The President's Day Precedent, Part 5
Season by season look at champions that also had the best regular season record.
(BoopNote: The text from our good friend and Philly uber sports fan Greg Frank came in at 10:17 a.m. It suggested since it was Presidents Day, we see how the NHL's President's Cup winners had fared in the Stanlley Cup playoffs. Since BoopStats doesn't process anything it sees or hears at 10:17 a.m., we went back to sleep ... and when we woke up, we realized we could do all four sports in separate posts throughout the day and tie them together in the end. Worked out pretty well, I thought. Thanks to Greg for his thoughts and help.)
All day, we've given you the most recent champions in each sport that had the best regular season records. Below, we clump them all together chronoloigically back to 1980. Some notables:
♦ Just four of the last 31 championships awarded went to a team that had the best record.
♦ There were 13 consecutive titlists w/o the best record from 2004 through the summer of 2007.
♦ The NFL has gone eight straight seasons without crowning its RS king, tied with MLB from 1999-06 for the longest "drought" in our time period.
♦ Between 1990 and 2006, baseball had as many World Series cancelled (one) as it did World Series champions with the best RS record (one).
♦ From the 1982 NFL season through the 1989 NFL season, 18 of the 29 champions had their sports best records.
♦ The NBA (1996-00) and the NFL (1982-86) each had five consecutive champions with the best W-L, the longest such streaks in our coverage.
♦ And for our soccer aficianados, The Goalkeeper chimes in with this: The Supporters' Shield is awarded to the MLS team with the best regular season record. Only six times in the 16-year history of MLS (2012 will be season No. 17) has the Supporters' Shield winner won the MLS Cup. The sixth was this past season. Prior to that it had not happened since 2008; before that it had not happened since 2002.