A History of Sucking

Here’s the List of all-time worst sports franchises as voted by the ESPN.com Page 2 readers:

1. Kansas City Royals
2. Tampa Bay Devil Rays
3. Detroit Lions
4. Arizona Cardinals
5. Atlanta Hawks
6. New Orleans Saints
7. Pittsburgh Pirates
8. Golden State Warriors
9. New York Knicks
10. Detroit Tigers
11. Chicago Blackhawks
12. Toronto Raptors
13. Houston Texans
14. Portland Trail Blazers
15. Cleveland Browns
16. Pittsburgh Penguins
17. Chicago Cubs
18. Boston Bruins
19. San Francisco 49ers
20. Baltimore Orioles
21. New York Jets

I’ll give you my bottom 5 at the end of this post. I considered several criteria when I cast my votes.

1) A long history of suckiness outweighs recent, intense suckiness.
2) It’s easier to compete in some leagues than in others.
3) A championship goes a long way.

In the spirit of the first criteria, I disregarded all the new teams who haven’t been around for a full decade yet. The Devil Rays, Raptors, Texans and Browns are too young to get stuck with the label worst franchise. By the way, if you are about to say something akin to, “Hey, the Browns have been around forever,” then you’re an idiot. The NAME has been around forever, but the current team has only been around since 1999. When your team pulls up stakes and leaves, you get a reprieve.

The second criterion is an attempt to consider the differences in the structure of the leagues. It’s simply easier to be competitive in some leagues than in others. The NFL, for example, is fixated on the idea parity, and it is structured to keep player talent evenly distributed across all the teams. Any management team who knows what they are doing should be able to at least make a realistic run at a Super Bowl every decade or so. Any owner who allows a management team to stay in place after not winning for over a decade is clueless.

The opposite of parity is Major League Baseball. Every year it boils down to the Yankees versus the rest of league, and one out of every four years the Yankees win. If you’re stuck in a market with limited money and limited appeal, you’re going to have a hard time gathering together enough talent to be competitive. The NBA and the NHL are in the middle of these two extremes.

Almost all the sins of incompetent ownership can be forgiven if a team can make it to the championship game/series. Depending on the league, a championship appearance can buy you a 10 to 25 year pardon for even the most blatant stupidity. NFL teams get the shortest pardon and MLB teams get the longest. As a Tiger fan I can attest to the fact that the chill of current Tiger funk is still mitigated by the warming glow of the 1984 World Series victory, but the 25 year clock runs out in 2009. Are you listening Mike Ilitch?

Who’s on my list? I’m glad you asked:

1. tie: Detroit Lions and Arizona Cardinals
3. New Orleans Saints
4. Golden State Warriors
5. Chicago Cubs

Okay, my bitter, Midwest bias is showing, but I don’t see how you can complain about any of these clearly incompetent franchises landing in the top slots. The top three are NFL teams because I feel their league offers them the easiest path to competence: a path they have all failed to take. Golden State is a deeply dysfunctional franchise, and the Cubs flirt with being intentionally bad.

The Lions, Cardinals, and Saints all have achieved unprecedented incompetence in a league where only marginal competence is necessary for some measure of success. The only hope these teams have to make the playoff is if the NFL adopts the NHL’s every-one-but-last-place playoff structure. I let the Saints slide down one slot because New Orleans has been through enough recently. As Ah-nold would (not) say, “You have to have the right Suck-ti-tude,” and these teams have it.

Up until the past couple years when the NBA finally ended the stupidity of illegal defense, all you needed to be competitive in that league was one or two top shelf players. A single player could transform a loser into a (marginal) winner in that world of man-to-man defense and super-star calls. The Warriors somehow failed to notice that reality. Their upper management could somehow never seem to get even one or two great players on the court at the same time. Considering they had an endless stream of high draft choices that failure is unforgivable. Y’all suck!

The Chicago Cubs franchise wallows in the excrement of its own wretched incompetence. The Cubs cultivate the persona of the lovable losers, and commit the unforgivable sin of striving for mediocrity. I’m sorry, but when fans are paying more and more of their hard earned money to support a team the ownership has a DUTY to do its best to win more than one championship per century. A lovable loser is still just a loser, and the Cub fans should wise up. Stop going to games. Stop buying the merchandise. Hit these jokers in the executive suites in the only place they understand: the bottom line. If they threaten to leave, pull a Cleveland on them: have Chicago claim the name ‘Cubs’ and let the business move elsewhere. They can be the Oklahoma City Cowboys, but the Cubs will always play in Chicago.