There's been a lot of publicity lately about a high school girls basketball game in Cleveland the other day that ended with a final score of 108-1. While a 107-point blowout isn't good for anybody, it still beats what happened in another girls basketball game in Las Vegas. The final score of that game was 51-2. It could've been worse, but the winning team intentionally didn't score for the final 20 minutes of the game. Why? Because Nevada has a mercy rule where teams aren't allowed to win by more than 50 points. And since they were trying to play by the rules, what resulted was NOT basketball.
You can see the video here. Frankly, it's embarrassing. I don't know which team it was worse for, either. Is it worse for the team that's so uncompetitive that the other team has to try and find ways not to score? Or is it worse to be on the winning team and go completely against your nature, just so the other team can feel better and the score looks more respectable? Frankly, I don't see any winners in that situation.
I get the spirit of the rule, but who is it really helping? In my opinion, it's more embarrassing when a team has to do that. There's a difference between running up the score and simply being better than a team. When you still have your starters in and you're pressing with two minutes left when you're up 30, that's running up the score. When you're simply so much better than your opponent that the score is out of control early, what else are you going to do? Short of stopping the game, there's very little that can be done to prevent such blowouts from happening when the talent level is so different.
Take the UConn women's basketball team. They win every game by 40-something points. Their first round game in the NCAA Tournament is usually over midway through the first half. And have you seen the score of some of the U.S. Women's National Team's Olympic qualifying games? They beat Puerto Rico 10-0 the other day! That was Puerto Rico's senior national team, the best players on the island, and they were no match for the World Cup champions. Yet you didn't have anyone calling out the U.S. for bad sportsmanship after that game.
Like it or not, blowouts happen. Even at the highest level. (You think the Denver Broncos weren't embarrassed after the Super Bowl two years ago?) The unfortunate fact is that they're more prevalent at these lower levels, where the quality of teams is not always the same. But coming up with ways to make scores less embarrassing doesn't do anything to help such situations. In fact, it makes them worse.
If you have a larger school with more resources in the same league as a smaller school with fewer students, is that smaller school facing long odds? Yes. That's pretty much the entire plot of Hoosiers (one of my all-time favorite movies) in a nutshell. If these blowouts happen regularly, there are really only two things that can be done to help level the playing field: reorganize the conference so that teams only face opponents they'll be competitive with, or leave things as-is and give them something to strive for.
The story of the Cal Tech men's basketball team is well-known. Most of the time, they took the court knowing they were gonna get their butts kicked. So what did they do? They got better. And that's happened for a lot of teams that used to be laughingstocks.
Unfortunately, there's no perfect solution to "prevent" blowouts. With sports, especially at the high-school level, they're a fact of life. That's what you get when teams that simply aren't on the same skill level are in the same town/region/conference. No mercy rules or running clocks will do anything to stop that.
Do we see lopsided high schools scores more often than we probably should? Yes. Is it embarrassing for the players involved? I'm sure. But what happened in Las Vegas isn't the answer. Everyone involved with that game should be embarrassed. And I mean everyone. Because it was unfair to ask the players to do that. And the very fact that it happened is a problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment