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The Worst City in Sports History

Detroit is four years into the worst run any city has ever seen from its sports teams

Dave Hogg
8 min readDec 9, 2022
A view of Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions.
This year is the 75th anniversary of the Lions’ last championship. They didn’t celebrate. (photo by author)

In 1962, the city of New York had some bad sports teams.

The first-year Mets went 40–120, the Titans (now Jets) went 5–9, and the Rangers and Knicks were both struggling. Between New Year’s Day and New Year’s Eve, those four teams went 106–219 — a winning percentage of .326.

(We’re counting old-school NHL ties as half a win and half a loss, since that’s the impact they had on the standings.)

Of course, fans in the Big Apple had plenty to cheer about in 1962. The Yankees went 96–66 on their way to yet another World Series victory and the Giants went 12–2 before losing their second straight NFL championship game to the Green Bay Packers.

However, if you happened to be a fan of the Mets, Titans, Rangers, and Knicks, it was a horrible year.

For more than 50 years, it was the horrible year in sports history. No city came close to 219 losses for decades.

If you think about it, that makes sense.

If a city’s baseball team loses 110 games — something that has only happened 24 times since the National League was founded in 1876 — they still need 119 losses from their NFL, NHL, and…

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Dave Hogg
Dave Hogg

Written by Dave Hogg

Freelance writer and data scientist in Metro Detroit. Covered pro sports for NHL.com and the Associated Press before COVID-19. Mentally ill and not ashamed.

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