May 7th, 2009 |
Published in
Daniel Gettinger, other sports
by Daniel Gettinger
One of my more controversial opinions has been that the Padres should not worry about building a team aimed at winning a world series in any given year, but should instead strive to be consistently competitive. One of the reasons is that a “consistently competitive” approach is the one that will actually maximize world series victories. The full article can be read here.
Over at the Charger Nation, I have written a post detailing why I would not be content with a “consistently competitive” approach from the Chargers. In presenting my argument, I examine why the argument I made for baseball does not hold in football.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
In baseball, once a team qualifies for the playoffs, it is nearly as likely to win the world series as any other team. This is because no playoff team actually has a very good of a chance of winning the world series. For example, last season, James Holzhauer used a monte carlo simulation to generate the odds of each playoff team winning the world series. The Boston Red Sox were deemed most likely to win the championship. Their odds: 16.8% The Milwaukee Brewers were the least likely team to win it all. Their odds: 9.2%. Not a very big difference. In baseball, qualifying for the playoffs (ie. being competitive in the regular season) is important, but anything above that is unlikely to increase a team’s probability of winning a championship by very much.
The same analysis does not hold in football. There are two primary reasons. First, upsets in any given round are much less likely in football. Second, the structure of the playoffs are different, with the NFL granting two teams per conference first round byes…
