The Super Bowl and Mortality

This year the Super Bowl turns 50. In that time some franchises have found their way to the championship again and again, and others have kept their fans waiting for another taste of victory.

How long has it been since the Bears won a Super Bowl? The Raiders? The Jets?

Sure, you could just look up how many years have passed, but does that really quantify the pain of all the fans who have never seen a victory?

That’s why we built the Super Bowl mortality tracker — a tool showing how many Americans were alive following every Super Bowl win by every National Football League team. If you rifle through all of the teams, you see not just the rise and fall of franchise empires, but the rise and fall of the American population and, hence, potential fans.

How does this work?

Let’s look at the Bears, who had their Super Bowl drought hit 30 years this season.

When the Bears last won in 1986, the Census Bureau estimates the population of the United States at around 240 million people. Each season without a Super Bowl victory saw that group of potential championship witnesses lose members, down to around 200 million this year (See how we got the numbers). That means more than 1 in 3 Americans have lived their entire lives without a Bears’ Championship.

While Bears’ fans have certainly waited a long time, there are four other teams with longer streaks of futility: the Oakland Raiders (32 years), Miami Dolphins (42), Kansas City Chiefs (46) and the New York Jets (47).

Of course, even those are better off than the 14 NFL franchises — nearly half of all teams — that have never even won a Super Bowl.

Maybe the next 50 years will be more kind to them.

How did we get these figures?

The tracker is based on yearly population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. For each year we found the most recent season a team had won the Super Bowl, and added up all residents born in that year or later.