The regular season did that. By this I mean sports, of course, specifically the major team sports, although you could apply the concept to any number of competitive reality TV shows, too. But no, though playoffs might make for compelling television, they are not proving who the best team is. On some level, I think we are all aware of this, but have forgotten it in the eye of this current mania, this televised landscape with more and more teams added every year.
A simple thought experiment can help prove this point. As is often the case, it’s watching a similar concept in a totally different realm which first forged this unlikely connection in my head. Gordon Ramsey has this relatively new show where he’s rustling up a batch of contenders, from various backgrounds, to determine which one of them he thinks makes for the best all around business person. He does this by coming up with a wildly different challenge every week, at the conclusion of which (in case you couldn’t guess), the worst performer of that episode is sent packing. And so on, as he winnows the candidates down from 12 or whatever, to a single champ.
My wife and I watched the first season religiously, as soon as every new episode dropped. And though highly entertaining, this thought suddenly occurred to me after we made our way through six or seven of these. At which point I remarked to her that I wasn’t convinced at all that this process was determining the “best” all-around candidate. Reason being that the greatest, most well rounded talent might have gone home after the first week. He could have possibly annihilated the competition in weeks 2-11 or whatever, and the first challenge just so happened to be his lone weak spot. Or maybe he just had a single bad day, you name it.
It seemed to me that the most accurate way to determine a champion would be to grade them every week, let everyone stick around for the duration of the series, then see who had the highest cumulative score. Presented these two options, I’m not sure who would argue that this isn’t more likely to produce a superior result, as opposed to this current cutting/chopping/elimination method running riot all over TV these days. Or in other words, I soon realized, my idea of a cumulative score…it kind of sounds a little bit like the regular season in a sports league, doesn’t it? As opposed to these single elimination playoffs we’ve grown so addicted to.
The primary argument against this, quite naturally, is people bellyaching, “well yeah, but that doesn’t make for very exciting TV! Playoffs are way more entertaining!” This is what we’re really talking about, when defending sports playoffs, though we have long since lost sight of that, a line which was probably obliterated at some point during the 1960s. The playoffs make for more gripping television, I get that. Just maybe tone it down with the chest thumping about this determining who the year’s big champion was, because it isn’t.
Another offshoot of this is people attempting to argue with scholastic seriousness some variation of the “stakes are getting higher” or that “the pressure is mounting” and so on and so forth. But I have to disagree with this as well. From a pure statistical standpoint, with 12 contenders, you’re at about a 9% chance of winning it all in week one, given a level playing field, down to a whopping 50% should you make it to the last showdown. It’s actually getting progressively easier to stick around.
This bears out in my limited first hand experience as well. About the only thing I can personally compare it to would be playing in poker tournaments. I have always, always considered the pressure to be pretty much gone by the time you make the final table. The most stressful point by far is just surviving into the money (what we might call “the playoffs”) and a somewhat distant second would be cracking the final table (a.k.a. maybe what you’d call the league championship round). And then having nine or ten guys at the final table itself is more nerve wracking than being down to heads up.
I secretly considered myself some flukish weirdo for thinking this, until working up the nerve to admit as much to other poker players, who it seems have almost unanimously agreed with me. Because this isn’t at all how these events are portrayed in the media, whether you’re talking about poker or team sports or even golf for cooking shows or what have you. Just remember that the next time some announcer is gushing about how some rookie must have nerves of steel because he doesn’t seem nervous at all playing in the World Series – well, no, I’m guessing that his stomach was a roiling sea during the last week of the regular season, when his team was fighting for its playoff life. Everything after that has been gravy.
This year’s baseball playoffs have dealt me a winning hand, so to speak, in writing this article, too. I actually started it before all three 100 win teams were bounced out in the early going, by vastly inferior squads. But man, that gift certainly helps sell my case. Also, is it me, but aren’t baseball commentators the most contradictory bunch in the land? (anything can happen in the playoffs, you just have to get there! But the playoffs definitely determine who the best team is! Strikeouts are a ho hum triviality if you’re discussing hitters; if you’re discussing pitchers, however, they indicate how unbelievably filthy this dude is! Getting named to an All-Star game is this sport’s highest honor! That’s why Stan Musial and Willie Mays are LEGENDS, because they made this exclusive club for 20 years straight! And this year we have forty two first time All-Stars! Forty two! Is that exciting or what!? Dave Kingman totally sucked; however, we are supposed to think that the even worse Kyle Schwarber is amazing!
And so on. All of which makes their takes on these proceedings especially suspect. But it’s no coincidence that the randomness quotient seems to have increased – not just here, but in every major sport – with every playoff team added. This is why I think we should just stick to referring to a team as that year’s Super Bowl or NBA champion or whatever, as just that, the playoff champion, but stop right there. Any reference to a best team should be limited to those who put up the best regular season record.
In fact if we ever encounter an alien species in some distant galaxy, and pose these questions to them, as neutral outsiders who presumably never trifled with our foolish earthly sports, they would probably consider the answer to this following scenario so obvious as to render it not worth asking. But I’m going to venture forth and voice it here anyway:
Oh great wise alien beings, which would you consider the superior method for determining eternal universal overlord status, at least until the next season of warfare begins?
a) Every team in the league spends a series of months battling in everyday combat against a wide range of their opponents. At the conclusion of this marathon, the battalion with the best record shall be crowned as the best team.
b) Following the conclusion of the above referenced regular season, approximately 40% of what are essentially – but not exactly – the best teams must henceforth compete in a series of single elimination tournaments, squared off against one another. Whoever survives such randomness will be crowned as the champion.
More than a little laughable when phrased as such, isn’t well? Well, even so, I don’t imagine we will overcome our obsession with these playoff series anytime soon, and that’s fine. They certainly are entertaining enough. However, should that ever happen, I have an interesting proposal that might work better. Who knows, some years it could even be more exciting, and would definitely better establish who the best team is.
Returning to baseball, how it would work in this instance is that every team would play out their seasons in exactly the same fashion. At the end of September, though, only the teams with the best eight records advance, period. We can do away with divisions, maybe leave the American and National Leagues intact for tradition’s sake, and take the top four from each – something to that effect. This is what’s known as “the cutoff” (and come to think of it, this is similar to how “the cut” works in a golf tournament).
Those eight teams don’t start pairing off into traditional playoff matchups, though. Instead, what happens is that the month of October continues as basically an extension of the season. Every team plays a three game series against the other seven teams. This forces them to essentially keep playing the same type of baseball they have been, with none of the weird breaks that first round byes have foisted on some teams, and skating by with basically two decent starting pitchers, et cetera.
This stacks up to 21 games, and in the current format, some teams could play as many as 22. So I believe this concept is doable. If you wanted, the top two at the end of October could still square off in a World Series, although maybe you’d have to scale the regular season back to its old tally of 154 games played.
And something similar could be staged in the other major sports as well. It’s entirely possible the owners could make more money with this concept, too, and that it might lead to greater drama overall. But I’m not holding my breath on this score, the odds of it actually happening. We all know that these leagues tend to run an idea into the ground before they ever begin to think about overhauling it. So we’ll probably see 75% of the teams making the playoffs before all is said and done.
But there is hope. For example, I think we’re already starting to see public interest in All-Star games slipping to the point that the NFL has toyed with this idea of scrapping theirs entirely. For the time being, they’ve gone with tinkering to completely overhauling it, as a last ditch means of keeping the patient alive a bit longer. And who knows, something this drastic could happen with this whole concept of the playoffs as well. Maybe by, say, 2123, we might have a league with its ratings in the doldrums, looking for new ideas and ready to embrace this change. Right around the time we discover those aliens, in other words. Until then, just remember that the Atlanta Braves were this year’s best baseball team, and despite who won the World Series, it does not alter this fact.
