The 29 most hopeless fan bases in professional sports

6. Detroit Lions

Last championship: 1957 (NFL championship)

Last winning season: 2014

It is a franchise so frustrating that two record-setting, jaw-dropping talents — Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson — deemed that early retirement from the sport as a whole would be better than continuing to adorn the Lions’ colors every fall.

The Lions are one of four current NFL teams that have never played in a Super Bowl, and in all honesty, they have only gotten close once: Way back in 1991, when the Washington Redskins easily disposed of them 41-10 in the NFC Championship game. Otherwise, after riding Sanders to marginal success throughout the 90s, the Lions have been bland to downright awful throughout the rest of the past 50 years.

They have the eighth worst winning percentage in NFL history, which would seem to say there are a number of teams that have it well worse.

Not true. That’s because the Lions have as much as a 30-year head start on some of the franchises below them, and only the Arizona Cardinals have played in excess of 1,000 games (as the Lions have). In short, Detroit has been worse, more often, than almost any team in history.

And at least the Cardinals have made the playoffs once in each of the past few decades — including a Super Bowl appearance in 2008. Before the Lions made the playoffs in 2011, it had been 12 years since they had played a 17th game in a season (when they made it as an 8-8 Wild Card). Between that time, the Lions lost 128 out of a possible 176 games — good for a .272 winning percentage.

This also included their 0-16 season in 2008, which made them the first team in history to not win a single game in a season. How did they follow that up? By winning two the next year, to make their 32 game run in 2008-09 a 2-30 spread, which equals an .062 winning percentage.

That alone is good enough to qualify them as providing as high of a bar of disappointment as could be imagined. But somehow, it gets worse.

Next: 5. Buffalo Bills