The Fights

Wear a Chargers jersey to Green Bay's Lambeau Field, and the tailgaters there are likely to offer you bratwurst and cheese curds.

In Kansas City, you might be treated to some succulent barbecue ribs.

In Oakland, well, in Oakland it's guaranteed some dufus wearing a dog collar and silver-and-black hardhat dumps a beer on you.

The same thing could happen today at Qualcomm Stadium. In fact, you might just as well count on it. It's a Raiders-Chargers weekend, and the beer and insults - and more than a few fists - will be flying.

These games feature enough testosterone to fuel a professional cycling team for months. It's four hours of overweight, overlubricated fans talking trash, bucking bellies and rolling in the aisles.

Does it get any better?

It's hard to look tough when there's popcorn and nacho cheese smeared in your hair, but these clowns don't care. They'll shell out $500 for a ticket, start their first fight by kickoff, then get locked in a holding tank before Daunte Culpepper can commit his first turnover.

Class isn't a word normally associated with Raiders fans, and this might be the only sentence in which they've ever appeared together.

Don't take my word for it. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can check out what it's like to be a lone (suicidal) Chargers fan mingling with the unwashed silver and black masses at Oakland's Black Hole. Let's just say hospitality isn't their most obvious attribute.

It's a different scene in San Diego. There's always plenty of good seats available for opposing team's fans at Qualcomm. That means there will be strength in numbers for Raiders fans flexing their beer muscles.

Asking a $12-an-hour security force to defuse all those upper-deck melees is about as effective as using a garden hose on a forest fire. But that's what will be happening today. The ridiculousness will be captured on multiple cell phone cameras, and the shaky, grainy footage will have been downloaded on the Internet and available for viewing by the end of the fourth quarter.

I, for one, can't wait to see those highlights.

Think of it as "The Jerry Springer Show" on location, minus the sappy, manufactured storylines. Just people acting stupid.

No, it doesn't get any better than that.

Contact sports editor Loren Nelson at (760) 740-3551 or lnelson@nctimes.com.