What is the most disappointing single season for a pro sports team ever?

If that team was coming off what many consider to be the greatest single season in history, then everything you described sets up a perfect storm of disappointment.

College football teams shouldn't count. It's all a bunch of guesswork anyway. The only reason USC was rated No. 1 is because the people who vote in the polls had no fucking idea whom to put there, so they drew a sexy "big name" out of the hat.

 

I completely disagree when it comes to that team. They went 15-1 the season before and dominated the playoffs like no team in history. This is expected to be a dynasty in the making. They go 14-2 in the regular season, setting an NFL record for fewest points allowed.

And then, in their first playoff game, they lead 13-7 at halftime, at home, against a Redskins team that would get throttled in the NFC Championship Game, and give up 20 unanswered points to end the game. It was absolutely sickening. To this day, I have never been that upset after a stupid game.

That's disappointing. Playoffs are part of it. I understand why they wouldn't be in baseball or even hockey, but in football, they're part of it.

 

Wasn't McMahon out for the last several regular-season games and the playoffs that season after the Charles Martin cheap shot? I don't think any team that loses its starting quarterback during the regular season can be viewed as a disappointment.

 

I'll nominate the 2011 Phillies, based on the ridiculous amounty of hype their rotation got, then to go down meekly to the Cardinals.

 

Fucking Doug Flutie.

 

That's where I was going. Verse made a good call on the '25 Yankees, too.

I could also make a case for the '65 Yankees. They were the first Yankees team since 1925 that didn't finish above .500. They finished 25 games behind the Twins.

 

I think this year's Lakers team is a pretty good example...
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You could look at that 2004 Lakers team with Malone and Payton and them not winning was a pretty big disappointment, but at least they made the finals...

The 16-0 Patriots losing in the Super Bowl is a disappoinment, but I don't think fits here...

The Bears team that went 14-2 and lost its first playoff game would be a better fit, but it's not that uncommon for the team with the best record to lose their first playoff game.

 

I think there's a major gulf between a disappointing game and a disappointing team. That Bears team equaled or exceeded your expectations for 16½ games.

 

That's a good point.

 

That's a terrible point.

 

Perhaps I'm alone, but I find this reasoning to be asinine. By the same logic, you might as well include the Patriots 18-1 near-perfect season because, gosh darnit, the last half of that last game sure was disappointing for Pat fans.

If the thread topic was most disappointing game or single loss, then I'm right there with you, that lloss to the Redskins belongs near the top of that discussion. But it's not, instead the topic is most disappointing "season", and a season in which an NFL team goes 14-2 "setting an NFL record for fewest points allowed" is far from that, instead it's more fit for a discussion of the greatest regular seasons of all time.

And do you know what it is when a team does that despite losing their starting quarterback and having to go with a pathetic rotating Tomczak/Fuller/Flutie rotation for most of the second half of the season? That's an astonishingly successful regular season. For 99 percent of that season Bears fans were anything but disappointed, hell they were ecstatic with that season all the way up until the second half of the final game, they were only crushed by one half of one game at the end.

I don't interpret that as being what this thread is supposed to be about.

 

I bet if you asked every member of the Patriots 18-1 team what their most disappointing season was, they'd all say the 2007 season.

They told you this?