Soccer Is More Exciting Than You Knew

We're always wary of studies put together by bored grad student types, but we feel obliged to comment on this, since pretty much everyone's sending it to us: A group of "researchers" for Los Alamos National Laboratory did a "scientific" study of the five major sports (they included soccer, for some reason) and concluded that soccer is the most exciting sport to watch. Yep.

First off, we congratulate these "researchers" for talking somebody into giving them money to, essentially, watch a crapload of sports. (It's not easy, trust us.) The rationale for their decision was that soccer has more "upsets" — they define an upset as "a leading team is overcome by an opponent with a worse record" — and since unpredictability, in their view, is the best indicator of how exciting a league is, that was their winner. Seriously. The rankings were soccer as the most exciting, followed by baseball, hockey, basketball and football, in that order.

There are so many problems with this study that enumerating them here would be like mocking a Jay Mohr column: So incredibly easy that it hardly seems sporting. We will say, however, that we're so freaking excited about the upcoming MLS season. We need to get our fantasy draft sheets in order.

Surprise Secret To Soccer Appeal [BBC News]