This should be in past tense. I’m sure that Mark Dantonio will have us in Pasadena for each of the next ten seasons.
In high school?! An elite high school team playing with 10 would destroy a mediocre team with 11. You have future professional athletes that shrug off 3 tackles a play, kids that average 10 yards a rush. 1 extra player on defense isn’t going to stop that. Now I know we’re talking about a large disparity in talent, but isn’t that the point?
This is only true if we’re comparing a 8A class team versus a 3A or 4A team (those are Illinois classifications, but you get the idea). If you’ve got a pair of 8A teams facing off, the team with more players is going to win 9 of 10 times. There are certainly exceptions to the rule with nationally regarded teams with future Heisman candidates who’d beat 2-9 teams, but if there’s any semblance of parity (which in the middle-to-large suburban Chicago conferences I played in there was, top to bottom) those undermanned teams are in deep trouble.
If we are talking about rural areas where one player can far exceed the talents of everyone else playing, then you are right. But the larger schools with established programs almost never see a disparity that large, what with 80-man rosters, weight programs and scouting.
Interesting that you allow this for high school only. My feeling is that this exact statement is true with 8A replaced by any skill level (2A, NCAA Div I-A, NFL, etc).
In sports - particularly in professional sports, there is no such thing as a lock.
I didn’t watch the game, but last years 8A game wasn’t close and from what I remember Wheaton destroyed pretty much everybody they played. That being said I agree with you in the most part that in American football one player would make a huge difference. I just think that at the high school level there exist such huge disparity in talent between some teams that in a team sport a one man difference wouldn’t be a complete death sentence to the short handed team.
Would Lebron James’ high school team have won games if they played with 4 players? I suspect they would win at least some.
This isn’t true. Guam would never EVER beat Brazil in a mens national team game. You could play from now until the end of life on Earth, it wouldn’t happen. Maybe if you get a ball that quantum tunnels through all of Brazil’s players, but that’s about it.
Soccer? I believe I restricted my statement to sports.
I keed! I keed!
I would beg the courts indulgence by pointing out that, for all pratical purposes, Guam and Brazil are not in the same league. It’s like expecting the Durham Bulls to beat the Boston Red Sox. Both teams are technically professionals, but…
They’re both the national teams of their respective countries. If Guam somehow qualified for a World Cup, they could play Brazil. The Durham Bulls could not play the Red Sox in a competitive match.
We came to that same conclusion to “What if the worst pro team played the best college team”. If the 80s Miami or 90s Nebraska or recent USC teams went up against a 3-13 NFL team?
It would be a complete and utter blowout by halftime, if not sooner. The NFL teams would find the one (or ten) players who would never make the NFL and they would exploit that. Even if the best player on the college team was a #1 draft pick on the worst NFL team, he wouldn’t necessarily start that next year. It all goes downhill from there.
Yeah, Wheaton was about as dominant as you will see at that level and I still think they’d have been in trouble, certainly would have finished below .500, if every team they played were up a man on them. Talent is huge but preparation can account for so much. I’ll submit that a physically dominant 10-man offense could probably move the ball well enough to put up some points, but I just don’t see a scenario where an undermanned defense could stop even the most pedestrian of offenses.
So I agree that at lower levels, being shorthanded wouldn’t be a death sentence. The higher up the ladder you get the slimmer the chances of surviving a game. By the time you reach the D-I schools it’s close to an impossibility. In the NFL it’d be a joke.
National teams really are the exception that proves the rule. While almost every league in the world gives at least lip service to the concept of parity, except the international competitions. To compete there, all you have to have is a country. IIRC, the Olympics recently instituted some minimum standards for competition (after that one guy that could barely swim competed in Australia). It would be interesting to see what would happen if the World Cup folks told the bottom 40 countries, “Look you need to each take your best player(s) and get together and form a couple of super teams and compete that way.”
What if all ten of the players on the one team were named Ditka? But Mike Ditka was the coach of the team with eleven players? And they played during Hurricane Ditka? What then???
DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BEARS, DA BEARS, DA BEARS, DA BEARS…
keels over of heart attack
Does either team have Lance Briggs?
mutter, mutter, mutter
If I understand the parameters of the question correctly–a player gets kicked out of the game and, regardless of the position he plays, the team plays a man short on offense and defense for the whole game–then it’s a blowout, no question about it. No team in the NFL is so bad that it would not be able to consistently take advantage of the team that’s a man down. At present, the NFL has 30 teams, if I remember right; even the worst NFL team is composed of the top players culled from a couple of hundred college teams. The talent level is just too high to have that kind of advantage not result in a blowout.
If you modify the question a bit, and say that one player is tossed and his team can’t substitute for him–that is, his specific position–that might change things. If it’s a defensive player ejected from Team A, then Team B has a huge advantage and will probably score at will; just line up in the shotgun, and there will always be a player wide open either down the field or for a short screen pass.
But if it’s an offensive player ejected from Team A, then Team A (down a man) might not have any chance to score–but Team B would still be playing against Team A’s full defense, and if Team A has a good defense, they might shut down Team B anyway, and the game stays close if not a 0-0 tie.
None of this necessarily applies to college or high school teams, where the disparity in talent is often huge even within leagues and/or divisions.
I actually have some experience playing 4 on 5. I grew up in Indiana, and after HS was done and I wasn’t playing college ball anywhere, I would play in a church leage or a rec league at various times throughout the year (and intramurals in season while in college). One time in a church leage we started with 5, and lost one to fouls early in the 2nd half. We were about the same heights as the other team, so we basically played a 2-1-2 zone without the center man, and just pinched it in at all corners. We used to run ALOT, but told everyone to crash the boards on defense instead of releasing 1 or 2 on each shot. I’ve always been a pretty good scorer who could get hot and run off 16-20 straight points in a game, and although I never went crazy this game, I kept us in it, and we actually ended up with the ball, down by 1, after one of our guys stole a pass and had about a 15 foot jumper at the buzzer to win, but missed.
The second time was a rec league, again both teams about equal in height, and we lost two players in the 4th quarter to fouls, giving us 4 to play. Again we went to a 2-0-2, pinched in, and hoped the other team wouldn’t hit their open shots. We had myself and 2 other guys who could shoot, and our big man who could rebound and pass well. We also ran alot. We were down by 2 with a few seconds left and I drove and hit a little jumper to tie it at the buzzer. The other team shot poorly, we rebounded well, and again, with time running out, had a player hit a running jumper to tie the game at the buzzer, and send it to another OT. At the end of that one, the other team hit a shot to take a 2 pt lead with 5-6 seconds left, and our other guard flew up the sideline and buried a long 3 at the buzzer to win it.
Both times we weren’t against a much bigger team, or we would have had a ton of problems. In basketball, assuming roughly equal talent and height among the 9 players, 4 can play with, and with some luck, beat 5. You need the team with 5 to shoot a little worse than normal, you need to rebound well and play solid zone defense and not overcommit, and have a scorer or two get hot. It helps if you can run, because you can still create matchups in your favor by doing so.
I’ve always thought basketball was different from the other team sports like football or hockey because even though you have to work as a team, one player can still put a team on his shoulders and carry it to victory pretty much by himself.
Oh yeah, and basketball has another equalizer- the 3pt shot. Both times we were able to hit more 3s than the other team, and when you trade 3 for 2 a few times, it makes up for the extra possessions the other teams get because their extra player gets a long rebound, or a loose ball, or whatever.
Another factor was…the other teams weren’t real sure what to do on defense…I mean, who practices a defense for when you are up a man in basketball?