As we have described in a previous post, fan misery is a multifaceted concept. One aspect of a fan’s misery is simply how often their team wins. We have defined this as “Daily Misery”. We quantify this aspect of fan misery by simply calculating a team’s winning percentage over a given period of time. So, this provides us with information used to determine a Team Daily Misery Index. In addition, fan misery can be intensified when the other sports teams playing in the same city experience dismal winning percentages at the same time. We quantify this aspect of fan misery by simply calculating the collective winning percentages for each team associated with a certain city over a given period of time. This provides information used to determine a City Daily Misery Index.

Let’s take a closer look at this concept of City Daily Misery. Currently, there are thirteen cities that have at least one sports team competing in each of the four major professional sports leagues—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Refer to Table 2 in the description of the Fan Misery Index for a list of these thirteen cities and their corresponding sports teams.

Table A provides the average winning percentage for each of these cities over the past five seasons. The cities are listed in descending order according to their winning percentage. So, in terms of fan misery, the further down the list equates to higher levels of misery.

4-Sport City	Average Winning %
Boston	.607
Philadelphia	.546
Los Angeles	.540
Minneapolis	.532
Denver	.532
Dallas	.529
Miami	.523
San Francisco	.520
New York	.489
Washington DC	.468
Chicago	.465
Phoenix	.459
Detroit	.364

Table A: Average winning % over the past five years

Detroit fans—according to this component of fan misery, your misery is absolutely justified and for at least one of the authors, we feel your pain. To put this in a different perspective, let’s dig a little deeper and look at the daily misery experienced by Boston fans and compare that to the misery of Detroit fans. What are the chances for your sports team experiencing a modest three-game win streak? Well, for Boston fans, the probability of winning three straight games over the past five years is 22.4%. For Detroit fans, this probability drops to 4.8%. On the flip side, the probability of Boston fans having to endure a three-game losing streak is 6.1%. For Detroit fans, this probability increases to 25.7%. This is simply further quantification of what Detroit fans already know and have been experiencing for several years—your city sports teams have been collectively and consistently bad and have been dishing out an inordinate share of daily misery for a significant amount of time. And, for this component of fan misery, no other city even comes close. These are bold claims, especially when every city and team fan base seem to find something that can and does provide legitimate misery. So, look for our next article to flesh out the “collectively and consistently bad” statement while subsequent articles will try to bring some validation to the “no other city even comes close” statement.

Our previous article made the statement that Detroit sports teams have been collectively and consistently bad for the past five years. They have been collectively bad in the sense that all four of Detroit’s teams have contributed to this misery. For example, the Detroit team with the highest winning percentage over the past five years were the Red Wings at .419. Unfortunately, even Detroit’s “best” team had the worst winning percentage for any hockey team during the last five years.¹ The winning percentages for the remaining three teams were as follows: Tigers = .393²; Lions = .328³; Pistons = .314⁴. 

In addition, when the Lions began the 2022 season with a 1-6 record, they were only living into the expectations that Detroit fans have grown accustomed to experiencing over the past five years. After all, no Detroit team had fielded a winning record since 2017⁵. So, it was a real shocker when the Lions won eight of their last ten games to finish the season one game over .500. This is the backdrop for the mild hysteria of Detroit sports fans anticipating the 2023 NFL season and answers the question of how a 9-8 record can feel like you just won the Super Bowl.

Table A highlights the percentage of time that a city’s sports teams had a record above .500 over the past five years and provides yet another piece of evidence confirming Detroit’s abysmal consistency and its sports fans’ justifiable agony.

4-Sport City	Seasons >.500	Total # of Seasons	% of Seasons >.500
Boston	15	20	75%
Miami	13	20	65%
Philadelphia	13	20	65%
Minneapolis	12	20	60%
New York	23	40	58%
Dallas	11	20	55%
Denver	11	20	55%
Los Angeles	22	40	55%
San Francisco	13	27	48%
Phoenix	8	20	40%
Chicago	9	25	36%
Washington DC	6	20	30%
Detroit	1	20	5%

Table A: % of seasons >.500 over the past five years.

Just how bad is this? Well, let’s assume that a team winning half of its games is a 50/50 proposition⁶. In terms of daily city misery, Washington DC has had a pretty bad go of it over the last five years. Given the 50/50 proposition, the probability that your four teams would only have six winning seasons over a five-year time span is 3.7%. This is a low probability, but not out of the realm of possibilities. On the other hand, the probability that your four teams would only have one winning season over a five-year time span is an incredible 0.002%. This is akin to flipping a coin twenty times and having heads show up once! So, if you flipped a coin 20 times and did this 50,000 times, you would get the results achieved by Detroit sports teams once!!! This is what daily misery looks like.

The data in Table A also provides some justification for our previous claim of the depths of Detroit’s misery not even being close to that of the other 4-sport cities. Our next article will provide additional validation of this claim using slightly more sophisticated statistics. In the meantime, give a warm hug to the Detroit sports fan within your social circle.

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¹ The three worst hockey teams: Detroit .419; Anaheim .432; Ottawa .450.

² The three worst baseball teams: Baltimore .375; Detroit .393; Pittsburgh .402.

³ The three worst football teams: Jacksonville .291; NY Jets .292; Detroit .328.

⁴ The three worst basketball teams: Detroit .314; Orlando .388; Cleveland .398.

⁵ The Pistons had a .500 record in 2018.

⁶ Although not an outrageous assumption, this is not a valid one for several reasons. But the four leagues do strive for a certain level of parity in their rules surrounding the draft, salary cap, and schedules. Also, the way that the NHL accounts for tie games at the end of regulation raises a team’s chance of having a winning percentage higher than .500.