Sports are mostly about losing
Winning is great. It is fun. But do not get used to it when it happens.
Let me start with a message to Philadelphia Eagles fans.
Enjoy this week.
Enjoy the parade on Friday.
Enjoy the entire offseason.
I mean all of that sincerely.
Revel in it. Talk your shit to Chiefs, Cowboys, Commanders and Giants fans. Shout “Go Birds” at each other until you can not possibly speak anymore. Do the E-A-G-L-E-S chant at every Flyers, Sixers and Phillies game this season.
Do all of that because these next few weeks, months and maybe even the next year or two are going to be the peak experience of your fandom.
Not only have you seen your team win a championship, you have seen it win two championships in a relatively short period of time (with another near-miss mixed in two years ago).
Embrace that feeling. Celebrate it. Shower yourself in it.
Because it is not only extremely rare to get that experience, but is also very likely to only get worse from here as a fan.
That is not a knock on the Eagles, or suggesting that they are going to immediately get worse as a team, or that they are not a well-run organization. Quite the opposite, actually. They might be the best-run organization in the NFL right now, and they should still be a serious Super Bowl contender for the foreseeable future. It is just the simple reality of sports fandom that this is the peak, and that it is quite possible that you have already seen the best Philadelphia Eagles team of your lifetime. Or perhaps anybody’s lifetime.
That is just how sports works.
That is something we do not understand enough in the moment when you are actually lucky enough to see your team win a championship — and especially multiple championships.
As thrilling and exciting as it all is, there is also an unintended curse and frustration that comes with it in the years that follow. Because now you know what it feels like. Now you know it is attainable. Now you have real, serious expectations and an unquenchable thirst to experience that feeling again. Now the outside expectations become higher because you have set the bar at the top of the mountain.
And every year that follows where you inevitably fail to reach the top of that mountain, the more disappointing it feels. The more frustrating it feels. The more you feel like you are deserving of a championship.
“We should win not because we are good, but because this is what we do.”
Along with that comes the outside noise from everybody else that expects you to win a championship.
I mention this not necessarily for Eagles fans specifically, but because I’ve just been thinking a lot about what it means to be a sports fan anymore and how much of a chore it feels like it has become at times.
Do not get me wrong, I love sports. Still love sports. There is not a happier moment for me than sitting at a random game between two teams that I could not care less about it, just enjoying a beer and enjoying the experience. I love writing about sports. All of that passion still exists.
But the 24/7/365 nature of sports talk, along with the the nature of sports media where engagement, speculation, insider information (which is 99% bullshit, by the way), and saying the most outlandish things possible is rewarded, just makes it all become …. exhausting.
(And that is when you are not being bludgeoned over the head with gambling information and the fantasy sports aspect of things.)
Anger and yelling is the primary mindset and emotion, and it seems to overtake everything no matter what the situation is. I do not always remember it being this way. I feel like this is a newer mentality that has grown with the rise of social media, sports talk radio/TV and non-stop hot-take shows on FS1 and ESPN all day.
Everybody is just yelling all of the time.
Sometimes anger is justified.
Dallas Mavericks fans should be angry right now. Pittsburgh Pirates fans should be perpetually angry. Cleveland Browns fans should be angry.
If your team simply waives a white flag (Mavericks) or shows zero desire to compete (Pirates), or is just completely inept and consistently near the bottom of the league (Browns), that is one thing. Yell. Buy your billboards. Get mad.
Sometimes, however, it is just looking for a pound of flesh because your team was simply good instead of great.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.
Just a couple of days after the Kansas City Chiefs lost the Super Bowl, Fox Sports radio host Rob Parker went on his show and said the Chiefs should force head coach Andy Reid out, saying among other things, “this fall off the cliff is two years in the making.”
Fall off the cliff?
They just went to their third Super Bowl in a row and won the previous two.
You can read more insane ramblings of a madman here.
Look, Parker is a clown. He always has been. He is the type attention-seeking, hot-take artist that has taken over sports talk over the past two decades. I don’t even know if he actually believes the things he says. He probably doesn’t. But it gets a reaction, reactions get listeners and viewers, and listeners and viewers make for happy advertisers and bosses.
But those words have power behind them. Eventually those words flow down hill and make their way into the fan discourse. There is almost certainly a non-zero number of Chiefs fans that legitimately DO believe they should move on from Reid because of the Super Bowl. Reid probably has one or two more non-Super Bowl seasons in him before talk like that starts to become more serious.
Because after all, if you have a championship caliber team … you better keep winning championships.
Let’s bring it back to a more local perspective with Pittsburgh teams.
For Penguins fans from my generation (basically anybody younger than 45 but also older than, say, 25), the peak era of fandom was right around the 2007 and 2009 seasons. The team had emerged from some down years, it was finally starting to get on more stable footing financially, and you could see there was a powerhouse team starting to develop.
They had two young megastars in Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, wins were adding up, and management was making a serious effort to go all in and win it all. The 2007-08 run to the Stanley Cup Final was magical. Every game was a major event. There was a palpable excitement throughout the city. Young fans were getting a taste of something they had not really experienced from the organization. Even though that season did not end with a championship, the team had gotten closer than it had been in nearly 20 years and there was a sense of inevitability for a championship.
It would come one season later in an epic rematch against the Detroit Red Wings. It was a championship for a new generation of fans and they mostly went nuts. It was incredible. And for another year or two every game remained a major event.
But then something else happened.
They started to lose in the playoffs.
They were upset in 2010 by a No. 8 Montreal seed in the second round to end their title defense, and it was mostly written off as a fluke due to a hot goalie.
In 2011 they blew a 3-1 lead to Tampa Bay and they mostly got a pass because Crosby and Malkin were both injured, and it was seen as a major accomplishment to win as many games as they did.
But then the 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 postseasons all happened where there erally weren’t any excuses for people to fall back on. And then anger and frustration started to creep in. Every year after that initial championship that they didn’t win, frustration built up more and more, to the point where there were serious discussions being had about whether or not the Crosby-Malkin era was a disappointment, even though both players were still only in their mid-20s and in the absolute prime of their careers.
Should they trade one? Did they have to trade one? Why aren’t they trading one? Why can’t they be more like Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane in Chicago and just be winners?
It’s not like it had been a long championship drought. It had been less than seven years, which in the grand scheme of things in professional sports is nothing. It was not until the 2015-16 season when the Crosby-Malkin duo won its second championship that they were finally deemed to not be a disappointment, as if there careers were now validated.
Then they won again the next season.
Then they have not won since, and now that the re-tooling has arrived there is a sense of apathy setting in, even with the appreciation for what that core accomplished. But that time period between 2009 and 2015? A lot of the fun got sucked out of it. Which is crazy when you look back at how good and entertaining that team actually was.
Earlier this week somebody followed in the footsteps of the Pirates fans that purchased billboards trying to get Bob Nutting to sell the team (a fruitless endeavor if there ever was one) and called for Art Rooney to either trade Mike Tomlin (he has a no-trade clause anyway) or sell the team.
I’m not going to sit here and say the Pittsburgh Steelers are above criticism and that they do not have problems.
They are not above criticism, and they do have problems.
They are stale.
They have not won enough in the playoffs.
They desperately — DESPERATELY — need a quarterback to help get them closer to a championship. Until they get that, nothing else matters.
If you wanted to make the argument that maybe it is time for a new voice and a new direction on the sidelines, I think you could get me to have that discussion. It has, after all, been eight years without a postseason win. That is one of the longer current droughts in the NFL right now, and some of the more recent playoff losses have been bad. They haven’t really been competitive in some of those games.
They need to do something about all of those things, and those are very valid discussions to have.
They should be had (and we will have them here in the coming weeks).
But I don’t know if that rises to the level of “buying a billboard and urging the owner to sell the team because you’re embarrassing us and we are fed up.”
Mostly because — and I know a lot of Steelers fans do not want to hear this — the team is still pretty good. It’s not as good as you want it to be. It’s not as good as the Eagles or the Chiefs. But it’s pretty good. It is competitive every year. You know every single season you are going to have a team that at least gives you a reason to watch it and pay attention to it for four months.
Since the start of the 2017 season only four teams in the NFL have won more regular season games than the Steelers. Since the start of the 2020 season, only six teams have, and that is despite the Steelers having — by pretty much every objective measure — some of the worst quarterback play in the NFL over that stretch. Most teams that get that level of play from their quarterbacks win three or four games.
I get it. They haven’t won any playoff games during that stretch. And that’s frustrating. I think if you really dug into those games individually there’s been some bad luck at times, there’s been some injury luck at times, there’s been some bad quarterback play at times, and there’s been some bad coaching at times. It’s all added up into the result you have had. But there is still something to be said for consistent competitiveness.
And, if we are being honest, that’s really the only thing you are owed as a fan from your team. Competitiveness and an entertaining product.
It has been 16 years since the Steelers won their most recent Super Bowl (which is crazy to think about how fast time goes), and that seems like a long time. For Steelers fans, it feels like an eternity.
The harsh reality is …. it’s not. It’s not actually that long at all.
The average Super Bowl championship drought in the NFL right now is 31.5 years, including the 12 teams that have never won one.
The Steelers are only halfway to the average drought. They are still nearly a decade away from matching their Super Bowl drought between 1979 and 2005.
The average championship drought in the NBA is 31.7 yards.
In the NHL it is 24.1 years (a number that is lowered dramatically by the rise of expansion teams that simply have not existed that long and have yet to win — Seattle, Atlanta/Winnipeg, Columbus, Minnesota, San Jose, Nashville, etc.).
In Major League Baseball it is 26.2 years.
If you look at the four major men’s North American sports league, the average current championship drought is just under 30 years. Of the 124 teams, only 49 of them have won a championship in the past 20 years. There are 57 teams that have droughts of 30 years or more. There are 37 over 40 years. There are 23 that are over 50 years.
A lot of this is also a matter of perspective.
A Chicago Bears, or New York Jets, or Cleveland Browns fan probably looks at a Steelers fan buying a billboard urging the owner to sell the team and asks, “really? This is nothing, bro.”
Just the same way a Pittsburgh Pirates fan would look at a New York Yankees fan that complains about having not won since 2009. Is the Pirates fan supposed to pull out a tiny violin and feel sorry for the team that has not won a World Series in *punches numbers on calculator* only 16 years and still wins 95 games every year? Hell no. I am not doing that. I will not do that. I would crawl over 25 miles of loose legos on my hands and knees to have that baseball team right now. Give me that.
Sometimes I go through ruts in my writing where I am not happy with what I am doing. Other times I go through stretches where I sit back and say, “I really like this.” When it comes to the latter, I think one of my better stretches was during the 2018 Stanley Cup playoffs when I spent a lot of time covering the Washington Capitals run to a championship. Before Game 6 of their Eastern Conference Finals series against the Tampa Bay Lightning — when they were facing a must-win game — I wrote this.
It opened with this sentence that I still firmly believe today: “Sports fandom is all about dealing with failure and disappointment.”
Winning is the goal. Winning is what you strive for and desire and want.
But every year there is only one team in each sport that ends its season with a win. No matter how good your team is, or good you think it is, chances are it is not going to be your team.
Teams like the Tom Brady era New England Patriots, and to a lesser extent the Patrick Mahomes era Kansas City Chiefs, wrecked the curve for everybody else. Those runs of sustained dominance and championship success are the extreme outliers.
Sometimes your team just does not win.
Sometimes we lose sight of the difference between “we did not win” and “we are terrible and need to change everything.”