Quote:
|
Originally Posted by canadiancreed
Just curious, how so? I'm jsut wondering because I may have a league in this situation soon
|
Here's an excerpt from our info page that attempts to explain it:
Quote:
An unbalanced schedule is unfair to the wild card teams. However, a balanced schedule is unfair to the truly best team in a division. After a good deal of discussion with LeGrandeOrange, the resident schedule expert in the community, we decided on going with particular ratios (number of games against each division opponent vs number of games against each non-division opponent and and total number of games in division vs total number of games outside division) of an unbalanced schedule for a number of reasons, but most importantly to make the division races as meaningful as possible. The main points as I recall them were:
-there are 3 division winners to every wild card
-division winners are more important to get right just because they are first place not second place teams
-one of the most exciting things in baseball are the divisional races and with less games per divisional opponent you have much less of a head-to-head race.
-with a balanced schedule a team only needs to have the best record against all the teams in its league to win the division title, not necessarily the best record against its division opponents. Like in current day MLB, it would often happen that the team with the best divisional record would not win the division (I remember there was a thread on this on the OOTP boards that listed these recent cases). With balanced the best team against all league opponents might be the same team that is the best against division opponents, but the chances that the true best team in the division wins the division is not as high as with unbalanced. And of course the more unbalanced it is the greater your chances that this happens.
|
EDIT: Actually, I think MLB currently uses an unbalanced schedule, but for awhile it did not.