Eagles' Super Bowl title brings relief to a sports mad city
Philadelphia has surprisingly been one of the most championship-starved cities in North America in recent decades
Sports in the city of Philadelphia evoke images of fervent, and often bad, fan behavior: fights in the streets, drunk partiers climbing greased up street poles and guys dropping expletives as news correspondents try to interview them on live TV come to mind.
Maybe it comes from a place of frustration for Philly residents. For a city that is so steeped in sports tradition, it really hasn’t seen much success in the past four decades. Arguably its most famous title is one that happened as part of a Hollywood boxing movie rather than real life, which has to irk its fans.
In the four major North American men’s sports leagues Philadelphia teams have captured -1.47 fewer titles than expected since 1991, according to my made-up Titles over Expected1 metric.
The Eagles’ Super Bowl championship this year was just the town’s third league title since the early 90s— the Eagles won their first Super Bowl in 2017 while the MLB’s Phillies won a World Series championship in 20082. The NHL’s Flyers and NBA’s 76ers haven’t won any major hardware since at least the early 1980s.
Of the twelve cities that host teams in the each of the four major leagues, the City of Brotherly Love ranks second to last ahead of only Minneapolis in expected championships during this timeframe.
Imagine how insufferable the city’s fans would be had they had a track record like some of the cities on the top of this list. The grease wouldn’t stand a chance.
Titles over Expected is a metric I created to quantify how a region is indexing against others in sports championships won. As I documented in a previous post about the topic the methodology and assumptions I employed to arrive at this metric is as follows:
I looked at the metropolitan areas where championships were won in the four North American men's professional sports leagues -- the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL.
I arbitrarily used 1991 as the starting point because that was the year I was born.
I'm defining teams' markets as the metropolitan areas in which their fans are typically found. For example, I'm lumping all of Wisconsin's major professional sports teams into the greater Milwaukee area because the Green Bay Packers, who play their home games two hours north at Lambeau Field, called Milwaukee home for a portion of their games through the 1990s and are effectively the entire state of Wisconsin's team. Similarly, the Golden State Warriors, who won multiple NBA titles while based in Oakland, Calif., would be considered part of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The New York Giants and New York Jets are included as New York City teams, despite the fact both teams play in New Jersey. The NHL's New Jersey Devils are the lone Jersey team in this analysis.
An important call out is we are assuming every team in a league has an equal chance of winning a championship each season, a fact we know isn't true in practice. Those chances vary across different sports as well. The NBA, for example, is much more deterministic than a sport like hockey -- hockey is inherently random given the units of success (goals) don't happen very often, unlike in basketball where 100+ points scored is the norm in an NBA game.
Overall, the Phillies have won two championships (1980, 2008), the Flyers two (1973–74, 1974–75) and the 76ers three (1955, 1967, 1983).