Playoff Fairness

[joecash]

Baseball has the most luck involved. Look at all the wildcards that have won the world series.

[cognito20]

For my money, the fairest playoff system in professional team sports is one that has not been mentioned, since we've been sticking to American sports....the playoff system in European, specifically English Premiership, soccer. Simply, their playoff system is not to have a playoff at all. The 20 teams play a 38-game regular season, home and away against every other team. 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss. Team with the most points at the end of the 38 games is the champion. (If teams are tied in points, the first tiebreaker is total goal differential, second tiebreaker total goals scored.) End of story. The team that played the best that season ALWAYS wins. 10 on the scale of the poll.

Their knockout "playoff" system, if you can call it that, is known as the FA Cup. Every professional and semi-professional team in England, as well as quite a few amateur teams, are entered in a blind-draw, single-elimination knockout format, home team selected randomly (and if the match ends in a tie, it's replayed at the -other- team's home stadium). Winners advance, losers go home. The higher-level professional teams are seeded into a later stage of the competition so that they only need to win 6 matches to win the Cup, but that's the only advantage they're given, while a team full of amateurs from the local pub would have to start from the pre-preliminary rounds and win 15+. These FA Cup games, while being the closest thing to the American "playoff" system, are completely separate from the league format described above. The team that has the most points in the Premier League is the "champion", while the winner of the FA Cup (who doesn't even need to be from the highest league....a team from the #2 division got all the way to the Cup Final before losing to Manchester United in 2004, and 2 teams from the #2 division WON the Cup in the 1970s, Sunderland in '71 and West Ham in '79) is just the "winner of the FA Cup", although that is quite a prestigious honor in its own right.

[DougOzzzz]

Yes the playoffs are really a poor way of determining a champion, compared to regular season results (assuming balanced schedules, i.e., each team plays each other team a set number of times).

[Jack of Arcades]

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Yes the playoffs are really a poor way of determining a champion, compared to regular season results (assuming balanced schedules, i.e., each team plays each other team a set number of times).

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Yeah, but then we wouldn't be talking about clutch players or Mystique and Aura.

[battschr]

If you are ranking these by how often the best team wins the final.... the nfl and nba are close for first, with baseball way behind...don't know about any other sports.

[pokerdirty]

98-99 Knicks, made the finals as the 8 seed. and you are trying to tell me that they established themselves as the best team in the east that year? No, it's only a matter of getting hot late in the season, and no falling victim to injury.

At least baseball is more selective in who they actually let into the playoffs (Division winners + the team with the best record that did not win their division, often better than at least one of the division winners).

[McGahee]

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Put it this way, what's more likely - the Devil Ray's take 2/3 from the Red Sox in Boston - or a lousy NFL team like the Bears goes to NE and beats the Patriots?

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That answer is pretty obvious and I find it astounding that everybody is arguing with you, personally.