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.
Fan Misery Index 