by Mark Hauser:

In my perfect world, there would be no single elimination tournaments in either individual or team sports. The purpose of a tournament is to find out who is the best at something. Single elimination tournaments rarely, if ever, fairly satisfy this criterion.

Practical? Yes. More exciting for the fans? Absolutely! Easier to plan and run? No question about it. And do not get me wrong, often the best athlete or team – or at least the athlete or team who performed the best during that tournament – wins. Plus, there is something to be said that if you want to claim to be the best at something you have to be able to perform well when the pressure and the stakes are the highest.

I understand all of that. However, it is impossible to always be performing at your best. In fact, by definition, no individual or team comes close to accomplishing this. Fifty per cent of the time you (or a team) perform below average and for the other 50 per cent you perform above average. Rarely do you play your best.

Nothing is going to save you if you or your team are having a bad tournament. However, a non-single elimination tournament can save you if you are the best, but happen to have one below average game. Or, sometimes you perform well, but some other individual or team play their best game or match in their life. These examples are bad luck – not usually choking – and single elimination formats increase the role of luck. Which, of course, decreases the chance of the best athlete or team winning the tournament. To me, this does not seem right.

In a typical golf tournament they play 18 holes four times, which seems reasonable. In sports such as tennis (and volleyball, table tennis and badminton in the Olympics) at least they play a series of sets, which makes it reasonably fair. Ditto for most of the field events in athletics where you get three or more attempts. However, in races (swimming and track) you get only one shot. This is tough in the sprints where, if you do not get off to a great start (or you are going up against Usain Bolt!), you probably won’t win – or worse, lose by 1/100th of a second. Ouch!

In American football (NFL), given that the physical nature of the sport does not allow them to play more than once a week, a single elimination tournament is the only practical way to go (at least the best team gets the home field advantage for every round but the Super Bowl). College football, for no good reason, has one game and no tournament. Moronic is too soft a word for this system.

I like the NBA, NHL and MLB because they all have best-of-seven series throughout the playoffs (except the first round of the MLB which is best of five). College basketball has too many teams and, consequently, has no choice but to run a single elimination tournament.

In soccer (football), the World Cup has pool preliminary matches followed by a single elimination tournament where sometimes the World Cup winner is actually determined by penalty kicks. I cannot imagine that anyone thinks this is the best way to run the world’s biggest team tournament (especially given that it is held only once every four years).

I would only have 16 teams (currently 32) in the finals and have two pools of eight teams. The teams would play a round-robin tournament and the top four (1st and 2nd in each pool) teams play a double elimination tournament.

This will result in more games (10-12 for the winner instead of the current seven), and the possibility of two final games (this is why double elimination tournaments are not popular, even though they are clearly fairer), but so be it. After all, sometimes fairness has a price. Welcome to my perfect world (impractical as it may be).

And now for the stupidest tournament in the history of sport – the US women’s Olympic softball team goes 7-0 in pool play, including a 7-0 win over Japan. The US defeats Japan (1st and 2nd seeds) 4-3 and Australia defeats Canada (3rd and 4th seeds) in the “semis”. Canada is eliminated, but Japan is not. Japan defeats Australia in the “finals”. Then Japan defeats the US in the “Grand Finals” 3-1.

Huh? Japan gets the gold and US the silver. The US posts an 8-1 record for the tournament, defeats Japan two times out of three and outscores them 12-6, while Japan finishes 8-2 in the tournament.

Why does the US have to defeat Japan twice in the playoffs and Japan only has to defeat the US once? If Japan is not eliminated in the semis after losing to the US, why is there not a double elimination format that applies to the US team that defeated them? After all, in softball they only play seven innings and they could have played a double header if necessary.

The problem with this format is that it only protects the number one or two seeds who LOSE in the semis and not the one who WINS. How much sense does that make?