Upsets are fun!

Is baseball really more exciting than football? According to the folks out at Los Alamos (and a few weeks ago, the University of California, as consortium with several companies, was granted further responsibility for the Los Alamos Laboratory, thus ensuring continued scientific excellence and bigger and better bombs), yep, it is because baseball suffers more upsets than (American) football — no word on how Canadian football does in comparison.

The "upset" factor, however, was highest for football — the non-American kind.

However much we might be disinclined to appreciate the "upset" factor as the predicator of excitement, it's true that hope for an upset is the reason they play the game: if you know who's going to win every time, they wouldn't be a reason to take it to the field.

Now, there are perhaps a few reasons for this: three of the sports under consideration — basketball, soccer, and ice hockey — are filled with continuous play, and suggest a leveling affect of talent and execution. Of the others, baseball often can be easily controlled by a single event or player. In football, not only is there no leveling affect of continuous play (rather, momentum plays a huge role in eventual outcome), but also a single player can less affect the game, as there are 24 starters for every team in every contest (if the punter and placekicker are two different people).

Frankly, I adore American football, but it's a lot less exciting than other type of football. Watch some of the matches in this summer's World Cup, and you'll see what I mean: they don't need commercials or somebody's sister's love life to make things interesting.