Over the next five months or so of the NFL offseason, there will surely be plenty of excitement among Lions fans. Their team spent large parts of last season among the favorites for the Super Bowl, and everyone will be hoping that the Lions’ front office can make the necessary tweaks to take the team a couple of steps further next season. A Lions victory would end an 18-year wait for a Big 4 Championship for the city of Detroit. Not a major drought in the grand scheme of things, but it is a drought nonetheless.
Of course, it is possible that a Detroit team will win a championship before Super Bowl LX next year. It’s highly unlikely that will be the Detroit Red Wings (the last Detroit team to win a championship), a team struggling in the NHL this season. It could certainly be the Pistons, who have been flying under the radar in the NBA. The Pistons will be in the Playoffs, and many pundits have cited them as a dark horse team to watch. As for the Tigers, the nascent MLB season will be interesting for Detroit baseball fans. The Tigers are on the up.
Debatable how much fans ponder droughts
It’s debatable as to how Detroit sports fans view the big-picture idea of a city-wide championship drought. It would be spectacular, for sure, if a team like the Lions ended a decades-long wait for a Super Bowl, yet most fans would only see that in the context of football itself, not the exercising of some curse hanging over the city. It’s not comparable to, say, Buffalo, a city that yearns for a major championship in any sport.
Moreover, you might argue that Big 4 sports leagues focus is somewhat pointless. The state of Michigan has obviously had huge success in recent years with the Wolverines winning a college national championship. We can also point to other sports, like horse racing, with trainers like Doug O’Neill winning Kentucky Derby honors; you can be sure O’Neill’s runners will feature prominently in the horse racing betting for the upcoming Triple Crown season.
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Yet, it is interesting to consider how these droughts are measured. The website Champs or Chumps takes a novel approach. Normally, the ranking is based on years since a championship win, putting cities like San Diego and Buffalo, neither of which have had a championship-winning team, at the top, but the website uses a system based on the number of teams in the city and then adds up the drought for each, coming up with a final total.
Boston should be the yardstick
It means, for instance, that a city like New York (eight teams) ranks higher on the drought list than Detroit despite having won a team that won a championship more recently (The New York Giants in 2011, if you were wondering). And cities like Nashville and Vancouver rank below Detroit despite never having produced a championship team. Overall, Detroit’s ranking is put at 64 cumulative seasons, calculated based on every season without a championship since the Red Wings’ success in 2008.
So, how should we measure Detroit’s success, or lack thereof? Arguably, the best way to do it is with cities with a comparable number of Big 4 sports teams. So, for instance, we can cite the cities of Minneapolis and Boston, both of which have four teams. Minneapolis actually ranks top overall, as the city last saw a championship win in 1991 (Twins – World Series). As for Boston, well, Beantown is the city that Detroit should aspire to emulate. Boston sits at the very bottom of the rankings, with the Celtics being the current NBA champions. The city’s teams have delivered 13 championships in the 21st century alone, covering all Big 4 sports.
