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Tuesday, March 04, 2003

Briefly Off Topic (Sports)
For better or worse, I've been a sports fan since I was three years old and went to high school football and basketball games in Virginia with my parents and siblings. I can tell you the names of players and teams in leagues that no longer exist in baseball, football, hockey, basketball and soccer. I've always been interested in ideas related to making sports more interesting and fair. One long-time ongoing debate in sports deals with "blowouts," where teams of vastly differing talent and/or size levels play each other (okay, maybe it's not that off topic). I've seen many UM football games where Navy or Duke or Northwestern came in with a team that had basically zero chance of beating Michigan, which if it wasn't obvious before the game clearly was five minutes in. Rules and tradition require that the two teams stay on the field for the full 60 minutes; etiquette requires that Michigan's coach replace his starters with second, third and fourth stringers in the second half, if not sooner. Fans paying $40 or so for a ticket are expected to sit there and watch Michigan's scrubs play against a still inferior opponent for another 30 minutes. Injuries to these players on both sides, almost none of whom have any chance at making the NFL (UM's starters do, but they're on the bench now), are frequent. There are many other problems, as well, but I'm already off topic.

A NY Times article describes this problem taken to its extreme in girls' high school basketball. Scores like 115-2 and 89-7 occur fairly frequently as schools with long traditions and girls who have been playing all their lives face new programs with girls just learning the game. Coaches in Michigan are pushing a remedy which calls for switching the clock to "running time" once a game gets out of hand--the clock no longer stops for fouls, turnovers, or timeouts, so the game ends sooner. Personally, I think that playing to a certain point total (winning by a certain margin) rather than using a clock would be a better solution--let good games last longer than bad games. But the real problem is that teams so far apart in talent are playing each other at all.

The solution to this is so simple in this day of the Internet that I wonder that no one seems to have picked up on it, at least not in this country. The key to the problem is that coaches or athletic directors now have to arrange schedules before the season starts; frequently this is done just by calling other schools and arranging a game or two. A much better solution would be to schedule home dates without particular opponents mentioned; every week, teams with road games scheduled play at teams with home games that have similar records. Good teams would play better and better opposition every week; weak teams would eventually meet their match and win a game or two. Powerhouse schools could have multiple junior-varsity teams that competed in the same overall league (although leagues as such would be mostly eliminated in this scheme; rather the whole schedule would eventually lead to a state champion). Fans could go expecting to see a competitive game on most nights, regardless of the ability of the home team. Also, the frustration that Big Ten fans feel just about every year when Ohio State wins a share of the football title without playing its co-champion (Iowa last year) at all would disappear. As both teams continued undefeated, they would eventually have to meet each other.

Back when communication was by letter and travel by train, it may have been necessary to have a complete schedule made out before the season starts. The Internet and other computer tools make this unnecessary. Simply scheduling home dates without specified opponents would work fine as long as there were an equal number of home and away dates scheduled among the teams in the league. As the article points out, the running clock and other game-shortening schemes deprive players of playing time. Redesigning the scheduling system to eliminate mismatches before they happen would avoid this and many other problems.