Was 2024 the worst year in modern Chicago sports history? Numbers don’t lie

On the penultimate Monday of 2024, I took my family to see a Bulls game only to watch them shoot 10-for-48 from 3-point range and lose by 20 to a team missing its two biggest stars. Three days later, I sat in the Soldier Field press box and watched the Bears lose, 6-3.

It was a fitting end because 2024 was the Year of the Loser in Chicago.

The Zodiac symbol is Matt Eberflus’ slack-jawed reaction to time expiring on his Bears career. Or, I guess, just a White Sox logo.

Yes, it was the Year of the Loser in our fair city, which made 2024 similar to 2023 and 2022, but even worse.

In Chicago, losing was a consistent and familiar refrain all year. Each team’s season had a masochistic feel, like shoveling your driveway during a blizzard. The losing started in January and it never cleared up.

En route to a record-breaking season, the White Sox lost 21 in a row over the summer, tying the American League record, breaking their franchise record of 14, which was set in June.  The Bears tied their franchise high (set just two years ago) when they lost their last 10 games of the year.

If it felt like the worst year you can remember in Chicago sports, that’s because it was.

In 2024, which includes parts of two basketball and hockey seasons and last year’s season-ending loss for our NFL team, the five major teams in town — the Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs and White Sox — had a combined winning percentage of .375 (191-318 with one Bulls and one Blackhawks game to go).

Think about it: Chicago’s big five teams lost 62.5 percent of their games in the calendar year. The Blackhawks had the third-best winning percentage in town and it’s .279. To put it in a baseball perspective, it’s like Chicago is one big 61-101 team. And that feels about right, doesn’t it?

How bad was that? Well, it was even worse than our previous worst year, 1999, when the five teams had a combined .400 winning percentage (192-292-15). I know what you’re thinking. What about the 1970s? Well, the losingest year of that decade was 1976, when the five teams went a combined 202-283-12 for a .418 winning percentage. In 1980, the teams went .434.

Last year, the teams finished with a .434 winning percentage, a slight improvement over 2022’s .429, which was the city’s lowest since 1999. Going into the last Bulls and Blackhawks games of 2024, the combined winning percentage of the last three years is .413 (632-899). So, basically. it’s been a little worse than 1976 for three consecutive years.

But it’s not just the black-and-white numbers that made this year so miserable. The totality of the Chicago sports experience was just so dreadful. Even the young budding stars acquired from losing — the drafting of Caleb Williams and Rome Odunze, the arrival of Connor Bedard, Angel Reese’s debut — didn’t bring in wins.

Since the Bulls made a postseason cameo in 2022, there hasn’t been a playoff team among these five organizations.

Only the Cubs had a winning record in 2024, a disappointing 83-79 echo of the season before. The Bulls, who finished 39-43, lost in the Play-In Tournament finale for the second consecutive year. The Blackhawks were a last-place team last season and are a last-place team going into the new year.

The biggest losers in town were, of course, chairman Jerry Reinsdorf’s record-setting White Sox, who went 41-121.

The Sox torpedoed the city’s winning percentage by themselves. Always desirous of the spotlight, the Sox were our No. 1 losers because they set a major-league record with 121 defeats. They’ve been a national laughingstock before — like when they lost 101 games in 2023, for example — but this disaster surpassed our expectations as they became one of the biggest stories in baseball for all the wrong reasons. Even their TV broadcast was a punchline, thanks to their viral rookie play-by-play man John Schriffen.

But the Bears gave the Sox a run for the worst team in the city. Normally, that wouldn’t be a surprise, but this year it was. After all, they had high expectations coming into the season and a 4-2 record going into their bye week. And then they lost their next 10 games going into the season finale on Jan. 5 in Green Bay.

The season started with “Hard Knocks” and delusions of grandeur for Williams, their rookie star quarterback, and the offense. It ends with a fourth consecutive season of double-digit losses and the franchise’s eighth losing season in 12 tries since firing Lovie Smith. For the first time in franchise history, the Bears fired their head coach during the season (and their offensive coordinator).

He wasn’t alone.

The White Sox launched manager Pedro Grifol and the Blackhawks jettisoned Luke Richardson. Teresa Weatherspoon was fired after one year with the Sky, and Frank Klopas, who got the Fire job in an interim status, was pushed into a front-office job.

Blackhawks coach Luke Richardson’s dismissal was one of five coaching changes among the pro teams in Chicago. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

That’s five coaching changes among the pro teams in Chicago, and the Cubs made a move the previous fall. Only Billy Donovan, with his streak of Play-In Tournament appearances, is still around from 2023. The Bulls are, once again, in ninth place in the Eastern Conference.

Losing is nothing new in Chicago, but the spate of firings was unusual. Maybe it was an admission that the losing has to stop, even if most of the people in charge of fixing it have little to no clue how to do it.

Maybe we place too much emphasis on the X’s and O’s and not enough on the Jimmys and Joes?

Craig Counsell was hired last year to take the Cubs out of mediocrity, but they won the same amount of games as they did under David Ross in 2023. Meanwhile, the Brewers easily won the NL Central without an $8 million-a-year manager.

In related news, Cubs president Jed Hoyer is in the last year of his deal and Bears GM Ryan Poles’ status looked a lot more tenuous after his boss president/CEO Kevin Warren big-timed him in the post-Eberflus firing news conference.

Warren was left to offer a silver lining on the Bears’ epic failure.

“One good thing about challenging times, it allows people around you, it allows each one of us to become stronger and stronger. To become committed. To become dedicated. To become vibrant. To really understand what it means when we talk about having character and integrity,” he said during an 8-minute soliloquy after the team canned Eberflus after Thanksgiving.

General manager Ryan Poles listens as Bears president and CEO Kevin Warren discusses the team’s coaching search during a news conference at Halas Hall. (Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press)

No one learns from losing quite like Chicago teams. So much opportunity. And yet, they rarely do learn, do they?

“I’ve never had a streak like this of losing in my playing,” Williams said before the Bears lost their eighth straight game. “So I ask questions. … I ask questions to the guys that may have lost a bunch of games in a row like this or had losing seasons. I ask them questions because the more knowledge that I have prepares me for the future if this ever comes close to something like this again.”

Don’t stop with your own locker room, Caleb. If there’s one thing Chicago has, it’s institutional knowledge about losing. Just ask anybody.

I’m here asking: Where are the ups?

There is no shortage of people who had a bad year in 2024, and remember, we’re only talking about Chicago sports.

And it wasn’t just teams losing on the court, field or ice.

The year began with the Bulls’ Ring of Honor disaster and it didn’t get better.

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The biggest off-field debacle has been the arrival and rocky debut of the city’s new regional sports network, CHSN, which was another “L” for Reinsdorf and his teams. With no Comcast deal done before the holidays, much of Chicago was left without Bulls and Blackhawks games unless they put up a digital antenna or bought a pricey app. The bad PR alone has dominated the news cycle.

We complain about the teams we watch and we complain when we can’t watch them.

Speaking of TV, Eberflus debuted a makeover at the combine and had a star turn on “Hard Knocks,” but still didn’t make it to December, becoming the first head coach in Bears history to be fired during a season. The Bears were primed for a breakout season and wound up back in the muck and mire.

Poles started 2024 in the catbird’s seat and was the Big Man at the Combine, armed with a No. 1 pick for the second consecutive year. But 10 months later, he looked shrunken sitting next to his boss, quiet and sullen, as they took questions about firing Eberflus.

Warren didn’t do his job, get a new stadium deal finalized, and Reinsdorf was frustrated by his attempts to strong-arm a new stadium for the White Sox. (The two teams were supposed to work on a joint proposal for public money, but it fell through.)

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As bad as things got, I swear there were Chicago athletes who had a good year in 2024.

It hasn’t been perfect, but Williams has shown more promise than any young Bears quarterback since, oh, the 1940s. Going into the season finale in Green Bay, he had thrown for 3,393 yards, 19 touchdowns and just six interceptions.

His greatest struggle was the opposite of the classic Bears QB’s biggest flaw: His low interception total might be proof he’s not taking enough downfield chances. Still, I’ve been impressed with how he carries himself in the public eye and that he’s suited up for every game. It was a rough year, but he’s still standing and he’s still slinging.

Shota Imanaga came over from Japan with expectations of being a back-end of the rotation stalwart for the Cubs. Instead, he was their ace, making 29 starts and finishing with a 15-3 record, 2.91 ERA and 174 strikeouts. He was also an entertainer, which was an add-on for a completely boring Cubs team.

Bedard, the first pick of the 2023 draft, finished off his rookie year by winning the Calder Trophy. He has reminded people recently of why he’s such a star but the sluggish play of his team — which resulted in Richardson’s firing — has dimmed his overall effect in Chicago. How often do you hear a non-diehard talk about him?

One of Chicago’s biggest stars was Angel Reese, the Sky’s rookie power forward who was an All-Star and a national celebrity. (Michael Hickey / Getty Images)

Aside from Williams, though, perhaps the biggest star in terms of wattage was Reese, the Sky rookie power forward who has a keen understanding of marketing and her particular role in the burgeoning women’s basketball media ecosystem. She can also play. Every week, it seemed like Reese was setting a record (some more meaningful than others) as a rookie. Many of my most popular stories this year involved her and only some had a Caitlin Clark angle. Reese has work to do — her offensive game is lacking polish — but she was not only an All-Star and an all-rookie player, but also a national celebrity.

We have too few of those in Chicago.

Reese and Williams are poised for big sophomore seasons. The Cubs just added Kyle Tucker, the Blackhawks will get another top draft pick. There are reasons to watch in 2025, but are there reasons to believe?

I wouldn’t expect any parades, but I would expect the Bears to get their stadium deal (in Arlington Heights) finalized. CHSN will work out a deal with Comcast to deliver a lot of lackluster games to Chicago.

The Bears need to nail their next coaching choice. The Cubs need to find a way to win their division. The Bulls are in competitive limbo, while the Blackhawks are trying to develop their young players on the fly. The White Sox are attempting to not be complete embarrassments. Good luck to new manager Will Venable in that endeavor.

But after 2024, it can’t get worse, can it?

We say that all the time, and unfortunately we know the answer.

(Photo of Matt Eberflus: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)