The Anatomy of Sports Misery

When near-success can sting more than perpetual failure

The legendary Jim McKay once famously described sports as “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”. We often celebrate the former while ignoring the latter. The greatest sports stories usually revolve around the champions and winners — history is, after all, written by the victors. But how do we quantify the depths of despair for teams and fans that experience losses?

ESPN recently tried to answer this question with a tool they call the “Misery Index”. By measuring a person’s favorite teams, the Misery Index tool pools 25 years of data — including results, expectations, and postseason success to determine how poor of an experience a fan base has. It covers American professional leagues, so international soccer and college sports are excluded. For the most part, the “miserable” teams in this exercise simply have bad records. But it forces us to ask, what is true misery, and when losing turns into apathy, is it still misery?

Defining Utopia

Before exploring what true sports misery looks like, it’s important to understand what the opposite looks like. In the NFL rankings, ESPN…