Dubious Team Performances
 

Which performance do you consider to be the worst-

2008 Detroit Lions 0-16
Obviously it's easy to to label a team that didn't win any games the worst of all time.

2003 Detroit Tigers 43-119
If you look at a list of all time bad baseball teams, you have to go back in time to the 1962 Mets to find the most recent team that won so few games. Even the 4 most recent expansion teams have won between 63-67 games.

2012 Charlotte Bobcats 7-57
Currently on a 21 game losing streak, and losing by a total of 14 points per game

Im saying Bobcats but the Tigers were hard to ignore. While the Lions were winless atleast they were still playing hard at the end of the season and in football its much more difficult to have games given to you. Being this bad in baseball or basketball is a much more impressive feat.

That Tiger season was just awful for me, so I'm probably biased. They were on pace to break the loss record, but went on a terror and won like 9 of their last 10 to close the year I think. What was worse to me, was that the 'record' they were chasing was of the expansion Mets.

I went into the season feeling great about them beginning a turnaround with Trammel (my favorite player) and other childhood heroes running the show.

From strictly a performance standpoint, I'd have to say the Lions. They didn't win a game and did something that hasn't been done since the advent of the 16 game schedule - lose every game. But they were competitive in many games that year and generally played hard. They barely had the worst point differential in the league that year. The Rams the next year had a worse point differential. So did the 2000 Cleveland Browns. So even though they didn't win a game, I can't vote for those lovable losers.

The 2003 Tigers were historically bad. They actually had some decent players who should have been in their primes - Higginson, Pena and Young could have played for many teams in the league. But Higginson was already on the downside and Pena/Young couldn't carry the team with their bats. They couldn't score runs and they couldn't prevent them. Their run differential was -2.1, which is incredibly bad. They were -1.8 the previous year, Arizona was at a -1.8 a couple of years later and the '96 Tigers were at a -2.0. The '62 Mets were also a -2.1, so the Tigers were pretty awful (though scoring was higher in 2003 than in 1962). They're definitely a candidate. If you asked for the worst two-year stretch, these guys probably have it locked up.

Even with that in mind, from an overall team perspective, if the Bobcats lose the last two, I'd have to say they may be the worst team in professional sports in modern memory. Not only would they set the NBA Win/Loss record for all time, but they've been outscored by 14ppg. There hasn't been a team this decade that has been outscored by an average of double digits - the last team to do so was the 1999 Clippers (at -10 ppg). The last team to get outscored more than the Bobcats this year were the 11-win Dallas Mavericks in 1992 (when scoring was significantly higher, so a bigger differential is to be expected). So not only do they suck from a W/L perspective, they're historically bad in getting blown out each game too. When you look at the team, there's a serious question whether any of those guys would start for almost any team in the league. What's just as bad is that no one in Charlotte cares. They say that 14,000 fans are coming to the games, but look at the TV and there aren't 6,000 fans in the stadium. You can't give tickets away. And no one gives two cents about the team. No one is even talking about it.

So maybe it's just because I'm in Charlotte, but if they lose the last two, I have to give them the head-nod, barely, over the Tigers.

Yeah, its difficult for me to vote any other way but 2008 Lions based on the fact that they didnt win a single game. The poll is most dubious, so in my mind, that means the most remarkably bad metric...wins/losses.

They played some really tough games though & would not fall on my top 5 list of worst NFL teams ever. Plenty of worse 1-15 teams over the years that I think that 2008 Detroit team would take to the woodshed.

Having said that, this year's Bobcats are pretty horrible, in a historic sense. Not only do they lose...they lose quite badly.

2012 kc royals.. thread over :)

What, nobody remembers the 1899 Cleveland Spiders? 20-134 and 3-54 to end the year :)

Off to a strong 17-80 start but just fell apart at the end I guess. :lol:

I picked the Bobcats. As Petros Papadakis said on the PMS show on Monday, even teams which are blown out by decent fringe playoff teams are blowing out the Bobcats.

The Bobcats' expected win percentage based on PF and PA is under 10. That's all I need to know.

I want to say Lions because they didn't even win a game but the Tigers were just god awful. They hit .240 as a team and their pitching was even worse. They had young talents simply completely overwhelmed.

Bobcats aren't in the running. That organization quit trying a while ago. It's more dubious to try and fail than it is to simply surrender and give up.

In the end, Lions win because they had Matt Millen. Nothing more dubious than that.

Dear god, make it stop. This is just horrific.

In some ways it has the makings of 2003 Tigers ... lots of great young talent, a couple of useful veterans ... and absolutely zero pitching. I'm still under the assumption that Sanchez will settle down and Chen and Duffy will settle into .500 pitches. Hochevar will be what he is ... occasional brilliance with the routine start of 1 1/3 innings with 12 runs along with a lot of 4.75 ERA outings throw in.

I feel for Luis Mendoza and he could have been a feel good story .. but he needs to be jettisoned to Italy or Japan along with Darrel May ASAP.

74/75 Caps? 8-67-5

1-39 on the road

outscored 446-181 (5.75 - 2.26)

Meh, that's hockey. It's not a real sport. *ducks*

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Actually, I don't think it's fair to compare teams from 40 years ago to today. The possibilities of putting together a horrible squad (or super squad) is higher when there's no Free Agency. A couple of bad drafts, a bad trade and *poof*, you're fucked for a couple of seasons because there's zero talent on the squad. With free agency, it's easier to improve your team and make it at least competitive. So to post an epic fail season now really takes skill (or an entirely lack thereof).

I know it's college, but the 80 game losing streak of Prairie View is pretty astounding.

Bobcats are dumping to get a better draft pick. Once they knew they sucked they threw in the towel.


Tigers were the worst, they were just a horrible team.

Can we maybe have some metric of what sporting events actually should count? I mean, personally anything before 1980 is fuzzy to me. But I gotta think that it simply isn't comparable to today. Maybe sports since the 90s are only comparable with themselves.

And Hockey doesn't count in my world either....I almost typed up your exact response but figured that the Hockey kids would cry.

If you're going overall dubious-ness, the Pirates current 19 year body of work has to count. The Browns and Lions recent performances are pretty shitty too.

Er, the facts don't support that. They've had the #1 lottery chance for quite some time now and they're still losing badly. Plus, it's not like they benched someone in an effort to take talent off the court or traded anyone away good at the trade deadline. They never had any talent to begin with.

Last year's team won 34 games (somehow), but look at the guys they got rid of. Stephen Jackson is 34 and averaged less than 10ppg this year (down from 18 last year). Gerald Wallace's scoring is down and he's at the end of his contract - there's no way he'd have resigned with Charlotte. Boris Diaw scores 6.5 ppg and he demanded a trade at the deadline. Kwame Brown? Shaun Livingston? The trades they made haven't panned out, but even if they hadn't moved anyone this was still a dreadful squad.

I give the edge to the Pirates - at least the Browns had a winning season in the last two decades.

Yeah, when it comes to overall team performances, I think you have to look at the pre-FA and the post-FA periods separately. Which makes the Pirates' run pretty damned remarkable. You'd figure they'd have to luck out at some point!

If the Pirates lucked out, they would be the Royals.

Basketball is less of one and it's included...

If that was the case there would be a lot more 0-16 teams and the popular opinion is that 0-16 is harder than 16-0.

This would have been funnier if the Pistons were the NBA team

The thing with football is that there have been 9 1-15 teams and countless 2-14 ones over the past few years. When you start to look at the NBA or MLB there really aren't many MLB teams who were within 10 games of the tigers. Or in basketball few teams only win 13 games.

If you gave the Lions the same amount of games, I still think they don't get as many victories as the others. A team could slack off, Lions try their hardest, and the Lions would still lose.

If you break it down the Tigers team would be like a 4-12 NFL team and the Bobcats would be like a 2-14 team. If you go purely by numbers that is. :)

The Iron Mike Sharp/Brooklyn Brawler tag team lost pretty much every match they had in 1988.

No MLB team would ever be better than 11-5 though. The best bulls team would only be 14-2.

This comparison doesn't work, but I think you know this.

They choked every time too. Always snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Yeah the Conquisadors were pretty awful back then as well.

i blame the refs. seriously its like they were NBA refs they were so biased

Sample size may have something to do with expected win totals of 0.

I dont think you would argue that NFL teams generally arent resting players until really late in the season and its few teams that are even in that position.

In the NBA it is constant 4 games in 5 nights scheduling and by this team of year a lot of teams arent even playing their best players.

In MLB, September 1st is callup time so you are seeing numerous starts from pitchers that arent really MLB ready along with lineups playing their borderline MLB ready players. Yes it works both ways.

In MLB/NBA you arent always getting a team at is best. In the NFL even in week 16 the Packers usually have plenty of incentive to go out there and beat the Lions.

A lot of teams have been using the Charlotte matchup to just rest their starters yet Charlotte is still getting kicked around the gym.

bucc does

I'm not even gonna get into the fallacy that basketball is a sport when someone tries to say Hockey isn't.


When basketball players start playing a full 60 minutes I might at least consider them worth something. "Professional basketball" is kinda like "Military INtelligence".

Fun related wikipedia page:

Imperfect season - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the 0-29-1 Rakovski Ruse of the Bulgarian A Professional Football Group.

I just hate hockey and you can draw your own things from that. It might just be all the Pens fans though. Anyways, don't hockey player only play like 22 or 25 minutes a game?

Well, i bet the royal's will fire seitzer within the week... then yost by the all-star break.... dayton moore won't be fired but he will resign..

Those 1988 Orioles were pretty bad :(

As an O's fan, I was pretty blinded going into that season thinking guys like Rich Schu, Ken Gerhart and Oswaldo Peraza would really surprise people :(

and in that ti,e they put out the amount of energy that would take a basketball player about 120 minutes of playing time to do.

Dude, it's a joke. Lighten up, Francis.

That Lions team was truly dreadful. People forget (because we want to) that when the first post-Millen season started, they had zero players on the roster from their 2001-2006 drafts. Millen took a 70 year old franchise and turned them into an expansion team.

Both that year and the next one, Kowalski (RIP) would come on the local sports talk show every week and say "This is what the other team is going to do. The Lions cannot stop them from doing it. The only way they can win is if the other team self destructs." and 30 of 32 times, that's exactly what happened.

its an old overdone really baseless joke that, oh yeah, isn't funny. I'd lighten up if people stopped trying to BE funny without the skill to do so ;)

Indeed they do but skating takes a helluva lot more effort than jogging up and down a far shorter court.

The bigger issue is the real lack of rest between shifts. You're on for up to a minute and a half, you're off for 2 and back on again, the body very rarely gets to slow down.


Basketball players are on for what 5 at a time perhaps? and while they half of that is pretty leisurely up and down the court and/or standing in one place working the passing lanes. Then you come out for up to 10-15 actual minutes at a time. (game time may be shorter but yer still sitting through the breaks)

However, further discussion of this should go to its own thread.


Back to your regularly posted shredding of horrible teams =)

Whine moar, Francis.

You're still not funny, but feel free to drag this on.

I'm not sure who the best player on those Lions and Tigers teams were, but the best player on the Bobcats is Corey Maggette. That has to have them win this, no?

+1 to whoever said they were terrible before they were tanking. Also for the last 10-15 games teams seem to be regularly giving players nights off against them and they still win in blow outs. Horrible.