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A case for the Riders to tank, and how a simple rule change would remove the incentive

Andrew Bucholtz

What if the best way for your team to win...was to lose? It sounds like something out of The Mouse That Roared, but it's perfectly applicable to the CFL at the moment thanks to the league's unusual playoff procedure. With an eight-team league, things have to be a little different than they would be with a larger one, and that's where the crossover rule comes into play; if the fourth-place team in one division has more points than the third-place team in the other division, they "cross over" into that third spot. By and large, this works very well, and it provides a way to reward good teams in tough divisions while penalizing bad teams in weak divisions. However, in particular circumstances like we're seeing this year, it can make it advantageous for a team in a particularly strong division to purposefully lose in order to wind up in the other division's playoff picture.

This was briefly mentioned here in the last paragraph of Sunday's Playoff Primer post, but it deserves further investigation. Given what we've seen from the league's teams this year, it would seem better for either the 8-8 Saskatchewan Roughriders or 7-9 Edmonton Eskimos to finish fourth in the West, cross to the East and face either the Toronto Argonauts (currently 7-9) or the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (currently 5-11) and then the Montreal Alouettes (currently 9-7). Otherwise, if either finishes third in the West, they have to face the Calgary Stampeders (10-6) and then the B.C. Lions (12-4). Record alone makes that case, but the case gets even stronger when you enhance it with RPI and SRS (explained here) and projected winning percentages, as friend of the blog Rob Pettapiece does here:

We can take each team's RPI and SRS rankings and convert them to winning percentage. For RPI, we just work backwards through the formula, assuming average competition, and figure out a WP for that team. For SRS, we divide each point above average by 33 (the standard points-to-wins converter in the CFL) to figure out the WP. Unsurprisingly, BC is the best team by this measure, at .765, or just above their actual record of 12-2. We can then take those winning percentages and figure out how likely each team is to beat every other team, accounting for home-field advantage (worth about 3.8 points over the last three years in CFL play).

...For the Riders, finishing third puts them against Calgary one week and, if they win, B.C. the next. They have a 27% chance of winning the semifinal, and a 15% chance of winning the Western final. They would then face one of Montreal, Toronto, or Edmonton in the Grey Cup, and when you go through all the possibilities they would have a 54% chance of winning that game. (They would in fact be favourites against all three of those teams: Montreal and Edmonton on neutral fields, and Toronto playing at home.) Add it all up and you get a 2.1% chance of going all the way.

Finishing fourth is, as suspected, better for Saskatchewan. They would now face Toronto (58% chance of winning), Montreal (40%), and only one of B.C., Calgary, or Edmonton (31%, averaged out). All together, that's 7.1%.

So the Riders are more than three times as likely to win the Grey Cup if they lose their next two games and Edmonton wins at least one to create the crossover situation. (The same logic holds for the Edmontons, too: 1.0% chance of winning if they are the 3 seed, or 3.8% if they cross over.)

Like many things in life, professional sports are an incentive-driven business. The ultimate goal for every franchise (if they're being really honest) is making the most money possible. Fortunately for competitive integrity, on-field success is one of the most important ingredients in making a profit, so teams are motivated to win. However, a large on-field success (winning a championship) trumps a small one (winning a regular-season game). Usually, the two coincide; most leagues' playoffs are set up so teams that are better in the regular season are favoured. That's usually the case in the CFL, too. When one division is dramatically better than the other from top to bottom (this year, the East is 26-38 overall, while the West is 37-27), though, the current rules fall short, and the best way to boost your odds of winning the championship is to lose a couple of regular-season games.

This is a remarkably easy fix, though, as compared to broader problems like tanking for draft picks. (Oddly enough, the CFL largely doesn't have that issue, as while the draft matters, the value of a #1 overall pick isn't as high as it is in many other sports leagues). All that would be required is adding a paragraph to the crossover rule that gives the third-place team in the stronger division the choice of staying in its own division or heading to the other one, while the fourth-place team takes whichever option isn't chosen. This would be substantially beneficial from a standpoint of keeping the final few weeks of the regular season interesting, and it would help the league's competitive integrity as well. All of a sudden, there's a huge incentive to finish third instead of fourth, rather than the reverse, and that makes more regular-season games matter. Until that happens, though, it would seem extremely worthwhile for the Riders to try to finish fourth rather than third.