Yup. Sox for sure.
Or to put it another way, it was a whole lot more fun being a 1990-1993 Bills fan than a 1990-1993 Cardinals or Lions fan.
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This is a trick question, right? LOL
I’d rather not be a perennial playoff team if I get more championships out of the fewer appearances. For example, I’d take a paltry 6 playoff appearances every 20 years if it also comes with 2 Superbowl wins every 20 years. I’d rather that than 16+ playoff appearances but only 0-1 championships every 20 years.
I say this because that’s my actual experience as a Giants fan. Sometimes good for maybe a 4-5 year stretch, other times bad for a decade plus. But in those 4-5 year stretches they’ve now stolen two Superbowl wins twice, two decades apart. If they stay on track, getting good around 2025 and then winning a couple Superbowls, I’m fine with the decades of suck in between. In my mind, I still have 8 years to wait:
1986, 1990
2007, 2011
2028, 2032
TriPolar, the question isn’t whether we want our team to lose the championship, and I have no idea where you’re getting that from. The question is whether we want them to make it to the postseason. Which is a prerequisite for winning the championship. If you vote “no”, then you’re saying that you don’t want your team to make it to the postseason.
To be fair, it can be a difficult question to parse. Are we asking would we have been happy rooting for a team that just finished a 15 year run of incredible regular season success, and 1 championship, or are we being asked would we be happy rooting for this hypothetical run for the next 15 years? For me, those really are the same thing - but I can see how maybe if you’re a Giants fan (NY or SF), or (ugh) a Yankees fan, that changes the calculus.
But the “and one championship” isn’t part of the question at all.
The question I posed in the poll is “Would you want your team to “be like the 1990s Atlanta Braves”?” and I then expounded on what exactly the 1990s Atlanta Braves did in my OP.
Of course, if I take the “90s” part literally, it’s better than I thought. The **1990s **Atlanta Braves only played nine completed seasons, made the postseason eight times, and won the 1995 World Series. I’ll take a World Series every nine years, thanks. That’s a better ratio of championships to seasons than any franchise in the sport except the Yankees.
The Nationals finished over .500 every season since 2012, won the division 4 times, and made the playoffs 5 times. That falls short of what the Braves, and more recently the Dodgers, accomplished. Even without what happened in October, I would have been ok with that. I think the WS win will lessen the sting of future sub .500 seasons that will probably come sooner than later; this is an old team.
This. only one team wins every year. But post season tailgates are a lot more fun that watching somebody else’s team play in the 1st round.
Lions fan
In the 54 years of the Super Bowl era they have only made the playoffs 12 times. Five of those were during the decade of milk, honey, and Barry Sanders. In the 44 years without Sanders the Lions managed just seven playoff appearances. Their sole playoff win was in 1991 season with Sanders.
I just want my team to be in big games.
Yep. And all those years they went 8-8 and had they won the last game of the year they’d have snagged a wild card. It was maddening.
The Pack have consistently made the post season for 2 decades now. Only 3 Super Bowl appearances and just 2 wins. But I’ll take that over 20 years of almost no play off appearances at all.
And those horrible seasons they had in the 70’s and 80’s? There’s nothing worse than it only being week 7 and your team is already eliminated from contention. It sucks!
In fairness, your topic title is also just “Would you like the team you root for to have a long stretch of reaching the postseason?” which makes no mention of number of championships.
In the NFL it’s kind of a no-brainer. Less than half the league has had more than 1 one win in a 15 year stretch. Only 6 teams have gotten more than 2 wins in a stretch.
I’m thinking of this as NY Giants fan. Over the last 10 years the team won 1 Super Bowl (yay!), and outside of that year, appeared in 1 playoff game, that they got crushed in (wah!).
Would you trade that one SB win for 10 years of high quality football where maybe you don’t win it all?
Before you say no… the team has been unwatchable for 3 years, and before one brief dip into the post season in 2016, were barely .500 for a few seasons before that. It’s a drag, and winning in 2011 seems really far away.
Uh, making the playoffs is a prerequisite for winning a championship. If this is really a “would you rather…” question, I guess I’d take the one championship over no championships, but that’s not how it works in real life.
Rivaling the Braves, the San Jose Sharks have missed qualifying for the Stanley Cup Playoffs only twice since the 1997-98 season - 19 of 21 seasons, one playoff was canceled for a lockout when the Sharks roster was stacked. Is twenty years of 82 crappy games each year really worth the one championship?
I think of it as if you could magically have chosen your team’s performance over the last 20 years, would you rather have experienced the past 20 years for the Buccaneers or Bengals?
The Bucs have been shitty for much of the past 20 years, but they do have a Superbowl win. The Bengals made it to the playoffs every year for like a decade, but not a single playoff win.
I’d pick the Bucs instead of the Bengals without hesitation.
That’s a very odd time frame to choose. The Giants have one Superbowl win over the past 10 years, true, but they also have 2 Superbowl wins over the past 13 seasons. Does the 2007 win not count for some reason?
That’s not the right question though. Of course if you could “choose” to force a 20 year historical outcome, you might say, take a championship versus none at all. But from a living your life as it plays out POV, if you rephrased this not as having foreknowledge built in to the decision but weighing the total statisticsal JAR (Joy Above Replacement Level) – are you a sports fan to experience the highest high, or also to avoid misery?
Because that would boil down to how miserable as a fan you are to have “19 years of being shitty”, which in turn boils down to how invested you are overall. If for example, you never even bother to really “tune in” until halfway or more through the season, and you then surface for air and say “so how’re the Bucs doing this year? - bad as usual? change channel” - then the pain of yet another slog of a losing season is more or less background noise in your life, and it won’t weigh as much against the thrill of riding a post-season run to the championship that one time.
But if you are the kind of fan to spend all summer griping about moves the Bucs made, fantasing that the prospects they have coming up or players they’ve signed or traded for might turn a corner and do something amazing, watch every game and follow every headline until they are well and truly done, and then continue to think about “well at least X was good, maybe next year…” throughout the end of the season and into the post-season…
…Then I would say that NOT being miserable and sarcastic except for the last game or two of the playoffs, and being energized, invested, and excited for the entire regular season (and off-season) for most of 20 years, is worth more than a 1-in-20 miracle run that you then eventually feel a bit bitter about (“why did they let X go, he was key!”, “…and Y was never the same player before or since”, etc.).
My Kansas City Royals had a long stretch in which they won two American League pennants and one World Championship. If that had come with fifteen years of playoff losses rather than fifteen years of crap, I think I would be able to live with it.
It’s both a round number and the time since their last playoff win. I’m not saying their other wins don’t matter, but over a long stretch of time would you prefer 1 championship followed up by irrelevance, or would you prefer to be perennially “in it”?
It’s the difference between the Giants and the Yankees lately. The Giants have more recently won championships, but it feels a lot more like they are a mismanaged team that stumbled into the win, while the Yankees haven’t won as recently, but are usually knocking on the door to make a run. Yeah, not winning is a disappointment, but with the Yanks, I’m not giving up on the season a third of the way through.