Parity (or a lack of it) in Pro Ultimate
We have a lot of fun storylines, but what about competitive balance?
Parity across the highest levels of ultimate has always been interesting to me. Early last month, we looked at the differences between parity in the PUL and WUL, and those trends have largely continued since then. However, in good news for lovers of chaos, two bastions of competitive imbalance in other areas have since fallen: Cal Poly SLO denied North Carolina Darkside a chance at their fourth consecutive men’s D1 title, and the Detroit Mechanix finally snapped their 81-game losing streak. Are we in a golden age of parity in ultimate?!
A lack of parity is extremely evident across the highest levels of the sport. Teams rise and fall in cycles in college and club, but we largely see similar locations and schools in competition for titles. However, in amateur and collegiate sports, an inequality of resources and eventual outcome is a fact of life wherever you look. But, there are also so many tournaments and levels of competition in club and college ultimate that often, teams and competitions can self-stratify to provide fairly even competition in many places at once.
More concerning to me is the pro landscape. Especially given that in American professional sports, the franchise model we employ (as opposed to the club football model from abroad) tends to foster parity rather than inherent inequality.
At the professional level, only one (out of four) UFA division has what I’ll call a competition for playoff spots. There are teams in every division that have won one or fewer games. And as mentioned, the Detroit Mechanix just won their first game since 2017. One team (Houston) is 4-5, but only because they have played the same 0-8 team (Dallas) four times. And because Houston and Dallas are in a five team division, that means the other three teams get a free pass to the postseason.
The PUL regular season ended with just three teams having a winning percentage above .500. Across the six-game regular season, those three teams finished with a combined point differential of +156. Despite this data including one game played between two of those teams, that means on average, DC, New York, and Philadelphia won every game they played by almost nine points. The semifinal games were an 11-point blowout and a not-that-close six-pointer. The final wasn’t close all game either.
Even my favorite child, the WUL, was not immune from a team being down and out the entire season this year (sorry, Arizona), but even then, the Sidewinders posted a -14 point differential across six games, which is over 20 points better than the best 1-5 team the PUL could offer.
So why is parity so hard to come by in the pro scene? And what would it look like if our pro leagues had more parity?
Well, to start with the second question, I think the answer would be the growth of the middle class. Right now, there are a few good teams and a lot of bad teams. There are not many teams we’d expect to pull off a big upset or are dark horse contenders to go on a deep run in the postseason. Not to mention that there are around two teams per conference/division where any sort of loss is noteworthy because we expect them to win every game they play. In my ideal world, there are only about one or two (three, maybe in a bigger league like the UFA) teams you can write into postseason play, one or two you can fully write off, and everyone else is in with a chance. This more closely aligns with how our current structure of pro sports tends to be in the US and still provides just the right amount of competitive balance and imbalance, in my opinion.
How do we get there, though? That part I don’t really have a good sense of. Why are there such large talent divisions to begin with? The league with the most parity is the smallest, suggesting that a higher concentration of talent is better for closer games. But that doesn’t really help the game grow. So why are so many pro teams struggling on the field against a few juggernaut programs? I reject the notion that it’s just that the talent is spread too thin. Especially for one-game scenarios instead of tournaments, I think most areas that have teams could scrounge together a local group to be competitive. Yet at the same time, travelling and playing for different pro teams than the closest one to you is fairly common for pro ultimate players. So, that entrenches a deeper talent divide than naturally exists.
And, of course, even if we’d expect one-off games to be more competitive, is it possible the rule changes pro leagues have made to the USAU ruleset create even more of a divide? Well, it certainly feels possible that a bigger field could swing the game more drastically in favor of a technically superior group. But I’ll have to find some sort of real data I can use before drawing any real conclusion. It’s also possible that the more limited practice time pro teams have versus club teams, the continued perspective from players that pro comes second to club (just look at why all those Pittsburgh players were missing from their game against the Mechanix), and the fact that this is still semi-pro and not anyone’s only job, means that we are still in the infancy of pro ultimate.
While this may be a lame conclusion, in all likelihood, the answer to why there isn’t more parity in pro ultimate is probably just that it hasn’t been around long enough. Sports like football and basketball only boast the complexity they have today because of well over a century of innovation. Not to mention the exorbitant amount of time people have been paid to think about those sports for a living compared to ultimate where no one has been able to figure out how to do that yet (please let me know when that job opens). Do I think these leagues, especially the UFA and PUL, could do more to encourage parity in their play? Absolutely. I’d love to see some tweaks made to the field size in the UFA (smaller, please) and the stall count in the PUL (standardize with the WUL and UFA) because I think that constraining players more allows for the scales to balance between teams.
But even though I’ve found it frustrating to follow many of the pro games I’ve initially been excited for, just writing and thinking about parity in these leagues has helped me see the perspective that we are in the middle of growing pains for the sport. While it isn’t always comfortable or pleasant to sit through, and while I would like to see some more aggressive tinkering from the powers that be, it’s exciting to think about where the sport may be in another 50+ years. However, once again, anything we can do to encourage innovation, we should be doing. Consider this my application to be on the rules committee for any of these leagues.
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This newsletter aims to tackle the gap in present coverage of ultimate as a sport. Commentary, analysis, and community are some of the guiding ideals behind the Breakside.
About the Author
My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him). I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and studied Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University. I am a journalist by trade and have been playing ultimate for over half my life. I love nothing more than combining those two interests. Contact me for discussions, feedback, story suggestions, and more on Twitter (@noamgum) or email (noamgumerman@gmail.com).