The Most Fair and Most Exciting Sports Tournaments

Orignially Posted 3/20/08:

So it's NCAA tournament time, which is of course awesome, but there’s something you hear a lot this time of year that really bothers me. Television personalities all over the place will make off the cuff snide remarks about the BCS, basically saying isn’t it great that we actually have a fair system, where we actually find out who the best team is. Now, I won’t deny that the 64 (or rather, 65) team tournament is a much more entertaining way to choose a champion than a combination of a computer program and a bunch of dudes voting on it, but I really don’t think its any more fair.

I’m defining fair here such that in the most fair situation, the best team wins every single time. This would obviously be very boring, and then we might as well just have PECOTA play the season for us.

So, my contention is that the best college football team wins the title about as often, if not more, than the best college basketball team. In football, the two teams in the championship game are almost universally two of the three or four teams, and they only have to play one game to decide it. In basketball, the best teams have to instead win 7 (!) straight games in single elimination competition, inherently the format most dependent on luck. You could argue in basketball that your luck at least happens during the game instead of in the minds of the coach’s etc, but I really don’t see how that makes it more fair.

Just for fun, here’s how I’d rate the major sport competitions in terms of fairness:

1) European Soccer Leagues: Everyone plays each other twice (home and home), and there’s no playoffs of any kind. The team with the most points at the end of the year wins, simple as that. This makes sense in such a low scoring sport, which makes it extremely dependent on luck in individual games. But without the cup competitions, it might make things a little ho-hum.

2) NBA Playoffs: For some reason, the best team almost always seems to win in the NBA. I think it’s because effort, concentration and intensity are genuine “skills” in basketball (as opposed to baseball, for instance), and this seems to make it possible for the best players to “raise their game” in the playoffs (again, as opposed to baseball, where that’s bullshit). Also helpful is how high scoring the sport is, how much importance individual players have and that they are all seven game series (what is the plural of series?).

3) Grand Slam Tennis: You have the variability of a single elimination tournament, but the best out of five sets format cuts out most of the luck factor. I think a lot of people would prefer it to be best out of three, so everyone wouldn’t be shocked when, say, Roger Federer loses before the finals, but I like it the way it is.

4) NFL Playoffs: It’s surprising to me how fair this seems to be, considering its only one game at a time, but the enormous advantage of the bye week levels that out. You obviously get situations like the Patriots in 2001 or the Giants this year, but it could be a lot worse.

5) (tie) NCAA Tournament: Not particularly fair, but it does seem that the cream still usually rises to the top. (Kansas is clearly the best team this year, as far as I can tell, so we’ll see. Pomeroy at Basketball Prospectus has them as better than 1:1 to win the whole thing! That’s ridiculous.)

5) (tie) BCS: ditto above.

7) MLB Playoffs: The thing that saves this from being at the bottom of the list is how difficult it is to make the playoffs in the first place, as only 8 out of 30 teams get there. That said, making the playoffs as a baseball team is like earning a lottery ticket with a 1/8 chance to win. If I were to guess, I’d say the best team usually has about a 22% chance of winning, and the worst team about 7-8% (See: Cardinals, St Louis). Those are not very disparate odds. Look at it this way: when the best team in baseball wins the World Series, and everyone is surprised, then, well, you’ve got a problem.

I’m not sure why this is exactly. I mean, you’d think 7 game series would iron out some of those problems. But the issue in baseball is that it is a game particularly dependent on luck. For instance, 60% of whether a ball put into play is a hit or not is due to luck. And whether your hits arrive when there are men on base or the bases are empty is critically important (note: most evidence suggests being “clutch” in baseball doesn’t exist—I’m skeptical that this is true, but it at least seems to be a minor effect at most). Also, home field advantage means nothing in baseball.

I kind of think that baseball should go to a 12 team playoff with the top 4 getting byes the way football does because that should solve a lot of these problems. I really just don’t think the 12th or 13th best team in baseball should be able to win the title (What where the Giants this year? 10th or 11th in football? That’s pushing what I’m comfortable with).

8) UEFA Champions League: Though there do seem to be teams like Liverpool and AC Milan that, for whatever reason, excel at the two-legged ties of Champions league competition, in a sport as low scoring as soccer, cup competitions will be inherently extremely dependent on luck. For example, one year Porto and Monaco played for the title (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, just trust me that neither of those teams were among the top 10-15 teams in Europe). And the year Liverpool won, they were terrible from a talent perspective. It sure is fun though.

9) Golf: Not quite a crapshoot, but about as close as you’ll get outside of, say, the World Series of Poker, which just proves how extraordinarily amazing Tiger Woods is. I wish I appreciated golf more, just so I could fully appreciate him.

Quickly, in order of entertainment value:

1) NCAA Tournament.
2) UEFA Champions League
3) NBA Playoffs (I love them, okay? NFL is great too, I guess. All around, I like the NBA the best, except when the Pistons or Larry Hughes are prominently involved.)
4) NFL Playoffs
5) MLB Playoffs
6) Grand Slam Tennis
7) European Soccer Leagues
8) BCS
9) Golf


So you see, the big difference between college football and basketball, and why the NCAA tournament is so much better, is because it’s so much more entertaining, not because it’s so much more fair. Also, yeah, I don’t really like golf, nor have any idea how fair NASCAR is (or why anyone would watch it).