Why don’t teams aim for a majestic sports dynasty, a run, a reign? Why not? Shouldn’t teams aim for a ninepeat, or an thirteenthpeat? A repeat is nice, a second consecutive championship is nice, but why not a long run? Salary cap?
I honestly don’t even understand your question. What makes you think they DON’T? Isn’t it obvious that many teams try to win more than two years in a row?
Kind of an odd question. The obvious answer is, who says they don’t? It’s not that easy to accomplish. You have to draft/trade better players, not just the ones that are on the team at the beginning, but ones to replace the older players that begin to age during your ‘dynasty’ - and scouting is an imperfect art/science. You’re at the mercy of human foibles, such as players that get into legal trouble or tear their ACL in a pickup basketball game. You’re at the mercy of random chance, like your star player getting rear-ended by a truck, or coming down with a disease. Most sports are games of inches, or even millimeters. A bad bounce at the wrong moment, just the slightest difference in force, etc, can change the outcome of a game, and so, a season.
It’s very, very hard to win it all ONCE. A tremendous amount of money makes it much easier - you can sign/trade for/keep the highest-priced players, and just as importantly, you can pay to correct your mistakes or replace players lost to injury - but it doesn’t guarantee a win. Yes, salary caps and competitive balance taxes cut back on the amount of money that can be poured into making your best team and so limit how much can be spent, but it’s not the only thing preventing long-lived dynasties. So, so many factors.
The teams with money, the best teams, try to win every year. Some teams, like my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates, seem to aim for a balance between butts in seats and money spent to maximize profit, since they are unwilling spend the amount needed to win.
I don’t know about other sports, but in baseball it is just one of those “unwritten rules” that you don’t try to win more than two World Series in a row. Even making it to the league championship series in consecutive seasons will have some traditionalists bemoaning the lack of sportsmanship.
I thought that in baseball, the unwritten rule was that it was an affront for anyone but the Yankees to make it to the postseason. A rule which everyone else is quite happy to flout.
In American sports there are often barriers put in place to prevent teams from being able to dominate like that.
No, others are allowed into the postseason, but the Yanks are expected to be in it every year.
It may be hard for the team to hold onto the players which enabled them to win the championship. Top players may be offered lucrative deals by other teams. This can drain some of the talent from the team and make it harder to win in subsequent years.
I think it just goes to show how little talent and experience contribute to winning. Although fans don’t like to admit it, more credit may be due to randomness than skill. If so, your chances of repeating a championship from year to year are not to be expected.
Take a look at Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, which has a chapter about the supposed “hot hand” phenomena in sports.
In American sports there are a large number of rules written into the structure of the leagues to encourage “parity”, the notion that in any year, all teams should have an equal chance at the championship. The most important of these rules are the draft order (the weakest teams get to choose first among the new players) and the salary cap (there is a limit on the total salary that a team can pay to its players). These rules are not perfect - the Patriots have been in about half of the last 20 Super bowls - but they have an impact.
In European football, by contrast, a few teams tend to dominate a league, basically because they can pay much more for players than the other teams in the league.
In part, it depends on the sport.
In the NFL, for example, you have to win every playoff game; one bad day and your season is over. Also, the regular season schedule changes from year to year, so the defending champions may be playing teams in tougher divisions than in the previous season. (Each team plays every team in one of the divisions in the other conference, and every team in one of the divisions other than its own in its own conference; these rotate from season to season. Also, division champions play all of the other division champions in their conferences.)
It’s not that hard to be good enough to win a title, but it is “that hard” to be dominant enough to have a serious chance to win multiple consecutive titles.
As evidenced by the fact that the OP’s favorite team, the Yankees, has, for purposes of this conversation, a bottomless bank account, and yet, in the 19 seasons from 2001-2019, have only appeared in the World Series three times (and none in the past ten years), and have only one WS win to show for all of that money.
Of ***course ***they “aim.”
It is extraordinarily difficult. In the pro US sports leagues, there are 28-32 teams per league. The odds that one team would win the championship are low in any given year. For them to win twice in a row is even lower yet. And to win three titles in a row is all the harder, given that everyone else is gunning after you with all their might.
None of this is true.
Then how did the 1991-1997 Cowboys go on that run, and the 1981-1998 49ers, the Patriots as well?
They did it by drafting well, having great coaching, and having a considerable amount of luck go their way.
But none of those teams three-peated, which is the topic of your thread. The longest streak of titles they ever had at any given point was merely winning two in a row.
They did come close - the Giants were a Roger Craig fumble away from arguably three-peating; the Cowboys only failed due to a few questionable officiating calls - but they never three-peated.
None of those teams threepeated. No NFL team has ever done that. Only three teams have ever even been in three straight Super Bowls (in the case of the Bills, four, and they lost them all.)
Isn’t it obvious why it’s hard to win three championships in a row?
I must assume that this is meant sarcastically in response to the OP, because otherwise it is one of the most absurd things I have read in this forum. Of course, the OP is absurd in itself.
With fewer teams and fewer levels of playoffs, it used to be possible for dominant teams like the Yankees to win five championships in a row, or the Boston Celtics to win eight NBA championships in a row. But no team has managed anything close to that in more than a half century. While it’s not utterly impossible, given the number of variables it’s pretty close to it.
Good god, yes.
Absolutely. It makes zero sense. Of course every team would like to win every championship. It’s just very difficult to do.
Too late to edit: The 49ers, not the Giants.