Upsets

What is an upset?

Webster’s defines upset as “emotionally disturbed or agitated”. Wait, wrong word. Okay, we don’t need no stinkin’ dictionary-especially not in March-to tell us what, in sports, an upset is.

It’s easy. An upset is when the team that isn’t supposed to win a game does. But who decides who’s supposed to win the game? The media? The fans? Las Vegas?

The most recent Rose Bowl, which was this year’s college football national championship game, pitted USC against Texas. Texas won-in an upset. Sort of. I still don’t see why the outcome of that game should have surprised anyone. Yes, USC had some championship history over the last few years, but if you looked at the numbers and the relative dominance of each team for just that season-which was the period we were finding a champion for, after all-it’s hard to say Texas wasn’t at least as good. O,r more accurately, it’s tough to say USC was really as good as Texas.

Not to turn into Hines Ward here, but calling Texas’ win an upset, in a way, diminishes the dominant regular season they put together. Sometimes upsets tell us we didn’t know the teams as well we thought. But sometimes, what we call upsets don’t tell us anything at all.

When the Colts lose in the playoffs-theoretically speaking, of course-is it really an upset? Doesn’t being good at offense and defense make Colts’ opponents generally more well-rounded and, therefore, better football teams? You wouldn’t call a better team winning an upset, so have the Colts ever been upset in the playoffs? I don’t the Colts are good enough to be upset (unless my Broncos ever beat them when it counts-that would be an upset).

Every sports fans claims to root for upsets, but most fans downplay the victory later if it wasn’t easy to see it coming. I still remember when a friend of mine told me the day after the Broncos upset the Packers in Super Bowl XXXII that if the Super Bowl had been a seven-game series-instead of just one game-that the Packers would have won. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had a point, but I have no idea what it was. Of course, football takes such a toll on the players that a long series is completely impractical. But like the Rose Bowl, that game didn’t feel like an upset. The Broncos had just a 12-4 record to Green Bay’s 13-3, but that’s hardly conclusive, considering how close some of the losses had been. The AFC had lost like 13 Super Bowls in a row, but that was hardly relevant.

Pointless conference comparisons, of course, bring us back to this month’s basketball tournament. March Madness, of course, is all about upsets, isn’t it? But then, what is an upset in March? Commentators and bloggers and real sportswriters will often say after a lower-seeded team’s victory that the victor showed they belonged in the tournament, or they were the better team. If they’re really the better team, then the game wasn’t much of an upset, was it? Besides, who’s to say that the selection committee is infallible and that the seeds are all perfect indicators of how good teams actually are anyway?

Even worse, of course, are the absurdly retarded conference-based comparisons. Let’s say, for example, that a team from the much-maligned Missouri Valley Conference beat a team from the mathematically toughest conference, the Big “Ten”. Well, that proves it-small schools have caught up with the big schools and we have achieved parity. Yet is there any reason to think that one single team from the MVC can’t be better than one single team from the Big Ten? Especially if they have to be better for one game?

Do upsets prove that the lower-seeded team is better? Does it say something about heart, effort, and work ethic? Or is it just part of the randomness you get when you extract results from such small sample sizes? Or, in other words, does Japan actually have the world’s best baseball team?

I thought the World Baseball Classic turned out pretty well. While I only saw some parts of some games, it was exciting and had great atmosphere-just like college basketball. But it’s hard to fault the United States team-which wasn’t necessarily the most loaded roster in the tournament anyway-for not being immediately dominant in such a short stretch of games. Watch who’s leading each division eight games into the major league baseball season this year and see how many of them actually wind up winning their divisions. Baseball especially seems to need long series to showcase true ability.

Of course, no one thinks a single-elimination tournament is the best way to determine a “true” basketball champion-the team that is, on some fundamental level, actually the best. That takes nothing away from the tournament, because a huge part of its appeal is that it’s so wide open. But if upsets are just bad teams beating good ones-well, what’s so great about that?