Bread and Circuses

I normally don't swim in these waters anymore. But at times the atmosphere gets to me just the same.

I don't like playoffs. They're one of the reasons, and perhaps the main reason, which turn me off from sports. If you'll excuse the admittedly vague pun of a dad joke, I don't like being played by playoffs. And that's what playoffs do. They try to manufacture excitement solely for the sake of cash and prestige. And that, I will argue, diminishes sports and wastes time.

Take Indiana's win over Ohio State yesterday. A great win? Not in this day and age. Sure, they beat OSU for the first time in 31 games. It's Indiana's first Big Ten Championship since 1967, when even I was but a child. And what's their reward for it? Basically, a pat on the head followed by, 'win two more games to prove yourself'.

If they don't win a national championship the conference title is no more than a footnote. If they should meet Ohio State again and lose, it will be thought of as a fluke. Indiana will have effectively won the wrong game.

Yes, it may not happen that way. Maybe the Hoosiers will win a Natty. That still accomplishes the same purpose: a meaningless and forgotten win over the Buckeyes on a cold December Saturday. Win it all or you're in the dustbin. Losers rarely get more than apologetic afterthoughts.

The championship is all that matters. And that has to be made even more difficult by adding more hoops to leap through, all so that more money can be made. There's talk of expanding college football playoffs to 16 for no other purpose than that. Don't try to argue integrity. All adding four more teams to a playoff field means are four more teams without a realistic chance to win. 

Now, if watching and rooting are your hobby, by all means enjoy. We aren't talking about any evil. At least, I don't think so anyway. But I am open to the question, quite frankly. Bread and circuses don't strike me as the best expressions of humanity or human effort.

Win or What?

As the playoffs for both basketball and hockey approach, so too do the commercials for their respective playoffs. They include all the usual catchphrases such as, 'Win or go home!'

But don't you go home even after you win? 

Just asking. Uh, for a friend. That's what I'm supposed to say, right?

Sports Playoffs and Society

Before we go any further we want to say something to those readers who might not accept this column as political enough. If George Will, perhaps the current dean of conservative commentators, can write about sports in general and baseball in particular in his missives, then so can we. There: our street cred is established.

Sports Illustrated has predicted that the Cleveland Indians will win the 2015 World Series. Billy Beane, the remarkably successful general manager of the Oakland Athletics, has famously said that the playoffs are a crapshoot. How do these tidbits work together? Well, as SI points out and Beane's remark essentially confirms, the best teams in the regular season don't necessarily win the World Series (or by extension, the Super Bowl or Stanley Cup and so on). Just getting into the postseason is all a team needs in order to have the chance at finishing on top of the heap. SI notes that both World Series participants, the Giants and the Royals, were wild cards in the 2014 playoffs.

This means simply that playoffs aren't fair to the better teams. At the highest levels of play anyone can beat anyone else in a short series, especially as overall weaker teams can shorten their benches. It isn't unusual in baseball for example to see a fifth starter relegated to the bullpen to strengthen it for a short run. But over the course of a full season a team can't do that. It must play its whole team. This is what allows the cream to rise: weaknesses of whole teams tend to get exposed over time. These weaknesses can be hidden in short term events such as playoffs.

On another front, the effect of mere hot streaks, momentum, are generally ameliorated during the regular season. One might win several games in a row, even 10 or 12, but that by itself won't power a team into the playoffs. Such a run in the postseason, even a lesser run such as 11-3 (which would win a baseball World Series) can win championships. By rights, then, they ought to be dismissed as merely lucky when scored against superior opponents.

If sports are supposed to be about fairness and the best team winning, if they are supposed to instruct both participants and the broader society in good sportsmanship and in recognizing and accepting that competition means separating the wheat from the chaff and that there should be no jealousy among us in accepting that, then they need to reassess the idea of playoffs. As Sparky Anderson said, the best team in baseball is the team with the best regular season record and not necessarily the World Series winner.

Playoffs hinder rather than build character and mettle. It's the long haul which creates those virtues in a person. If sports wish to teach society that, they need to instill them within their systems of play. Anything less, and less is what we've got now, is nothing more than bilking people out of their cash with an artificial excitement. Such bread and circuses will only make a nation soft. Both our athletics and ourselves will be weakened.