We are now the city with the longest major pro sport championship drought

[Mister Hoarse]

Time to suffer this footballs

[Heatmiser]

There will be over a million people downtown today for the cavs victory parade. It's nuts. People arrived at 4 am. Some stayed all last night just walking around. Tons of families. Everyone is so positive. Bars ran out of beer already! Not sure how much you guys can see of this on tv. So proud of Cleveland. No riots or dummies lighting couches in fire. Talked to a cop and there were only 5 arrests Sunday night. That is down from a regular weekend night.

TG

[Lightningwill_420]

There will be over a million people downtown today for the cavs victory parade. It's nuts. People arrived at 4 am. Some stayed all last night just walking around. Tons of families. Everyone is so positive. Bars ran out of beer already! Not sure how much you guys can see of this on tv. So proud of Cleveland. No riots or dummies lighting couches in fire. Talked to a cop and there were only 5 arrests Sunday night. That is down from a regular weekend night.

TG

Hooray for no riots. Cleveland is better than Columbus, I take it.

[Formula 21]

Congrats to the Cleveland fans for celebrating the right way. No fires, no killings, very classy.

[Lightningwill_420]

What's up with Columbus? All they have is a hockey team named after a bunch of depressed guys yanking it.

Ohio State

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/03/columbus_police_official_mass.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/riot-cops-use-tear-gas-columbus-crowds-after-ohio-state-n284976

[Millionaire Wussy]

Great story man. Happy for you. I would probably be crying for days too if the Chargers or Padres ever amounted to anything.

I would be in shock.

[Boltjolt]

Make it 110. Padres are out of it this year. Hec they are already out of next season too lol. We gonna keep this streak going a while it seems. The Chargers are the only hope since the Padres suck bad every year.

[Bolt-O]

USA Today ranks the most depressed sports cities:

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/06/sad-depressing-miserable-sports-cities-2016-ranking

[floydefisher]

I live in Cleveland. You cannot believe how good this feels, how uplifting it is. Cleveland sports fans are the best -- they stand by their team no matter what, often in the crappiest weather you can imagine -- and we were so hungry for any kind of title. After so long, getting so close and always coming up short, it felt like we would never get there. There are guys in their 60s and 70s still bawling their eyes out two days later. There were so many fans downtown Sunday night the state patrol closed off all the highways. There were no crimes, or fires, or any mischief. Just imagine about 50,000 people all acting like best friends all night. Unbelievably awesome. And Labron being from northeast Ohio makes it all the better. (Fun fact, both James and Curry were born in Akron, same hospital. Curry's Dad played for the Cavs at the time). Cleveland gets made fun of a lot (we make fun of ourselves, too) in general, so it is nice to see the City in a positive light for once. The people here deserve it -- it's a great place to live.

I have rooted for the Indians and Cavs my whole life. Cannot bring myself to be a Browns fan hence my allegiance to the Chargers.

TG

I have to admit I'm impressed with Cleveland fans for not acting like assholes and blowing up the city.

Lot better than what I've seen from most cities recently.

Enjoy your NBA championship.....you truly deserve it.

[Boltjolt]

USA Today ranks the most depressed sports cities:

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/06/sad-...s-2016-ranking

We have three championship births not two . A super bowl and two world series. Man we are irrelevant to everybody else.

[Mister Hoarse]

We have three championship births not two . A super bowl and two world series. Man we are irrelevant to everybody else.

Plus an AFL Championship.

[Jaywa]

Ouch. http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/1...-diego-buffalo

Cleveland finally got its trophy. Fifty-two years after the Browns won the 1964 NFL championship, the Cavaliers ended a drought that seemed like it would never end by roaring back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals to bring glory back to Northeast Ohio. By my count, 151 teams representing Cleveland in the four major American professional sports attempted to win a championship during that time span and came back empty-handed. (Save your jokes about the 2016 Browns and their motivations.) You're familiar with the Browns, Cavaliers and Indians, but it's a list that includes the Crusaders of the World Hockey Association and the Barons of the NHL, too.

The run of bad luck befalling Ohio's second-most-populous city seemed to stretch beyond sheer disappointment and variance. Cleveland, it was often said, was cursed. The Red Sox fan in me knows that curses can be broken, but I did start thinking about how long it had taken a Cleveland-based team to win a title. We know that cities usually win titles more frequently than Cleveland, but how frequently? Has any city ever waited longer for a title than Cleveland? And with the Cavaliers finally lifting a trophy after so many years of pain, who takes the city's place as the continent's most tortured fan base?

To figure all of this out, I came up with a new, not entirely empirical measure of losing called the Sports Misery Index. Just as no number can ever entirely explain the glee of winning a championship, no metric can ever fully articulate the pain that comes with year after year of losing. That's reality. All we can do is try to estimate that pain and put it in context, which is where the Misery Index comes in.

The method

One of the problems with figuring out which city has been tormented the longest is that all sports markets aren't created equal. This isn't a reflection on fandom or how much a given city cares about its team, but the reality that some cities have more shots at losing (and more chances to get their hopes up) than others. Compare Washington, D.C., and Jacksonville, for example. The Jaguars, Jacksonville's only professional team, haven't won a title in their 21 years of existence. That's hardly out of the ordinary. In Washington, though, there have been teams suiting up in each of the four major sports since the Nationals came to town, and none of those teams has won a title since Washington's football team won the Super Bowl at the end of the 1991 season. It has been 25 years since a Washington team won a title.

Fans in Washington and Jacksonville have each waited a relatively similar amount of time in terms of years for a title, but Jacksonville's team is 0-for-21. Washington's teams are 0-for-84. We need a way to adjudicate for both time and opportunity. The Misery Index scoring system does just that. For each market, the first team to fail to win a title in a given season yields one point. Each subsequent team that comes up short in the same calendar year generates a half-point. So, each year that its respective teams fail to win, Jacksonville receives one point of misery (for the Jags), while Washington receives 2.5 points (one point for its football team and a half-point each for the Wizards, Capitals and Nationals). You keep accruing points until somebody representing your city wins a title.

After finding a scoring system that worked, I went back through 1876 and calculated the Misery Index for every city or market that sent a professional baseball, basketball, football or hockey team out to play. I made a few choices. I included the American Basketball Association, WHA and American Football League but didn't include any other competitors to the four established major leagues. I left out MLS, college sports and the Canadian Football League, which will come into play. To some extent, that's a reflection on what those leagues mean in different places: Atlanta might value a Georgia Tech national title in football more than it would have enjoyed a Thrashers Stanley Cup, but New York wouldn't treat a St. John's NCAA tournament victory the same as it would the Yankees' winning the World Series. The Sounders mean significantly more to Seattle than Chivas USA meant to Los Angeles. You get the idea.

I didn't count partial seasons, and I combined markets where it made sense. Oakland and San Francisco were joined at the hip, but San Jose and Sacramento were separate entities. New Jersey's teams, as well as all entries past and present from Brooklyn and Long Island, fell under the New York City umbrella. Cities that lost teams before regaining them didn't pick up any extra points for the years they were without teams, but their counter also picks up from where it previously left off when they get their teams back. I'm also going to talk about teams' winning their titles during the actual year and time in which they won as opposed to the start of that given season; it's not as if Cavs fans could start planning for their parade back in October.

That's enough preamble. Let's start with this: Using the Misery Index, which city had to endure the most pain before winning a title?

...

1. San Diego (83.5 points)

Last title: Chargers, 1963

And then, rising above (or below) the fray, it's ... San Diego? Indeed, it's San Diego and its tan, Teva-ed denizens who inherit Cleveland's title as the longest-suffering fans in sports. With the Padres in last place in the NL West and already listed with a 0.0 percent chance of making the playoffs, this number will rise to 84 shortly. The Chargers finished 4-12 and might not even be in town next year. And the Clippers, Mariners, Conquistadors and Rockets have all come and gone without delivering a title.


San Diego's last title came on Jan. 5, 1964, 44 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in a league that hasn't existed for 46 years. The Padres have made the World Series twice and lost eight of their nine games. They blew an 8-6 lead in the 13th inning of a play-in game in 2007. In the Chargers' lone trip to the Super Bowl, they went down 14-0 within the first five minutes and were blown out by 23 points. Just in the past 15 years alone, they lost one playoff game where their legendarily accurate kicker missed three field goals and another when their safety fumbled away an interception with an eight-point lead and six minutes to go. This city has experienced trauma.

And yet, there's something undeniably weird about suggesting that San Diego fans are long-suffering. When we think of heartbroken cities, we almost always think of frigid cities that are past their economic prime. We think of Cleveland and Boston, of Buffalo and Minneapolis. The idea of fans suffering in perennially gorgeous weather by the beach feels wrong, like there's something inherently more meaningful about losing when you have to trod back home and shovel snow for six hours.

There's not. San Diego fans have suffered for 53 years while barely sniffing a title; there are grandfathers who have spent their entire lives in San Diego rooting for local teams without ever feeling for a moment like they're close to winning a championship. That's every bit as depressing as it must have been for Cleveland fans during their dry spell, and with the late-'80s Browns, the mid-'90s Indians and the two eras of LeBron, you can argue that they had much better teams and players to support.

Exit Cleveland. Enter San Diego, now the most tortured sports city in North America.