Ties and Overtime

[jknezek]

Yep. I'm starting a thread because I got tired of sorting through multiple places. I was mildly against this rule change, mainly because I think more soccer is better and with the substitution rules being what they are... player fatigue is on the coaches being unwilling to go deep into a bench. A bench that for many teams is at least equal to the size of the team on the field, if not double that at home. I thought the OT rule made more sense in conjunction with the proposed substitution changes, but one without the other is just... well, not my cup of tea. Is it something I'd go to war over as ruining the game? Of course not. I just think more game time is better for deciding the best teams, a tricky proposition when you can't play a true home and home type round robin.

So I did some basic research using Week 6 of the D3soccer.com Fan Poll through Week 6 and here's the data on ties:

2011 - 23
2012 - 23
2013 - 28
2014 - 20
2015 - 25
2016 - 28
2017 - 15
2018 - 26
2019 - 34
2021 - 30

average: 25.2
median: 25/26


2022 -- 57
Coaches -- Pack the bus against better teams. So far this year, on average, it's more than twice as easy to get a draw against the Top 25 than it's been historically. It's bloody hard to score in soccer, a game already noted for teams with 15 SOG losing to a team with 1 on a semi-regular basis. Well, in NCAA college soccer it's now twice as easy to tie up the better teams.

We all know that when a top team ties a team they were expected to beat, home or away, it's a negative for the top team and a positive for the lower team. So really, if you are a mid-tier team playing a top tier team, just put 10 back, waste as much time as possible, and kick and run and hope up front. It's a lot easier to have it work out when games can be more than 20% shorter.

[OldSoccerGuy]

Thank you for analysis...wow double the Ties....bring back the Golden Goal OT will keep OT player minutes down if thats the main worry versus the full 20 of OT (2x10).

[SimpleCoach]

My notes from the episode II of Around D3 where I raised this very issue.  And I compared a year to one day....

Now that we are into the season with the overtime rule change, it seems that there are a lot more ties.

-  Wednesday, 14 September
-  For the women, there were 122 game. 16 ended in ties.  13% of games ended up in ties.  18 game season, 2 games would end in ties.
-  For the men's, there were 118 games.  Of those, 22 of those games ended up in ties.  18.5% of games.  If I were to extrapolate... for a team with 18 games in a season, they would have 3 games end in ties.
-  For one day, 18.5% seems a bit high to me, but what do I know? 
-  So I decided to take a look at 2021. The men had an average # of ties across all games of 8.3% in 2021.  The women, slightly lower at 7.8%.

Granted this is a comparison of an entire season across all programs to a sample  one day of games.... But if it is reflective of where we are at, the women will almost double the number of ties, and the men will have a 2.5x increase in ties!

SC.

[jknezek]

Actually SimpleCoach... when you look at the Top 25 through Week 6... a total of 288 games have been played, 57 ended in ties. That's 19.79%. So in a typical regular season of 16 or 17 games, we can expect a Top 25 team to have 3-4 ties this year.

[SimpleCoach]

Actually SimpleCoach... when you look at the Top 25 through Week 6... a total of 288 games have been played, 57 ended in ties. That's 19.79%. So in a typical regular season of 16 or 17 games, we can expect a Top 25 team to have 3-4 ties this year.

I wasn't that nuanced.  I looked at all games on the 14th, regardless of ranking.  And then for 2021, I looked at the entire season for all teams.

SC.

[jknezek]

Actually SimpleCoach... when you look at the Top 25 through Week 6... a total of 288 games have been played, 57 ended in ties. That's 19.79%. So in a typical regular season of 16 or 17 games, we can expect a Top 25 team to have 3-4 ties this year.

I wasn't that nuanced.  I looked at all games on the 14th, regardless of ranking.  And then for 2021, I looked at the entire season for all teams.

SC.

I know, and that makes for a better comparison. But the teams that are most affected by ties tend to be the better teams, since more teams will play for a tie against a stronger opponent. And we clearly see that it is a) a whole lot easier so far this season, and b) going to make comparing teams a lot harder.

W&L tied Lynchburg and CNU last week. They dominated Lynchburg, CNU played them essentially straight up. But on the record, each game goes as a tie. Unless you dig deep into the stats, they look like equivalent results. They weren't even close. Would W&L have won or lost either of those games in OT? Who knows. But when you outshoot a team 20(10) to 6(3), I like my odds over 20 more minutes to get a result. When it's 10(1) to 8(2) I think 20 more minutes won't help too much.

[camosfan]

Williams was quite happy with a tie at Wheaton just now! 2-2

[PaulNewman]

OK, I agree with Hopkins (and he and I often are not in sync), Ejay, etc.  I agree about the rule change but also about "tends to get people really in their feelings."  I am frankly more fascinated by the latter and exactly what that is all about including why I lose my mind anytime we get into one of these  And, lol, there is no way I can compete with that scrolling bold banner in post #1.  I wouldn't have the first clue how to do that!

In any case, of course there are more draws this year.  There's no OT!!!  I'm not denying there is a major increase but a fairer comparison would be this year's results versus how many games would have ended in draws last year or in prior years if OT had not been played.  With OTs the number can only go in one direction....down.

I also agree that if you can't get it done in 90 minutes then why do you deserve another 20 minutes?  The thesis is almost as though teams are getting cheated if they get evaluated on 90 minutes? 

Also have not seen hard evidence presented that teams are parking the bus and going for a draw.  Like why?  For what?  The only time to do that is in playoff scenarios where there IS OT and you can argue that inferior teams are playing for PKs.  Does anyone seriously believe Colby WANTS to be 3-3-10?  Like what prize do they get for that?  Does Williams want to be 4-1-5?

I don't have the proof by anecdotally at least there seem to be MORE goals scores in the last 3 minutes than before.  To use the W&L example, the stats advantage is great but the truth is that Lynchburg was on the verge of a win as W&L drew even in the 88th minute.  Wesleyan leveled with Hamilton in the 89th minute.  CMU beat JCU with 10 secs left. 

There's also a belief/wish that one's superior team is gonna win in OT.  That does not always happen, and truth be told, beyond my other arguments, the single biggest visceral reason I oppose OT, specifically sudden death OT, is that I cannot stand for my team or teams to lose that way.

[Christan Shirk]

From the D3soccer.com database:

Year	Matches	Ties
2014	3850+	8.6 %
2015	3850+	8.5 %
2016	3850+	9.1 %
2017	3800+	8.8 %
2018	3800+	8.4 %
2019	3900+	8.8 %
2021	3650+	8.3 %
2022	2400+	18.9 %

The total number of ties so far this season has already exceeded the total in all previous seasons by approximately 33%.

[PaulNewman]

It all comes down to our prisms...and within our own prisms our logic makes internal sense.  And when two people are looking through there own prisms they aren't looking at the same thing....they aren't assessing the same thing.   It's like with the substitution thing.  If you don't have a kid playing and don't anticipate that then playing time isn't gonna be a big priority and you are freer to wax on about liberal substituting ruins the game.  If you do, did, or expect your kid to play then you probably will care about that a lot more than stylistic worries (and even if you're a Messiah parent).  I can listen to Souders tell me how my kid is just as important to team success as Trent Vegter even though he never plays a minute, but that is of little comfort after watching yet another 90 (or 110) minutes with my kid having to stand and cheer all that time while it's killing him (and me) on the inside.  I know, I know...he can quit.  That doesn't feel so great either...for any player or parent.

[PaulNewman]

From the D3soccer.com database:

Year	Matches	Ties
2014	3850+	8.6 %
2015	3850+	8.5 %
2016	3850+	9.1 %
2017	3800+	8.8 %
2018	3800+	8.4 %
2019	3900+	8.8 %
2021	3650+	8.3 %
2022	2400+	18.9 %

The total number of ties so far this season has already exceeded the total in all previous seasons by approximately 33%.

Can you do the same comparing prior years if they ended at 90 vs this year?  It's a mathematical truism that the number would be significantly higher now.  And the focus on this taints the picture in the direction of proving that the change is not a good one.  Which means buying into the idea that draws are inherently unwanted.

[SimpleCoach]

I am not sure where I heard, but someone told me at some point that 50% of games that went into OT ended in ties.   If that is/was true and not a figment of my hyper active imagination, then the amount of draws makes sense.  Maybe a little higher, but all in all in line with what that would look like in a year of "more" ties.

SC.

[PaulNewman]

I am not sure where I heard, but someone told me at some point that 50% of games that went into OT ended in ties.   If that is/was true and not a figment of my hyper active imagination, then the amount of draws makes sense.  Maybe a little higher, but all in all in line with what that would look like in a year of "more" ties.

SC.

Exactly.

[Gregory Sager]

Speaking of prisms, one of the aspects of this debate that hasn't been mentioned yet is sporting culture. Americans in general do not like ties. If there is any word in sports that is quintessentially American, it is the word "tiebreaker". Even-steven outcomes of any kind are not a part of our sporting culture. We're indoctrinated at a young age in the absolute importance of winning, and that winning and losing are a clear-cut binary. Our national pastime has what is essentially a play-till-you-drop rule that for the most part eliminates the possibility of ties. (American baseball fans tend to be utterly perplexed when they first learn that ties are allowed in the Japanese major leagues.) Our one homegrown sport that the rest of the world has wholeheartedly embraced, basketball, likewise has a play-till-you-drop rule to ensure a win/loss outcome. Football had ties for many decades, but they were relatively few and far between; it was a novelty if a team had more than one tie in a season, and most seasons a team wouldn't tie at all, whether it was on the high school, college, or pro level. Even that infrequent outcome proved too much for football fans, so the various levels of the sport came up with their own overtime rules to dispel the dreaded draw.

Soccer's closest sister sport on these shores, hockey, has long been subject to ties for the same reason as soccer: it's darned hard to score, and the only scoring increment, a goal, counts for one. That means that if you're behind you must first come level before you take the lead, which, along with the difficulty of scoring, is a surefire recipe for ties. And hockey, like college soccer, has flirted with various tiebreakers, including the alien and bizarre method of shootouts as well as overtimes. That's because the people who love hockey the most, Canadians, share the lack of affinity with ties that we have here south of the border.

But the soccer world south of the Rio Grande and beyond the seas has no such compunction about draws. To the rest of the world, draws are very much a standard part of the game, and, indeed, are often a preferred strategic objective. And I think that there's a divide among American soccer fans between those who like the game and have added it onto their sports-fan menu as one sport to follow among many, and the diehards who have adopted a more exclusive and more global (for lack of a better term) outlook and who thus choose to view the sport through the prism of Europeans, Mexicans, Central and South Americans, Africans, and Asians. To them, acceptance of the draw as a legitimate outcome -- in fact, the insistence upon calling it a "draw" rather than the more American "tie" -- is to them part and parcel of what being a fan of the beautiful game is all about.

I'm going to do something dangerous and say that neither outlook is right or wrong. If you want to be all Yankee Doodle about it and declaim that ties are un-American, that's fine. If you want to be the cosmopolitan soccer purist and insist upon the globally-reinforced mentality that draws are simply a natural part of the sport of futbol, that's fine, too. If you're a mix of those two schools of thought -- hey, no problem with that, either. There's no right or wrong way to be a fan -- unless you're storming the field and inducing the riot police to load up their tear-gas canisters, that is.

[jknezek]

Comparing a 400+ team division where you try and crown a champion in 4 months with a 20 team league with a single or double 10 month long round robin is a fallacy. I do find it interesting that the people who said NCAA soccer shouldn't be like the rest of the world for subs are now consistently saying... "stop being so American about ties and look at the rest of the world."

It's entertaining if nothing else. And hockey does play overtime. At least the NHL does. One 5 minute period of 3v3 in the reg season. Playoffs are different.