You know, I've been thinking about something for a while now, ever since the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in back-to-back seasons, a first in the NFL since the 2003-04 New England Patriots accomplished this. Over time, I couldn't help but notice something a little suspicious about this Chiefs team: they were starting to perform consistently well right around the same time another Kansas City sports team, the MLB's Royals, started regressing. Upon further investigation, I found that the Chiefs' ongoing streak of AFC West titles and eventual AFC dominance started in 2016, the same year that marked the beginning of the Royals' ongoing playoff drought. But if you go back just two more years, the Royals were World Series contenders for back-to-back seasons, losing in 2014 against the San Francisco Giants and winning in 2015 against the New York Mets. In 2022 and 2023, the Chiefs were one of the NFL's top teams while the Royals were one of the MLB's bottom teams. I started wondering, what was happening?
My immediate hypothesis was that major, "big-market" cities with multiple sports teams could not afford to allocate resources towards multiple sports and/or multiple teams at the same time. On paper, this makes sense- cities have a finite amount of resources for construction, advertising, recruiting, whatever these organizations are spending their money on, and if I was to assume that these sports teams are receiving some of their funds and resources from their host city, then it felt safe enough to assume that they may choose to spend their resources towards the more successful teams in the city instead of the underperforming teams for the sake of revenue, television marketing, et cetera. I'm not fully aware of what major televising broadcasters or major sports leagues are putting their money towards, but one thing was for sure: this kind of pattern was showing up yearly, and I wanted to see if I could collect information on other times when something like this has happened.
My end goal with this thread is to see if I can possibly use some of the information collected over time to try and project how certain teams will perform in certain seasons. I already mentioned the recent Kansas City example, but I can think of a few others, too- Cleveland from 2014 to 2018, Chicago during the early 2010s, heck I'll throw in the Arizona Cardinals and the Arizona Diamondbacks from this past year while I'm at it. I'm not going to go on record here and say this is some United States-wide conspiracy theory or anything like that- with so many cities to pick from, most of these are realistically just a coincidence of timing- but I still find it fascinating nonetheless. Most of the information I have access to is more recent, also, so it would be extra interesting to see if there's trends like this from back before I was around, too.
I do want to mention the idea that a city can have multiple successful teams at the same time, too, further decreasing the possibility that leagues and cities are sabotaging underperforming teams to help perennial contenders or anything like that. 2020 had two Tampa Bay teams win their respective league championships (the Buccaneers and the Lightning- the Rays had a good shortened season too) and Philadelphia (the Phillies and the Eagles) almost did the same thing in 2022. Two different cities, Boston and Baltimore, are also showing positive signs in this regard right now. On the other side of the coin, you have places like Washington with multiple teams underperforming at the same time (all three of the Commanders, Nationals, and Wizards aren't doing so great right now in their respective leagues). From what I can tell, situations like 2020 Tampa Bay are the exception rather than the norm, however, and even that was during the year of a pandemic going around. All in all, I guess I'm just interested in what cases of this are out there that I haven't seen yet. This thread doesn't need to be anything significant, just a fun little research activity on the side. Take care, everyone, and thanks for your help!
My immediate hypothesis was that major, "big-market" cities with multiple sports teams could not afford to allocate resources towards multiple sports and/or multiple teams at the same time. On paper, this makes sense- cities have a finite amount of resources for construction, advertising, recruiting, whatever these organizations are spending their money on, and if I was to assume that these sports teams are receiving some of their funds and resources from their host city, then it felt safe enough to assume that they may choose to spend their resources towards the more successful teams in the city instead of the underperforming teams for the sake of revenue, television marketing, et cetera. I'm not fully aware of what major televising broadcasters or major sports leagues are putting their money towards, but one thing was for sure: this kind of pattern was showing up yearly, and I wanted to see if I could collect information on other times when something like this has happened.
My end goal with this thread is to see if I can possibly use some of the information collected over time to try and project how certain teams will perform in certain seasons. I already mentioned the recent Kansas City example, but I can think of a few others, too- Cleveland from 2014 to 2018, Chicago during the early 2010s, heck I'll throw in the Arizona Cardinals and the Arizona Diamondbacks from this past year while I'm at it. I'm not going to go on record here and say this is some United States-wide conspiracy theory or anything like that- with so many cities to pick from, most of these are realistically just a coincidence of timing- but I still find it fascinating nonetheless. Most of the information I have access to is more recent, also, so it would be extra interesting to see if there's trends like this from back before I was around, too.
I do want to mention the idea that a city can have multiple successful teams at the same time, too, further decreasing the possibility that leagues and cities are sabotaging underperforming teams to help perennial contenders or anything like that. 2020 had two Tampa Bay teams win their respective league championships (the Buccaneers and the Lightning- the Rays had a good shortened season too) and Philadelphia (the Phillies and the Eagles) almost did the same thing in 2022. Two different cities, Boston and Baltimore, are also showing positive signs in this regard right now. On the other side of the coin, you have places like Washington with multiple teams underperforming at the same time (all three of the Commanders, Nationals, and Wizards aren't doing so great right now in their respective leagues). From what I can tell, situations like 2020 Tampa Bay are the exception rather than the norm, however, and even that was during the year of a pandemic going around. All in all, I guess I'm just interested in what cases of this are out there that I haven't seen yet. This thread doesn't need to be anything significant, just a fun little research activity on the side. Take care, everyone, and thanks for your help!
