Stuck in Limbo: The Great Debate on Meaninglessness

• #MNMF •

Every year, across all sports, there are a select few teams that people actually care about. But what about the rest?

I’m sure most can relate. After months of fantasizing, you and your pops finally get those tickets to that mid-season game. It may not be the most meaningful, but hey, it’s your favorite team and it’s what you can afford. You giddily drive down to the stadium on a crisp afternoon, you take in the atmosphere of the excitement-filled stadium.

While the lights beat down on grown men in a glorified wrestling match, you’re content with what you’ve witnessed so far. After it’s finally over, you, now satisfied with your experience, retreat to your late-night homestead to finally rest as the mythical-seeming professional athletes roam your dreams.

Looking back, however, despite the excitement you endured watching live, just how meaningful was that game? Assuming you’re just a middle-class fan of an average team, the answer should be not at all. Sure, you’ll that experience for a great while, but to the rest of the world, it’s a mere statistic in an archive of thousands of them.

It’s a bit surreal, isn’t it? Realizing that despite how fondly you look back on that memory, to most others it’ll just be another set of numbers on Pro-Football-Reference.

This is our topic of discussion in today’s blog: what’s the meaning in meaningless games?

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Firstly, we must establish what has meaning and what doesn’t in sports. After all, if there wasn’t a difference, sports wouldn’t be exciting, would they? More on that later.

One could argue that everything in sports an utterly meaningless. When you oversimplify things, sports all just boil down to adults throwing balls very hard at other adults, moving balls to certain points of significance in a specific way, or throwing balls up and hoping they land where you want them to.

Sure, when you explain it like that, sports do seem extremely meaningless, don’t they? The thing is, when anyone explains sports in that particular way, they’re using something called a logical fallacy, particularly the straw man technique. If you’re not familiar with what this is, it’s basically when you oversimplify someone else’s argument in order to benefit your own.

You see, sports aren’t just throwing balls and moving things around. Sports are so much more. Sports are a type of entertainment the unite people together, and allow us to witness something we’ve enacted before, just not as well. They stimulate one of our basic human needs, the need for competition, in a world that neutralizes that by the minute.

Sports provide breathtaking storylines that are forever ongoing, with plot twists that can never be expected. Overall, sports are the perfect storm of entertainment for those that enjoy them. So yes, Susan, sports do have great meaning, despite how odd they may seem without context.

With that rant out of the way, it’s time that we separate meaninglessness from that of meaning. To do this, we must understand two things: what the end goal of sports is and what fans find interesting.

For starters, I think it’s safe to say that the end goal of all sports leagues is to come in first place. In the case of football, that would be to win the Super Bowl. So, I feel that to have a meaningful game in the latter half of the season, you must be in contention to win the championship. In most sports, this would mean to be in playoff contention.

In the early areas of the season, things seem to get a bit more tricky, however, because no teams have clinched or been eliminated from the playoffs. At that point, to have meaning, your team must host some sort of storyline. Whether that be a very talented player that you recently acquired play on your team or the fact that your team nearly one the championship in years prior.

These games have meaning because many fans are interested in them. People like excitement, that’s what interests them. To fans, it’s exciting to see these storylines and watch games with playoff weight.

There is one exception to this though, and that’s teams that are extremely bad. These teams have meaning because they’ll receive great draft picks, ultimately hinting at a great future. This speculation is ultimately a great storyline, and that’s why they’re an outlier.

All in all, that is what defines meaningfulness in sports. Now that we have this understanding, we can start to assess what meaningless games are, and why they even exist.

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It’s now the section of the blog where I channel my inner Booger McFarland and point out the obvious to help the flow of the blog; games that don’t have meaning are classified as meaningless games. Thanks, Booger! The fact of the matter is, if meaningless games had absolutely no purpose, they wouldn’t even be played. That begs the question - what’s the point then?

After a bit of brainstorming and research, I think I’ve developed two reasons why mediocre teams that no one cares about playing games that no one watches are actually very important, and what I’ve come up with may surprise you. In fact, I believe that they’re so important, sports wouldn’t be nearly as exhilarating as they are without them. Let me elaborate.

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𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐀 - 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞

For this explanation, I’d like to refer back to the introduction of this writing. There, I tried to create a relatable experience - one of an average fan of an average team going to a live game.

Yes, on paper that game will go down as what it is - meaningless. However, to those who experienced it, it will be a lifelong memory. You see, not everyone can afford to go to extremely meaningful games like the NFC Championship or a playoff decider. Plus, if you’re unlucky, your team won’t even make it there.

In that situation, the only way you can see a game live, which is an experience every football fan should go through, is to go to a meaningless game. Because nobody cares, the tickets will be cheap and the arena won’t be batshit insane, but you’ll still get to enjoy the exhilarating experience that is live, in-person sports.

Without meaningless games, only a select few would get to enjoy that experience. Thankfully, it isn’t that way.

Now, this is only my first reason why meaninglessness is important. In retrospect, this is the far more minor reason, too. I do still believe that it is important, but compared to reason B, this is the far less important side.

𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐁 - 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞.

I want you to think for a moment. Imagine a world of sports where no team is better than the other, and every game is meaningful. Sounds perfect, right? Upon further examination, however, you’d notice that there’d be something off about it.

I’d like to cite a quote from “The Incredibles”. When the villain of the story, Syndrome, is in his classic “I’m the villain and I have the protagonists trapped, so I will explain to them my entire plan” speech, he says “And when I’m old and I have my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so then everyone can be super. And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”

This quote essentially points out the fact that when everything is ‘good’ it makes everything the same, ultimately nullifying the word and making everything ‘just average’.

We can apply this to sports by realizing that if every game/team had meaning, none would. No games/teams would stand out, ultimately making nothing interesting and never allowing anything to achieve greatness.

The fact that we have mediocrity makes sports beautiful. They create the norm for what’s ‘average’ and act as a benchmark for us to realize what’s amazing and what isn’t. Mediocre things are the basis of every ‘good/not good, better/not better’ argument, and ultimately keep the sports world fresh.

What I’m trying to say here is that meaninglessness allows us to tell the difference between what’s meaningful and what isn’t. It gives us the chance to appreciate things. It also creates diversity and skill gaps between teams and players, serving as the foundation for underdog stories and rebuilds.

Not only that, but it allows us to decide for ourselves what we like and enjoy by creating depth among sports. That is truly the reason on why meaninglessness is so much more meaningful than meets the eye.

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Hopefully now we can realize and appreciate mediocre teams. Sure, they may miss out on being seen on ESPN, but they reserve a much more important position even if it may go unnoticed. So next time you’re at a game that has no surface meaning, just think about what those type of moments due for sports, and maybe you’ll enjoy it just a little bit more.