So in Little Nemo’s Football Feud, he mentions that the reason he included the Arizona Cardinals was because they were one of the league’s two founding franchises that still remain (the other is the Chicago Bears). This kind of boggled me, as I always thought of them as kind of a scrub team, so I looked up their history; they have 2 championships, one of a ten-team league in 1947, and the other from back when the NFL was barely a league, in 1925 - they had the championship by virtue of having the best record (in 14 games played) in a league where the actual number of games played by the teams in the league ranged from 3 to 20. Add to that the fact that the Cardinals have moved twice (and changed their name from Phoenix to Arizona while they were in their current location), so they don’t even have a historic stadium & real ties to their glory days in the way that, say, the Cubs do, and I was wondering if anyone could nominate another founding franchise of one of the three major US leagues (NBA, NFL, MLB; throw in NHL if you want) that’s had as crappy a history.
(For MLB, I’d count a “founding franchise” as one that was in the NL or AL when the World Series got started).
The Pittsburgh Pirates have certainly been crappy in recent decades, although they had some glory years before that.
Regarding the Cardinals, my grandfather was a Chicago Cardinals season ticket holder. Even in Chicago, a lot of people don’t realize that NFL support was once regionalized just like baseball today. The Bears played in Wrigley Field, and the Cardinals in Comiskey Park. North Siders were Cubby-Bear and South Siders were Sox-Cardinals.
For baseball (using 1901 as the “official” start of MLB), the list is:
National League
Pittsburgh Pirates
Philadelphia Phillies
Brooklyn Superbas (now Los Angeles Dodgers)
St. Louis Cardinals
Boston Beaneaters (now Atlanta Braves)
Chicago Orphans (now Chicago Cubs)
New York Giants (now San Francisco Giants)
Cincinnati Reds
American League
Chicago White Sox
Boston Americans (now Boston Red Sox)
Detriot Tigers
Philadelphia Athletics (now Oakland Athletics)
Baltimore Orioles (now New York Yankees)
Washington Senators (now Minnesota Twins)
Cleveland Blues (now Cleveland Indians)
Milwaukee Brewers (now Baltimore Orioles)
So pretty much all of those have had at least some glory within the last 50 years or so; the Indians at least had the almost-but-not-quite period in the mid-90s. And at least they’ve stayed put. On the other hand, Chief Wahoo. Still, the Cardinals keep the crown for the moment.
The Buccaneers are, in a sense, one of the founding franchises of the modern NFL; they didn’t exist at the time of the AFL-NFL merger, but the addition of 27th and 28th franchises was part of the original merger agreement.
I don’t think anyone could argue that they didn’t set the standard for suckitude for 20 years.
For the NBA, it’s clearly the Sacramento Kings. They won one championship as the Rochester Royals, and then struggled as the Cincinnati Royals, and as then Kansas City-Omaha Kings (later Kansas City Kings) before moving to California.
Actually, despite their recent success, the Phillies have been a horrendous franchise. They’ve been around since 1883, and are 1119 games below .500, and only 2 championships to show for it (1980 and 2008). The Cubs haven’t won since 1908. Baltimore is 890 games below .500 with 3 championships.
The NHL is a bit of a strange case. People often talk about the “Original Six” teams in the NHL: the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, the New York Rangers, the Boston Bruins, the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks. However only the Maple Leafs(originally the Arenas) and the Canadiens were part of the original four team NHL. The other founding members members were the Montreal Wanderers, which folded a couple of years after the league was formed when their arena burned down, and the Ottawa Senators, which did not survive the Great Depression.
If we count the Original Six as founding members, then there are lots of candidates. The Blackhawks have won the Stanley Cup only 2 times since the Original Six era began in 1942: once in 1961 and then they endured a 49 year drought before they won the Cup this year. The Bruins have also won only 2 Cups since 1942, both in the seventies. The New York Rangers have won only once since 1942, in 1993.
And, for years, they were the St. Louis Browns. The Browns and Senators were the classic hard-luck franchises, but both have decent histories as the Orioles (not recently, of course) and Twins. Even if you don’t ignore the last few years, the Phillies probably have the worst history overall, mitigated by the fact that Cubs’ years of success are now beyond living memory.
The Toronto Maple Laughs. 43 years of lacklustre hockey and counting! The loss of Tyler Seguin (and whomever they would have gotten next year) for Phil Kessel ensures that they will suck for several seasons more, despite the bright eyed optimism of Leaf fans that Brian Burke will somehow turn water into wine.
There’s the Dayton Triangles. They were one of the founding teams of the NFL. Their initial season in the NFL went pretty well. They won the first NFL game ever played (14-0 against the Columbus Panhandles) and went on to a four game winning streak in what was then a nine game season. But their eventual season record was 5-2-2.
But things went downhill fast for the Triangles. They couldn’t attract audiences in Dayton and eventually lost their homefield and became a traveling team. Their overall record in the seven seasons between 1923 and 1929 was a dismal 5-42-4.
In 1930, the team was sold, relocated, and renamed. As the Brooklyn Dodgers (and briefly the Brooklyn Tigers) they had 60-100-9 record from 1930 to 1944. In 1945 they merged into a weak expansion team, the Boston Yanks, where they had a 3-6-1 season.
The team officially seperated from the NFL after the 1945 season and joined the AAFC.
I have trouble putting the franchise with the second-most Stanley Cups in NHL history in the “worst founding franchises” category. I guess that if you take the position that only Toronto and Montreal count as founding franchises then Toronto gets the nod for the worst of the two simply by virtue of the fact that the Canadiens are one of the most successful franchises in all of North American sports. Admittedly their recent history has been less than stellar but I don’t think that completely erases 13 championships.
My father was cheated in a business deal by Hugh Culverhouse, the first owner of the Buccaneers. He claimed that he subsequently actually paid an old gypsy woman to lay a curse on the team.
My father was not particularly superstitious, and may not have believed in the curse at all, but he was vengeful, and probably would pay someone just to say he did. He took great delight and perhaps some personal pride in the team’s long history of being manhandled and crushed by the rest of the league.
Why start these threads when the Lions are such an obvious answer. They have the only 0-16 record ever dropped by an NFL team. They have the lowest winning percentage of any team over the last 50 years. They have never played in a Super Bowl. They have lost 20 straight road games breaking their own mark of 19. They have to get to 26 to catch Tampax Bays record of 26, but they were an expansion team.
Here are the wins the last 10 years
2
\0
7
3
5
6
5
3
2
9
The NFL has rules to prevent this from happening. They give the worst teams the top draft choices. They give the bad teams the easiest schedule. So to have a bottom ass team for decades, requires a special kind of bad management. Their coaches get fired and never get another pro head coaching job. One of our coaches got arrested for drunk driving while naked.
Yep, I gave up my season tickets when Barry retired.
The Browns really had only one good team in their entire existence in St. Louis – 1922, when the won a club-record 90 games, but finished a game behind the Yankees. They managed to win a pennant in 1944, winning 89 games, but mostly because so many players were off fighting the war. They only finished better than 4th three times before moving east.
The Senators were one of the AL’s best teams from 1924-1933, with three pennants and only a slight slump in 1928-29. In 1934, though, the team collapsed and never challenged anyone again except for a couple of second-place finishes during the war years. Things improved when they moved west.
Just about all baseball teams had stretches like that. The Dodgers went from 1920-41 between pennants, and didn’t win the franchise’s first World Series until 1956. The Yankees never won anything before Babe Ruth.
If you go by the Phillies’ full history, they are only .003 worse than the Orioles in overall win/loss percentage. The Phils are .471 starting from 1883 and the Orioles are .474 starting from 1901. But the Phils are 229 games further under .500 than the O’s.
That’s a great resource. The Yankees could lose every single one of their games for the rest of the 2010 campaign, as well as every game in every season through 2024, and still have a .500 overall record.
Just noticed the Braves will be playing their 20,000th game tonight. Neat. But a quick Google news check and the Braves home page seems to suggest this is passing basically unnoticed. They are retiring Tom Glavine’s number tonight, but I don’t see any mention of the 20,000th game in the stories about it.
