LogFAQs > #976851196

This topic was made for me and I have thoughts. Ones shattered already said but I am going to repeat them because man do I feel strongly about this, as people who are in the sports discord channel will tell you.

Sports are fluky. Some more than others, but any given team can win on any given day based on innumerable factors. This makes it imo impossible to determine the best team based on "Well this team beat this team but lost to that team and only beat this team by 5 etc." Matchup strengths and weaknesses exist, but if team A matches up well against 28 other teams but doesn't matchup well against 1 team, I would consider them better than team B who matches up well against 25 but doesn't against 4. But playoffs give us that exact possibility: The best team can run into a buzzsaw spoiler who got lucky in round 1 and just happens to be their kryptonite. I hate that.

I get the hype around playoffs. I participate myself in march madness, I get that people love chaos. They want to see the successful team fail. Tons of people love an underdog story. But my enjoyment of sports is derived from seeing the better team win, and playoffs provide avenues for the worse team to win. Like the teams who are "just good enough" but clearly aren't an elite team get a second chance they didn't earn. I don't like that. I do not enjoy seeing a 9-8 team in the NFL beat a 14-3 team. Unless it's the pats, but talking beyond fandom here.

It's even worse in the NFL where rounds are a single game. I get why, NFL is the most physically punishing sport and you can't have guys playing 3-5 game series. But it also lends itself heavily to single-game flukes. As a pats hater, I can enjoy as much as the next guy the year the pats went 18-0 then lost in the super bowl, but objectively the patriots were the best team by a mile that season and should not be thought of as losers because they lost a single game that we as a society have arbitrarily deemed to be the most important one. Using playoff success to measure a player is STUPID because we just decided that some games matter more than others. They shouldn't, just like how say NBA players get lauded for being "clutch" by scoring a lot in the 4th quarter. Hey maybe if they scored those points in the first quarter they wouldn't be in that spot. Points in any game should matter the same, and any game should matter the same.

This is why I like the NBA the most, because even with playoffs, the NBA is the least fluky sport and it's rare for one of the top seeds to fall before they're supposed to. THe 1/8 & 2/7 matchups are usually treated like jokes, but even then, NBA arguably suffers the most from "Regular season doesn't matter." At least fewer games in the NFL makes each one matter. Not so for the other 3 major ones. So even the NBA isn't perfect.

I don't even like the idea of conferences or divisions. In my ideal sports world, every team plays every other team a couple of times and then the one with the most wins, wins. I don't care about things like travel, because if everyone plays everyone then the travel is the same for them all. This is probably the toughest in the NFL where there just aren't enough games to do this, I'm willing to accept it there, but I find the idea of "interleague play" in MLB anathema. "Let's just split up teams arbitrarily and make it so you only usually play your own div to help feed in to the playoff system!" I hate it. Sorry wigs, I hate it. That system doesn't determine the best team in the whole league, it determines the best in each conference and then pairs them together which just doesn't work for me, because maybe that's a bad matchup for one team! Maybe one of those teams played weaker competition! It just isn't fair. That is what I want in my sports, fairness. Even if it's impossible to be completely fair, that doesn't mean I don't want to strive for as much as possible.

To summarize, I understand why playoffs exist but I don't want them. They don't give me what I want, which is the team that proves itself over the course of playing every team to be the best one. Not the team who got hot for 10 games or the one who matches up well against the favorite. I will be "old man yells at clouds" about this.