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?
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?
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