Where Does Massachusetts Fall Amongst The Greatest Sports States?

Yesterday SB Nation's Jon Bois published an interesting post entitled "What's The Greatest Sports State" which takes a look at the winning percentage of each state. To do this, Bois compiled the winning percentages of all NBA, NFL, MLB, college football and college basketball (had to be in a power conference) since basically the dawn of professional sports in America and smooshed all the numbers together to get a state winning percentage.

Of course, as a resident Massachusetts-onian, and someone who has seen great sports success in this state (along with years of failure, think pre-2001 New England Patriots), I wanted to see where Massachusetts fell on this list. I was stunned to see MA near the bottom of the list.

But after thinking about it for a minute it made sense. Bois explains:

Clearly, states with collegiate powerhouses will have a leg up here. The winningest team in baseball, the Yankees, is .568 all-time; in contrast, college basketball programs such as Kentucky and UNC are well over .700 all-time. This helps to explain why Massachusetts, in spite of the glut of success over the last decade and the long-term success of the Celtics, has a rather poor showing here: relatively speaking, they don't have much in the way of NCAA football or basketball. There's a slight bias against the large-market corners of the nation, and I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether that was an accident.

Ahh I get it now. The Red Sox play 162 games and make it to the playoffs winning 59 percent of the games, yet Alabama wins 90 percent of the games and, voila! Massachusetts falls to the bottom. It doesn't appear that sports that play more games are waited any differently than college football that only plays 12 games a season. Just look at how college sports heavy the top of the list is: Nebraska, Kentucky, Oklahoma & Utah (?). Massachusetts doesn't stand a chance with only BC counting (because obviously UMass, Holy Cross and Harvard don't matter).

Not that I put much weight in this analysis, but it's fun to just look at and debate. Honestly, I would rather just compare titles that come out of the state, and I'm sure Massachusetts would be much higher. But regardless using these stats alone I can smile knowing my state is better than South Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, and Iowa.