When you think about it, life as an NFL fan can generally be a miserable existence. After all, only one of 32 fan bases has reason to celebrate after its team’s final game of the season.
Some fan bases have experienced such exhilaration more often than others. Some have done so, but not in a long time. Some seem always on the brink of such unbridled joy, only to have their hopes crushed on a regular basis.
And, of course, some fan bases have never had the opportunity of celebrating a Super Bowl victory.
As the season comes to a close with Super Bowl LVII on Feb. 12, we tried to determine which NFL fan bases are generally the most (and least) miserable. Our complicated, and completely made-up, formula considers such factors as recent success or failure, level of optimism for the near future and, to a lesser degree, past glory (the thinking being, the longer ago an event was, the less relevance it might have for today’s fans).
Here’s how the ranking turned out (please note the years listed refer to the regular season, not necessarily when the postseason games took place), with the fan bases with most reason to be upbeat at the top and the ones that should be most deeply unhappy at the bottom:
