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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Soccerizing the Super Bowl
In some soccer qualifying tournaments, you do a home-and-home, and do a total score of the two games to get the winner. A BJOL reader suggested:
The Super Bowl has always seemed to me to suffer from three flaws that the World Series, and the NBA and NHL championships avoid. (1) The Super Bowl is basically no different than any other game: one 60-minute game for the championship, a test no greater than any run-of-the-mill regular season contest, which to me tends to leave the whole thing feeling somewhat anti-climactic. (2) The game is played at an antiseptic neutral site, with home fans and weather—two deeply traditional aspects of football—largely eliminated. (3) The interminable two weeks between the last pre-Super Bowl playoffs and the Super Bowl itself.
I would propose to solve all these problems at once, and likely generate enormous new league revenues, by making the Super Bowl a two-week, two-game, home and home series, starting the week after the conference championships. The winner would be the team who scores the most total overall points over the two games, but all points scored in the second game would count double, to assure interest in the second game even if the first is a blowout. The team with the better regular season record would be at home in the second game.
Bill loves the idea, but rightfully notes that the NFL doesn’t see these three issues as problems and they would certainly adopt a “if it ain’t broke” reasoning.
That said, would Super Bowl parties actually last two weekends? I think it works in other sports because you can do home-and-home with hockey, basketball, and soccer. For football, you’re going to have the layoff of a week. I don’t really go for this idea.
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