Sports make sense as a way for individuals to develop and show off certain packages of physical and mental abilities. Team sports make sense as a way to show off such abilities in contexts of team production, which have long been especially relevant to human success. Of course we need not be consciously aware of this function; genetic and cultural evolution needed only make us inclined to do sports when that might make us get and look good.
The emphasis on "sportsmanship" and the rules+umpire and suchlike. The British sports are substantially dialed back relative to other versions of the same sort of activities, but they are the ones that became universal. I think the selection now (and since maybe ~early 1800s) has been for spectacle, not war training.
In earlier societies, sure, what you say sounds reasonable. But I assumed your context was the role of sport in today's societies.
Also, stories usually culminate in a climactic ending. Season-long champions often can be determined before the end of the season, when a team "clinches" the championship. That makes it difficult to attract interest in the remaining "meaningless" games.
As an example, men's professional golf has implemented a season-ending "playoffs", the FedEx Cup, in recent years. Golf is one of those games where the winner of any one tournament is not necessarily the best golfer, so they have struggled to find the best format for the playoffs. Just having the best players compete in one final "championship" tournament would leave too much to luck. Instead, they have some complicated point system for regular season tournaments plus points for four "playoff" tournaments. They keep trying to tweak the point system so that the champion won't be determined too much by luck but, at the same time, won't likely be determined before the final tournament. Golf also maintains a rolling world ranking system which continuously ranks players according to the last two years of performance. World ranking may tell us who the best player is at any given moment, but it doesn't help spectators select which tournaments to watch if they don't want to watch all of them.
Championship games attract a broader spectator base. Casual fans can watch the championship games only while devoted fans can watch all of the regular season games too. Think of how many people watch the Super Bowl that don't watch any other NFL games.
We can't just designate a random regular season game as the "important" one for casual fans to watch because that game won't necessarily pit the two best teams against each other. We need the regular season to determine the best teams. We also don't know ahead of time which games will turn out to have been most important in determining a season-long champion. Championship games allow us to answer for the casual fan the question, "If I only watch one game this season, which one should I watch?"
So, if we start with a variety of sports, some with championship games and some with only regular season champions, then the former will draw both devoted and casual fans while the latter will draw only devoted fans. By natural selection, we will end up with mostly sports with championship games as they will seem to have the most (casual+devoted) fans.
It seems to me that a simpler explanation might fit better. Perhaps people just don’t realize the small sample size problems of championship tournaments and perceive them as the best way to diagnose ability. I feel like there is something intuitive about the “king of the hill” being the team that truly is the highest quality team. I’m a sports fan who has had a lot of interaction with statistically illiterate typical fans, and I think the large majority of people really do see the championship as deciding the best team.
In junior high, on rainy days, they had us playing dodgeball. It isn't a team sport, everybody is your enemy, and the goal is to have you and your semi-allies killing each other last. I had surviving VietNam combat figured out quicker than the jocks did.
No, I don't think this works. Sports as we understand them today are pretty much a British Public School invention from maybe the mid 18th C. There have been plenty of other "sports-like" things throughout history, of course, in every culture. But it's the British ones, with everything that implies (specific rules, umpires, "sportsmanlike"-behavior, clubs) that have conquered the world. Not the ones that most aggressively train you for war.
This seems to boil down to the question: "Why are high stakes more exciting to people than low stakes?" I would guess the answer for games would be the same as the answer for stories... and it might have something to do with focusing our attention on moments of drama where the consequences of actions are very clear and intelligible to spectators. Feeding the outcome of a game into an ELO formula and then updating stats a little bit as a result is a more opaque outcome than the winner of a single big game getting a shiny ring or cup.
Edit: I do agree that there is probably something to the idea that people want to see how others perform in high pressure situations ("clutch"). And it might have something to do with war but it seems like there might also be a more generalized reason that would also explain championship matches in non team-based contests (e.g. high jump) that have a much looser connection to the war metaphor.
"If we just want to know about team abilities, why put so much weight on championships?"
Because we *don't* just want to know about team abilities; we also want to put on a good show for viewers. These two goals are in some ways related: the Superbowl teams must actually excel at the sport; it wouldn't be a good show if you could watch and think "my kids could beat these guys". But in other ways the goals conflict: if it were announced tomorrow that the whole football season is cancelled because an AI has determined the best team just from watching them practice, no one would be happy (regardless of whether we could all agree that the AI is accurate).
You correctly argue that championships are not appropriate for the first goal, but they are great for the second: a high-stakes game is a better show than a low-stakes game, which in turn is a better show than watching an AI crunch numbers.
Now early in the process of choosing a best team, the audience is small or absent, so the predominant goal is finding the best. But as the process gets closer to choosing the best team, the audience will get larger, increasing the importance of putting on a good show. At the same time, the importance of actually choosing the best gets *smaller*, especially at the very highest level, where nothing at all hinges on who we call the world's 'best' (our top basketball team does *not* face the Nerdlucks to save us from enslavement). In this sense the opposite of your thesis may be true: in a world where war was more common and sports more directly connected to it, the goal of finding the best soldiers might remain strong enough for us to resist the allure of championships, but in our world where war is rare and sports quite distant from it, we can afford to indulge our desire to just see an epic showdown.
Interestingly, European football is organized differently. Teams compete in a league and a separate knockout competition for a trophy. The knockout trophies have become devalued recently with teams and fans tacitly acknowledging that the real test of a team is how they perform in the league. Maybe because soccer is a low scoring contest and thus weaker teams can more easily get lucky.
The leagues do allow for high stakes contests - when big teams play each other. These games would be devalued if the league was only about qualifying for the championship.
It seems strange to think of sports playoffs as being about the better team at all - the causal structure is that owners / advertisers like having a set of higher stakes games which are artificially given prizes to drive extra interest in the outcomes.
This explains both the playoffs, and things like all-star games, 3-point contests, and bowl championships, which all have very different structure, but they clearly aren't about finding the best team as it can be related to war abilities.
Total war is rare in history; most cultures had limits on acceptable war behavior.
The emphasis on "sportsmanship" and the rules+umpire and suchlike. The British sports are substantially dialed back relative to other versions of the same sort of activities, but they are the ones that became universal. I think the selection now (and since maybe ~early 1800s) has been for spectacle, not war training.
In earlier societies, sure, what you say sounds reasonable. But I assumed your context was the role of sport in today's societies.
Also, stories usually culminate in a climactic ending. Season-long champions often can be determined before the end of the season, when a team "clinches" the championship. That makes it difficult to attract interest in the remaining "meaningless" games.
As an example, men's professional golf has implemented a season-ending "playoffs", the FedEx Cup, in recent years. Golf is one of those games where the winner of any one tournament is not necessarily the best golfer, so they have struggled to find the best format for the playoffs. Just having the best players compete in one final "championship" tournament would leave too much to luck. Instead, they have some complicated point system for regular season tournaments plus points for four "playoff" tournaments. They keep trying to tweak the point system so that the champion won't be determined too much by luck but, at the same time, won't likely be determined before the final tournament. Golf also maintains a rolling world ranking system which continuously ranks players according to the last two years of performance. World ranking may tell us who the best player is at any given moment, but it doesn't help spectators select which tournaments to watch if they don't want to watch all of them.
Championship games attract a broader spectator base. Casual fans can watch the championship games only while devoted fans can watch all of the regular season games too. Think of how many people watch the Super Bowl that don't watch any other NFL games.
We can't just designate a random regular season game as the "important" one for casual fans to watch because that game won't necessarily pit the two best teams against each other. We need the regular season to determine the best teams. We also don't know ahead of time which games will turn out to have been most important in determining a season-long champion. Championship games allow us to answer for the casual fan the question, "If I only watch one game this season, which one should I watch?"
So, if we start with a variety of sports, some with championship games and some with only regular season champions, then the former will draw both devoted and casual fans while the latter will draw only devoted fans. By natural selection, we will end up with mostly sports with championship games as they will seem to have the most (casual+devoted) fans.
It seems to me that a simpler explanation might fit better. Perhaps people just don’t realize the small sample size problems of championship tournaments and perceive them as the best way to diagnose ability. I feel like there is something intuitive about the “king of the hill” being the team that truly is the highest quality team. I’m a sports fan who has had a lot of interaction with statistically illiterate typical fans, and I think the large majority of people really do see the championship as deciding the best team.
What do you consider the evidence that British sports don't prepare and show war abilities, relative to other typical social activities?
In junior high, on rainy days, they had us playing dodgeball. It isn't a team sport, everybody is your enemy, and the goal is to have you and your semi-allies killing each other last. I had surviving VietNam combat figured out quicker than the jocks did.
No, I don't think this works. Sports as we understand them today are pretty much a British Public School invention from maybe the mid 18th C. There have been plenty of other "sports-like" things throughout history, of course, in every culture. But it's the British ones, with everything that implies (specific rules, umpires, "sportsmanlike"-behavior, clubs) that have conquered the world. Not the ones that most aggressively train you for war.
This seems to boil down to the question: "Why are high stakes more exciting to people than low stakes?" I would guess the answer for games would be the same as the answer for stories... and it might have something to do with focusing our attention on moments of drama where the consequences of actions are very clear and intelligible to spectators. Feeding the outcome of a game into an ELO formula and then updating stats a little bit as a result is a more opaque outcome than the winner of a single big game getting a shiny ring or cup.
Edit: I do agree that there is probably something to the idea that people want to see how others perform in high pressure situations ("clutch"). And it might have something to do with war but it seems like there might also be a more generalized reason that would also explain championship matches in non team-based contests (e.g. high jump) that have a much looser connection to the war metaphor.
The question is why it is a better show. We couldn't just randomly pick a game and declare it to be the "big show".
"If we just want to know about team abilities, why put so much weight on championships?"
Because we *don't* just want to know about team abilities; we also want to put on a good show for viewers. These two goals are in some ways related: the Superbowl teams must actually excel at the sport; it wouldn't be a good show if you could watch and think "my kids could beat these guys". But in other ways the goals conflict: if it were announced tomorrow that the whole football season is cancelled because an AI has determined the best team just from watching them practice, no one would be happy (regardless of whether we could all agree that the AI is accurate).
You correctly argue that championships are not appropriate for the first goal, but they are great for the second: a high-stakes game is a better show than a low-stakes game, which in turn is a better show than watching an AI crunch numbers.
Now early in the process of choosing a best team, the audience is small or absent, so the predominant goal is finding the best. But as the process gets closer to choosing the best team, the audience will get larger, increasing the importance of putting on a good show. At the same time, the importance of actually choosing the best gets *smaller*, especially at the very highest level, where nothing at all hinges on who we call the world's 'best' (our top basketball team does *not* face the Nerdlucks to save us from enslavement). In this sense the opposite of your thesis may be true: in a world where war was more common and sports more directly connected to it, the goal of finding the best soldiers might remain strong enough for us to resist the allure of championships, but in our world where war is rare and sports quite distant from it, we can afford to indulge our desire to just see an epic showdown.
Yes, the more noise in who wins each game, the less sense it makes to focus admiration on single elimination tournaments.
Interestingly, European football is organized differently. Teams compete in a league and a separate knockout competition for a trophy. The knockout trophies have become devalued recently with teams and fans tacitly acknowledging that the real test of a team is how they perform in the league. Maybe because soccer is a low scoring contest and thus weaker teams can more easily get lucky.
The leagues do allow for high stakes contests - when big teams play each other. These games would be devalued if the league was only about qualifying for the championship.
But it seems clear that it isn't the prizes that are driving the extra interest in championships.
Hanson's theory would imply that audiences are extra interested in championship games because of that war heritage.
It seems strange to think of sports playoffs as being about the better team at all - the causal structure is that owners / advertisers like having a set of higher stakes games which are artificially given prizes to drive extra interest in the outcomes.
This explains both the playoffs, and things like all-star games, 3-point contests, and bowl championships, which all have very different structure, but they clearly aren't about finding the best team as it can be related to war abilities.