Kansas City Chiefs
Illinois Football
Illinois Basketball
Colorado Avalanche
All four have won championships. The first three before I was born. The fourth before I moved to Colorado and became a fan.
Mark has his stupid Cardinals and Red Wings. Matt has his White Sox.
Will I ever see a championship?
- - -
Which got me thinking...am I due? What are the odds of winning one? First I'll just pretend that these are any old teams.
I've been a Chiefs fan since I was 8, but I have to subtract about 7 years (between moving away from KC and finding my roots in college). So that gives me 15 years of being a serious Chiefs fan.
32 NFL teams. Mathematically, each team has a chance to win every year. That's a 15/32 possibility of seeing a Chiefs title already.
I've been a serious Illini fan since 2001. 120 college football teams. 12/120 of a cfb title.
345 college basketball teams. 12/345 chance of seeing a cbb title.
And I have 1 full year of Avs fandom under my belt. They didn't win the Cup last year. 1/30 chance there.
Add it all up and we get...
To this point in my life, I've had a 63% of one of my teams winning the title.
How to interpret this? Am I due? (And yes, I obviously know that "being due" doesn't exist. You know what I mean.)
Let's imagine a 20-sided die. And let's say that I am a fan of number 7.
If I roll the die once, I have a 1/20 chance of winning. After ten rolls, I have a 10/20 chance of getting a 7. After 13 rolls, 13/20. After twenty roll, I have a 20/20 chance of getting a 7.
If this was a fair die, you could expect that 7 would come up once in 20 rolls. But that's not how dice rolling works. You could roll it 20 times and get 3 or 4 sevens. You could get zero.
Back to the sports. So it seems that if your "title odds" were from 0 to .25 and you won a title, you would say that it happened far earlier than you expected. From .25 to .50, would be slightly earlier. From .50 to .75, would be slightly later. And from .75 to 1, would be far later. And if your number was over 1, than you would be "due" in my book, even if that doesn't exist.
Of course this only works if sports teams were fair dice. And they're not.
If you lived in Cleveland and were a Browns, Indians and Cavs fan. Let's say you're 48. So we'll say you've been a serious fan for 40 years.
40/32 + 40/30 + 40/30 = 3.92
You've invested your life in these teams and you could mathematically expect to see about 3 or 4 championships over the long haul. The bigger the sample size, the more you would expect it to even out. And you got zero.
Meanwhile your cousin lives in Boston. He has a kid that started rooting for the Patriots and Red Sox in 2000. And just hopped on the Bruins and Celtics bandwagons the year they won.
So that's 13/32 + 13/30 + 1/30 + 1/30 = .906.
That kid could comfortably expect to have seen 1 title in that span. He got 7.
(Also that kid has a better number than me? Rooting for college teams doesn't do shit for your number.)
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So what about my specific teams. The Avalanche aren't in contention right now, but in 3-7 years could be in position to make a run. I'd call this a fair die, with expectations of getting 1 in the next 30 years.
The Chiefs are in disarray, but with a good quarterback might have a shot in about 5 years. Considering their history, I don't think they're quite a fair die. I'd pose their long haul odds more like 1 in 50 years.
Illinois Basketball was the closest I've come to a championship so far. But I'd put their odds below the Chiefs right now. Possibly as low as 1 in 100. And 2005 might have been their shot for this century.
And Illinois Football? They will never win a national championship again. I guess it's like rolling a die with 10,000 sides. But that might even be too generous.
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