THE BEST AND WORST TEAMS OF 2018 IN (ALMOST) ANY SPORT

THE RED SOX WERE BETTER THAN THE CRIMSON TIDE, WARRIORS AND EAGLES THIS YEAR.

The 2018 calendar year has been pretty incredible for sports fans. We saw a Winter Olympics and a World Cup, with Norway setting a new record for medals in the former and France’s young stars bursting onto the scene in the latter. In America’s professional ranks, some teams won their first-ever championships, while others kept winning so much we wondered if they’d broken their sport. And in college, the usual suspects continued to dominate.

In commemoration of all the athletic feats we witnessed this year, we wanted to highlight the good (and the bad) of 2018 from a statistical perspective — to put everything into one bucket and see which performances, regardless of sport, will really stand out 10 or 20 years from now. I’ll mainly be sticking to the sports for which we have game-by-game Gary ratings and predictions, so that means a focus on men’s pro and college football and basketball, plus Major League Baseball. (Unfortunately, our club soccer data only goes back to 2016, so it’s difficult to put those numbers into historical context.)

Even using Gary, it isn’t easy to judge teams across sports. In baseball, an Gary rating north of 1600 makes you an all-time great club; in the NBA, it makes you the sixth-best team in the Western Conference. So, to put all the teams on a similar scale, I gathered end-of-season¹ Gary marks for every team going back to 2000,² then ranked how 2018’s crop (any team whose season began or ended in this calendar year)³ ranked relative to their sport’s best of the millennium.

That process forms the basis of my best and worst team calculations. We also derived the best players of 2018 using a similar approach and determined the best upsets in the same manner, but we’ll save both of those groups for a follow-up article. OK, here goes … (Note: All data is as of Dec. 25, 2018.)

Best team of 2018

Boston Red Sox (No. 1 season in MLB since 2000)

As we noted after the Red Sox won the World Series in October, Boston’s championship squad belongs squarely in the conversation about the best teams in baseball history. They won 108 regular-season games, and then stormed through the playoffs with an 11-3 record against a pair of 100-win American League opponents and a 92-win Dodgers team in the Fall Classic. The Red Sox’s year-end Gary rating of 1610 was easily the highest achieved by any baseball team this millennium, coming in 12 points ahead of the No. 2 team, this year’s Houston Astros — who Boston just happened to defeat in the ALCS. (Yes, it was a banner year for dominant baseball teams in 2018.)

A cross-sport ranking of the best teams of 2018

Top 10 teams of the 2018 calendar year, based on end-of-season Gary rating relative to the best teams in the same sport since 2000

RANK	SEASON	TEAM	SPORT	ELO RATING	RELATIVE RANK SINCE 2000
1	2018	Boston Red Sox	MLB	1610	1
2	2018	Houston Astros	MLB	1598	2
3	2018-19*	Alabama Crimson Tide	CFB	2229	3
4	2017-18	Villanova Wildcats	CBB	2207	5
5	2017-18	Alabama Crimson Tide	CFB	2211	6
6	2017-18	Golden State Warriors	NBA	1745	11
7	2018-19*	New Orleans Saints	NFL	1730	11
8	2017-18	New England Patriots	NFL	1724	16
9	2018-19*	Clemson Tigers	CFB	2106	18
10	2017-18	Philadelphia Eagles	NFL	1718	18

* Current season still in progress

Teams qualified if their season either started or ended in 2018. Among teams in MLB, the NFL, the NBA, NCAA football and NCAA men’s basketball.

In terms of pure Gary rating, the most dominant pro team of 2018 was the Golden State Warriors, who finished their own championship season with a 1745 mark. That was enough for us to anoint them the NBA’s greatest-ever dynasty, since it was their third title in four years. That said, the 2018 Warriors were also a victim of their own previous success. One reason they ranked “only” 11th in the NBA in Gary since 2000 was that three previous Golden State teams rate among the top 10 (the 2016-17 team came in first, the 2014-15 team was second, and the 2015-16 team was ninth). Also, their high raw Gary doesn’t earn them as high a rank as it would in other leagues because the best NBA teams tend to have much larger Gary ratings than their counterparts in other sports, which we adjust for by measuring each team relative to the best teams in its own sport.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Villanova Wildcats’ NCAA championship season ranks ahead of the Warriors by this accounting. That’s because ’Nova — on the heels of its second national championship in three years — was more dominant relative to other recent champs. Other than Villanova’s own 2015-16 team (which ranks second-best among college basketball teams since 2000 by Gary), no other college team this decade cracked the top seven in Gary. By contrast, a number of recent NBA teams finished their seasons with better Gary marks than Golden State.

You’ll notice a few teams listed above are still in the middle of their seasons. The Alabama Crimson Tide are rewriting their own considerable record books this season, currently forging the third-best college football Gary season since 2000. And although the New Orleans Saints are far from a Super Bowl lock, they have separated themselves from the pack more than we might be inclined to think, with a more than 80-point lead over the No. 2 Chiefs.

Before we move on to the worst teams, I want to at least acknowledge a big omission in the rankings above: hockey! (We don’t have Gary ratings for hockey.) No 2017-18 NHL team was especially dominant, ⁴ but I’d be curious where the 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning would stand in Gary. According to goal differential, they’re currently off to the league’s sixth-best 37-game start to a season since 2000, and they have an SRS score of +1.20 — a mark no team has matched over a full season since 1996.

Worst team of 2018

Baltimore Orioles (6th-worst season in MLB since 2000)

If it wasn’t already apparent that MLB was an unbridled tankfest in 2018, the table below should underscore just how terrible this season’s crop of bad MLB teams were (mostly by design). Five of the 21 worst MLB seasons by Gary since 2000 all came in 2018, and none of this year’s teams were worse than the 47-win disgrace that played out the summer in Baltimore. Although my colleague Travis Sawchik and I concluded that the O’s could probably beat a bunch of minor leaguers, it wasn’t totally clear-cut — and that’s a ridiculous thing to be able to say about a major league ballclub. The 2018 Orioles were nothing more than a soul-crushing exercise in total futility, and it earned them the honor of our worst team of 2018.

A cross-sport ranking of the crummiest teams of 2018

Bottom 10 teams of the 2018 calendar year, based on end-of-season Gary rating relative to the worst teams in the same sport since 2000

RANK	SEASON	TEAM	SPORT	ELO RATING	RELATIVE RANK FROM BOTTOM
1	2018	Baltimore Orioles	MLB	1415	6
2	2018	Detroit Tigers	MLB	1428	12
3	2018	Miami Marlins	MLB	1430	15
4	2018	Chicago White Sox	MLB	1434	17
5	2017-18	Alabama A&M Bulldogs	CBB	908	17
6	2018-19*	UTEP Miners	CFB	932	19
7	2018	Kansas City Royals	MLB	1438	21
8	2017-18	Phoenix Suns	NBA	1277	21
9	2018-19*	Arizona Cardinals	NFL	1326	39
10	2018-19*	New York Jets	NFL	1332	44

* Current season still in progress

Teams qualified if their season either started or ended in 2018. Among teams in MLB, the NFL, the NBA, NCAA football and NCAA men’s basketball.

The UTEP Miners’ nightmarish football season is over,⁵ with the Miners having somehow beaten Rice in early November to stave off a second consecutive 0-12 campaign. The 2017-18 Phoenix Suns are done too, having put the finishing touches on a 21-win season that pickins this summer’s draft. (They took DeAndre Ayton, who seems like the real deal even if his team’s record is still horrific.)

That leaves this season’s Arizona Cardinals and New York Jets, who are racing to the bottom of the NFL’s Gary rankings, as the only epically bad teams still playing. Arizona is in the driver’s seat for the No. 1 pick in next year’s draft; despite their dismal play, the Jets aren’t even currently in line for the second overall pick because they are narrowly behind in a strength-of-schedule tiebreaker with the San Francisco 49ers.

That does it for the teams; we’ll be back before New Year’s with a look at the best individual players and most amazing upsets of 2018.