Quote:
Originally Posted by Bearcat
Huh, I thought it was even closer to 50% than that.... I'd like to see the coin flip go away just so home field advantage plays into it, and it would add to the strategy at the end of regulation, since if you were the home team, you could decide beforehand whether to kick or receive in OT (and the road team would generally have a good idea of what the home team would plan on doing, too).
Does anyone know why the college system is called the Kansas tiebreaker? Does it come from the 8-on-8 (or whatever) leagues?  |
Here's about as good of an analysis as I can find:
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_11_08_04.html
It basically says that if you factor out years that had different overtime rules (keep in mind that this is 2004 data), about 60% of coin toss winners win games. And about 33% of them win on the first possession.
To me, that says that 33% of teams lost without ever touching the ball on offense. I just can't dig that. The study also suggests that the first-to-6 rule would mean that about 49% of teams win based on coin toss vs. 60%, which is a tremendous improvement.
It would increase the # of ties from 9% to 12%, but I think most would agree that we would rather have 49% of games decided on a coin toss than 60%.