TITLE WAVE
WILL HOUSTON HAVE MORE CHAMPIONSHIP GLORY COMING IN 2018?
Pittsburgh adapted the City of Champions brand back in the late 1970s, and it did so partly at Houston’s expense. If the Oilers could done the impossible and blocked those great Steelers teams from the Super Bowl, Steel Town would have only been the
City of Champion with its “We Are Family” Pirates having prevailed in the 1979 World Series.
Today, with its back-toback Stanley Cup champion Penguins, Pittsburgh remains a pretty happy place for a sports fan to live. Although the Steelers disappointed in the 2017 NFL playoffs, they remain among the top four favorites, at 12-1, to win Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta next February. But the Pirates, having traded Gerrit Cole, their best pitcher of recent vintage to the reigning World Series champion Astros, they’re one of the longer, if not longest, shots in 2018 at 80-1.
You liked that last sentence, didn’t you? Me too. “Reigning World Series champion Astros” has really nice ring to it after 55 tedious years of waiting and waiting and waiting ’til next year. Better still, Houston as a whole is veering dangerously close to “City of Champions” bragging rights itself, which is dramatically new turf for the many of us who have been pierced by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune through the decades.
Fact is, as we speak today, no town has better odds of going three-for-three in 2018. The only way we could be sitting prettier would be if four-for-four were an option. Damn you, NHL.
Although the Astros aren’t the betting favorite to repeat as baseball’s best, that’s mostly the result of entrenched prejudices and/or kneejerk assumptions. It’s being incorrectly assumed, largely by the costal elites, the Orange overachieved last fall. They didn’t. With the addition of Cole, assuming a return to his pre-2017 form, they are better constructed for an encore triumph than pretty much every champion that failed to defend over the previous 17 seasons.
And, at 6-1, the Astros are still going off as the second betting favorite, tied with the Dodgers behind the 5-1 Yankees, who have added mega-slugger Giancarlo Stanton, granted a seemingly more impactful pickup than Cole. The Rockets, in turn are also the second betting favorite at 9-2, trailing only defending champion Golden State and, for the moment, they’re playing better basketball than the Warriors, who limped into the All-Star Break with four losses in eight games. The Rockets, meanwhile, were reeling off 10 W’s in a row to carry the NBA’s best record into the league’s winter holiday. Also, they have already beaten the Dubs twice in three regular-season meetings.
Then we have the Texans. Although nobody has seen Deshaun Watson doing football things since he tore his ACL on or about the first of November, his aura has given his team the benefit of the doubt. The Texans, coming off a 4-12 finish with nine losses in their final 10 games, may still have a disastrously constructed offensive line, a defenseless secondary and a huge unknown in J.J. Watt coming off a second major injury, yet only five teams are getting better odds than their 18-1 on the futures market.
In elite company
Houston’s average ranking based on the likelihood of each of its teams winning the next championship in their respective sports rounds down, remarkably, to a collective third. The only other city that comes close to that is Boston, whose average ranking rounds down to a collective fourth. The Patriots are favored among all NFL teams at 11-2, the Bruins tied for third among NHL teams at 8-1, the Celtics fifth among NBA teams at 16-1 and the Red Sox seventh among MLB teams at 12-1.
Rarefied air here, folks, and, adding to our embarrassment of riches, the Houston Cougars are ranked in both national polls for the first time in more than three decades, dating back to the time of Phi Slam Jama.
Further, research shows we’re one of a relatively small handful of cities that can say more of our teams have been feted with victory parades than haven’t through the years. Two-for-three is twofor-three. We may not be way up there in terms of quantity of titles — Boston teams have won 20 combined compared to our three since the dawn of the Super Bowl era in 1966 — and all five of Chicago’s teams and all four of Philly’s have hoisted