Cities and Championships

Much has been written about the championship drought in Cleveland.  And it is real.  It has been 52 years since the original Cleveland Browns shut out the Baltimore Colts 27-0 on December 27, 1964.  There are lots of other droughts, some are even worse than Cleveland’s.

I’ll start with a few disclaimers.  First, I am just one person.  I compiled a lot of data and double-checked as much as possible, but I am certain that something somewhere is a year (or digit) or two off.  Because my ultimate conclusions are based on rounded off numbers, and are not intended to be fractionally precise in any event, the assumed mistakes do not significantly affect my analysis.

Second, the data starts in 1950.  I had to pick a year and that one is nice and round.  There are certainly people alive who remember championships that were won before 1950, but I’m guessing that none of them place too much importance on those championships.  Philadelphia residents don’t place much emphasis on the Eagles’ 1949 NFL championship.  The same goes for the Yankees’, Red Wings’, and Lakers’ championships in 1949.  Each of those teams (and therefore each city) has won since then and more importantly, most fans weren’t alive then.  And the further back in time we go, the less important historic championships are.  Just ask Cubs fans how much pride they take in the back to back World Series the Cubs won in 1907 and 1908.

Third, I didn’t consider defunct teams.  The records of ABA and WHA teams are part of the equation only if their franchise continued in the NBA or the NHL.  The Indiana Pacers won ABA championships in 1970 and 1972, those count.  The ABA championship won the Pittsburgh Pipers in 1967 does not.

Fourth, I decided to lump Anaheim in with Los Angeles.  Maybe that isn’t fair, maybe they are separate cities.  But I consider them the same city even though they are no more distant from each other than San Francisco and Oakland.  It’s just that San Francisco and Oakland have always been separate and one of Anaheim’s teams is the Los Angeles Angels.

Fifth, cities with only one professional team were eliminated from consideration.  There really is no point in comparing the utter futility of the Columbus Blue Jackets, which are only 15 years old, with the cumulative horror that Buffalo fans have endured:  104 seasons since their last championship.  Also, what would I do with Syracuse, which hasn’t won a championship in 63 years or had a team for 55.

Once the one-sport cities (Calgary, Columbus, Edmonton, Green Bay, Hartford, Jacksonville, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Ottawa, Portland, Quebec, Rochester, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Jose, Syracuse, Utah, and Winnipeg) are removed, the database contains 36 cities.  Removing the one-sport cities eliminates three cities with five or more championships (Edmonton 5, Green Bay 7, San Antonio 5).  That would be troubling if I were assessing the quality of franchises, but I’m not, I’m assessing the cumulative misery of cities and I have artificially determined that a city without more than one team can’t be considered to have suffered as much as Cleveland, whose three teams have gone 150 seasons without a championship.

None of this should be taken too seriously.  My conclusions would change if I had chosen a different starting point or compiled different numbers – winning percentage, for instance.

With the disclaimers out of the way, here is a brief recap of my methodology.  I ranked the 36 cities in three categories:  championships won since 1950, the years since the last championship or 1950 or the years that a city has had a team (whichever is lower), and the cumulative seasons played since the last championship.  I then ordered the three categories and gave a team one point for the worst position, two for next worse, etc.  Any ties were averaged.   The team with the lowest point total is the unchampion.  A truncated chart below shows the totals.

Let’s start at the other end of the spectrum.  The top five cities for championships (according to this no- doubt-flawed methodology) are Boston, San Francisco and Chicago (tied), Oakland, and Denver.  Between them they have won 61 championships, over 22% of all championships since 1950.  And they have all won within the past year or so.  New York, which has the most championships, hasn’t won for four years, meaning that 28 seasons have passed since the last championship.

The members of the axis of misery (in order): San Diego, Vancouver and Buffalo (tied), Milwaukee and Cleveland (tied).  Cumulatively, they have won only nine championships, well under 4% of all championships.  The most recent was the Bucks triumph over the Bullets in 1971. These cities haven’t won a championship since the Nixon administration.  The aggregate of the seasons played in these cities since each last won a championship is 502 years; the aggregate for five cities at the top of the rankings is 14 years.  That is a chasm.  But it can close quickly.

For instance, if the Cavaliers win, they would vault to fifth place, from 33rd.  Such quick rehabilitation might be a flaw in the system, but it might not.  After all, if the Cavs win, the 52-year drought becomes zero years, the cumulative seasons since the last championship becomes zero seasons.  That is worth a lot.  Cleveland fans would be as muted as Red Sox fans after 2004, when their 90-whatever year drought became zero.  It’s hard to proclaim “woe is me” when your last championship was seven minutes ago.

Recency is a powerful force.  The perfect answer to the question: what you have done for me lately, is: won a championship.  The next question from Cleveland fans would be:  what about the Browns.  I have no answer for that.  Even worse, I have no answer for Padres’ or Chargers’ fans.

CITIES and CHAMPIONSHIPS