AUSTRALIAN RULES FOOTBALL
My understanding here is that the #1 and #2 teams meet in the first playoff match. The Winner automatically advances to the championship (the Grand Final); the loser must then play the winner a playoff between the #3 and 4 teams; the game between the loser of 1 v 2 then plays the winner of 3 v 4 in the Grand Semifinal, with the winner then being the second team in the Grand Final.
COLLEGE BASEBALL WORLD SERIES AND THE WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC
These I STILL cant understand, even though they have been explained to me (and yes, I’ve wikipedia’d them). Something about “double elimination”, and each team plays each other, but if you get 2 losses, your eliminated??? I’ve been known to be thick, however.
BRAZILIAN SOCCER
I’m not going to even begin to explain how this one works, mainly because up until a few years ago, the playoff format was changed almost annually. But here is the article that attempts to explain it all:
What other sports have playoff tournaments that are a bit offbeat? I remember reading the NHL used to have a playoff system where the #1 and #2 teams would have an opening playoff round, with the loser eliminated and the winner playing the winner of a elimination between the #3 and 4 teams, or something crazy like that! Then there’s the old NASL, which basically featured a playoff elimination format, except the teams played home and away games, and if the teams were tied, a “mini-game” was played to determine the winner.
Ottawa had a team in the Can-Am league last year. It was a six team league at the time, and the championship was decided between the team that had the best record in the first half of the season, and the one with the best record in the second half.
EDIT: There were also a #3 and #4 seed, so I guess it wasn’t that bad. You could ostensibly, though, have a team go on a tear in the first half of the season, then fall off the face of the planet and still have a playoff berth!
Division I-A (yes, I know it’s called something else now; don’t care enough to look it up again) college football.
Decided by two polls, one for sportswriters and one for coaches.
Throughout the season, the relative strengths of all the teams in I-A are determined via computers and a human poll. Whole bunch of factors, including strength of schedule and overall margin of victory. Each team is assigned a number, and from there come the rankings.
At the end of the season, the teams ranked #1 and #2 play in the Bowl Championship Series, which is a one-off championship game. It’s called a “series” because it’s cycled among five different bowl games.
The winner of that one game gets an automatic #1 ranking in the coaches’ poll (and the loser #2), while the sportswriters are free to vote however they wish.
If the sportswriters pick the same #1 as the BCS winner, that team is the national champion. If not…er…well, that’s…something else.
And to add insult to injury, all levels of college football below I-A use a conventional playoff system, every year throwing into sharp relief how truly ridiculous this is.
Point of order:
The AFL has a final 8 system as outlined here.
The four team final series was last played in 1971.
From 1972 to 1994 the AFL used a 5 team final series.
The NRL (rugby league) uses a similarly structured finals series.
Of course a lot of non professional club competitions don’t have 8 team finals.
Top four would be the most common and the finals fixtures of 1v2, 3v4 then preliminary and grand final. I’d have thought that pretty much ubiquitious across the Australian sporting landscape. I’ve played that format in AFL, soccer, rugby, cricket, hockey, basketball, softball.
The only other format, most often seen in more casual competitions is termed “cutthroat” with 1v4, 2v3 and both winners play the grand final.
That’s standard in a lot of baseball tournaments and, yes, it means you need to lose twice to be eliminated. A single baseball game is often not enough to determine the better team, which is why baseball playoffs are multiple games (the only exception the pros is when there’s a tie for the wild card, and that’s because you can’t build in the time to play multiple games). A team may have one dominant pitcher, but two who are only so-so.
Usually, there’s a round robin of the teams playing each other. Two losses, and you’re out.
Several minor baseball leagues use a split-season like this. I’m not particularly fond of it. The worst part is not the second-half stinker that advances because they were good in the spring–it’s the fact that it’s possible for a team with the best overall record to not advance, if they are just edged out by one team in the first half, and by another team in the second.
No, the single-game divisional or “wild card” tiebreaker makes sense, because it’s not really just a single-elimination game–it’s an extension of the regular season. It’s the “rubber” game of a season-long series.
Maybe not unusual so much, but somewhat pointless: for some time recently England’s Minor Counties Championship in cricket was divided into two conferences, and the leading team from each conference met in a final. Simple, right? Except:
Not every team played the same number of games. Some teams didn’t play against each of the others in their conference, others played a team more than once. Each team was assigned a number of points for each game based on whether they’d won or how many runs they’d scored or wickets they’d taken in the first innings…and then those points were divided by the number of matches they’d played. So a team could play the six worst teams in the conference and finish top of the conference on average, while a better team could play against tougher opponents and not win.
Once the top teams were decided, they played in a one-off championship game. As you might know, many cricket games end in draws, but there are ways to determine which team had the better performance in a draw (first innings lead, for example). Minor Counties, in their infinite wisdom, simply decided that teams that drew the championship match would share the trophy no matter what.
Not really. If you beat the other team every time in regular season play, you still lose the playoff if you don’t win the game. The earlier games don’t count, just the playoff.
MLB adds one or two days (for three-way ties, which haven’t happened yet) after the end of the season for ties, but because of the way they want the playoffs to take place, they can’t delay the schedule for a best of three. (In 1951 and 1962, when there was a three-game playoff, the series was delayed a day, but that was before prime time TV ratings drove the decision; the also series ended by October 16 instead of November).
Often a league doesn’t have the right number of teams for teams for a regular tournament (i.e., not a power of 2), so they give various byes. In the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conferece, three are ten teams. The teams are seeded one through ten. Teams 7 and 10 and 8 and 9 play each other. The winners play the top seeds.
The earlier games most certainly do count. Every single game counts, from the beginning of April to the end of September. You wouldn’t be in a position to play the tiebreaker otherwise.
A tiebreaker game isn’t merely to decide which of those two teams is the better–it’s the resolution of a whole season’s play to determine the best of the division. If one of the tied teams has thus far beaten the other soundly, they can only be tied if they’ve also lost a bunch of games against other opponents that the second tied team has won. The question of which team deserves to advance is not a simple matter of which has won the head-to-head games.
For at least a year or two (IIRC, probably the last year or two of its independent existence, before the merger with the NFL was finalized), the American Football League had a playoff system in which the two division winners would play the #2 team from the other division in the first round of the playoffs – i.e., the team which won the Eastern Division would play the #2 team from the Western Division, and vice-versa. Winners from those two games would then play for the AFL championship, and the right to play the NFL champion in the Super Bowl.
As I’m sure you’ll recall, until last year or so the MAAC had an even more convoluted playoff system whereby the top seed received a “double bye” directly to the semifinals. A good way to reward the top seed, maybe, but IIRC one year three teams tied for the top seed at 14-4, so one of those teams got the double bye and the other two got hosed.
That happened in the majors in 1981, when so much of the middle of the season was lost to a strike. The Cincinnati Reds had the best record in baseball for the season as a whole, but were screwed out of the playoffs because of the split-season system MLB implemented.
The NCAA basketball tournament has what they call “play-in” games just to get into the official tournament, but those are really tournament games too.
Not an unusual system, but a quirk: I understand the Mexican Baseball League used to permit the team that won a playoff series to “draft” a player from the losing side for the next round.
With 10 races to go in the 36-race season, all but the top 12 drivers are eliminated from the Championship “Chase”… However, 31 other drivers continue to compete alongside the top 12 each week to fight it out for 13th on.
Meanwhile, before those final 10 races, the points of the top 12 are “reset.” Regardless of how many points had previously separated them, the leader goes in 5 points ahead of second, who goes in 5 points ahead of third, and so on. Except there’s a bonus (10 points, I think) added to that for each of a driver’s previous race wins. Got it?
Oh, and how are the points doled out in the first place? You don’t have time.
The English Premier League, like most top-flight European football leagues, has no play-offs - the team with the best record over the season are the champions, stop. The Championship (Football League) division below the Premier League does have play-offs, but they’re between the teams that finished 3rd to 6th in the league (the top two teams are automatically promoted, and the next four play off for the last promotion spot). The same system is used in League One. There are four promotion slots from League Two, so the top three teams are promoted automatically, and Nos 4-7 play off.
When first introduced the playoffs were between the teams finishing 3rd, 4th and 5th in the lower division and the team finishing 3rd-from-bottom in the upper division (only the bottom two were automatically relegated).
With minor league split seasons, what happens if the same team wins both splits? How did they propose handling it in 1981 during the strike?
Personally, I don’t think its a bad idea for AAA minor league ball. You could have a team with a great first half, and then by July all their stars are picked off by the major league team, or traded away. . . or the team could suck, but then the major league team trades a star for some AAA players, and it has a great second half. In AAA, the team rarely resembles what it looked like at the beginning of the season; maybe a 1st half and 2nd half winner plays each other to face the overall W-L leader or something like that . . .
I also forgot to add the playoff system our teacher made up for our 3rd grade afterschool intramural indoor soccer league: the top 2 teams and the bottom 2 teams would make the playoffs, while the middle 4 teams would get screwed.
. . and maybe file more under “stupid” than “unusual” . . starting 1981 the NHL seeded each team in the Division 1-4, and the #1 team in the division played the #4 team, then the division winners played each other, then the conference champions faced each other for the Cup. Totally stupid because:
The Norris Division had 6 teams, while the other 3 divisions had 5, so two teams got screwed out of the playoffs while if you played for the other division, your odds of getting cheated were less. (This disadvantage was passed on the Patrick Division when I think Kansas City or Colorado moved to New Jersey)
Teams played 80 games to eliminate 5 out of 21 teams.
Thanks to this system, in 1985-86 the Buffalo Sabres were last in the Adams division with 80 points, and missed the playoffs . . . while 5 other teams with less than 80 made it, including 3 teams that won 26 games or less. The Penguins also got screwed, earning “only” 76 points in the 6 team Patrick Division. Two years later the Rangers and Penguins got the finger, they were the bottom two in the Patrick with over 80 points, while 6 teams bypassed them with worse records, including the 21-49-10 Maple Leafs. To put this into perspective, this would be like a .350 baseball team making the payoffs, while a team slightly above .500 doesn’t make it.
It ruined playoff races way too early in the season. Instead of competing with teams within the conference for the coveted 8th spot, teams were basically playing for playoff berths, especially if great teams like the Oilers ran away with the division, leaving the other three teams fighting for scraps.
There are at least a couple other conferences that do this as well. The West Coast Conference (which includes Gonzaga) and the Horizon League (which includes Butler) have this ludicrous system. Then there’s the Big East, which has 16 teams, yet doesn’t have eight first-round games. They have the double bye crap as well.
Split-season leagues would give the second spot to the other team with the best overall record. MLB didn’t think that far in 1981, in fact the system they chose not only screwed the team with the best overall record but somehow allowed an incentive for a team to tank games at the end (I forget the details).
Minor leagues do it to keep more teams involved in playoff races for more of the year, creating more fan interest and selling more tickets. In theory, anyway.
In the Rugby Championship in England (the second division), twelve teams play each other home and away. The top eight of these are divided into two pools in which the clubs again play each other home and away. The winners of each pool play each other over two legs, and the winner gets promoted to The Premiership.
I prefer the soccer way… The League is a league competition, The F.A. Cup is a knockout competition.
Sorry about this screed, but I challenge anyone to explain all the pertinent issues more succinctly!:
The Scottish Premier League in Association Football has a split in order to reduce the number of games. For a long time the league had 10 teams in it, playing each other 4 times to make a manageable 36 game season (Until the 70s it had been a 18 team league with 34 games, but that threw up too many meaningless games). However the smaller teams preferred a 12 team league to make it easier for them to avoid relegation. For several years there were 44 game seasons, which is way too much for top players who are also playing in Europe and for the national team.
So, last time the league voted to move to 12 teams, it was decided to introduce this split in order to reduce the number of games to 38. Teams play each other 3 times, and then the league is split into 2 groups of 6, who play each other once. There are no play offs, the winner of the league, and all other significant positions are simply decided on the position after 38 games. There is the anomaly that the team in 7th place may have more points than the team in 6th, but that has no actual significance.
Many people moan about this set up, but they are all pub bores who refuse to acknowledge that reducing the number of teams in the league is not feasible for political / financial reasons, and going back to a 16 or 18 team league would necessarily mean a reduction in competitiveness and reduce attendances, as the top teams would end up playing long sequences of 6,7 or 8 goal victories which fans would quickly tire of.
The worst thing about the current set up is that teams do not play an even number of home and away games. A proposal has been made to go to a 14 team league, with a split after everyone plays each other twice. The top 6 then play each other twice, and the bottom 8 play each other twice. I think this is the best option and the most likely to be adopted. It recognises the fact that the top 6 has increased the excitement in the last few years, as teams vie for the championship and the various European spots.
