Novak Djokovic? More like Novax Joker-ivic, amiritefolks?
How Djokovic's case reflects decades of Australian xenophobia. That and college football playoff formats: which one and why? Let's find out.
Welcome to the first edition of 2022 of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.
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Novak Djokovic? More like Novax Joker-ivic, amiritefolks?
National security is therefore about a proper response to terrorism. It’s also about having a far sighted, strong, well thought out defence policy. It is also about having an uncompromising view about the fundamental right of this country to protect its borders. It’s about this nation saying to the world we are a generous open hearted people taking more refugees on a per capita basis than any nation except Canada, we have a proud record of welcoming people from 140 different nations.
But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
Then Prime Minister John Howard said those words back in October 2001 prior to the Liberal Party’s re-election to federal government. The last sentence still resonates in my head all these years later. Howard played on white Australia’s long history of xenophobia, one of the pillars of the Commonwealth’s founding, and gave it a new spin in the context of terrorism and national security following the September 11 attacks. Probably few people in the world benefited as substantially from 9/111 as Howard did, turning a likely loss into a gain of two seats in the space of eight weeks.
Since then, both sides of politics have engaged in a race to the bottom to see who could out-brutalise the other in its treatment of “asylum seekers” (in the post-9/11 parlance, “refugees” before then2) to win votes in the western suburbs of east coast capital cities, while simultaneously allowing immigration rates to grow for those who have the means to fly here, instead of taking a leaky boat across the Indian Ocean.
In 2020, coronavirus blessed Australia with the perfect excuse to shut down and cut itself off from the outside world. Shockingly, white Europeans were given the same treatment as everyone else in coming to Australia, perhaps a first in national history.
Which brings us to notable dipshit, tennis player and aspiring Australian Open participant, Novak Djokovic. Being vaccinated is a condition of entry to Australia and Djokovic has refused to publicly confirm his vaccination status, although it is impossible he would need to go through this rigamorale if he could prove he was, in fact, vaxxed up, so all of this is likely because he is an enormous dickhead utilising a loophole to help the genuinely ill for his own laziness.
Despite this, Tennis Australia (operator of the Australian Open), the Victorian government (sponsor of the Australian Open) and the Australian government (notionally the sovereign in the situation) have decided to accommodate his dickheadery and in doing so, made the situation much worse with their laughably inept lack of coordination. Sensing an opportunity for an easy PR win after a couple of years of allowing the federation to deteriorate, current PM Scott Morrison snapped into action, well after Djokovic had left Europe, to make life hard for him.
It’s not at all surprising to see national unity achieved in watching the full power of the Australian government turned to the task of making Djokovic eat shit. He’s anti-vax, so that satisfies the vast majority of Australians who have had the jab so we might, one day, see an end to life under the pandemic. He’s being held up by Australia’s immigration system, world leading in its cruelty, so that satisifies viewers of Border Security and the voters in marginal electorates that that system is meant to placate. He’s Serbian, so that satisfies some specific types of racists. He’s unpopular and few want to see him win.
The international profile of Djokovic has brought all sorts out of the woodwork. The frequently seen refrain from foreign journalists3 and his fellow tennis players is that “this isn’t good for anyone”. No shit. Everyone involved, except for Rafael Nadal, looks incredibly stupid. But the reality is that this is a rare example of a rich and famous white man has been caught up in Australia’s inhumane border protection machinations. No one cares when it’s literally anyone else.
So we should spare a thought for the thousands of ordinary people, who are routinely shoved into its gears so governments don’t look soft on immigration4. If the outcome of this is Australia asking itself, “what the actual fuck are we doing to people here?”, then I’m happy to make Djokovic sit in a crappy hotel before sending him home5. He’ll be fine.
Given how many opportunities Australia has had since Howard uttered those words to change things, I have very little hope that this time is different. We have spent most of the last twenty years replaying the hits on an endless loop and the terror of a foreign disease has had us scrambling further and further back into the past for a security blanket. There’s a long way to go.
Postscript:
Against my expectations, Djokovic won his case, seemingly on procedural grounds rather than any sense of higher moral purpose or even if his medical exemption is actually valid. It’s crazy what happens when someone with the time, money, resources and motivation challenges the system. If only more people had this specific combination of circumstances!
Meanwhile, it would have been the easiest PR lay up imaginable for the federal government to have denied Djokovic his exemption before he got on a plane. Instead, they dithered. Just like they did with the bushfires (another easy PR lay up), just like they did with the pandemic and just like they will do with every crisis this country will face for the foreseeable future.6
Whether the government will take more decisive action (refer note 5) remains to be seen. Certainly, the news of Djokovic being arrested on the streets of Melbourne with a hood shoved over his face before he’s bundled into an unmarked van and taken to an undisclosed location (Tullamarine Airport) will not be broken by some lunatic on Twitter, as it seemed to be last night.
I think the court case landing in his favour will swing public opinion in his favour or, more accurately, against the government. Any further heavy-handedness is not likely to be met with rejoicing, as the triumvirate of idiots - Tennis Australia and the state and federal governments - risk embarrassing us in front of the other countries.
The grace, the beauty of sports
It is horrible to use this injury to a line judge for “comedic” purposes but I hope you will see how this is pertinent to the prosecution’s case that Novak is a dickhead, your honour.
College football playoff never fails to disappoint
The semi-finals of college football’s playoffs held on new year’s eve resulted in two lopsided scorelines, with neither Michigan and Cinicinatti ever being particularly close to winning. The national championship will then be a rematch of the SEC title game from December 4 between Alabama and Georgia on January 10.
In the context of Cincinatti being the first non-Power 5 school to be allowed to participate in the playoffs, repeated blowouts in semifinals and the mooted future expansion to accommodate more teams, this pair of results has created Discourse among the college football twitterers7.
The net result was that two arguments got conflated: college football, by its nature, only allows a few schools at any one time to be successful, and that the playoff should be expanded to allow more schools a chance at the title. The latter is unlikely to materially impact the former but the disingenuous made this their strawman to argue with8.
To examine the two propositions in more detail, I developed my own Elo rating system for college football. It starts in 1998 and is optimised to deliver the best head-to-head tipping rate over that time. Here’s where each school stood at the end of the 2021 regular season.
It’s worth noting that the Elo system is being very generous to the teams in the lower half and obviously does not move especially fast to respond to this season’s specific results (see Clemson at 9 and Baylor at 15). This is fine because I’m not making the argument that Elo ratings should replace the current ranking system. I want to use it to make two points about the current system.
The first is that the gap between the top schools hasn’t really changed much over time. The following is a plot of the gap between the top rated and second rated schools, the top and third rated and the top and fourth rated schools in terms of the gap in Elo ratings, for each week of the regular season9 dating back to 2000. While individual weeks fluctuate depending on scheduling and shock losses, the long term trend is pretty flat.
This century, at least, it’s always been pretty unequal and there are substantial structural factors that require modification10 for this to be mitigated. The playoff format is almost immaterial and whether its four, eight or twelve teams, there’s going to be teams getting blown out. This happens in other sports too where it doesn’t cause an existential crisis.
The second is that, even with dominant teams, the expanded playoff increases the potential number of winners. Here I’ve run 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations based on the end of 2021 Elo ratings to determine how a four team (the current system), an eight team or a twelve team playoff format11 would impact the final outcome.
Now we could quibble over the exact numbers but the point is to demonstrate order of magnitude changes. In a four team playoff, we would expect the current iteration Alabama against the current field to win nearly half the time (or, in other words, win a championship every two years). In an expanded playoff, this drops to winning only a quarter of the time (every four years). The reason? The additional game provides an opportunity, albeit a small one, for Alabama to lose and a new program to take their place.
While Elo is being generous to the field, even if the opposition in the first round has a 10% chance of a win in a single game (roughly reflective of a team with a 12-1 record), that’s still a greater challenge for the would-be champions to overcome. At the same time, either four or more other programs have non-zero chances of winning the title that they don’t currently have.
The probabilities may be remote but by expanding the playoff to include more teams, a paradox is seemingly achieved: the playoffs are open to more teams to stage an upset and the path to overall victory is made more difficult by the greater number of trials (and therefore should more reliably crown a worthy winner12).
I think this is ultimately a good thing, particularly if your goal is any one of the following:
to expand the geographical coverage of the CFP to increase national engagement
to increase the inventory of high rating games for ESPN and other broadcasters
to make better use of historic bowls and other IP
The current format does none of these things. While lowering the bar that has to be cleared to make the postseason reduces the importance of the regular season, the tradeoff here seems worthwhile. The bar remains extremely high: even with a twelve team format, CFB would still only allow <10% of competing teams in its playoffs, compared to the 43% that make the postseason in the NFL now. Conversely, the playoffs wouldn’t necessarily exclude teams that have excellent records in less pretigious conferences.
The challenge will be fitting in three, perhaps four, weeks of playoffs without overwhelming the already stretched player pool. There’s probably enough money on the table to make it happen though.
Mailbag
Reader Klára Shikha of Kasri, Indonesia, writes:
Would you prefer the current college football playoff system system or an 8 or 12 team playoff?
That’s a great question, Klára. I think 12 is my preference, solely because it would create the maximum number of high stakes games. Pitting better teams against each other more often would be better for my entertainment personally, especially as these games would like be during the weekend days here in Australia. I also think people will worry less about blowouts if they’re concealed with more competitive matchups in the first round.
Mail in your questions with a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Sick, Sad World of Sports, Locked Bag 6969 in your capital city or shriek at @scksadwos.
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George Bush, Dick Cheney and oil companies in Iraq might be other candidates. Possibly the Taliban if you prefer the long game. Honourable mention for the UK surveillance state.
I must say it feels weird but comfortable, like wearing a pair of old jeans for the first time in years, relitigating anti-Bush/Howard stuff in the 2020s but then there’s a whole bunch of adults now who would have no memory of it the first time around.
Worth noting that the mandatory detention policy came from Labor, instituted in 1992.
Domestic journalists know better than to speak like Australians are an exotic species of aliens, as if this is not the template for right of centre parties in the UK, US and Europe. It endears these people to no one.
Both major parties are soft on immigration - which is fine if the infrastructure is built to accommodate them! - but less so if your political status is in some dispute.
Even if he wins the case, the Home Affairs Immigration Minister can still tell him to fuck off, just as easily as his predecessor personally approved the importation of au pairs for his friends. That could be appealed but Djokovic will have to sit in hotel quarantine until its resolved. Could take a while because the system is purposely set up to avoid granting people access and it definitely does not move speedily. So my advice is: go get the jab, Novak. If your argument is that catching covid allows you to postpone getting vaccinated, that implies an intent to get vaccinated in which case, why aren’t you already?
We can speculate whether the other side might be less prone to dithering but we don’t have to speculate for the current lot because we know who they are and what they are like.
As it probably does every year…
It doesn’t help that people who sneer at the like of Cincinatti or the concept of playoff expansion seem to be some of the dumbest chuds on the internet.
I’ve removed anything College FB Reference calls week 1 or anything beyond week 14 to help keep the pool of schools participating in a given week as wide as possible.
You can pretty safely file this under “things that will never happen”.
For the 8 team format, I’ve assumed the top 6 conference champs by CFP ranking would be seeded 1-6 (Bama, Michigan, Cinicinatti, Baylor, Utah and Pitt respectively) with at-large invites given to the next two highest ranked schools (Georgia, Notre Dame this year) with a straight knock-out tournament seeding 1v8, 2v7, 3v6 and 4v5 in the first round and the second round with the highest surviving seed vs the lowest surviving seed and the other two winners in the other semi final.
For the 12 team format, I’ve extended the at-large invites to include the next four highest ranked teams (Ohio State, Ole Miss, Oklahoma State and Michigan State). The top four are given a bye in the first week with the remainder of the tournament following as per the 8 team.
It’s not possible to really design a format that requires schools currently outside looking in to not have to beat a very good team on the way to their championship without also getting substantially better.