Coming Up Short: A Cleveland Sports Odyssey

This book is a kind of report card on Cleveland sports teams from 1966 to 2007.

While it doesn t provide detailed stories about individual players, it gives a thorough review of the Cleveland teams failures and successes since the Super Bowl era began in 1966. The book first paints the overall picture and provides the statistics underneath the scar tissue of some of Cleveland s stunning failures. Then the book probes deeper into the sub-periods from 1966 2007, including the long drought of 1970 1985 (when all of the teams were disastrous), the resurgence of the Indians between 1995 and 2001, and the exciting 2007 season in which both the Cavaliers and Indians came very close to winning it all.

For passionate number crunchers, in an appendix, the book also compares Cleveland teams with other cities teams using statistical models. The analysis shows that Cleveland sports teams should have won four championships in the forty-two year period from 1966 2007. No other city underperformed by a larger magnitude.