Destroying the Wall Street Journal's Silly Idea that the NFL Regular Season "is for suckers"

So, it is true that a playoff system results in the possibility that the team with the best record does not win, and things like the nature of the sport and the number of playoff qualifiers increase the possibility of upsets. However, there was something in this piece that struck me as wrong, and that I needed to address. Here:

"Being No. 1 in the regular season has become a quaint anachronism relevant only in college football. In each of the four major leagues, the best regular-season team has won the title less than half the time since 1966—with baseball (29%) being easily the lowest. The NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy—awarded annually to the team with the best record—has become synonymous with coming up short in the playoffs."

Ahh, the argument about the regular season in college football. Let’s assume that rather than having a playoff in each sport, we simply declared the team with the best record at the end of the season to be champion. Would we really be much better off at finding the best team by that method?

No major American sport is like European soccer leagues, which feature no playoff (or completely separate cup competitions) in their domestic league. Those leagues play home and away games between every league member. The NBA and NHL may play every team in the league (in a typical season) but the distribution is not uniform. MLB schedules are imbalanced. NFL teams play less than half of the other teams in the league in the regular season. Teams within the same conference may share less than a third of their schedules in common, and then get to play it out in the postseason. College football? It’s like a scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Out Off [ed. note: I am now sitting catatonic like Cameron in disbelief of my error]; “Alabama once played Northeast Louisiana, who played Arkansas State, who went out with Tulsa, who totally saw Oklahoma State puke at 31 Flavors last night.”

So, using the various reference sites available at sports-reference.com, I looked at the last twenty seasons for the six major U.S. sports: MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, college football, and college basketball. Using the “simple rating system”, which would account for schedule strength and margin of victory, I looked at how frequently the team (or one of the teams, if there was a tie) with the best record in the regular season also had the highest rating for those regular season games. (For the college sports, I limited the look to the teams among the 6 major conferences).

Here is how frequently the team with the highest winning percentage also finished with the highest simple rating system rating. The colleges include the postseason results, bowl games for football and ncaa tournament for basketball, while the professional ones just include regular season results.

These results make sense. Baseball has by far the longest season, which should be better at identifying the best team, even with the schedule imbalances, because of the size. The NBA is just ahead of the NHL, and that league has more scoring opportunities to distinguish teams, whereas hockey has scoring that is a rarer event. The NFL is the lowest of the professional leagues, of course, as the season is short and schedules vary. Both college sports check in even lower as schedules are even more diverse, even when limiting it to the top conferences.

Comparing the graphic in the WSJ piece on how frequently teams with the best record won each sport, baseball would seem to be the sport most diluted by a playoff. The short series creates a lot more randomness relative to a long season. The NFL, on the other hand, I am not so sure that if we selected a champion after the regular season, it would be any better at getting the best team. The playoffs is a way to test teams who did not always play the same schedule, and where luck is, yes, involved in the regular season too. Sometimes we have the Giants from this year, a team that had a worse record than many teams even after the playoff results. The other way, we would end up with teams like the Titans in 2008 being declared champs.

I’m just not going to espouse the virtues of regular season champs, and claim that college football is the purest, when teams don’t all play each other and there is a vastly different set of schedules.

[photo via Getty]