Mandy Jensen: Um... ["Peyton Manning" is] like — how do I put this? When someone has this great reputation, but you always wonder why, because, when it really counts, they can't deliver?
[...]
Ted Trimble: Yeah, fine, but... still — why a Peyton Manning? I don't get it!
Chris Graham: I think you're missing the point! Uh — basically, the point is: like the rest of us, you bought the Arizona hype, and, when they did their usual Peyton Manning, you got burned!
[...]
Ted Trimble: Yeah, fine, but... still — why a Peyton Manning? I don't get it!
Chris Graham: I think you're missing the point! Uh — basically, the point is: like the rest of us, you bought the Arizona hype, and, when they did their usual Peyton Manning, you got burned!
— Saturday Night Live, ESPN's NCAA Tournament Pool Party
This person is rarely successful: they might look good on paper, but when it counts they fizzle out.
Supporters will claim he is the greatest thing since sliced bread, they’ll say that all the high-stakes failures do not prove anything because he really won them, and they will attack anyone who tries to point out that he can't deliver when it counts.
Compare Fake Ultimate Hero, where most people seem to realize they are not that great, and Small Name, Big Ego, when it's the person himself who has a bloated self-esteem. May overlap with Crutch Character, depending on how long they hold out before this trope comes into play: they can still make important gains for their team early on, even when they lose their steam by the time they reach the climatic matches.
The Trope Namer is the SNL sketch quoted above, which Manning, the former Trope Namer, was hosting after he won the Super Bowl.
Manning himself was playing Ted Trimble with Jason Sudeikis as Chris Graham.
This is different from Informed Ability in that the person might have the skills and you have seen them, but they are not able to finish the job with them. May be the result of Always Second Best. A villain who regularly faces an Invincible Hero is likely to be this. Often the result of being Well-Trained, but Inexperienced.
No real life examples for sports, please - as per Real Life Troping, unscripted sports are not tropable.
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Advertising
- A commercial for Staples features the main character rattling off a series of office archetypes (the paranoid employee, the lazy employee, etc,) before turning to one employee and saying, "Joe, you continue not living up to your resume."
Anime and Manga
- Surprisingly, the main character of Dragon Ball Son Goku is one of these. He has only won one tournament, the 23rd budokai vs Piccolo, and all others come up short in some, disqualified by technical ringout or quite literal gods getting in the way. Even anime filler and Super doesn't have him win although by this stage in his training, Goku tends to try to avoid winning so as not to attract too much attention.
- As much is said about Kamina of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, he actually hardly ever won a fight on his own, and only ever mostly succeed when fighting with Simon. Granted when they are fighting, Kamina appears to be doing most of the work. Also, he was able to get Simon to stop being such a wimp, basically get the whole story and rise of man thing started yet is mortally wounded when facing and bringing down the series' first extremely powerful foe, but manages to have a lasting impact and come back from the dead as a ghost or something to get everyone out of a Lotus-Eater Machine, which makes him something else entirely. The supplemental material explains why this is. For all his bravado, Kamina never truly believed in his own abilities, which meant he had the lowest Spiral Power levels of anyone in the series. Meanwhile, it's clearly established that Simon ends up having the highest. While Kamina does the work, he needs Simon to back him up, or he is - quite literally - powerless.
- In Pokémon: The Series, Ash is a somewhat downplayed example, as most trainers never win all eight badges in the first place, which is an accomplishment in its own right. However, he only rises above the quarterfinals twice, reaching the semifinals in the Sinnoh League and the finals in the Kalos League, with the latter tournament only having 64 contenders (the others had over 100, involving 1 or 2 extra rounds)note . The one exceptions to this are when he took part in the Orange League and the Battle Frontier, which held the same prerequisite of obtaining the respective badges/frontier symbols, but instead of a tournament, Ash would be given the right to battle against the league/frontier’s top-ranked trainer’s, and won.
- He was very close to averting this in the Kalos Pokémon League, as he reached the finals of that tournament and was VERY close to finishing it off with Ash-Greninja. Unfortunately, Alain and his Mega Charizard X would have other ideas.
- His losing streak finally came to an end in Alola, where he beat Gladion and won the League, even shocking Ash that he had won. Then, he goes on to beat Leon and become the World's Strongest Trainer.
- Saki (specifically, the Achiga-hen spinoff) presents Shindouji All-Girls' High School from Fukuoka, which had a long history of qualifying for the National high-school mahjong tournament... and getting no farther than the second round. For the current season, they fielded as Vanguard the incredibly lucky Kirame Hanada, hoping to at least survive through the five phases of each round. Alas, they still came up short, though at least they made it as high as the semifinals.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Game Plan, The Rock plays one of these before he meets his long-lost daughter.
- Played with in By the Sword. Alex Villard believes his father was this because his father was a famous modern-day fencing champion who died in a duel with a student of his after finding out that the student was having an affair with Villard Senior's wife. This leads the younger Villard to muse "He spent half his life winning fencing tournaments, but the only time in his life that he was in a fight that mattered he got himself killed". This fuels Villard's win at any cost, no matter how dirty your tactics approach to both fencing and life. Later that student, now out of prison for killing Villard Sr, sets Villard Jr straight. Villard's father had given the student a live rapier while arming himself with only a blunt practice sword and beat the student within an inch of his life with the practice sword. In the end, humiliated by his defeat, (in part because the student had been an Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy back in the day) the student had stabbed Villard Senior In the Back when senior was ready to show him mercy.
- One of the reasons why Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore was such a Jerkass and grew into the villain of the film. Despite his reputation as a great player he was never able to win the championship and get the Golden Jacket. As his strongest competition weren't playing in the tournament this year he seemed like a shoe-in, only his thunder kept being stolen by Happy's violent antics while playing so nobody cared that he was on his way to the championship.
Live-Action TV
- Cowboys Jet & Cord ran The Amazing Race three times, and, due to their ability to blaze through physically or technically based tasks and their huge popularity, were huge favorites to win all three times. However, they lost all three times due to making several small mental or navigational mistakes, all of which accumulated to cost them the win.
- All My Children's Susan Lucci turned in enough magnificent performances to be nominated for an Emmy a whopping 19 times (this is a record). And every one of those times, she was beaten out by another actress before finally winning in 1999.
Music
- Any act that gets lots of critical acclaim but not a lot of sales or chart success.
- Creedence Clearwater Revival infamously had five consecutive singles hit #2 on the Billboard chart, though some of them hit #1 on the rival Cashbox and Record World charts.
- British boy bands are infamous for being unable to achieve much success internationally. One Direction have averted this, but no other British boy band has made it even halfway to their level. Same deal with British girl groups; the only ones to have achieved any real global popularity were the Spice Girls.
Tabletop Games
- In the Battletech parody Critter-Tek, which reinvents Humongous Mecha combat via the rules of baseball, House Mongrel of the Flea Worlds League are described as filled with potential that never quite gets realised, playing well at home, and on the road, and yet somehow always losing 20 games in a row in the middle of the season. The main issue seems to be that they're rife with infighting (parodying the factionalism of the Free Worlds League), and they respond by getting rid of the problem players ... who are also the best players.
Web Original
- Byzantium in AH World Cup is meant to be an Expy of the Netherlands in The World Cup, always one of the favorites to win it all but never actually does. Even in the actual simulations, Byzantium struggled against teams they were expected to win against, drawing all their matches before they were finally defeated when facing another favorite.
- Since 2007, GameFAQs' Contests Board has run a "Video Game Music Contest". 256 songsnote , single-elimination bracket, vote for which song you like more. To prevent the same songs from dominating year after year, any song that makes it to Round 5 is immediately "retired" from appearing in any future edition of the main bracket and can only return for the occasional Tournament of Champions, which means that making the field year after year requires a certain level of popularity during the nomination phase without ever actually being able to go on a prolonged run. Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke and The Best Is Yet to Come have managed to make the field in all 10 contests.
- UrinatingTree has an entire series of videos, dubbed "A Legacy Of Failure", devoted to analyzing this trope in professional sports. Unsurprisingly, several teams highlighted in the folders above are featured. His own rules for featuring a team in this series are notably stricter than the trope's own definition, specifically:
- The team has to have been active in their current league for at least 40 years.
- They usually have to qualify for their sport's postseason on a fairly consistent basis.
- They have never won their sport's top prize despite all their postseason participation. (This was slightly amended with the 2020 release of the episode for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who last won the Stanley Cup in 1967 and from which point the recap begins.)
- The series was expanded in 2018 to begin covering coaches with a reputation for playoff futility, with coaches being required to participate for at least 10 years without a championship to receive an entry.
Real Life
- The Rafale fighter plane. Consistently touted by French aviation fans and a few others as close, equal or better than the F-22 despite the disagreements of the foremost authorities on the matter and even a number of French politicians and defense experts. Has been the focus of a major PR campaign in weapons sales by Sarkozy after no foreign sales ten years after going into production to no result, and looks to see either no sales ever or half a squadron's worth of planes. In early 2009 France itself cut production, amidst governmental backroom beatings of the Dassault Thales' managerial staff. Contrast with the highly successful Mirage series, compare with LeClerc.
- It does, however, easily match or surpass performance of its actual competitors on the export market: the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet (American), Eurofighter Typhoon (British/German/Italian), Saab JAS 39 Gripen (Swedish), and Mikoyan MiG-29M and MiG-29K (Russian). The F-16 has been exported to 25 nations, the F/A-18 to 7, the Typhoon to 3, the Gripen to 4, the MiG-29M to 2, and the MiG-29K to 1. The Rafale, as of October 2011, has yet to secure a single export contract. Then in 2015 Dassault suddenly received a flurry of orders from Egypt, India, and Qatar, with Kuwait, the UAE and Canada considering orders of their own.
- Interestingly, one of the potential buyers for the Rafale was the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi...which France took a leading role in overthrowing by using their own Rafales to bomb the hell out of his military. Perhaps the new government formed by the rebels, which both saw the Rafale in action and has considerable reason to be grateful to France, will finally provide Dassault the opening they need?
- The Dreadnought line of battleships and all the modern BBs that followed. A fleet confrontation between them never made a decisive contribution to a war. In fact, only once did post-Dreadnought battleships engage each other in a truly significant battle at all, World War I's Battle of Jutland, which was fought to a completely inconclusive result in which both sides withdrew after inflicting relatively slight losses on each other given the size of the fleets involved (28 battleships and 9 battlecruisers for Britain vs 16 battleships and 5 battlecruisers for Germany, plus nearly 200 supporting ships between them).
- William Jennings Bryan electrified the Democratic National Convention with his famous cry of "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." and at the tender age of 36 (only one year older than the Constitutional minimum of 35), he became the youngest major-party nominee in history, and he put his dazzling oratorical power to good use, traveling 18,000 miles in three months, giving 500 speeches in 100 days - he lost by a huge landslide in the Electoral College. He was nominated again in 1900 - and lost by another huge landslide. He sat out the 1904 election, quite rightly realizing that he had no hope of beating popular incumbent Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt stepped down in 1908, Bryan jumped back in and proceeded to lose by his biggest margin ever.
- Similarly, Adlai Stevenson had a reputation as a campaigning orator and suffered two landslide defeats in a row against Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fairness, he was campaigning against the hero of World War II in Europe in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Stevenson seemed to be quite aware of how little chance of victory he had. When a supporter told him that every intelligent American would vote for him, he responded, "That's not enough. I need a majority."
- Thomas Dewey was nominated in 1944 to run against FDR - of course, he lost by a large margin! He was, unlike the other three unfortunates who had to, renominated in 1948 because Roosevelt had died and he was up against the considerably less challenging Truman. Sensing victory, the Republicans were sure such a popular candidate would win - nope.
- Henry Clay, considered by most historians to be one of the greatest Senators in US history, unsuccessfully ran for President three times in the general election (in 1824, 1832, and 1844). He also sought his party's nomination in 1840 and 1848 but was passed over both times in favor of popular war heroes. Clay once complained bitterly that his supporters kept nominating him against opponents he had no chance to beat, and passing him over in years where he would have been virtually guaranteed to win.
- Wayne Owens (D-Utah) served four non-consecutive terms in the US House of Representatives in a relatively safe (by Utah standards) Democratic seat but went 0-for-4 in statewide elections: three Senate races and a run for governor.
- Both of Hillary Clinton's runs for president in 2008 and 2016 ended in failure, despite wide acclaim from political leaders and celebrities. At least in 2016, she made it all the way to the nomination despite a fierce battle with Senator Bernie Sanders, and won the popular vote.
- The Australian Labor Party lost two supposedly certain federal elections in the 21st century. The first was in 2004, with John Howard's popularity fading due to his sycophantic attitude towards George Bush during the War on Terror. The second was in 2019 when the Liberal Party - noticing they'd been losing every poll for nearly 6 years - stacked the deck by making a preference deal with Clive Palmer's party, wherein Palmer gave up any votes his party received to the Liberals in exchange for approvals for his next mining project.
