Is this the best time to be a sports fan in Kansas?

As Royals danced in the street to celebrate their World Series victory and Wichita State basketball fans rev up for a season that will likely continue its unprecedented success, it’s natural to wonder if this is this the best time ever to be a sports fan in Kansas?

But what about the early 1990s, when the Chiefs were in the playoffs every year, the Jayhawks made two final Final Four appearances and Kansas State began a decade of dominant football?

Or the mid-1980s, the last time the Royals won the World Series and the previous era of Shockers’ Missouri Valley Conference dominance?

Or even the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Chiefs won the Super Bowl and the Jayhawks played in the Final Four and the Orange Bowl?

Our method

To limit our analysis, we focused just on the most popular teams in Kansas: the Chiefs, Royals, Jayhawks, Shockers and Wildcats.

Every person has his or her favorite sports and favorite players, so the best time to be a sports fan for each person will differ. But in this analysis, we treat each Kansas team equally. For collegiate accounting, we included basketball and football because of their popularity nationally.

While considered, we didn’t include Shocker baseball because collegiate baseball does not have the same following on a national level. We certainly appreciate that for some sports fans in Wichita nothing will top the 1989 national championship in baseball.

Most teams in postseason

For many fans, entering the postseason is what makes a season interesting, because it means your team has a chance to win it all.

By this metric, 2013 was the best year to be a Kansas sports fan. That’s because seven teams were involved in the postseason: WSU’s and KU’s men’s and women’s basketball teams made the NCAA Tournament, as did the K-State men; the Chiefs made the playoffs; and K-State played in a bowl game.

The best three-year span was 2013-2015, with 18 total postseason appearances.

1993-1995 came in second with 13; it was mostly the same teams then, except the Chiefs were in the playoffs every year but the Shocker men and women were not.

Most postseason games played

One of the best ways to measure how good a year it was to be a fan is to count how many post-season games Kansas teams played. This allows you to count all the excuses you had to go out drinking or scream at the TV.

According to this metric 2015 is the best year ever to be a sports fan in Kansas because there have been 22 total postseason games.

The best three year span is again 2013-2015, with a total of 56 postseason contests for fans to watch. The next best era was 1984-1986 with 29 total postseason games.

The problem with this that it gives extra weight toward the Royals because baseball teams play more games in the postseason. So it’s no coincidence that these two eras overlap with Royals’ postseason runs.

It also prioritizes recent years over past years because every sport has added more games to their postseason schedule over the last 30 years.

Most postseason games won

If you are a sports fan, you care not just about how many trips to the postseason your team plays, but how well it does when it gets there.

But it turns out that in Kansas the number of games won in the postseason correlates strongly to the number of games played. If anything this only further emphasizes how strong the past four years have been.

Kansas teams have won 45 postseason games since 2012. The years 1985-88 (25) were the next best four-year span.

Most rounds of postseason play

If you look at just how many rounds of postseason play a team advances, that makes a Shocker win in the NCAA Tournament just as important as a series win for the Royals. So baseball doesn’t unduly influence the results.

2013 tied 1981 with 15 rounds of postseason play. These were years in which the Kansas college basketball teams did well in the NCAA Tournament.

But it under-emphasizes the achievements of the football teams, such as the Chiefs, who made the Wild Card in 2013, or the Wildcats who were only able to play in a single bowl game each year.

Weight achievement

A better way to measure sports fandom would be to weight each team’s postseason performance equally. That way it doesn’t matter how many playoff games are played in each sport, just overall how well the team did.

It may only have taken the Chiefs a couple games to win the Super Bowl in 1969 but that’s arguably as impressive a feat as the Royals winning the World Series after 16 postseason games in 2015.

After we weight the teams*, the best years to be a Kansas sports fan were 1981 and 1995. In 1981 all three college basketball teams made it several rounds in, the Royals played in the divisional playoffs and the Jayhawks played in a bowl game. In 1995 the Chiefs went to the divisional playoffs, KU made the Sweet 16 and both K-State and KU football teams finished in the top 10 of the AP poll.

When the Shockers went to the Final Four in 2013 it was just the third best year in Kansas sports; the Chiefs made the playoffs and both the Jayhawks and Shockers made the women’s NCAA Tournament.

The era from 2012 to 2015 is still the best era ever to be a Kansas sports fan but not by much. The weighted score from 1994-97 was 52, a successful era for the Chiefs, Jayhawks and Wildcats. That’s just a little below the 61 points from 2012-2015.

*METHOD OF WEIGHTING: We weighted each team’s postseason performance to give 7 points for a championship, 6 points for being runner-up, 5 for reaching the semifinals, 4 for the quarterfinals and so on. (For college football 7 points for a championship, 6 for a top 5 finish, 5 for top 10, 4 for top 15…etc.)

SO WHO IS THE BEST?

If you thought this was the best time ever to be a Kansas sports fan, there is a lot of evidence to back you up. But it’s not as decisive as you think. The mid-1990s was also a pretty great time to be a Kansas sports fan.

This story was originally published November 4, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Is this the best time to be a sports fan in Kansas?."