Every Year They Fizzle Out

Mandy Jensen: Um... ["Peyton Manning" is] like — how do I put this? When someone has this great reputation, but you always wonder why, because, when it really counts, they can't deliver?
[...]
Ted Trimble: Yeah, fine, but... still — why a Peyton Manning? I don't get it!
Chris Graham: I think you're missing the point! Uh — basically, the point is: like the rest of us, you bought the Arizona hype, and, when they did their usual Peyton Manning, you got burned!

— Saturday Night Live, ESPN's NCAA Tournament Pool Party

This person is rarely successful: they might look good on paper, but when it counts they fizzle out.

Supporters will claim he is the greatest thing since sliced bread, they’ll say that all the high-stakes failures do not prove anything because he really won them, and they will attack anyone who tries to point out that he can't deliver when it counts.

Compare Fake Ultimate Hero, where most people seem to realize they are not that great, and Small Name, Big Ego, when it's the person himself who has a bloated self-esteem. May overlap with Crutch Character, depending on how long they hold out before this trope comes into play: they can still make important gains for their team early on, even when they lose their steam by the time they reach the climatic matches.

The Trope Namer is the SNL sketch quoted above, which Manning, the former Trope Namer, was hosting after he won the Super Bowl. Manning himself was playing Ted Trimble with Jason Sudeikis as Chris Graham.

This is different from Informed Ability in that the person might have the skills and you have seen them, but they are not able to finish the job with them. May be the result of Always Second Best. A villain who regularly faces an Invincible Hero is likely to be this. Often the result of being Well-Trained, but Inexperienced.

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Major Sports with their own pages:

• NFL
• NHL

Other Examples:

Auto Racing

Due to the large fields, this trope can occur many times in auto racing, whether in NASCAR, Formula One or the IndyCar Series:

• In the NASCAR ranks, Mark Martin was a walking version of this trope. He was a perennial crowd and statistical favorite through his career (even into his early 50s), but never won a Cup Series championship nor a Daytona 500; many fans think he's been ripped off of at least one of each (the best known of each being the dastardly 46-point penalty that wasn't his fault and cost him a championship to Dale Earnhardt in 1990, and the infamous finish of the 2007 Daytona 500 regarding NASCAR allowing him and race winner Kevin Harvick to fight to the checkers while a last-lap Big One occurred behind them in a situation where NASCAR would throw the caution flag in other scenarios; it has been debated that Martin was ahead of Harvick when the crash happened).
• Before the title got passed over to Martin, Dale Earnhardt was best known as the driver that just couldn't win a Harley J. Earl Trophy: wrecks, blown engines, flat tires, being outraced by other drivers (in 1993 and 1996, he got passed late race by Dale Jarrett and had to settle for second), Dale just couldn't win it until his 20th try, in 1998; even then, that race ended under caution, so who knows whether or not he or Bobby Labonte would have led that final lap had it been green. And, in a tragic note, his final race happened to be the Daytona 500...
  • Earnhardt's not alone here: Buddy Baker only won the Daytona 500 on his 18th try, while Darrell Waltrip only won it on his 17th try, and Bobby Allison, David Pearson and Michael Waltrip on their 15th tries.
  • To add to the irony, it took Dale Earnhardt 20 attempts to win the Daytona 500, while Dale Earnhardt Jr. managed to win the 500 twice in 15 starts, and those were on his fifth try (2004) and 15th try (2014).
• As a driver, Tony Stewart had three Cup Series championships and won 48 races, but he was shut out in the Daytona 500 every time it looked like he had a shot. The closest he got was in 2004. He led 98 laps, or almost half of the race, but Dale Jr. overtook him with 20 laps to go after the last pit stop cycle and he couldn't get around him. In 2008, Stewart led coming to the white flag, but he and his then-Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch got outdrafted by the Penske duo of Ryan Newman and Kurt Busch, and Newman took the flag. Ironically, Newman would join Stewart's new team in 2009.
  • On another level, the only Stewart-Haas Racing driver that has won the 500 while with the team (Newman's Daytona 500 win was with Roger Penske and Harvick's was with Richard Childress) was Kurt Busch in 2017, although Stewart has won the Coke Zero 400 four times between Gibbs and SHR (2005, 2006, 2009, 2012). This makes Stewart the only multiple-time winner of that race who has never won the Daytona 500.^note And it's worth noting that every multiple-time Daytona 500 winner, with the exceptions of Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin, has at least one Coke Zero 400 victory as well.
• Can easily be said about Dale Earnhardt Jr. when you consider that after that 2004 season, he had single wins in 2005 and 2006, then a 76-race winless streak from the spring Richmond race to the 2008 Lifelock 400 at Michigan, followed by a 143 race winless streak to the June 2012 Michigan race. A concussion that put him out for two races after Talladega made the last part of the season mediocre for him. Fortunately, Junior showed evidence of significant recovery, as he scored eight top tens in the 2013 Chase and scored the second-most points of all the Chase drivers behind Jimmie Johnson. He then broke a 55-race winless streak by winning the Daytona 500 again in 2014 and then proceeded to sweep both Pocono races.
• Carl Edwards has the misfortune to be one of the best non-Hendrick drivers in an era dominated by Hendrick drivers (the most heartbreaking example being losing in 2011 to the Hendrick-affiliated Tony Stewart in a tiebreaker, he led by three points going into the race - however, the fact that Stewart had more wins than Edwards contributed; for the record, every championship from 2005-2011 was won by Chevrolet - two with Stewart and five with Jimmie Johnson). Likely, if Edwards had been able to pass Regan Smith at Darlington in the spring on the last restart, he would have won the championship. In the 2009 Aaron's 499, where, approaching the finish line, Edwards spun backwards after contact from Brad Keselowski, causing Edwards to go airborne, and bounce off Ryan Newman's hood into the catch fence.
• Kyle Busch was long notorious for flaming out once the Chase began, no matter how well he did in the regular season. The most dramatic example of this is 2008, where he won eight regular season races and led by over 400 points just before the Chase reset - then crapped out immediately after, failing to win a single Chase race on his way to a 10th-place finish (out of 12 Chasers). Then he went out and finally won the title in 2015 despite missing the first eleven races.^note some analysts have counter-proposed that it was because of the missed races, and not wringing himself completely dry just to get into the Chase
• It's been a recent trend that the runner-up in the Chase one year gets massive hype as the series' potential next champion, but not only do they fail to win the Cup Series the next year, more often than not their stats fall way off and they find themselves struggling just to make the next Chase, let alone do anything once they get there. Every driver who finished runner up to Jimmie Johnson during his streak of five consecutive championships from 2006 to 2010 was subjected to this trope.
  • Carl Edwards is the defining example of this, as part of his larger tendency to fizzle out. After finishing third on a tiebreaker in 2005 (same points as Greg Biffle, but Biffle won six times to Edwards' four), he ultimately missed the 2006 Chase and wouldn't win another race until 2007. In 2008, he won nine times but finished second to Jimmie Johnson after Johnson basically blew away the other Chasers, with even Edwards' three wins in the last four races not being enough to overcome Johnson's lead. He then limped into the 2009 Chase and again went nearly two years without a win. 2011's heartbreak was followed by a series of cascading disasters over the summer of 2012, which took him completely out of the Chase, and he once again went nearly two years without a race win.
  • For that matter, Biffle also missed the 2006 Chase, and even defending champion Tony Stewart couldn't manage to back up his regular season performance well enough to get in - although he ended up winning three Chase races anyway.^note a likely reason why the 2007 Chase was expanded to 12 drivers, a rule change that would have granted both Stewart and Biffle Chase spots had it been in effect that year
  • 2006 runner-up Matt Kenseth didn't fall off as dramatically as the rest of these, but he still failed to follow up his impressive run in 2007, dropping from four wins to two, and from second to fourth in final points.
  • 2007 runner-up Jeff Gordon went from six wins and a modern-era record thirty top tens to zero wins, nineteen top tens and about the same "we'll just be taking up Chase space" sentiment that Tony Stewart expressed in 2011, only this time it was a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
  • 2009 runner-up Mark Martin actually went into what may or may not be his swansong after he missed the Chase and failed to win in 2010.
  • 2010 runner-up Denny Hamlin is legendary in this regard - everyone thought he would put it all together in 2011 and deliver Toyota its first championship, but the self-destruct that cost him the 2010 championship carried into 2011, as he had only one win, limped into the Chase on the Wildcard, and ultimately parted ways with crew chief Mike Ford after it became clear that the two no longer trusted each other.
  • Initially, it looked like 2012 runner-up Clint Bowyer was going to avert this for 2013, as he was second in points for a big chunk of the regular season. However, his central role in Spingate and the subsequent media hounding got him out of sorts enough that his driving suffered in the Chase - although he got six top tens in the Chase, only two of those (third at Martinsville, fifth at Homestead) were better than ninth, and that was enough to keep him from seriously contending for the Cup, ultimately finishing seventh. It also didn't help that, much like Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon and all three of Carl Edwards' letdown seasons before him, he failed to win a single race.
  • Also an inversion with the 2012 runners-up. Brad Keselowski won five races in 2012 to win the championship title, while Jimmie Johnson finished third in the final points. In 2013, Johnson won the Daytona 500 and five more races, led the points for 28 of 36 weeks, and won his sixth championship title. Keselowski, on the other hand, struggled greatly, and ultimately missed the Chase. His only win of 2013 was playing "spoiler" at Charlotte in October.
  • Matt Kenseth in 2014 once again played it straight: after seven wins and a runner up finish to Jimmie Johnson in the points in 2013, he had no wins in 2014. However, as a result of the new Chase elimination format, he advanced farther than Johnson, who had three wins prior to the Chase plus one more after his elimination but didn't advance past the Contender Round due to crashes and poor finishes at Kansas and Talladega. Nonetheless, though, Kenseth was eliminated in the Eliminator Round.
  • Ryan Newman scored no wins and was fairly pedestrian in the 2014 regular season, but made it into the Chase on points and from there ran the gauntlet before finishing second behind Kevin Harvick in the Championship race at Homestead-Miami. In 2015 he still had no wins but once again made the Chase on points - only to be bounced from championship contention after the Contender Round, and eventually fell short of the top ten in points.
  • 2015 runner-up Kevin Harvick plays with this in 2016: He's still one of the fastest drivers on the grid, but he couldn't find the same level of consistency that he had in 2014 or 2015 to allow him to make it to the Championship race at Homestead.
  • 2016 runner-up Joey Logano got hit with this pretty hard, as he failed to make it to the Playoffs (the renamed Chase) in 2017. He actually got a win during the season at Richmond, but that win got encumbered^note NASCAR's term of saying that the car isn't legal enough, usually caused by the car being caught with a rather major violation during post-race inspection (remember, NASCAR very rarely disqualified a driver's car and strip the driver off from the results during a race) and Logano got his playoff berth stripped away thanks to the encumbered finish, which is vital as that was his only race win all-season long. Logano would ultimately finish the season as the best of the rest among those that failed to make the playoffs. However, Logano would rebound and go on to win the Championship in 2018, beating defending champion Martin Truex Jr. by just under 7 seconds.
• Jamie McMurray first raced in the Sprint Cup Series in 2002, turned full time in 2003, and has a trophy collection many stock car drivers would envy: a Daytona 500, a Brickyard 400 and two wins at Charlotte are among his seven Cup Series wins, plus he has an all-star race victory in 2014. He has five top 15 points finishes but has never cracked the top 10...mostly because 2004 was the first year the Chase system was adopted, and he had never made the Chase until 2015. But in 2015, he still only finished 13th in points.
• It's rare to see someone win back-to-back Daytona 500s. After Sterling Marlin won the 1994 and 1995 races, it took until Denny Hamlin in 2020 for there to be a driver who defended their Daytona 500 win with a second Harley J. Earl Trophy.
• Although there are a fair number of Daytona 500 winners who've also won Daytona's summer race, the Coke Zero 400, only five of them managed to win both races in the same year. This has been attributed to the fact that the two races have different lengths, and the summer race is more or less a standard Cup race whereas the 500 is a prestige event. The biggest gap between Daytona sweeps was 31 years, as after Bobby Allison swept the races in 1982, no one else managed to repeat this feat until Jimmie Johnson did it in 2013.
• No winless drought in auto racing might be better documented than the entire Andretti family at the Indianapolis 500. Sure, Mario won the race in 1969, two years after winning the Daytona 500 (even that is part of the "curse", as Mario is one of the top IndyCar drivers ever, and most of the rest have 2, 3, or even 4 wins at Indianapolis), but in the 40 years since then, nobody from the clan has won it as a driver, often having it snatched away in bizarre and mind-numbing scenarios, such as Danny Sullivan's spin and win over Mario in '85, mechanical problems in '87, Michael's own problems in '92 (he led 160 of 200 laps), and Marco losing it to Sam Hornish Jr. in 2006 despite leading on lap 199 (the first driver ever to lead lap 199 and not win; critics say Marco lost it due to taking the wrong line into turn 3 which cost him too much speed). Having Michael win the race as a car owner for Dan Wheldon, Dario Franchitti, and Ryan Hunter-Reay doesn't take away all of the sting...
• In IndyCar racing on a championship scale, Hélio Castroneves best embodies this trope - despite racing for Roger Penske (always one of the top teams in the series) for most of his career, winning multiple races most seasons, and equaling the record for most Indy 500 wins with his fourth in 2021 (after being let go by Penske, no less), he has never won a series championship.
  • Roger Penske's whole team suffered this once the reunification happened in 2008. Castroneves was the first in 2008, coming up short to Scott Dixon, then Ryan Briscoe to Dixon and Franchitti in 2009, Will Power to Franchitti in 2010 and 2011, Power to Hunter-Reay in 2012, and Castroneves to Dixon again in 2013. Finally broken in 2014 with a Power championship, but Castroneves was still runner-up in his own right. Castroneves' loss in 2013 was especially painful when having held nearly a one-race lead on Scott Dixon with three races to go, Castroneves suffered gearbox issues in both legs of the Houston doubleheader, while Dixon finished 1st and 2nd to take a lead he wouldn't relinquish at Fontana. Even worse, Castroneves was sponsored at Houston by Shell & Pennzoil who were the sponsors of those two races.
  • Incidentally, Penske's NASCAR teams also had trouble winning both the championship and the Daytona 500 for much of their early existence, despite fielding former champions Rusty Wallace and Kurt Busch in the flagship #2 car. Busch himself was widely considered the best restrictor plate racer to have never actually won a restrictor plate race (at Daytona or Talladega) until breaking through the 2017 Daytona 500 with Stewart-Haas; however, at least one of his close calls came because he was helping Penske's second team, the #12 of Ryan Newman, break through to win the 2008 Daytona 500. Later, they'd shed the championship curse after Brad Keselowski was put in the #2, with Bad Brad winning the Sprint Cup in 2012, and then scored another Daytona 500 in 2015 with the second car, now numbered 22 and driven by Joey Logano; he would bring home Penske's second Cup championship in 2018 despite being regarded as a long shot compared to the other finalists at Homestead.
• This trope is also pretty common in Formula One. Victories are largely determined by the quality of the car; the driver himself can only do so much. If his car is a driving wreck even the most skilled pilot will struggle to even secure some points, not even talking about winning a race here. As such most races are won by drivers from the top two or three teams, with the occasional underdog winning one every once in a while. Now-retired German driver Nico Rosberg, for example, was considered an exceptionally good driver with lots of experience despite his young age, but it took him over 100 races to secure his first win, despite everyone expecting him to be able to this much earlier.
  • Heck, it took Jenson Button 114 tries to win his first race, and even that was a fluke. It was unknown whether he'd even win again, especially after his team (the aforementioned Honda) becoming backmarkers. It can be argued that his career was saved when Ross Brawn bought the Honda cars after they withdrew from the sport. Jenson and the newly-renamed Brawn GP dominated the first half of the 2009 season, and while he didn't win again that year, he finally won his first title, a whole 9 years after receiving all the hype in the world.
  • Felipe Massa meanwhile, is an example of a once-elite driver who became this following a Career-Ending Injury. He scored eleven wins for Ferrari in the mid-to-late 2000s, even coming close to winning the driver's championship in 2008; but following his near-death experience at Hungary in 2009, it was clear he wasn't quite the driver he used to be. For the rest of his tenure at Ferrari, he wouldn't score any more wins and largely played second fiddle to teammate Fernando Alonso; only scoring four podiums before being replaced by Kimi Raikkonen in 2014 ^note who was Massa's own teammate at Ferrari from 2007 to 2009. His tenure at Williams wasn't much better; while he scored three podiums in 2014, he once again found himself languishing near the back of the grid and playing the bridesmaid to his teammate, before retiring from the sport in 2017.
• Applies to Japanese manufacturers at Le Mans and as constructors in Formula One. Honda had great success as an engine manufacturer to McLaren, Red Bull and others but the Honda factory team only has three wins (one each in 1965, 1967 and 2006). The Toyota F1 team raced from 2002 to 2009 in F1 and won nothing despite their huge budget. Toyota has tried the 24 Hours of Le Mans several times in different decades and has never cracked the top step of the podium, with probably the most heartbreaking loss occurring in 2016 when, with three minutes to go, the Toyota leading the race basically died due to a hose coming loose from the turbo, letting Porsche take the win. In fact, the only Japanese win at Le Mans was Mazda in 1991, up until 2018 where Toyota finally broke through in the Le Mans 24 Hours with a one-two finish. Nissan tried Le Mans but also never won it.
• Returning to NASCAR and Bill Elliott. Elliott was one of the sport's most dominant drivers, particularly during the latter part of The '80s and early 1990s; winning the 1988 Winston Cup championship as well as winning the sport's Most Popular Driver Award 16 times before withdrawing his name in 2002; with his legacy continuing as the father of 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion Chase Elliott. However, Elliott had the potential for at least two more championships that slipped away due to poor late-season performances.
  • First, the 1985 season which proved Elliott's breakout season, as Elliott - driving the #9 Coors Ford Thunderbird for Melling Racing - won 11 races; including the Daytona 500, Winston 500 at Talladega and Southern 500 at Darlington to become one of only two drivers to clinch the "Winston Million" bonus^note the only other driver to accomplish this feat would be Jeff Gordon in the program's last year of 1997, though unlike Elliott he won the championship as well as well as 11 poles to earn the nickname "Awesome Bill from Dawsonville"^note Dawsonville being Elliott's hometown into the metro area just outside of Atlanta; only to blow a 206 point lead over Darrell Waltrip following the Southern 500; ultimately losing the championship to Waltrip by 101 points after finishing 31st in the season finale at Riverside due to transmission problems.
  • Fast-forward to 1992. Elliott had left Melling Racing after the 1991 season to join iconic team owner Junior Johnson in his #11 Budweiser Thunderbird^note incidentally, the #11 Junior Johnson team was the team the aforementioned Darrell Waltrip won his three championships - the last of which was the 1985 season mentioned above - before Waltrip left after 1986 replacing Geoff Bodine. 1992 saw a spirited three-way battle for the championship between Elliott and fellow Ford drivers Davey Allison and owner-driver Alan Kulwicki; with Allison leading most of the season until suffering a vicious crash at Pocono. Elliott would win a grand total of 5 races and three pole positions - with 4 of the victories coming in a row to tie a modern-era NASCAR record, eventually taking a 154-point lead over Allison with 6 races remaining; only for mechanical problems and poor late performances to hamper him again entering the season finale at Elliott's home track of Atlanta Motor Speedway: the 1992 Hooters 500. That race garnered a ton of attention, as not only was it the final race of NASCAR legend Richard Petty's career but a whopping six drivers had a mathematical chance to win the championship (in addition to Allison, who had retaken the points lead following his victory the previous week in Phoenix; Elliott and a surging Alan Kulwicki, drivers with an outside shot included 52-year-old Harry Gant, who set the modern-era consecutive victories streak tied by Elliott the previous year during his "Mr. September" run; Richard Petty's son Kyle and finally perennial championship bridesmaid Mark Martin)^note and unknown to racing fans, the debut of a future legend in Jeff Gordon; with Elliott going on to win the race but lose the points war to Kulwicki, who edged him out by 10 points due to Kulwicki leading the most laps in the race (Allison, who needed a Top 10 finish to clinch the championship, finished 3rd in the points after Ernie Irvan blew a tire and T-boned Allison, damaging Davey's tie rod and steering; with Allison finishing 27th in the race)^note of the six that entered Atlanta with at least a mathematical chance at the title; Allison finished ahead of only Mark Martin, who blew an engine. Elliott would never come close to a championship again and won only 4 more races (including a 7-year gap between victories that spanned Elliott's entire run as an owner-driver) before retiring from full-time competition after 2003.
• In The New '10s, Ryan Blaney became known for being a Spiritual Successor to Kevin Harvick as a driver who could pull wins out of absolutely nowhere, but also became infamous for just as inexplicably losing races he'd been dominating in, with him having several races he'd been leading ended by unexplainable mishaps or fluke wrecks.
• Perhaps the greatest fizzler in NASCAR history is Daniel Hemric, who spent 8 years and 208 races without a win in all three of NASCAR's top series, despite qualifying multiple times for the playoffs in the Truck and Xfinity series based solely off of consistent performance. In 2021, he finally broke his curse by winning the final race of the Xfinity season and the championship at once; fittingly, his win came on a last-lap move and a photo finish.

College Sports

• The University of Michigan football team was well known for most of the '00s to have an exceptional season, and then lose both The Game versus Ohio State (the biggest rivalry in college football) and their Bowl game. The worst was in 2006, when Michigan went into The Game after a perfect season ranked #2 to OSU's #1 and suffered a heartbreaking 42-39 loss, and then proceeded to go to the Rose Bowl and get thoroughly thrashed by the University of Southern California 32-18 after getting denied a shot at a rematch in the BCS National Championship game. Their only consolation was that OSU was itself thrashed even worse by Florida 41-14 in the title game. Go Blue.
  • Making this a real Kick the Dog moment was that just the day prior to the now-famous edition of The Game, legendary Michigan coach and former Ohio State assistant Bo Schembechler died.
  • Schembechler himself also seemed to embody this trope. In his 20+ year career at Michigan, he dominated the Big Ten, won conference titles almost every other year, and has been hailed as one of the greatest head coaches in college football history... and yet he was never able to win a national championship and was notorious for losing bowl games.^note Part of this stemmed from Schembechler's personal belief that winning the Big Ten (read: beating Ohio State) was a much more important and satisfying accomplishment than winning a national title, of which Michigan already had plenty from its past history.
  • In The New '10s, Schembechler's legacy continued in the worst way as Brady Hoke, and then Jim Harbaugh after him, have lost to Ohio State in almost every season they coached the team. Harbaugh's cases are particularly rage-inducing as Michigan came in ranked just below Ohio State in 2016 and above the Buckeyes 2018 and still lost both games, with the former being a controversial double overtime loss and the latter being a 62-39 blowout, in both instances knocking them out of consideration for the College Football Playoff. Harbaugh would finally beat Ohio State for the first time in his coaching tenure in the 2021 season, clinching a berth to the Big Ten Championship game and knocking Ohio State out of Playoff consideration, and finally being selected for the Playoff following their conference championship. Harbaugh followed that up in 2022 with the first 13-0 record in his coaching tenure at Michigan following their second consecutive conference championship...which, naturally, led to a loss to TCU in that season's Fiesta Bowl to bring Michigan's bowl game losing streak to six. As before, their only consolation was that later that night, Ohio State would itself blow a lead that it had accumulated in the final minute of the Peach Bowl and lose to defending champion Georgia.
  • Finally averted in the 2023 season after Michigan overcame a sign-stealing controversy to clinch their second consecutive 13-0 season, win the Rose Bowl in a closely-fought battle with Alabama to snap their bowl game losing streak, and put a 34-13 whipping on Washington in the title game to win their first national championship since 1997.
• Some times the roles were reversed. In fact, ever since the "Ten Year War" (the period from 1969–78 when Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler coached against one another), Michigan and Ohio State have alternated between periods of potentially great seasons ruined by losing to the other school. It started with Michigan's 24-12 win in '69 against an OSU team that many thought was the greatest college football team ever. After that, the only regular season games Michigan lost from 1970-75 were to the Buckeyes. The Wolverines rebounded by winning the last three games of the Ten Year War. The John Cooper years (1988-2000) were especially frustrating for Ohio State, as the Buckeyes went 2-11 against the Wolverines; the biggest loss there was probably 1995, when a 31-23 loss to Michigan cost OSU the Big Ten championship, allowing Northwestern to go to the Rose Bowl for the first time in 46 years.
• Ohio State is a perennial powerhouse and generally acknowledged by everybody except Michigan fans as the top team in the Big Ten. However, they also have a well-earned reputation for coming up short in the postseason.
  • The Buckeyes are notable for postseason futility against the Southeastern Conference^note They haven't fared much better in regular season games against the SEC, recording only 1 win in school history against an SEC team other than eternal losers Kentucky and Vanderbilt. - highlighted by the aforementioned 41–14 loss to Florida in the 2006–07 national title game and a loss to LSU the following year. They did defeat the Arkansas Razorbacks in the 2011 Sugar Bowl... which was officially vacated (along with all of their other wins for the 2010–11 season) due to OSU putting 5 ineligible players on the field. They finally found success against the SEC in the inaugural College Football Playoff, upsetting top-seeded Alabama in the 2015 Sugar Bowl en route to winning the national championship the next game.
  • Since winning the first College Football Playoff, the Buckeyes have fallen short of winning another title. In their two following appearances they lost to Clemson both times, the first one being a 31–0 shutout by the Tigers in 2016 and the second one in 2019 being a much closer matchup, with the Tigers winning again. The Buckeyes finally got their revenge on the Tigers the following year by a wide margin, but would go on to predictably lose to an incredibly dominant Alabama team in the championship.
  • The following year, Ohio State would lose to their hated rival Michigan for the first time in a decade and miss out in the College Football Playoff. And in the very next season, the Buckeyes would lose to the Wolverines again, this time at home and by a wider margin, though they made the Playoff where they very narrowly lost to defending champion Georgia by a missed field goal.
• Michigan State. Oftentimes they would always get off to a flying start only to end with late season collapses and embarrassing losses, leading to the nickname "Same Old State". For the 2010-2011 season, it seemed that they may have finally proven themselves to be a real contender^note  well, to everyone except Iowa fans, due the 37-6 beatdown that the Hawkeyes inflicted on the Spartans, sharing the Big Ten title with Wisconsin and Ohio State. Then came the Capital One Bowl against Alabama, which was a loss deemed so bad by many (Alabama won 49-7.) that people wondered why they even bothered to show up to the game, let alone continue to play after halftime. In turn, the team lost the credibility they built up that year, as people just chalked up the loss to Michigan State "holding their illusion up longer than usual".
  • They finally shed the label in 2011-12 by beating an SEC opponent (Georgia) in the Outback Bowl. In double overtime. The fact that it came down to hoping for Georgia's kicker to miss a chip-shot field goal in the first overtime and blocking a field goal in the second overtime did not make the win any more impressive.
  • And then, in 2013-14, Michigan State won its division and a #10 ranking by going 11-1 (with the sole loss being a nail-biter against Notre Dame), and then roundly beat until-then-undefeated (indeed, two-seasons undefeated) national #2 Ohio State 24-34, sending MSU to the Rose Bowl at the #4 slot as a slight favorite over Stanford. The Spartans won 24–20.
• The "Big Least" in general, especially after Miami (FL) bolted, eventually leading to their status as a power conference (at least in football) being stripped... and also to the death of the original Big East, with the football side regrouping as the (non-power) American Athletic Conference and the non-FBS schools rebooting the Big East as a non-football conference. In the first five years of the BCS era, the Big East champion made the title game three times, though only Miami in 2001-02 actually won (with Miami's stunning loss to Ohio State the following year far more remembered). Shortly after that, however, Miami and Virginia Tech (who was responsible for the other title game appearance) bolted for the ACC, with Boston College following a year later, and the conference became a running joke, unable to get out of its own way.
  • In 2006, West Virginia was #3 at the end of October, behind only the aforementioned Michigan and Ohio State (which would naturally sort itself out, all but assuring that the Mountaineers would get into the top 2 if they kept winning), until they ran into Louisville. However, the Cardinals themselves were all the way up at #5 when they knocked out the Mountaineers, elevating them to the #3 spot...which they held for one week before losing a heartbreaker to Rutgers in which a Louisville defensive lineman jumped offsides on what would've been an overtime-forcing missed field goal by Rutgers' kicker, allowing him to retry from 5 yards closer to clinch the victory. Only, the thing was...Rutgers, while not nearly as highly regarded as WVU or Louisville, hadn't lost a game yet at this point, either, and moved up to #7, at which point, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, the Football Gods glanced sharply in their direction and demanded to know what the hell they were doing up there. The Scarlet Knights lost to unranked Cincinnati the very next week, and while both WVU and Rutgers would lose again (the latter to the former in a triple-overtime heartbreaker), Louisville's close loss to Rutgers was their only loss of the season, and without it, they'd have probably faced Ohio State in the Championship Game that year.
  • The following year was defined by chaos all over the place, with the #2 ranking in particular being passed around like a hot potato (LSU went 7-0 as the #2 team in the country, including winning the national championship game from that ranking, but other teams went just 1-7), and two Big East teams were among the casualties. The University of South Florida, a relative newcomer to the FBS in general, surprised early with an upset of #17 Auburn, and after knocking off #5 West Virginia to run their record to 4-0, they were off to the races, eventually peaking at #2 when they ran their record to 6-0. Then they lost a Thursday night game to Rutgers that began a three-game losing streak and careened out of the top 25 entirely. Meanwhile, West Virginia bounced back from the loss to USF, and by the final week of the season, with so many teams having multiple losses, the Mountaineers and their 10-1 record found themselves holding the hot potato. They dropped it by the score of 13-9 to their 4-7 rival, the University of Pittsburgh, allowing LSU, which had just lost as the #1 team the previous week to fall to #7, to climb all the way back up to #2.
    • Just to show that the curse of the Big East is inescapable, LSU made that climb from #7 to #2 by beating the #14 team by a single touchdown in the SEC Championship Game, while the #6 team, over in the ACC, had a more convincing win over the #11 team, yet only rose to #3. Said team? Virginia Tech, former Big East member. ^*This is, of course, a narrow-minded view of the situation. LSU and Virginia Tech played each other early in the season and the result was a lopsided LSU win. Once it became evident that the two might actually be in competition for a spot in the title game, the human voters no doubt made a much bigger point of making sure LSU was ahead of Virginia Tech, something that wouldn't have been a huge priority when neither was even in the top 5.
    • Said #11 team was also a victim of the #2 curse and was in fact the only one other than LSU to win a game as the #2 team (over VaTech, oddly enough). That would be Boston College, of course, another Big East expat.
  • In 2009, it looked like maybe the Big East had finally thrown off the mantle of chokers when 11-0 Cincinnati rallied from a 21-point deficit to narrowly beat #15 Pittsburgh, preserving their perfect season. Yes, it was a longshot, with the Bearcats only ranked #5 entering the game, but #4 TCU didn't even have a game that week and was close enough that Cincinnati could pass them and #1 Alabama and #2 Florida were set to face each other in the SEC Championship Game, assuring that one of them would lose. All they need was one... second... less. For one brief, shining moment, it honestly looked as though #3 Texas had lost the Big 12 Championship Game, 12-10 when quarterback Colt McCoy held the ball for too long before throwing it away. The refs reviewed it, and they ruled that the ball had gone out of bounds before time expired and that the incompletion had officially occurred with one second left. The Longhorns brought out their kicker, and he drilled a field goal to give them a 13-12 win that left the Bearcats stuck at #3. (Incidentally, TCU fans are equally convinced that they were the ones robbed by this extra second, as many of the BCS computers that determined one-third of the rankings formula had Texas ranked ahead of TCU but behind Cincinnati; had the Longhorns actually lost, the margin in the computer rankings would've grown close enough that the Horned Frogs' advantage in the human polls would've pushed them up to #2. Whether this is true or not is a moot point, because both teams lost their perfect seasons by losing their bowl games, rather lopsidedly in Cincinnati's case.)
  • In 2010, on the other hand, the Big East found a far more unusual way to be a complete embarrassment: by sending a team from outside the top 25 to a BCS bowl game. While West Virginia was #22 in the final BCS rankings, preventing the conference from being completely shut out of the rankings, it was Connecticut that officially won the bid (though UConn, WVU, and Pitt were all deemed co-champions). The ensuing bowl game wasn't pretty.
  • 2011 was no better, with the soon-departing Mountaineers actually landing one spot lower, at #23, while earning the bid. They actually pulled the upset in the bowl game, though, crushing Clemson (oh, hey, another team with a reputation for choking!) by the score of 70-33 in the Orange Bowl.
  • 2012, on the other hand, displayed that even in a conference of chokers, nobody out-chokes the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. After a 7-0 start, they dropped a non-conference home game to Kent State, but as a non-conference game, this didn't affect their chances of winning their conference. With two weeks to go, the Knights were 5-0 in conference and ranked #18, with Louisville at 4-1 in conference and also ranked, at #20, and all other teams already having two conference losses. Since their rise from longtime losers began, the Knights had never lost to a ranked team at home on a Thursday night (including the aforementioned wins over Louisville in 2006 and South Florida in 2007), and their season finale was at home, against Louisville, on a Thursday. Care to guess what happened? Yep, Rutgers and Louisville both lost that Saturday, thereby removing the Cardinals from the top 25 without allowing the Scarlet Knights to clinch the BCS bid, and Louisville beat them five days later to take the BCS bid. Rutgers at least managed to get credited as conference co-champions, the first time they'd even managed that (Cincinnati and Syracuse also ended up at 5-2, a 4-way tie for the conference championship), but it was cold comfort as Rutgers had by this point managed to parlay their premium media market location into an invitation to join a far stronger conference—one where they'd be hard-pressed just to finish seasons at .500, much less contend for conference titles. This was their last real chance to get to a major bowl game, and they'd thrown it away.
• Things weren't much better elsewhere in the Garden State. After missing the NCAA tournament entirely for five straight years, the 2011-12 Seton Hall men's basketball team got off to a blazing start, rising into the top 25 in early January with a 14-2 record. They then closed the regular season 6-10 and lost in the second round of the Big East tournament, narrowly missing out on the NCAA tourney. Three years later, they again got off to a hot start at 12-2, giving them a #19 ranking. They split two games the week they entered the top 25 and only fell to #21. Then they lost one more, dropping them to 13-4, and were still #24. Then they lost again...and again...and by the time the season ended, they barely even had a winning record.
  • The following year, they finally discovered the key to success: avoid the top 25. At roughly the same juncture that they'd received the #19 ranking the previous year, they were again 12-2 but missed out on the top 25, and then ran into the best team in the conference, followed by suffering an upset loss. They pulled a big upset the following week, but then ran into the top two teams and suffered two more losses, dropping to 13-6... and then started rolling. By the end of the regular season, they were 22-8 and had neatly managed to avoid ever actually reaching the top 25, allowing them to take down the Big East Tournament. This gave them their first top 25 appearance of the season... so, of course, they lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
• In college basketball, the NCAA men's and women's tournaments are a subversion of this trope, given that besides the usual powerhouses, different teams tend to appear every other year. One exception is Arizona, one of the recent men's teams with a notable tournament streak; 25 straight appearances (until 2010). In fact, one of the attractions to March Madness is that it's incredibly, exceedingly difficult for one team to make it to the Final Four two years in a row. On the women's side, however, that is not exactly the case with UConn, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Baylor, Stanford, and South Carolina. Any one of the six (if not two or three) is a safe bet to reach the Final Four year in and year out.
  • North Carolina has been a long-dominant team, but had a nasty reputation between 1976 and 2005 as the University Noted for Choking, because they only won three championships in thirty years despite regularly making the top 8 or the Final Four.
  • Villanova had this reputation in the 2010s. 2009 saw Villanova return to the Final Four, then from 2010 to 2015, didn't even make it to the Sweet 16. Then 2016 came along, and with one buzzer-beater, Villanova won its second national title over... the University of North Carolina. The Wildcats likely shed this reputation permanently with their third national title in 2018, winning every tournament game by double digits.
  • The reference to Arizona having a reputation of fizzling out in the Saturday Night Live sketch in the page quote was based on three embarrassing first round exits by the highly-seeded Wildcats in The '90s, losing to East Tennessee State in 1992, Santa Clara in 1993 (as a 2-seed) and Miami (Ohio) in 1995.
• The University of New Hampshire Wildcats football team consistently defeats higher-ranked teams, NCAA Division I FBS^note known as I-A before 2006 teams (they're FCS^note known as I-AA before 2006), and, from 2005 to 2008, lost in the I-AA/FCS semifinals four years in a row. They lost in the quarterfinals in 2009 and 2010, and the round of 16 in 2011.
• Oklahoma football almost always has a winning season, but ever since head coach Bob Stoops' brother and defensive coordinator Mike left to become the Arizona head coach, neither has had the success alone that they achieved together, and Oklahoma's reputation for winning big games (to the point where Bob Stoops was referred to as "Big Game Bob") has given way to a reputation for choking in them, especially after the Boise State game.
  • Since the beginning of the playoff era, the issue has only been exacerbated. Between 2015-2019, Oklahoma has had two Heisman winners, 5 consecutive conference titles, four Playoff appearances, and have yet to win a single playoff game. Their Playoff losses run the full gamut from nailbiting double overtime thrillers to uncompetitive slaughters.
• The University of Missouri Tigers have been playing basketball since the early 1900s and still have never appeared in a Final Four, making them the Butt-Monkey of border state rival (and Invincible Hero) the University of Kansas. This is despite the fact that Missouri has dominated Kansas in nearly everything else. Kansas could also qualify, as it has just four championships to show for its near semi-annual Final Four appearances.
  • Missouri has made 28 NCAA tournament appearances without a Final Four (not counting one vacated due to NCAA sanctions), but Xavier has appeared in 29 (with none vacated), and BYU is the leader with 31.
  • As for the most appearances without a national title, Notre Dame and Texas share that distinction with 37. The Irish have made only one Final Four trip (1978), while the Longhorns have three (none since 2003).
  • On another level, Houston has the most Final Four appearances without a natty (6). Illinois and Oklahoma are right behind with 5.
  • On the women's side, Georgia has the most tournament appearances without a national title at 36 (as well as the most Final Four trips without a natty, 5), and DePaul has the most without a Final Four trip at 25.
• Clemson in everything. It's to the point where among college football fans, this trope is called "Clemsoning".
  • In the 2013 football season, Clemson was undefeated, ranked #3 in the country and seen as a serious national championship contender...until suffering a 51-14 annihilation at the hands of Florida State.
  • Continued in 2014, when Clemson was repeatedly handed the chance to upset #1 Florida State - starting with FSU's Heisman-winning QB being suspended for the game for yelling "Fuck her right in the pussy" in the student union (seriously) and ending with FSU serving up a turnover inside their end of the field with less than 2 minutes left of a tied game. Clemson denied all these offers and lost in overtime.
  • In 2015, the Clemson Tigers rode a top-ranked undefeated record all the way to their first National Championship Game appearance since 1981, and fought a valiant battle against the Alabama Crimson Tide, only for defensive breakdowns to do them in the final quarter as the Tigers lost 45-40.
  • The 2016 and 2018 seasons averted the Clemsoning trends, as both of those seasons resulted in national championships for the Tigers, both of which were against Bama. The 2016 season ended with a fourth quarter comeback while the 2018 season ended with with dominance over the Tide thanks to the efforts of quarterback Trevor Lawrence. It looked like the 2018 championship would end the "Clemsoning" era once and for all...
  • ...until the next season, when Clemson again got to the CFP, scoring a hard-fought 29–23 win over Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl before running into a buzzsaw in the form of Joe Burrow and the LSU Tigers, ending in a 42–25 loss. And the Tigers returned to the CFP in the following season, but got blasted 49–28 by Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl.
  • The 2021 season saw this trope come back in its glory for the Tigers, where they unexpectedly finished the regular season with a 9-3 record thanks to a regressed offense, resulting in the Tigers missing the ACC championship for the first time since 2014. The Tigers improved the following season, going undefeated in ACC play and were seen as Playoff contenders once more, but they would end up losing at Notre Dame by a surprisingly large margin, losing to rival South Carolina which not only broke a winning streak against the Gamecocks but broke a 36-game winning streak at home, and losing to Tennessee 31-14 despite greatly outgaining the Vols on offense.
• The Georgia Southern Eagles football team was a powerhouse within the FCS, winning 6 national titles. However, in their final three playoff appearances, the Eagles came up short in the semifinals each time, losing to the University of Delaware Blue Hens in 2010 and the North Dakota State Bison in 2011 and 2012.^note The last two of these losses were during the first two of NDSU's run of five straight FCS titles, and nine in 11 years, so Southern can't be completely blamed for those. In 2013, Georgia Southern announced that its football program would move up to the FBS and the Sun Belt Conference in 2014.
  • Fortunately, in their first season in the Sun Belt Conference, they led an undefeated conference season and ended up winning the Sun Belt title outright; however, due to a transition period, GSU was unable to compete in a bowl game. They've since enjoyed a decent level of success, and in 2022 went into Nebraska and stuck the final dagger into Scott Frost's disappointing tenure as the Huskers' head coach (mentioned below).
• The Pitt Panthers Men's Basketball Team managed to reach the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007 and 2009. Only once in that span did they make the Elite 8, and they never made the Final Four.
• The Nebraska Cornhuskers football team in the '80s and early '90s under coach Tom Osborne never lost more than three games a year and were in contention for a national title every year, but choked against the speedy, athletic southern teams (most notably Florida State and Miami, who clinched 3 combined national titles in bowl games against Nebraska). The most painful of these was in the 1983-84 season, when undefeated #1 Nebraska tried and failed a two-point conversion against Miami (in the Orange Bowl, held at Miami's home stadium) that would have won the national championship, when a standard PAT kick would have tied the game (there was no overtime in college football until 1996) and STILL kept them at #1 in the rankings. This infamously gut-wrenching moment can be viewed here: [1]
  • This has carried over to the more recent seasons. The Bo Pelini era was infamous for having the Huskers ranked only for them to be on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle, with the 2012 Big Ten Championship loss against Wisconsin, a team they had beaten earlier that season, in a 70-31 blowout. In every year that Bo Pelini has coached Nebraska, the team has finished with every four losses, while only a few of the wins came against teams that finished ranked. This trope is the biggest reason for his dismissal from the team alongside his notoriously Hot-Blooded attitude.
  • His successor, Mike Riley, who seemed to be hired because he was the polar opposite to Pelini personality-wise, finished 6-7 his first season but every single loss was by 10 points or less, many of them being heartbreakers. His second season had the team be ranked as high as #6 after a 7-0 start, but the team would finish 9-4 and unranked. His last season was a complete dud, with the team finishing 4-8 and led to his firing.
  • Riley's successor Scott Frost, who is an alumnus of the program and whose hiring was well-received by fans, wasn't immune to this despite being hired after going 13-0 in his second season with UCF. While his first season had him finish 4-8, the team did finish the second half on a 4-2 run. His second season at the helm, however, was considered a big disappointment and serves as the reason why pollsters shouldn't rank a team in the preseason after finishing 4-8 in the previous season. The team finished 5-7 as a result of a regression of the offense and poorly-made play calls by Frost. One notorious call in particular was against Iowa near the end of that game, where instead of going for the win, he sent in the punting team which allowed the Hawkeyes to make a last-second game-winning field goal, which is also how Iowa won the previous year. It only got worse for Frost and the Huskers—in 2021, they went 3–9, with eight of the losses being by one score and the other by single digits; in fact, five of their last six games were one-score losses! It continued in 2022, with the Huskers losing again by a single score, aided greatly by Frost's inexplicable play calling. He finally got the axe after the Huskers' third game, yet another one-score loss.
• Speaking of Nebraska, the Big 12 Championship Game might as well have been called "Chokes 'R' Us".
  • The very first Big 12 Championship Game pitted #3 Nebraska against unranked Texas. This was in the pre-BCS era, where the champions of the Big Ten and Pac-10 were still bound to go to the Rose Bowl, so a win would've allowed the Huskers to face #1 Florida State for the National Title (sort of; it probably would've been a "split title" if #2 Ohio State won the Rose Bowl, which it did.) The Huskers were trailing the Longhorns 30–27 with about 2:30 left, but had the Horns facing fourth-and-1 from their own 29. Texas went for it... and a Huskers defensive breakdown left a receiver 10 yards clear, resulting in a 61-yard catch-and-run.^note Brent Musburger's call for ABC: ...on a roll, and a throw to... Got him! Wide open, baby! Texas ran it in on the next play and won 37–27.
  • The 1998 game was the dawn of the BCS era, and #3 Kansas State faced #8 Texas A&M. The #2 UCLA Bruins had already lost earlier in the day, so a win would've sent K-State to the inaugural BCS National Championship Game. KSU led 27–12 after three quarters, but A&M rallied to send the game to overtime and won 36–33 in double-OT to knock the Wildcats out.
  • The 2001 game pitted #7 Colorado against #3 Texas, while elsewhere, #6 Tennessee was facing #2 Florida. The Volunteers knocked off the Gators, but Texas couldn't capitalize, putting the Volunteers in prime position to go to the national title game. Bizarrely, when they squandered that the following week (for some reason, the Big 12 Championship Game was a week earlier than the SEC Championship Game that year), the #2 spot went to... Nebraska, a Big 12 team that hadn't even played in the conference championship game after suffering their lone loss of the year against... Colorado. A 62–36 annihilation. (Colorado had incurred a non-conference loss, as well as losing a conference game—to Texas, ironically—which was why they were still behind Nebraska even after winning the conference title and destroying the Huskers to win the division.)
  • In 2003, #15 Kansas State faced undefeated, #1 Oklahoma and embarrassed them by the score of 35-7, giving the two spots in the national title game to USC and LSU...or so the human pollsters would've had it. Despite the humans having USC #1, the computers thought little enough of them that they didn't even make the top 2, and Oklahoma's choke didn't cost them a shot at the National Championship...that year. It might've contributed a little bit to the lopsided 55–19 score that USC beat them by in the following year's National Championship Game.
  • As mentioned above, 2007 was a year in which nobody seemed to want to stay atop the rankings for very long. Kansas, who briefly might have entered this trope in basketball a few years earlier when their normally dynastic team suffered back-to-back first-round upsets but had generally been the conference punching bag in football, had entered the final week of the season at #2 but lost to #4 Missouri, but this along with #1 LSU's triple-overtime loss that week allowed Mizzou to reach the #1 spot entering the conference championship game. Their opponent? The only team to beat them in the regular season, #9 Oklahoma. The rematch went the same way, and the Big 12 wasn't represented in the national title game yet again.
  • Also noted above, 2009 very narrowly missed turning into another example, with Nebraska almost avenging their 1996 loss.
  • The 2021 Big 12 Championship Game pitted the Oklahoma State Cowboys against the Baylor Bears, with the Pokes having a chance to reach the College Football Playoff. However, the Pokes were denied the conference championship and a Playoff berth thanks to a very narrow goal-line stand by the Baylor defense where the Oklahoma State running back was just inches short of a touchdown.
• The Virginia Cavaliers men's basketball team was good... in the 70s and early 80s. They had an improbable ACC championship in 1976 (starting the tournament ranked 6th out of 7 teams!). They had two Final Four trips in 1981 and 1984 and last entered the Elite Eight in 1995. For the next eighteen seasons, they won a grand total of four ACC tournament games and one NCAA tournament game (Albany in 2007). Then 2014 happened. They went 16–2 in the ACC regular season that year, only losing by four to Duke and in overtime to Maryland. Ranked #12 nationally, they beat #4 Syracuse (who a week before had been #1) to win the ACC regular season title outright for the first time since 1981. Then they went to the tournament championship, and who else would they play but Duke? Then they got to the Sweet Sixteen, losing by two to Michigan State. Yes, technically fizzling out again, but perhaps they'll start to avert this trope...
  • Not in 2015, which was the very definition of fizzling out. Through February, their record was 28–1, the best in school history. March 2, they came from behind to beat Syracuse to win a second outright ACC regular season championship, the first team from outside of North Carolina in conference history to do so back-to-back. They doubled the score against four teams, held three teams to under thirty points in an entire game, and nearly tripled the score against Harvard, who they held to a single field goal in the first half. Statistically, the 2015 Cavaliers were one of the best defensive teams since the shot clock was instituted. Then they lost three of their last five by an average of four points. Including a Round of 32 loss to Michigan State.
  • Then in 2016, the Hoos received another 1 seed, and their bracket opened up with 2 seed Michigan State being upset in the first round by #15 Middle Tennessee State and 3 seed Utah being stomped in the second round by #11 Gonzaga. After winning their first 3 games, all that stood between Virginia and a Final Four appearance was 10th-seeded ACC foe Syracuse, whom they had beaten earlier in the season. After leading by 14 at the half, the Hoos were outscored 47-27 in the second half to lose the game 68-62.
  • The next year, UVA earned a 5 seed. It didn't start the tournament well, having to survive a 76–71 dogfight against 12 seed UNC Wilmington.^note A sister campus of the North Carolina. In the second round against 4 seed Florida, the Hoos were utterly embarrassed, losing 65–39—the lowest score ever by an ACC team in NCAA tournament history.
  • 2018 added what looked at the time to be the most remembered chapter in Cavalier history, and the fact that it's on this trope page can already tell you that it's not for a good reason. With their stingy defense, the Hoos dominated all season with a nation-best 31-2 record, cruised through the ACC tournament and easily locked up a #1 seed in the tournament in what was the best season of the program's history. Unfortunately for the Virginia faithful, all those accomplishments appeared to set the stage for tragedy in the first round, as they were promptly beaten by #16-seeded UMBC^note University of Maryland, Baltimore County — the first-ever instance of a #16 seed doing so since the NCAA men's tournament expanded in 1985 (#1 seeds were 135-0 prior to this). Thus a great season became lost in the narrative of being the ignominious recipient of the biggest upset in the tournament's history at that point, and one of the biggest upsets in all of sports.
    • Perhaps even more infamous was the way the Cavaliers lost. UMBC didn't just win in a close, hotly contested game with an overtime thriller or a last-second shot; they won by 20 in a game that was never really close past halftime. There have been some close calls before that would suggest that eventually history would be kind to a #16 seed — Georgetown escaped Princeton by a point in 1989 while coincidentally, Oklahoma edged East Tennessee State by a point in that same tournament — but a blowout happening seemed even far less likely.
  • The Wahoos, with most of the key players from the UMBC embarrassment returning, spectacularly averted this trope the next season, winning the national title. But since then, their postseason résumé has been:
  • 2020: No postseason held thanks to COVID-19.
  • 2021: First-round NCAA loss as a 4 seed to 13 seed Ohio.
  • 2022: The Hoos don't even make The Big Dance, going to the NIT (where they lost in the quarterfinals to St. Bonaventure).
  • 2023: Another 4–13 loss, this time to Furman. Making this more maddening was the role of Kihei Clark in both the title season and this loss. As a freshman in 2019, he made one of the headiest plays during UVA's title run with an unexpected pass to Mamadi Diakite in the closing seconds of regulation in the regional final against Purdue (which we'll get to later) that led to the basket that sent the game to overtime. As a fifth-year senior in 2023, he was caught in a backcourt trap against Furman. Instead of calling timeout or throwing the ball off a defender's leg, he lobbed a pass into the frontcourt, where it was intercepted by a Furman player. That player in turn passed to an open teammate for the three-pointer that gave the Paladins the win.
  • 2024: Despite finishing third in the ACC regular season, the Hoos struggled on offense all season, scoring only two Quadrant 1^note the highest of the categories that the NCAA selection committee uses in evaluating potential tournament teams wins. Many observers thought UVA shouldn't have made the field, but they ended up in the First Four^note A set of four games whose winners advance into the main 64-team bracket. against Colorado State. Cue a 67–42 annihilation, with UVA's score second only to its 2017 humiliation as the lowest by an ACC team in the Big Dance.
• Mississippi State in everything. For the longest time, when it looked like they were doing exceptionally well, no matter the sport, you could count on them to fizzle out at the end of the season, often embarrassingly so. One notorious example was the 2014 football season, where they went 9-0 to start the season and were ranked #1 only to get shut down by Alabama (in a game where the Crimson Tide threw three interceptions and the Bulldogs still never once led), and then lose to arch-rival Ole Miss two weeks later before getting dominated by Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl. The worst part of it all? State fans never saw it coming. Ever.
  • A partial aversion: In 2017, the Bulldogs women's basketball team made the NCAA finals, only to lose to SEC rival South Carolina. However, State's fans will undoubtedly look back fondly at this team, considering that in the semifinals, the Bulldogs beat UConn... the same UConn that had won the last four national titles and was riding a 111-game winning streak.
  • Though the next year, this same team, with most of its stars back, lost the title game on a buzzer-beater to Notre Dame.
  • At long last averted for good in 2021, when the Bulldogs won the Men's College World Series for their first-ever NCAA title in a team sport.
• In recent decades, Purdue became this in men's basketball. Between their most recent Final Four appearances in 1980 and 2024, the Boilermakers won 10 Big Ten regular-season titles, made 31 NCAA tournaments, and earned four #1 NCAA seeds (not counting the Final Four seasons). Just a few examples of their frustration:
  • In 1994, a team led by consensus national player of the year Glenn Robinson made it to the Elite Eight. Then Robinson hurt his back, allegedly while roughhousing in a hotel room with teammates, and shot 6-for-22 from the field in a loss to Duke.
  • Two years later, the Boilermakers again earned a 1 seed. This time, they barely survived 16-seed Western Carolina before going down in the second round to Georgia.
  • In 2000, Purdue's regional bracket opened up, and all the Boilermakers needed to do to make the Final Four was beat 8-seed (and Big Ten rival) Wisconsin. Cue a late Purdue scoring drought and a 64–60 loss.
  • In 2010, Purdue entered February with a team widely considered to be a major threat for that year's Final Four in Indianapolis. Then star Robbie Hummel suffered the first of multiple ACL tears that dramatically curtailed his career, and Purdue was never the same. (Making it even more gut-wrenching for them, Indy school Butler made that Final Four.)
  • In 2019, Purdue had Virginia beaten in the regional final, only to become the victim of the aforementioned Kihei Clark pass and Mamadi Diakite jumper that forced overtime.
  • The next NCAA tournament in 2021 (as noted previously, COVID-19 scuttled the 2020 edition) saw the 4th-seeded Boilermakers go down in the first round to 13 seed North Texas.
  • Then in 2022, a Boilermakers team that featured NBA lottery pick Jaden Ivey and a pair of talented 7-footers, including 7-4 Zach Edey, only had to beat 15-seed Saint Peter's to make the Elite Eight. Cue the Peacocks erasing a 4-point deficit in the final 5 minutes to become the first 15 seed ever to make a regional final.
  • The next year, Edey entered the tournament as the likely national player of the year, eventually receiving all major awards, and the Boilermakers earned a 1 seed. They became the second 1 seed to lose to a 16 seed in the men's tournament, going down to Fairleigh Dickinson; Edey played well, but he was basically the only Purdue player who had a good game. Making it even more humiliating for Purdue, FDU: (1) was rated by the NCAA as the weakest of the 68 teams in the tournament, (2) played in the Northeast Conference, which had never previously won a Round of 64 game and was rated as the weakest in D-I that season, (3) only made the NCAA tournament because regular-season and tournament champ Merrimack was ineligible because it was still transitioning from Division II, (4) had to win a First Four game two nights earlier to even advance to play Purdue, and (5) boasted the shortest roster in all of D-I men's basketball, with two starting guards under 5'10" and no rotation player taller than 6'6". This also gave the Boilermakers the dubious distinction of being the first team ever to lose in consecutive tournaments to teams seeded 15 or worse. At last averted in 2024, with Edey leading the Boilermakers all the way to the championship game (though they still lost to defending champs UConn).
• Florida State's baseball team has made the NCAA baseball tournament 59 times, 44 of them consecutive (1978–2022)^*The streak was interrupted but not ended when COVID-19 scuttled the 2020 season before the tournament would have been played. The actual end came in 2023, when the Seminoles had their first-ever losing season. and has made the Men's College World Series 23 times in program history (the third-most of any school), including three trips to the finals. How many national championships have the Seminoles won? Zero. To make matters worse, their in-state and ACC rival Miami has four national championships in baseball, and their other in-state rival Florida won their first baseball national championship in 2017.
  • FSU also shares the current record for most women's basketball tournament appearances among Power Five programs without a Final Four trip; the Noles and Iowa State each have 20.^note In addition to the aforementioned DePaul, Montana also has more, and Stephen F. Austin is even with FSU and ISU.
• Speaking of baseball, East Carolina has appeared in 32 NCAA tournaments. Seven times, the Pirates have reached the super regional, one step shy of a trip to Omaha. Number of MCWS appearances: none. The 2022 tournament was especially heartbreaking, as the Pirates hosted the super regional, took a 1–0 lead over Texas in the best-of-3 series, and had a 7–2 lead in the seventh inning of Game 2. Cue a Longhorns comeback win in Game 2 and an easy Horns win in Game 3.
• NC State has the dubious distinction of making the most appearances in the final AP football poll (14) without ever finishing in the top 10. Their best finish was #11 in 1974. Next up on that list are Texas Tech (11 final poll appearances, best finish #11 in 1938 and 1973) and Virginia (9 appearances, best finish #13 in 1951).
• Canadian university sport example: the University of Saskatchewan Huskies football team has played in 11 Vanier Cups (the national championship game), putting them in a tie for third place for most appearances in the game, but they've gone a dismal 3-8 in the Vanier, including three losses in a row from 2004-06 (and 4 out of 5 with a loss in 2002, with the 2006 loss on their home field), and losses in 2021 and 2022. Their last win was in 1998.
• Among the two conferences of HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) schools in the Division I Football Championship Division, the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) is the more prestigious, with schools like Grambling, Jackson State and Alabama State, while the rival Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) is often perceived as featuring lesser schools. But in the Celebration Bowl, which has paired the two conference champs since 2015, the MEAC has won all but two games, with the SWAC's only wins being escapes by Grambling against North Carolina Central in 2016 (10–9) and Florida A&M against Howard in 2023 (30–26). The 2021 and 2022 editions were especially stinging fiascos for the SWAC, since they were represented by Jackson State, who had gotten a ton of attention from having NFL great Deion Sanders as their head coach. In 2021, JSU entered the game at 10-1, being heavy favorites over a 6-5 South Carolina State squad, but SCSU pounded them 31–10. 2022 saw JSU enter the game undefeated, with the expectation that they'd be motivated to give Sanders a farewell gift of a win before he left to become the head coach at Colorado, but North Carolina Central staged a second half comeback to send the game to OT, where NCCU prevailed 41–34.
• In addition to the woes of the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team mentioned above, the men's basketball team has a dubious bit of notoriety: they're the only major conference team^note defined in basketball as the Atlantic Coast, Big 10, Big 12, Big East and Southeastern conferences, plus the Pac-12 until it dissolved after the 2023-24 season to have never won an NCAA tournament game. As of 2024, their all-time NCAA record is 0-8. They didn't even make their tournament debut until 1986. Especially stinging was their 1991 appearance, where they entered the tournament ranked #11 in the AP poll, and were given a 3-seed by the selection committee, only to lose to 14-seed Xavier 89–84, in one of the biggest first round tourney upsets up to that point in time. Nebraska has won the NIT, though (in 1996).
• William & Mary is one of three teams who were NCAA Division I members when the men's basketball tournament was first held (1939) and are still D-I, but have never made the tournament. They've had their chances, making 9 appearances in conference tournament championship games, with an automatic bid on the line, but losing every single one. Since the college itself was founded in 1693 (the second oldest in the US after Harvard), college basketball analytics guru Ken Pomeroy has joked that they have a 300+ year streak of not making the tournament. The other two teams, Army and The Citadel, are more understandable, being military academies with strict admissions standards that limit their recruiting pool plus height restrictions that make it even harder to build a competitive basketball team,^note The only reason future Hall of Fame center David Robinson was able to play at Navy was that he was 6'7" when he had his official pre-admission physical, which is 1 inch under the absolute limit. He grew to 7'1" by the time he graduated. though Army had a successful stretch in The '60s and The '70s, making the NIT several times and boasting Bob Knight as a coach and Mike Krzyzewski as both a player and coach. Army actually got an NCAA invite in 1968, but Knight turned it down because he felt they'd have a better chance in the NIT (instead, they lost in the first round). They haven't come anywhere near NCAA contention since then.
  • If you change the criterion to current D-I teams who were D-I members when the NCAA adopted its current three-division structure in 1973 and have never made the tourney, Army, The Citadel and William & Mary are joined by Maine, New Hampshire and Pan American/UT Pan American/UT Rio Grande Valley.^note Pan American University became University of Texas Pan American in 1989, then in 2013 it merged with University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College (one school) to become UT Rio Grande Valley, though the new school didn't start instruction until 2015. UTRGV considers its basketball program a continuation of UTPA's, which began in 1952. Maine is 0–4 in conference tournament championship games, while UNH has never made it past the semifinals. For those two, men's hockey is the major winter sport and basketball is an afterthought. Maine is a bit better in women's basketball, with 10 NCAA appearances, but its 1–10 tourney record also counts for this trope. The UNH women haven't made the tourney at all. Before their D-I history, the UTRGV men won an NAIA championship in 1963.

Cricket

• South Africa in the Cricket World Cup. A team that has always been highly-ranked since they were allowed back into international cricket in 1992, but has never made it past the semi-finals due to a string of amusing (not to them) failures. Highlights include:
  • In 1992, they looked to be heading to victory in the semi-final against England, until a rain interruption, which by the rules of the time left them needing to make 22 runs of one delivery to win. This was the impetus for the introduction of the Duckworth–Lewis method,^note now known as the Duckworth–Lewis–Stern method which we'll see below.
  • In 1999, their semi-final against Australia ended in a tie. Australia advanced to the final due to finishing higher in the super sixes stage of the tournament.
  • In 2003, their group stage match against Sri Lanka was affected by rain. A miscommunication caused the batsmen to leave the field with the scores tied under the Duckworth–Lewis method, causing them to miss out on a spot in the super sixes.
  • It happened again in 2015, with New Zealand beating them on the second-last ball in the semi-final.
• Also in cricket, the Melbourne Stars in Australia's Big Bash League, who have made the semi-finals in all seasons since the league was established (and finished on top in 2013–14). They lost in the semis in the first four seasons. In BBL5, they finally made the final but lost to Sydney Thunder (who had finished last or second-last in every previous season). Fans blame this on key players getting called up to the Australian national near the end of the season.
• As of early 2024, India last won an ICC tournament with the 2013 Champions' Trophy. Since then, they have lost five finals and four semi-finals in men's ICC tournaments. Their reputation for this was really cemented in 2023, when they lost both the World Test Championship and Cricket World Cup finals to Australia, the latter after going undefeated until that point. A few months later, they also lost the Under 19 World Cup final to Australia.

Figure Skating

• Michelle Kwan is the most decorated figure skater in US history and is justifiably considered one of the greatest figure skaters of all time. In her career she earned:
  • More perfect (6.0) scores than any skater in history — a record that will stand indefinitely, now that the 6.0 scoring system has been abolished.
  • Twelve US championship medals, nine of them (1996, 1998–2005)gold ^note  She won the silver in 1994, 1995, and 1997. This is the all-time record, achieved by only one other skater, Maribel Vinson Owen.
  • Nine world championship medals, five of them (1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003) gold (tying Carol Heiss' record) ^note  She won the silver in 1997, 1999, 2002, and the bronze in 2004).
  • Is one of only a handful of skaters to win two Olympic medals — but neither of them is gold. Because both times (1998 ^note She won the silver& 2002^note She won the bronze ) the gold medal was hers for the taking, she succumbed to nerves and turned in mediocre performances.
• Canadian figure skaters in general seem to be cursed by this trope. Canadian men who won the world championships but continually fell short at the Olympics are:Brian Orser, Elvis Stojko, and most recently Patrick Chan.
• At least they won a medal. Kurt Browning, four-time World and Canadian Champion skater and the first figure skater to land a quadruple jump, never earned a medal of any color during his three appearances at the Olympics ^note  Disappointing eighth, sixth, and fifth-place finishes in 1988, 1992, and 1994, respectively. despite being the projected winner at the '92 and '94 Games, Josée Chouinard could only manage 9th place finishes in both of her ventures, and Emanuel Sandhu had a disastrous 13th-place showing in 2006.
• Nancy Kerrigan was a lovely skater who would skate beautifully during the short program, only to crack under pressure and fall apart in the long (the 1993 World Championships were the worst example of this tendency). As such, she never earned the gold at any major international competition—even when she finally got her act together and turned in the best performance of her life at the 1994 Olympics, she still couldn't win gold, being edged out by 1/10 of a point by Oksana Baiul.
• The queen of this trope would be Sasha Cohen. While certainly an admirable skater, she only ever won one major competition, the 2006 US Championship, settling for silver and bronze, respectively, at the Olympics and World Championships later that year. In both instances, much like Kerrigan, she was in first place after the short program before costing herself the gold with faulty performances in the long.
• The runner-up, fittingly, would be France's Surya Bonaly, an excellent jumper and spinner with a respectable slew of titles—three-time World silver medalist (1993–1995), a five-time European champion (1991–1995), the 1991 World Junior Champion, and a nine-time French national champion (1989–1997)—who almost inevitably made a mistake that left her short of an Olympic medal (she failed to make the podium in any of three appearances), or of a World Championship.
• Nicole Bobek was a terrific jumper who suffered from poor training discipline and this was reflected in her results. She was on her way to being the 1995 World Champion before a faulty long program dropped her to third place, and was the projected bronze medalist at the 1998 Olympics until disastrous performances left her in 17th place (to be fair, she was suffering from a hip injury).
• American women in general have been cursed by this trope since 2006. Whereas they once dominated with 1-2 medalists at nearly every Olympics for a total of 23 medals, including 7 golds, statistics no other country can boast, they haven't earned a medal since Sasha Cohen's silver in Turin and had their worst results ever in Pyeongchang with 9, 10, 11 place finishes. It's even worse in the World Championships, where 72 medals have been earned—including 5 consecutive golds by Carol Heiss and an unprecedented sweep in 1991 ^note  Gold for Kristi Yamaguchi, silver for Tonya Harding, bronze for Nancy Kerrigan but there's been a similar drought, with one medal earned since 2006, a disappointing silver in 2016, though the losing streak was finally broken in 2024 with another silver for Isabeau Levito.

MLB

• Paul Dickson's Baseball Dictionary uses the term "morning glory" for a hitter who shines early in the season but then cools off.
• For over a century, the Chicago Cubs were the favorite example of this in American sports, and they have a very long-standing reputation as "lovable losers". It is unlikely that anyone alive today saw their World Series win in 1908, the final time they won the Series in the 20th century, and most people in the stands at their last World Series loss (1945) are probably also dead. Nevertheless, they've still fielded some good teams that by all rights should have been contenders. Despite that, no matter how good they seemed to be in a given season, you knew that they'll choke somewhere short of the World Series....
  • The Cubs' reputation for fizzling is so entrenched that it has led to the supposed Curse of the Billy Goat being blamed. Cubs lore has it that a bar owner^note Whose bar still exists, albeit in a different location, and still has a decent bar and rather good burgers, and is the inspiration for a rather famous sketch from Saturday Night Live was told to leave Wrigley Field (the Cubs' home field since 1914) during Game 4 of the 1945 World Series because his goat was bothering other fans, so the the owner put a curse on the Cubs ("Them Cubs, they aren't gonna win no more.") - the Cubs lost that game, lost the series, and didn't make it to the World Series again until 2016. Superstitious fans have even tried to break the curse through elaborate, usually goat-related means.
  • Finally averted with their victory in the 2016 World Series on November 3, 2016, 108 years after their 1908 World Series championship. Though several times in looked like another Cubs collapse was imminent (losing 2 games in a row at home to go down 3-1, blowing a 6-3 lead with 2 outs in the bottom of the 8th of Game 7), but for the first time in 108 years the Cubs were World Series Champions. Thus ends the longest championship drought in American sports history (taking the goat curse with it), and one of the longest in world sports history (the drought title immediately shifted to the team they defeated, the Cleveland Indians [now Guardians]). Game 7 is now effectively being considered one of the best games in the history of baseball.
• The 00's New York Yankees were known for this. They were coming off of their unbelievable run of 4 World Series titles in five years from 1996-2000. However, between 2001 and 2008, they achieved the top seed in the AL 3 times and made the World Series twice, and didn't win a single title, one of the longest stretches in the history of the club. They had three particularly notable years in that stretch. First was in 2001, when they fell to the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team in only its 4th year, in the World Series, making the D-backs the youngest team in modern American professional sports to win their sport's title—and to add insult to injury, the World Series loss happened shortly after 9/11, and—for once—most of the baseball-watching public was actually rooting for the (usually-reviled) Yankees. The second was 2004, when they became the first team in MLB history and only the third team in the history of American sports to lose a best-of-7 series after racing out to a 3-0 lead, falling in the American League Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox. The third time was in 2008, when they missed the postseason for the first time since the early 90s.
  • The ultimate humbling, however, may have been 2010: The defending champion Yankees, the team with the most World Series appearances in history, lost the pennant to the Texas Rangers - the oldest MLB franchise to never reach the Series before then. Extra points for Alex Rodriguez - not just the supposed best player in the game, but one the Yanks poached from the Rangers six years earlier - striking out looking to end the ALCS.
  • There was also Dave Winfield, whom George Steinbrenner called "Mr. May" due to his failure to perform in October when it mattered. Alex Rodriguez seems to hold this role now (former Yankees manager Joe Torre has revealed that Rodriguez's nickname "A-Rod" was altered in the locker room to "A-Fraud" for his poor postseason performances), though his clutch performance in the 2009 Yankees series win might shake that a bit.
• The Atlanta Braves won a record-setting 14 consecutive division titles (or 14 in 15 seasons, depending on whether you believe the 1994 season, which ended in a players' strike, counts). They took home the World Series trophy once (the strike-shortened 1995 season). The streak ended with four consecutive first-round exits, and their next five postseason appearances after the streak's end also ended with a first-round exit, including the inaugural NL Wild Card Game in 2012. This despite having three future Hall of Fame pitchers in Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz all in their prime (one of those three won the Cy Young Award in a stretch of seven out of eight years in the 1990s, although one belonged to Maddux when he was with the Chicago Cubs), forming one of the greatest rotations in baseball history. However, this changed for them in the 2020s...
  • In 2020, the Braves swept the Cincinnati Reds in the best-of-3 Wild Card Series, then swept the Miami Marlins in the best-of-5 NLDS, only to have the eventual World Series Champion LA Dodgers mount a comeback from a 3-1 series deficit in the NLCS.
  • In 2021, after having the All-Star Game taken away from them, the Braves managed to win their division, defeat the Milwaukee Brewers 3-1 in the NLDS, defeat the defending World Series champion Dodgers 4-2 in the NLCS, and knock-off the Houston Astros 4-2 in the World Series, their first title since 1995 and 4th in franchise history.
• The 2011 Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves will forever be linked for one miraculous, baffling and unbelievable 2 hours and 10 minutes: Game 162 on September 28-September 29. Both teams were and still are considered codifiers even after the Braves won the World Series in 1995 (as previously mentioned) and until the Red Sox won in 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018. Anyway, "Game 162" for 2011 does not refer to one game, but four that would determine the wild card seeds for the playoffs. In 2 hours and 9 minutes, the Red Sox and Braves were out of the playoffs, and the St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays were in. A short timeline is below:
  • 9:56 pm Eastern in Atlanta: Chase Utley of the Philadelphia Phillies hits a sacrifice fly in the top of the 9th inning, tying the game at 3-3.
  • 10:23 pm Eastern in Tampa Bay: Evan Longoria hits a home run in the bottom of the 8th; the score is Yankees 7, Rays 6. The Rays began the inning down 7-0.
  • 10:26 pm Eastern in Houston: Cardinals defeat Astros 8-0. At this point, they'd need the Braves to lose to have the wildcard outright. If the Braves won, they'd have to play an additional game to determine the National League wildcard seed.
  • 10:47 pm Eastern in Tampa Bay: Dan Johnson hits a home run to tie the Yankees-Rays game. That was Johnson's first hit since the first month of the season.
  • 10:58 pm Eastern in Baltimore: Play resumes after a rain delay of 1 hour 24 minutes, with the Red Sox leading 3-2 at the seventh-inning stretch.
  • 11:28 pm Eastern in Atlanta: Hunter Pence scores in the 13th inning for the Philadelphia Phillies to take a 4-3 lead.
  • 11:40 pm Eastern in Atlanta: Game over. Braves are out, Cardinals are in.
  • 11:45 pm Eastern in Tampa Bay: Sox get knocked on defense. Bill Simmons needs another drink.
  • 11:59 pm Eastern in Baltimore: The Orioles' Nolan Reimold ties their respective game versus the Red Sox at 3-3.
  • 12:02 am Eastern in Baltimore: Robert Andino hits a game-winning single; Orioles win 4-3; it's the backup SS's 7th RBI against Boston in the last eight days. The Red Sox now need the Rays to lose to force an additional game for the American League wild card seed.
  • Just three minutes later... 12:05 am Eastern in Tampa Bay: Longoria hits a game-winning home run: Rays 8, Yankees 7. Rays are in, the Red Sox are out.
  • Remember: Tampa Bay was losing 7-0 with six outs to go in Game 162 against the juggernaut Yanks. They had to pull a Miracle Rally just to pull off their September Miracle Rally! It was like a Major League movie come to life (and no team had ever rallied from such a deficit in the final game of the season to get into the playoffs).
  • The Sox, meanwhile, were 89-0 when leading after 8 innings that year, with closer Jonathan Papelbon facing the bottom of the hapless O's lineup with two outs and no one on.
  • This whole ordeal is now Harsher in Hindsight for the Rays and Yankees. Both teams lost in the AL Division Series to the Rangers and Tigers, respectively. "Game 162" was meaningless for the Yankees; they had already won the AL East and were in the playoffs win or lose. It's also this for the Braves when you remember that the Cardinals ended up winning the 2011 title. In 2012, the Braves averted this trope in shocking fashion when an infield fly call went the Cardinals' way. In the newly established Wild Card Playoff Game. Where Atlanta had Home Field. Due to having an 8-game advantage on the defending Cards, who themselves were only 2 up on the 6th place Dodgers at the end of the Season.
  • And the historical capper: Both teams set the mark for biggest blown September leads in baseball history. The Red Sox led the Rays for the AL Wild Card by 9 games on September 3rd (the full "September swoon" can't be measured by wild card lead since the Sox ended August as a division leader), the Braves led the Cardinals for the NL wild card by 8.5, and no team had ever squandered such a commanding lead in September, with their mathematical odds of reaching the playoffs each being over 99%. Since the Red Sox are the more signature franchise and were the favorites to win it all after adding superstar Carl Crawford, they grabbed most of the headlines, much to the small consolation of the Braves, who are basically the MLB leader in this trope over the last 20 years.
  • Needless to say, probably the greatest day of baseball ever. Except for the fans of the two losers.^note They still have those respectively listed World Series wins.
• The New York Mets have gotten this in the past few years. Oftentimes, they'll start the year playing fairly well, but by August or September, things will go wrong enough for them to be out. The worst of these were their epic collapses in both 2007 and 2008. They seemed to finally be averting this with a trip to the World Series in the fall of 2015 (their first since 2000), only to win only 1 game out of 5 and be soundly defeated—at home, no less—exactly as they lost in 2000.
• The Moneyball-era Oakland Athletics were one of the best teams in baseball from 2000 to 2003, making the playoffs every year, and every year they found creative ways to lose in five games in the ALDS. In 2001, they seemed to have the best team in MLB, winning 102 games, playing better than the 116-win Seattle Mariners... but lost in the first round when Jeremy Giambi failed to slide.
• The Houston Astros have been this any time they field a good team. Of particular note is their late-90's run, where they won the NL Central three years in a row, but not once made it past the Division Series. They later won the Division Series in 2005, defeating the Atlanta Braves 3-1, and winning the NLCS by beating the St. Louis Cardinals 4-2. Then they would face the AL champions Chicago White Sox, and the Astros were favored to win the Series (their first ever), especially since Roger Clemens was among the notable players in the team. Instead, the White Sox swept them 4-0. To further twist the knife in this ordeal, Clemens had a hamstring tear one month prior to the World Series. While the injury didn't hamper much of his performance in the Division and NL Championship Series, it finally did him in during Game 1 of the World Series (he lasted only two innings), which contributed to the Astros getting swept by the Sox.
  • In 2017, after beating the New York Yankees in the American League championship, by winning four of the seven games they played, including the final seventh game, the Astros went on to face the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was in the final game, played in Dodger Stadium, that the Houston Astros finally won their first World Series championship since the franchise was established in 1962, by beating the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1. However, this glory would be short-lived, after former Astro Mike Fiers blew the whistle in 2019 that the Astros cheated that season through various video-related means, using spotters and cameras to signal to the dugout what pitches were signaled by the opposing catcher, which were relayed to the hitter by banging on the dugout roof and trash cans. An internal investigation confirmed this, which cost the general manager and manager their jobs. Although the title was not stripped and no players were punished in exchange for their testimony, the players and organization now bear a scarlet letter in regards to 2017 as an on-the-record sham.
• In both 2011 and 2012, the Cleveland Indians, renamed Guardians after the 2021 season, (you'll see teams from this city mentioned a lot) were the #1 team in their division early on in the season (In 2011, they were the #1 team in all of baseball for a short time). In both instances, however, they had a dismal second half and failed to make the playoffs. In 2012, they actually finished the season in last place in their division due to how terrible the second half of their season was.
  • In the '90s, they made it to the World Series twice and lost both times: in 1995 to the aforementioned Braves, and in 1997 to the Florida Marlins.^note In Game 7. In the 11th inning. On a walk-off line drive that glanced off pitcher Charles Nagy's glove. After the Indians held up Sandy Alomar on third base with one out and subsequently got thrown out at home in the top of the 9th.
  • The Guardians now hold the longest World Series victory drought, and longest in the American League since 2005 - their last World Series win was in 1948. This used to be only the second-longest, but in 2016 the Chicago Cubs broke their epic 108-year World Series championship drought... by beating the Indians. With the final game of that Series being played in Cleveland (and going into extra innings, because it seems a confrontation between two tortured teams needs to be as long as possible). This was most remarkable for the Indians getting to a 3-1 game lead, but having the Cubs surge to win the final 3 games of the Series in a row to take the championship. With the Cubs' century-plus-long curse and their "goat curse" out the window in November 2016, the Indians/Guardians now have the drought weight on them.
• The Pittsburgh Pirates ended up getting this reputation in the first half of the 2010s. At one time the Pirates were one of the top contending teams in MLB, with historic players and World Series titles to match. However, after respected coach Jim Leyland left the Pirates in the 90s, they went on a losing streak that would last for two decades, the longest such streak in North American professional sports. But even when things looked like they were starting to get better...
  • The last two years of the losing streak would give a taste for what was ahead. In 2011, the Pirates shocked the baseball world by suddenly having a winning record going into the All-Star break. However, after a marathon game with the Atlanta Braves that lasted 20 innings, the Pirates lost over a suspect call. From that moment onward, they went on a losing streak and finished the year with a losing record. 2012 would even be more painful for them. The Pirates carried a winning record all the way until September, only for them to suddenly start losing series to some of the worst teams like the Chicago Cubs, and ended their season with another losing record.
  • In 2013, the Pirates finally reestablished themselves as one of baseball's best teams, but were eliminated in the playoffs by their division rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals. In 2014, they finished second in their division to the Cardinals by only two games and were eliminated by the San Francisco Giants in the Wild Card game. 2015 was particularly galling; they had the second best record in all of baseball, but ended up finishing second to the Cardinals (again) and had to settle for a Wild Card spot (again), where they proceeded to get eliminated by their other division rival, the third place Chicago Cubs.
  • In 2016, the team started to go back to its old ways; they started out hot and fought hard to stay above .500 for most of the season despite a June swoon, but they would fizzle out in September and finish below .500. In 2017, they stumbled out of the gate and never really had a chance. In the meantime, the Kansas City Royals and Chicago Cubs would snap their infamously long championship droughts in 2015 and 2016 respectively, leaving the Pirates with the longest championship appearance drought, having not played in the World Series since 1979 (in fact, they haven't even been to the League Championship series since 1992). Despite the Hope Spot provided by the 2011-2016 Pirates, the "loser" label remains with them.
• This, in a nutshell, is what the so-called "Curse of the Bambino" upon the Boston Red Sox consisted of. (For the record, most Sox fans didn't think of their team as "cursed"—just subject to repeated misfortunes.) From 1918 to 2004, the thing with the Red Sox—unlike the other famous "cursed" team of baseball, the Chicago Cubs (who are hardly ever contenders)—was that they were usually very good. It's just that they could never...quite...make it. In a typical year, they would be a very good team—but they often had difficulty assembling the best record in the American League (which was how the pennant was determined until 1969). Even when they made it to the World Series—or in later years, to the postseason playoffs—they kept not quite being able to clinch that last win (see, e.g., their spectacular twelfth-inning victory in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, widely considered one of the best if not the best baseball game ever played, quickly followed by a hair's-breadth defeat in Game 7, losing by a single run scored in the ninth). If you're looking for the definition of Every Year They Fizzle Out in baseball, it's pretty much the Red Sox for that whole period of their history.
  • In 1948, the Red Sox were in control of the American League pennant race in the last month only to drop it to the Indians. Boston came back to tie it up and force the first-ever A.L. playoff game. Thanks to the poor choice of pitcher Danny Galehouse (8-7), Boston lost the game and the pennant to the Indians.
  • Then there's the horror of 1978: In July, the Red Sox owned a 14-game lead in the A.L. East. Then, the Yankees began an astounding comeback while Boston slumps and they end the season tied; in fact, the Bosox had to win their final eight games just to get to the tie. In the winner-take-all playoff game, Bucky Dent's infamous three-run homer allows the Yankees to win and Red Sox fans stunned at the total collapse.
  • Even more than the 1975 World Series (though that one had a suspect call go against them in Game 3), the 1986 World Series stands out as an example of the Red Sox fizzling when it mattered most. With the Red Sox up three games to 2 and leading 5-3 with two out and nobody on in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game 6, Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi allowed three straight hits and was replaced with Bob Stanley. Stanley then threw a wild pitch that allowed the tying run to score and the winning run to go to second and then failed to cover first base when speedy Mookie Wilson hit a grounder to aging first baseman Bill Buckner, a lapse that probably would've given Wilson an infield single if the ball hadn't famously gone through Buckner's legs to allow the winning run to score from second. The Sox then blew a 3-0 lead in Game 7.
  • The Red Sox were so predictably the team that fizzles out every year that the writers of the American adaptation of "Fever Pitch" had written it into the ending, which was the opposite of the ending of the British novel/film it's based on. The film was supposed to end on a wistful "there's always next year" kind of vibe. Except they shot it in 2004. The subversion of this trope meant the ending had to be very quickly re-written, with one of the final scenes filmed at Game 4 of the World Series that year. Ironically, this made it a closer adaptation to its source material, which involves a similar Miracle Rally from a football team.
• The Los Angeles Dodgers:
  • From 2013 to the end of that decade, they got this reputation in the postseason. Despite a rich ownership group willing to spend, an excellent and forward-thinking front office, and immense player talent throughout their entire system, they hadn't been able to end a championship drought that had lasted since 1988. This is perhaps exemplified by the performance of their ace pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who since 2011 has been widely considered the best pitcher in baseball. He has the achievements to make a strong case: 3-time Cy Young winner, 5-time ERA title winner (2011-2014, 2017), has thrown one of the best no-hitters in MLB history, has led the league in strikeouts multiple seasons, and through 2023 has a career regular-season ERA of 2.48. And he's had 2 seasons where he won over 20 games (2011 and 2014). Yet, if someone only looked at his postseason record, they'll be shocked if they were told this, as he has a postseason ERA of 4.50 (significantly worse than league average) and (almost) always brings out his worst performances whenever his team needs him the most. To go into more detail:
    • In 2013 and 2014, after pitching very well against the Atlanta Braves in the 2013 NLDS, he went on to lose four straight postseason starts against the same team (the St. Louis Cardinals), becoming the first pitcher in franchise history to do so. While his first loss in the 2013 NLCS was a well-pitched game where he only gave up one unearned run, his second loss was a complete blowout (with Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter opening the floodgates) that eliminated the Dodgers from the playoffs. In Game 1 of the 2014 NLDS against the Cardinals, Kershaw had a 6-2 lead to work with at the beginning of the 7th inning, but proceeded to blow the game (perhaps not surprisingly, it was Matt Carpenter who drove in the go-ahead runs). In the final game of the 2014 NLDS (St. Louis led the series 2-1), Kershaw once again blew a 7th inning lead (2-0 this time) when he threw perhaps his worst curveball ever and gave up a three-run homer to Matt Adams, once against eliminating the Dodgers from the playoffs; to add insult to injury, it was the first home run Kershaw had ever given up to a left-handed batter, and Matt Adams happened to be one of the worst at hitting against left-handed pitchers like Kershaw.
    • 2015 had Kershaw managing 300 strikeouts in the regular season, and while he pitched well and won in his second game of the 2015 NLDS against the New York Mets, the Dodgers were eliminated in five games anyways, in part because Kershaw lost his first game of the series.
    • 2016 (where Kershaw pitched well but missed many games to injury) had the Dodgers finally winning an NLDS again (against the Washington Nationals, though Kershaw himself didn't pitch particularly well), and Kershaw pitching a winning gem against the Chicago Cubs in his first start of the NLCS. But you know how this story goes; the Dodgers end up one game from elimination and relying on Kershaw to keep their hopes alive, and Kershaw proceeds to disappoint.
    • In 2017, the Dodgers have one of their best regular seasons ever and proceed to make it to the World Series for the first time since 1988, and as the favorites against the Houston Astros (who had never won a championship since their establishment in 1962) to boot. Kershaw's own fortunes were looking up too; sure, the Arizona Diamondbacks hit four home runs against him in his sole start of the NLDS (with the Dodgers only winning that game because their own offense performed even better), but he proceeded to pitch well (though not necessarily his best) against the Cubs in both of his NLCS starts, and his first World Series start was an absolute gem of a victory. However, Kershaw would once against fizzle out right at the moment when his team needed him the most; in a crucial Game 5 start when the series was tied 2-2, Kershaw gave up a three-run lead twice (4-1 and 7-4) via home run to the Astros, leading to an epic back-and-forth game. When it finally ended in extra innings, the Astros had won and Kershaw had set a new record for home runs given up in the postseason. The Dodgers would go on to tie the series the very next game, but the final game ended with the Astros hoisting the championship trophy.^note If it's any consolation to Kershaw, he wasn't anywhere near the Dodgers' worst starter in the World Series; Yu Darvish, another ace pitcher whom the Dodgers had acquired that season specifically to push them to the top, was absolutely demolished by the Astros, to the point where he never made it out of the second inning in either of his starts. In fact, Kershaw had to come in as a long reliever for Darvish's final World Series start; he actually pitched really well, but by then the Astros had already taken what would be an insurmountable lead (leading to more mutterings that Kershaw could only pitch well in lower-pressure situations). It later came out that Darvish had been inadvertently tipping his pitches, which is a major no-no for pitchers in any league whether intentional or not—in other words, his pitching patterns were such that the Astros were able to figure out what he was going to throw while still in his delivery. However, a more sinister explanation came out in January 2020, when it was found that the Astros had been using video cameras to steal opponents' pitching signs in real time. (While sign stealing by baserunners who manage to get to second base is an accepted part of the game, it's very much prohibited to use technology to steal signs in real time.)
    • In 2018, the Dodgers had a strong regular season, and won the National League Championship against a very strong Milwaukee Brewers who extended the series to the seventh game where the Dodgers won by scoring a three run homer that got them the 5-1 victory. Next came the World Series, where the Dodgers faced off against the Boston Red Sox, who had just come off a very strong regular season, and record setting season for the franchise loosing only one game out of four against the New York Yankees, and one out of five against the Houston Astros. The Dodgers lost the first two games against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, back in Dodger Stadium, the dodgers eked out a 3-2 victory after a grueling 7 hour, 18 inning game. In Game four, thanks to a three run homer by Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers were up 4-0 on the sixth inning, where pitcher Rich Hill was retired for the night on the seventh inning. His replacements, Ryan Madson and Kenley Jansen, allowed the Red Sox to score an incredible nine runs in three innings, and though the Dodgers scored again, the final score was Dodgers 6, Red Sox 9. In game five, the Red Sox got off to a good start scoring a two run homer at the top of the first inning, the Dodgers scored one run in the bottom of the first, but Kershaw allowed four runs, and Pedro Baez allowed another single home run on the eight inning, leading to a score of 5-1. At the bottom of the ninth inning, Chris Sale struck out Manny Machado, leading to the Red Sox to claim their fourth World Series Championship since 2004, while the Dodgers, for the second year in a row, lost in their home turf. And once again, when Clayton Kershaw was trusted to pitch big, he failed, losing Game 1 and crucial Game 5, which gave Red Sox the World Series. This makes his record 9-10 in the post season with an ERA over 4.30. He has also become the only pitcher to give up the most home runs during the World Series.
    • 2019 saw the Dodgers once again post a strong record—this time, they finished 106-56, their best record since moving to L.A. Once again, they were division champions and faced the Nationals in the NLDS. After going back and forth in the first four games (Dodgers taking games 1 and 3 and the Nats taking games 2 and 4), they were in a decisive Game 5. With the Nationals never advancing past the NLDS, it was easy to assume that history would repeat itself... until Kershaw (who came on in a relief appearance) gave up two home runs back-to-back in the 8th inning, and then Howie Kendrick (an ex-Dodger) put the nail in the coffin by belting a go-ahead grand slam in the 10th inning to send the Dodgers packing, preventing them from making the NLCS for the fourth year in a row.
    • However, in 2020, which was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both Kershaw and the Dodgers defied their postseason reputations. As for Kershaw, he threw 8 innings of shutout ball in his only appearance against the Brewers in the wild-card round, with the Dodgers advancing. In the Division Series against the Padres, he only threw once, giving up 3 runs in 6 innings but still getting the win. Next was the NLCS against the Braves, who shelled him for 4 runs in 5 innings in his only start in that series; fortunately for him, the Dodgers made it to the World Series against the Rays. Kershaw proceeded to have two solid outings, getting the win in both and posting a 2.31 ERA for the Series, which the Dodgers won to end a 32-year championship drought.
    • Unfortunately they went back to their underachieving ways. The 2021 season was incredibly promising for the Dodgers who looked poised for another World Series run. They would have a great season with an 106-win season and clinched a playoff spot……..as a Wild Card team. How did they end up in that spot? Their hated enemy, the San Francisco Giants, had an incredible year themselves. With several players having breakout seasons and some older players returning to form, the Giants would win 107 games and end the Dodgers’ decade-long NL West title streak. So the Dodgers spent much of the season playing catch-up to the Giants. After beating the Cardinals in the Wild Card, the Dodgers would meet the Giants in the NLDS for the first time ever. Within a back-and-forth five-game series, the Dodgers would beat the Giants albeit on a very controversial call by the umps. Unfortunately, the tired Dodgers would be very easy pickings in NLCS vs the eventual 2021 Champions Atlanta Braves. Even worse? The Dodgers became the first 100+ win team to not have home field advantage in the NLCS.
    • 2022 once again looked very promising for the Dodgers. After signing Freddie Freeman in free agency, manager Dave Roberts guaranteed during spring training that the Dodgers would win the 2022 World Series. They absolutely dominated the 2022 season and beat down everyone in their division including the San Diego Padres. Reclaiming the NL West and setting a franchise record of 111 wins, becoming the best team of the 2022 season. Then comes the NLDS where they would face the 89-win Padres. Despite taking Game 1, the Dodgers would lose in humiliating fashion to their little brother to the south. Even worse? The game clincher was in San Diego where Padres fans came in full support of their team after years and years of Dodger fans hijacking Petco Park.
    • In 2023, they again won the NL West, earning a bye into the Division Series where they faced the Arizona Diamondbacks, which were the last team to get into the NL playoffs and had to take down the NL Central champion Milwaukee Brewers to get to the DS. The Dodgers sent Kershaw to the mound to open the series, and this followed: double, RBI single, single, RBI double, 3-run homer, hard-hit groundout, walk, RBI double, pitching change with the Dodgers down 6–0. It was the first time Kershaw had failed to finish the first inning of a start in his entire career. It wasn't much better in Games 2 and 3, with neither of the Dodgers' other starting pitchers lasting 3 innings, and Game 3 starter Lance Lynn giving up four homers in an inning, a postseason record for any pitcher. Not to mention that Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman went a combined 1-for-21 at the plate. The Dodgers, needless to say, were swept out of the postseason. This story argues that the main culprit for the Dodgers' recent woes is GM Andrew Friedman, who "continually builds tremendous regular-season teams that are completely unfit for the playoffs."
  • The Dodgers were famous for this before—in the 1940s and 50s, when they were still in Brooklyn. They had come out of a long stretch of absolute futility, but they always ran into two problems: the New York Giants and the New York Yankees. The Giants, their in-town, in-league rivals, frequently beat them in the pennant race, and even when they won the NL Pennant, the dominant Yankees would always shut the Dodgers down in the World Series. Except for once—in 1955. And two years later, the Dodgers would leave Brooklyn for LA—where they would win the World Series three more times in the next eight years (1959, 1963, and 1965). This trope was the basis for a famous city-wide rallying cry for Dodger fans: "Wait till next year!"
• Before their 2010 championship, the San Francisco Giants had not won a championship since 1954, back when they were the New York Giants. They seemingly inherited this from their rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, who won their first championship (and only one in Brooklyn) in 1955.
  • They would return to the World Series in 1962 after another best-of-three playoff win against the now Los Angeles Dodgers, only to lose to the Yankees in the World Series in 7 games, then failed to reach the postseason again until 1971, when they lost to Pittsburgh in the NLCS.
  • They led their division for most of 1978 before the Dodgers caught them late and won the pennant, and in 1982, they were in the division race down to the wire before getting knocked out by, of course, the Dodgers. (They returned the favor the next day, however, giving the division to the third team in their three-team race.)
  • They finally returned to the World Series in 1989, facing the cross-bridge Oakland Athletics in a World Series that was famously interrupted by an earthquake striking the Bay Area just before the scheduled start of Game 3. The extra time didn't keep the Giants from getting swept.
  • In 1993, the last season of the two-division, no-wildcard format, the Giants had a phenomenal season, leading their division by as many as 10 games on July 22; a month later, the lead was still 7.5 games and they'd not had a losing streak of more than 2 games since late May (and no losing streak of more than three games all season). Then came 6 games against the Atlanta Braves, the team chasing them, in a 9-game span. They went 1-5. Less than a week later, they began an 8-game losing streak that dropped them from 3.5 up to 3.5 back. Not content to let it end there, they proceeded to win 14 of their next 16 to enter the final day of the season tied with the Braves at 103-58; no team had ever won 100 games and failed to make the playoffs, but one of them would—and after a 12-1 loss to (who else?) the Dodgers, that team was the 103-59 San Francisco Giants.
  • In 1998, they again got hot late, going 9-1 to enter the final day of the season tied with the Chicago Cubs for the NL Wild Card. They lost, but so did the Cubs, forcing a 1-game playoff, which the Cubs won.
  • In 2000, the Giants made the playoffs but lost in the first round to the wild card Mets, 3 games to 1. The following year, the Giants were eliminated from playoff contention on the second-to-last day of the season.
  • In 2002, the Giants finally returned to the World Series for the first time since 1989, facing the Anaheim Angels. After taking Game 1, they fell into a 2 games to 1 hole, but took Games 4 and 5 at home to take a 3-2 lead and got off to a 5-0 lead in Game 6. With just 8 outs to go, starter Russ Ortiz gave up back-to-back singles and the Angels' Scott Spiezio greeted the first San Fran reliever with a 3-run homer; the following inning the Angels scored three more to take a 6-5 lead and won the series in 7 games.
  • In 2003, the Giants went wire to wire in first place, winning 100 games, only to lose to the wild card Marlins 3 games to 1 in the first round of the playoffs.
  • Finally, in 2010, the Giants won their first World Series since 1954 and their first in San Francisco, and they quickly followed with two more in 2012 and 2014. The 56-year drought was nonetheless one of the longest in the sport's history (tied for ninth-longest with the Houston Astros, who entered their 56th year of existence and won their first championship since they were established in 1962).
• The Detroit Tigers were this in the late 2000s and early 2010s, arguably the same territory as the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox. After spending the 1990s and early 2000s in the doldrums (with an American League record 119 losses in the 2003 season), they turned things around enough that by 2005 they were playoff contenders and in 2006 they won the pennant, only to fall to the incredibly underdog St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. From 2007 to 2010 they kept just missing the postseason (except the rather weak 2008 season) on account of choking in August and September. Then they consistently made the postseason from 2011-2014, during which time they won the AL Central each year, and managed to win the AL pennant in 2012 (only to lose in the World Series to the San Francisco Giants). Despite this, they still kept falling in the playoffs, and some in Detroit began to note—with alarm—that it was now over 30 years since the Tigers last won a championship (with 1984's "Bless You Boys"), and that the team had never gone more than 24 seasons without a World Series win since first winning in 1935. Then the window began to close; 2015 was a lost year due to injuries to key players, the 2016 Tigers paid tribute to their 2007-2010 selves by being eliminated from the playoff race on the very last day of the regular season, and in 2017, management finally decided to enact a perhaps long-overdue rebuild. Adding to the misery of Tigers fans, the team inaugurated said rebuild by trading their long-time ace pitcher Justin Verlander (who had spent all of his career up to that point in Detroit and was a pivotal part of their multiple division championships and playoff runs) to the Houston Astros^note Verlander quickly became the team's ace, and was key to them winning their first World Series championship ever. Perhaps as a fitting metaphor for his former team, Verlander's trade precipitated a total collapse of the Tigers, who proceeded to only win six of their final thirty games and finish with one of the two worst records of the 2017 season (tied with the San Francisco Giants).
• The Seattle Mariners deserve a place on this list as well. In the 1990s, they were one of the premier teams in the American League, with stars such as Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, and Edgar Martínez... one of the premier regular season teams, that is. Even after winning a Major League record 116 games in 2001 (after Rodriguez, Johnson, and Griffey had all left, but with newly imported Japanese superstar Ichiro Suzuki), the Mariners couldn't win the American League pennant. They were one of only two teams (the other being the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals) that has never even been in a World Series. But with the Nats reaching (and winning) their first ever World Series in 2019, the Mariners are now the only team that has never played in the Fall Classic.
• The Washington Nationals had problems with this both on the season and individual game level. They have won their division four times (2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017), only to bow out in the NLDS. After missing the postseason in 2018 and losing star player Bryce Harper to free agency in the offseason, the Nats were picked by some to miss the postseason in 2019, and they were headed down that route in the first two months of the season. However, they managed to turn it around and clinch a Wild Card spot. In the NL Wild Card game, they were trailing the Brewers 3-1 until some clutch hits (coupled with a Milwaukee error) gave them the lead and then the win. However, they went on to face the juggernaut known as the Dodgers in the NLDS. Despite the odds being against them, the Nats managed to win two of the first four games, forcing a win-or-go home Game 5 in Los Angeles. Trailing 3-1, Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto homered back-to-back off of Clayton Kershaw (who's known for struggling in the postseason) in the 8th inning to tie the game. Two innings later, Howie Kendrick hits a go-ahead grand slam, which would prove to be the difference, sending the Nats to their first ever NLCS.^note That is, if you don't count their years as the Montreal Expos (1969-2004). The Expos made it to the NLCS in 1981 and most likely would've made it in 1994 had it not been for the strike. The Nats then proceeded to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals and pull off late-game, on the road heroics against the similarly dominant Houston Astros to earn their first World Series championship in franchise history.
• The Minnesota Twins have fallen into this trope as of recent years. After winning their second and most recent World Series in 1991, they wouldn't reach the postseason again until 2002, when they reached the ALCS and lost to the eventual World Series champion Angels. 2003 and 2004 saw them getting eliminated by the Yankees in the ALDS. After 2004 is where things started to get bad:
  • 2006: The Twins win the American League Central Division crown, but get ousted by the A's in 3 games in the ALDS.
  • 2008: The Twins are engaged in a season-long battle with the White Sox for the AL Central Division title. It comes down to a Game 163 in Chicago, with Jim Thome (who would play for Minnesota later in his career) belting the go-ahead home run in the 7th inning, giving the White Sox the division and the Twins were sent packing.
  • 2009: In their last season in the Metrodome, the Twins once again find themselves playing in a Game 163 for the AL Central crown, this time against the Tigers. The Twins would win the game in 12 innings to get to the postseason, but they were knocked out by the Yankees, who would go on to win the World Series.
  • 2010: In their first year at Target Field, the Twins are division champs once more. Once again, they are ousted by the Yankees in the postseason.
  • 2017: The Twins return to the postseason for the first time in 7 years, and they're in the Wild Card game against the Yankees. You know how this ends...
  • 2019: The Twins get their second 100-win season in franchise history. They face the Yankees once again in the postseason. They lose to the Yankees once again.
  • 2020: The Twins win the AL Central for the first time in 10 years and this time, they face the now-reviled Astros^note  The Astros were part of a sign-stealing scandal that did not see their World Series title from 2017 stripped, much to the ire of fans from the other 29 teams. in a best-of-3 Wild Card series. The Twins get swept, now having lost 18 postseason games in a row, dating back to 2004. It's the longest such streak for any team in any of the four major North American sports leagues.
  • 2023: Surprise! The Twins' postseason losing streak finally ends with a 3–1 win in Game 1 of their Wild Card series against the Toronto Blue Jays, and they close out the Jays in Game 2 to make the Division Series. However, they didn't make it any farther, dropping the DS 3–1 to the Astros.
• After the 2021 World Series, Dusty Baker had become baseball's version of Marty Schottenheimer (see the NFL section for more). While Baker does have a World Series crown as a player (winning with the Dodgers in 1981), as a manager, he had fallen short multiple times:
  • In 1993, Baker's first managing job came with the San Fransisco Giants. The team missed the postseason completely despite having a 103-59 record. How? The Giants finished second in the NL West to the Braves (yes, the Atlanta Braves were in the NL West once upon a time), and only division winners made the postseason at the time. ^note  This was set to change in 1994 with the addition of the Wild Card, but it would ultimately get pushed to 1995 because of the strike. The Giants wouldn't make the postseason until 1997, when they lost to the upstart Marlins (who went on to win the World Series). In 2000, the Giants lost to the Mets in the Division Series, and in 2002, they lost to the Angels in the World Series. The Giants would let Baker go after the season ended.
  • In 2003, Baker became the Cubs' manager. With great starting pitching and hitting, the Cubs would reach the NLCS and were just five outs away from making their first World Series since 1945... and then the Steve Bartman incident happened, causing the Cubs to lose their composure, the game, and the series to the Marlins (who went on to win their second World Series). It would be Baker's only postseason appearance with the Cubs, and he was let go after 2006.
  • In late 2007, Baker became the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. In 2010, the Reds would win the NL Central Division title, but got swept by the Phillies in the NLDS. In 2012, the Reds won the division again and won the first two games against one of Baker's old teams, the Giants... who won the next three games to win the series. After a Wild Card loss to Pittsburgh in 2013, Baker was let go.
  • After two seasons away from baseball, Baker came back in 2016, this time as manager of the Nationals. In his two seasons there, the Nats won their division twice, but lost in the NLDS twice. Baker was let go after the 2017 season.
  • In 2020, Baker resurfaced as manager of the Houston Astros. That same postseason, Houston lost to Tampa Bay in the ALCS. In 2021, Baker led the Astros to the World Series (his first in 19 years), but they fell to the Braves in six games. 2022, however, finally saw Baker achieve postseason success outside of the LCS: The Astros, having the American League's best record, completed one of the more dominant postseason runs in recent MLB history, almost going undefeated in the postseason^note They swept the Mariners and Yankees to start 7-0, but would lose Game 1 and Game 3 in the World Series.. Houston won its second World Series (and Baker's first as a manager) by defeating the Phillies in six games.

NBA

• The Utah Jazz in The '90s. They lost three conference finals (1992, 1994, 1996) before finally making the NBA finals in 1997 and 1998, where some guy named Jordan thwarted their attempts to win rings. Their power forward Karl Malone tended to shoot worse and be less assertive in the playoffs, their head coach Jerry Sloan had problems preparing the team for big games (witness the infamous 96–54 blowout loss in game 3 of the '98 finals), and their aging front line (Malone and guards John Stockton and Jeff Hornacek were all in their mid-30s in their finals seasons) tended to run out of gas at bad times. They finished with the league's best record in the strike-shortened post-Jordan 1998-99 season with the core of their finals teams intact, but got knocked out in the conference semis by Portland, and they started to fade afterward.
  • The New York Knicks from the The '90s say hello. Made even worse by actually facing Jordan before the finals (before he briefly retired and the Knicks defeated the Bulls in '94, New York spent three years in a row losing!).
  • In fact, any good NBA team during the The '90s that wasn't the Bulls or the Rockets was this, thanks to Jordan's (and Olajuwon's, during Jordan's temporary retirement) reign. Examples aside from Utah and New York include Charles Barkley's Phoenix Suns, Gary Payton's Seattle SuperSonics (the first 1-seed to lose a first round series to an 8-seed when the Denver Nuggets knocked them out in 1994), the underrated Charlotte Hornets with Alonzo Mourning and Larry Johnson, the Shaq-and-Penny Orlando Magic, and Reggie Miller's Pacers, to name a few of the more prominent examples. There was a reprieve after Jordan's Bulls broke up after 1998, which opened up things for Tim Duncan's Spurs in 1999. But then the Kobe–Shaq Lakers began their ascension to power in Los Angeles.
• The Golden State Warriors during the brief Run TMC (Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Chris Mullin) era were among the NBA's best offensive teams, yet they never succeeded in the playoffs due to their so-so defense.
• In the '60s, the Los Angeles Lakers were this. Led by Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, the Lakers were often expected to dethrone the Boston Celtics, yet even when they jumped to leads in Finals series and later on added Wilt Chamberlain, they could not overcome Bill Russell and Boston.
  • Part of the reason for this was that Elgin Baylor was getting starter minutes despite playing on destroyed knees and generally shooting poorly (the only thing he was still capable of).
• After a certain point, you get to believe that God simply hates the Indiana Pacers. Take for instance the infamous 2004-05 season, when some of the Pacers' most valuable players were suspended for different parts of the season, but in Ron Artest's (later Metta World Peace, now Metta Sandiford-Artest) case, he assaulted a fan and caused a huge melee, which got Artest suspended for the remainder of the season. This would also be team legend Reggie Miller's last season before retirement. If you thought that was bad, go back to the season before, when the Pacers went 61-21, their best record in franchise history. They reached the East Finals, and it was clearly a golden opportunity for the franchise to finally be champions... Until their playoff series against the Detroit Pistons (the very team that they would face in the notorious "Malice at the Palace"), where an out-of-nowhere shot block at the very last second sent the Pacers home with their tails between their legs. They've yet to recover, really.
  • Reggie Miller in general was a phenomenal talent who could never seal the deal. This is the man who scored 8 points in 9 seconds, who posted game-winning threes over Michael Jordan, whom ESPN's 30 for 30 described as "the reason [New York] never slept", but all he ever led his team to were late-season collapses and finals blowouts.
  • In The New '10s, the Pacers saw a full resurgence under coach Frank Vogel and swingman Paul George, that still fizzles out in a sad way. Their best so far was in 2013, when the Pacers nearly upset the eventual champion Miami Heat. The next season the Pacers got the top seed in the East... while regressing terribly in the final month of the regular season, and afterwards, barely beat the 8-seeded Atlanta Hawks (who were without their top player). Another struggling series against the Washington Wizards ensued. In the Conference finals, the Pacers that begun the season as favorites finally started to show beating the Heat in Game 1... only for two straight and close losses afterwards. And after a close win in Game 5, getting crushed by 25 points in the sixth to end Indiana's series. The Pacers then proceeded to enter 2014-15 on their left foot, losing George to an almost season-long injury and Lance Stephenson to free agency, and despite a late season surge fell out of the playoffs. Come 2015-16, the team resurges, returns to the playoffs, forces a Game 7 against the 2 seed, and the Pacers still became the first team to lose a series to the Toronto Raptors in 15 years. And one year later, their experience with the 2 seed goes even worse, a sweep by the Cleveland Cavaliers, that possibly helped George leave town for the Oklahoma City Thunder. 2018 had the Pacers pushing the Cavs to seven but still losing (add three defeats to the Heat, and LeBron James has killed Indiana five times!) Their luck did not improve any in the following years, as Indiana got swept out of the first round by the Celtics in 2019 and the Heat in 2020, lost the play-in game for the 2021 postseason to the Wizards, and fell way short of the 2022 postseason.
• From the 2006-07 to 2014-15 NBA seasons, the Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James were a major example:
  • Advanced to the 2007 NBA Finals only to be swept by the San Antonio Spurs (final game in Cleveland!).
  • Lost in the 2008 Eastern Conference semifinals to eventual NBA Finals champion Boston Celtics
  • Lost the Eastern Conference finals in 2009 to the Orlando Magic.
  • Lost the 2010 Eastern Conference semifinals to the Celtics in 6 games. Also contained a horrible moment when, with just over a minute and a half to go in Game 6, Cleveland (trailing by a far-from-insurmountable nine-point deficit) seemingly gave up, showing no urgency in trying to score or play defense. This last one is particularly notable because many analysts were of the opinion that LeBron wasn't even trying for whatever reason.
  • And then LeBron himself added insult to injury when he left Cleveland in 2010 for the Miami Heat. Although they were upset by the Mavericks, they avenged it in the 2012 season. LeBron won the regular season MVP, a championship (against the favored Oklahoma City Thunder team) and the finals MVP, while leading his team in points, assists, rebounds, and steals. He did it again in 2013. Meanwhile, the year LeBron left, Cleveland had a 26-game losing streak (a single-season record among American pro sports).
  • LeBron returned in 2014, even attracting Kevin Love to Cleveland and providing a Hope Spot for fans. Despite irregular play, the Cavs still finished as the second-best team of the East, and on the playoffs got their second Finals appearance. Then, against the equally unlucky Golden State Warriors, it was proven Cleveland always gets it worse: having already lost Anderson Varejão in the regular season and Kevin Love in round 1, Kyrie Irving went down after the first game of the decision (where the Cavs scored only two points during overtime), LeBron tried to do things by himself... and a somewhat hopeful 2-1 lead was soon negated by the Warriors winning three-straight (thanks to the efforts of Andre Iguodala who started ZERO games in the regular season yet somehow managed to win the Finals MVP), thus leading to the Dubs breaking a 40-year drought at Cleveland in Game 6. As if Cleveland sports fans hadn't suffered enough already.
  • The Cavs finally averted this in the 2015-16 season, when they finally won a championship by beating the heavily favored Warriors in seven games, becoming the first team ever to overcome a 3–1 series deficit in the NBA Finals.
  • 2016-17 was kind of a return to form: the Cavs easily wrecked the East, only losing one game before a third straight final against the Warriors... where they only won one match, though it at least prevented the Cleveland crowd from seeing an adversary win a title in their home yet again. 2018 had LBJ heroically bringing an underwhelming Cavs team to the final, and then got swept by the Warriors, after which he skedaddled to the Lakers. Took until 2022 for the Cavs to become a postseason team again, ironically in a season where LBJ and the Lakers crashed and burned.
• NBA cousins Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter are widely considered individual-player versions of this trope, to such an extent that nearly EVERY team they play on (they've both played for 4+ teams EACH) happen to find limited success in the post-season. McGrady's Houston Rockets eventually ended a drought of not winning a Playoff series since acquiring him— as SOON as he was sidelined by injury and unable to play. Maybe this trope should be named after McGrady. The curse was finally broken when McGrady won a playoff series in 2013, while healthy... by only playing the last few minutes of game 4 in a sweep of Los Angeles by the San Antonio Spurs. He also reached his first finals - only for the Spurs to lose to the Heat despite almost clinching the title in Game 6.
• The Sacramento Kings in the early 2000s. Fans of every NBA team not named the Lakers could rally around them. They became the NBA's Woobie at that time. They are one of a handful of franchises in any sport to have played in FIVE different cities with only one championship to their name. 2021 marked their 70th year since winning a title. Even worse, the Kings at their peak were a victim of what likely appears to be a fix, swinging the crucial Game 6 of the 2002 conference finals back in the Lakers' favor when the Kings had a commanding lead and a ticket to the NBA Finals in hand.
• The LA Clippers. After decades of losing, the Clippers became NBA contenders thanks to Blake Griffin and Chris Paul. Despite their skill, the Clippers' playoff appearances ended early:
  • During the 2011/2012 season, the Clippers eased past the Memphis Grizzlies in the 1st round, only to be swept by the San Antonio Spurs in the 2nd round.
  • The Clippers became considered as championship contenders during the 2012/2013 season, won their first-ever division title, but they ended up losing in THE FIRST ROUND to the Memphis Grizzlies, the team they beat a year before.
  • In 2013-14, playoff-seasoned coach Doc Rivers arrived, and another Pacific title ensued, as would a Round 1 victory over in-state rival Golden State Warriors. But then despite much effort into upsetting the Oklahoma City Thunder, OKC still beat them. Apart from the playoff choke, the tail end of the 2013-14 season was rough for the Clippers as controversial owner Donald Sterling was involved in a scandal caused by some racist comments he made about blacks watching his games. Thankfully, Adam Silver quickly ended the Clips' misery by banning Donald Sterling from the NBA for life.
  • Before the 2014-15 season started, former incompetent owner and notable bigot Donald Sterling was banned and stripped of the team. There was hope for the Clippers, as they were now owned by billionaire Steve Ballmer (a former CEO of Microsoft), who had the passion (and budget) to improve the team. Likewise, the Clippers were in a better situation compared to their division rivals (the Warriors, despite their talent, were going through a turbulent coaching change, the Suns and Kings weren't exactly elite teams, and the Lakers, who were the Clips' usually successful crosstown-rival, were headed for perhaps their worst season of all time.) Some even thought that the Clips would surprise everyone by winning the NBA Championship. Unfortunately for the Clippers, the Warriors not only stole the Pacific Division crown: they also ended up with the best record in the NBA. Nevertheless, the Clippers (as a 3rd seed) managed to eliminate the Spurs (who were the defending champions) in a hard-fought 7 game series. Round 2 was going well for the Clippers, who built a 3-1 lead on the Houston Rockets. Then they got trounced on game 5, blew a series-winning match at home which the Clips were leading by 19 points after the third quarter, and were crushed by Houston on game 7. To make matters worse: the Atlanta Hawks going to the Eastern Finals made the Clippers the only team that failed to get to the Conference Finals in every season since their adoption in 1971 (which coincidentally was the year the franchise begun as the Buffalo Braves), and the Warriors broke a 40-year title drought (overcoming 1-2 deficits in both the first round and the finals). The 2014-15 season was a CRAPPY time to be a Clippers fan.
  • In the 2015-16 postseason, the Clippers didn't wait until the semifinals to do their fizzling out. This time they blew an early 2-0 series lead to lose to the Portland Trail Blazers in six games, losing both Paul and Griffin on the way.
  • In the 2016-17 playoffs, the Clippers would outdo the previous year's choke by losing in the first round to the Jazz (who had missed four straight postseasons, and had last won a round seven years prior) in seven games. Unlike last year, the Clips were pretty much on the back-seat throughout the series, despite leading 2-1 at one point and having higher-profile star players (although Griffin again injured himself halfway through) than the small-town Jazz. Some even speculated that this loss would signal the end of "Lob City", with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin potentially becoming free agents in the upcoming offseason, which ended up to be true when the former forced a trade to the Rockets during the offseason, while the latter was dealt to the Pistons midway through the next season (the Clippers went on to miss the playoffs by a few games).
  • In 2019-20, having reigning Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard along with Paul George raised the hopes that the Clippers could finally win the big one. And then again the team couldn't get to the Conference Finals, opening 3-1 on the oft-underperforming Denver Nuggets and managing to suffer a horrific collapse in which they had a double-digit lead in each of the last three games yet managed to blow it for a lopsided Game 7 elimination. Perhaps The Sports Guy was right to claim the team had a Native American curse put on them?
  • In 2021, the seemingly impossible happened and the Clippers won two rounds. And in the conference finals, as much as they gave a fight couldn't stop Chris Paul's new team, the Phoenix Suns, who downed the Clippers in 6 games, the decisive one in Los Angeles. 2022 was a sad regression, as the Clippers fell in the play-in tournament, to two teams with very few playoff wins, the Minnesota Timberwolves and the New Orleans Pelicans.
• The Oklahoma City Thunder are a twofer:
  • First, they're a relocation of the equally unlucky Seattle SuperSonics, who after the 1979 title had big names such as Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, but struggled to bypass some better teams (only finals appearance was in 1996... against the Chicago Bulls team that finished 72-10 and only lost one playoff game before the Sonics pushed them to game 6), was the first 1 seed to lose to an 8th, and then got swindled by a new owner who lied that would keep the team while planning the Oklahoma move.
  • Then, the Thunder begun a slow climb towards a dominant team that just can't win the big one: losing the Conference Finals to the Mavs (who would win it all), the Finals to the Heat, trading away rising star James Harden while also losing Russell Westbrook in the playoffs en route to the Grizzlies beating them to the Western finals, and in the season Kevin Durant finally got his MVP award, struggling against the Grizzlies and Clippers before the Spurs outed them in the Conference finals. The following season Westbrook did his best to compensate Durant being the one sidelined by injuries, but the Thunder ended out of the playoffs. 2015-16 had OKC returning to form, beating a strong Spurs team and going up 3-1 on a Warriors team some deemed an Invincible Hero. Then they lost game 5, led game 6 the entire time until losing in the closing minutes, and despite starting ahead on game 7 letting Golden State take it all. And then Durant signed with the Warriors in free agency. Russell Westbrook had an outstanding 2016-17 season that kept OKC in the postseason, but he alone couldn't help against a much better Houston Rockets squad (led by the previously mentioned James Harden), and even as Paul George joined the Thunder the following season, they were beaten by a surging Utah Jazz in 2018 and a good Portland Trail Blazers squad in 2019 (5 games finished on a buzzer-beater). The jinx put on the Thunder by resentful Seattle fans is undeniably powerful!
  • The Thunder's era as contenders ended during the 2019 offseason. First, PG requested a trade to the Clippers to join his fellow L.A.-area native Kawhi Leonard; the Thunder obliged, getting two players and a record five future first-round draft picks in exchange. Shortly thereafter, they dealt Westbrook to the Rockets for Chris Paul and two more future first-rounders. CP3 kept the boat afloat in 2020 and sent the team to the playoffs... against those Rockets with two former Thunder stars, who beat them in 7. Paul then got sent to the Suns in a deal that netted the Thunder several players and yet another future first-round pick. Those deals and draft picks started to pay off in the first half of the 2020s, with the Thunder becoming serious contenders, so we'll see what happens.
• The New York Knicks have been to the Finals 8 times yet have only won the Championship twice: in 1970 and 1973. In 1994, they blew a 3-2 series lead in the Finals and lost the last 2 games to the Houston Rockets. They have also not been to the finals since 1999. After a terrible stretch where incompetent GM Isiah Thomas ran the Knicks to the ground, in 2011-12 the team saw a resurgence that still fell short as rising star Jeremy Lin had to sit out the rest of the season and the playoffs due to a knee injury in late March 2012. A month later, the Knicks would lose to the Heat in their first playoff round in 5 games. When they took 54 wins in 2013, and their first division championship in over ten years, they were knocked out in spectacular fashion by the Pacers in the Semifinals. The following season, despite stellar performances by Carmelo Anthony, the Knicks lost frequently, and a late-season resurgence fell short as they still got one game behind the final playoff spot. In 2014, the Knicks finally hit rock bottom by going on a losing streak that ended up being the longest in franchise history and finishing last overall. Only in 2021 the Knicks finally had a good team that went to the postseason... that lasted just five games.
  • Or, to put it all in a nutshell, the Knicks are the Buffalo Bills of the NBA. (Though they have 2 NBA titles to their name.)
• Since Michael Jordan's second retirement, the Chicago Bulls fell into a Audience-Alienating Era that would have them not reach the playoffs until 2005 and even from that point on, they would often find themselves knocked out of the first round whenever they post a winning season. After a 2010-11 season that saw the Bulls advance to the Eastern Conference Finals before bowing 4-1 to the Miami Heat; the 2011-12 team finished the strike-shortened season with a 50-16 record and the top-seed in the Eastern Conference; only for point guard Derrick Rose to tear his ACL in the opening game of their first-round series with the Philadelphia 76ers; a series that the 76ers won in a 4-2 upset. The next season saw the Bulls advance to the Eastern Conference semi-finals even though Rose would not play a single game despite having been cleared to play in March 2013 and again losing to the Heat. The 2013-14 season saw the Bulls finish 48-34 and 4th in the East only to be upset by the Washington Wizards in the first round 4-1 in a season where Rose returned at the beginning of that season, only to suffer yet another season-ending injury a month later. 2014-15 finally had Rose returning to health, Joakim Noah still at peak form, and the arrival of Pau Gasol. Chicago was third in the East, advanced to the semi-finals, and then were beaten by the Cleveland Cavaliers, the fourth time LeBron James outed the Bulls in six years (before the two Heat wins, he lead the Cavs past them in 2010). 2015-16 saw the Bulls barely miss the playoffs, the first non-postseason in 8 years. 2016-17 had a rejuvenated (if with older stars) Chicago barely scrape into the post-season, steal two games from the top-seeded Celtics in Boston, and then lose four straight, with the decisive game in Chicago. And another bad season followed, as people departed or got injured, with the Bulls only qualifying again in 2022.
• Whenever the Toronto Raptors seem to have become a contender instead of The Chew Toy, they are hit with this. The Raptors only won a playoff round twice in 8 attempts: after the first in 2001, five Round 1 losses in 14 years, thrice having won the Atlantic Division (the last in 2015 being particularly painful as the Washington Wizards swept Toronto); then 2016 had the Raptors finally getting their dues (compensation to Canada having all teams missing the NHL postseason?) with a fourth Atlantic title in 2016, and not only winning their first playoff series in 15 years (against the equally suffering Indiana Pacers) but a second one to reach the Eastern final - both with Toronto being pushed to 7 games, as it seems the fandom will never get it easy. To the point the third finished with the Raptors losing in 6, at home, to Cleveland. And the next two years, the Raptors were swept by the same Cavs (the first at home, the second as the 1 seed), to the point people said the city should be renamed LeBronto after the one who slaughters it in the postseason. That, of course, was before LeBron skedaddled to LA. And the Raptors brought in Kawhi Leonard, making them both win the East without LeBron (though it wasn't easy, given the Conference Finals had Milwaukee opening 2-0 before Toronto won four straight) and then beat the Golden State Warriors who dreamed of a "three-peat", Canada's first Big Four title since the Blue Jays and Canadiens in 1993. But even that would prove a short-lived high, as Leonard left for his native LA in free agency that offseason, joining the Clippers. (The Raptors kept the boat floating, but fell in the Conference Semifinals in 7.)
• The Portland Trail Blazers, who even have the problem of being the only major league team in Oregon,^note Aside from Major League Soccer's Timbers, who consequently have a huge fanbase that even extends to the Distaff Counterpart Thorns. making a dedicated/massive following suffer a lot. Their first playoff appearance after six terrible first years led right to the title. Four seasons falling in round 1 ensued, then a missed postseason... followed by an impressive 21-year streak in the playoffs, which unfortunately led to plenty of first-round crashes and two lost NBA finals (to the Bad Boy Pistons and the Michael Jordan Bulls). The end of it coincided with an Audience-Alienating Era where the team had so many troublesome players that they got the nickname Jail Blazers. Since 2008-09, Portland went to the playoffs 10 times, winning a round only thrice. Not helping the Blazers retrospect is having drafted many injury-prone guys who when good don't last enough (Bill Walton, Brandon Roy) and when underwhelming are picked before better choices (Sam Bowie ahead of Michael Jordan, Greg Oden instead of Kevin Durant).
• In 2011, the Memphis Grizzlies finally ended a long run as The Chew Toy that started back in Vancouver, returning to the playoffs after four seasons and miraculously beating the top-seeded San Antonio Spurs. Unfortunately, the "Grit-and-Grind" era is successful and consistently qualifies for the postseason, but has been unable to go very far - their trip to the Conference Finals in 2013 ended in a sweep by the same Spurs they upset two years prior. The only other time the Grizzlies won a round, in 2015, had them stopped afterwards by the Golden State Warriors who would eventually win it all. And both 2016 and 2017 had Memphis sacrificed right away by... the Spurs! 2018 had the Grizzlies hitting Rock Bottom as their stars ran away and plenty of losing ensued (including a massive 140-79 loss to a so-so Charlotte team). Memphis finally resurged in 2022 with one of the best teams in the league, only for their star Ja Morant to get injured in the second round, opening the path for a Golden State Warriors victory.
• Take away their two Finals victories, and the Houston Rockets have fallen short pretty often. Moses Malone won two MVPs in his six years there, but only got as far as a surprise Finals run in 1981, losing to the Celtics. Hakeem Olajuwon brought the Rockets to the finals in his second season (also losing to the Celtics!), and then suffered until 1994, when Houston won the first of two championships during Michael Jordan's brief retirement. After two more strong seasons losing to the team MJ would trounce in the final (Seattle and Utah), came 12 years without winning a round, even if good players such as Yao Ming and the above mentioned Tracy McGrady were in the roster. James Harden arrived from OKC in 2012, and the team soon became a contender that never missed the postseason... and fell thrice in the first round, along with having serious problems overcoming the Golden State Warriors. Most painfully, in 2017-18 the Rockets, reinforced by Chris Paul, finished with the best result in the league, easily won the first two rounds, and once they had a 3-2 advantage on the Warriors in the Conference Finals, Paul got injured and Houston suffered comebacks in the final two games. The 2018-2019 season added to the misery as the Rockets faced the Warriors yet again in Western Conference semi finals. The Warriors were heavily shredded with injuries including Kevin Durant who usually performs big for the Warriors during the playoffs. This was the best chance for the Rockets to win and make it to the western conference finals and possibly win a championship in the finals, right? In Game 6, the Rockets had total command of the game……only for Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson to put on one of their classic Splash Brother performances and win the game. Even worse, Curry barely scored during the 1st quarter but ended the game with 30 points. In 2020, despite the addition of Russell Westbrook, Houston fared even worse against another star-studded team, the Lakers led by LeBron James, falling in just 5 games. 2021 had Harden and Westbrook jumping ship and a very injury-prone Rockets team finishing last overall.
• The Phoenix Suns have a history of this. Only seven years into existence, they managed to reach the finals, and in spite of their best efforts - including a famous triple-overtime loss - couldn't stop the Boston Celtics. Nearly 20 years of "not enough" later, they rode an MVP season for Charles Barkley to again get to the finals. Against Michael Jordan, so even if by Barkley's admission they saved Chicago from being destroyed in a huge celebratory riot in Game 5, it was still a defeat in six. During the 2000s, coach Mike D'Antoni and star Steve Nash built a flashy and very effective team that frequently finished atop the conference, only to crash in the semifinals if not earlier. After losing the third Conference Final in seven years in 2010, came a whole decade outside the playoffs. Then, the Suns of Devin Booker and Chris Paul rebounded with fury, going all the way to the Finals again! And in spite of opening 2-0 against the Milwaukee Bucks, they then lost four in a row to Giannis Antetokounmpo and his squad, ensuring 53 years waiting wouldn't be enough for Phoenix to get a title. The following year, Phoenix had the best record in the league, and fell to the Dallas Mavericks in round 2, a game 7 at home, by over 30 points. That game also featured the second-worst point differential for a home team in a game 7. At halftime. There even was a point in the third quarter when Luka Dončić had outscored Phoenix by himself, 30–27.
• The Philadelphia 76ers of the New Tens and Early New Twenties are in the midst of one of these, though this is a more frustrating example than most. Dubbed "The Process", The Sixers spent the early part of the Tens intentionally tanking seasons for higher lottery picks. While it has netted the team solid star talent like Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid, the postseason returns have been minimal. The Sixers have had consistent seasons of contention but failed to reach past the Semifinals in a consecutive series of heartbreakers (Mostly thanks to the Celtics). The tragic irony of the underachieving is the Sixers originally underwent "The Process" to begin with hopes to avoid becoming this trope. Even signing James Harden (who left previously-mentioned Houston for Philly in hopes of winning a title) in the 2021 offseason hasn't been enough to push Philadelphia over the top.

Professional Gaming

• In Dota 2, when it comes to The International, in terms of professional organizations, Team Secret is possibly the biggest example in its pro scene. Its first iteration consisted of Puppey, Fly (then known as Simba), N0tail (then known as BigDaddy), KuroKy, and s4. They had some good success but wasn't enough for Puppey, who would kick Fly and N0tail for Evil Geniuses's zai and Arteezy. They were considered to be the most star-studded roster ever made in Europe and had shown it, having won the last four LANs before The International 2015. They only finished 7th-8th after being beaten by Virtus.pro, a disappointing showing for the all-star team.
  • So, in the post-TI5 shuffle, Puppey restarted his team, acquiring pubstar w33ha, and longtime veterans MiSeRy, pieliedie, and EternaLEnVy to make another star-studded roster. This iteration had even more mixed success, apart from a 2nd place finish at The Frankfurt Major and a victory at The Shanghai Major. Unfortunately, Puppey once again kicked two players, this time in w33ha and MiSeRy for Arteezy to once again return and bring Universe this time. This went as abysmal as one would've expected, with Secret finishing last both at The Manila Major and at TI6. What's more embarrassing was that Universe left the team before The Manila Major even ended, returning to EG. For added humor and irony, w33ha, MiSeRy, both on Digital Chaos, and Universe managed to make it to the top 3 with their teams, with DC triumphing over EG in the Lower Bracket Finals to finish 2nd.
  • Post-TI6, Puppey restarted his team once more, making a final roster for TI7 of MP, KheZu, MidOne, and YapzOr, the latter two of which would form a core trio alongside himself. This was a quiet time for the team, and had mixed results as well overall, having to qualify for TI7 through the qualifiers. They finished 9th-12th, eliminated by eventual winners Team Liquid.
  • For the 2017-18 DPC, MP and KheZu left, with Ace and Fata joining in. They would win both seasons of Dreamleague held during the season and finished 4th overall in the standings. They had a much better showing at TI8 but ultimately lost to Team Liquid once again, finishing 5th-6th.
  • 2018-19 DPC: zai returns to Secret, and Nisha joins. They managed to finish 2nd at The Kuala Lumpur Major, and 1st at The Chongqing Major, along with wins at ESL One Hamburg 2018 and Katowice 2019. They have qualified for Dreamleague Season 11, and are looked on right now as the best team in the world, surpassing Virtus.pro. Time will tell if this transitions to a dominant performance at TI9.
• Virtus.pro are dangerously becoming this when it comes to TI. While they finished 5th-6th at TI5, they weren't considered to be favorites, and actually had a good underdog run, culminating in their upset of Team Secret. They didn't qualify for TI6, dropped their roster after that, had an absolute resurgence in the Fall season by signing Lil, Solo, RAMZES666, 9pasha, and No[o]ne in the lead-up to TI7, now considered as favorites, would only finish 5th-6th, falling to eventual winners Team Liquid, were considered the best team in the world in the 2017-18 DPC after swapping Lil for Na'Vi's RodjER, were considered to be the shoe-in to win it all, and would finish 5th-6th once again, this time at the hands of Evil Geniuses.
• For CS:GO from 2015 to the start of 2018, it was the Danish team of Astralis (then once known as Team Dignitas/Team SoloMid). Let's see: 3rd-4th at ESL One Katowice 2014, 3rd-4th at ESL One Cologne 2014, 5th-8th at Dreamhack Winter 2014, 5th-8th at ESL One Katowice 2015, 3rd-4th at ESL One Cologne 2015, 5th-8th at Dreamhack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015, 3rd-4th at MLG Major Columbus 2016, and 5th-8th at ESL One Cologne 2016. See a pattern? They were once infamously known for performing very well in the Majors...until they reach the semifinals, where they always lose. Fans have called this "The Semifinal Curse" for their constant tendency to just choke when they make it to the semifinals. This was averted for a time when they made the pioneering decision to hire a sports psychologist to help with their issue of mentality and won the Atlanta Major, but would be played straight for the rest of the year, where they would once again fall to eventual winners Gambit Esports at the Krakow Major, finishing 3rd-4th. This was eventually (and finally) averted for the second and possibly last time after the Boston Major, where after Kjaerbye's sudden departure and the acquisition of Magisk, would go on an absolute tear for the rest of the year, culminating in a dominant performance at the FACEIT London Major, where in the Champions Stage would go undefeated all the way to their 2nd Major victory, cementing their era. It would be further cemented with their win at the ESL Pro League Season 8 Finals, where they not only won the event itself but with this their fourth ESL/Dreamhack victory, won the $1 million prize of Intel Grand Slam Season 1 as well. One hell of an aversion right there.
• In professional League of Legends, the entire North American region is infamous for being a chronically-underperforming major region, but an exception to this (ironically making them the most qualified for this phenomenon) is Cloud9. Active since 2013, Cloud9 has been the most consistently-performing team in the NA-based League Championship Series, reaching playoffs in almost every split since its inception, but in terms of international tournaments like the Mid-Season Invitational and Worlds, they generally only eek past the group stages, with the furthest they've ever gotten being reaching semifinals in Worlds 2018. This is still better than their local competition (the only other NA team to have ever gotten out of groups was Team SoloMid in Worlds 2014), but it's become a tragically recurring joke that "the last hope for NA is Cloud9", which sadly never seems to mean much.

Tennis

• In the 1990s, British player Tim Henman was the one all home fans followed and cheered for at Wimbledon, even going so far as to have a massive seating area for his fans (Henman Hill), despite being knocked out in the quarter- or semi-finals of every Wimbledon he entered. He admittedly wasn't helped by having to compete during the heyday of Pete Sampras, considered by many to be the greatest tennis player who ever lived, but even after Sampras retired, things didn't much improve for Henman.
• After Henman retired, Andy Murray took up the baton for British tennis fans, being known for years as the best tennis player to never have won a Grand Slam title; he reached four Grand Slam finals, including Wimbledon which no male British player had reached the finals of since 1938, only to lose all of them. He finally put an end to this by winning the 2012 US Open, and two Wimbledon titles after that.
• In a somewhat Hilarious in Hindsight example, Roger Federer used to be considered this. Tipped to be a future Slam winner as young as 16, he proved himself able to regularly beat the best in the world... in the small tournaments. At Grand Slams he lost in the first round as often as not and hadn't even reached a semi-final before his maiden title. With other young guys such as Lleyton Hewitt, Andy Roddick and Marat Safin proving that they could succeed where he failed, many people speculated that he was destined to be the talent who could never come good.
• In another Hilarious in Hindsight example, Novak Djokovic was also considered this when he followed up his maiden Grand Slam title in 2008 with a string of disappointing performances and even retiring halfway through matches with claims of being ill or fatigued. People began calling him "Choke-ovic" and saying that he lacked the mental fortitude to challenge the top players on the big stages. Then 2011 came around and, well, it's safe to say that no one's going to be using that nickname for him anytime soon... or ever.
  • The only tournament where Djokovic still qualifies is the Olympic Games. He started off well, a bronze in 2008. Then, 4th in 2012, first round in 2016, 4th again in 2020, while also pulling from the mixed doubles bronze match (which was thought by many as unfair to his partner, who only once went past a Grand Slam quarterfinal). To match how rivals Nadal, Federer and Murray have gotten the gold in either singles or doubles, Djokovic needs to still be in top shape at 37 in 2024. His adamant refusal of COVID vaccination threw a monkey wrench into this, leading to his deportation from Australia in 2022 (though Australia ended its COVID restrictions later that year, and allowed him to return in 2023) and preventing him from entering the US (the last major country to lift COVID-related border restrictions) until May 2023.
• Kei Nishikori, Milos Raonic, and Grigor Dimitrov were all touted as the "Next Generation" of ATP players in the 2010s who would go on to become the next dominant top players. However, while these players had some success at the Grand Slam level (with Nishikori and Raonic each making a Slam final, and Dimitrov making two Slam semifinals) and could occasionally beat the long-dominant "Big Four" of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray, they ultimately fell short of breaking through the Big Four's monopoly of the Slams due to a combination of injuries (especially for Nishikori and Raonic) and inconsistent performances (especially for Dimitrov) and are now called the "Lost Generation" instead.
  • This trope is also starting to creep into the new crop of "Next Gen" young players. Nick Kyrgios used to be hyped up as the most promising of these players after beating Rafael Nadal to make the 2014 Wimbledon quarterfinals as a teenager, but after making the 2015 Australian Open quarterfinal, he didn't reach that point in any Slam until making the 2022 Wimbledon final (losing there to Djokovic). Kyrgios has also yet to make the top 10 in the ATP rankings.^note Even crueler for him, his 2022 Wimbledon run didn't help him in the rankings. After Wimbledon's organizers announced that Russian and Belarusian players would be banned from the event after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ATP (as well as the WTA) ruled that no ranking points would be awarded. Even Alexander Zverev, the most successful Next Gen player with five Masters and two year-end championship titles to his name, has struggled to translate his Masters success to the major stage with only three Slam quarterfinals and four Slam semifinals reached so far. Lesson of the day: it sucks to be a hyped young prospect in the Big Four era. Finally averted by Carlos Alcaraz, who won the US Open in 2022 and became the first teenager ever to become ATP No. 1 (both current and year-end), following it up with a Wimbledon win in 2023.
• On the women's side, Caroline Wozniacki used to be this, failing to win a Grand Slam singles title despite winning numerous titles and being ranked No. 1 for over a year. Then in 2018, she returned to No. 1 after a six-year absence from the top spot by winning the Australian Open over another former example of this trope: Simona Halep. At the time, she too had yet to win a Grand Slam in spite of making multiple Grand Slam finals, winning many other titles, and being ranked No. 1. But then came that year's French Open, by which time Halep had returned to No. 1, and this time she cashed in, claiming her first Slam title.^PostscriptSadly for Wozniacki, she developed rheumatoid arthritis soon after her Australian Open win, forcing her to retire after the 2020 Australian Open... until coming back in 2023.
• Speaking of Simona Halep, she spent over four years as a consistent top 5 player who won many titles but just couldn't seem to break through to win her maiden Grand Slam title. She lost from a break up in the final set of her first Slam final (to Maria Sharapova at the 2014 French Open) and then from a set and break up in her second and third Slam finals (to Jeļena Ostapenko at the 2017 French Open and the aforementioned Wozniacki at the 2018 Australian Open), leading several people to accuse her of being too mentally weak to win big, until she reversed the script by winning from a set and break down against Sloane Stephens in the 2018 French Open final.
• Anna Kournikova was considered by many to be the surprise package at the 1997 Wimbledon tournament, getting through to the semi-finals despite not being seeded. Afterwards, while she had a successful doubles career (winning two Grand Slam Doubles Tournaments and reaching the #1 ranking in 1999), her singles career was much less successful with her never winning a major and only reaching a career high ranking of #8.

WNBA

• The Chicago Sky of the WNBA were founded in 2005. They didn't qualify for the playoffs in their first seven seasons, due to getting into the playoff race every year, only to trip at the finish line. In 2013, they finally got their first playoff berth, only to get swept by the defending championship team, the Indiana Fever. In 2014 they surprised with a finals run, that still resulted in a sweep by the Phoenix Mercury. After coming up short in the playoffs in 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020,^note The Sky did not qualify for the playoffs in 2017 and 2018 the Sky finally broke through in 2021, winning their first championship, largely in part due to Chicago native Candace Parker, who joined the team in the offseason.
• The Atlanta Dream are the youngest team in the league but are a good example nevertheless. In 2010, they made it to the WNBA Finals and got swept. In 2011 they made the Finals again and got swept again.^note In fairness to the Dream, they were facing the Minnesota Lynx, who had rookie juggernaut Maya Moore and had completed one of the biggest turnarounds in WNBA history. They were prevented from making a three-peat by losing to eventual champion Indiana in the first round. They made it back to the Finals in 2013, only to get swept by the Minnesota Lynx who beat them in 2011. One more finals loss and the Atlanta Dream will become the Buffalo Bills of the WNBA.
• Before Atlanta, there was the New York Liberty. Six years, four Finals, one miracle shot deemed best playoff moment in league history, no championships.

Association Football (Soccer)

• Men's national team examples:
  • Everyone on the England national team, who, despite containing some of the best and most famous players in the world (former Captain Steven Gerrard was, in his prime, quite literally dubbed 'the best player in the world' by legendary former Galáctico Zinedine Zidane) as part of the so-called 'Golden Generation' of the Noughties and often blitzing the qualifiers, haven't won a major tournament since they won The World Cup in 1966. Indeed, despite often high pre-tournament expectations, they are proverbial for exiting in the quarter-finals on Penalties. The 2014 World Cup hit a new low when they failed to even get out of the group stage - and Euro 2016 wasn't much better when they went out in the Round of 16 to Iceland. Then, once pretty much all optimism (beyond hopes that the inevitable humiliation wouldn't be too bad) was gone, a young and relatively untalented team under inexperienced manager Gareth Southgate promptly subverted this trope by fighting its way to the Semi-Finals of the 2018 World Cup, and the 2019 UEFA Nations League (designed to be an in-between competition/lead-in to the European Championship) - though it probably helped that Southgate had previously been the England U-21 manager, coaching most of the players in the squad from junior level, and the resultant team spirit and discipline. They then built upon those semi finals in their next tournament by making the final of Euro 2020. Which they lost in London on penalties!
    • This has actually been explained, with many players of the so-called 'Golden Generation' independently revealing that the 'Golden Generation' was notoriously cliquish; United players stuck with United, Chelsea players with Chelsea, Arsenal with Arsenal, Liverpool with Liverpool, etcetera. None of the players were willing to mix more than superficially or cooperate in any way that might be used against them at club level. The fact that playing for England was treated more as a chore than a privilege also didn't help. The result was eleven phenomenally talented players pulling in different directions and doing whatever they felt like, rather than an actual team. Against weaker opponents and in lower stakes games, this wasn't a problem. At the highest level, it was exposed. By contrast, while Southgate's 'Young Lions' are considered to be notably less intrinsically talented than the 'Golden Generation', they are far more disciplined and cohesive.
  • Scotland, as relayed by George MacDonald Fraser in McAuslan.
  • Wales, until the 2016 European Championships. While not expected to win anything, with players of the calibre of Neville Southall, Ian Rush, Ryan Giggs, and Gareth Bale, they were at least expected to qualify for a tournament - however, until they qualified for the 2016 Euros, the last time they'd been at a major championships, it was 1958 and they'd been knocked out by a young fellow called Pelé. Then they promptly took the footballing world by storm, swaggering to the Semi-Finals in style, thrashing Russia 3-0 and a much-fancied Belgium side 3-1, before apparently running out of steam and losing 2-0 to eventual champions Portugal.
  • Before the Euro 2008 and 2010 World Cup titles, the Spanish football team would also qualify - like their English counterparts, they were infamous for superbly talented players fizzling out at international level.
  • The Dutch team has been described as "the best team that never won anything". The "Clockwork Orange" lost two straight World Cups; Ruud Gullit/Marco van Basten won the European Championship, but bombed in the WC they went to; the generation of Dennis Bergkamp and Patrick Kluivert never went past the semifinals of either the World Cup or European Championships (they even didn't qualify for a WC after being eliminated by Ireland); and the next generation (Wesley Sneijder, Arjen Robben, Robin van Persie) lost the 2010 finals, turning the Netherlands into the only team to qualify for three World Cup finals and lose them all (though the Dutch's Unnecessary Roughness, in the latter case, gained them very little sympathy, especially when compared to the stylish Spaniards). NFL fans could say they're the Buffalo Bills of soccer.
    • Might be rubbing off on the Dutch women. Though they did win the Women's Euro in 2017, ending Germany's two-decade-long stranglehold on that competition, they lost in the 2019 World Cup final. Then again, the USA team that beat them was so strong that one USWNT player said before the World Cup that she thought the USA's bench was better than any of the competition's other teams. In the ensuing Olympics, even a more struggling USWNT still beat the Dutch on penalties in the quarterfinals.
  • The Portugal team has been this recently, with players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Deco, and teams like Porto running the Champions League. The national side especially failed to win the 2004 European Championships, at home in the final, and against Greece, but still lost. This may count as a Moment of Awesome for the Greek side though. In the 2016 European Championships, they managed to avenge the loss as they beat France 1-0 in the final, winning their first-ever trophy.
  • The Egyptian team has a similar story to Portugal's, with the national team dominating Africa and Al-Ahly and Zamalek running the African club-play scene (to say nothing of Al-Ahly's 3rd-place finish at the '06 Club World Cup). Nevertheless, they have qualified for the World Cup just three times (1934, 1990, 2018), never getting past the first round. Egyptians suspect that the good Egyptian players are intentionally not playing up to their usual best, in hopes of better European club contracts.
    • And now the Egyptian team having won the past 2 or 3 African Nations Cup championships have fizzled out of the qualifying stage, finishing bottom of their group and beaten by Niger of all teams.
    • Particularly damning was Egypt's performance in the 2014 World Cup qualifications, in which Egypt dominated until it reached the final round against Ghana, when it lost by an all-but-insurmountable 6-1 in the first leg of the two-game playoff—which included an own goal by Ali Gomaa. Granted, the Black Stars are good, but considering Egypt managed to win 2-1 in the second leg pretty handily... (And of course, Ghana ended up in the "Group of Death" with Germany, Portugal, and the United States, so perhaps another Cup appearance wouldn't have done much for Egypt...).
  • Peru. Their good teams of the 70s only won one continental tournament. Despite great players like Claudio Pizarro, Jefferson Farfan, Paolo Guerrero, Roberto Palacios, and Nolberto Solano, they didn't qualify for The World Cup for 36 years, finishing near last position every single time, except for France 98 when they finished sixth and got eliminated on goal difference, and 2018 when they finally qualified, with Guerrero and Farfan the only players who are recognizable outside the country. And even with that, they got eliminated at the end of the two matches into the group stage after single-goal defeats to France and Denmark.
  • Poor Australia just could not get over the final hurdle of the World Cup qualifiers (apart from a one-off appearance in 1974) until they finally swapped from Oceania to Asia. According to former Australian captain Johnny Warren's autobiography, the Australian team, prior to a match against Rhodesia, got a witch-doctor to curse the opposition goalie, and then failed to pay him, causing him to reverse the curse. Australia then suffered a string of failures in World Cup qualifiers, most famously 1998, where they were leading 2-0 late in the game against Iran, only for Iran to score two late goals, and qualify for the World Cup on away goals. In 2004, television personality John Safran paid another witch doctor to remove the curse, and Australia hasn't missed the World Cup since (even making it to the second round in 2006 and 2022).
  • South Korea in the AFC Asian Cup. A major football power in Asia and historically the most successful Asian football team, having participated in nine consecutive and ten overall FIFA World Cup tournaments, the most for any Asian country. They even once reached the World Cup semi-finals in 2002, being the only Asian (and by extension the first team outside of Europe and the Americas) team to do so.^note Morocco became the second team outside of Europe and the Americas to make it that far in 2022. With their successes in the World Cup one might think South Korea may have been the most success in the AFC Asian Cup. They did win it twice but the last time they won was in 1960, when it was contested by only 4 teams.
  • Indonesia in the ASEAN Football Championship. They are consistently one of the favorites to win the cup but they have yet to do so despite numerous times being the runners-up or reaching the semifinals. Things got worse for them as they were suspended from 2015 to 2016 and dropped like a stone in the FIFA rankings (the only Southeast Asian nations lower than them in the rankings were minnows Cambodia, Brunei, and Timor Leste).
  • The Philippines Took a Level in Badass during The New '10s, but developed a reputation as a talented team that just can't win the big one. Not helping is the fact that The Philippines has one of the highest FIFA rankings in the region (behind only Australia and ahead of traditional powerhouses Thailand and Vietnam), is one of very few Southeast Asian nations to have a recent representative in Europe's "Big 5" Leagues (specifically, Cardiff City's Neil Etheridge), and has a lot of fans who consider the Pinoys as Southeast Asia's next big thing.
  • Mexico is infamous in The World Cup as, between 1994 and 2018, they have been knocked out in the Round of 16 seven times in a row. Seeing as the national teenager team is world champion and the under-23 team is Olympic gold, people usually attribute this to the increasing cynicism of professional football players as they grow older and care more about money than winning. This streak of Round of 16 eliminations was finally broken in 2022... by not even reaching that round in the first place, ending up third in the Group Stage.
  • The Argentina national football team is historically one of the most powerful association football teams, and outside of a decade or two, they have been powerhouses of the sport practically since its inception. However, this hasn't translated particularly well to silverware in recent decades—after winning Copa América in 1993, the Albiceleste went nearly 30 years before winning their next major title. During this drought, they appeared in four Copa América, one World Cup and one Confederations Cup finals, but lost them all (two Copa América to Brazil and Chile each, the latter of which had never won the cup before, a World Cup to Germany, and a Confederations Cup to Brazil). The generation commandeered by Lionel Messi, which has been a major part of four of those six finals, became so infamous for this that many football fans simply no longer wondered where Argentina will end in a competition, but who they would lose the final against. But then in 2021, with Messi approaching the twilight of his career, they defied their history by defeating Brazil in the Copa América final on Brazil's own home ground, and later won the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, against the defending champions France.
  • Since the Velvet Divorce, the Czech Republic national team have never failed to qualify for the European Championships - with a 100% record in the Euro 2000 qualifiers - making the Final in their first appearance, and have made the last eight on three further occasions since. When it comes to the World Cup, they've only been there once. In 2006, where - despite being ranked second in the world in the last ranking before the tournament - they crashed out after the group stage after losing two of their three matches.
  • The Belgium national football team generation that started in 2010 is one of the, if not the finest generation of players that country ever produced, with several mainstays at some of the strongest teams in the world such as goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, playmaker Kevin de Bryune and striker Romelu Lukaku. They had, however, gained some infamy as, despite consistently being ranked first in the FIFA rankings during their prime period, the team had never come close to obtaining any kind of silverware, never reaching World Cup finals (including a Group Stage elimination in 2022) or European Championship semi-finals. It can be compared with Spain in the previous decade, as a group of talented players that never delivered at a national level.
• In women's soccer there's Brazil, which has a team as strong as the male one (one of their players, Marta, was chosen five years in a row and six times in all as the best female footballer by FIFA), but not as victorious, fizzling in both the Olympic Games (two straight 4th places followed by two straight runner-ups... losing both finals to the US team! and it got worse in 2012, when they didn't even reach the semifinals; 2016 at home was a huge Anti-Climax, with the team that won the first two games handily only getting to fourth place; and in 2020 fell in the quarterfinals to a Canadian team who rode a Boring, but Practical game to the gold) and the Women's World Cup (runner-ups in 2007, 3rd place in 1999, two quarterfinals, two round of 16, and three group stages). Brazil's case is also subverted by the fact that they might have had the best female player in the world, but compared to nations like the United States and the European powers, the amount of funding Brazil puts into their women's soccer program is on an amateur level. The Brazilian women's team is underfunded to the point that they're routinely forced to wear old men's jerseys and cleats, even while representing their country at the Olympics and World Cup. Their women's national team is understaffed to the point that the United States routinely brings more team cooks to International tournaments than Brazil will bring an entire staff combined. The Brazilian team simply eats whatever the local cuisine is, and hope it doesn't make them sick. And lastly, while the USWNT will spend a year prior to the World Cup playing dozens and dozens of international friendlies as preparation, the Brazil team will play 2 or 3 games. If anything, the Brazilian women's soccer team is more of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits than anything else.
• Also in women's football was England; despite the funds lavished on the men's teams, it was The Un-Favourite, and even when teams like Arsenal Ladies started taking Europe by storm, the Lionesses were the archetypal 'nearly' team, easily swatted down by the likes of the USNWT. Then came the 2015 World Cup when, as the surprise package, they very nearly reached the final (and lost to Japan in the cruellest way imaginable - Japan counter-attacked late, an England defender had to stick out a leg to block a cross to prevent the easiest of goals, and ended up knocking it into her own net when it could have gone anywhere). This and the way they played their hearts out made them the darlings of the nation, because this was the furthest any British team, male or female, had got since 1990 (the Welsh men's team would match it the next year at the Euros), and the men's team was notorious for its underachieving and apparent apathy. Unlike most examples, they ultimately kicked on and won the Euros against old rivals Germany in 2022, and lost a nail-biting World Cup final to Spain in 2023.
• English Premier League examples:
  • Liverpool FC, until 2010 the team most likely to come third in any competition you care to name. Thanks to prior glory days, they're still a close second in the 'most successful English team of all time' stakes, just make it worse. In some parts of the UK, "Liverpool supporter" is considered roughly synonymous with "masochist". They may have managed a spectacular win in the 2005 Champions League, coming back from 3-0 down against AC Milan (hence the final being dubbed 'the Miracle of Istanbul'. To this day, no-one has a clue how it happened), but not much else. There was a Champions League final appearance in 2007 (also against Milan, who got their revenge), FA Cup and Charity Shield wins in 2006, and a League Cup win in 2012, but the main title Liverpool want right now is the League, having not won it since 1990. Whenever they do look like winning it, via dazzling attacking football spearheaded by a spectacularly talented striker making up for a deficient defence (Michael Owen, Fernando Torres, Luis Suárez), their form invariably collapses the following season, usually because their striker has moved on to bigger and better things (respectively: Real Madrid, Chelsea, and Barcelona). And it's not always just the strikers, either. Even their 2005 Champions League win came at the expense of their domestic season; UEFA had to re-write the rule books to guarantee the previous year's champion a chance to defend their title.
    
    However, a mixture of charismatic manager Jürgen 'the Normal One' Klopp and canny financial work/Moneyball based transfer policies (albeit combined with a willingness to cough up massive transfer fees to get their man) instituted by the owners, FSG (who also own the Red Sox), has revitalised the club. Klopp's appointment in October 2015 restored their swagger, taking a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to the League Cup and the Europa League finals in his first season. The latter was particularly remarkable: they brushed aside arch-rivals Manchester United and pulled off an astonishing 4-3 home victory over Borussia Dortmund. Jut over a year later, they got back into the Champions League, and reached the final, which they ultimately lost to Real Madrid in 2017-18, before stepping up and winning the damn thing in 2018-19 against former fellow Premier League underachievers Tottenham Hotspur, having beaten European giants PSG, Bayern Munich, and Barcelona on the way there. Their domestic season was pretty impressive too: while they lost the Premier League to Manchester City, it was by only a single point - moreover, their tally of 97 would have won them the league any season before 2017-18, and the nearest team to them were Chelsea, a full 25 points behind. At long last ended in the next season, however, comfortably winning the title with seven games still to play. While the following season saw a dramatic collapse, that was more a case of Diabolus ex Machina thanks to a truly ridiculous injury crisis - the two main centre-backs, then their back-ups, and then sometimes the back-ups of the back-ups, all got injured, resulting in Liverpool ending the season with a partnership of a 24-year-old centre-back who'd played in the German second division for the last two years and had been about to leave the previous summer, and a 19-year-old who'd spent the last season playing in the sixth division. That was arguably not the worst of it. And despite that, they managed to win 8 of their last 10 games, drawing the other two, and ultimately sauntering to 3rd place, breathing down the neck of second-placed Manchester United. The following season, they returned to form, and very nearly pulled off the unprecedented Quadruple, this time missing out on winning the League not just by a point but by 8 minutes (City having mustered a last minute come-back against Aston Villa), and a very tight rematch with Real Madrid in Paris that was noted for both the goalkeeping heroics of Madrid keeper Thibaut Courtois who kept Madrid in the game single-handedly, and the horrific mismanagement of policing at the Stade de France that raised a lot of very unpleasant memories of Hillsborough (especially since the immediate response of both UEFA and the French authorities was to blame the Liverpool fans).
  • Chelsea and Manchester City both received massive (if controversial) cash injections in the 2000s and 2010s respectively that suddenly made them contenders for massive silverware hauls, yet the former seemed to keep fizzling out in their attempts to win the UEFA Champions League (twice losing to Liverpool in the semi-finals and once losing to Manchester United in the final), while the latter never quite seemed to get a league championship run together. Then in 2012, Manchester City won the Premier League for the first time since 1968, and Chelsea conquered the Champions League for the first time ever (leading to many jokes regarding this as proof of the Mayan Apocalypse... or maybe just a Man United Apocalypse, given their implosion in the 2013-14 season after Ferguson retired and Moyes took over). City has yet to master the art of succeeding in the Champions League, however, a trend continuing in 2015-16 despite their reaching the semi-finals, and losing the 2020-21 final to Chelsea. This finally ended when they claimed the trophy after beating Inter Milan in the 2022-23 final.
  • Arsenal FC. Despite always being in contention for the League title, they haven't won one since the legendary "Invincibles" season of 2003-2004, consistently finishing either 4th or 3rd in the League, complete with impressive wins at times when it didn't matter...and frustrating losses and draws at times when it did matter. Nowadays, Arsenal has the rather derisive moniker of being "strong against the weak and weak against the strong". Unlike Liverpool, they don't have a rich Champions League history; before they reached the 2006 final against Barcelona, Arsenal had never progressed beyond the quarter-finals. This lack of Champions' League pedigree is a source of frustration to both the fans and manager Arsène Wenger, who could probably win another double armload of Premier League titles and still consider himself a failure if they didn't add a Champions League championship. And just when it looked like they would finally win the league in the 2022-23 season, they suddenly lost steam fast to the point of Manchester City finishing ahead of them by 5 points, snatching their third title in a row. In 2023/24, it was seemingly inverted with the team starting off in second-gear yet keeping pace at the top, only to turn it up at the turn of the year and only drop five points out of forty-five possible to start the year, and yet they do not control their own destiny because Manchester City hold an extra game and are on an equally-impressive unebaten run.
  • Manchester United may have had a reputation as a juggernaut in the Alex Ferguson era, but it wasn't always that way, and even the Ferguson era wasn't exactly smooth sailing:
    • During the late '70s and the '80s (several years removed from the glory years of Matt Busby and the holy trinity of Best, Law and Charlton), they fielded talented squads yet never won a single Football League First Division (England's top flight before the Premier League) title thanks to Liverpool's dominance, which was occasionally challenged by local rivals Everton. Then came the '90s, Eric Cantona, Alex Ferguson and Fergie's Fledglings (Beckham, Giggs, Neville, Scholes, etc.); suddenly, United became the Premier League juggernaut football fans now either love or hate. The power of that juggernaut has faded somewhat following Ferguson's retirement, with United finishing outside the Champions League places in the 2 of the 3 seasons that followed. To add insult to injury, when they did qualify from the Champions League, they promptly failed to get out of the group stage, dropped down into the Europa League and were then swept aside with almost insulting ease by resurgent arch-rivals Liverpool. Nowadays, Man United are commonly seen as a big-spending club (86 million quid for Paul Pogba, anyone?) that flatters to deceive in major competitions (with the exception of 2016 FA Cup and 2017 Europa League wins).
    • As for the Ferguson era, they developed a nasty reputation for fizzling out in the Champions League; despite being a domestic powerhouse and a near-constant Championship presence, the Red Devils only came away with UCL silverware in 1999 and 2008 while losing the finals in 2009 and 2011 (both times to Barcelona). Then again, winning the Champions League is pretty tough; not that it prevents Liverpool fans from mockingly chanting "Five Times" in response to United fans' chants of "20>18".
  • Newcastle United during the late '90s. Despite constantly staying near the top of the table and having excellent goalscorer Alan Shearer, the Magpies never won a Premier League title thanks to powerhouses Manchester United and Arsenal. In particular, manager Kevin Keegan's rant in 1995 - when Newcastle once comfortably led the league table - has achieved memetic status among English football fans.
    "I would love it if we beat them! Absolutely love it!"
  • Tottenham Hotspur are probably England's most infamous example, in some ways being an exaggerated (and worse) version of Liverpool - every year is 'their year', when they would break into the Champions League places, dominated for most of a decade by the so-called 'Big Four' of Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool. They general play attacking football that is delightful to watch, but leaves them with the defense of a colander. They finally managed to do this in 2010/11, following Liverpool's spectacular collapse the previous year, going on a decent run in the Champions League. Then Manchester City happened and Real Madrid bought their star player, making this a case of Bait the Dog. And then came the 2018-19 season, in which they barely qualified for next season's Champions League by finishing fourth, and after a surprising Champions League run (beating Borussia Dortmund, Manchester City, and fellow surprise team Ajax), they lost the final to former fellow Premier League underachiever Liverpool. To put Tottenham's reputation into perspective, over the course of the Noughties and New 10s, the word "Spursy" entered the average football fan's lexicon and came to mean "to consistently and inevitably fail to live up to expectations".
  • Aston Villa in the Martin O'Neill era is an excellent example. They would look like they were going to challenge for the Champions League places, and every year, specifically in March, they would go on a bad run of results and drop out of the challenge. They were in the Championship - English football's second tier - for a couple of seasons, but they returned to the Premier League in 2019.
  • Leeds United at the Turn of the Millennium was perhaps the most devastating example of a talented team failing to live up to its potential, to the point where anyone born prior to around 1990 will consider them one of the country's traditonal big clubs, and anyone born after that will consider them little more than a lesson in how hubris and mismanagement can permanently destroy a club's place at the top table of football. After winning the final pre-Premier League title and then being a solid but largely unspectacular team for the rest of the 1990s, the end of the decade saw a young squad regularly challenge for honours, yet never actually come all that close to winning anything despite runs to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup and then Champions League in successive years. Their failure to win anything (or even qualify for the Champions League more than once) caused the huge sums they invested in players to bring about a spectacular financial implosion and two relegations in three years, to the point where the Football League was forced to apply a number of Obvious Rule Patches when they went into effective bankruptcy in the summer of 2007, simply because there were so few precedents for such a spectacular downfall. They did eventually return to the Premier League after 16 years in 2020, but this ended up amounting to very little as they simply became yet another club who had a surprisingly impressive Premier League debut, only to totally crash and burn in their second season (albeit Leeds did at least string it out to a third season before falling back into the Championship).
• German soccer long had Bayer Leverkusen and Schalke 04, two top teams who just couldn't win a championship despite often best conditions (or in Schalke's case waiting for over 50 years since the last one). Leverkusen even managed to be only second place in three different contests in 2002: the Bundesliga, the DFB Cup, and the Champions League. And for many of Leverkusen's players^note Michael Ballack, Hans-Jörg Butt, Oliver Neuville, Carsten Ramelow and Bernd Schneider, the story does not end there: They formed the core of the 2002 German national team, which went all the way to the final - only to lose 2:0 against Brazil in the first-ever World Cup match between those two. However, poster-child of this trope Michael Ballack (then with Leverkusen) did not actually play in the final as he had gotten his second yellow card in the semifinal and was thus barred from participating (the rule was later changed explicitly to allow finals to include all stars healthy enough to play). As for Schalke and Werder Bremen (another struggling Bundesliga team), their poor form in the league worsened to the point where they were relegated in 2021, ending their respective tenures of 30 and 40 years in the top league. However, both Schalke and Werder Bremen would end up returning to the Bundesliga in 2022, so time will tell if they can make a comeback; things didn't end well for Schalke though as they got relegated again in 2023. Leverkusen would finally avert this trope in 2023–24, going unbeaten in all competitions through mid-April and clinching its first-ever Bundesliga title with five matches to spare.
• Thierry Henry was accused of this at Arsenal. Despite being their record goalscorer and voted by the fans as one of Arsenal's greatest ever players, he was still thought of as being unable to perform in the big games like Cup Finals. Most notable was in the 2006 Champions League Final where the Gunners were leading 1-0 with ten men against Barcelona, Henry failed to score from a one-on-one with the keeper when usually it would have been no problem. Arsenal eventually lost 2-1, and that's the closest they have come to securing that European trophy they most desire.
• Brazilian examples:
  • Vasco da Gama, Botafogo, Palmeiras and Internacional became infamous in the 2000s for going far but tanking in at least one championship per year (Vasco was runner-up 14 times in 12 years◊, and Inter managed to finish second thrice in five Brazilian championships - a runner-up campaign a decade later, in 2020, was arguably even more painful: in the last round, Flamengo lost their match yet still won the title because Inter just couldn't break a 0-0 tie - plus losing to an African team in the FIFA Clubs World Cup!).
  • Atlético-MG had 30 years as this following the first official Brazilian championship in 1971^note in 2011, two tournaments that preceded it were RetConned into being considered Brazilian tournaments too. The team were national runner-ups thrice - one of those undefeated, given the finals were lost on penalties - and reached the semifinal seven times, while also underperforming in the Brazilian Cup and continental tournaments. Then came over a decade of intense suffering, with Rock Bottom being a relegation in 2005. Since 2012, Atlético has returned to contending, but luck only struck their way in 2013 (won the Copa Libertadores) and 2014 (won the Brazilian Cup over Arch-Enemy Cruzeiro) - specially as many decisive games were nail-biters - highlighted by two second place campaigns in the national tournament. The common joke is that the team is unable to win championships a second time around around... until 2021, where they finally won the Brazilian championship again after 50 years and a second Brazilian Cup.
  • Grêmio had this reputation for a period of time going from the late 90s into the 2010s. The last relevant title was a very hard-fought Série B title (in one of the most infamous matches in Brazil's football history, winning with only 7 players and 20 minutes overtime) in 2005 to return to the first division, the team would have a good squad, but would have mediocre standings in the Brazilian Championship table and frequently qualify to Copa do Brasil and Libertadores and reach far in the competition only to lose. The team would later recover by signing ex-player Renato "Gaúcho" Portaluppi as a coach and would win the Brazilian Cup in 2016 and Libertadores in 2017.
• Major League Soccer:
  • The best example is the New York Red Bulls, or the MetroStars, as they were once called. They're one of the founding teams of the league when it started in 1996 and have fielded some very good squads, have one of the most advanced academies in US Soccer, developing a lot young talent^note  Their reserve team, New York Red Bulls II play in the USL Championship (US second division), winning once and frequently getting in the conference finals. Meanwhile the New York Red Bulls U-23 are one of the best performing teams in USL League Two (formerly the Premier Development League, or PDL) and the amateur league National Premier Soccer League (NPSL), and had Thierry Henry, one of the league's biggest stars, on the roster for the last years of his career, yet they have almost no hardware whatsoever: they didn't win the Supporters' Shield^note (the trophy awarded to the team that finishes atop the regular-season table) until 2013 (and proceeded to get bounced out of their first round of the playoffs on late goals by Houston that year), have attended only one MLS Cup Final (2008, which they lost to Columbus), and both times they made the CONCACAF Champions League (2009-10 and 2014-15) they were eliminated in the preliminaries. The one championship they have won was the 2004 La Manga, a pretty minor international designed so cold countries can play a winter tourney. Making matters even worse for the Red Bulls, their city rival New York City FC won the MLS Cup in 2021.
  • The New England Revolution have been just as unlucky. They lost five MLS Cup Finals (including three in a row), and despite winning the 2007 U.S. Open Cup (coincidentally, both closing the three-year slump... and when the NFL's Patriots, who play in the same stadium, lost the Super Bowl after a nearly perfect season!), took seven years to reach another championship game, which they lost to the LA Galaxy in extra time.
• Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg had a legendary reputation for failing to qualify for the UEFA Champions League. For the first decade-plus after Red Bull bought Austria Salzburg in 2005, Salzburg failed to qualify for the group stage, at times under bizarre circumstances, such as losing against F91 Dudelange from Luxembourg in 2012 and conceding two late goals at home against Red Star Belgrade in 2018. However, they vindicated themselves with an incredible Europa League run in the 2017-18 season, only going out in the semifinals at extra time against Olympique de Marseille. That run played a big role in elevating Austria in the UEFA club rankings high enough to get the country an automatic place in the 2019–20 Champions League group stage, with Red Bull themselves being the first beneficiary. In the 2020–21 CL, Red Bull (having won the Austrian title yet again) found themselves in their old nemesis of the final qualifying round, since Austria had dropped a few spots in the UEFA club rankings. This time, they didn't fizzle out.
• Liga MX examples:
  • Atlas, one of Guadalajara's top two teams, not only tend to lose the derby against the local Chivas, but also didn't win a single championship since 1951, at least until the Apertura 2021 tournament. Led by Argentinian manager Diego Cocca, also a former Atlas player, they won against León in penalty shootout, thus finally ending a 70-year drought. They would later win it again in the next tournament, Clausura 2022, this time against Pachuca.
  • Cruz Azul are one of the "Big Four" teams ^note along with América, Pumas UNAM and Chivas yet they didn't win the league from the 1997 Apertura until the 2021 Clausura. During this drought, they reached the final six times and lost them all (although they won a CONCACAF Champions League and Copa MX in between). On the final match of the Clausura 2013 tournament, they lost against rivals América in penalty shoot-out despite dominating most of the match. Because of that match, Cruz Azul is viewed as a Butt-Monkey, and as a result, the term "cruzazulear" ^note to do a "Cruz Azul" was coined as a way of really screwing up what was otherwise a guaranteed victory.^*And was recognized by the Royal Spanish Academy as an official Spanish word in late 2020. Their loser status got worse when they lost again against América in the Apertura 2018 tournament, and against Pumas UNAM in the semifinals of the Guard1anes Apertura 2020 tournament despite leading 4-0 from the first leg of the latter. They finally averted this in the very next tournament, Guard1anes Clausura 2021, in which, led by Peruvian manager Juan Reynoso (who was part of the Invierno 1997 squad that won the league), they beat Santos Laguna in the final match, winning their ninth league and ending a 23-year drought.
• In Colombia, there's América de Cali. During the eighties, it was one of the strongest teams in South America and managed to prove that... by being the only team to lose three Copa Libertadores finals in a row between 1985 and 1987 - two of them (Argentinos Juniors and River Plate) being teams that had never won the competition before. Yet another defeat in the 1996 finals (again against River Plate) makes it the team that has reached the Copa Libertadores finals the most times while winning none of them. In three of those lost finals, club legend Antony de Ávila was part of them, only missing the 1987 finals... only to compensate it by also reaching four lost finals in 1998, playing for Barcelona de Guayaquil.
• Argentine outfit Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata is often mocked in its country due to never winning a top-flight league ever since argentine football became professional in 1931. This is despite the fact it is tied with Newell's Old Boys as the fifth team with the most seasons in the division at 75. Its silverware during that time only contains three second-tier championships, an anniversary cup and a league containing only mid-table teams.
• French powerhouse Paris Saint-Germain has exemplified this trope since they Took a Level in Badass after being acquired by the Qatar Sports Group. On one hand, they are practically The Juggernaut in the French Ligue 1, winning the title almost every year by huge margins. On the other hand, they haven't exactly translated their success to the UEFA Champions League, qualifying to the knockout rounds in almost every year, but never quite reaching the finals (at least until 2020). To make matters worse, post-takeover PSG has boasted phenomenal talents like Zlatan Ibrahimović, Neymar, and Kylian Mbappé, which makes their UCL ineptitude even more embarrassing.
  
  Three painful UCL Tournaments stand out for PSG. In the 2017 UCL first round, PSG led Barcelona 4-0 on aggregate after winning the first leg in Paris, despite Barça boasting of the feared Messi-Suárez-Neymar frontline. Unfortunately, they would go on to lose the second leg 6-1 (conceding three goals in the last seven minutes), thanks to a masterclass performance by Neymar and a last-minute goal by Sergi Roberto. Fast forward 2 years later, and PSG (now with Neymar and Kylian Mbappé in the fold) would find themselves in a much more favorable first-round matchup against a struggling Manchester United side. PSG would win the first leg 2-0 at Old Trafford, and held a seemingly insurmountable advantage due to their two away goals and the subsequent suspension of United talisman Paul Pogba. To the dismay of their fans, PSG would proceed to shit themselves in the second leg, losing 3-1 in Paris and getting knocked out on away goals. If the fact that they lost 3-1 at home to an injury-ravaged United side wasn't embarrassing enough, then the fact that United's series-winning goal was a last-minute penalty kick pretty much seals PSG's memetic reputation as the Buffalo Bills of the UEFA Champions League. And then came 2020. PSG were well on their way to another Ligue 1 title when COVID-19 hit, stopping the French season dead (they would be awarded that title). They would have one match in the next five months (the Coupe de la Ligue final, which they won) before the Champions League resumed, with the eight quarterfinalists going into a "bubble" in Lisbon. They were on the verge of elimination by Atalanta, only to score two goals in added time. Then came a 3–0 semifinal win over RB Leipzig, giving them their first trip to the final... against a Bayern Munich side that hadn't lost a game in that season's CL, and were on a 21-game winning streak in all competitions. PSG ended up losing a 1–0 heartbreaker.

Other Sports

• In men's gymnastics at the Olympics, the Americans have a trend of performing very well in qualifications only to crumble in the final; in spite of finishing in 1st place during the 2012 London qualifications and 2nd place during the 2016 Rio qualifications, they turned in error-riddled routines in both finals to end in 5th place.
• On the women's gymnastics side, it's rare enough to be noteworthy for a female gymnast to win the Olympic all-around title as a reigning world all-around champion, and while women's gymnastics is known in many cases for short careers, this frequently holds true even if the gymnast in question seems to be in a position to win. Ironically, every All-Around gold medal from 1956 through 1972 was a reigning World Champion (when, as it happens, there was a greater interval between the World Championships, which were held only in non-Olympic even years, and the Olympics), but ever since Nadia Comăneci (who was too young for the 1974 World Championships) broke the streak with her win in 1976, it's happened only twice: Lilia Podkopayeva (Ukraine) won the world title in 1995 and the Olympic title in 1996, and Simone Biles (USA) did the same for 2015 and 2016. (The shift is likely due in large part to the fact that the sport underwent a transformation in the 1970s; the pre-1970s style of gymnastics was much less physically punishing, and conequently those gymnasts didn't have the same kinds of short careers and brief peaks that became common in the 70s and beyond.)
• Until he won the Masters in 2004, Phil Mickelson was known as the best player never to win a golf major. That mantle was passed on to Sergio García until Sergio also won his first major at Augusta, this one in 2017. However, Mickelson has still struggled to win the US Open, finishing second a record six times (solo and shared) and yet to win it. Since Sergio's victory, most would point to former world #1 Lee Westwood as the best active player to never win a major altogether.
  • The only under-50 tour majors Greg Norman won were two Open Championships, contested in Great Britain. He was a long-time contender on American soil majors (The Masters, US Open, PGA Championship) but either through his own bad play or miracle shots from other players, he's had an 0-for in those three tournaments. Norman was ranked #1 in the world for over six years, which would be comparable to saying Tiger Woods still has his five Masters victories while erasing away his other 10 major wins and any more in those three he may win in the future.
  • Amusingly, Colin Montgomerie also fit the bill as someone who could never win a major despite several near misses...until he claimed two majors on the over-50 Champions Tour (now PGA Tour Champions) in 2014. ^note And for those who might think these are watered-down events, he won these against some very established professionals, including Bernhard Langer, Tom Watson, and Fred Couples. And with names such as Woods set to turn 50 within the next several years, and others such as Ernie Els, Steve Stricker, Vijay Singh, Davis Love III, Miguel Ángel Jiménez, and Mickelson having turned 50 and easing their way onto the Champions Tour (with Love winning a regular PGA Tour event, Jiménez winning a European Tour event, and Mickelson winning a regular major after turning 50), there is still serious star power among the seniors.
• Phil Gordon. Wrote several books teaching poker. Color-comments several poker tournaments. Has never won a World Series of Poker bracelet, and has in fact never finished higher than third in one (though he does have a high finish of 4th in the main event and has a World Poker Tour title). Most importantly, he got rich playing.
  • This is fairly common among well-known poker players/writers, such as Mike Caro or Doyle Brunson (who singlehandedly popularized no-limit Texas Hold'em and the WSOP and didn't win a tournament in the big-money days). Generally speaking, they honed their skills in ring (live cash) games, which have a very different pace from Tournament Play. Because of the randomness of casino games, it's very easy for one or two bad breaks to ruin an otherwise stellar performance. This is especially common at the WSOP in the post-Moneymaker era, where the sheer number of amateurs means that the winner is basically the player with the most luck that happens to be just good enough to take maximum advantage of it (which, conversely, means that WSOP winners tend not to have nearly as much success before or after).
• Raymond Poulidor finished second three times in the Tour de France, and third five times. Unfortunately, not only did he never win, he never even wore the yellow jersey. Because of this, he became known as the "Eternal Second".^note This was Prior to the Reign of the Dopers. Incidentally, Poulidor was the first cyclist who was drug tested on the Tour and was treated by other cyclists as a scab for doing so. Woobie cred, much?
  • Another example is Gilberto Simoni, who won Giro d'Italia twice during his career and never finished higher than 17th in Le Tour, usually dropping off in the early stages.
• Take a look at the top seeds in Ninja Warrior. There are ten or so competitors (among them Bunpei Shiratori) that consistently pass the second stage. Then recall that only three men have ever won (and one of them, Kazuhiko Akiyama, has had about a 50/50 record of clearing Stage One since - though to be fair, he's suffered chronic injuries). Pretty much all of them fit the trope.
  • This is slightly hard to say for sure because every time someone wins the producers go and change the whole course. They may scale it back if no one wins after so many seasons, but the difficulty is upped constantly.
• The United States men's and women's Curling teams. Every match they have played so far has been decided by the very last rock in the 10th and 11th ends, and always not in their favor.
  • Until the 2018 Olympics, when the men stunned pretty much everyone by winning gold.
• In Rugby Union:
  • The French club Clermont Auvergne. Despite reaching the final of the French Top 14 championship ten times, including three times in the 2000s, and having a squad that many consider being the best in Europe, they never actually won the competition until 2010.
  • The New Zealand national team, the All Blacks, had not won the Rugby World Cup since the first tournament in 1987 despite going into every tournament as favourite, usually when ranked at number 1. They finally won in the 2011 World Cup which was hosted in their home country, but they struggled in the final against their opponent France, winning by just 1 point, even though they easily won when the two sides met in the pool stages. To put into perspective how strange New Zealand's lack of success in world cups is, New Zealand has a positive win/loss record against every other Rugby team they ever played - no team has ever dominated any sport as much and not won world cups as the All Blacks have in Rugby. However, the ABs have since made this trope a thing of the past, successfully defending their World Cup crown in England in 2015.
  • As for France, they hold the record for most losses in World Cup finals (three) and ties with New Zealand for most losses in semifinals (also three). They have yet to win a World Cup.
  • The Crusaders, a team out of Christchurch, New Zealand in the southern hemisphere Super Rugby competition, gained this reputation under two successive coaches, Todd Blackadder and Mark Hammett. They had a squad full of star players and made it to the knock-out stage without fail, but they always fell just short of actually winning the title. Then Scott Robertson replaced Hammett in 2017... and they didn't fizzle out any more, winning the title in 2017, 2018, and 2019. And winning Super Rugby Aotearoa, a temporary NZ-only league created on the fly amid COVID-19, in 2020 and 2021. As well as winning the first two editions of the retooled Super Rugby Pacific in 2022 and 2023.
• Every professional sports franchise in Seattle. In the forty-plus years of the modern sports era, the city has claimed exactly five championships in the Big Four, four in basketball (one by the SuperSonics, who then did the ultimate fizzle and moved to Oklahoma City, and three by the WNBA's Storm) and one in football (when the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII, after 38 years of existence and 34 since the Sonics' title in 1979!).^note Plus four soccer championships, that helped the Sounders build quite a fanbase. Still, the Sounders didn't win the MLS Cup until 2016, and its Distaff Counterpart Reign only finished second in the NWSL... before moving to Tacoma in 2019, though they came back to Seattle in 2022. And as already discussed above, the Mariners baseball team has never managed to do anything ever in terms of winning championships.
• In Australian Rules Football, Collingwood were this from 1958 to 1990, much to the delight of their Hatedom. After Essendon lost to them in the 1990 Grand Final, the Carlton cheer squad (their team being a major rival of both Essendon and Collingwood) rubbed salt into the wound, with their banner for their first match the next year riffing on Essendon sponsor TAC's slogan: "If you lose to Collingwood in a grand final, you're a bloody idiot." Collingwood haters called the Magpies' tendency to choke in the finals the "Colliwobbles", and even post-1990, the fact that they have won only two premierships since 1958 (the aforementioned 1990 and 2010) means the term is still in use.
  • After 1990, Geelong took over the mantle (although that began in 1989 with their grand final loss to Hawthorn). This lasted until they won the 2007 premiership.
  • The Western Bulldogs had won only one premiership in their history (1954), made the Grand Final only one other time (1961) and lost seven Preliminary Finals between 1985 and 2010 before finally breaking through for their second premiership in 2016.
  • As the page quote suggests, Port Power was this during the 2000s. Despite being minor premiers two years in a row, they choked during the finals both times, before finally winning the Grand Final in 2004. They also reached the Grand Final in 2007 but lost it to the aforementioned Geelong. On the other hand, Port Adelaide is the only team in AFL history that never won a wooden spoon.
  • The Richmond Tigers were basically this for the early part of the new millennium. After eleven consecutive seasons out of the finals (2002 to 2012) and only making them twice since 1982, Richmond had its long-awaited return to finals action in 2013, only to be eliminated in ignominious fashion by Carlton, who had been promoted from ninth place to replace Essendon, who was punished by the AFL due to their involvement in a controversial supplements program. Although they made the finals again in 2014 and 2015, they were eliminated in the first round both times, by Port Adelaide and North Melbourne respectively. They missed out on the finals completely in 2016. Then in 2017, they made the finals again... and smashed this trope into oblivion, annihilating their three finals opponents by an average of over 40 points to claim their first premiership since 1980, winning against heavy contenders Adelaide^*this triggers Adelaide's Audience-Alienating Era that gets them their first wooden spoon three years later. They would win again in 2019 and 2020, beating out Greater Western Sydney and Geelong respectively.
  • Essendon hasn't won a finals match since 2004, and in most of their finals matches since have lost by large margins.
  • Carlton has the dubious distinction of having twice (1977 and 2022) spent the entire year in the top tier (top 6 in '77, top 8 in '22), only to miss making finals because of a late season collapse; they lost their last two games in '77, and their last four in '22, blowing late fourth quarter leads in their final two games, a 5-point loss to Melbourne, followed by a 1-point loss to Collingwood in a game where a win or draw would've put them in finals, after holding a double-digit lead for the entire final term.
• In Australia's National Basketball League, the Sydney Kings got the nickname "Violet Crumbles" due to (1) their colors of purple and yellow resembling the packaging for the chocolate bar of that name, and (2) their tendency to disintegrate in the playoffs.
• Mixed Martial Arts
  • David "Tank" Abbott finished second and third twice in his four tournament outings, in spite of plenty of fanfare, due to being an out-of-shape and one-dimensional brawler.
  • Kenny Florian fought at the top level in four different weight classes. He finished second in the inaugural The Ultimate Fighter tournament and challenged four times for various UFC titles, losing each time. He retired without ever winning a belt.
  • Chael Sonnen has lost three championship fights that he was in the process of winning, once in the WEC against Paulo Filho and twice in the UFC against Anderson Silva.
  • Uriah Faber. Between losing his featherweight title to Jose Aldo and being beaten by Frankie Edgar at featherweight he was 10-0 in non-title fights and 0-6 in title fights.
• British marathoner Paula Radcliffe. Held the world record from 2003 to 2019. Three-time winner of the London & New York City Marathons, one-time winner of both the Chicago Marathon and the marathon at the World Athletics Championships. Numerous accolades, including the English Athletics Hall of Fame. But she failed to win a medal of any color in the FOUR times she represented her country at the Olympics, to the point of outright failing to finish in 2004, despite being the overwhelming favorite—she was even well in the lead in 2004 before dropping out.
• Boxing:
  • David Tua picked up wins over four former champions during his career in The '90s and The Aughts, and during his heyday was one of the most famous people, period, in his homeland of New Zealand. He held several regional belts and main-evented cards on US television, but he only challenged for a world title once in 2000 and lost. Despite fan clamor for him to be given another shot, another ten years went by without another world title match before he decided to call it quits.
  • Lucas Matthysse for the most of The Aughts was one of the most feared punchers in the light welterweight division. While he did capture an interim championship, a WBA "regular" championship^note The WBA has more than one belt in some weight classes for monetary gain. The "super" champion is considered the legitimate world champion whenever this occurs and a host of regional titles, and put on a Fight of the Year winner in 2014, but both times he stepped up to challenge for a world title, he was knocked out, with Danny Garcia in particular embarrassing him. He retired in 2018 never having tasted world championship gold.
  • Martin Murray, one of the United Kingdom's top middleweights, has won many domestic titles and headlined cards, but always had the reputation of never being able to beat other top fighters; he's had four world title shots and lost them all. However, two of those are particularly sore, as according to many boxing journalists he should have been a two-time champion, but got robbed on the scorecards in Germany both times.
• In volleyball:
  • Men's volleyball has Italy in the Olympics. They dominated the '90s, with 3 straight World Championships, a World Cup, and eight of the 10 annual World League (now known as Nations League). Olympics results starting with 1992? 5th, Silver (losing to the Netherlands, who they beat in the World Cup and Championship finals), Bronze, Silver (losing to Brazil, who had taken over as the strongest volleyball team), 4th, Bronze, Silver (after winning the semifinal on an heroic comeback, only to again lose to hosts Brazil - who had lost to Italy in the group stage, but rolled over in the finals with a 3-0), and another quarterfinals exit.
  • On the topic of men's volleyball and Olympics, Poland has a dubious honor of five straight quarterfinal exits since The 2000s, despite at least one medal finish in every other tournament (including back-to-back World Championships in 2014 and 2018 and second place at the 2022 Worlds). Their only consolation is that three of these losses were to the eventual champions.
  • The Brazilian women's volleyball team. While they did break the choking in the Olympic Games (1996, 2000: bronze, after losing the semifinals to rival/usual destroyer Cuba; 2004: fell in the semifinal to Russia after losing five straight match points, then again to Cuba in the bronze match) with two straight gold medals and are still the biggest winners of the annual Grand Prix (current Nations League), the girls still struggle in both the World Championship and the World Cup, only getting as high as a silver medal. The 2016 Olympics even broke the good streak by having the girls suffer a heartbreaking comeback by China in the quarterfinals, Brazil's first time out of the semifinals since 1988. The team has since been going through a rebuild of sorts, though at least they redeemed themselves in the following Olympics by winning a silver.
  • Another female example is Russia, who hasn't managed to remain as dominant as the Soviet team was. Unlike Brazil, they did win the World Championship, twice even. And yet in the Olympics, it's at most two silver medals (including three straight quarterfinals exits!), they never won the World Cup, and haven't won the Grand Prix/Nations League since 2002, or even medaled since 2015.
• The German Football League (Germany's premier American Football competition and one of the toughest American Football leagues in Europe) has seen its fair share of this. First Head Coach Troy Tomlin of the Braunschweig Lions (now known as "New Yorker Lions" for sponsorship reasons but still often referred to as Braunschweig) went to five consecutive German Bowls with his team only to lose all of them and quit shortly thereafter. Then, when he returned for the 2013 season, he handed the curse on to other teams. The Dresden Monarchs managed their first-ever appearance in the final after 2011 and 2012 champions Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns had fallen in the quarter-finals to Berlin Adler, the perpetual rival of Dresden. Dresden had a dominant run offense in that year around RB Trevar Deed, and it was he who committed the only turnover in the 34-35 loss in the final on the very last drive sealing Tomlin's first championship. The next three years would all see the same pattern: Braunschweig would handily win its division with Dresden a close second. Dresden, Hall, and Braunschweig would dispatch of overmatched competition in the quarterfinals so that Dresden was to play their semifinal at the Unicorns - only to fall in dramatic and tragic fashion in close games before Braunschweig would dispose of the Unicorns in the final. While Dresden now holds the longest consecutive playoff streak in the North, they have yet to appear in their second German Bowl and yet to win their first one. Meanwhile, Hall seems to have perfected "First in the South, done in the final" into an art form. Oh and that Running Back mentioned above? Yeah, he's been retiring and unretiring from European Football every season since 2013 and despite an earlier stint with the Kiel Baltic Hurricanes (in which he lost the final to Hall), and decent 2014, 2015 and 2016 seasons with the Dresden Monarchs (now on Defense more often than not) he has yet to win the championship he so wants.
• The Philippine Basketball Association has Rain Or Shine, which was a constant contender in The New '10s with the likes of Paul Lee, Jeff Chan, and Gabe Norwood headlining a talented roster which was formerly coached by team-oriented tactician Yeng Guiao, but had only 2 championships to show for during their glory days (relatively paltry compared to the trophy-laden hauls of San Miguel, Purefoods, and TnT).
  • A newer example is Global Port, a talented team (led by the likes of Terrence Romeo (a renowned player in FIBA Asia tournaments) and Stanley Pringle) which rarely ends up making the playoffs. When they do, they often fail to get past the Quarterfinals.
• Lindsey Jacobellis is the most decorated female snowboard-cross athlete ever — 10 X Games championships, six world championships — except when it comes to the Olympics, where she may be the biggest case of Laser-Guided Karma in the history of either Olympics. In the 2006 Winter Olympics, the then-20-year-old had a commanding lead down the final stretch and decided to celebrate with a simple method grab off the final jump, only to crash, allowing Tanja Frieden to pass her for the gold and sending Jacobellis to silver. It only got worse from there:
  • She went off course while trying to avoid a collision and was disqualified from the 2010 Olympic semi-final heat
  • She crashed in the 2014 Olympic semi-final heat
  • After making the finals in the 2018 Olympics, she lost her lead halfway through and finished off the podium in part due to a poorly waxed board.
  • Finally, in 2022 at the Beijing Winter Olympics, at age 36, Jacobellis went wire-to-wire in every round to capture the long-awaited gold, and put to bed the what-if questions that had dogged her for 16 years. It was the United States' first gold in any sport at the Beijing Games in the first five days of competition. As a cherry on top, three days later, Jacobellis added a second gold medal as one-half of the victorious team in mixed snowboard cross.
• American hurdler and bobsledder Lolo Jones. Despite two world championships in the 60m hurdles and various indoor records, her career has been stamped as this trope due to her high-profile shortcomings at the Olympics. In 2008, after winning the national and world indoor championships, she was leading the 100m hurdle finals at the Beijing Olympics until she clipped and stumbled over the penultimate hurdle, plummeting her to a 7th-place finish. In 2012, expectations were higher due to not just continued success, but becoming a celebrity due to various photoshoots and endorsements taking advantage of her attractive appearance, and a well-publicized interview in which Jones admitted she was still a virgin. Jones finished 4th, missing a medal, and had salt poured in the wound when two of her teammates (who won silver and bronze, on top of a gold in 2008) criticized the media and Jones on national TV the next day over Jones being a Spotlight-Stealing Squad. Jones also transitioned to being a bobsled brakeman, and was selected to represent the U.S. in the 2014 Winter Olympics. This was met with public criticism by various bobsledders for the perception of Jones making it on name recognition alone, including one teammate who was left off the Olympic squad stating "I guess I should've been working on gathering more Twitter followers". Jones's sled team finished 11th at the Olympics, the only one of the three American teams not to finish on the podium.
• Welsh hurdler Colin Jackson - who specialized in the 110m hurdles - was, at one stage, the world indoor and outdoor, European and Commonwealth champion and held the world record for more than a decade. His results in the Olympics: silver (1988), 7th (1992), 4th (1996) and 5th (2000).
• Professional bass fishermen Roland Martin, Shaw Grigsby, Bill Dance, and Jimmy Houston all enjoyed great careers on the BASS circuit and became hosts of their own fishing shows. But they never won the Bassmaster Classic, with Dance, Grigsby, and Martin's best finish being 2nd in eight, 16 and 25 appearances respectively, while Houston's best finish was 7th in 15 appearances.
• Sumo wrestler Tochinoshin Tsuyoshi has won the most sansho (special prizes awarded for exceptional performance during a tournament) of any active rikishi and has defeated two Yokozuna. In 2014 after returning from injury he fought his way from the preliminary ranks to the top division in less than a year. He's just good enough to regularly get promoted to the top ranks but not quite good enough to stay there and he’s fallen into a predictable pattern of an incredible showing in one tournament which pushes him up the rankings, followed by a poor or mediocre one in the next that drops him back down. In 2018 he achieved the rank of Ozeki, the second highest in the sport, tying the record for the longest time taken to reach it; and then lost it again, also tying the record for shortest reign.
• Although the BIG3 professional 3-on-3 basketball league has only existed since 2017, the 3 Headed Monsters are already falling into this trope. They are the only team to make the playoffs in all four seasons to date^note (The 2020 season was canceled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic), have never finished below .500, and have played in the championship game twice. The Monsters have yet to hoist the trophy, having lost both of those title games to their nemesis Trilogy.
• Combat robotics has BattleBots competitor Witch Doctor. The bot is a consistent title favorite each season, and even made two finals only to come up short both times. In Season 4, it was knocked out by Bite Force who remains one of the most successful bots overall to this day. Two seasons later, Witch Doctor made it back to the finals only to fall to underdog Tantrum. In the spin-off BattleBots: Champions the bot competed in that final match only to lose to Season 5 Giant Nut winner End Game. In the end, the team just couldn't get their hands on a piece of hardware to the point where fans on the show's subreddit started calling them "the Buffalo Bills of BattleBots".

Professional Wrestling

• As it stands, most would probably go with either The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase or "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig as the greatest competitor to have not been granted the world title. (Never mind Curt Hennig was AWA World Champion in 1987-88, before he went to the WWF). Ironically, DiBiase was promised by the then-WWF to win the WWF Title at WrestleMania IV. However, politics occurred (that didn't even involve him!). WWF wanted The Honky Tonk Man to drop the Intercontinental title to Randy Savage, but Honky refused and threatened to leave WWF with the belt, so WWF caved in and allowed Honky to keep the belt, and gave Randy Savage the WWF title at WrestleMania IV to make up for it.
• Another good contender could be Rowdy Roddy Piper, especially since he got quite a few title matches against Hulk Hogan in the 80s. Hot Rod didn't just lose to the Hulkster every time, he got disqualified every time.
• Then, there's Lex Luger. He choked against Ric Flair (multiple times), Yokozuna (twice), and Hollywood Hulk Hogan... all for either the NWA/WCW or WWF Title belts^note Luger managed to briefly avert this and pinned Hogan clean as a sheet for the WCW World Championship on the Aug. 4th, 1997 episode of Nitro... only to lose it right back to Hogan 6 days later at Road Wild.
• In ECW, Tommy Dreamer had a long feud with Raven in which he continually ended up losing to him. Dreamer finally won on Raven's last night with the company.
• Chris Benoit's angle going into WrestleMania XX, where both Triple H and Shawn Michaels made a huge deal over the fact that, despite receiving numerous opportunities, he always seemed to choke in world title matches, and thus both felt he was not in their league. Guess who won?
• The Road Of Homicide, part revenge, redemption quest over his frustration at not being able to win a single title belt of any kind in Ring of Honor. So he shot for the big one and at the end of the road was Bryan Danielson.
• WWE's angle for the revival of ECW was based on this - Rob Van Dam was built up as, in Joey Styles' words, the greatest competitor to never win a World Title, heading into his battle with WWE Champion John Cena in the main event of the revival show One Night Stand. By the time the show was over, he wasn't without one anymore.
• In New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Toru Yano developed a reputation for being a "spoiler", in that he could somewhat reliably beat many of the promotion's top wrestlers but for whatever reason was continuously unsuccessful when it came to winning title belts, tournaments, wager matches or really anything with a tangible or long-lasting symbolic prize. He mainly existed to make all better wrestlers wait for their success, or "spoil" their good runs. It had a clear effect on his psyche, as Yano began as a somewhat serious and clean technical wrestler but degenerated into an alcoholic who was best known for trying to cheat his way to the quickest victories possible. After seven years his bad luck finally came to an end when he and Togi Makabe of Great Bash Heel won the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Titles. Individual success continued to elude him though.
• Another New Japan case was Katsuyori Shibata. Despite being groomed as one of the company's "Three Musketeers" it took him precisely seven years to win a title belt in the company, or anywhere else in pro wrestling for that matter, a whopping sixteen years of failing to win when something was on the line if his other pro wrestling and mixed martial arts ventures are to be included. Meanwhile the other two, Shinsuke Nakamura and Hiroshi Tanahashi, racked up title belts constantly when they weren't simply enjoying long reigns. Even after Hirooki Goto helped Shibata to win the IWGP Tag Team Titles in 2015 it would be another year before he finally gained a singles belt in the NEVER Openweight Title. A year earlier Goto also helped end Shibata's tournament drought via the World Tag League but he continued to falter in singles tournaments while the other two already had several under their belt with Nakamura winning the New Japan cup that year and Tanahashi going on to win the notoriously difficult G-1 Climax for the second time the next year.
• Hirooki Goto is a bigger fizzler than his friend. Despite receiving eight opportunities at the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship, Goto has lost all of them. Made more egregious in 2016. Goto failed in his eighth challenge for the World Championship and proceeded to finish second in both the New Japan Cup and G1 Climax!
• Ring of Honor pulled this with Tyler Black and Roderick Strong; the latter was 0-15 in World Title matches at one point. Ironically, Strong would defeat Black to win the title at Glory By Honor IX.
  • Even more ironically, Black would go on to win what most fans consider a far more prestigious World title at WrestleMania 31. And that was just the first of his five WWE world title reigns in singles.
• When Pro Wrestling Wave was founded in 2007, Yumi Ohka quickly shot her way into the main event, consistently winning tournaments and multiple bout of the year awards, yet she consistently failed to win a title belt of any kind, with her own Black Dahlia stablemate Misaki Ohata bringing younger wrestlers into the faction to offset Ohka's age and "The World Famous" Kana proclaiming Yumi Ohka had lost the right to call herself Wave's Ace in November of 2012. Ohka's tournament wins made her eligible for another to decide Wave's first singles champion in February of 2013 however and she capitalized by knocking off Ohata and beating Kana in the finals, which she then followed up by finally defeating Kana's Triple Tails to win Wave's Tag Team Titles alongside Ice Ribbon's Hikaru Shida.
• When EVOLVE started, each wrestler's wins and losses were recorded in order to determine who would become champions or get title shots. Chuck Taylor of Ronin proved to be very successful, ending up with the best record in the company, but time and time again he failed to win the belt while his Ronin partners Rich Swann and Johnny Gargano were racking up title belts in EVOLVE's partner promotions FIP and Dragon Gate USA. He eventually abandoned Ronin to form The Gentleman's Club, a group dedicated to his own success, and it led to none as far as winning any title belts in EVOLVE or the rest of the WWN while Gargano would become the inaugural EVOLVE Tag Team winner with Drew Galloway, who was substituting for Swann.
• Cheerleader Melissa had been on every volume of SHIMMER, and for seven years she had come up short in every last title opportunity she had until 2012 when she managed to beat Madison Eagles for the singles title belt.
• Jay Briscoe had been in Ring of Honor from day one and before he challenged Kevin Steen for the ROH World Title, a video montage was shown of all his prior failures to win an individual ROH title belt.
• WWE tried to do this with John Cena in the lead-up to WrestleMania 29, where he even compared himself to Donovan McNabb as a guy who couldn't win the big one should he lose to The Rock again. Tried being the key word, because Cena was already a 10-time champion going into the match, meaning he not only could win the big one, but had done so ten times already.
• Christie Ricci had one of the best records of any PGWA wrestler and earned the most title shots in history. Come her planned retirement in 2015 and still no reigns to her name. Her legacy will be kept intact there because Ricci did win a belt in LLF, another company that worked with Special Events.
• On WWE NXT, Sami Zayn had a reputation as the guy who couldn't win "the big one", losing all of his important matches, which included all his matches at the TakeOver events. In what was an 18-month climb to the top, Zayn finally won the championship at TakeOver: R Evolution.
• Hania The Howling Huntress challenged for different titles and competed in tournaments without ever winning.
• Big Show was known for his poor singles record and constant jobs at WrestleMania, having lost seven single matches. This became part of the build for WrestleMania XXVIII, where Cody Rhodes would constantly mock The Big Show for his inability to "win the big one". This would end up being the WrestleMania where The Big Show finally broke his singles losing streak by defeating Rhodes to win the Intercontinental Championship and joined the list of Grand Slam Champions.
• Sasha Banks was this at WrestleMania until WM 38 in April 2022. She lost all of her first six WM matches; although only of those matches was a singles match, said singles match was a SmackDown women's title match that was the main event of Night 1. Sasha, the champion, was unable to defend her title, losing to the newly-crowned Bianca Belair. Although she climbed the mountain to win five RAW women's titles from 2016-2020, she also added to her "choker" label by never successfully defending any of them. Ended at WM 38 when she and Naomi won the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship (encompassing both Raw and SmackDown) in a four-way match featuring incoming champions Carmella and Queen Zelina, plus Liv Morgan and Rhea Ripley as well as Natalya and Shayna Baszler.
• Wade Barrett. From the onset of The Nexus, it became clear to everyone that management was high on Barrett and wanted to push him. And they tried, several times, only for any momentum he would get to be cut off by an injury or some kind of questionable booking decision. While he did have a prolific career for an upper-midcarder, he never really got to fulfill his full potential as a performer before he was released.

Non-Sports Examples

Advertising

• A commercial for Staples features the main character rattling off a series of office archetypes (the paranoid employee, the lazy employee, etc,) before turning to one employee and saying, "Joe, you continue not living up to your resume."

Anime and Manga

• Surprisingly, the main character of Dragon Ball Son Goku is one of these. He has only won one tournament, the 23rd budokai vs Piccolo, and all others come up short in some, disqualified by technical ringout or quite literal gods getting in the way. Even anime filler and Super doesn't have him win although by this stage in his training, Goku tends to try to avoid winning so as not to attract too much attention.
• As much is said about Kamina of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, he actually hardly ever won a fight on his own, and only ever mostly succeed when fighting with Simon. Granted when they are fighting, Kamina appears to be doing most of the work. Also, he was able to get Simon to stop being such a wimp, basically get the whole story and rise of man thing started yet is mortally wounded when facing and bringing down the series' first extremely powerful foe, but manages to have a lasting impact and come back from the dead as a ghost or something to get everyone out of a Lotus-Eater Machine, which makes him something else entirely. The supplemental material explains why this is. For all his bravado, Kamina never truly believed in his own abilities, which meant he had the lowest Spiral Power levels of anyone in the series. Meanwhile, it's clearly established that Simon ends up having the highest. While Kamina does the work, he needs Simon to back him up, or he is - quite literally - powerless.
• In Pokémon: The Series, Ash is a somewhat downplayed example, as most trainers never win all eight badges in the first place, which is an accomplishment in its own right. However, he only rises above the quarterfinals twice, reaching the semifinals in the Sinnoh League and the finals in the Kalos League, with the latter tournament only having 64 contenders (the others had over 100, involving 1 or 2 extra rounds)^note And in that tournament, he suffered a Diabolus ex Machina. The one exceptions to this are when he took part in the Orange League and the Battle Frontier, which held the same prerequisite of obtaining the respective badges/frontier symbols, but instead of a tournament, Ash would be given the right to battle against the league/frontier’s top-ranked trainer’s, and won.
  • He was very close to averting this in the Kalos Pokémon League, as he reached the finals of that tournament and was VERY close to finishing it off with Ash-Greninja. Unfortunately, Alain and his Mega Charizard X would have other ideas.
  • His losing streak finally came to an end in Alola, where he beat Gladion and won the League, even shocking Ash that he had won. Then, he goes on to beat Leon and become the World's Strongest Trainer.
• Saki (specifically, the Achiga-hen spinoff) presents Shindouji All-Girls' High School from Fukuoka, which had a long history of qualifying for the National high-school mahjong tournament... and getting no farther than the second round. For the current season, they fielded as Vanguard the incredibly lucky Kirame Hanada, hoping to at least survive through the five phases of each round. Alas, they still came up short, though at least they made it as high as the semifinals.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Game Plan, The Rock plays one of these before he meets his long-lost daughter.
• Played with in By the Sword. Alex Villard believes his father was this because his father was a famous modern-day fencing champion who died in a duel with a student of his after finding out that the student was having an affair with Villard Senior's wife. This leads the younger Villard to muse "He spent half his life winning fencing tournaments, but the only time in his life that he was in a fight that mattered he got himself killed". This fuels Villard's win at any cost, no matter how dirty your tactics approach to both fencing and life. Later that student, now out of prison for killing Villard Sr, sets Villard Jr straight. Villard's father had given the student a live rapier while arming himself with only a blunt practice sword and beat the student within an inch of his life with the practice sword. In the end, humiliated by his defeat, (in part because the student had been an Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy back in the day) the student had stabbed Villard Senior In the Back when senior was ready to show him mercy.
• One of the reasons why Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore was such a Jerkass and grew into the villain of the film. Despite his reputation as a great player he was never able to win the championship and get the Golden Jacket. As his strongest competition weren't playing in the tournament this year he seemed like a shoe-in, only his thunder kept being stolen by Happy's violent antics while playing so nobody cared that he was on his way to the championship.

Live-Action TV

• Cowboys Jet & Cord ran The Amazing Race three times, and, due to their ability to blaze through physically or technically based tasks and their huge popularity, were huge favorites to win all three times. However, they lost all three times due to making several small mental or navigational mistakes, all of which accumulated to cost them the win.
• All My Children's Susan Lucci turned in enough magnificent performances to be nominated for an Emmy a whopping 19 times (this is a record). And every one of those times, she was beaten out by another actress before finally winning in 1999.

Music

• Any act that gets lots of critical acclaim but not a lot of sales or chart success.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival infamously had five consecutive singles hit #2 on the Billboard chart, though some of them hit #1 on the rival Cashbox and Record World charts.
• British boy bands are infamous for being unable to achieve much success internationally. One Direction have averted this, but no other British boy band has made it even halfway to their level. Same deal with British girl groups; the only ones to have achieved any real global popularity were the Spice Girls.

Tabletop Games

• In the Battletech parody Critter-Tek, which reinvents Humongous Mecha combat via the rules of baseball, House Mongrel of the Flea Worlds League are described as filled with potential that never quite gets realised, playing well at home, and on the road, and yet somehow always losing 20 games in a row in the middle of the season. The main issue seems to be that they're rife with infighting (parodying the factionalism of the Free Worlds League), and they respond by getting rid of the problem players ... who are also the best players.

Web Original

• Byzantium in AH World Cup is meant to be an Expy of the Netherlands in The World Cup, always one of the favorites to win it all but never actually does. Even in the actual simulations, Byzantium struggled against teams they were expected to win against, drawing all their matches before they were finally defeated when facing another favorite.
• Since 2007, GameFAQs' Contests Board has run a "Video Game Music Contest". 256 songs^note 192 songs in the 2007 edition and 128 in the 2016 edition, single-elimination bracket, vote for which song you like more. To prevent the same songs from dominating year after year, any song that makes it to Round 5 is immediately "retired" from appearing in any future edition of the main bracket and can only return for the occasional Tournament of Champions, which means that making the field year after year requires a certain level of popularity during the nomination phase without ever actually being able to go on a prolonged run. Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke and The Best Is Yet to Come have managed to make the field in all 10 contests.
• UrinatingTree has an entire series of videos, dubbed "A Legacy Of Failure", devoted to analyzing this trope in professional sports. Unsurprisingly, several teams highlighted in the folders above are featured. His own rules for featuring a team in this series are notably stricter than the trope's own definition, specifically:
  1. The team has to have been active in their current league for at least 40 years.
  2. They usually have to qualify for their sport's postseason on a fairly consistent basis.
  3. They have never won their sport's top prize despite all their postseason participation. (This was slightly amended with the 2020 release of the episode for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who last won the Stanley Cup in 1967 and from which point the recap begins.)
  • The series was expanded in 2018 to begin covering coaches with a reputation for playoff futility, with coaches being required to participate for at least 10 years without a championship to receive an entry.

Real Life

• The Rafale fighter plane. Consistently touted by French aviation fans and a few others as close, equal or better than the F-22 despite the disagreements of the foremost authorities on the matter and even a number of French politicians and defense experts. Has been the focus of a major PR campaign in weapons sales by Sarkozy after no foreign sales ten years after going into production to no result, and looks to see either no sales ever or half a squadron's worth of planes. In early 2009 France itself cut production, amidst governmental backroom beatings of the Dassault Thales' managerial staff. Contrast with the highly successful Mirage series, compare with LeClerc.
  • It does, however, easily match or surpass performance of its actual competitors on the export market: the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet (American), Eurofighter Typhoon (British/German/Italian), Saab JAS 39 Gripen (Swedish), and Mikoyan MiG-29M and MiG-29K (Russian). The F-16 has been exported to 25 nations, the F/A-18 to 7, the Typhoon to 3, the Gripen to 4, the MiG-29M to 2, and the MiG-29K to 1. The Rafale, as of October 2011, has yet to secure a single export contract. Then in 2015 Dassault suddenly received a flurry of orders from Egypt, India, and Qatar, with Kuwait, the UAE and Canada considering orders of their own.
  • Interestingly, one of the potential buyers for the Rafale was the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi...which France took a leading role in overthrowing by using their own Rafales to bomb the hell out of his military. Perhaps the new government formed by the rebels, which both saw the Rafale in action and has considerable reason to be grateful to France, will finally provide Dassault the opening they need?
• The Dreadnought line of battleships and all the modern BBs that followed. A fleet confrontation between them never made a decisive contribution to a war. In fact, only once did post-Dreadnought battleships engage each other in a truly significant battle at all, World War I's Battle of Jutland, which was fought to a completely inconclusive result in which both sides withdrew after inflicting relatively slight losses on each other given the size of the fleets involved (28 battleships and 9 battlecruisers for Britain vs 16 battleships and 5 battlecruisers for Germany, plus nearly 200 supporting ships between them).
• William Jennings Bryan electrified the Democratic National Convention with his famous cry of "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." and at the tender age of 36 (only one year older than the Constitutional minimum of 35), he became the youngest major-party nominee in history, and he put his dazzling oratorical power to good use, traveling 18,000 miles in three months, giving 500 speeches in 100 days - he lost by a huge landslide in the Electoral College. He was nominated again in 1900 - and lost by another huge landslide. He sat out the 1904 election, quite rightly realizing that he had no hope of beating popular incumbent Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt stepped down in 1908, Bryan jumped back in and proceeded to lose by his biggest margin ever.
• Similarly, Adlai Stevenson had a reputation as a campaigning orator and suffered two landslide defeats in a row against Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fairness, he was campaigning against the hero of World War II in Europe in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Stevenson seemed to be quite aware of how little chance of victory he had. When a supporter told him that every intelligent American would vote for him, he responded, "That's not enough. I need a majority."
• Thomas Dewey was nominated in 1944 to run against FDR - of course, he lost by a large margin! He was, unlike the other three unfortunates who had to, renominated in 1948 because Roosevelt had died and he was up against the considerably less challenging Truman. Sensing victory, the Republicans were sure such a popular candidate would win - nope.
• Henry Clay, considered by most historians to be one of the greatest Senators in US history, unsuccessfully ran for President three times in the general election (in 1824, 1832, and 1844). He also sought his party's nomination in 1840 and 1848 but was passed over both times in favor of popular war heroes. Clay once complained bitterly that his supporters kept nominating him against opponents he had no chance to beat, and passing him over in years where he would have been virtually guaranteed to win.
• Wayne Owens (D-Utah) served four non-consecutive terms in the US House of Representatives in a relatively safe (by Utah standards) Democratic seat but went 0-for-4 in statewide elections: three Senate races and a run for governor.
• Both of Hillary Clinton's runs for president in 2008 and 2016 ended in failure, despite wide acclaim from political leaders and celebrities. At least in 2016, she made it all the way to the nomination despite a fierce battle with Senator Bernie Sanders, and won the popular vote.
• The Australian Labor Party lost two supposedly certain federal elections in the 21st century. The first was in 2004, with John Howard's popularity fading due to his sycophantic attitude towards George Bush during the War on Terror. The second was in 2019 when the Liberal Party - noticing they'd been losing every poll for nearly 6 years - stacked the deck by making a preference deal with Clive Palmer's party, wherein Palmer gave up any votes his party received to the Liberals in exchange for approvals for his next mining project.

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