Let's break this down a little better, because even at 10 years, it doesn't necessarily tell the whole picture. This one speaks for itself. Especially since the 1 winner has also won 1/2 the conference championships in this time period. The North (excepting the Browns) are the only one that's really up for grabs here. The South is trash and the winner is mostly irrelevant. The West had Denver win it 5 straight years. KC is poised to do something similar (3 years running!), since the rest of the conference is hot garbage. This is truly the wildcard conference where some butt team comes out and manages to beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl. The NFC certainly seems up for grabs. It wasn't that long ago, though that every NFC Championship game for nearly a decade had the Cowboys, 49ers, or both playing. That's not ancient history or a bygone era or anything. The Pirates didn't win And this is exactly why we break this down - the Dodgers have won the division 7 years in a row. But the Yankees and Red Sox have combined for 7 of those and if we want to take this to 20 years, have combined for 16 NL East championships. The Yankees accounting for 11 of those.
Definitely, and has a lot to do with the odds of making a living in that sport. I mean, the odds are really low in the revenue sports, too, but the potential payoff is much greater. The pro volleyball or cross country circuits just don't quite have the same allure.
I believe we've set a rule recently that if you're going to claim people said something you need to back it up, so go for it.
Fixed it for you. Do you have any idea how many kids on full-ride academic scholarships just dick around in college?
You don't get to ignore data just for the fun of it. Bad team or not, the South counts towards the point. And the Colts were pretty good under Manning. The Cowboys haven't made the final in 25 years. That's pretty close to a bygone era in today's NFL. The Niners made it in '97, then had a good 3 year run from 2011-'13. And the Niners and Cowboys combined were in 8 of the 10 finals from '88-'97 but again, that's getting to the point of ancient history.
Do you have any idea how many non-football/basketball players are on full-ride scholarships? Hint, not many.
I'm with JasonMa on this one. I don't think the numbers are that high. And the students I know who are on full rides mostly seem to be working pretty hard at their studies. But I'm not actually on a campus.
It's not about qualifying it ... It's the numbers vs the numbers. All you stated is that we should look at division winners, so I did. I went back 10yrs and reported the numbers in the EPL. This is what the numbers say for the US. In the span of a decade there are A LOT of teams in the NFL and MLB that are winning something or at least getting a season or two of relative success. That's not what's happening in the EPL. Of course, if you want to break it down ... how many clubs have qualified for the CL in the last decade, Europa/Europe? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it ain't as widespread. I mean if we want to qualify everything then the Cowboys haven't been in the NFC title game since 1995 ... that's an entire generation of sports fan that only knows the Cowboys were GREAT because of the history books. Think about the state of the top division of soccer in England in 1995 vs today. I'd say that's long enough ago ... ... but I've certainly (and nobody else to my knowledge has) disregarded the the SUPER teams we have. What we have done though, is pointed to the fact that we get those AND the overall more competitiveness within our leagues. We don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
So I did it for division winners in baseball/football ... here's what the CL and EL qualifying looks like in the EPL in the last decade BY TABLE FINISH NOT CUP COMPS/OTHER QUALIFYING as we don't have that here BUT I did include 'qualifying' round slots (not just group stage) by table position to help even that out: Total number of different CL qualifiers: 7 (Leicester the only non Big 6) Total number of different EL qualifiers: 13 (7 not a Big 6 club) --- non big 6 EL qualifiers: Villa, Newcastle, Everton, Southampton, WH, Burnley, Wolves A total of only 13 diff clubs have BY VIRTUE OF TABLE POSITION "won" something in the Premiership competition.
You've clearly never actually read what I've said. The numbers back me up. The top-spending clubs in the EPL occupy the top spots in the table on a nearly yearly clip. That's not up for debate. It's a fact. Man U will probably finish in the top 6 in spite of themselves and if they're lower than that, they're certainly not going to be anywhere near the relegation zone. In a one-off game, any team can (theoretically) beat any other team, especially in a tournament setting. No one would claim that Lehigh was better than Duke in basketball but a few years ago, Lehigh beat Duke. It was a one-off game. Upsets happen all the time. People and teams get lucky or catch their opponent on a bad night. That doesn't mean that if you suddenly threw AZ into the EPL that they'd be able to finish in UCL contention. I don't think anyone expects Newcastle to finish very high in the EPL but that didn't stop them from getting a surprising win at Tottenham. Man U is only 3 points out of the top 4 in the EPL right now despite having a bad year by their standards. Money buys enough talent that teams can weather storms of players getting injured, suspensions, bad runs of form by key players, etc. Money means that if Man U isn't where they want to be during the January transfer window that they can go out and buy players that smaller clubs are priced out of. To look at where Man U is now (which honestly isn't that bad) just seven weeks into a season and to compare a one-off draw in Europa League an indictment on Man U's season, then you're being purposely disingenuous.
That's also part of the Crazy doctrine, copy paste from the artificial level playing field closed shop doctrine. Level playing field =everybody can be a winner (resulting in mediocracy), so everybody can be a loser. It's that stubborn lack of willingness to truly understand the concept of Pro/Rel (no, it doesnot mean every club has to be subjected to the threat of relegation), so he comes time and time again with the stupid mantra "when was the last time/did they ever ...relegate). You simply are either not willing to grasp the concept at all, which doesnot mean you have to agree with it as a concept for the States, or you really have no clue and are incapable of truly understanding what it means. In both circumstances you're not contributing to the discussion, but either polluting it with ignorance or trolling it. So to refresh your memory, P/R is the result of a list of clubs too long to play in one season against each other. So they were seperated based on merit ranking. This ment the clubs below the top league merit ranking would be excluded from the chance to be champion one day of the top league, so a system of mobility was added to the merit ranking. As you can notice before the merit ranking took place there already wasnot a level playing field and it wasnot (couldnot by definition) part of the forming of the divisions, because if there was a level playing field introduced one had to revert to selecting by who wants to pay the most (sounds familiar to a certain system, doesnot it).
You really should join the United thread with this nonsense. You get the shit over you from their fans instead of banging your drum of me being something. Dare you to go there and spout this shit there?
It's not rocket science. I can understand differences of opinion, but it's really silly to maintain that critics of pro/rel aren't grasping some elusive higher truth.
7th? Right now I think they'll take That! They used to talk about the big 3 - then it was four, then 6! I reckon next season they will have to change it to the BIG 10 no!?
What? Seriously? What? But you threw in the "resulting in mediocrity" talking point so good for you. Have you ever watched an American sport? The athletes playing baseball, football, hockey, basketball are all the best in the world at what they do. There's nothing mediocre about it. But you punched your bingo card so good for you. I understand the concept of pro/rel. You're having trouble understanding that for the biggest/richest clubs the threat of relegation is meaningless. That's my issue with it. Man U fans are mad that they're not dominating their league like they did a few years ago. I bet if you asked them if they thought they'd get relegated this year they'd say no. The stratification in the top Euro leagues between the haves and have nots is demonstrable. The concept of pro/rel as it's presented in the American context by its most ardent supporters is that it's all about meritocracy. That it's a battle between what team wants to be successful and punishment for those who aren't successful. What the pro/rel brigade in the US (and you apparently) don't understand is all the talk about merit flies out the window when you're throwing millions of euros at players just for transfer fees. If you can't see that, that's not my problem. Again, I totally understand the concept. But it's a league organizational structure that doesn't apply equally to every team. In every big soccer league there are teams that are immune from pro/rel. Whether it's in Europe or South America where the richest clubs consistently stay at the top of the top divisions, or if it's in Mexico where clubs can buy their way out of relegation or into promotion. Okay now that's just funny coming from you. Yeah I know that. European clubs could have organized by region as well and we wouldn't be having this discussion. But the game is light-years beyond what it was when pro/rel was first devised and when merit actually meant results on the field. What made pro/rel interesting in the old days was...you guessed it...parity. The only major soccer league that has p/r and any semblance of parity is the Japanese top league. Europe has moved way past that. If you can't see that, that's not my problem. There was a relatively level playing field when pro/rel was first introduced. That was the reason they did it in the first place. You had too many teams that were all playing at relatively the same level who couldn't fit in one league. So pro/rel was introduced to sort things out. What has happened since is that the teams that want to pay the most are immune from that system entirely. That's the fact of the matter. You can keep pretending that I don't understand the concept of pro rel, which is actually a pretty simple concept, and you can keep pretending that money doesn't play a huge role in how pro/rel actually plays out but you're ignoring the reality of the professional game. So don't accuse me of trolling when I and others point this out.
In the window we're using here, Manning would only have been with the Colts for the first 3 years. He definitely played a part in the 5 straight AFC West titles for Denver, though. If we're comparing apples to apples, though, pointing out that some of the divisions have more parity doesn't negate the AFC East or the AL East. We have examples where the top places are more or less secured by the same faces just like European leagues do. And dollars to donuts, they'll finish yearly somewhere in the top of the league. My point wasn't specifically about the Cowboys or the Niners, it was that that sort of dominance wasn't unique to the late 80s/early 90s given that we have Patriots doing roughly the same thing in the AFC for the last 20 years. Someday Brady will retire and there may be an interregnum of parity, but eventually some other dynasty/dynasties will emerge.
No, but it's much easier to finish ahead of 3 teams than 14. We've had SEVERAL "runs" in the last decade in both football and baseball where a team got GOOD (especially relatively to the division they were in). We've had one or two teams "dominate" that spectrum of time as well. That hasn't happened in the EPL. There are 6 teams that have all but won ALL of it. We've actually stated this before. We DO get "dynastic" teams and runs in our sports even in a parity/closed system. I grew up with the Bills being a top 3 team any given year. I remember the Cowboys being absolute ASS BEFORE they golden 90s run. I remember the Pirates wishing the Braves were in the AL. It happens. We've actually pointed to that as part of what makes our system good for the sports. We get dominance and "great teams" rising up ... AND we get the KC Royals and Florida Marlins winning the WS or the Seahawks blowing up and winning a SB (or the Cardinals playing in it) ... ... the difference is that these teams aren't a Leicester story because the possibility of it happening isn't so outlandish that it takes a Hollywood script to play it out.
Lets be honest here about the Patriots. They have been very very good for a while now. But they've also been blessed to be in a division with 3 of the worst run NFL teams in that same time period. Its a hell of a lot easier to get a high playoff seed and home field advantage when 6 of your games are against the 2000s era Dolphins, Bills, and Jets. You take some of the other great teams in the last 20 years like the Saints, Seahawks, Broncos, Steelers, etc.and swap them into that division and you're going to see an increase in their overall success rate. Not to the Patriots level (they are a very good team regardless of who they play) but better. Meanwhile the Patriots playing in the NFC West or the NFC Central aren't going to be as dominant as they've been (but again, they're still going to win rings).
\ As a Patriots fan I would certainly agree with that. But otoh remember that the NFL rigs its schedule for parity so theoretically, at least, the Patriots were playing a higher standard of non-divisional teams than the mean. And the Patriots have, of course, a remarkable playoff and Superbowl record, including wins on the road as against Kansas City last season. I'd give most credit to their coach and quarterback and say that their crap division is a factor, but not a big one. Of course, it does highlight a flaw in such a conference structure.
The biggest advantage is easy wins to drive towards home field advantage in the playoffs. Outside of that I'd agree that there isn't that much gained from it.