Eighteen. If you’re a Real Salt Lake fan you know what that number means.

Another game and you’re in ‘99 Metros territory. And you know as well I that nothing is going to change so long as Ellinger is in charge. If this continues much longer there will be no dispute about it: Ellinger’s Real Salt Lake will be the worst performing team in Major League Soccer history.

Now there’s a certain dignity in supporting a lousy team. But let’s be clear: that dignity is conferred only retrospectively. It’s only later, when you’re actually winning games, that you can look over at those newly arrived bandwagon bums and know that you are better than them because you were there during the darkest of days.

That dignity does not exist during the dark days themselves. The dark days are miserable days, they are days of fomenting anger, an anger whose primary object will always rightfully be the negligence and incompetence of the team’s management. And let me assure you Real Salt Lake fans if your team has gone eighteen games without a win and your coach hasn’t been fired, then the management of your team has been negligent and incompetent.

Supporting a team as poorly managed as Real Salt Lake is undoubtedly a miserable endeavor. But some people cannot cope with misery. Such people foster within themselves a sort of cognitive dissonance that helps them deal with the situation. They refuse to cast judgment, they refuse to place blame. The team, they say, “tried” really hard every week and “the coach is not the problem.” In fact, when pressed these people will deny there is a problem. And if you say there is a problem, if you blame the coach, if you criticize the tactics (or lack thereof), they will admonish you for not supporting the team. (Yes, this type of person occurs frequently today in the political world as well.)

These are the happy-go-lucky idiots who support the team “win or lose,” “no matter what.” They have conned themselves into believing that everything is going well, that everything is going according to plan. Those people are insufferable. They’re the soccer fan equivalent of that wretch in high school who was so confused that he laughed and smiled whenever he was picked on and beat up. He couldn’t admit his dire social situation and he couldn’t admit that something was very, very wrong. So he pretended it was all a lark and constructed his own explanatory reality in which things weren’t at all as bad as they truly were. In fact, to him things were just splendid. Such dissociation from the genuine reality of the situation is therapeutic to be sure. It is also pathetic.

There is another way. When you’re a good team that goes bad (as DC United did a few years back) then it’s harder for the fans to stomach the downturn and I suspect they react visibly and vocally more quickly. But Real Salt Lake is a young team. It’s a team that has never experienced genuine success on the field. I can’t be certain, but I suspect that’s why there remains to this day a lack of visible protest and criticism in the stands. It’s time that changed. Real Salt Lake fans need to stand up and say, as the old line goes, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Now there are a lot of ways to do this – banners, chanting, booing, walking out en masse to name a few. But I think my favorite, and the one that always seem to make it onto TV and into the newspapers is hiring an airplane to tow a “fire the coach” banner over the stadium while the game is in progress. I would like to say that the DC United supporters on BigSoccer.com were the first people in Major League Soccer to use this tactic, but apparently Eric Wynalda was the first when back in MLS’s early days he hired a “small plane that towed a banner encouraging the team to fire [coach Laurie] Calloway.” I will say, however, to the best of my knowledge those DC United supporters were the first fans to take such action.

After 9/11 there were some rumors that flying a banner over a stadium was no longer legal. There is a grain of truth to this rumor, but that grain is not applicable to most Major League Soccer situations. It’s only illegal to fly a banner over a stadium during a game if there are more than 30,000 in attendance. Since this is very, very rarely the case in Major League Soccer, planes towing “fire the coach” banners remain a viable tactic for disgruntled soccer fans.

Of course, when hiring an airplane you also have to choose your game carefully. The DC United fans chose an ESPN2 game (Real Salt Lake’s only ESPN2 game this year is on May 27). But I’m personally not sure that ESPN2 games are the best choice. Seems to me those games are more or less scripted and they’re not that likely to give much attention to any airborne stunt. In DC United’s case the plane was shown on TV, but there was very little discussion about it. A case could be made for preferring a locally broadcast game.

So that’s the choice. You can gleefully stick your head in the proverbial sand or you can take a vocal and visible stand. (Hey, that rhymes!) And there’s nothing more visible than aerial advertising to convey your “fire the coach” message.

And if that doesn’t work? Well, don’t let them tell you ninjas are never the answer.