PARIS—Let’s get one thing straight here: there’s nothing wrong with kissing your sister. In fact, I’ve frequently found your sister to be a pretty quality smoocher, on the whole.
Likewise, I have no ideological problem with ties in sports. Sometimes the old “kissing your sister,” as they call it, is a perfectly satisfactory result for two teams, when neither can produce a particularly convincing argument for victory.
Of course, not all ties are created equal. France’s national football team finished off a dismal 2008 campaign with a 0-0 tie on Wednesday night, in a friendly against Uruguay. The match was so dull and devoid of good chances that I turned it off after 70 minutes.
At the other end of the tie-xcitement spectrum, we find the 1968 Harvard versus Yale college football game, a classic and thrilling tie that celebrated its 40th anniversary this weekend (a documentary by the filmmaker Kevin Rafferty opened Wednesday in New York).
In that November 23, 1968 clash between what were, at the time, two of the States’ greatest footballing powerhouses (both teams entered the traditional season finale rivalry match, known as The Game, with undefeated records), Harvard overcame a 29-13 deficit in the final 42 seconds with 16 miraculous points that prompted the editors of the Harvard Crimson newspaper to pen one of sports journalism’s most famous headlines: “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.”
Football ties like that one seem cool in retrospect, but in the NFL they can wreak serious havoc on the standings because of their sheer uncommonness. The league saw its first tie in six seasons this past weekend, as the Cincinnati Bengals and the Philadelphia Eagles ran out the 15-minute overtime period to secure a 13-13 draw.
Now, this wasn’t the historical rarity of the weekend, not by far. That award goes to the Pittsburgh Steelers and San Diego Chargers, who produced the league’s first-ever 11-10 final score line. Yes, after 12,837 games, a team scoring three field goals and a safety finally defeated a team scoring a touchdown and a field goal, thanks to a blown officiating call on the final play that incorrectly wiped out a Troy Polamalu touchdown and caused a $100-million-dollar gambling swing in Vegas, where the Steelers were a roughly 5-point favourite. Oopsies!
But the Bengals-Eagles result was soul-crushingly anticlimactic, and not even the post-game revelation that Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb didn’t know that an NFL game was allowed to end in a tie (seriously, Donovan, you didn’t know? yeesh) could make up for the visual damage done to the league’s standings. In a league where Wins and Losses mean everything, we now have to suffer through the season’s remaining six weeks with a new column, Ties, cluttering up the standings to accommodate the 5-4-1 Eagles and the 1-8-1 Bengals. Thanks a ton for that, gang.
The win-loss simplicity of the NFL standings, this most recent act of compromise notwithstanding, is one of the reasons, along with the small sample size of contests, why I think the game has risen to its pre-eminent position in the North American sporting market. It doesn’t take much for a casual fan of the league to see the record “6-4” next to the Indianapolis Colts to know exactly what kind of season they’re having. Same for the 9-1 Giants, or the 2-8 Seattle Seahawks.
Compare that to the NHL, where the 8-8-2 Phoenix Coyotes are having what the casual observer would have to assume is a pretty middle-of-the-pack start to its season, whatever that “2” at the end means, since we all know that the NHL got rid of ties after the 2004-05 lockout season.
Sorry, casual observers: the 8-8-2 Coyotes are currently sitting 22nd in the 30-team league. So 8-8-2 puts you in the bottom quarter of the league these days? Apparently so.
Now, I’m not going where you might think I’m going with this, especially if you’re used to listening to shootout arguments from Toronto Maple Leafs fans, who uniformly hate this rule (because their team is lousy at shootouts). See, I like the shootout in the NHL, and I have no problem with one point being awarded to the losing team in overtime or the shootout. It’s a marketing trick: after the lockout, the NHL realised that it was competing for dollars in the cutthroat North American sports market against three sports (basketball, baseball and football) that didn’t have ties.
So the spirit of the decision to eliminate ties with the shootout – to give the paying customer a definitive result at the end of an evening where they’ve invested 3 hours and let’s say $100 – is solid. If you want to attract new fans, and your product it good, you don’t want first-time fans coming to the rink and having their first live hockey game end in a tie. That’s not how you win repeat customers.
(Contrast that with Europe, where soccer matches end in ties all the time, but soccer remains by far the biggest game in town. I think the 3-points-for-a-win scoring system also helps a great deal in establishing respect for the draw in soccer.)
So my problem with the NHL is not the shootout. It’s the bookkeeping. Now that I live outside Canada and don’t follow hockey as closely as I once did, I want to be able to scan the standings in the newspaper once a week and quickly be able to keep up on what’s happening. And I think that the standings format that the NHL has devised – keeping track of wins, losses and “overtime losses” – is a problem. Why? Because at first glance, so many teams have a winning record!
Looking at today’s NHL standings, if I total up the wins and the losses, I find that NHL teams have won 278 games and lost only 205 games. What a league! Oh, but there’s that pesky third column, the overtime losses, which brings our total losses up to 278. Phew!
So why are the losses divided between two columns, and the wins aren’t? Why is a loss in overtime not a loss? I mean, you lost that game, right? I understand that with the one-point overtime loss, all losses are no longer created equal. That’s fine. But the whole point of the shootout, as I explained above, is to satisfy that primal urge in North American culture to identify a winner and a loser.
That’s the way sports works – every time one team wins a game, another team loses. I know it’s a silly, meaningless point I’m making here, but after living for 5 years with the two-thirds-of-teams-have-a-winning-record bookkeeping method of the post-lockout NHL, I really do think that something like this alters people’s perceptions of the league.
And I do think it matters. How am I supposed to take seriously a league that tells me that most teams win more often than they lose? Do you know how many teams had more losses than wins in the 2007-08 NHL season? Six. Six teams finished with losing records, notwithstanding these “bonus points.” See, that’s what the overtime loss is. It’s a bonus point. So why can’t we count an overtime win in the “Wins” column, an overtime loss in the “Losses” column, and have a third column that nobody pays attention to called “Bonus Points”? Would that be too difficult?
Call me old fashioned if you want. I guess I just want people to tell me straight up whether they’re winning more often than they’re losing. That, and a kiss from your sister. Sometimes ties can be a beautiful thing.
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