But there's a problem: The stadium Wi-Fi has already dropped and Coach Will McCarthy, gazing at his tablet, can't load the plays. The owners look panicked. "Fucking a hundred thousand dollars' worth of Wi-Fi, and it fucked up!" owner Patrick Dees hollers on the sidelines.

Thinking on his feet, McCarthy relays his own choice to the quarterback, a former Ohio State Buckeye named Verlon Reed, in the huddle. Seconds later, Reed drops back, prepares to throw—and fumbles into the end zone. The Danger recover for a touchdown.

The revolution has some ball-control issues.

QuickHoney

We are a nation of armchair quarterbacks. To those of us who came of age during the 1980s and ’90s, sports have always been more than just players on the field. Sports are a galaxy of stats, an encyclopedia of strategy, and a belief that we, too, are experts. We mock NFL coach Andy Reid's horrible clock management, fire off tweets about NBA coach Tom Thibodeau's aversion to resting his stars, and still have to hear from whiny Red Sawx fans about Grady Little leaving in Pedro. We're forever firm in the belief that we could do better if someone would just hand us the clipboard. The Screaming Eagles pose an intriguing question: Can a democratic approach to running a sports franchise be as effective as, or even more effective than, the authoritarian rule of a single owner and coach? In other words, what if the braying jackasses in the seats had to put up or shut up?

Gambits like this have been tried before. In August 1951, the St. Louis Browns baseball team introduced Grandstand Managers Night, where more than 1,000 fans holding placards that said "Yes" or "No" voted on key gametime decisions. It worked: The lowly Browns, who would go on to lose 102 games that year, beat the Philadelphia Athletics 5-3. In England right now, a semi-professional soccer team allows fans to pick the starting lineup. In a 2016 NFL pre-season game, the Tennessee Titans let individual fans call the team's first two plays, which resulted in a 15-yard run and a 31-yard pass. The next three plays, called by coaches, netted a total of four yards.

The Screaming Eagles' braintrust consists of a group of dudes with similar ideas of fan empowerment coming together to live out a kind of bromantic Entourage fantasy. After a drunken conversation with friends in a New York bar in 2007, Grant Cohen, an aspiring digital-media entrepreneur, developed a plan to buy a minor-league baseball team and hand it over to fans. That didn't work out, but years later he joined up with three tech-world veterans—Sohrob Farudi (now the group's CEO), Vivek Jain, and Patrick Dees—who had also toyed with enhancing the fan experience before buying into an arena-league football team in Vegas co-owned by rocker Vince Neil (a dazzling failure). Meanwhile, in Chicago, an ex-Bear named Ray Austin was developing an app that would allow fans to call plays during games. The guys decided to join forces, and Project Fanchise was born. This was no gimmick, the owners insisted—they were in it to win it. "We're not a circus act," Jain told me. "We want people to take this seriously."

"I don't care where the plays come from as long as they work."

Their master plan: Before each game, the team's registered fans answer a series of questions, quizzes, and trivia that generate their individual "Fan IQ." A better IQ weights that fan's choices more than an uninformed schmo's; some high-ranking fans would receive choice perks, like being allowed to streak the field—in a Speedo, no free-flopping junk allowed. The system ended up changing: Ultimately, Fan IQ was determined based on whether a fan chose the majority play, and how well that play performed. (And yes, one guy actually bought the streaker perk, but never made his run.)