Bad teams are important. They offer perspective. If your team is a middle-of-the-road franchise that manages a playoff spot every couple years, you can look above at the championship teams and envy, or you can look down at the perennially awful teams and feel relatively good about your prospects of long-term sporting enjoyment.
Are We Running Out Of Horrible Sports Teams? A Statistical Study
Perennial losers such as the Clippers and Lions have risen to prominence. Others, such as the Bills and Nationals, may not be far off. It’s a terrifying question: are we running out of super-sucky sports teams?
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And in fact, if you are a fan of one of these bad teams, you are liberated. If you truly couldn’t deal with the losing, you wouldn’t still be a fan. But since you are a fan, you can simply enjoy a sport for what it is and its players for who they are, without clinging to dubious ambitions or fretting over the standings. If you’ve never rooted for a God-awful team, I encourage you to try it. It’s a great time.
If bad teams are important, it’s important to make sure we perform an assessment and make sure we’ll continue to have bad teams in the future. Not just teams who go .350 one year, but teams who post losing records year after year after year, consistently demonstrating that no, they are not just having a “bad year” -- they are simply bad.
That is the purpose of this study. I’ve looked at the NFL, MLB, and NBA, and found every team since 1980 to string together five or more consecutive losing seasons. That’s a pretty fair definition of a “bad team,” I think: a half-decade or more of losing and failing to contend. A middle-schooler’s team is losing. He’s in college, and they’re still losing. Let’s go with that.
I’d like to reiterate that I don’t wish to incite panic. But we must face the facts before us.
Observations of note:
- Since 1980, there have been an average of about six teams per year who were mired in a losing-record streak of five or more seasons. There are currently only four, one of which is the Nationals -- an on-the-rise franchise that fell only one game short of a .500 record in 2011. They're likely to end their streak next season, leaving us only with the Pirates, Orioles and Royals.
- Over their last 42 seasons combined, the Pirates, Orioles and Royals have a total of exactly one winning season (the Royals finished at 83-79 in 2003).
- From 1998 until 2001, 11 teams were stuck in a 5-year losing streak. That's over a third of the league, y'all! In terms of basic coin-flip odds, we could expect 15 of baseball's 30 teams to post a losing record in a given season. The fact that almost as many strung together five such records in a row ... that's pretty remarkable. The turn of the century clearly heralded a golden age for awful-ass teams.
Looking toward the future:
- Some look at the Royals and see a team that might finally crawl back into contention within a couple years. The Pirates, who hold an American pro sports record with 19 consecutive losing seasons, were actually playing decent baseball for much of last season before sputtering out. The Orioles, on the other hand, offer us absolutely no indication that they're going anywhere.
- On the horizon, the Indians, Astros and Mets are the only other teams with as many as three consecutive losing seasons. The Indians and Mets are capable of going .500 at any given time. But the Astros, who finished at 56-106 last season and have spent the last two years completely gutting their roster, seem poised to be super-sucky for years to come.
Observations of note:
- The trend demonstrated here is that in any given year, about five teams should be in some stage of a five-year losing streak. Once again, we're well short: there are only two.
- The largest blow to our supply of crappy teams, of course, is the Lions' rise to prominence. Once the most reliable laughingstock in the NFL, the Lions have plenty of young talent and figure to be decent-to-good for the foreseeable future.
Looking toward the future:
- One of the two teams with a long losing streak, the Bills, showed troubling signs of contention last season before falling off a cliff. Thankfully enough, the Rams, who have averaged three wins a season for the last five years, appear to be firmly buckled in on the suck locomotive. Which is funny, because nobody ever buckles their seatbelts on trains.
- In 2011, the Browns and Seahawks completed their fourth consecutive losing seasons, and the Dolphins and Redskins finished their third. The Seahawks are not very good, but in the NFC West an 8-8 record is always possible. The Browns seem well-positioned for long-term failure, because losing is what the Browns are for. Same goes for the modern Redskins to some degree. The 2011 Dolphins, despite losing their quarterback and head coach, managed to recover from an 0-7 start to finish at 6-10.
- The NFL's long-term suck reserves figure to come from the Rams, Browns, and perhaps Redskins. Given the relatively parity of the modern NFL, suck reserves are especially finite, and therefore especially valuable.
Observations of note:
- As I sort of expected, the NBA has more of the losing streaks we're looking for than any other league. The consistency is remarkable: there was a healthy number of awful teams throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
- This chart reflects the in-progress 2011-12 seasons. That, for example, is why the Pacers' streak is reflected as finished here -- as of this writing, they're 23-13 and appear poised to avoid another losing season. Meanwhile, the verdict is still out on the Timberwolves, who are 20-19 as of this writing.
- Speaking of the Pacers, they did reach the playoffs last season despite a 37-45 record. Being mired in a long losing streak doesn't necessarily disqualify a team from playoff contention. The NBA is weird.
- A couple years ago, the three foremost bastions of crappiness in the sporting world were probably the Pirates, Lions and Clippers. And like the Lions, the Clippers have now ascended from the lowest rungs. This is a problem.
Looking toward the future:
- The two teams with active losing-season streaks -- the Nets and Kings -- have talented young players in Deron Williams and Tyreke Evans, but they both figure to finish near the bottom of the league this season. I'm not really sure whether they'll be able to turn their fortunes around in the near future.
- Thankfully, there appears to be plenty of crap-ass basketball on the horizon. The Wizards, Raptors, Pistons and Warriors are currently at work on their fourth consecutive losing seasons. It's also worth keeping an eye on the Cavaliers and Hornets, who are trying to find their own way after their superstars left town.
Conclusions:
It seems clear that we are nearing dangerously low levels of shitty bizarro-dynasties. Since 1980 we have witnessed a total of 70 five-season losing streaks. Thanks to newfound success for a few perennial losers, there are now only eight such active streaks, and future prospects are looking rather limited.
From this vantage point, it seems as though we’ll still have the awfulness of the Pirates, Orioles, Royals, Rams, Kings, and Nets to enjoy for at least a little longer. They’re rare jewels, friends. They do not grow on trees. Their presence is never guaranteed. Enjoy these ass-horrible cellar-dwelling train-wrecky embarrassments while they’re still with us.
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