Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
January 16, 2004, Washington Post

Worst Sports Town? We're No. 1!

Joe Gibbs has returned to coach the Washington Redskins. Everyone expects the Hall of Fame football coach to lead the Skins back to their winning ways and maybe even to the Super Bowl before long.

All I can say is that Gibbs better start working quickly. Because right now, Washington, D.C., is the worst professional sports town in the country. It's true. Washington is the rock bottom. The absolute worst.

Here's how I figured it out: I looked up the regular season winning percentages of the teams in Major League Baseball, the National Football League, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League. (For hockey, I used percentage of possible points won.) Then I added all the percentages of the teams to get a "score" for each city's sports teams. The city had to have teams in at least three of the major sports to be in the running.

I can hear all the soccer fans out there yelling, "What about soccer?!" Sorry, but soccer is not a major professional sport in the United States. At least, not yet. Anyway, the D.C. United team was sorry last year. And, yeah, the Washington Freedom won the Women's United Soccer Association title last summer, but then the whole league shut down just a few days later. Some victory celebration.

So (as of Thursday morning), here are the scores for the three sorriest sports cities in America:

The Cleveland fans have it almost as bad as we do, but at least the Cavaliers have the NBA's most exciting player -- the amazing LeBron James. The Wizards have . . . the Wizards have . . . I guess we have Kwame Brown. Big whoop.

Please don't tell me that the Baltimore Orioles are Washington's baseball team. Baltimore is not Washington, D.C. By the way, even though Baltimore has only two professional teams (the Orioles and Ravens), the city's "score" (.438 + .625 = 1.063) is higher than Washington with its three pro teams.

So what's a Washington sports fan to do? Maybe move to some winning city or at least root for their teams.

The three cities with the best sports teams are:

* I let Boston fans claim the New England Patriots as their team, and Minneapolis fans get points for all the Minnesota teams.

But I never liked fans who only care about a winning team. If you're a real fan, you've got to hang with the home teams. And hope that Coach Gibbs can turn at least one of Washington's woeful pro teams into a winner.