At the 40 & Over 3.5 women's event, there was a 4-way tie at 3-1 for 3rd thru 6th. Two of the teams, SoCal and Intermountain, were tied on court record at 10-6. This means the flawed tie-breakers come into play.
Specifically, the next tie-breaker is sets lost, and both teams lost 16 sets. The fact that Intermountain won 21 sets as compared to SoCal's 20 sets is ignored, it is not included in the tie-breakers. The next tie-breaker is games lost and SoCal lost 144 to Intermountain's 146, so SoCal gets 3rd.
In addition to Intermountain winning an extra set, what the USTA's tie-breakers also ignore is that Intermountain won 156 games compared to SoCal's 142. In fact, SoCal lost more games than they won, 142-144, while Intermountain won significantly more than they lost, 156-146.
By ignoring sets won, what the USTA is basically saying is that if you lose an individual court, there is no difference between losing in straight-sets vs losing in a 3rd set tie-break. In this case, Intermountain lost as many sets as SoCal, but took more matches to third set tie-breaks, but gets no credit for doing so.
And the games lost tie-breaker is just fundamentally broken, as it says it is better to lose a set 6-0 (6 games lost) than 7-6 (7 games lost). This is simply baffling. And indeed, in their first match Intermountain lost a set 7-6, and in their third match lost a set 7-5. Had they lost those sets 6-2, clearly not as good a result, they would have tied on games lost and the tie-breaker would have gone to game winning percentage where Intermountain would have won. How does this make sense?
Now, you might argue, this was just determining 3rd vs 4th, both teams are advancing. That is true, but that doesn't give the flawed tie-breakers a pass. And it is actually meaningful as it affects seeding and Intermountain must face a Florida team that had a 14-2 court record while SoCal gets to face NorCal that only had an 11-5 court record. So the flawed tie-breakers do have a significant impact on Intermountain's ability to make the final.
I've written about this before, I even submitted a regulations change proposal to fix it, but the USTA elected to not act on it. I guess they simply don't care about equitably determining standings at Nationals.
What do you think? Should Intermountain have been third in the standings instead of SoCal? Should the USTA change the standings tie-breakers?
I completely agree that the current tiebreakers are absurd while also being easy to fix. Regarding nationals, has there ever been an undefeated team that was eliminated by the tiebreakers? I've noticed a few times when there were four 4-0 teams after the "round robin" portion, although I didn't check how close those four-team situations came to having five 4-0 teams.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe five 4-0 teams has happened at Nationals yet, but in 2019 there were two occasions where it was one match away from happening. And NorCal used the format for Sectionals and did send an undefeated team home.
DeleteThe 40 4.5 women almost had 5 4-0 teams. I think a 1-2 New England beat one of the 3-0 teams in their final pool play match.
ReplyDeleteBut, you're totally right about these tiebreaks. I'm glad you wrote a letter to USTA, but sad they disregarded it, don't have a clue what's going, or don't want to change anything. It seems they want to change something yearly but then are hesitant to change other things that they definitely should.
The same tiebreaks are used for our sectionals, too.
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ReplyDeleteNice post! Silly that they don't use fraction of sets/games won for exactly the reasons you describe. I'm seeing this in my current league. Two teams are tied for 1st for points. The "top" team has an 11-7 sets record vs. 13-8 for 2nd place. 'course, 2nd place has the better sets record with 62% won vs. 61% won for the "top" team.
ReplyDeleteWhy are the tie break rules the same for 2 team ties and 3 team ties. It seems ridiculous that head to head is not the first factor when just 2 teams are tied
ReplyDelete