What's Fair About It?

Joe Posnanski is, I am convinced, the most insightful sports writer working in America today, and he had another gem of an article a couple days ago. Posnanski was writing about the "fairness" of the NFL playoffs.

We, as American sports fans, like endings. I think that speaks a little bit to who we are. We tend to think of September baseball games being more important than April games. We tend to think of heroics in the fourth quarter being more meaningful than heroics in the second. We tend to put more stock into great Sunday finishes in golf than great Thursday opening rounds. I think the vast majority of us believe in the fairness of playoffs over the fairness of extended excellence, the value of single-elimination games over the value of many weeks of consistent winning. Like I say: I think that speaks a little bit to who we are.

I think this is right on target, American's like to duke it out, to settle the score, and that fits with the NFL playoff system. But Posnanski is just getting warmed up. After going through the intricacies of the NFL playoff system, he gets to a very interesting and important question, but one that he points out is often off limits for discussion.

I love the NFL playoffs. I love the randomness of it. The NFL is built around that Any Given Sunday credo, and the game thrives largely because of that. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. But the question I think about, the question I want to ask here, is: WHY do we love that sort of randomness?

I bring up the BCS again. Lately, it feels like I have been arguing a lot in favor of the BCS, which is a weird thing because I don’t like the BCS system, don’t have any desire to argue for it, and I absolutely would prefer a well-designed college football playoff. My problem, I guess, is that I want to have a discussion, and it seems that almost nobody wants to talk about it. It seems like just about any time I bring up the question — is a playoff really MORE FAIR — I get yelled at, even by close friends. The BCS has been demonized past the point of absurdity, past the point where anyone even LISTENS when someone suggests that, hey, maybe it’s not that bad.

Is a playoff really MORE FAIR? What does fair even mean? This year in college football, the BCS system had Oregon play Auburn for a trophy they called the national championship trophy. This left out other very good teams, particularly undefeated TCU. This wasn’t fair. There was much griping about it, and rightfully so. It is absurd and somewhat arrogant to believe that we can use our eyes and our computer systems and our innate sense of the game to look at more than 100 Division I football teams playing somewhat self-determined schedules and simply pick the two best teams. The flaws in the system are obvious.

But aren’t the playoff flaws obvious, too? This year in the NFL, the playoff system included a seven-win team and took one 10-6 wild-card team while leaving two other 10-6 teams at home. The system made a 12-win team and two 11-win teams go on the road for their first game, while three teams with 10 or fewer wins (including the NFL’s first seven-win playoff team) played home games. This year, the NFL rewarded New England and Atlanta for their 14- and 13-win seasons by giving them an extra week to heal and home field advantage. This seems like a seismic advantage. But is it really? We cannot argue that they promptly lost convincingly — making that one loss much more important than their stellar 16-game seasons. We cannot argue that 12 of the last 24 bye teams have lost their first playoff game.

I think this is an oft misunderstood point among most American sports fans, and especially most critics of the BCS system in college football. I would argue that the argument against the BCS is not that it is more unfair than a playoff alternative, but that it doesn't give enough teams the opportunity to settle things on the field. Those aren't the same thing. A playoff simply by virtue of increasing the number of teams competing for the championship increases the odds that the team that wins the championship will not have had the best record during the regular season. A playoff, as Posnanski says, prizes success over a smaller time frame. The BCS does as well, but in order to make it to that prized smaller time frame (the 1 game championship) a team has to be successful (at least as determined by the BCS system) over a longer time frame. This is less true in the NFL playoff structure (e.g. 7-9 Seattle made the playoffs this year while two 10-6 teams did not).

This is all my way of saying that we should get discussions of fairness out of the BCS debate. If we as Americans like the idea of settling things on the field with a winner take all game at the end of season as the culmination of a sudden death playoff as opposed to allowing pollsters and computers to tell us who the best teams are and then having them duke it out then so be it, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that will make things more fair. In fact the fairest system may well be that of the English Premier league and other sporting leagues that share its structure. Here is Wikipedia's description of how it works.

There are 20 clubs in the Premier League. During the course of a season (from August to May) each club plays the others twice (a double round-robin system), once at their home stadium and once at that of their opponents, for a total of 38 games. Teams receive three points for a win and one point for a draw. No points are awarded for a loss. Teams are ranked by total points, then goal difference, and then goals scored. At the end of each season, the club with the most points is crowned champion. If points are equal, the goal difference and then goals scored determine the winner. If still equal, teams are deemed to occupy the same position. If there is a tie for the championship, for relegation, or for qualification to other competitions, a play-off match at a neutral venue decides rank.^[21] The three lowest placed teams are relegated into the Football League Championship and the top two teams from the Championship, together with the winner of play-offs involving the third to sixth placed Championship clubs, are promoted in their place.

This is a fairer system because by prizing success over the course of an entire season as opposed to a few games, one makes certain that the team with the best record wins the championship. Why is this fairer? Because with chance any team can lose one game, especially at a high level of competition, but over the course of a season the best team will win out because of the greater sample size of games to weed out those succeeding because of chance from those succeeding because of talent, hard work, and teamwork. But we'll never get such a system in America fair as it may be because as Posnanski argues, its not the American way. Success over the long term may be immeasurably harder than success over the moment or over the course of a game, but it's also more fun to watch two teams compete for it all when the stakes are at their highest.

In the wake of their defeat, few are probably ready to recognize the greatness of the Patriots. What they have achieved over the past 10 years is much harder to achieve than what the Jets achieved over one game, but to the victor goes the spoils, for now at least.