Introducing the NFL Fanbase Frustration Index

A Definitive Measure of Pent Up Disappointment

So, a few weeks ago I did a bunch of spreadsheet data entry and determined that the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers were, from a utilitarian standpoint that seeks minimal suffering for the maximum amount of people, objectively the two NFL playoff teams least worthy of our collective rooting interests. But God and fate are cruel, so of course they’ll meet each other in Super Bowl LV next weekend. (Standing by my work in the linked piece above, I’ll be rooting for the Chiefs, I guess. Yay?)

But enough about the Chiefs and the Bucs! I’m sick to death of them, and so are you! The teams I’ve spent more time thinking about since last Sunday are the two Conference Championship losers — those poor, hapless Packers and Bills — and contrasting the very different strains of despair and discouragement their fans must be feeling right now.

At first glance, it’s better to be a Packers fan than a Bills fan. Green Bay is only ten years removed from winning the Super Bowl and just 24 years removed from winning another. They’ve got four Lombardi trophies to their name across 55 years and the actual Vince Lombardi led them to even more success before that. They’re the smallest market with an NFL team and they’ve enjoyed almost three straight decades of either hall-of-famer Brett Favre or future hall-of-famer Aaron Rodgers under center. There are 32 teams in the NFL and the Packers are by all metrics one of the most successful. What’s not to love?

The Bills on the other hand have nothing but a long legacy of losing. They’ve lost big games — four straight Super Bowls in the ’90s, you don’t have to remind them, thank you — and they’ve endured prolonged stretches of ineptitude, kicking off the twenty-first century with seventeen consecutive missed postseasons. There are 32 teams in the NFL and the Bills are by all metrics one of the least successful. What’s left to love?

And yet! Gauging the reaction to Sunday’s losses, it seems like the Bills and their fans are fairly content with how this season went after coming within just two wins of their first Lombardi trophy. Meanwhile the Packers and their fans are as glib and salty and frustrated as ever, despite a very good season and a rich history of success. How can this be?

Acute and Chronic Sports Pain

A general consensus in the sports fan discourse is that winning big games “spoils” a fanbase; that the once pitiable fanbase, upon finally winning a championship or two, becomes entitled and insufferable and unsympathetic in a hurry, and that the more they win the worse it gets. I don’t think that this is entirely true! I think that losing big games “curdles” a fanbase.

There are two types of pain when it comes to losing. One type is the acute pain that comes from coming this-close to winning, but coming up short. In short: playoff losses. Your heart races, and then your heart sinks. It stings. It’s hot. You really feel that loss, you know? And then the other type is the chronic pain that comes with losing regularly and repeatedly, and never even coming close to winning the big game. Your heart never races when this happens; you just slowly grow numb and apathetic to winning at all. It’s cold. You’re numb, not mad. You’re depressed, not upset. You don’t feel the losses at all, and if anything you yearn to feel that type of hot, acute sports pain.

In my mind, this is the fundamental difference between Bills fans and Packers fans after Sunday’s games. The Bills just lost the biggest game they’ve played in 25 years, and any hot, searing, acute pain they’re feeling is a nice respite from 25 years of numbness. That’s not to say they’d have preferred to lose the game — winning feels better than losing, dammit! Leave that piping hot take in your ass where it belongs! — but having never felt a loss of this magnitude in 25 years, they’re doing just fine. Packers fans, on the other hand, have lost this exact game — the NFC Championship — four times in seven years. And frankly, they’re sick of it!

And again, I think the general discourse gets this wrong! I think there is too much emphasis on playoff droughts and title droughts, as if only Browns and Lions fans know true sports despair. Yeah, sure — they know that cold pain. They know it better than most of us ever will! But they know nothing of the biting, stinging hot pain that festers and vexes and tortures. Packers fans know this all too well, and thirty-year Bills fans may know it better than anyone.

Enough Already! Here’s the Thing I’m Doing

With all this in mind, and to shift the discourse on what it means for a fanbase to “suffer,” I would like to introduce a metric I call the Frustration Index. The Frustration Index seeks to quantify the acute sports pain I just described. We can all glean from simple Wikipedia lists which teams have gone the longest without a playoff win or a championship ring or whatever, but are those the most “tortured” fanbases? No. Or at least not necessarily. Anyway, my Frustration Index is based on three simple tenets.

1. Recent success alleviates all previous failure. Look at the Chiefs. One year ago, they hadn’t won the Super Bowl in fifty years. Only a monster could feel no empathy for their fans back then. Now they return to the Super Bowl as defending champions and the rest of us aren’t giving them one iota of compassion for the previous fifty years. It doesn’t matter if your Frustration Index is 20, 50, or even 100; as soon as you win the big game, you’re right back at zero.
2. Previous success does not alleviate recent failure. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the Frustration Index and what sets it apart from mere drought counters. It doesn’t matter if you have a legacy of losing or if you’re spoiled by old success — it sucks to lose big games year after year!
3. The closer you come to the summit, the harder the fall hurts. Again, missing the playoffs hurts, but it doesn’t sting. Getting eliminated in the Wild Card Round hurts a lot less than falling one game short of the Super Bowl. What the Bills accomplished in the early ‘90s — again, four straight Super Bowl losses — is the most tragic four-year run imaginable, and far more brutal than any given decade or more of standard Jacksonville Jaguars ineptitude. For this reason, the Frustration index awards franchises and fanbases one point for every missed postseason, two for every loss in the Wild Card round, three for every loss in the Divisional Round, four for every Conference Championship loss, and five for every Super Bowl loss. Not all losses carry the same context, and flattening them down into a simple metric is applying an objective standard on a subjective quality, but who cares? That’s like the entire point of this whole exercise.

Now that the Frustration Index is defined, let’s put it to use and see who’s really been tortured throughout the years.

The Most Frustrated NFL Fanbases of the Last 10 Years

1. Green Bay Packers (Frustration Index: 29)
2. San Francisco 49ers (Frustration Index: 24)
3. New Orleans Saints (Frustration Index: 22)
4. Atlanta Falcons, Houston Texans, Pittsburgh Steelers (Frustration Index: 20)

Surprising, no? This list flies directly against the prevailing winds of the discourse! The Packers, Steelers, and 49ers have 15 Super Bowl wins between them and the Saints just won it all in 2009. Save maybe for Atlanta, none of these teams feel like failures. Yet to any sixteen-year-old who’s been watching football for ten years, that’s exactly what they are. So, pour one out for the youths in the Packers fanbase. They really have had a rough go of things lately!

The Most Frustrated NFL Fanbases of the Last 20 Years

1. Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers (Frustration Index: 38)

3. San Francisco 49ers (Frustration Index: 37)

4. Los Angeles Rams (Frustration Index: 36)

5. Los Angeles Chargers, Tennessee Titans (Frustration Index: 34)

Wind the clock back another ten years, and things shift noticeably. From our last list, the Packers, Saints, and Steelers drop off thanks to their respective Super Bowl wins in the late ’00s. The Texans were just plain dogshit in their first decade and didn’t make the playoffs often enough to lose big games.

Jumping all the way to the top of the pack now are the Atlanta Falcons, who squandered the Michael Vick era in addition to Matt Ryan’s career so far, and the Carolina Panthers, who it’s very easy to forget have lost two Super Bowls in the last twenty years. Joining them are additional two-time 21st century Super Bowl losers in the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles (but really mostly St. Louis) Rams, and then the 2001–2020 Chargers and Titans round things out without even making a Super Bowl. Rivers, Tomlinson, McNair, CJ2K. It’s kind of impressive how often they both failed. God, those fans must be so frustrated!

The Most Frustrated NFL Fanbases of the Last 30 Years

1. Minnesota Vikings (Frustration Index: 57)

2. Atlanta Falcons, Tennessee Titans (Frustration Index: 55)

4. Buffalo Bills, San Francisco 49ers (Frustration Index: 52)

Hey, there they are! I knew those Buffalo Bills would show up once we reached all the way back into the ’90s. And soaring to the top of the list out of nowhere are the Minnesota Vikings, whose inability to win the big one with Randy Moss and Daunte Culpepper, or Brett Favre and Adrian Peterson, or Stefon Diggs and Dalvin Cook — I mean really, just take your pick here — really just builds and builds over a thirty-year window.

Take note! The 49ers won the Super Bowl in 1994, but have amassed enough playoff failure since then to post a top five Frustration Index in four fewer seasons than the 1991–2020 window we’re looking at here. Young, Garcia, Smith, Kaepernick, Garoppolo — what a rich legacy of coming up short in big games to follow up the Joe Montana years.

The Most Frustrated NFL Fanbases of the Super Bowl Era

1. Minnesota Vikings (Frustration Index: 122)
2. Tennessee Titans (Frustration Index: 98)
3. Buffalo Bills (Frustration Index: 95)
4. Los Angeles Chargers (Frustration Index: 86)
5. Atlanta Falcons, Miami Dolphins (Frustration Index: 85)

The farther back we look, the more the Frustration Index stabilizes, so let me bail on these ten-year increments and jump all the way back to the start of the Super Bowl era itself, 55 years ago. Good God, those poor Minnesota Vikings! Every year, fewer and fewer people remember just how good the Vikings used to be. They lost four of the first eleven Super Bowls behind the prowess of their “Purple People Eaters” defensive line and they’ve never even been back to the big game itself; since then, they’re a barely fathomable 0–6 in the NFC Championship game. And the thing about the Vikings is that they’re constantly in the playoffs! They’re never all that far away from a Super Bowl ring, which makes all of those playoff losses even harder to stomach. To put this into perspective, the Bills could make and lose four straight Super Bowls — again! — and they’d have a Frustration Index of 115. Imagine! The Vikings truly stand alone as the most frustrating team to root for in the history of the NFL.

Moving down the list, you could make the argument — and, sure, I’ll go ahead and do so — that the Tennessee Titans fanbase has really only existed since 1997, and that the current team’s Frustration Index should really be capped at 44, with the remaining 54 Frustration Index points allocated back to Houston. And if you do that, and combine those points with the modern day Texans’ score of 29, then what you’re really left with is a Houston fanbase with an overall NFL Frustration Index of 83. And likewise you could lop the last four years’ worth of Chargers frustration — it’s only 5 points, don’t worry — and sort of freeze San Diego with a Frustration Index of 81 for the rest of time. That may sound cruel, but so was foisting the Chargers upon them for fifty years.

And hey, check out the Miami Dolphins creeping into the top five by virtue of a tie. Yeah, that perfect 1972 season was a long, long time ago! It’s been 47 years since the Dolphins have won it all, and along they way they squandered plenty of deep playoff runs with one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time in Dan Marino. That stings!

The next five teams on the list, for those curious, are the Browns, Bengals, Jets, Cardinals, and Lions. This is the tier of hapless teams normally considered to have the most miserable fanbases in the NFL. They never win and they rarely contend. But if you’ve been following along this whole time, you know that I’d consider that type of pain is cold, chronic, and numbing. This is misery, yes, but it is not frustration!

I’ve got no real conclusion. I like this metricand I think it’s very useful for reframing some of our internal conceptions and national conversations about sports unhappiness. It is okay for Green Bay fans to be deeply unhappy after the decade they’ve endured — this does not make them “spoiled!”