Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Championships are a form of measurement

A mighty cheer was heard across the nation (especially via Twitter!) these last two weeks as a college football playoff has been planned. I think people are actually more collectively pleased by the end of the BCS than the implementation of a playoff--but that's human nature for you.

Personally, I'm agnostic about the entire thing, despite the fact that one of my two teams (Texas) would have benefited from a playoff in 2008. (Of course, Texas would have had to play an additional game in 2005--but Vince Young sneers at the notion that any other team would have taken home the hardware that year). Some years, there is a clear-cut #1 and #2 team. Other years, not so much.

What I ultimately reject is the idea that any playoff system is designed to crown the "best" team as champion. the champion is the team that the rules of a tournament deem to have won the games that matter most according to the rules of the tournament. That doesn't mean the team is the best.

To take an extreme example, nobody would seriously contend that the Cup champion of a European soccer association is, in fact, the best team in the country. Liverpool won the FA Cup this year in England (the FA cup is England's highest rated knockout tournament). Liverpool, however, finished in 8th--an astounding 37 points behind Manchester City and Manchester United. Both Manchester City and Manchester United had records of 28/5/5. Liverpool went 14/10/14. Forgetting Liverpool for a moment, teams from lower divisions of English soccer (such as Millwall a few years back) have actually made the final and (in the more distant past) eight such teams have even won the cup.

In England, the Premier League Champion is considered the best team in the land. The FA Cup seems generally considered to measure something quite different, such as the ability to rise to the occasion. It captures magic, not excellence. Manchester City were the best team in England; Liverpool caught lightning in a bottle.

Today, Andy Staples--a writer I generally admire--engaged fans on Twitter, ultimately defended the playoff method of crowning champions, suggesting that the Giants (a 9-7 team) were worth champions because they "beat the best teams when it mattered most."



With respect, that's a tautology and, therefore, basically worthless. Any team that wins according to the rules prescribed by that competition will be the legitimate winner, no matter how absurd those rules happen to be. Nobody claims that the Giants did not deservedly win the Super Bowl. The question is, rather, whether the fact that the Giants won the Super Bowl really proves they're the best team. Although we like to think that the better team wins when it matters most, that's simply not true. We acknowledge this "error rate"--if that's what we want to call it--by having multiple-game series in sports like basketball and baseball. Could you imagine a World Series being decided by a one game playoff? In a sport where all but the worst teams win 70 games a year? One might as well throw dice. In football, the best teams do tend to win more often, but Vegas will tell you that even a severe underdog generally has a reasonably decent percentage chance of victory. The odds of "the best" true talent team winning 3 or 4 football games in a row (and thus the Super Bowl) are considerably less than 50%. The Super Bowl champion, then, is *usually* not the best team in the sport.

Championships are determined by rules that attempt, crudely, to measure excellence. Any playoff format in a single-elimination tournament is going to serve as a very crude instrument to measure that excellence. I understand that we can't really have, say, a European soccer league table to determine the winner because the 100+ college football teams don't all play each other home and away. But, there's something to be said for the notion that the worth of a team is better revealed by how it performs all season than in a playoff tacked on at the end.

{roponents of the playoff are confusing accuracy (of "correctly" selecting the best team) with legitimacy (having a system that we feel is fair). The advantage of the playoff system over the BCS is not that it more often selects the "best" team--in fact, I suspect the opposite might be true. Rather, the advantage is that we feel it is more likely to give a shot to teams that otherwise might not have an equal opportunity to compete. The result of a single game might be random, but it is not unfair.

Ultimately, I think that being clear about just what we want out of our champions would improve the discussion. Do we want to select the "best" team? Or do we want the most "fair" process? Championships are tautologies. Any competition provides its own criteria for greatness. Let's be honest, however, about what we're measuring.