Atlanta, Seattle top list of America’s most miserable sports cities

It’s been quite a year for sports fans in Atlanta. Since last spring, the NHL Thrashers left town for Winnipeg, baseball’s Braves blew a near-lock playoff spot on the final day of the season, and the NBA Hawks and NFL Falcons got bounced out of the post-season early yet again.

That was enough to push Atlanta, always among the top finishers in Forbes’ annual ranking of America’s Most Miserable Sports Cities, back to the top spot for the first time since 2008. Last year’s “winner,” Seattle, slips to No. 2. Phoenix, Buffalo and San Diego, as usual, round out the top five.

Our unique sports misery methodology isn’t focused on long-term futility, as epitomized by such teams as the L.A. Clippers, Baltimore Orioles, and until recently, the New Orleans Saints. You know about all that. This is about misery as defined by heartbreak – teams good enough to win a lot of games and advance through the post-season, only to disappoint fans in the end by falling short of a championship. Which cities have endured that the most? No one tops Atlanta, a combined 1-5 in World Series and Super Bowl play, not to mention numerous post-season flops in earlier rounds.

Misery points are earned in the heaviest doses by poor winning percentages in the championship round (Super Bowl and pre-Super Bowl era championship games, World Series, NBA Final, Stanley Cup Final), and then get incrementally lower as you move down the playoff ladder to conference title games (and baseball’s LCS) and then to earlier rounds (we also count second place, non-playoff baseball seasons, the rough equivalent of an early playoff exit in the other three major North American sports leagues – hence the Braves’ collapse last September cost them on the misery meter). We round out the calculations by giving some weight to championship droughts (17 years for Atlanta, 33 years for Seattle) and to the ratio of total seasons to championships won (for example, the four teams in Phoenix sports history have competed for a combined 95 seasons with one title to show for them, won by the 2001 Diamondbacks). We also toss in a bonus misery point for losing a sport to relocation, such as the NHL in Atlanta and the NBA in Buffalo and San Diego.

http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=ys-forbes-atlanta_most_miserable_sports_cities_022812

No. 8 Cleveland

Teams: Indians, Browns, Browns II, Rams, Cavaliers, Barons
Championship Round Record: 7-9
Semifinal Round Record: 4-11
Total Seasons/Championships: 225/7
Last title: 1964 No, Cleveland. Miserable as you are, you’re not No. 1. Those seven titles before 1965 are part of the city’s history. They count.

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eddf45gdeg/no-8-cleveland/#gallerycontent