I’ll say basketball is the closest simply because you may have a bunch of one-and-done individuals on the pro team vs 4-5 year team in college.
“One-and-done” is a descriptor that rapidly loses it’s meaning, the longer the players have been out of college. How many NBA teams do you think there are that have more than two rookies any given season, that actually play?
The defending NBA Champion Cleveland Cavaliers’ four best players (LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson) played a combined 86 games in college. They are three one-and-dones, and one none-and-done. And Irving only played eleven games at Duke. Any team of college seniors you’d like to give odds against them?
Giving odds against and being the closest gap between the pros and college aren’t remotely the same thing.
How about this…A team of hand-picked All-American basketball players would beat a team of hand-picked worst NBAers (presently playing). Yes? or at least have a good chance?
Stipulated. That gap ain’t close, either.
Disagree, mainly because if there was a “pro gymnastics league,” it would have the best gymnasts who are currently in college. Well, the men’s teams would; the women’s teams would probably consist of girls too young to go to college.
Remember that the thread isn’t about a team of college all-stars against the pros; it’s about existing college teams. Maybe if one school could get the best players in the country for five straight years, it could do it.
Any existing college team against the Cavs? Of course not. However, if you somehow manage to get five or six players who would have been drafted in the first round out of high school into the same college, they might stand a chance against one of the weaker NBA teams. It depends on how strong each team’s bench is.
Then again, what is the largest number of high schoolers drafted in the first round of an NBA draft, anyway?
If a top-tier college wrestler went into the ring with even a minor-league pro wrestler, one of two things would happen. Either the college wrestler would pin the pro in seconds, because the pro’s moves and techniques aren’t designed to compete against the college wrestler’s; or the pro wrestler would toss the college wrestler around like a rag doll, the college wrestler not being trained in the pro’s moves (which are designed for maximum entertainment value and require the opponent’s cooperation).
Kentucky had seven players drafted one year, but I don’t think that any school has ever had more than five drafted in the first round… And they still would have gotten smoked. To paraphrase the great American philosopher Tony Kornheiser, a really great college program might have as many as seven NBA players on it, but an NBA team has thirteen NBA players on it.
I believe that the 2004 NBA draft had the most players drafted straight out of high school, with eight (Dwight Howard, Shawn Livingston, Robert Swift, Sebastian Telfair, Al Jefferson, Josh Smith, JR Smith and Dorrell Wright). The NBA adopted the one-and-done rule two years later.
I’d go so far as to say that if you hand picked the worst of the worst NBA players, you could have a competitive game against the best hand picked high school players.
I think this is a math problem. A simple formula that ignores differences in leagues/conferences/divisions would be ratio of pro players to college players.
Lacrosse and women’s soccer.
The major 4 sports plus Men’s soccer-----not even close.
I disagree. Over the course of 1,000 games, the top college team would win a decent percentage. Somewhere between 100 and 200 would be my guess.
In general, baseball winning percentages are not as high as in other sports.
In addition, it’s fairly common for very bad teams to beat very good teams. It’s not at all uncommon for very bad teams to win the season series from very good teams. The reason for this is that baseball is a very flukey game, to a far greater extent than other sports. For instance, in a game where someone - anyone - hits a 3 run homer, he is probably exceeding his season average by a factor of between 5-20. But yet, people hit 3 run homers all the time. So the extremely unusual does happen. Other sports don’t feature those types of outlier performances. Same goes for pitchers (though personally I don’t think the flukiness of pitching performances is as much on the pitchers as many people assume - some of it is due to the flukiness of hitters, as above).
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, goes directly from college baseball to MLB with no stops in between. When it was allowed, it was not unheard of for top high school players to not only go directly to the NBA, but be really good.
I do not think a college team could win at a 20% clip against an MLB team. Even 10% seems pushing it to me. And the difference is pitching.
200 is a ludicrously high number. That would be equivalent to a regular season record of 32-130, which is very bad but not that far below replacement level, which is about 42-120 or so. College players , not even a top NCAA team, are not anywhere near MLB replacement level, not even close. Maybe one or two will be.
There’s two huge problem here.
- There are no bad teams in the major leagues. They’re all good teams; the absolute worst team in the major leagues in 2016 was probably Minnesota, but Minnesota is ludicrously better than college level. Miles better. You take the best team in college and the Twins are better at every single position by a very, very wide margin.
A brief look at college statistics is quite revealing. The range of performance - an absolutely dead on indicator of league quality - is incredibly wide as compared to professional baseball. A dozen or more players in Division-I will bat over .400 every year and entire teams will hit .330, while many individual pitchers will have Nintendo-like numbers as well and teams will have ERAs under two and a half. That doesn’t happen even in Single-A ball. A college team is nowhere near THAT good.
- Baseball is not competitively balanced because it’s “flukey.” It’s competitively balanced because teams play every day for six months, which forces the teams to use a wider array of players, thus preventing a single team from assembling an unbeatable force of players. If, for instance, baseball was played only one day a week, like football, the range of outcomes would be completely different; even if they still played for a full 26 weeks you’d have some teams going 23-3, because a team like the Dodgers would never have to use any pitchers other than Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen.
The sheer number of games also tends to flatten out luck. Truth be told, a football team that goes 15-1 is probably lucky. But over 16 games you can win a crazy number, and indeed baseball teams do have runs of 14-2 and 15-1 from time to time. It’s not coincidental that hockey teams, who play more than football teams but less than baseball teams, have a range of outcomes closer to baseball than football; last season the very best team, Washington, went 56-26, which is very high by baseball standards but not out of reach; the very worst team, Toronto, went 29-53, which isn’t a lot different from the Twins.
Basketball is more balanced than football but much less so than basketball; it’s played exactly as much, but basketball teams can play the same 9-10 men pretty much every night, with four or five of them playing the bulk of the time. That is impossible for a hockey team, which must divvy its playing time up among more people, which leads to more competitive balance.
You mean nobody like Mike Leake, Dave Roberts, Dave Winfield, Bob Horner, Pete Incavilgia, John Olerud, Sandy Koufax, Xavier Nady and a bunch of other guys?
It rarely happens now, though.
OK. I thought the question was about the top college teams playing, not about any random college team.
OK. But Minnesota won a lot more than 10%-20% of their games. So it’s not very instructive to say that Minnesota is miles better than the best college team, because no is arguing that the best college team would win nearly as many games as Minnesota.
As I’ve outlined in my prior post, baseball is flukey. You’ve not addressed that, other than to simply deny it. But it’s true.
Again, any random player hits homeruns in a game, and in that one game the guy is playing a lot better than Babe Ruth’s average performance. (Same for a guy who gets two hits - he’s a lot better than Ty Cobb in that one game.) By contrast, in basketball it’s much more rare for a mediocre player to play much better than LeBron’s average performance even for one game. Point of which is that even if you’re not facing Babe Ruth, you might be facing a guy who plays much much better than Babe Ruth in that one game, and even a good team could lose to such a guy.
I don’t agree with this. If teams played once a week then all teams would use their best pitchers, not just the ones who had Kershaw and Jansen. Some teams might be better off and some worse off, but it would depend on the dropoff between their #1 pitcher and their #2 pitcher, not on how good their #1 pitcher is.
But regardless, it’s the same for any sport. In football you need over 22 starters, once you include special teams. I don’t see why having 5 starters being pitchers fundamentally changes anything.
But it’s much more rare than in football. In any given season there are usually one or two teams who are 14-2 or 15-1. If you broke up the first 160 games of the baseball season into 10 discrete 16 game seasons, how many of them would feature any team playing at 14-2 or 15-1?
Ok, so 2 guys in the last 21 years have gone directly to MLB from college. I’d say that still proves the point.
Don’t forget the Washington Generals! They’d probably even *let * some college team beat them.
You had to go and say “nobody”, thus provoking some wiseass to look it up. Now, if you had said high school…
I’m surprised that there have only been two in the 2000s. After all, college ball matures a player like the lower levels of the minors. A hot spring training and Bob’s your uncle. I wonder if it happens less for financial or service time reasons.
Key question is whether the top-top baseball players go to college altogether. Baseball has a much stronger minor league system than the other major sports.