In Praise of Losing Teams

I've been a sports fan all my life, and if you took the amount of heartbreak and pain I have felt as a fan up to this year and doubled it, it still wouldn't approach the amount of pain and heartbreak I have felt this year alone. Consider:

My alma mater is Ohio State. They did something pretty remarkable and unprecedented this year, making it to the National Championship Game in both of the big sports. No one is ever going to remember that, though, since the same team beat them in both games. Really took them to the woodshed, in fact. Florida has now won three straight college-sports-anyone-cares-about championships, and it's going to stay that way at least until January 7th, 2008.

My hometown is Akron, and I cheer on their school's football and basketball programs even more feverishly than Ohio State. They followed up their 2005 MAC championship football season with a 5-7 season with mostly the same players. As far as basketball, what happened to them was so uniquely excruciating and ridiculous that it deserves its own column, which I already wrote. I say this has been the most painful sports year for me, and Akron basketball represents the crown jewel of the pain.

I'm not much of a pro basketball or baseball fan these days. To get through the parts of the year not covered by football or college basketball, I turn to soccer and the English Premier League. I'm Pompey mad, which for the uninitiated means I'm a supporter of Portsmouth Football Club. They would have qualified for advanced European competition this year for the first time in their history, if a disallowed goal that should have counted against Arsenal the last game of the year did count (and the rest of the game then played out as it actually did).

Finally, for the last two years, I've followed the CFL, which I have decided is a better summer football alternative than NFL Europe and Arena Football. I watched every Montreal Alouettes game available to me (about 85% of their total games) in that time. That means I've watched them lose the Grey Cup (the CFL Championship game) both years. In fact, Montreal has participated in five of the last seven Grey Cups, but won only one of them.

The team that gave me the least amount of pain this year? The team that gave me my greatest moment of 2006-7 joy? The 4-12 Tampa Buccaneers, that's who.

Although they were a playoff team the previous year, they were a tenuous and rapidly-aging one. When quarterback Chris Simms went down early in this last season, pretty much any hope of being competitive went with him.

But, anything can happen in the NFL, and on October 22nd against the Eagles, a couple of poor throws from Donovan McNabb were returned by Ronde Barber for touchdowns and the Bucs were up 17-0. McNabb, needing to redeem himself, went on a tear to guide the Eagles back out in front. During the comeback, it was painfully clear how superior the Eagles were to the Buccaneers from a talent perspective. The Bucs were powerless to stop the comeback on their own turf. Their only hope was for Bucs kicker Matt Bryant to hit a 62-yarder on the game's last play. He was 0-for-3 from beyond 40 yards up to that point on the season, and his career-long was 50. Of course, he made the kick, the third longest in NFL history. I yelped when I saw it sail through the uprights.

So what do all the stress-inducing teams have in common with each other, in contrast with the Buccaneers? They are all quite good, so they engender hope. Hope can be a dangerous thing, Red told us in The Shawshank Redemption, and he was right.

Think about this. In a 30-team league of any given sport, perhaps six or seven have the talent to win a championship (at least, if you ask their fans). But for all but one of them, the season is going to end in disappointment. There can be only one champion.

Save for the Buccaneers, all of my teams were win-a-championship-good (or in the case of Portsmouth and Akron basketball, good enough to earn a berth in a more prestigious tournament) and it earned me a year of aging prematurely. These damn teams left nothing but disappointment and the chance at cursing the heavens (and some producers and officials) in their wake.

None of that is an issue for fans of bad teams. Any loss is expected, any win or positive development is a pleasant surprise. All upside.*

So here's my advice: love sports, but don't like the stress associated with being a hardcore fan? Pick a poor team to support. Once they get any good, for the sake of your sanity, move on to another bad team.

* This does not count teams whose front office is so horrendous that they have sucked for years and still have no real prospects of getting better. Sorry, Royals and Lions fans.