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godwulf
11-24-2013, 08:09 AM
I was reading the sports section of the newspaper this morning - which in the Baseball off-season generally takes me only a few minutes, max - and a question that I've had for years returned: WHY are teams referred to, throughout the season, as being "No. 7" or "No. 20", or what-have-you?

The stories, sometimes even the headlines, all say things like "No. 17 ASU 38, No. 14 UCLA 33" or "No. 22 LSU beats No. 12 Texas A&M". The last time this occurred to me, it was several years ago, and the ASU Baseball team was starting out the season with an amazing run of wins, and the paper kept referring to them as "No. 8 (or whatever) ASU" - WTF? I'm assuming that these are some sort of pre-season rankings, based on how a particular team did the previous year, and/or how they are expected to perform during the current season? What's the point?

To my knowledge, this is never done in pro sports. The closest a news report of a pro Baseball game, for example, might come is to refer to a team as "the defending World Series champion Red Sox", or mention "the Yankees, who finished last year fourth in their division". Once a new season begins, all bets are off and anything can happen; teams are not saddled with some kind of numeric expectation/ranking for the entire year.

Can someone please explain to me why this is done?

coxfan
11-24-2013, 08:38 AM
Pre-season rankings make zero sense. They discriminate against underrated teams, because the pre-season overrated team gets to keep its ranking as long as it wins, holding back the underrated team below it.

And all these polls are subjective, with personal biases affecting the voting. In the 1970's UGA one year beat Alabama in football and finished with a better record, but still were ranked below Alabama at season's end, probably due to Bear Bryant's reputation more than anything logical.

But a pre- season poll can give some satisfaction at season's end in a sport like baseball where the national championship is determined in a competition that's fair to all. After the South Carolina Gamecocks won the 2010 College World Series, one poll had them ranked only 14th to start the next year. What was especially galling was that 6 of the 7 losing teams in the 2010 College World Series were ranked ahead of the gamecocks. Were these pollsters looking at the 2010 final standings upside down?

The gamecocks gave those pollsters their comeuppance by winning the 2011 national championship with a perfect NCAA Tournament record. Of the six teams from the 2010 CWS that had been picked above South Carolina, only Florida even made it back to the 2011 CWS (where the gamecocks beat them both games, after winning the season series two to one.) In all, South Carolina went 9-3 over other teams ranked number 1 in 2010-2011. So much for polls!

godwulf
11-25-2013, 08:12 AM
Okay...but aside from their perhaps not being accurate or reflecting reality, what would their purpose be, even if they were? What sense does it make to keep calling a team "No. 12" or "No. 21" when they've just won their division or region or whatever and have a better record than any other team in the sport?