http://www.sportingauthority.com/Sporting_Authority/Home/Home.html Thank you for visiting SportingAuthority.com. We strive to provide witty and irreverant commentary on the world in which we play.<br/><br/>We’re based in Toronto but we like to think our scope goes beyond our hometown teams. Please contact steve@sportingauthority.com with any questions. iWeb 3.0.1 http://www.sportingauthority.com/Sporting_Authority/Home/Home_files/00000598.jpg http://www.sportingauthority.com/Sporting_Authority/Home/Home.html http://www.sportingauthority.com/Sporting_Authority/Home/Entries/2009/11/12_Underachievers.html c1b2aa1e-ae8e-4237-92f0-36b36489608c Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:40:23 -0500 <a href="http://www.sportingauthority.com/Sporting_Authority/Home/Entries/2009/11/12_Underachievers_files/JeterError.jpg"><img src="http://www.sportingauthority.com/Sporting_Authority/Home/Media/object000_1.png" style="float:left; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px; width:251px; height:189px;"/></a>It’s a generally accepted maxim in sports that to be successful, you have to beat the teams you should beat, and overachieve from time to time against teams that expect to beat you. When you lose to a league bottom-feeder, you’ve let an opportunity slip away.<br/><br/>However, even the worst teams in any league sometimes overachieve; moreover, even the best teams in any league sometimes underachieve. Even the best baseball team in history underachieved, by definition, dozens of times. Regardless of which team you think deserves that honour -- this year’s Yankees, or the Black Sox of 1919, or the Yankees of 1927, or the Big Red Machine in the mid-‘70s -- nobody has ever gone unbeaten, not even close. That means that the best team in baseball, ever, lost to a worse team forty or fifty times.<br/><br/>So if the best baseball team of all time underachieved fifty times in one season, how many times does a bad team overachieve? It’s a mirror of the same argument. The worst team of all time in a given sport never should have won a game, because every opponent they had was by definition a better team than they were. The only North American professional sports teams that didn’t overachieve even a single time in their respective season would be the expansion-era Tampa Bay Buccaneers and last year’s Detroit Lions, both of the NFL. They both went 0-fer in their regular seasons.<br/><br/>We have to believe that this argument also applies to individual sports. Federer’s got a great winning percentage, but he’s not unbeaten. He’s even lost in the opening round of tournaments before. Tiger is going to wind up with the most majors of all time, and probably the best winning percentage in major tournaments of all time as well, but that winning percentage is still not 100%; it’s currently 27% (14 out of 52 since the 1997 Masters).<br/><br/>So the next time you’re playing squash, or gin rummy, or Gears of War, and you get your behind handed to you by your wife, or your kid, or your grandpa, just remember:<br/><br/>Even Tiger underachieves 73% of the time.