Out here in the middle where the center's on the right
And the ghost of William Jennings Bryan preaches every night
To save the lonely souls in the dashboard lights
Wish you were here my love, wish you were here my love
--James McMurtry
As the NFL's signing period bursts out of the gate, the NCAA basketball tournament revs up and the Boys of Summer head south for the Spring, it's worth noting how many teams are doomed in the long run for the very reason that they don't suck.
It's a fact of some modern sports that abject awfulness is not nearly as bad a place to be as mere mediocrity. In some ways, this mirrors real life. Think of a functional alcoholic who manages to get to work most days, perform adequately and muddle through an unfulfilling and ultimately abbreviated life. He will never get help. He needs a crisis to force a reckoning that could lead to recovery.
Take the Bubble
In the NCAA tournament, as documented here previously, a bubble team squeaking in on the 11 line is in better shape than a squad that hangs from the underside of the Top 25. The former will play a six-seed in a match-up that confers, historically, roughly a one-in-three shot of victory. That pits them against a beatable three-seed, or roughly 16% of the time, the upstart 14-seed. Two wins confers Sweet Sixteen status.
But an eight-seed? That is NCAA purgatory. First, they must play a toss-up game against a lower seed, the spoils of which is a death match with the #1. That's a lot worse than taking on a #3. The difference among seeds is vast at the margins: #1 Kentucky this year wipes the floor with any three-seed and #16 Lafayette couldn't pack a #14-seed's lunch. But the gap between #6 and #12 is more-or-less a rounding error.
Better Off With A Bum
In the NFL, the calculation is a bit different: Unless your quarterback is a star, your team is toast. Nick Foles, Ryan Tanneyhill, Jay Cutler -- these gentlemen are among the 32 greatest quarterbacks in the world and roughly middle of the NFL pack, but each is insufficient to lead his team to a championship. Worse, each is eminently capable of captaining a middling march, neither good enough for a Super Bowl, nor bad enough to draft a future star QB. Moreover, because each so outperforms a plausible replacement, he commands a massive contract that restricts other team options in a salary cap environment.
NFL teams that crater almost always lack talent at the QB position -- or their talent is so thin they drafted their star quarterback with a high pick the year before and have yet to surround him with complementary parts. Such teams are flush with cash and strong draft classes, and can rebuild behind a future-superstar QB.
It's happening in the NBA as well, where the front office in Philadelphia has sold off all the merely good players in order to save cap space for a superstar signing and grab a top draft pick. They recognize that iterative improvement will not win a championship in a league where only the three or four best teams have any shot at the crown.
Baseball Is Different
Which brings us to baseball, where the curse of the center doesn't apply at all. In baseball, the goal is to earn one of the 10 playoff berths and roll the dice from there. The Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants were the fourth and fifth best teams in their leagues respectively before meeting in the World Series.
Moreover, talent is more fickle and less determinative in baseball than in other sports. It's not clear at all who will win the AL East or Central this year, or who will capture any of the four Wild Cards. Teams like Cleveland, Florida, Toronto, both Chicago contingents and others could be very good in 2015 -- or pretty bad, depending on a host of unpredictable circumstances. And drafting is such a crapshoot that first picks regularly flame out before setting foot on a Major League field.
So keep hope alive for your hometown nine, whoever they are (special exemptions: Philadelphia, Minnesota, Phoenix), but pray that alma mater gets dropped to the 10 line.
No comments:
Post a Comment