A recent thread asked why football’s single-game pass record has for so long, and it’s in part because the opposing team stunk so badly.
So here’s my hypothetical:
Having made a bundle in cryptocurrency and macaroni art NFTs, I’ve managed to create my own football team. However, I am a lunatic billionaire and have purposefully assembled the worst football team in history.
The Boston Bravos are so bad that every single-game record in the books is blown out of the water. A number of talented teams and players will also be able to pad their season-wide stats in their games against us, so plenty of other records are up for grabs too.
We’re talking dozens of sacks a game. Thousands of yards of offense. Interceptions for everyone!
The Bayonne Bravos (we moved mid-season) fold after just one year, but the damage is done. Unless a new mad billionaire puts together an even worse team, the records against the Brunswick Bravos (we moved again during this sentence) will stand forever.
What happens? Is the season expunged? Does every recordsbook from here out just have an appendix with the records from that year and otherwise pretend it never happened?
PS: If it helps, assume I bought some random actual team and am pulling a Major League situation to tank games on purpose.
I don’t have much to add, but Chicago State University’s basketball team historically has been known for its very bad teams. Years ago during a radio broadcast, the opposing team’s announcer stated that any time a player or team sets a single-game record against CSU, the record should automatically come with an asterisk.
That sounds like the University of Waterloo here in Ontario, Canada. The joke was every other team tried to book Waterloo for their Homecoming games so the home team would have a guaranteed win.
The Waterloo Warriors football team represents the University of Waterloo in the sport of Canadian football in U Sports. The WarriorsU Sports football program has been in operation since 1957, winning two Yates Cup conference championships in 1997 and 1999. Currently, they are one of six teams to have never appeared in a Vanier Cup game and the longest tenured program in the OUA to have never qualified for the national championship game.
The only salient difference is the sheer stinkiness of the Ballyhoo Bravos - the stats against them are so outrageous that the concept of (single-game) records is effectively out the window forever. There’s simply no conceivable way for anybody to match the year’s numbers in actual competitive play.
If team means football team and football means soccer, SC Tasmania 1900 Berlin is the team you are looking for. Scroll down to “dubious distinctions” and you will see why. Long gone but unforgotten.
Assuming the Boise Bravos (they moved again after post #5) are a legitimate NFL franchise, the records will live in infamy. In fact, the question is answered in the OP. The dismal record of the New York Yanks (not Yankees) still lives in the record books. And although the New York franchise disappeared, then reappeared in Dallas, where it disappeared and reappeared as the Baltimore Colts, the old Colts, who moved to Indianapolis, have never claimed the New York or Dallas years to be part of the Colts.
What will likely happen is that when the team folds after finishing its season in Bug Tussle, the franchise will be transferred to new owners in a new city, and the Bravos will live on only in the record books and eccentric fan clubs. When the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore, the Orioles owners, like the Colts owners, specifically disclaimed the previous city, and the Orioles who had been Brownies the year before were thought of as simply appearing on the new team.
The records are inextricably a part of the overall league record. It is what it is. They have to stand.
NFL teams have lost every game of the season; it’s just a matter of degree.
National Lampoon had a story many years ago about a hilariously inept NFL expansion team called the Alaska King Crabs, but they accidentally won the last game of the season to ruin everything.
The 1899 Cleveland Spiders will always live in infamy, but they had colorful players including one of my favorite pitchers, Crazy Schmit.
Crazy won 2 games and lost 17 that year*, but amazingly didn’t have the worst winning percentage (.105) on the pitching staff. That honor went to Frank Bates at 1-18 (.053), followed by Harry Colliflower’s 1-11 (.083).
*the experience may have been what sent him over the edge.
**Crazy began his career with another horrendously bad team, the 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys, who went 23-113-2.
My gf played basketball in high school. She’s not tall, not fast, not especially coordinated; but neither were any of her teammates. It was a very small school and the girls on the team all played for fun.
One season they were unable to complete the season against schools in their own division when one school withdrew, so their final game was against a bigger school. They were shut out. Shutout in basketball. She said it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, like adults playing all-out against a team of 4 year olds.
Even though the Dallas Texans (1952) inherited the players from the folded 1951 Yanks, and the Colts then inherited many of the Texans’ players (and other team assets) after the Texans, themselves, folded at the end of the 1952 season, the NFL treated both the Texans and Colts as brand-new expansion teams, and thus, not continuations of the same franchise.
Most of the bad teams mentioned as examples in this thread can’t have been nearly as bad as the one posited in the OP because they actually won games. If you want merely bad teams you can look to Tampa Bay 76-77 who had a 25 game losing streak or more recently the Cleaveland Browns who had a 0-16 season in 2008, and more recently from 2015-2018 had two 17 game losing streaks separated by a single win.
But I think the OP is talking about something like sending the local pop-Warner team to the NFL. I think if they really were irredeemably bad to the point of being an embarrassment, they would get kicked out of the league.
[quote=“Buck_Godot, post:14, topic:975709”] more recently the Cleaveland Browns who had a 0-16 season in 2008, and more recently from 2015-2018 had two 17 game losing streaks separated by a single win.
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It was the Lions who were winless in 2008, not the Browns.
Lets look at the 2008 Lions. They allowed 517 points, 6470 yards, easily the worst of the worst that season. The 3rd most points allowed in the history of the NFL. But… compared to the average, that’s only 10 extra points a game and 44 extra yards a game.
Even if you put a bunch of college rejects on the field, the other team is only going to do so well. They’ll go up a few scores, then put in their third stringers and run out the clock.
The season’s stats would remain in the NFL record book but I’m not sure the league would allow you to complete the season. Never mind it being a Major League situation, this seems closer to a Springtime for Hitler-type scam and that would get the law involved as well.
Possibly so; they might try to force a sale and a change in ownership/management. How quickly they could accomplish it, especially if crazy @Johnny_Bravo decides to litigate it (a la Al Davis’s fights against the league), is a different question.
No asterisks. That just doesn’t happen. The records would stand.
That said, a team that bad probably couldn’t complete the season due to injury. Football is a rough sport. A team that is bad enough that every game sets records is bad enough every player would probably get seriously injured every game.
The League office and other owners would have to get involved if every game ended with multiple hospitalizations and resulted in new free agent signings to replace lost players. That would affect the bottom line, and they would never stand for losing revenue.
