This web­site, recently brought to my atten­tion, uses a sim­ple for­mula to deter­mine the true “City of Cham­pi­ons.”  While I politely ignored the fact that Brook­lyn has a higher rank­ing than cities with actual, you know, teams, (Ed. Note: Brook­lyn Nets baby!) it caught my atten­tion that my beloved Col­orado Avalanche, with two cham­pi­onships in thir­teen sea­sons of exis­tence, are appar­ently a more suc­cess­ful fran­chise than the Mon­treal Cana­di­ens with their 24 cups, and the Red Wings with their 11.  Also, I’ll be sure to alert every­one in my office that the Florida Mar­lins are over three times more suc­cess­ful than the Boston Red Sox.  Either sports fans every­where have been mis­taken in their assump­tions all these years, or Ben­nett Dono­van needs to stick with his day job.  I have a feel­ing Base­ball Prospec­tus will not be request­ing his for­mula devis­ing ser­vices any time soon.

The site obvi­ously is not seri­ous (I hope) and even con­tains a dis­claimer that the rank­ings have noth­ing to do with which are the best sports cities, it just looks at cham­pi­onships and the rate at which each city’s teams have won them.  But it does lead me to think of pub­li­ca­tions such as Sport­ing News that do rou­tinely rank the best sports cities.  They usu­ally for­mu­late their rank­ings using vari­ables like cham­pi­onships, num­ber of play­off appear­ances, win-loss per­cent­age, and atten­dance.  Despite any other intan­gi­bles they may throw into the cal­cu­la­tions, it will always be the case that places whose teams have had recent suc­cess will come out at the top.  I do not think that is a valid deter­mi­na­tion of the actual best sports cities.

Obvi­ously, when a fran­chise is win­ning, fan inter­est is high (unless you are in Atlanta).  So in any city, the num­ber of play­off appear­ances, win­ning per­cent­age and atten­dance will all be directly cor­re­lated.  In order to find the truly great sports towns, any sort of cal­cu­la­tion should reward the places where atten­dance and fan inter­est remains high even when the local teams stink (sorry Oak­land and Pitts­burgh).  In the Sport­ing News’ rank­ings, for exam­ple, Boston has been named the top city four out of the past seven years, thanks to the Patri­ots and Red Sox suc­cess this decade, and the Celtics title last sea­son.  Dur­ing the city’s cham­pi­onship drought dur­ing the 1990’s, how­ever, it was never any­where near the top of the list.  Has Boston really only become a good sports town recently?  If Pitts­burgh is ranked at the top this year, does that mean it is a bet­ter sports city now than it has ever been before?

Off the top of my head, I think a bet­ter for­mula should go some­thing like this:

1. For all the pro­fes­sional fran­chises in each city, find their best and worst reg­u­lar sea­sons in the past ten years.
2. For each selected sea­son, sep­a­rately cal­cu­late the following:

[(X÷Y)×Z] ÷ A

X = Team’s local tele­vi­sion rat­ings for selected season

Y = League aver­age tele­vi­sion rat­ings per market

Z = Aver­age atten­dance by % of sta­dium capacity

A = Team’s win­ning per­cent­age in that season

1. Aver­age the results for the team’s two seasons.
2. Aver­age the final results for all the teams in the city.  Higher scores are better.

A for­mula like this could fairly judge fan inter­est for teams that have been con­sis­tently good or bad over the time frame cho­sen (ten years in this case) like the Red Wings and Pirates, and aver­age out teams that have had rad­i­cal rever­sals in for­tune like the Celtics who bought their way from worst to first dur­ing 2007–2008.  If wanted, a third median sea­son could be added to the for­mula to bal­ance things out fur­ther.  Also, those places that can suc­cess­fully fill sta­di­ums, but still have almost zero fan inter­est (I’m think­ing of all the unde­serv­ing hockey cities south of the Mason-Dixon Line) will be exposed by their nonex­is­tent tele­vi­sion ratings.

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s char­ac­ter keeps hear­ing “If you build it, he will come.”  Sim­i­larly, when teams win, the fans will come.  That is only nat­ural.  It is the fans that come even when the team is not win­ning that deserve recog­ni­tion.  Like Cost­ner star­ing at his base­ball field all year wait­ing for “them” to come, the fans watch­ing and wait­ing for their per­pet­u­ally bad teams to finally turn it around will receive the great­est reward when it does hap­pen.  By that time, they will not need Sport­ing News to tell them which city is the best.