Butt Monkey/Sports

For a particularly frustrating/heartbreaking form of this, see Every Year They Fizzle Out.

• Every team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters will be the Butt Monkey for at least that game. Special notice especially goes towards the Washington Generals, who were once a champion ABL team in Philadelphia before the league folded.
• Every pro team from Seattle is this. What with the Sonics being stolen and relocated to Oklahoma City, the Mariners losing superstars whenever they hit free agency and the Seahawks with their lone appearance in the Super Bowl only to be the Opposing Sports Team to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the eyes of the fans, media, and yes even the officials. Apart from two wins by the women's pro basketball team, the city hasn't scored a professional sports championship since 1979 with the SuperSonics (who even left the city!).
• Any team that goes an exceptionally long drought will suffer this, but if fans/media can trace the drought to a certain event, it becomes multiplied as they are called "cursed franchises." Two of the biggest examples.
  • A year after winning the 1918 World Series, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, who went on to become the games' greatest player and team. The Sox would be known as having the "Curse of the Bambino" (although that really didn't become lore until 1990) until they finally won the Series again in 2004.
  • The New York Rangers underwent a long drought after winning the Stanley Cup in 1940, presumably because the following year they burned the Madison Square Garden mortgage papers in the Cup and then helped drive the rival New York Americans out of existence. Opposing fans would drone the players with chants of "1940!" until they finally took the Cup back in 1994.
    • The Detroit Red Wings, today universally-loathed power players, had this going during their 42-year Cup drought, with opponents using the word "1955" like a weapon until they finally took it in 1997.
• The Chicago Cubs. 103 years without a World Series title and counting. They haven't even reached the Fall Classic since World War II. The Cubs are probably the worst team championship-wise in sports. After their 1908 World Series victory, they didn't even win a playoff series until 2003. Then, just when it seemed they were going to win the pennant for the first time since 1945... well, just Google "Steve Bartman".
  • As mentioned above, many "cursed teams" are dubbed that because of infamously bad moves the team made. What are the Cubs supposedly cursed by? A goat. During that last World Series trip in 1945, a local tavern owner tried to take his pet goat to a Series game, even buying the goat a ticket. When the other fans demanded he and the goat leave, he declared the Cubs would never win again.
• Any pro sports team in or near Dallas that isn't the Cowboys. Even after the Texas Rangers finally made the World Series in 2010 and 2011 and the Dallas Mavericks won it all in 2011, Cowboys fans throw their five Super Bowl titles in everyone's faces and claim the others are therefore aren't worthy of attention (the Mavs Finals games barely beat Cowboys preseason games in TV ratings!) while they ignore that the Cowboys went 12 years without a playoff win and are still in their longest Super Bowl drought in franchise history.
• The Detroit Lions, consistently the worst team in the league and the first team in NFL history to go 0-16. That particular season, the head coach--who got the job at least partly through connections anyhow--was a complete idiot; at one game against the Cincinnati Bengals (Butt Monkeys in their own right), the Detroit crowd dressed up in Bengals orange rather than Lions blue in protest.
  • The curse could be broken, with a 10-6 finish in 2011 that got them their first playoff berth since 1999. Unfortunately, a loss in the last game of the season--to the Green Bay Packers' second-stringers--put them in the tougher wild card spot, facing the formidable New Orleans Saints. They lost.
• The Tampa Bay Buccaneers started out this way - just before their first NFL game, they got lost in bowels of the Houston Astrodome for almost 20 minutes. It really never got much better for them as they were the first team to go winless in a season (0-14), having the longest losing streak in football (0-26 their first 26 games) and not returning a kick for a touchdown for the first 31 years of their existence.
  • Tampa Head Coach John McKay summed up the Bucs futility with his usual humor: "We can't win at home, we can't win on the road, so we were going to petition the league for a neutral site."
• Before the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl, they were considered to be the league's biggest joke next to the Lions. The 1980 season saw them reach the peak of putrid play, going 1-15, at the time being the worst record in league history. And thus, the nickname "Ain'ts" was born.
  • Fun fact: their fans were the first to wear bags over their heads.
  • Another fun fact: You know the previous example Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost their first 26 games? They won their 27th game. Guess which team that was? That's right: This buttmonkey. The Saints.
• The Los Angeles Clippers, dear lord, the Clippers. It's gotten to the point where other teams' fans in the league PITY Clippers fans when they visit Staples Center. And it might never get any better for them. Rising star Blake Griffin aside, the Clips are crippled by a racist owner who doesn't care about winning games and a merry-go-round of GMs and head coaches who don't know what they're doing (with current coach Vinny Del Negro proving our point). A lot of teams in the NBA are bad - the Clippers are the only team that has never been really good (although they did try in the one year where they took the Phoenix Suns to seven games in the Western Conference semifinals). And now the Clippers have lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs may be a Butt Monkey on their own with that many losses in a row (26 to be exact), but the Clippers' status as a Butt Monkey of the NBA will be enhanced with the defeat that ended the aforementioned losing streak.
  • However, their recent trade for star point guard Chris Paul might be a sign that they really could be shedding their skin here. Still, only time can truly tell with this team.
• The New York Islanders in the NHL also seem to embody this as of late. Despite the fact that they were a dominant force in the 80's, they've only managed a handful of playoff appearances (usually as one of the lower seeds) in the past fifteen years. The team just cannot catch a break. They play in perhaps the worst arena in the league (it was even recently revealed to have an asbestos problem), their new arena deal being mulled and stalled by the local city council, and are absolutely dwarfed in the local media by the much larger New York Rangers. The fact that their mascot during the 90s looked like the Hi-Liner Fishsticks guy didn't help.
• Cleveland's teams. ALL of them: the Indians ('97 World Series), the Cavaliers (The Shot, The "Decision"/Betrayal), and especially the Browns (let's see, there's The Drive, The Fumble, Red Right 88...) The last time the city's had a championship to celebrate: 1964. There's a reason ESPN called it the most tortured sports city in America.
  • The Cavaliers just barely managed to avoid officially becoming the worst franchise in professional sports history... by stopping one game short of the 27 consecutive losses needed to go on to full Butt Monkey glory. Instead, they get to share the 26 game record with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Either way, the 2010-2011 team still holds the worst losing streak in NBA history, a record it took from the 1981-1983 Cavaliers. Yes, two seasons.
  • And adding further insult to the Browns' injury: Because they're in the same division, every year they have to travel to the Cincinnati Bengals, who play in Paul Brown Stadium (Yes, the namesake of the Cleveland team has his name on the stadium of a cross-state division rival), and the Baltimore Ravens - the original Browns franchise that packed up and moved in 1996 and won the Super Bowl four years later in its new town.
  • The ultimate Butt Monkey in baseball has to be the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Their owners had bought the St. Louis Browns but kept ownership of the Spiders (something illegal today) and transferred most of the good players from Cleveland to the newly-remained St. Louis Perfectos. They only won 20 games out of 154 -- 35 games behind the next-to-last place Washington Senators, giving them a winning percentage of .130, baseball's worst and one of two seasons below .200 (the 1890 Pittsburgh Pirates being the other).
• Speaking of Cincinnatti, the Bengals are also a Butt Monkey. No matter how much of a whipping-boy the Browns are in the AFC North, at least they have days when they won championships (albeit before the current NFL was formed). The Bengals have no such history, only having one period of being competitive in their history (1981-1990), and they still didn't win any Super Bowls. It also doesn't help that after period of success came the era of "The Bungles"(1990s), when they were absolutely terrible. It seems that they're getting better nowadays with an underrated defense and the drafting of Andy Dalton, Jermaine Gresham and Jerome Simpson, but time will tell.
  • Just how bad was the Bungles era? During that time period, the franchise had nine seasons with 10 or more loses, three of those seasons in which they had the league's worst record. When NFL Films did a Top 10 worst teams countdown, the Bengals teams of the 90s earned a spot on the list. Yes, you're reading that right -- teams. That's how bad they were.
• As an NHL franchise for the first thirteen seasons, the Kansas City Scouts/Colorado Rockies/New Jersey Devils only made the playoffs once and were a joke to the point that Wayne Gretzky called them a Mickey Mouse Organization after a 13-4 pounding in a game against the Edmonton Oilers. By the 1987-1988 season, New Jersey Took a Level in Badass and only missed the playoffs twice since.
• The city of San Diego. It's the largest major metropolitan area in the U.S. never to have won one of the four modern major professional sports championships (though the fact that the city only has teams for two of the four sports doesn't help) and both their football and baseball teams have come close only to be crushed in agonizing defeat. The Chargers did win a championship, but that was in 1963, when they were in the old American Football League. The AFL and NFL merged in 1970, and the Chargers have not won a championship since.
  • Actually, their pro soccer team, the Sockers, were a formidable force in the 1970s and early 1980s. Why MLS never awarded a franchise to San Diego is baffling, to say the least!
• The Buffalo Bills. If you asked a football fan what they're most famous for, the three common answers will likely be:
  • a) They're the first team to lose four consecutive Super Bowls
  • b) They're the team who the Tennessee Titans beat in the "Music City Miracle"
  • c) They're the team that the other teams in the AFC East slaughter for 2 easy wins.
• The Houston Oilers won the first ever AFL championship - and never won another one. A string of crushing playoff defeats in the team's NFL history finally came to a head in 1993, when they blew the biggest lead (35-3) in NFL playoff history to the freakin' Buffalo Bills. The fans dubbed them "Choke City" (Adding insult to injury, they declared the Rockets "Clutch City" when they won the NBA title a year later) and simply stopped caring. When owner Bud Adams declared he would move the team to Tennessee in 1996, about 200 fans showed up downtown in protest.
• It may be hard for a younger football fan to believe this, but for much of their existence, the New England Patriots were this. With mediocre season after mediocre season and being on the receiving end of one of the most lopsided Super Bowl defeats in history for the one season that they were not mediocre, if you asked Patriots fans in the 80s (Hell, probably early 90s fans as well) if they thought they could win a championship in their lifetime, they probably wouldn't have an answer. Then came the 2000s and birth of a dynasty and they haven't resembled anything close to this trope since.
• The Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series is often looked upon as the butt monkey of sportscar racing due to the series' notoriously hideous and low-tech Daytona Prototypes. They are now working on a plan to try and shed that image, however, beginning with an attempt at repairing the appearance of their Prototypes.
• The NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies were this during their mercifully short existence. They won the first two games in franchise history and it was all downhill from there, with two 19+ losing streaks in their first season and no season in which they came close to a winning record or any hope for the playoffs. At least one high-profile player who was drafted by them flatly refused to play; aside from the team's pathetic win-loss record, the fact that the city is in a relatively far-off corner of North America and the fact that it may be the city in North America with the lowest African-American/Canadian population didn't make it too popular with players. Mercifully, after years of losing and driving once-excited fans away, the team was sold and moved to Memphis, where they became little bit better, but not by much... at least, not until the 2010-11 season.
  • The Vancouver Canucks gets a dishonorable mention, they have an extreme tendency to set new record lows in playoffs ranging from being the only President's trophy team to win only 1 out 7 games (and having a terrible scoring average in the playoffs) and being shut out in the playoff finals. Also they never won the cup, ever.
• For much of their existence, the Philadelphia Phillies managed this. They once held the professional sports record for the most consecutive seasons without winning at least half of their games (finally eclipsed by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2010), also once held the record for the longest championship drought (they went 97 years from their inception to their first championship; that record was eclipsed by the aforementioned Cubs in 2006), and became the first professional sports franchise to amass a total of 10,000 losses (since joined in that regard by the Atlanta Braves). Their recent success, however, means that nobody is going to pity the team or its fans much at the moment - though the fact that some of their futility records are being eclipsed also helps.
  • The Eagles (last title: 1960) and Flyers (last title: 1975) also apply.
    • If you're wondering why the Eagles count, keep in mind that despite the success they've had in the 00s, the Eagles are the only team in their division not to have won a Super Bowl. The fact that every other team has won at least 3 Super Bowls doesn't help (yes, even the Redskins)
• Formula One pilot Rubens Barrichello was this. As three time champion Ayrton Senna tragically died in 19934, he was the best Brazilian pilot in the field and thus the one Brazilians expected from the most. Unfortunadely Barrichello spent 6 years with middling cars and low results (in 1997 he only finished two races out of 19), and after getting to the best car, Ferrari, became for six years second fiddle to Michael Schumacher, who in turn ran his way to become the biggest F1 champion. Once he had the best car again, in 2009 with Brawn, his bad luck struck again and he finished third while his teammate Jenson Button was champion. He ended up going to Indy Car in 2012 as his previous team chose not to renew his contract, going for... Senna's nephew Bruno!
• The Charlotte Bobcats. Being an expansion team, it was expected for them to be terrible, but nobody expected them to be this terrible. After a few bad seasons, they surprised everyone with a playoff bid in 2009, but it all went downhill after being swept out of the first round. They didn't even come close to making the playoffs in the 2010-2011 season and set a new record for the worst season^[1] by an NBA team in history in the 2011-2012 season, with 7 wins and 59 losses. This was made even worse by the fact that the team had 23 straight losses and 34 losses by at least 10 points. Not even being owned by Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest player in the league's history, helped them, as he's been publicly questioned by many (including his friend, Charles Barkley) on his ownership abilities, with some grossly mismanaged contracts for players not worth half the money. And before you think that there is a bright side that they will receive one of the top four picks in the 2012 Draft, keep in mind that all of the Bobcats' lottery picks have been busts so far.
• The former Atlanta Thrashers. As an expansion franchise, they had the typical growing pains in their early seasons; however, the team became more of a joke after their lone divisional win in the 2006-07 season. In their only playoff appearance in the same season, the Thrashers were swept by the New York Rangers. Since then, apathetic (and largely incompetent) owners and dwindling attendance ultimately caused the Thrashers to move to Winnipeg, where the team sold out 13,000 season tickets in less than 15 minutes.

1. ↑ in regards to win percentage (.106).