This week, the sharp Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin wrote a column about the sports fan’s misery index.  Rushin writes that for many of us, it’s good to feel bad.  We create methods and calculations to quantify our misery and look for any way to inflate that quantification.  For example, “When we’re miserably hot, we create a Heat Index to feel hotter than the actual temperature. When we’re miserably cold, we conjure windchill to help us feel more frigid still.”

This desire to despair is nowhere more applicable than the sports community.  Sports fans are perpetually lamenting their team’s shortcomings.  Rushin argues:

“No one is happier to be unhappy than sports fans, which is why Cubs fans (zero titles in 102 years) are legion and Marlins fans (two titles in 14 years) are non-existent…that’s where every fan secretly wants to be, because misery doesn’t really love company after all — it wants to be alone, at the very top.”

To inflate the misery, Rushin comes up with an indiscriminate index that each fan base can use to tout their woe.  [Read more...]