OK, hands up everybody who knows the relegation system of Barclay’s Premier League. Nobody? No worries I gotcha covered. As the Associated Press reports (and I got this from Sports Illustrated btw):
Newcastle and Middlesbrough were relegated from the Premier League on Sunday, while Hull and Sunderland stayed up.
Newcastle lost 1-0 at Aston Villa and Middlesbrough was beaten 2-1 at West Ham to finish in the last three teams on the final day of the league season.
Hull lost 1-0 to newly crowned champion Manchester United and Sunderland went down 3-2 at home to third-place Chelsea.
Last-place West Bromwich Albion was already certain to go down and drew 0-0 at Blackburn.
If this will insult your intelligence as a “football” fan, then feel free to skip to the next paragraph. Let me quickly go through the idea of relegation: The 3 bottom-placed teams at the end of each season of the Premier League are busted down to what amounts to kind of a minor league system. The 3 top teams from that league take the place of the losers from the Premier League. Thus, the bottom of the roster in the Premier League changes quite a bit from season to season.
So let me propose an idea here. Relegation is something that basically doesn’t exist here stateside. But I think there’s an argument to be made that it could be advantageous to install something like that in some of the more inflated sports leagues we have. Continue reading »
