Best teams to never win a championship (last 50 years)

I will throw in the mid-to-late 1980s Syracuse teams... Pearl Washington, Coleman, Douglas, Seikaly, Billy Owens, Steve Thompson....they couldn't get out of their own way at times.

 

I'd say that puts them among the most entertaining teams never to win a championship.

But no running game and a suspect defense is why they didn't win a championship, why they never returned to the Super Bowl, and why they aren't even one of the best teams not to.

 

and the 1988 dodgers might have been the shittiest team ever to win a championship.

 

Meh, they won 94 games and had the league MVP and Cy Young winner. Besides, the '06 Cardinals have locked that one down for a looooooong time.

 

52 years ago, the 1960 NY Yankees lost to Pittsburgh 4-3. Yankees won their 3 games 16-3, 10-0 & 12-0. Pirates won 6-4, 3-2, 5-2 & 10-9
Pirates team ERA 7.11 Yanks 3.54
Yanks hit .338; Pirates .256

Yanks Bobby Richardson was the Series MVP, not Mazeroski who the the game winning HR in the bottom of the 9th

 

The Houston Oilers of the late '80s and early '90s pissed away a ton of talent. The offense alone sent seven players to the Pro Bowl one season. They were loaded for years and couldn't harness it.

 

That 2002 Miami Hurricane team was pretty much an NFL roster. And Craig Krenzel single-winged them to death.

 

How was that Mariners team so good? Looking at the roster that year, all they had were Ichiro, a steroid-addled Bret Boone, and a bunch of guys either past their prime or whose prime was never that impressive.

 

One of the more interesting hypothetical debates in sports could be who would win between the Broncos and the Vikings that year. Many people remember the Vikings for their one loss and playoff choke. But then forget that the Broncos were 13-0 and a last-second miracle catch via the Giants from possibly playing for a perfect record. With the prefecto out of question packed it in at the Dolphins before turning it back on in the playoffs where they crushed those same Dolphins 38-3 and really were not threatened by the Falcons (can you believe they went 14-2 that year?) that beat the Vikings.

The 1998 Vikings undoubtedly belong on any list of championships never won, but had they got by the NFC championship game they would have played a fellow team that could go down as one of the NFL's best ever and might have still been on the list. It would have been a game for the ages, that's for sure.

 

"This guy here is dead."

 

Ichiro hit .350, Olerud, Boone, Martinez and Cameron all had very good years.

When your lead-off hitter hits .350 and steals 50+ bases you going to score a good amount of runs. When that lead-off guys is followed by four guys who had power, average and OBP you're going to score a lot of runs.

 

Those M's were uncommonly successful in one-run games -- 26-12. (The A's, who had a spectacular wild-card season of 102-60, finished 14 games behind the M's and were only 21-19 in one-run games.) Seattle's Pythagorean W-L that year was 109-53.

With that and the way the Yankees kicked them aside in the ALCS, not out of the realm to conclude they probably weren't as good as the record showed.