While watching the first College Football Playoffs show on ESPN last week, I thought to myself what a useless exercise it was. There are still so many games to play and so many different directions that the season can go based on the games remaining. This plan for a weekly update is at best mindless self-promotion and more likely a recipe for disaster. In the past, you had a team or two feeling slighted for not making the championship team. Now we’ll have pretty much every 1-loss team thinking that they deserve to make the final 4, and the worst part is that just about each team will have a case. I asked myself, is this the biggest boondoggle in sports? In this context, a boondoggle is the use of resources (time and money) to do something that adds no value in any way.
ETA: The show and rankings this early are the boondoggle, and NOT the playoff format, in case it wasn’t clear.
And then I began thinking of others:
Pre-season player awards. The NCAA actually hands out Pre-Season All America awards to players who haven’t actually played a game yet that season. In some cases like basketball, the award recipient hasn’t even played a college game ever. But yet we hand them awards.
NFL Pro Bowl. At least in other sports, the All-Star game is in mid-season and provides a way to promote their star players that other parts of the continent and world may not see regularly. But no one cares about the Pro Bowl. The season is over and football being the type of sport that it is, an injury can kill someone’s career.
Capital One Cup. EPL teams don’t care about it since they place value the FA cup. What’s the point if no one wants to win it?
I think they exist to give a glimpse into what the committee is thinking. If they only have the one, end of the regular season/conference championships vote, then the fans of the #5 and lower teams would probably scream louder that the entire thing was rigged somehow.
I don’t think the players receive any actual awards for these; they’re just predictions as to who will be All-Americans at the end of the season. Certainly, no college player would be allowed to accept anything for being a “preseason All-American”, which, BTW, would not be given out by the NCAA. While the NCAA does have “official” All-Americans in some sports, these are performance based (e.g. in swimming, and I think in wrestling as well, the top 8 in a particular event at the NCAA Championships are declared All-Americans).
“Should there be an NFL Pro Bowl?” has been a topic of discussion for decades.
Especially in the past few decades, a number of players have convenient excuses not to play in the Pro Bowl; it’s worse now, now that it is before the Super Bowl so no one from the two Super Bowl teams would be in it. Then again, most Super Bowl players skipped the Pro Bowl anyway even when it was a week later. Most players treat it as a paid vacation in Hawaii.
You can’t really have a legitimate football “all-star game” because there’s no way to teach the teams enough offensive and (especially) defensive plays to make it meaningful in any way. College football has the same problem (e.g. Senior Bowl, Shrine Game, Blue-Gray Game), but I have seen analysts say that a particular performance helped or hurt someone’s draft chances.
I assume this is what was once called the League Cup (I think it was called the Milk Cup at one point as well)? The Capital One Cup means something entirely different in the USA - it is an award (well, two - one for men and one for women) given to a university that does the best in just about all NCAA sports (sports that are so small that there is no separate Division I championship, but all divisions compete for a single combined championship, like men’s water polo and women’s ice hockey, may not be counted), with extra weight given to popular ones (I think in the men’s cup, football, basketball, and baseball are worth 3x normal points).
I think the main problem with the League Cup is, with the increased participation in the Champions League, having to play in the League Cup as well really stretches a team out over the season.
The NIT. Half the teams that get in are pissed that they didn’t make the big dance. Plus it’s a big rigged in that the teams that the NIT wants to wind up in NY get to play all their early round games at home.
Any all-star game except MLB. Especially the college games. Nobody gives a damn. Want to make it interesting- have the black players play the white players.
The Heisman. Some may say it’s heresy, but this is way way way overblown.
The World Baseball Classic. They’re pretty loose about who can play for who. Oh, your great grandmother was Italian and you had a pizza once? Go ahead and play for Italy.
NASCAR. Getting to be a real joke how they play with the system every year.
It’s better than it used to be, when they would wait until each round was done and then pair up the teams geographically.
Also, if the NIT is a boondoggle, then most of the college bowl games, especially the ones that end up with two 6-6 teams, are boondoggles as well. The NIT isn’t so much anachronistic as it is a chance for more teams to continue their basketball seasons. As for the first few rounds being played on home courts, that’s the only way they’re going to get any sort of crowds to those games, especially with the new “regular season champions that lose their conference tournaments and don’t get into the NCAA tournament get into the NIT automatically” rule.
On top of that, the NCAA is going to use the NIT to experiment on possible new rules. This year: a 30-second shot clock, and a slight modification in when TV timeouts are taken (something like, starting 30 seconds before when a TV timeout would be called, if a team calls a timeout before that TV timeout, then that TV timeout is removed). (The preseason NIT will also have a couple of test rules; the “no-charge arc” under each basket will have a 4-foot radius instead of a 3-foot one, and the minimum shot clock reset is 25 seconds instead of 15.)
If any basketball tournament a boondoggle, it would be the ones that are below the NIT.
One year they got a bit too obvious greasing the skids for ND. They got the worst team in the field at home in round 1, the winner of the second and third worst teams at home in round 2, etc.
If they use it for experimental rules then that’s cool.
The NBA and NHL regular seasons. Just draw the names of two teams that won’t go to the playoffs out of a hat and then start the playoffs. Also start basketball games with 2 minutes left and the score 98-98.
Formula 1. They might as well just run all the computer sims and control programs out to a conclusion and save all that expensive travel, engineering etc. in the name of some of the most tedious racing on earth.
It’s increasingly the case that training camp is becoming a waste of time, actually. All North American leagues, with the arguable exception of MLB (and I’d argue it counts too) play preseasons that are just way, way too long. This is especially irritating n the NBA and NHL, which play a bunch of preseason games no one cares about and them embark on a regular season that requires a whole shitload of games on back to back days, which is a sure way to see some really awful basketball or hockey, and in the NBA at least probably drop one team’s winning percentage by 50 points, at least.
I actually like hockey.