Question
by Roland86 on Aug 25, 2009 3:03 PM EDT
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PrintI was recently thinking about that dreaded game at Iowa last year, and major upsets in general in sports. After this happens sometimes the winning underdog claims they are better than the team they beat. This is actually false. Given the circumstances of that day, you won but that doesn't make you a better overall team. Was Stanford better than USC? Was App St better than UM? Were the Giants better than the Pats? Ehh I think most people would say not. 8-9 times out of ten the losers of those games would come out on top. It is kind of a grey area in sports where W-L is usually the bottom line. I would guess that about 90% of the time, a winning team is the "better" team but these upsets are the other 10%. It is just something that has kind of bugged me for awhile and it is the thing that makes those losses so hard to stomach; you know you are the better team and you should have won. As a fan the hardest thing to do is accept if someone is better than you and upsets throw wrenches into the intricate thought process.
Head to head is the biggest metric of deciding "who is better" however, if a team is clearly better by every other metric, the h2h pales is kind of my thought here. It goes both ways too, was Miami probably "better" than PSU in 87? Yeah, even though us die hard PSU guys/gals would never want to admit. Were we better than Iowa last year? Yeah, but I would not expect any Iowa fans to bow down to that, I would expect them to celebrate that win.
Anyways, I would much rather be a fan of team that it is considered an upset if you lose, not an upset if you win. It is obviously never fun to lose, but If it is a huge deal that you lost, that is a pretty good sign that you are a great team.
This isn't a dig on Iowa or Stanford or the Giants or App St or anyone else. You won, gradulations. You earned every bit of that victory. I like underdogs if they are not going against a favorite team of mine; it's just really more of an observation. It is these types of situations that make me love cfb and sports in general. Anything is possible and the ultimate goal of determining the best team or individual is an incredibly subjective argument which provides for lively discussion in forums like the one we have right here.
I hope any of this makes sense to people, it is kind of a tough thing for me to verbalize.
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well
I would say there are some flaws in your argument…if by being the better team do you mean having better athletes, then yes some of those teams are better than others but there are other factors involved in sports, any one who plays knows that
heart is one of the biggest factors…a lot of teams know they are going to take a whooping (cough Akron cough, cough) but they still play and they play hard and well if the supposed better team feels they are entitled to win that game and just go through the motion then they will get beat every time (PSU vs Miami, not that PSU was a dramatic underdog but Miami felt entitled in my opinion, army fatigues and all)
Other factors have a lot to do with winning and loosing too, game plans for one (App St vs scUM)…spread that D out and pick them apart all day, Oregon fallowed suit and beat them the very next week, by your argument Mich should be better than both of those teams but they lost 2 in a row by the same method
I am not trying to disparage your argument but there are a lot of reason for the underdog taking one every once in a while…
We lost last year to Iowa b/c our game plan sucked, we played our D 15 yrds off the line of scrimmage and gave the receivers all the time in the world to get open and nothing against Clark but I still think he was reeling from the concussion in the OSU game…plus we didn’t have any heaters on our sidelines…poor poor management on our training staff
enough ranting…we need this season to start already…is it just me or do they need preseason in college football
After reading your comment...
I think this is more evidence to support my argument. If there were 162 football games in a season, fluke things like “we didn’t have heaters”, or even the quality of the gameplan, would tend to equalize. With only one shot, it’s anybody’s guess as to who is actually “better”. Better is an absolute, football is complicated.
alright I will give you that
but remember it all pales in comparison with
OOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGGGG SEC speed and
Tim (impregnate my wife with your love child) Tebow
so we will never be better than that
"heart" or "grit" are interesting factors.
I personally think they are kind of overrated. That can only take you so far, you still need to have a similar level of talent to be able to compete. If it is close enough, then this “x” factor can decide it. But App St did not beat Michigan because they had more heart. They won because UM played their worst and App St played their best. I would say though that PSU beat Miami in 87 because of this factor. We may have wanted it more, but we also had a vastly underrated amount of talent that was at least reasonably comperable to theirs.
Hollywood has subconciously planted the idea in our head that as long as you believe you can achieve. You should believe, it is very important, but you also need to work and have a certain level of god given ability.
Black Shoes. Basic Blues. No Name. All Game.
"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth."
don't forget this
I can’t remember who said it but it’s an awesome comment
When it’s third and ten, you can take the milk drinkers and I’ll take the whiskey drinkers every time
I agree with the premise
and I think it helps to think of sports that provide what football doesn’t: a greater sample size. In baseball, the Red Sox can beat the Yankees 9 games to 7 in the regular season but if the Yankees end up with a better record, they are the better team. The idea is that a team plays such a volume of games that things like opponents’ record tend to equalize, and each team’s overall record is more than sufficient to indicate the quality of the team. In football, with so few games being played, the record alone leaves some room for interpretation, and we end up spending 100’s of hours on talk radio and College Football Live to dissect who played who and which team’s QB was injured against this team…etc.
In the end, I think the answer in football more often than not is: who knows. With 12 or 13 games played against relatively few common opponents and widely differing circumstances playing into each game’s outcome, there is NO way to tell who is truly the “better” team a lot of times.
Sorry for the longwindedness.
That's one more argument for (and also against) having a college football playoff
since in college football it is pretty impossible to figure out the best team, it all comes down to “what team is most deserving”. You can then break it down to “what is my metric of ‘most deserving’?” Is it the team that looks like one of the best 2 teams over the first 12/13 games of the year, and then wins the head-to-head matchup between those teams. Is it the team that looks like on of the best 8/12/16/32 teams over the first 10-12 games of the season, and then is able to win the tournament against the rest of those “best” teams? Head-to-head matchups surprisingly aren’t that great at saying who the better team was (as you point out in your list of underdogs).
Heck, even in baseball the “best” team doesn’t always win the World Series, and as the Pats/Giants Super Bowl shows, the best team doesn’t always win the Super Bowl.
That’s one of the reasons why I kinda like how the NHL has the President’s Trophy honoring the best team during the regular season, as well as the Stanley Cup, which honors the team that was able to make it to the playoffs and win the tournament. I suppose an argument could be made that you’re not the unanimous/united/decided/obvious “best” team unless you have both awards (which isn’t always the case).
As a crude “experiment” you could use something like this http://www.sbrforum.com/Betting+Tools/Spread+ML+Converter.aspx which uses the predicted spread in a game to say how likely (or how many times out of 10 or 100, or whatnot) it is for one team to beat another. You could then do something like use the actual results of each game as the input into the “spread”, and back calculate some obscure metric the likely record of that team over the season, or whatever, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. Iowa beat us, though we were likely the better team, and USC beat us, while they were likely the better team, or at least closely matched. Sure, 9 times out of 10 we’d probably beat Iowa, and maybe 3 or 4 times out of 10 we’d beat USC, but they’re not gonna set up that many games, so what we have was an 11-2 team that lost the Rose Bowl, graduated some players, and prepared to try again in 2009.
by The JuggerNitt on Aug 25, 2009 4:12 PM EDT up reply actions
I like the idea of the President's Trophy
but it’s too bad it wouldn’t really work in CFB.
by PSUisMyHeart on Aug 25, 2009 4:22 PM EDT up reply actions
Wasn't there one once, barely?
But it is still buried in Nixon’s grave since they couldn’t remove it from whence it had been shoved.
by confirmy on Aug 25, 2009 4:33 PM EDT up reply actions 5 recs
agreed, it wouldn't work in CFB
and it would amount to what the MNC was before the BCS, but to be honest, there’s no real way to determine the “best” school in the country anyway (even through playoffs), so it wouldn’t hurt, either.
Last year would have been interesting, too, depending if you count conference championship games in “regular season” or not, as Alabama probably would have won the “President’s Trophy”, while Florida would have won the “Championship Game”
by The JuggerNitt on Aug 25, 2009 6:17 PM EDT up reply actions
Very true
Personally I’d count championship games as part of the regular season.
by PSUisMyHeart on Aug 25, 2009 7:17 PM EDT up reply actions
Well, traditionally, bowl games in college football do kinda act as part of the regular season (basically just being an extra game added on). That’s true with the BCS championship game as well, though it take the focus (and power mostly) off of other bowl games in terms of determining a champion (though the AP can vote another team champ).
See, this is all what I was trying to get at.
There are so many factors that it is futile to try and decide who the best team in the country. Add in all the flukey things that can happen, like upsets and it messes it all up.
Even in say, Baseball with a great sample size, a few games can decide a lot. If the Yankees go 98-64 and the Red Sox go 96-66, its pretty close. The Yankees won more, but 2 games is close enough that any oddities could have had an effect. There is not enough separation.
I guess the main lesson is that unless you completely dominate the field for the entire regular and post season, you have to accept that all the murkiness will mess with your argument for #1. In any sport, but especially in cfb. And doubly especially when you argue about all-time greatness.
Black Shoes. Basic Blues. No Name. All Game.
"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth."
the difference with the baseball comparison
is that if 2 teams are really that good and “deserving”, then they’ll likely both make the playoffs via the Wild Card (which is usually what happens when 2 teams are ~100 wins). Of course you could have a third team in the mix, also vying for the Wild Card spot, but that’s not as common, and usually means that there is a 4th team that is much better than those 3 teams anyway (or at least as good as), in which case you’re still putting 3 of the best 4 teams in the playoffs.
by The JuggerNitt on Aug 25, 2009 6:20 PM EDT up reply actions
"Best Team"
Indeed, the ideal way to determine a “best team” is to play a ton of games with balanced schedules and see who turns out with the best record. A single head to head game is meaningless in determining a better team due to too much noise. That’s why I tend to think of playoffs as determing a “champion” but a regular season determining the “best” (or “strongest”) team. Also, one problem with playoff games (or any single game) is how they are a snapshot and only reflect a team at that moment while season results would measure a team over time — I’ve never really udnerstood the diea that being a “better team at the end of the season” was more important than being better over the entire season; isn’t being consistently good a valuable trait?
That’s one reason I’m intrigued by European soccer and how their “champion” is the team with the best season record. No playoffs, just play the games and see how it shakes out. MLS does that to a much lesser extent, as they have a regular season award (the Supporters Shield) which is similar to the NHL President’s Trophy, but I think somewhat more important in MLS. But they also have your standard playoffs with that winner being the “true” champion. Of course, the downside to having a regular season winner being the champ is that the end of the season can be anticlimatic (a team could “win” with games to spare rendering them meaningless) and also because it eliminates teams from contention much earlier than a playoff format. So, there’s good and bad.
Doesn't European soccer also drop the lowest teams from the higher divisions
and promote the higher teams from the lower divisions? To me that has always been an intriguing option, and I would LOVE to see something like it in college football.
by The JuggerNitt on Aug 25, 2009 6:23 PM EDT up reply actions
Yeah, but...
It’s too complicated to do for our football. Russia – and I COMPLETELY ahem chose them at random – has 16 teams at the top league, and they all have to play each other. So first you’re looking at a 15-game season at the least – although they usually do a home-and-home each season, so this would turn out to be 30(!) games in a season. This would leave absolutely no time for any historical rivalries as the teams scramble to get the season over before they lose their 6th-string to injuries around the 25th game or so. Remember, we’re trying to think up ideas that allow us to bring back the Pittsburgh beatdown, not disallow it!
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