Tigers Tackling History

[Todd]

Monday, September 15, 2003


By Jim Baker
ESPN Insider

From as best as I can gather, football season is underway.

Personally, I've never been good at seasonal transitions and I am assuming that you aren't either. Confused? Well, who can blame you? It's a confusing time of year. A Minnesota-Chicago score comes across the ticker at the bottom of the screen on ESPN2 and the numbers don't quite make sense: "17-10 in the second? Say what?"


To help you make this annual rite of passage, I offer today's column in a manner designed to help you accept that football season is upon us and that soon baseball will be gone.

The 38-110 Detroit Tigers have 14 games left. What they do in those 14 games will decide their place in baseball history. Fourteen also used to be the number of games played in the National Football League. From 1961 (1960 for the American Football League) to 1977, that was the length of the regular season schedule. In that time, at least one team managed to hit every single record at least once (unlike the subsequent 16-game schedule, which has yet to see a 16-0 or 0-16 showing).

So, to help us all begin easing into the next world -- the sport that many of us use to get us through to the next baseball season -- let's find an example of each possible 14-game record and use it to examine the rest of the Tigers season:





14-0: 1972 Miami Dolphins
If the Tigers can match the famous Dolphins, they will rise way out of the ugly streets of the sub-.300 ghetto and avoid all sorts of the attendant humiliation contained in a life lived at that level.

What are the odds of any team closing out the season with 14 wins? Pretty high. What are the odds of the Tigers closing out the season with 14 wins? Take whatever the first number is and multiply it by itself and you're in the ballpark on the Tigers. Has it really come to this? Having to win 14 in a row just to match the '69 Padres and Expos?

Final record: 52-110

13-1: 1976 Oakland Raiders
What do the '62 Lions, '67 Jets, '68 Browns and '76 Patriots have in common? That's right: they were the spoilers of perfect regular seasons in the 14-game era. Only four teams managed to go 13-1 in that time and these were the four clubs that kept them from doing so.


The Lions beat the Packers 26-14, the Jets upended the Raiders 27-14, the Browns beat the Colts 30-20 and the Patriots crushed the later Raiders 48-17. Those Raiders got their vengeance in the playoffs, 24-21.

Final record: 51-111

12-2: 1966 Green Bay Packers
The first Super Bowl champs. If the Tigers can replicate this record the rest of the way, they'll be spending the offseason in the company of pride.

Final record: 50-112

11-3: 1975 St. Louis Cardinals
Yes, this actually happened. I invite you to look it up. The football Cardinals once won 11 games in a single season -- a 14-game season, no less. I include it here for the benefit of the Tigers in the hope that they can look upon that record and see in it the possibility of all things miraculous. Should they manage to pull it off, they would edge just over .300 and avoid being one of the 20 worst teams of all-time, provided "all-time" means "since 1901."

Final record: 49-113

10-4: 1970 Detroit Lions
We had to include one Lions entry in here and it was this club, the NFL's first-ever wild-card team (along with the '70 Dolphins in the AFC).


These Lions are also germane to a baseball story because they lost their only playoff game by a baseball score: 5-0 (to Dallas).

Final record: 48-114

9-5: 1962 Pittsburgh Steelers
Chosen here only because they managed to win so many games while being outscored by 50 points. It's not that hard to do in football -- one must simply get blown out in one's losses and have their wins be much, much tighter. That's not quite possible over a 162-game schedule in baseball. The Tigers have been outscored by 318 runs this year and no amount of gerrymandering could turn that into a winning record.

Final record: 47-115

8-6: 1970 Cincinnati Bengals
The Bengals are chosen here to represent for the 8-6 crowd because they, unlike all other 8-6 teams got something out of it: a trip to the playoffs. This was the second-worst record to qualify a team for the postseason in the 14-game era. (The '63 Boston Patriots got in at 7-6-1 after beating Buffalo in a tie-breaker.) What would such a record mean for the Tigers? An opportunity to leapfrog over those '40s Phillies teams of losing legend.

Final record: 46-116

7-7: 1977 Atlanta Falcons
I have chosen this team because they had one of the stingiest defenses of the 14-game era (129 points surrendered, albeit in a league with reduced overall scoring) and it reminds us that the Tigers were going to be a team built on pitching and defense, inspired by the dimensions of their new park.


How much that has gone astray -- not that it was necessarily a bad idea in the first place. A beautiful ballpark is Comerica Park, one that truly puts one in the mind of some of the older stadiums with vast outfield expanses. Sadly, money misappropriated to folks like Damion Easley helped send the plan off-message.

Final record: 45-117

6-8: 1975 Denver Broncos
What's it like to lose 106 games and then get worse by another dozen the following year? Nobody knows -- it's never been tried before. If nothing else, the Tigers will set a record for the Least Improved 100-Loss Team in Baseball History. There's nothing special about the '75 Broncos, really. To be honest, I picked them at random because 6-8 is sort of a random kind of record.

Final record: 44-118

5-9: 1964 Chicago Bears
People have a tendency to focus on the counting number rather than the percentage. For instance, when the Mariners won 116 games in 2001 they were often given credit for tying the 1906 Cubs while it was conveniently ignored that they had eight additional opportunities to do so.


The Tigers are going to find that this is true on their end of the spectrum as well. Even though they only need to win three games to better the '62 Mets winning percentage, they will have to win five so that they don't match their 120 losses. I will guarantee you that if they don't go at least 5-9, the number of losses will get the focus.

These Bears tumbled like nobody's business. After winning it all in '63 by holding opponents to 10 points a game, they gave up 379 in '64 and fell to sixth place in a seven-team division.

Final record: 43-119

4-10: 1968 Boston Patriots
This was the Patriots' last season playing in Fenway Park, so there's your baseball tie-in. The Tigers went 0-6 at Fenway this year, being outscored 51-15 in the process. At .286, 4-10 is the closest record to what the Tigers have done to this point (.257).

Final record: 42-120

3-11: 1975 New England Patriots
This is the magic record for the Tigers need to slip the noose of the '62 Mets -- the team everyone has been comparing them to since they got off to their unfortunate 1-17 start. These Patriots were chosen because they, among the 21 teams who finished at 3-11, were the only ones to manage a complete turnaround the next season.


In 1976, they went 11-3 and qualified for the wild card. The '66 Houston Oilers rebounded from their 3-11 season to win the Eastern Division the next year, but with a 9-4-1 record. (Both teams lost their only playoff game.) Let their success stand as a beacon to these Tigers -- however unrelated it may be!

Final record: 41-121

2-12: 1961 Oakland Raiders
Selected here to show that great things can come from humble beginnings and that sometimes, things have to get worse before they can better. The Raiders slipped to 1-13 the following season before getting on the track that has made them one of the sports' flagship franchises. Using a formula so complex that not even I pretend to understand it, 2-12 is actually the record the Tigers can expect in their remaining games based on what they have done so far this season against Kansas City, Minnesota and Toronto, their final opponents.

Final record: 40-122

1-13: 1969 Chicago Bears
These Bears were outscored 332 to 210. That is nearly the exact same ratio by which the 2003 Tigers have been outdistanced: 1.61 to 1. The Bears' only victory came over the Steelers, who were also 1-13. Should the Tigers win but once more, it would help them escape the 1916 A's, but would put them below the 1935 Braves and the 1962 Mets.

Final record: 39-123

0-14: 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers
The first-year Bucs were shut out five times -- over one-third of their losses. The Tigers are nowhere near that, having been blanked in just 14 percent of theirs -- so there's something to celebrate.


Should the Tigers crap out, they will squeeze past the 1916 A's as the worst team of the so-called Modern Era. Theirs will be a .2345 winning percentage while those A's went .2352.

It doesn't seem likely, does it? ... Does it?

Final record: 38-124

Jim Baker writes Monday through Friday for ESPN Insider. He can be reached at jbakerespn@yahoo.com