sports where you can 100% outplay your opponent and lose?

[legend42]

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It's not that it's unluckier. It's that the unlucky event has a way greater probability of deciding the outcome of the game.

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This is, of course, true. But part of his (and others') argument was that it's not unlucky to hit the post, just a bad shot. This, I also take issue with.

A basketball shot is more pure than a soccer shot. In BB, any open shot from inside 20 feet that doesn't swish or graze the inside of the rim is basically considered a brick. There are certain shots in soccer where one should have a comparable success rate (penalty shots, shots from inside the box with time and good angle with a lot of open net, etc.) but soccer shots just aren't as fine by their nature. In general, the most you can do is aim for an area, and hitting the post is usually not going to be considered a "brick".

But also, an inferior soccer team can control the game a lot more to play for a scoreless tie, something a BB team obviously can't do. And the scoring system in BB is much more just than soccer. If soccer had a system where you received, say 1 point for each corner kick, 3 points for hitting a post, and 10 points for a goal, I think you'd see the better win a lot more often (I know the obvious counterargument: you're supposed to score goals, not hit posts, but the rarity and often flukiness of goals is precisely what makes soccer so volatile, especially as compared to basketball).

And I think the Vegas money lines can really tell the definitive story here. Did books even hang a ML on the Dream Team 1992 Olympic games?

[MicroBob]

I'm guessing I'm seeing it a bit more ala ElD's argument which I was thinking a bit about on my own as well.
I'm still completely in the dark about what it means to 100% outplay an opponent though.

Some weird stuff can definitely happen in soccer and it can certainly lead to an inferior team winning the game.
Probably moreso than hoops.
Although I'm not convinced that it's more than baseball.

In my experience in baseball there are MANY games where one pitcher gives up hard contact all game long but his defense just happened to be standing in the right place to bail him out. Some of that is positioning and a bit of strategy. A lot of it is just luck.

The pitcher is trying to get the batter to make crappy contact. The batter is just trying to make good contact and hoping to hit it into a hole. This is what it boils down to a lot of the time.

Over and over again it goes the opposite way where the pitcher does his job and induces lousy contact but it bloops in for a hit...or the other way where the pitcher screws up and gives up an absolute bullet but it just happened to go right at the SS.

I've seen plenty of games that finished 5-0 with one team out-hitting the other 12-6 or something where the losing side had every opportunity to argue that they actually played well but just got a bit unlucky at the wrong times.


I do understand the soccer argument though and recently come off a stretch where I felt the rec-league team I was coaching was about the luckiest of the lucky last year.
After going 2-28 in our first 3 years we finished last season with a record of 4-2-4.

We got lucky week after week after week and while we worked hard to go the whole season with only 2 losses against mostly superior competition there was no question that in many of our ties or even our victories we were basically battling just to hang in there and we caught enough breaks while the other team hit just enough cross-posts.

But I kind of look at those kinds of breaks between soccer and baseball to be somewhat similar.

[Equal]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned golf yet.

[Silent A]

While soccer is a natural leading candidate because of its low scoring, you can't ignore the fact that baseball can have 4 runs depend on a single pitch.

Also, NFL football needs to be mentioned. IIRC, the best statistical predictor (after points scored, of course) is which team had the most turnovers. Now obviously, there is an element of skill involved in generating turnovers, but the luck factor is enormous.

As for crazy scoring systems, nothing beats the old figure skating system that used placement points based on rank in comp. figures, short, and free programs. Using judges is bad enough, but assuming th difference between 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. is always the same only made things worse.

[Ralph Wiggum]

I can think of none by the criteria laid out in the title of the post. 100% is a lot.

[iggymcfly]

There are a lot of sports where you can regularly lose due to luck, but most don't fit the criteria of "100% outplayed". If the single best attack in a soccer game is the one that scores the only goal then the winning team at least did something better. Likewise for converting breaks in tennis or stringing together strikes in bowling.

I think the very best example of 100% outplaying your opponent and losing comes in boxing where the judging is very often biased if not outright rigged. Your opponent can literally not be better at one single thing during the fight and still win. This can also easily happen in gymnastics and figure skating and is even possible in basketball since the refereeing has such a large influence.

[MyTurn2Raise]

hockey

[bpc009]

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hockey

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I think hockey is obviously a good answer, but it is behind soccer in every aspect.

Bob,

I agree, I have no idea what 100% outplaying means. And though I can see sort of what you mean iggy where you are trying to quantify it, I still don't think it's possible.

Also, I think we need to leave corrupt judges out of this, because they can change the outcome in most sports, not just the ones mentioned.