This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/JimHarbaughTheChamp on 2024-03-03 03:56:46.
For this report I have decided to compare the magnitude of how much a loss means across various North American sports and how much you as a fan should let it upset you.
I will take two things into account - the number of games in a regular season, and how difficult it is to make the playoffs.
Baseball, as we know, has 162 games in the regular season, and 6 teams from each league make the playoffs. Here’s how it compares to other major sports:
- NFL (since 2021): 17 games in a regular season, 14 teams out of 32 make playoffs.
- NHL (since 2013): 82 games, 16 teams out of 32 make playoffs.
- NBA (since 2020): 82 games, 20 teams out of 30 make playoffs (if you count play-in games).
- College Football (2014-2023): 12 regular season games + CCG. 4 teams out of 131 made playoffs. For the purposes of this exercise I will count the “Postseason” as any NY6 Bowl (and going forward, there will be 12 postseason slots, so it works moving forward)
| Regular Season Games | Initial 1 loss = __ MLB losses | Teams in League | Postseason Slots | % of teams to make Postseason | Difficulty of Making Postseason (compared to MLB) | Adjusted 1 loss = __ MLB losses | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MLB | 162 | 1 | 30 | 12 | 40.00% | 100.00% | 1 |
| NHL | 82 | 1.975609756 | 32 | 16 | 50.00% | 80.00% | 1.580487805 |
| NFL | 17 | 9.529411765 | 32 | 14 | 43.75% | 91.43% | 8.712605042 |
| NBA | 82 | 1.975609756 | 30 | 20 | 66.67% | 60.00% | 1.185365854 |
| CFB | 12 | 13.5 | 131 | 12 | 9.16% | 436.67% | 58.95 |
Per my findings, losing a single hockey game should make you as upset as losing 1.6 NLB games, and losing an NFL game is as bad as an 8.6-game losing streak in MLB. Due to how easy it is to make the postseason in the NBA, losing 1 NBA game is only marginally worse than losing an MLB game. A single CFB loss, however, should have you as upset as 59 MLB losses.