Further excerpts from "Advanced Bracketological Studies"
jesse
@ March 15, 2009


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2
[Previous excerpts from my forthcoming book can be found here. Enrollment in this year's class on advanced bracketological studies can be found here. The group ID# is 79883, and the password is "ballsack".]

seal.jpgChapter 2: The Fallacy of Ascertaining Supremacy

The great obsession of sports is determining a champion.  Every sport requires that all teams or individual participants be ranked against each other in a hierarchical fashion.  Most team sports (with a notable exception we will get to soon) fashion a seeded tournament with successive rounds, wherein the winner advances until a champion is determined.  Individual sports like tennis and golf resort to a rankings system, where performance in each event is weighed into an overall score to determine a champion. 

The notable exception is college football, where, at the end of the regular season, a panel of voters selects two teams to play for the championship without the assistance of a formal bracket.  This format has proven highly unpopular among sport enthusiasts; in fact, Barack Obama felt the need to take time out of a busy campaign schedule to decry the lack of a playoff in college football.

What this position assumes (incorrectly) is that the playoff is the best way to determine which team is the best.  All playoffs systems are flawed to varying degrees, and engender the same kind of dissatisfaction.  Nowhere is this more prevalent than in college basketball, the gold standard by which tournaments are to be judged.  64 teams are selected, seeded, and pitted against each other in a month-long experiment in natural selection.  But even this paragon of champion selection is wrought with flaws. Consider:

  • Those who disparage the college football system want an 8-team seeded tournament. Yet, even with 64 teams participating, there are inevitable complains about those teams left outside looking in. 
  • In fact, the argument could be made that the tournament is too large. With 64 teams participating, the eventual champion is required to win 6 straight games.  Even the best teams during the regular season rarely win 6 straight games against regular competition.  Too large a tournament makes it too difficult for the top teams to claim a prize which should, by other objective measures, rightfully be theirs.
  • The whole tournament apparatus hinges on seeds, which is an unscientific process.  Teams must be compared against each other despite playing different schedules and different opponents.
Indeed, this last problem taints most major sports.  The most scientifically accurate way to determine a champion would be to construct a season where each team played identical schedules and competition.  That way, all questions of strength of schedule and margin of victory would be eliminated.  A schedule constructed in this manner with a large enough sample size to smooth out the noise of statistical variations would generate an undisputed champion without the need for playoffs, complicated logorithms, or expert panels.

Naturally, there is not a single sport that does, or would consider, adopting this format.


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daytrader @ March 15, 2009 5:17 PM

I have a few comments on this post:

1) As much as I hate to admit it, golf does have the best form of ranking. In golf it is you versus the field. Your success primarily depends on your performance. Tennis in fact has continuous tournaments just like college basketball has one. Since in tennis there are so many, one can afford to have a poor performance and still have other opportunities to make up for it.

2) I agree that it is a task to win 6 consecutive games to be deemed "champion", but both the "good" and "not as good" teams have to do it. If you are a top team then you should have an easier time winning 6 games than a lower seeded team.

3) Almost all sports are governed by a higher power. Television. In this specific tournament, people like the "Cinderella story". The underdog that moves on. Thanks to the seeds everyone knows who these teams are. The drama is greater in these single-elimination games. TV, and in turn the money that it gives these schools, is exactly what has prevented a college football playoff.

4) I do agree with your assessment of equal strength of schedules. The problem is that with hundreds of schools how can you have a fair schedule? You could argue that there should be only 32 teams in Division I-A, but again money would prevent that from ever happening.

Actually, I would ask you to pay attention to the new experiment that is the UFL, United Football League. This new, and probably soon to be defunct, league has only 4 teams and will have a 6 game schedule. Therefore each team plays every other twice, once at home and once on the road. This might be enough to determine the champion, but in this case the top two teams will play in a Championship Game. This may be the fairest way to determine a true best team that I've ever heard of. Also, these 4 teams have hired 4 former NFL coaches as the coaches of their teams, so perhaps there might be some chance of success. And I don't think Vince McMahon is involved.

yaworm @ March 15, 2009 8:11 PM

One sport will consider adopting this format. "Hatchitooie." I can't tell you much about it, except that it's proprietary, owned by myself, and more of an up-and-coming pastime. There is alot of distance running involved. It's super-lame, so they'll love it in Europe, where people will call it something tarzan-esque, like "Futfall."

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