Minnesota Boy's Lacrosse now Varsity Sanctioned

[LaxRef]

Anyone care to speculate which schools are most likely to "go varsity" for 2007?

Which ones are already "Varsity" with respect to their school's athletic departments? Which ones already get a lot of support from their schools?I would guess Breck, Blake, Benilde, Totino, St. Thomas, AHA, Eden Prairie, Hill Murray are very likely. Maybe some of the public schools that play in their football stadia like Roseville and Cooper?

[Hammer23]

One thing that will annoy people is that supposedly the playoffs next year will consist of only 4 Varsity teams (the club league can do whatever they want, of course). This is a far cry from the 24 teams that make the playoffs under the current system. Personally, I think 24 is too many and 4 is too few, but this will sort itself out over a few years.

How is 24 too many when other sports such as football and hockey give every team an opportunity to play a post-season game every season? To me I feel that giving players the opportunity to compete in the playoffs enriches the high school sports experience.

For example: If there is a team that has a rocky start to their season but ends up being very competitive at the end. However because of their poor performance at the beginning they do not qualify for the playoffs, is it fair to say that one of the better teams in the league cannot participate simply because they needed time to "mesh" as a team? Now understandably, the playoffs are meant for the teams that have played well throughout the entire season, but is it more fun to play all competitive games in the tournament, or to have a lopsided score in the quarterfinals or even semifinals, which is the case in years past.

I personally feel that if you give a team that one last chance to prove themselves, they might turn some heads and prove they belong in the playoffs, on the other hand, it does make for a lot of "blow outs" in the first few rounds.

Also, if we are to have less teams in the playoffs, shouldn't we expand the season to let the best teams truly break away from the pack. Example: (While this has no correlation to lacrosse) in Major league baseball, the season is so long that it becomes clear which teams are playoff worthy by October. Team A could have 50 more wins than team B and it makes sense why team B wouldn't make the playoffs. But if you look at the team records ten games into the season, it could be a lot closer and maybe Team B could have a better record than Team A even though Team A would eventually prove themselves as the superior team.

Just some thoughts and concerns I see when I compare lacrosse to other high school sports. Not saying the current way isn't working well, but just some stuff I've noticed.

[GrayBear]

Query:

If there's a sanctioned varsity playoff, and MBSLA conducts its customary playoff, who's the true state champ?

[laxfan25]

[Personally, I think 24 is too many and 4 is too few, but this will sort itself out over a few years.

Actually in Michigan, every team playing lacrosse is in the playoffs. There are four regions in the state, with two divisions. 29 teams in Div 1, so three teams get first-round byes. 36 teams in Division 2, so there are four pre-regional games to get to 32. Some early games are severe mis-matches, but by seeding into 4 regions the semis and finals are usually very good.
Here is a link to the pairings and seedings;
http://www.mhsaa.com/sports/blax/06reg.doc

Everyone gets a chance at the brass ring - there just aren't that many George Masons though.
I think varsity sanctioning is a good thing - it has added legitimacy to the sport. In my other posts I was just pointing out how some things have changed, and that there are more "rules" to follow, and how it has affected refereeing, from a selfish perspective.
Given where HS lacrosse was when I left MN in '01, this is a momentous day, one that I'm sure surprised the lacrosse community. I have to believe that Mark Hellenack has a big smile!

[DanGenck]

I have to think that Minnesota would do what they normally do and offer a Sectional Play-off format to decide who will play in the State Tournament. Unfortunately, this could take a few years as teams move from club to varsity and the game grows, etc.

I dare say, the Minnesota play-off system for football and many other sports is quite good. No sectional championship, no state tournament. Just like it should be!

[Brandon Carlson]

I dare say, the Minnesota play-off system for football and many other sports is quite good. No sectional championship, no state tournament. Just like it should be!

Dan, I may need further claification to discern exactly what you meant with this comment.

[DanGenck]

I meant to say that if you do not win the sectional, you do not go to state... as it should be.

[Brandon Carlson]

Got it now, and agreed. If you're not even the best team in your section, how can you be the best team in state? Good point.

[LaxRef]

Got it now, and agreed. If you're not even the best team in your section, how can you be the best team in state? Good point.

This buys into the fallacy that just because one team beats another team that that team is better. It is theoretically possible to have two teams that are completely evenly matched, with no team being better than the other. The rules require that only one team win when they play even though in a long series of games each team wins only about 50% of the games. To say that the team that wins is better is akin to me flipping my quarter 100 times, and you flipping yours 100 times, and me claiming my coin is "better" at coming up heads than yours because mine came up heads 53 times and yours only came up heads 51 times.

Of course, in sport, one team probably will be better in the sense that over a long series of games that team will win a higher percentage. But suppose of two teams, one will beat the other 60% of the time. Just because Team A won the one time they played doesn't mean that Team A is the better team; it could just be that Team A was the team that wins 40% of the games between those teams and that it happened to win that day.

There is a great deal of luck in sport in the sense that there are things largely out of the control of the players and coaches that affect the outcome (temperature, wind, rain, snow, field conditions, angle of the sun, injuries, result of the coin flip, slight variations in the balls used in play, condition and style of goals used, exact placement of goals and lines on the field, whether random factors affected the sleep of the players or officials, the officials assigned to the game, whether those particular officials know an obscure rule that comes into play in the game, and so on; each of these factors taken individually may have a small effect on the game in general, but in a particular game any of them could be decisive). And, as we all know, just because you beat a team once doesn't mean you can beat them every time; the main reason for this is random variation.

This doesn't mean that the team that wins the game played doesn't deserve credit, nor does it mean that they shouldn't move on in the playoffs. However, to assert that the team the won the game is necessarily the better team is not correct. They just played better in that particular game.

The system of not moving on if you don't win the section championship is fine if your only goal is to crown a champion. However, once you start making statements like "Well, we lost the championship game, but we feel pretty good about being the second-best team in the state," you're into the realm of fallacious reasoning. The team that won isn't necessarily the best, but even if they are, the second-best team might have lost to them in the section championship (or earlier).

Of course, designing a bracket that, assuming no random variation, assures the second-best team meets the best team in the championship game requires a lot more games be played, and it usually isn't worth it.

[DanGenck]

I hear your points, but I absolutely hate the idea that if you are not the best team in your region/section that you could potentially win the State Championship. Why have regions/conferences/sections or even a regular season if the tournament lets everyone in?

Figurative example-

Regular Season Football:

Eden Prairie- 24
Burnsville- 20

Sectional Play-off:

Eden Prairie- 31
Burnsville- 28

State Championship Game:

Burnsville- 21
Eden Prairie- 20


How is this fair to Eden Prairie? Why should they have to prove themselves that many times against the same competition? There should be some reward for regular season victories and high school is the only place that still does that. Cheers to you, Minnesota!

[Gopherlax29]

LaxRef, though your comments are usually insightful, I find your last one horrible. Flipping a coin and winning a game are not even close to the same thing. If Osseo beats Kennedy 16-1, you are telling me that it is because of things that are not in control. Yes I think best of 7 is the best way to do things in the playoffs, but to say a coin flip is like winning a game, no. I could have misread your post a little bit, but it seems rather stupid to compare the coin to a team winning a game. Why practice if it is all luck? why do we play? Why not just flip a coin and say one team is heads and the other tails, that would help out a lot I bet. Save time at least.

[laxfan25]

At least here in Michigan, the Regionals (sectionals, I suppose) are just one step on the way to the State Championship, just like the regionals in NCAA B-ball. Once you lose, you're out. I've never seen it where you have regionals, and then everyone is back in for the state.

[LaxRef]

LaxRef, though your comments are usually insightful, I find your last one horrible. Flipping a coin and winning a game are not even close to the same thing. If Osseo beats Kennedy 16-1, you are telling me that it is because of things that are not in control. Yes I think best of 7 is the best way to do things in the playoffs, but to say a coin flip is like winning a game, no. I could have misread your post a little bit, but it seems rather stupid to compare the coin to a team winning a game. Why practice if it is all luck? why do we play? Why not just flip a coin and say one team is heads and the other tails, that would help out a lot I bet. Save time at least.

(Note: I'm going to use Team A and Team B in my examples; I am not intentionally referring to any specific teams, so comments about playing style, etc., are not to be taken to be about any specific teams.)

You are misreading me. I make the point that in reality, the teams are not like coins. Usually, one team is better, so that team will win more than 50% of the time when those teams play. For example, team A may beat team B 60% of the time when they play, so team A is better. However, when they play, team B might win. You simply cannot conclude from the fact that, when they played, team B won that team B is better (in the sense of being able to win more than 50% of the time when the teams play each other).

There will always be some luck involved, but if the teams have any skill at all then it will never be all luck; that's an important distinction. When many people hear "random," they immediately think it is all luck, when really it just means there is a random component. Look at poker: it is clearly random (that's what all that shuffling the cards is about), but there's a huge skill component, too, since we tend to see many of the same faces at that final table on ESPN year after year.

The point of all the practice and hard work, of course, is that this work many increase the probability that you win. By putting in long hours of practice, team A may go from a 60% chance of beating team B when they play to a 70% chance. (If team B is working equally hard, though, it may not be possible to realize big gains.) In practice, we never know what these probabilities really are or when they change.

Now, to your example of team A beating team B 16-1: There is additional information here, since the score is very lopsided. It is unlikely that Team A and Team B are evenly matched, with each team winning about 50% of the games, if one team wins by such a large margin. Maybe in this case Team A beats Team B in 99% (or more) of the games they play. There's still that small chance, maybe 1 time in 100, where team B might have the cards fall just right so team B wins. That could involve, say, the two teams playing on a day when team A has more than a dozen players out due to the flu, or maybe they play on a rainy, muddy day that neutralizes the strengths of team A (maybe speed and crisp cutting) and works to the strengths of team B (ground balls and hitting), plus the rain results in sagging pockets and Team A gets nailed with a few illegal stick penalties.

(I'll grant that people aren't always receptive to this model of sports because it requires looking at things from a statistical perspective. The key idea, which is tricky, is that we're viewing the one game the teams play on a certain day as one realization from a large population of games that could have been played that day under varying conditions. In practice, the teams can't play all of those games, since the skill levels of the teams would change over time if you tried to have them play 100 games against each other. I fear I don't always explain these concepts sufficiently well, but hopefully this post helps explain them a bit better. Feel free to ask further questions!)

As a side note to all of this, the concept of "better" is a bit slippery in sports. If we take Team A to be better than Team B because Team A wins 60% of the time when those teams play, it may well be that Team B is better than Team C and, amazingly, Team C might be better than Team A. This may be because of the styles of play of the teams or certain personnel matchups. (You can actually create 3 sets of dice that exhibit this same nontransitive pattern.)

[Hammer23]

So... what exactly are you trying to say about lacrosse being sanctioned as a high school sport in minnesota laxref?

I guess the points you are making do make sense in the respect that yes, if there are two teams that are closely matched, there are more components that go into the game than just skill alone. But I really do not feel that a team like Irondale (and I am only using these two teams because they are the first and last teams on the laxpower ranking) could manage to find enough random components to beat a team like Blake. The fact that (in theory) Blake has more skilled players and more experienced coaches makes it more possible for them to adapt to situations out of their control, like weather, officiating, and field conditions. It is possible for a team to play poorly in the given conditions, but I think that could only make a difference between two more evenly matched teams.

When you made the reference to Team A losing in the championship and calling themselves the second-best team even though Team B is actually the second-best team and lost to the best team in a prior round. The fact that Team A earned their way to the finals and lost gives them the right to call themselves the second best team. You are right though in the respect that Team B could be better on paper and had beaten Team A 100 times in the regular season, but Team B couldn't find a way to make it to the finals. That is high school sports, and maybe the next year, Team B could make it to the finals. In the playoffs it comes down to which team plays better on that given day, not how they did over the entire season (even though their regular season performance could give that team an "easier" road to the championship). The state champion for football used to be determined by how well a team played during the regular season and there were no playoffs. I think it is more exciting with the playoffs.

In your poker example, I think most people would agree that the cards that come out to each player are completely random, but whether or not a player gets good cards in that particular game falls onto luck. I do agree that there is something more involved in the game of poker besides luck though. The best poker players can win with the worst cards.

What you are saying is absolutely theoretically true, but it just doesn't work that way in real life, and luck does play a role.

[LaxRef]

So... what exactly are you trying to say about lacrosse being sanctioned as a high school sport in minnesota laxref?

I'm more making a point about playoffs and what they really mean.

I guess the points you are making do make sense in the respect that yes, if there are two teams that are closely matched, there are more components that go into the game than just skill alone. But I really do not feel that a team like Irondale (and I am only using these two teams because they are the first and last teams on the laxpower ranking) could manage to find enough random components to beat a team like Blake. The fact that (in theory) Blake has more skilled players and more experienced coaches makes it more possible for them to adapt to situations out of their control, like weather, officiating, and field conditions. It is possible for a team to play poorly in the given conditions, but I think that could only make a difference between two more evenly matched teams.

I guess I can't quite grant that the probability of Team B beating Team A in this case is 0%, but it might be very small, like 0.000000001% or something. But you're right is that there eventually comes a difference in ability so great that the conditions that would be required for the lesser team to win are ridiculous. Usuallly, such disparities do not occur when you have two playoff teams, though.

When you made the reference to Team A losing in the championship and calling themselves the second-best team even though Team B is actually the second-best team and lost to the best team in a prior round. The fact that Team A earned their way to the finals and lost gives them the right to call themselves the second best team. You are right though in the respect that Team B could be better on paper and had beaten Team A 100 times in the regular season, but Team B couldn't find a way to make it to the finals. That is high school sports, and maybe the next year, Team B could make it to the finals. In the playoffs it comes down to which team plays better on that given day, not how they did over the entire season (even though their regular season performance could give that team an "easier" road to the championship). The state champion for football used to be determined by how well a team played during the regular season and there were no playoffs. I think it is more exciting with the playoffs.

I completely agree that the team that wins the championship should be prooud of their accomplishments, and that the team that lost the championship should as well. This is how sports work. However, I'm simply saying that to call these teams the best and second-best is not accurate. There's too much variation to be able to make that claim. If there weren't such variation, you could handle the entire baseball season, regular season + playoffs, by playing having a round-robin tournament among the MLB teams.

The second point is that the playoff format used most often in high school (unseeded or poorly-seeded direct elimination) wouldn't guarantee the second-best team playing the best team in the championship game even if those terms were well-defined. So that team that loses the championship game should be proud of what they've done, but it's fallacious to call them the second-best team.

I've been involved with ocean lifeguard racing for about 25 years. We have running, swimming, paddleboarding, rowing, kayak, and other rescue races. Before I got involved in writing the rules for our tournaments, you would occasionally have, say, 5 heats of two people doing a race, with the top 2 people from each race going to the finals. There were medals for first, second, and third places. I changed things so that the top 3 people from each heat always advanced so that even if the 3 fastest people ended up in the same heat they could all advance to the finals and win medals. Again, this ignores the fact that there is random variation in performance (in the ocean, this is a huge factor, since there are waves to catch sometimes), but at least everyone knows they have a fair shot at a medal no matter how the heats are drawn (which, in big tournaments without good seeding information, should be done randomly).

In your poker example, I think most people would agree that the cards that come out to each player are completely random, but whether or not a player gets good cards in that particular game falls onto luck. I do agree that there is something more involved in the game of poker besides luck though. The best poker players can win with the worst cards.

What you are saying is absolutely theoretically true, but it just doesn't work that way in real life, and luck does play a role.

Here I was just pointing out that there is an obvious luck component to go with a less obvious skill component in poker. And, actually, the best players can't win with the worst cards if they're playing other good players. My sister-in-law is a very good poker player, and her stance used to be that you can't win without some luck, but you can't win with only luck. However, she has since seen someone win a tournament in which someone made a large nummber of poor decisions but won because they got incredible cards hand after hand.