"For this analysis, we considered those cities in the US and Canada with at least three teams in the big four professional leagues (it’s not hard to be bad with just one or two teams; sorry Buffalo and Milwaukee). We weighed playoff appearances, playoff series wins, and championship wins in the Misery Score. We also relied heavily on recent success, since there’s no better way to forget a drought than with a lot of winning (we’re looking at you, Red Sox fans). See the Appendix for details on our scoring system and city clustering choices. "
Toronto is second, “New York City B” (Jets, Mets, Islanders) is third. Is it typical for someone to be a Jets/Mets/Islanders fan?
Boston came up in the “What teams do you like/dislike” thread, with someone asking how you can have so much hate for the poor old Red Sox who weren’t a winning team for all those decades. But as you can see from these statistics, Boston as a whole is the LEAST miserable sports town (with a 4 to Cleveland’s 53) so they can just go suck an egg!
What do you think? Does your level of sports misery fit with this chart?
With only two professional championships in men’s sports since the end of WWII. But I guess with the Seahawks having made it to two straight Super Bowls (and coming OH SO CLOSE to winning two straight) it’s relatively easy to forget what a miserable experience it’s generally been over the years to be a sports fan in Seattle. But apparently not as miserable an experience as it’s been in Cleveland (another strong candidate: Atlanta)!
I forgot about Atlanta until I read this report, because they were just murdering baseball in the 90s (against Cleveland, too) and in the NBA they had Hakeem when I was paying attention to basketball. They have really fallen hard since then!
Seattle didn’t qualify since it only has two major league teams (though it seems they could have counted the Sonics, who played there within their 30 year time frame and actually won a championship).
Overall the methodology and results seem about right to me. I would be interested to see how it would change if they didn’t count the NHL as a major league. As a denizen of Chicago A who doesn’t care about hockey, they have significantly underestimated my misery!
Here’s the problem for me as a St. Louisan. It’s true that the Blues have never won a Stanley Cup in nearly 50 years, and it’s also true that in the last decade the Rams have pulled the worst suck job in sports and are probably going to leave the city completely. But the Cardinals are doing well, and as long as the Cardinals do well, we’re the happiest sports city in America, and no stupid statistics are going to tell us otherwise.
I’ve seen a much simpler statistic come to the same conclusion: Of all cities with even one of the major American sports, Cleveland has gone longest without a championship.
But the fact that Seattle had its NBA franchise STOLEN from it would seem to add to its sports misery, wouldn’t you think (for those who still care about the NBA, that is)?
Winning a major sports championship two years ago vastly trumps misery experienced 15 years ago. There is no equivalence at all there. Any city that has won a major championship in the last three years cannot be said to have any degree of misery.
Bear in mind that a city with teams in all four major pro sports should on average win a major championship about once every eight years, so if a city has just one champion in the last eight years, that’s precisely what would be expected by chance, and of course even less if the city doesn’t have four teams.
I note that the misery index does not count Toronto’s football team, since it’s in the CFL. Fair enough, as most people in Toronto don’t count it, either. For the few people around here who do care about the CFL, though, in fairness, the Argonauts did win the Grey Cup as recently as 2012.
