Fix a sport

Combine the rules of Blitzball with the rules of Cricket and make the whole thing lean towards less slowdown and offense you get Critzball!

Bike race photo finish decided by four ten thousandths of a second.

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I can’t believe I watched five full Crickzball matches in the last few days of my work trip.

Glad you liked it, I thought it was really good.

It’s fun to see a new sport development process in real time with professional level commentary, albeit with amateur level athletes.

As a follow up from my critzball post one of the captains did a postmortem on the experience.

I’ve often thought gloves could be banned for goalkeepers, which would lead to more goals, and more exciting match scores.

This video seems to show a technique that would make gloveless goalkeeping to still be pretty secure in many cases, but would allow for slippy hands to be a problem in more high pressure moments.

Would no gloves result in a lot more broken hands?

Yeah, probably. I guess I thought about it often but not thoroughly.

I guess they have a point on the safety issue, but it’s still a shame. The most exciting thing to happen in their sport in a long time, and they ban it.

But did anyone think they wouldn’t ban it for the next season? It was exciting because it was novel and it worked that one time, but obviously unsafe if everyone slams their car into the wall on the final lap.

Basketball had a problem that was fixed long long ago by the addition of the shot clock. Without the shot clock the game becomes completely broken as one team can hold the ball until the clock runs out.

Apparently in some places high school basketball does not have the shot clock. Can you guess what happened?

https://www.si.com/.amp/extra-mustard/2023/02/08/oklahoma-high-school-basketball-weatherford-anadarko-game-4-2-score-shot-clock

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I applaud those kids.

Clearly you didn’t read because the kids who tried to pull the stunt were the ones who lost. Their strategy was to score a last second 3 point shot when they were down 4-2. They missed.

The correct strategy is to get possession of the ball while you have the lead, and then just wait out the clock.

To me this didn’t sound like they wanted to win the game, but to win a change in the rules. But due to a lack of journalism in the form of interviews or followup questions to the players or coaches, I guess we’ll never know.

Did I say anything about winning?

This person runs down basically everything I’ve been saying about fixing sports and television, and they go even further. They’re mostly comparing NBA to F1, but I think it applies to basically all the sports that are doing it right, vs. the ones doing it wrong.

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Hits the “why the NBA isn’t fun to watch” nail on the head:

The NBA, not so much. The league allows entertainment-killing nonsense like flopping and intentional fouling and endless timeouts and interminable reviews to continue, and refuses to shorten the season — increasing the importance of every game and making it more likely that star players play — for fear of losing gate revenue

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Calling a timeout should cost a point.

Okay, let’s get to it.

The number of matches a sports team plays per regular season should aim to increase the overall value of the sport, not maximise in-person ticket revenue per team. Ticket revenue was good for when baseball was the main form of live entertainment in a town, but there have long been many better options.

Increasing overall value means:

  1. Making each game notable. Too many games means each one has little impact. 162 games per baseball team? Each game isn’t even worth 1% of getting to the post season/promotion into a higher league. 82 games in basketball? Not much better.

  2. Scheduling! Too many games means too many for regular scheduling. It should be very easy to answer the question “when is the next game?” Basketball could own two nights of the week, easily. Wednesday and Saturday, your team will be playing somewhere. Done. These days… who knows? Nobody really has time for more than two games per week anyway.

  3. Star players on display! How many games per season does a healthy basketball star play now? About 60 games. Imagine going to see the Milwaukee Bucks and it’s just Giannis Antetokounmpo’s night off? That sucks! Baseball pitchers? Good luck seeing any specific pitcher in any random game, as they all need many days off between so their arms don’t fall off.

  4. Extra duties. With a reduced schedule, the athletes can take part in more non-match activities. Or at least non-league matches like friendlies, exhibitions, extra tournaments (like soccer’s international fixtures, or regional club competitions like the Champions and Europa Leagues).

  5. Matchups! You want every team to play every other team.

The Premier League has struck a good balance in all this. 20 teams, and they all play each other twice (once home and once away) leading to 38 games per season. Every fan knows the score of the latest matches with their rivals, as they only happen twice per year.

The NFL has 32 teams but only 17 games. I find the number of games too few to be economical with its use of stadiums. Also each team can’t play all others, so many matchups don’t occur for years at a time. A quick google shows “The Dolphins and Broncos only met once in 22 seasons: they played December 20, 1975; September 29, 1985; and then December 21, 1998.”

So if baseball is at the extreme “too many” end and the NFL at the “too few” end, we probably need about 30-50.

Both NBA and MLB have 30 teams, and both have two sections (east and west conferences, National and American Leagues) so we can use the same solution for both sports.

Each team plays every other team in their conference/league TWICE, once home and once away. That’s 14 opponent teams, twice, for 28.

Each team also plays every team in the opposite conference/league ONCE, alternating home and away each season. That’s 15 more games, for a total of 43 games in the regular season.

43 feels about right!

Every season we get to see every matchup between teams, and they will mean a lot more because they are more rare. The Subway Series will no longer be a series, but the SUBWAY SHOWDOWN, with a single game having a much bigger impact. And of course, if the NY teams want to keep the ticket revenue, they now have space in the schedule for extra non-MLB games if they wish to keep up the rivalry in other ways.

Solved.

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