Frequently Asked Questions

How do you allocate teams to cities?

If the name of the city is in the team name, then the team belongs to that city. For example, the San Francisco 49ers' stadium is in Santa Clara, but they belong to San Francisco. Teams like the Golden State Warriors or Arizona Cardinals are given to the city where the stadium is located, or the nearest major city that also hosts other major sports teams.

In the unusual WW2-cases where multiple teams merged into one team temporarily, such as the '44 Carpets or the '43 Steagles, they were given to the city in which they played their opening home game.

Also, all of the Minnesota teams should be labeled Minneapolis/St. Paul, but that would make the tables too large. Sorry, St. Paul.

How does scoring work?

Read all about that here.

How are the championship droughts calculated?

A drought starts or is extended only if your city goes an entire year without any of the teams winning a championship. There are no partial droughts within a year.

When a season spans two years, which year does the championship belong to?

For MLB and MLS seasons, which are entirely contained in one year, the championship belongs to that year.

For NBA and NHL, where we can refer to a season longhand, we refer to both years, such as the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. But when referred to shorthand, or when we are allocating the championship to a specific year, we always use the later year, which is the year the playoffs were in. For example, we consider the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls and the 1996 Chicago Bulls to be the same team, and that team won the championship in 1996.

For NFL, we always refer to each team by one year, and that year is the year the season started and when most of the regular season games are played. So for example, we would refer to a team as the 1985 Bears even though they played multiple games in 1986. And for consistency's sake, we also refer to the '85 Bears as having won the NFL championship in 1985, even though the Super Bowl was actually played in 1986.

This is a little confusing because it isn't consistent, but this is the widely accepted way to refer to the teams in various leagues for sports fans. For NHL and NBA, we track a season by the later year, and for NFL seasons we track a season by the earlier year.

For most sites, these distinctions would just be a matter of cosmetics, but for our site these distinctions do matter for various rankings, for example in terms of drought lengths by city or lists of multiple championships in the same season.

How do you choose which leagues and years count?

For basketball, only NBA league-years are counted, dating back to the first season.

For hockey, only NHL league-years are counted, dating back to the first season.

For baseball, only MLB league-years that had a modern world series are counted, starting in the 1903 season (the year of the first modern world series). However, we still track games back to the beginning of the modern era (1890 and onwards) for things like winning streaks and championship droughts, they just don't count for the Champ score.

For football, we count NFL league-years starting in 1920, and AFL league-years starting in 1960. The AFL and NFL merger was completed in 1970, so from 1970 onward, only NFL league-years are counted. AFL championships do not count for the champ score, and because of this, AFL-only seasons do not count towards championship droughts.

For MLS, we include every year in league history starting in 1996.

How often is the site updated?

All pages related to games are updated every day, so all stats related to individual games (streaks, head to head records, biggest wins, etc) should be at most one day out of date.

The champ score updates 5 times a year, at the conclusion of the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS seasons.

Why does MLS count less than the other leagues?

MLS used to not be in the champ score at all! But due to the rapid rise of soccer in the USA, thanks to Men in Blazers and others, we've added in MLS with a 1/3rd weight in the champ score calculations.