Hello, while the various rolling threads are fun and good for fans of those sports they can get a bit impenetrable. I do enjoy reading and chatting about sports in the wider sense, so let’s try that in here.
Part 1 was here, about the idea of ‘greatness’. Feel free to bump and continue that chat if interested.
This the second thread, and the topic is Structure, Form and Format.
Things I like:
5 set tennis matches
promotion/relegation between leagues
the madness of the snooker shoot out
Things I am frustrated by:
leg play in most darts tournaments.
champions league qualification treated like a trophy in the premier league
sprint races in F1 being exactly the same tactically as a grand prix just over less distance
lack of the heavyweight boxing matches that fans actually want
Things I’m unsure about:
Women’s boxing being 2 minute rounds instead of 3. Would it be better if it was 3 minute rounds? Will they change it in future as women’s boxing changes?
pretty much all changes done for commercial reasons - what examples are there from other sports?
anything to do with sports I don’t follow, because I know nothing about structure, form or format. interested to know more about sports such as cricket, golf, athletics, swimming. also the two rugby codes.
I think the most perfect scoring systems in sports are the 3/7 points systems used by rugby union and American football.
For rugby, two penalties being worth just less than a converted try gives the perfect level of weighting between the two, sometimes encouraging teams to go for it, sometimes knowing a penalty is enough. Funny to think that they were worth the same up to the 70s.
For American football, same basic thing but with a risk/reward extra point that can boost it to 8 giving rise to even more permutations.
Both also have he jeopardy that while scoring 14 points in two minutes is unlikely, it’s not impossible, meaning games that seem out of hand retain some interest.
Honorary mention to tennis which is also an excellent (if peculiar) system.
On the other side of things: Too many points is bad. Basketball has too many points and it is impossible to get excited by any of them.
I was resistant to the league split thing in the scottish premier league in football but it is actually good as it means those fighting relegation are fighting it out amongst themselves and those trying to win the league have to play the best teams.
if the scoring system of 3 and 7 is so perfect why did they start awarding bonus points for scoring lots of tries? does that not imply that 7 points per converted try wasn’t enough on its own?
Something I didn’t mention in the OP is snooker match lengths and snooker tournament formats.
The world champs is all best of 19 frames or longer, including qualifying. The tour championship is best of 19 all the way through but only for the top 12 (previously top 8) for the season. So the world champs is the only time a lot of the players actually play matches that go on for more than one session. That means they’re more likely to struggle if they ever get to a final in one of the other tournaments. And that means less diversity in the winners list, which isn’t good for the sport.
The world champs has 2 games at a time until the semi finals. To me that’s completely ludicrous. Imagine if the FIFA men’s world cup had two quarter finals going at the same time. A lot of the other snooker tournaments have all 4 quarter finals on the Friday, but with 2 games at the same time in the evening and 2 games at different times during the day. What’s the point in that? Give them all a one table setup and a tv slot!
I love the format of Test cricket. Playing over five days (although often three or four in practice) gives it a real sense of ebb and flow and narrative structure as the dominance shifts. And then that scales up to a five match series, and you can be invested in one competition between two teams for months
The bonus points don’t have any impact on the 3/7, they affect the points table rather than the match scoring itself and I would presume are to encourage expansive play. Not really an expert, very much a fairweather rugby fan these days.