Exactly
IMHO, the way it should work is that a win is worth a win and a loss is worth a loss. There’s so need for “points” if there are no ties. It doesn’t make any sense to me for a team to be rewarded for winning a game by one goal than for winning it by three; why should a team that dominates, a truly great team like the 1984 Oilers, be given fewer points? In some circumstances you could have a team scoring on itself because they need the three points.
There’s no way in the NHL to be awarded 3 points for a win. All wins are worth 2 points. It’s just that a team that loses in OT/Shootout also gets 1 point.
So suppose the two leading teams in an NFL division had win/loss/tie records of 10/7/0 and 9/4/3. Wouldn’t the 10 game winner be the division winner? That differs from English football where a possible Premier League end-of-season top two could be 30/6/2 (92 points) and 29/3/6 (93 points). The English football team with the higher points would win the league, even though they had fewer wins.
In the current football World Cup, a team could have theoretically won their group stage without scoring any goals. However, that would rely on all six group games being scoreless draws, and the winner being decided by coin flips (I think that’s the method for the final tiebreaker). Slightly more theoretically likely is a team having three 0-0 draws and coming in second in the group, thus “winning” through to the knock-out stages.
In the WC of 1982, Italy advanced from their group with three draws (though only one 0-0), only to win the title in the end. (that was still in the two points for a win era, though)
No.
Assumedly you mean that the second team has a 9/4/4 record, rather than 9/4/3?
But suppose that the team has a 9/4/4 record. Since a tie is a ‘half-win, half-loss’, that team’s record is effectively 11/6 and would be the division winner.
ETA: Since the introduction of overtime in the NFL in 1974, no team has had more than one tie in a season.
What’s the best emoticon for making a very stupid math mistake? Because I failed to add up to 17 correctly. I need a slap-in-the-head emoji, but don’t see one. I was going for 9/5/3 for the second team.
So the 9/5/3 team would have 10.5 points and would be the division winner over the 10/7/0, 10 point team.
Thanks for the answer.
In the U.S., and the NFL, they don’t refer to them as “points” in relation to the standings, but “wins.” But, yes, a team that’s 9-5-3 effectively has a record of 10.5-6.5, which would place them ahead of a team that is 10-7.
And, in most seasons, the number of tied games in the entire NFL is either zero or one; I’ve been scanning through Pro Football Reference, and I haven’t found any season in the past three decades in which there were more than two tied games.
Changes to the NFL overtime rules in recent years (shortening the overtime period from 15 minutes to 10 minutes, and making it impossible to win the game with a field goal on the first possession) have probably made ties slightly more likely, but not so much that even two ties for a particular team in a season are a likely outcome.
FTR: Ties used to be nonentities in the NFL (thru the early 70’s), with standings determined by won loss percentage only, no half wins/losses figured in.
I realise this has never occurred, and is very unlikely to occur, but how would the nomenclature difference be handled? Team B had 9 wins but won the division based on 10.5 “assessed wins”?
Silly side question, but hopefully within the scope of the OP. Could an NFL team have a scoreless season (8.5 “assessed wins”) and still make the playoffs? I know that teams can make the playoffs with losing records, but ties mean points (aka 0.5 “assessed wins”) to their rivals. Suppose that within a division, one team had 17 ties and no other team had any ties besides games played against the winless/loseless team. Could the team with only ties make it to the playoffs?
Yeah, probably something like “9 wins, but three ties effectively gave them 10 1/2 wins.”
It’d be entirely possible, but it would all depend on the records of the other teams in their division and conference.
NFL teams are organized into two “conferences” of 16 teams; each conference is then sub-organized into four “divisions” of 4 teams each. There are two ways to qualify for the playoffs:
- Winning your division, by having the best win-loss record of the four teams in your division
- Earning a “wild card” berth, by having one of the three best win-loss records in your conference, among teams which didn’t win a division
There have been three teams which have won their divisions with only 7 wins (2020 Washington, 2014 Carolina, 2010 Seattle), and three which have done so with only 8 wins (2013 Green Bay, 2011 Denver, 2008 San Diego); in all of those cases, they were the “best” team in a weak overall division.
So, yeah, it’d be entirely possible for a team with, effectively, 8.5 wins (all through ties) to make the playoffs, but it’d entirely depend on what the other teams’ records were.
Doubtful if the NFL would use the term “assessed wins”!
The winner of the division is based on winning percentage. Winning percentage is determined by dividing the number of wins by the number of games played. When calculating that percentage, a tie is indeed counted as ‘half of a win’.
For instance, there was a tie earlier this year between the Colts and the Texans. Right now, the Colts record is 4-6-1. They’ve played 11 games and ‘won’ 4.5 of them. Dividing 4.5 by 11 yields .409, which is, in fact, the current winning percentage for the Colts.
That makes sense. Thanks for the factual explanation.
Of course it’s no coincidence all these happened in the last twenty years; it was in 2002 the NFL went to four four-team divisions. Four teams out of 32 is really not very many, and it’s essentially inevitable the NFL will get a shockingly crappy division champion every few years.
Having the same number of teams broken into 3 divisions makes it rather surprisingly less likely you will end up with a division champion with 8 wins.