An Objectively Correct Utilitarian Ranking of 2021 NFL Postseason Rooting Interests
Happy new year. It is time once again for another postseason of NFL football. Our collective reward for willing a by-most-accounts completely regular 17-week season into existence — a season that ended on time, in which every game was played, while something like a third of the players in the league ended up on the COVID-19 list at one point or another — is the biggest NFL playoff field yet.
Yes, fourteen teams — damn near half the league, what is this, the NBA? — have qualified to compete for the Lombardi Trophy this winter, in front of anywhere from zero to a handful of fans, so as to help a confused and frustrated nation pretend extremely forcefully that everything is very normal right now. This is the very definition of resilience, and we thank football for its service.
Speaking of the greater good, let’s pivot back now to the issue at hand: an objectively correct ranking of 2021 NFL postseason rooting interests. If the entire raison d’être for professional gridiron football’s ongoing occurrence amidst a pandemic (or otherwise!) is to provide a modicum of entertainment for a desperate and downtrodden nation at the expense of the health, happiness, and wellbeing of a few dozen athletically gifted millionaires, then it follows that the NFL believes deeply in utilitarianism and in providing the greatest amount of good and happiness for the greatest number of people.
We can easily follow their lead and create an objective ranked order of worst-to-best utilitarian NFL postseason outcomes using two and only two sets of data for each team:
- Market size: How many people would this team’s success bring joy to? The United States of America are divided into 210 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive media markets. Just as every municipality in this country falls within the borders of exactly one state, every county also belongs to exactly one media market. These markets generally extend outward from population centers. The largest market is New York, which contains 6.337% of all television households in America — about 1 in every 16. The smallest market belongs to Glendive, Montana, and contains 0.003% of all television households in America, or roughly 1 in every 33,000. (This is probably why New York gets to have two football teams even while Glendive doesn’t have any football teams at all.) An oversimplifying assumption we can make here is that every NFL team’s fanbase is located entirely within the media market in which the team plays. This is terribly imprecise and ignores secondary markets, but so does the NFL’s televised game blackout policy. Very broadly and succinctly then, we can assume for our purposes that a Super Bowl win will bring joy and happiness to the entire population of the media market in which the team plays, and not one person more.
- Championship drought: How long have those people been deprived of championship-based happiness? When it comes to professional sports leagues, America has had “the big four” since time immemorial: the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB. It is important for us to consider not only how long the people of each media market have gone without a Super Bowl win, but how long each market has gone without a title in any of the big four leagues. Think of this the way you would think of an ungrateful and thankless child asking his parents for a PlayStation 5. “A PlayStation 5? But we just bought you a Nintendo Switch!” In this metaphor the child is a Cleveland resident, the PS5 is a Browns Super Bowl win, and the Nintendo Switch is the 2016 NBA Championship. (Importantly, we are limiting title drought calculations to the aforementioned big four leagues. We cannot and will not tell Seattle-Tacoma residents craving another Super Bowl win that they have a perfectly good Seattle Sounders FC 2018 MLS Cup at home; extending the earlier metaphor, an MLS Cup is an N-Gage.)
That’s it! Those are the only two statistics we need. By multiplying each NFL team’s market population by the number of days it’s been since that market last won a big four championship (as of February 7th, 2021, the date of the upcoming Super Bowl), we can derive an easily quantifiable measure of sports unhappiness, measured in terms of person-days, and sort the teams accordingly to reveal, as promised, an objectively correct utilitarian ranking of 2021 NFL postseason rooting interests.
14. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Media Market: Tampa-St. Petersburg (Sarasota)
Population: 5,523,606
Last Championship: 9/28/2020 (Tampa Bay Lightning)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 729 million
Ah, this is nice. As if you needed another reason to root against Tom Brady, the vile 43-year-old six-time champion and greatest quarterback of all time, trying to win a title for a nondescript franchise in a Floridian backwater city of retirees and transplants that know neither winter nor struggle. As if you needed another reason to root against that ignoble doofus Rob Gronkowski, whose shtick was stale and tired five years ago. As if you needed another reason to root against the incorrigible Antonio Brown, cut by three separate teams just last season ago amid a multitude of rape allegations. Until now, your desire to see this 2010 Miami Heat-esque assemblage of ring-hungry veterans get ground into a fine paste before Martin Luther King Day was purely a matter of distaste. But perhaps no one has made the case for rooting against Tampa Bay better than the local hockey team and their months-late Stanley Cup win. There is no other market in America that boasts a sports unhappiness metric that clocks in at under a billion person-days; nobody needs a Super Bowl win less than these people do!
13. Kansas City Chiefs
Media Market: Kansas City
Population: 2,750,316
Last Championship: 2/2/2020 (Kansas City Chiefs)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 1.020 billion
Let’s talk about some reasons to root against the Chiefs. First and foremost, they’re the defending champions, which buries them on the person-days of sports unhappiness metric. And even if you’re into the idea of dynastic dominance—we haven’t seen repeat NFL champions in sixteen years, after all — there’s the issue of Tyreek Hill being maybe the single most loathsome person in professional sports (and we were even just talking about Antonio Brown). And even if you can ignore players’ off-field moralistic shortcomings — there are just so many bad apples to consider on an individual basis, you know? — then there’s the unforgettable scene from opening day at Arrowhead Stadium when Chiefs fans, even in a diminished capacity, audibly barraged “a moment of silence and respect for racial tolerance and healing” or whatever the hell it was with a chorus of boos. Ha! What a bunch of toilet people, those cretins. And then otherwise affable head coach Andy Reid had to pretend he had “no idea” why the locals would jeer the concept of racial equality. Yes — we all wonder!
12. Los Angeles Rams
Media Market: Los Angeles
Population: 15,779,856
Last Championship: 10/27/2020 (Los Angeles Dodgers)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 1.625 billion
Here is a great example of the utilitarian aspect of “person-days of sports unhappiness” at work. The people of Los Angeles have won a sports championship more recently than the people of Tampa Bay or Kansas City — hell, they won not just one but two, just a few months ago! — but the substantially larger market size in Los Angeles means that a Rams championship would mitigate more person-days of sports unhappiness than either the Bucs or Chiefs bringing home the big one. As far as the Rams themselves go, what can be said? They gave us perhaps the shittiest Super Bowl of all time just a couple years ago and now the same outfit is back again, this time in new and dis-improved uniforms. Why did they throw their iconic look directly into a trash can to replace the logo with something that looks like it was designed to pop against a smartphone background? It stinks!
11. Washington Football Team
Media Market: Washington (Hagerstown)
Population: 7,213,836
Last Championship: 10/30/2019 (Washington Nationals)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 3.362 billion
With rosters and coaching staffs that approach the size of the U.S. Senate, every football team in the NFL is capable of stringing together a series of inspirational individual stories into an overall feel-good narrative that it can use to garner sympathy and casual rooting interest for a month or so. On that front, no football team this year can beat the Football Team. Their head coach, Ron Rivera, spent the season completing cancer treatments while showing up for work every day in the midst of a pandemic. Their quarterback, Alex Smith, has lost starting jobs to both Colin Kaepernick and Pat Mahomes in his career, and very nearly lost his leg a few years ago after a gruesome on-field injury that took years to recover from. And the team’s longtime controversial name, a no-doubt-about-it hundred-percent racial slur whose usage Webster’s Dictionary was calling “often contemptuous” as far back as 18-fucking-98, is finally dead and gone forever, except when television commentators accidentally use it three times a week. Surely then, the Football Team is the football team worth rooting for this postseason, yes? Dear God, no! The Football Team is a 7–9 collection of bozos who have no business competing in the postseason, led on the sidelines by a man who should be nowhere near so many people in his condition, led on the field by a man who should be thankful he can walk and retired from this very violent game, and collectively owned by Dan Snyder. Appreciate what Hockey Team and Baseball Team have recently given you, Washington (Hagerstown), because this football team can go kick rocks!
10. Green Bay Packers
Media Market: Green Bay-Appleton
Population: 1,207,776
Last Championship: 2/6/2011 (Green Bay Packers)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 4.413 billion
At this point it is possible that some readers may suggest that I’ve underestimated the sports unhappiness of the Packers fanbase overall, because actually the Packers fanbase is better represented by the 2.5-million-person Milwaukee market, or perhaps even by the 5.8-million-person population of Wisconsin overall; and that if I used those numbers, then the sports unhappiness measurement that a Packers win would alleviate should be nearly quintupled to something like 20 billion person-days; and that as such the Packers should be much higher in these rankings. And to these completely hypothetical people, I say, “Thank you for reading! I look forward to reading your several-thousand-word-long piece on objectively ranking NFL postseason rooting interests, please let me know where I can do so.”
9. Pittsburgh Steelers
Media Market: Pittsburgh
Population: 3,311,538
Last Championship: 6/11/2017 (Pittsburgh Penguins)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 4.428 billion
Oh gross, oh yuck, the Steelers are objectively a preferential rooting interest over five other teams in the field? Hey, the math and the gut don’t always agree. One pretty funny and already forgotten storyline of this bad and dumb NFL season is that the Steelers took a perfect record all the way into the month of December, and were 11–0 with less than a month left in the season, and “when the Steelers go undefeated, should we add an asterisk to that 16–0 record?” was at that point in time a great hypothetical conversation starter. And then this bag of turds went ahead and lost four of their final five games, fell from the first seed to the third, and by most accounts look not just beatable, but extremely beatable, totally lost, adrift and aloof. Good!
8. Cleveland Browns
Media Market: Cleveland-Akron (Canton)
Population: 4,191,114
Last Championship: 6/19/2016 (Cleveland Cavaliers)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 7.100 billion
Well hey, this is nice. The Browns have made the playoffs! It’s been seventeen or eighteen years since that happened, and roughly fifty quarterbacks, and it’s been something like twenty-five or thirty years since they won a playoff game, and they’ve never even been to a Super Bowl, much less won one, and aren’t they just a fun team to root for here in the depths of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic? In fact, Cleveland’s last NFL title came in 1964 — eighteen years more recently than their last World Series win — which means the almost 4.2 million people of Cleveland are more than 20,400 days removed from sports happiness, giving them an unprecedented 85 billion person-days of misery, and truly is there no city more sports unhappy than this cursed mistake by the lake! Except, no! No, this isn’t the case at all! For LeBron James came back to Cleveland out of the goodness of his heart, got his ass whooped by the Warriors in three of his four seasons with the team, but broke through one time — just one goddamn time, dammit! — to give the people of Cleveland their only championship of the last (and probably next) fifty years. Was it worth it, guys? Indianapolis, Seattle — even Baltimore fans deserve more sympathy than you people do now.
7. New Orleans
Media Market: New Orleans
Population: 1,887,150
Last Championship: 2/7/2010 (New Orleans Saints)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 7.583 billion
New Orleans has no baseball team, has no hockey team, and for all intents and purposes it has no basketball team. Like the comparably small market of Green Bay-Appleton, New Orleans has a championship drought inexorably linked to its Super Bowl drought. And holy cow, has it really been more than ten years since Drew Brees and the Saints gave these people their one and only respite from sports unhappiness? It almost feels like they’re due for another one, right? Dear reader: wrong! There are over a trillion combined person-days of sports unhappiness across the big four North American sports leagues right now, and a Saints win would address less than one percent of them!
6. Baltimore Ravens
Media Market: Baltimore
Population: 3,186,122
Last Championship: 2/3/2013 (Baltimore Ravens)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 9.324 billion
I’ll admit — this one feels wrong. Baltimore is a smallish market, falling just outside the top 25 in the United States, and this very football franchise won the dang Super Bowl less than ten years ago. So let’s look for a subjective rooting angle. Best I can do is compare the 2019 Ravens to the 2018 Chiefs — each of those teams had a second-year quarterback put up record-setting, explosive numbers, and each of them lost in the playoffs; and then the 2020 Ravens and 2019 Chiefs had much more pedestrian follow-on seasons, regressing back to the earth a little, raising questions like “was that fun mobile quarterback with a cannon for an arm really just a one-year-wonder?” But then the 2019 Chiefs went ahead and won the Super Bowl, bookending a forgettable postseason and a forgettable regular season with an amazing regular season and a Super Bowl win. Can these Ravens follow suit and do the same? Probably not. Let’s watch them anyway.
5. Seattle Seahawks
Media Market: Seattle-Tacoma
Population: 5,412,018
Last Championship: 2/2/2014 (Seattle Seahawks)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 13.866 billion
It is weird how the Seahawks, who appeared to be the best team in the NFL and who were right on the cusp of “dynasty” status until the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLIX, kind of faded away without ever really fully imploding or sucking. They’ve just sort of been milling about in good-not-great fashion for a number of years now in a very difficult division, and what do you know, look at that, enough time has passed at this point for them to look like one of the best teams in the NFC all over again, this time with a completely new and different identity as an offensive powerhouse. They’ve essentially fully rebuilt themselves without so much as one losing season, and their return to the top of the pack is the kind of feel-good story we could all appreciate, here in 2021.
4. Chicago Bears
Media Market: Chicago
Population: 9,987,126
Last Championship: 11/2/2016 (Chicago Cubs)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 15.560 billion
Within what was already a very silly and dumb NFL season, the Bears had themselves an incredibly silly and dumb season. They started out with a red-hot 5–1 record, lost six consecutive games to fall to 5–7, then won the next three games to climb all the way back to 8–7 and needed only to win in the final week of the season in order to complete the improbable comeback and clinch a playoff spot. And instead they went ahead and crapped their pants and got their doors blown off! And then still they snuck into the newly expanded playoff field with a little help and some goofy tiebreakers — shoulda been you, Arizona — and they might be the blandest and least exciting team in the tournament, and none of it matters anyway because they’re off to New Orleans to do the same thing they just did all over again, which is to lose by three scores. Probably, I mean. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about this team much at all since Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall were on it.
3. Indianapolis Colts
Media Market: Indianapolis
Population: 3,232,770
Last Championship: 2/4/2007 (Indianapolis Colts)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 16.542 billion
Good grief, are the people of Indiana really the fanbase third-most deserving of our collective rooting interest on behalf of the greater good? I’m old enough to remember two back-to-back generational talent quarterbacks (and young enough to remember nothing beforehand) falling directly into their laps! Twenty years of Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck, and the math and metrics says they deserve our pity more than eleven other postseason-bound fanbases. Pah! If there’s a story here to get behind, it’s that Phil Rivers is more or less inarguably the most accomplished active quarterback in the league without a ring to his name. I still don’t care for the guy! Your mileage may vary.
2. Tennessee Titans
Media Market: Nashville
Population: 3,016,158
Last Championship: None (First represented in a big four league on 10/10/1998 by the Nashville Predators)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 24.600 billion
Let’s be honest. The previous twelve fanbases on this list can go straight to hell for having ever experienced sports happiness at all, a concept that exists only in dreams for the two-team city of Nashville. And here our concept of person-days of sports unhappiness runs into a bit of a pickle; it’s been an infinite number of days since Nashville last won a big four sports championship, but it is patently absurd to give the Music City infinite sports-unhappiness credit; a more recent date than “never” is in order. The city of Nashville has existed for 217 years, but that predates the concept of professional sports in North America. The oldest championship in the big four sports leagues, the World Series, has been around since 1903. (Yes, sit down, shut up, everybody knows that the Stanley Cup dates back to 1893, obviously, but before 1915 the Stanley Cup was contested multiple times a year like a friggin’ wrestling championship belt, you dunce!) But even that date gives these people far too much grievance! Look. You can’t have sports unhappiness before you have sports, and Nashville didn’t have sports until the Predators showed up in 1998. Which still makes them the second-droughtiest sports city represented in these NFL playoffs, the poor bastards. Go ahead and root for them!
1. Buffalo Bills
Media Market: Buffalo
Population: 1,768,998
Last Championship: None (First represented in a big four league on 9/4/1966 by the Buffalo Bills)
Person-Days of Sports Unhappiness: 35.168 billion
In 2017, Bills fans saw their team make the playoffs for the first time in eighteen years and were just the happiest mofos on the planet to watch their 9–7 team score a field goal in a playoff loss. In 2019, they carried actual hopes and dreams into the postseason only to have their souls crushed by an overtime loss right out of the gate. And here and now they are 13–3, better than they’ve been in thirty years, and they might have the hottest offense in the league. If you’re rooting against the Buffalo Bills now, thirty years after they kicked off a run in which they lost four consecutive Super Bowls and twenty-five years after their last playoff win, then you are a monster with no compassion or sympathy and you deserve whatever sadness finds you in the year to come. Let’s go Buffalo-o, et cetera.
In Summary:
Use this information accordingly for Super Wild Card Weekend and the coming month and stay safe out there during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Good bye and so long!
