Not when the proposal that was being responded to was to find ways to increase scoring in games so that ties would be avoided.
I’m the one suggesting a change to the game to reduce ties, and I don’t care if there are ties. I don’t care if tournaments fail to produce a winner due to ties. On the other hand, I also don’t really see ties as a positive feature, either, as some seem to.
But if you want to have tournaments reliably produce a winner without the awkwardness of a tiebreaker system, then reducing the number of ties is a great way to that.
True. The problem is ties provide an important function in non knockout tournament play.
I’m obviously not familiar enough with football tournaments. What function do they serve?
Each team gets a point.
Sometimes a tie is the most accurate representation of who was the better team. Though it could be argued that in a 0-0 draw neither team deserves a point.
Only if one holds that offense is intrinsically ‘better’ than defense.
Another Euro game went to kicks today.
It is true that no major American sport except the NFL has ties now in the regular season. The most recent league to get rid of them was the NHL in 2005. NFL can have ties but they are very rare. They only play one OT during the regular season.
I may have told this story before on these boards.
When my daughter was about 13 or so, her recreational soccer team took part in a six-team mini tournament. Games lasted about 40-45 minutes, maybe? Not sure of that, but close.
The teams were divided into two groups for round robin play to establish position for the knockout round. So my daughter’s team had two games in this section of the tournament. Both ended in 0-0 ties. As fate would have it, the game involving the other two teams also ended 0-0.
The sanctioned way of resolving this was a three-way shootout. I don’t recall exactly how this worked, but it took forever and ended with my daughter’s team in third position. That put them into the first knockout round against the second-place finisher in the other half of the draw. The game ended…in a 0-0 tie. (That’s three 0-0 ties for her team if you’re scoring at home.) Knockout round, so a shootout was necessary…this time they won, putting them into the final four and a game against one of the teams they had already had a 0-0 tie with.
This game ended 0-0 (detect a pattern here?). My daughter’s team lost the shootout, the third (or fourth, depending on how you look at it) they’d gone through on the day. That put them into the third place game. Final score: 0-0. Penalty kicks to decide third: they lost.
Five games. Not a single goal scored. Yes, they were shortened games, but still… Four or possibly five shootouts. No, I didn’t want them to play all night long. But scoreless game after scoreless game was kind of unsatisfying, and settling ties via shootouts turned out to be completely unsatisfying. As has been said above, it wasn’t soccer.
True but a lot of these games are inept offenses facing mediocre defenses.
I’m not sure if I even think this is a good idea, but figured I’d toss it out there:
How about do the shoot-out before the overtime? Regulation ends in a tie, do a shoot-out, then play overtime. If overtime ends in a tie we already know who won the shoot-out.
You are not the first to suggest this and it would really motivate one team. But there is no incentive for the winning team to try to play at all. Just build an 11 man wall in front of the goal. Pretty quick it would become pointless to play after the shootout.
Would it run into the same issue if there were a shootout before the match?
I don’t see why it wouldn’t. If a team knows that all they have to do to win is not allow a goal in under any circumstances, that’s not actually all that hard to do. The game’s balance works because both teams need to try to score, which is another reason that allowing ties is sort of fundamental to the game.
I do see how this causes a problem in knockout tournaments. The best solution might be to not have knockout tournaments. But people like them. I always find the group stages more interesting personally. But I like regular season baseball more than the playoffs too.
But that’s fine. That’s soccer. That’s more or less what a team does after they score the first goal in extra time, or if they’re up a goal with 5 minutes left in normal time.
The advantages to this plan (which I strongly support) are twofold:
(1) when the final whistle blows, when the game ends, there are two 11-man teams out on the field actually playing soccer. The final act is soccer.
(2) Lots of times when a soccer game is boring (and it’s not just that I think it’s boring, it’s the announcers saying it’s boring as well), it’s because both teams are afraid of losing, so both teams are playing defensively, and no one has an incentive to attack. That’s possible as long as the score is tied. But with PKs before overtime, the score is NEVER tied in overtime.
The only valid argument I’ve heard against this plan is that it would screw up player conditioning, after running for 90 minutes, then having to sit through PKs, then run more, but that must be a solvable problem.
I’m still not seeing the purpose it serves. Yes, you get a point, because a tie is different than a loss or a win. But tournaments would work just fine if there weren’t ties. They don’t add anything essential.
If playing a game is the process by which you determine which team is better, then a tie game is means that the better team could not be determined within the margin of error of the structure of the game. A game structure that results in many ties is simply one with a greater margin of error.
Think about changes to the game that would increase the number of ties, like narrowing the goals, or shortening the playing time. Would those changes make the game better? I’d argue they would not. Increasing the number of ties just makes games an even worse predictor of which team is better.
So, if more ties is worse, why is fewer ties better? Other than status quo bias. Is it possible that we’ve chanced onto the absolutely optimal number of ties in football? Seems unlikely.
They do add an essential element to non tournament play though. Because they provide a point to both sides they provide a balance that allows less luck in the final table than would otherwise be possible with teams only playing each other twice. Without ties you would need to double the number of games in the season at minimum or put up with HUGE swings in the standings based on luck. That doesn’t have anything to do with tournaments, but unless you are suggesting that we have a different game for tournament and league play (which I don’t think you are) then changing the game play to eliminate ties doesn’t work.
Why not? Or at least roughly optimal.
Why make wholesale changes to reduce ties? Sometimes teams are equally matched.
Tournaments have this strange thing that after the group stages, they don’t allow for ties. So you figure something out. Prior to PKs it was a coin flip or drawing lots. Same basic deal - they want a winner so the tournament is more exciting. Though I think, because of that, in soccer there is more of an acceptance of the fact that sometimes the winner of the tournament isn’t the best team.
I wonder if the best solution is actually to eliminate both teams from the tournament in the event of a tie. There would need to be some way to reorganize things and crown a winner in the event of every team drawing in a round. But this might be best (assuming we do hate pks, and I know not everyone does).
How is this fair? By analogy, if the NFC Championship Game results in a 27-27 tie, should the AFC Championship become the de facto Super Bowl?
Yeah, why not? Is it less fair that having a coin toss? It would also give extra incentives to not end the game with a tie because a tie is as good as a loss in tournaments then. A tie being as good as a loss adds incentives to relegation battles, maybe it would help with tournaments. It wouldn’t be boring.