It was 85 and sunny yesterday and it’s 33 and snowing today. That can mean only one thing: spring is here in Chicago and the Team Demo Association (TDA) season is right around the corner.
Last year I wrote a preview of the season complete with predictions for where each of the teams would finish. I was wrong almost everywhere. The only thing I got right was that Stranglehold would finish in seventh. I picked Full Throttle to win the season and they finished fifth. I picked the Junkyard Dogs to finish second and they finished sixth. I picked Damage, Inc. to finish in eighth and they finished fourth. In short, I probably could have randomly picked team names out of a hat and done better last year than I did by using things like my brain and supposed knowledge.
It brought up an interesting question going forward: for my 2013 preview, should I pick a team to win the season that I didn’t think would actually win in an attempt to have a better shot of being correct in September? It was all very meta. I didn’t know what was stranger: that my reasoning made no sense or that it was perfectly logical all at the same time.
As I was debating what pick to make, one thought crossed my mind and made me stop in my tracks: I was thinking about this whole thing from a 2012 perspective, not a 2013 perspective. The difference being that the point structure changed rather substantially in the off-season.
The TDA operates on a points system. There are no playoffs and there is no post-season. The team that collects the most points over the course of the season is the year’s champion. And it’s hard to argue with that. It’s the very definition of the word ‘best’.
The reason it has been hard to argue that the team with the most points is the best is because the points have always been doled out equally for each win. As is the case in every other sport on the planet, wins and points are synonymous with one another; in the TDA, this meant that teams earned two points for each race they won. In 2013, this is changing. Now, points and wins will no longer mean the same thing. First round wins are now only worth one point while second round and third round wins are still worth two.
What this means is that there is now a scenario where a team with five wins on the season can finish lower in the standings than a team with just three wins. It’s mind-boggling, but very true. Consider the following: if Team A wins five first round races and Team B wins three races one night and loses all of its other races, if Team B owns the tie-breaker against Team A, Team B will still place ahead of Team A in the final standings despite the fact that it won 40% less races.
It’s a scene, to be sure. I would never have thought that being a flash-in-the-pan would be preferable to being consistent, but here we are.
Upon realizing this, my thoughts on the previewing the season changed. No longer is it simply a matter of picking which teams will have the most wins, but rather, figuring out which teams will have the most points. And that’s a much different beast.
With this new points system, a premium has been placed on getting into the finals. Not winning the finals, mind you, but getting there; sure, winning would be nice, but it’s not imperative to win in the final to win the season. The reason for this is because of the boost the two-point second round gives you. Two wins on one night is worth the same, if not more, in the standings than three first round wins across three nights. No one is going to make up any ground by just winning a first round race. It’s to-the-finals or nothing.
The reason for the change in point structure was to alleviate all the ties that had been coming up in recent years; had this point structure been in place in 2012, Orange Crush would have finished in second place by themselves with Mean Green Machine third. Sure, it would have also then moved Damage, Inc. and Full Throttle into a tie for fourth, but let’s move forward. What the change also does is give a huge boost to both the incredibly good and incredibly bad teams. The power teams get a boost because they’re already in the finals with regularity and they’re now going to get more points for doing what they’re already doing; the scrub teams get a boost because they could enter Fifth Night having lost four straight races and, by winning out, still manage to finish the year in the top three. (Oh yes, this is possible too). The teams that have made their bread-and-butter by winning a fair amount of first round races and then occasionally sneaking into the finals are just out-of-luck. The points that they received for this just got halved.*
* One point I want to make is this: the four points that teams received for showing up in 2012 and the six points that the teams will now receive in 2013 for the same thing are completely and totally immaterial. If every team will receive 30 points on the season for just showing up, you can just go ahead and subtract them from the point totals. They make no difference. What separates the teams is the points that are earned from winning and this year those numbers look like this: 1 point for a first round win, 3 points for a second round win, 5 points for a third round win.
Using 2012 logic, I was contemplating whether Mean Green Machine could win the season. Yes, they lost Ryan Decker to Reckoning, but they also picked up Dave Swan and Pete Ryan from Damage, Inc. My initial thought was to have them finishing second. Then I started thinking about what this would mean: Mean Green Machine would have to beat Reckoning, Orange Crush and/or the Junkyard Dogs a minimum of three times this year. And when you put it like that, it doesn’t seem as likely.
Let’s break this down a little more. When gunning for the championship, winning in the first round doesn’t matter anymore. It’s winning in the second round (and finals) that matters. Best case scenario for teams: they only have to beat a member of the Reckoning, Junkyard Dogs, Orange Crush triumvirate (the Big Three) once to win the night. One thing that the Big Three have going for them is that they never have to face themselves. Reckoning won the 2012 championship and only beat one team with a winning record, Orange Crush Second Night.
With the impact of first round wins quite literally cut in half, the only way to win the championship is going to be to get to the finals. This has always been true—although Reckoning only won one night in 2012, they did get to the finals three times, the most of any team—but now is absolutely imperative. Getting to the finals one night, or winning it one night and then winning a lot of first round races (ala Damage, Inc. in 2012) is now on the fast track to nowhere. Damage, Inc. earned 30 points in the 2012 season. If you apply the new point system to their season, it would now drop down to 26 points, putting them into a tie with Full Throttle for fourth place.
Boiling a lot of fat away, the best way to win is still to win. The more the merrier. Now, though, that thought is applied to each night especially. Win in the second round and you’ll have three times the points of the team you beat (3 – 1). Win in the finals and you’ll have five times the points of the team you beat in the second round (5 – 1).
So my prediction for 2013 is that two teams are going to stand out well above the crowd, two teams are going to bring up the bottom and the rest are going to be in a weird middle ground of quicksand where it seems like they should be making up ground on the teams ahead of them, but aren’t. If you’re picking champions this year, the question quickly becomes: which teams will be able to get to the finals two or more times?
THE INDIVIDUAL TEAM PREVIEWS WILL COME IN THE 2013 PREVIEW COLUMN PARTS 2 AND 3.