Sports debate questions

Most lists of sports debate topics are written for people who already follow the game. Who's the greatest of all time? Which era was tougher? At most tables, half the room cares a lot and the other half came for the snacks.

A stats question also has an answer somewhere, and whoever reaches for their phone first gets to it. Nothing you can look up tells you whether you're allowed to switch teams after moving. That one is about loyalty, and your friend who calls every period a quarter has opinions on loyalty too.

This sounds like a bar argument until a tax bill depends on it. The English Bridge Union runs duplicate bridge tournaments and paid VAT on the entry fees. Services linked to sport can be exempt, so it asked for the money back. The case reached the EU's top court, which ruled in October 2017 that bridge doesn't qualify, because its physical element "appears to be negligible." Logic, memory and planning didn't save it. Neither did being good for you, or being played competitively.

The court was careful about this. It said it was reading a tax law, not deciding what sport means in general. Its test still works at home, though: is the physical part more than negligible? Golf probably survives. Video games come down to whether your thumbs count.

It's the same fight as whether a hot dog is a sandwich, and that one went through a tax office too. Some words have a clear middle and a fuzzy edge. Everyone agrees a sprint is a sport. Nobody agrees on darts.

It might, if you're in the building. In a 2002 study, forty qualified soccer referees judged recorded challenges from a match. Some heard the crowd and the rest watched in silence. The ones who heard it were less sure of themselves and called 15.5% fewer fouls against the home team. That was a lab, and the crowd was in the recording. Nothing in it covers your living room. The referee still can't hear you.

Fans have a better story on the hot hand, the idea that a player who has hit a few shots is more likely to hit the next one. In 1985, three psychologists studied basketball shooting and called that belief "a powerful and widely shared cognitive illusion." In 2018, two economists found a bias in how streaks had been measured, and reported that correcting it reversed the original conclusion. The person yelling "he's on fire" spent thirty years being corrected and may have been right. They will be unbearable about this.

Read the question, count to three, and have everyone point a thumb up or down at once. Whoever is outnumbered goes first.

Give the whistle to the person who doesn't watch sports. They have no team and no grudge. They decide when a point has been made, and they call it when someone starts reciting numbers.

One stat per person, per question. If you check your phone, you lose your turn.

Halftime and commercial breaks are about the right length. Don't open the booing question right after a loss, unless you want to see what's underneath. Stick to fans. Socks and parking lots are safe, and real people's private lives aren't. The debate topics page has more for when the game comes back on.

In The Lobbyist, everyone picks a side on their own phone, in secret. Then one player is told to argue the side they didn't pick, so the person passionately defending early exits may never have left a game before the final whistle. You argue, you vote on who's faking, and the phones show who was lying. If you draw the side you hate, here's how to sell it.

The golf, board game and shotgun questions are in Fuzzy Logic, the free deck. The rest come from Armchair Referee, Coach Hollerman's guest deck. A new guest moves in every Friday, each deck is free for its week, and its questions stay on its page afterward. How to play.