Rain Man
07-07-2019, 03:21 PM
I'm seeing the congratulatory news items about the Women's World Cup, and how our talent pool of 329 million beat a country with a talent pool of 17 million for the championship.
Um...yay?
I have the same ambivalence about the Olympics. Yeah, we win a lot of medals, but it's because we're 10 times bigger than most other countries (even setting aside dollars for training and stuff). The only question in most years is whether we'll win the most medals against countries like China and Russia that also have enormous talent pools. I find myself often rooting for the Danish guy or the Thai woman or whoever is vainly trying to get onto the medal stand. I'm a Team USA guy in the end, of course, but to some extent it feels like we're rooting for Alabama against Alcorn State, and there's less satisfaction in winning.
In individual sports the nation doesn't matter so much, but in team sports it's an enormous advantage to be representing a larger country. Statistically, the tenth-best player on the USA basketball team would be the best player on 75 percent of national teams.
To make things more fair, I propose that team sports be assigned based on population. If a country has less than (for example) 50 million people, they get a national team. But if they're 50 to 100 million people, they get two teams for which players are assigned randomly. The USA with more than 300 million people, would have 7 teams competing in international events. Maybe you could give them regional names to spur fans, like USA West and USA Mountain and stuff.
Doing this would certainly give the larger nations more chances to win, but that's not inherently unfair. The big issue is that the rosters of each team would be more on par with those of smaller countries because the talent would be more spread out. This would make the games more interesting and add drama. As Americans, we would still have a lot of national pride watching our various teams, and we would have more "Olympians" or whatever since there are more roster spots.
Of course, you'd need other countries to do the same thing. There'd be a lot of incentive to cheat, so you'd have to have some sort of public lottery where everyone's players get assigned to teams randomly.
Thoughts? Would this make it more exciting to watch international team competitions?
Um...yay?
I have the same ambivalence about the Olympics. Yeah, we win a lot of medals, but it's because we're 10 times bigger than most other countries (even setting aside dollars for training and stuff). The only question in most years is whether we'll win the most medals against countries like China and Russia that also have enormous talent pools. I find myself often rooting for the Danish guy or the Thai woman or whoever is vainly trying to get onto the medal stand. I'm a Team USA guy in the end, of course, but to some extent it feels like we're rooting for Alabama against Alcorn State, and there's less satisfaction in winning.
In individual sports the nation doesn't matter so much, but in team sports it's an enormous advantage to be representing a larger country. Statistically, the tenth-best player on the USA basketball team would be the best player on 75 percent of national teams.
To make things more fair, I propose that team sports be assigned based on population. If a country has less than (for example) 50 million people, they get a national team. But if they're 50 to 100 million people, they get two teams for which players are assigned randomly. The USA with more than 300 million people, would have 7 teams competing in international events. Maybe you could give them regional names to spur fans, like USA West and USA Mountain and stuff.
Doing this would certainly give the larger nations more chances to win, but that's not inherently unfair. The big issue is that the rosters of each team would be more on par with those of smaller countries because the talent would be more spread out. This would make the games more interesting and add drama. As Americans, we would still have a lot of national pride watching our various teams, and we would have more "Olympians" or whatever since there are more roster spots.
Of course, you'd need other countries to do the same thing. There'd be a lot of incentive to cheat, so you'd have to have some sort of public lottery where everyone's players get assigned to teams randomly.
Thoughts? Would this make it more exciting to watch international team competitions?