Futility loves company

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2015 (3973 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By pretty much any measure, 1990 was a fantastic year.

Nelson Mandela got out of jail. Germany was reunified. Goodfellas and Dances With Wolves appeared in movie theatres. Public Enemy put out Fear Of A Black Planet and Sonic Youth released Goo.

Here at home, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers won the Grey Cup. It was the 10th CFL championship for the Bombers since the advent of the league — and the second cup victory for the Bombers in three seasons.

Winnipeg football fans had every reason to be ecstatic. But as history has demonstrated, 1990 had a dark side — and I’m not just talking about the first Gulf War.

In what’s become one of the least probable streaks in professional sport, 1990 marked the last time Winnipeg won a CFL championship. The Bombers’ Grey Cup futility streak is now 24 seasons long and counting.

This is a huge reason Bombers GM Kyle Walters is trying to load up on talent for 2015, a season that culminates in the first Grey Cup ever held at Investors Group Field.

Assuming all nine CFL clubs have an equal shot at the cup, the Bombers have an 11.1 per cent chance of winning this year. Vegas oddsmakers believe Winnipeg’s chances are slightly worse than equal, pegging the Bombers’ odds at mere 10 per cent in early May.

Over the past 24 seasons, however, the Bombers have greatly exceeded the odds. In a league where only eight or nine teams competed during all but two of those years, simple arithmetic suggests Winnipeg was far more likely to have won the Grey Cup at least twice over the past two decades.

Sure, there were near-misses in that time span. There was the injury that kept quarterback Kevin Glenn out of the 2007 Grey Cup, which the Bombers lost by a mere four points to Saskatchewan. There was the inexplicable meltdown at the 2001 Grey Cup, which saw a 14-4 Bombers squad fall to the 8-10 Calgary Stampeders.

But when you ignore injuries, poor play, bad luck, questionable coaching and all manner of curious management decisions — in other words, all the incalculable variables that have conspired against Winnipeg — simple arithmetic suggests the odds were overwhelmingly in favour of a Bomber Grey Cup victory at some point between 1990 and now.

Specifically, the Bombers had a 95.07 per cent chance of winning the Cup at some point from 1991 to 2014, based on the number of teams in the CFL during each of those seasons and the assumption all those squads had an equal chance of winning in any of those years. And yes, this includes 1994 and 1995, when the CFL had 12 and 13 teams, respectively, thanks to U.S. expansion.

The corollary of this statistic is the Bombers’ futility streak is highly unlikely. There was only a 4.93 per cent chance the Bombers would go without a Grey Cup victory since 1990, when Tom Burgess and Danny McManus threw a combined four touchdown passes to lead the Blue over the Edmonton Eskimos by a score of 50-11.

In other words, the odds were about 20-1 against Winnipeg failing to win a Grey Cup since 1990. Statistically, this is less probable than the Toronto Maple Leafs’ inability to win a Stanley Cup since 1967.

How, you ask? Simply because there were many more teams in the NHL every year since the Original Six era ended than there were in the CFL.

While the Leafs haven’t drank bubbly from the Stanley Cup in 48 seasons, the probability of Toronto’s futility streak was 10.3 per cent. And yes, this doesn’t include 2005, when no Stanley Cup was awarded due to the season-long NHL lockout.

Happily, the Bombers don’t own the worst championship-futility streak in professional sports. The Blue & Gold don’t even own the worst streak in pro football.

The Arizona Cardinals haven’t won an NFL championship since the days before the NFL-AFL merger and the Super Bowl. The Cards last won an NFL championship in 1947, when the franchise was known as the Chicago Cardinals.

The probability of that happening? Only 3.84 per cent, which is close to the chance of an astronaut or Mount Everest climber dying during an adventure.

Even worse are the Sacramento Kings, who last won an NBA championship as the Rochester Royals in 1951. The probability of this franchise futility streak unfolding was 1.77 per cent, which is close to your chance of getting lung cancer by age 75 if you started smoking as a teen but gave up before you turned 30.

Why were the NBA Kings twice as futile than the NFL Cardinals? Again, simply because there were more teams in U.S. pro football than there were in pro basketball.

Of course, no pro-sports franchise comes close to the championship futility endured by the Chicago Cubs, who last won a World Series in 1908.

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Sure, the Major League Baseball championship is hard to win, given the sheer number of teams involved over the decades.

But the Cubs only had a 0.41 per cent chance of failing to win at some point in the 106 complete seasons since their last World Series. That probability is so lousy, it’s equal to the odds of a tsunami towering above 12 metres hitting New Zealand in any given year.

As a result, Blue Bomber fans shouldn’t feel too bad. At 4.93 per cent, the probability of the Bombers’ Grey Cup futility comes close to the chance of the Monarch butterfly being driven to extinction this century due to the disappearance of the only thing its larvae eat.

The lesson to Winnipeg season-ticket holders? Head to the nearest garden centre, because it’s time to start planting milkweed.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca