My son's team, having gotten a taste of victory last week, apparently liked it a lot, because they won again yesterday (hanging another bagel on their opponents to boot!). Now, at 2-3, they're in the playoffs. Due to the state of sports reporting around here (what do you mean, I can't get daily news, scores, and standings for middle school football? I'm shocked, I tell you! Shocked!), I don't know anything about the team they're playing next week in the first round.
I opined to flower_goddess that since they were 2-3, they were probably the lowest seed or close to it, and would thus be playing the highest seed (or thereabouts) in the first round. Her response: "Well, that's hardly fair! They're going to get killed!" I replied, "That's how playoffs almost always work - the worst team to qualify plays the best team first, and the middle teams play each other." She wasn't seeing eye-to-eye with that model: "If the best team is really the best team, they should have to play the second-best team first to prove it!"
I was so floored by this statement, which runs counter to, well, my entire lifetime of What I Know To Be True About Sports, that I couldn't even respond for a minute. Eventually, I came up with a few alternative lines of argumentation:
- "The reward for finishing first is the easiest path through the playoffs. In fact, most playoffs re-roll after every round to ensure that the best surviving team faces the worst surviving team in the next round."
- "Your way wouldn't be fair to either the #1 or #2 teams. There's no incentive to finishing hard if your reward is to play the other best team first."
- "Why reward the teams that just barely squeak into the playoffs with a game against another weak team first?"
Do you think I went overboard when I said "If women ran football, not only wouldn't there be a playoff, they wouldn't even keep score!" ?
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