The People’s Guide to Rooting Interests in the 2022 NFL Playoffs
Guidance for Apaths and Empaths
It is time yet again for the National Football League’s annual postseason tournament, delayed this year not by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic but instead by one additional week of regular season action. Yes, the NFL now officially averages more games played per pandemic season than per non-pandemic season, and that’s something we can all appreciate albeit with wildly varying levels of irony and cognitive dissonance.
Many people will watch these playoff games with some degree of interest, rooting for this or that team, or against this or that that player. Fine! Let them. Many more people will watch these playoff games with little or no actual concern for their results and no regard for the former group of people. What I seek to do here, with this listicle, is to provide otherwise ambivalent playoff game viewers with objective guidance on which teams should win the Super Bowl to maximize human happiness and minimize human pain.
I did this last year, laying out my rationale and methodology in so many more words than I am willing to type on a lunch break this time around. In short: these rooting interests are based on a utilitarian approach that seeks to alleviate as many people as possible of as many years of sports anguish as possible, and they are based on an oversimplified and purely geographically-determined concept of fanhood. By multiplying each NFL team’s media market’s population by the amount of time it’s been since any professional sports team in that market last won a championship (as of February 13th, 2022, the date of the upcoming Super Bowl), we can derive an easily quantifiable measure of overall sports unhappiness. So let’s do that.
And let’s also admire some city flag design decisions along the way. You know what the team uniforms and logos look like, you don’t need to see those again. My visuals should represent the people, dammit!
14. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Media Market: Tampa-St. Petersburg (Sarasota)
Population: 5.6 million
Last Championship: 7/7/2021 (Tampa Bay Lightning)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 3.4 million
The Bucs clocked in as the team unworthiest of your rooting support last year as well, and since we are living in the worst of all possible worlds, the Bucs won the Super Bowl last year anyway, curing an infinitesimally small number of person-years of sports happiness in the process. And then for good measure the Lightning won a second straight Stanley Cup a few months later, just wasting another golden opportunity for anybody else at all to enjoy an overdue sports title. Everyone under the sun has some opinion or another about Tom Brady and whether it’s good or bad or actually-just-kind-of-funny-and-not-even-that-annoying-really that he wins the Super Bowl every other year, but that kind of narrative-based rooting interest is for the birds in this rooting guide; a Brady-agnostic mindset requires an ethical person to root against the Buccaneers with the entirety of his, her, or their heart.
13. Kansas City Chiefs
Media Market: Kansas City
Population: 2.7 million
Last Championship: 2/2/2020 (Kansas City Chiefs)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 5.5 million
The Chiefs were the team second-unworthiest of your rooting support last year as well, and since we are living in the worst of all possible worlds, the Chiefs came second-closest to winning the Super Bowl last year. They did this right after their head coach’s son drunk-drove into a kindergartner and paralyzed her, so, you really do not need additional reasons to root against the Kansas City Chiefs. I guess there is also Tyreek Hill for good measure.
12. Las Vegas Raiders
Media Market: Las Vegas
Population: 2.3 million
Last Championship: None (First represented in a “big four” league on 10/6/2017 by the Vegas Golden Knights)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 10.0 million
Las Vegas is a pretty small city with a very new presence in the professional sports scene and as such there just aren’t a lot of people who have been waiting a long time for the Raiders to bring the Lombardi home to, uh, Nevada.
11. Green Bay Packers
Media Market: Green Bay-Appleton
Population: 1.3 million
Last Championship: 2/6/2011 (Green Bay Packers)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 13.8 million
Many people have disliked Aaron Rodgers for a long time but his commitment in recent years and months to becoming the most widely loathed face of the National Football League has been an exciting development. You don’t need to root for the people of Green-Bay Appleton to win a sports title, regardless.
10. Pittsburgh Steelers
Media Market: Pittsburgh
Population: 3.2 million
Last Championship: 6/11/2017 (Pittsburgh Penguins)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 15.0 million
A lot of people out there will tell you that Ben Roethlisberger is a big fat piece of shit who does not deserve the gushing tributes he has received in this, his final season as an NFL quarterback. You can probably justify whatever opinion you have about the man if you wince and hedge enough, but you cannot justify rooting for the people of Pittsburgh to win another title when there are so many larger fanbases out there in greater anguish.
9. Los Angeles Rams
Media Market: Los Angeles
Population: 15.8 million
Last Championship: 10/27/2020 (Los Angeles Dodgers)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 20.5 million
The people of Los Angeles saw their beloved Dodgers win a World Series only just one year ago. But the sheer quantity of those people forces us to reckon with the darker side of utilitarian moral quandaries and acknowledge that, yes, a sizable population means that sports-anguish re-accumulates more quickly in high-population areas.
8. New England Patriots
Media Market: Boston (Manchester)
Population: 6.8 million
Last Championship: 2/3/2019 (New England Patriots)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 20.7 million
The NFL has rarely in its history enjoyed having a franchise so worthy of universal envy and contempt as the Bill Belichick-led New England Patriots. They win and they cheat and they win more and they cheat more and for two decades now it’s been like that. But please ignore all that noise and direct your attention to the noble fans of Boston, who are currently enduring their first three-year championship-free stretch since the Clinton Administration. Slowly but surely these people are worming their way back into having actual amounts of sports unhappiness all over again.
7. San Francisco 49ers
Media Market: San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose
Population: 7.3 million
Last Championship: 6/8/2018 (Golden State Warriors)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 26.9 million
Permit me one tangential rant. The Combined Statistical Area that includes both San Francisco and San Jose is called the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA. San Jose takes top billing in the CSA name either because as a city it has a greater population than San Francisco or because its county, Santa Clara, has a greater population than San Francisco County. I am not clear on which rule drives the naming convention, but both comparisons hold true, and no matter how you slice it there are more San Joseans than San Franciscans, and so no matter how you slice it San Jose is a larger city than San Francisco. Why then does their shared media market give preferential treatment to San Francisco in its name? And why must the NFL team, which now plays in the larger city of San Jose, do the same? The people of San Francisco don’t really deserve this win, but maybe the people of San Jose do. Thank you; this rant is over.
6. Philadelphia Eagles
Media Market: Philadelphia
Population: 8.2 million
Last Championship: 2/4/2018 (Philadelphia Eagles)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 33.2 million
This is the part of the guide where I have run out of interesting things to say about football teams, football players, and American cities. You could justifiably root for the Eagles, sure, but you really don’t need to do that. Philly is a big city with lots of fans, but it’s only been four years.
5. Tennessee Titans
Media Market: Nashville
Population: 3.0 million
Last Championship: None (First represented in a “big four” league on 10/10/1998 by the Nashville Predators)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 70.7 million
After nine teams with really barely any sports unhappiness to speak of, all things considered, the top five teams really represent some desperate fanbases. The Titans were last year’s second-worthiest team to root for, and despite another year of sports unhappiness they’ve fallen to fifth in this year’s rankings. This means that there are even more teams in the field this year that could cure an even greater amount of sports unhappiness — five fanbases in the mix this year that you could feel really, really happy for instead of two or three. Bravo! But since we are living in the worst of all possible worlds, none of the teams from here on out will win the Super Bowl, and the Bucs-Chiefs encore will be all the more depressing for it.
4. Cincinnati Bengals
Media Market: Cincinnati
Population: 2.5 million
Last Championship: 10/20/1990 (Cincinnati Reds)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 79.7 million
The people of the third-largest city in the seventh-largest state in the nation have gone thirty-two goddamn years without any sports happiness. It’s hard to make the case that they really deserve more than they’ve enjoyed — five World Series wins, three of them even within many living people’s lifetimes — but 79.7 million is a whole lot of person-years of sports unhappiness. Just root for the Bengals! It’ll be fun, I promise. Star running back Joe Mixon may have punched a woman in the face in college, knocking her into the corner of a table and out cold, but even bringing this up is conflating too many moral compasses at once.
3. Dallas Cowboys
Media Market: Dallas-Fort Worth
Population: 8.1 million
Last Championship: 6/12/2011 (Dallas Mavericks)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 86.9 million
Using utilitarian morality to sell the New England Patriots as “not even all that worthy of rooting against” may have strained the idea significantly, but using it to justify the universal case for rooting for the Dallas Cowboys — for the Dallas Cowboys! — may just break it entirely. Best to move on quickly and without thinking more about this.
2. Buffalo Bills
Media Market: Buffalo
Population: 1.7 million
Last Championship: None (First represented in a “big four” league on 9/4/1966 by the Buffalo Bills)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 93.4 million
I am shocked and shook to see that the lovable loser Bills have slipped from their perch atop last year’s rankings as the most sports-unhappy fanbase in the playoffs, but I suppose a region of less than two million people can only shoulder so many person-years of sports unhappiness. The collective weight of their nearly-sixty-year-old drought-based misery may feel historic and permanent and huge, but a city like Chicago matches and exceeds it every time they go ten years without a title. There’s always a greater good, you know?
1. Arizona Cardinals
Media Market: Phoenix (Prescott)
Population: 5.9 million
Last Championship: 11/4/2001 (Arizona Diamondbacks)
Person-Years of Sports Unhappiness: 120.3 million
They don’t have one of the longest title droughts and they don’t have one of the largest populations hoping for it to end, but Phoenix (Prescott) has enough of each of those things to just plain crush the rest of the field when it comes to person-years of sports unhappiness. As such, these are the Super Bowl champions the rest of us should root for to alleviate the most sports-based suffering at once. It’s that simple. Go Kyler Murray, I guess?
This was all very stupid. But now you know! Go forth with self-congratulatory moral convictions this weekend and enjoy the games from your ivory tower, as I will be doing.
