Danny Manning fan?
Jim Abbott/Reggie Jackson?
Alan Shearer?
Lemieux/Jagr?
Browns... no idea
Pretty much all yes... and the last would be Kosar, Dixon and Mack... the 80's Browns were great... until they got to the AFC title game every year.
Honestly MOST of them I picked before I was old enough to know better, Pens and Jay hawks had as much to do with a little kid liking the mascot as anything... then I came across Mario and Manning later... The Angels are the only "family' team we have... and I loved the Browns in the 1980's... ND came from Cath. V Convicts II with the 3rd and forever game... I've been a fan ever since...
again, bottom line is, I picked my teams pretty young, grew up in a family where you could NOT root for many of the local teams (Raiders, Trojans, Lakers) but could root for whoever otherwise... and once my teams were my teams it just was. I think being a So Cal sports fan with only one team (Angels) actually starting out here, made it easy to look nationally as well.
The only team that has any recent story behind it is Newcastle… I am of course a Celtic fan but when the SPL hit hard times about five or so years back it became harder and harder to view any of their games…
Begrudgingly I decided I had to take up an English team: I then came up with a formula of sorts… the team couldn’t be from the South, had to be as close to Scotland as possible, had to have a good relationship with Celtic, had to have a rich history (not necessarily a winning one, but rich), and couldn’t be the hot team of the day (like a Man U)…
All that together really brought only two teams out at all… NCU and Liverpool… I went with NCU.