I’m mostly thinking about NCAA football here, but this could apply to anything. Let’s say you have two teams with the same record, 10-1 for example. The typical tie-breaker goes to the team that beat the other one, right? But why?
The usual response is that if Team A beats Team B, they’re better. But that’s not really true — any team has a chance of beating any other team, even if the other team is better. Think about who beat Team A — some other Team Q that was worse than both Team A and Team B, at least according to records. Do we think Team Q is better than Team A? No way. We just assume Team A had an off day or Team Q got lucky. So then why don’t we chalk up Team B’s loss to Team A to an off day or a bit of luck?
Personally, I’d rather reward the team whose single loss came against a stronger opponent — Team B. What’s more impressive, losing one game to a really good team or losing one game to a mediocre team? I think you know where I stand.
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.
January 9th, 2008 at 10:33 am
hmmm… an interesting point. But game outcomes aren’t 50-50. If it’s 60-40 in favor of the truly better team (which I think is reasonable for football), by naming the head-to-head winner as better, you’ll be right 60% of the time. That doesn’t sound great, but I don’t know how to figure out how likely it is that you’d be correct in picking the better team based on how their losses compare.
I guess ideally, you’d advocate a system in which teams were credited for each win and debited for each loss based on how likely those outcomes were?
January 9th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
But game outcomes aren’t 50-50. If it’s 60-40 in favor of the truly better team (which I think is reasonable for football), by naming the head-to-head winner as better, you’ll be right 60% of the time.
Well, that’s if you only look at the head-to-head game. Why ignore the other team’s loss?
NCAA football is a 119 team league that only plays 11 regular season games. You HAVE to have an intelligent strength of schedule adjustment.