Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 10:30:31 12/04/24 Wed
Your supposition doesn't make sense, GG. It's more of an advantage to finish at home.
It's like choosing to start on offense or defense in football. For generations, head coaches chose to start on offense, to hopefully seize the momentum early.
Now almost all head coaches choose to start on defense, because they'd rather have the advantage of receiving a kickoff later in the game. Coaches finally realized that advantages compound later in the game when there is more information available. That offsets giving your opponent the chance to strike first.
It's like a home team in baseball always choosing to bat second even though they are entitled to choose to bat first.
It's why, in college football overtime, the team which wins the coin toss always defers starting on offense in favor of playing defense first. There's more information available when you have the ball second.
The same phenomenon is true over the course of a season. You want to stockpile your advantages late in the season, when you have more information about what you need to accomplish to achieve your goal, which presumably is the season-long conference championship.
Think about your favorite example of all time, 1995.
With seconds left in the game against Dartmouth, Princeton coach Steve Tosches made the correct and unassailable decision to kick a field goal for the tie, instead of going for a touchdown and the win.
As a result, Princeton was the outright Ivy League champion for 1995.
That's the advantage of more information. There's more information available later in a game and later in a season.
Go Green, you were very quick to point the finger of blame at Surace when Princeton seemed to switch season finale opponents from Dartmouth to Penn several years ago. You whined and complained that Surace didn't want to face Dartmouth at the end of the season with a championship on the line.
It turned out of course that, not only were you wrong, you were completely wrong. When Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia and Cornell all shuffled their season finale opponents, the initiative came from *YOUR OWN* alma mater. It was Dartmouth that requested the change, inconveniencing five other schools.
(That Dartmouth would prefer to end every campaign against Brown instead of Princeton boggles my mind. Forget what the football coach wanted; I'm surprised that the admissions department didn't resist the optics being changed. If I'm running the admissions department in Hanover, the one institution in America that I most want to be associated with is Princeton University. Who doesn't want to finish the season against the #1 university in the country which kind of looks like Dartmouth in terms of undergraduate focus? What an epic mistake.)
I suspect the same is here. I'll bet your boys bitched about always finishing the season on the road. That explanation makes much more sense than an opponent complaining about you starting the season at home. Logic, my boy, logic. Try to use more of it.
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