On the Extra End Thing

Whether you want to admit it or not, it's a problem.

We’ve gotten too good. Well, you and I probably haven’t. But the reality is that elite-level curlers have gotten too good for the traditional extra end. A combination of equipment, sweeping knowledge, and near-perfect ice (most of the time) have gotten us in a situation where the extra end with the last team to score not having hammer just doesn’t work anymore. I took a poll on Twitter a night or so ago, and wasn’t surprised to see this result:

Look, I get it. We hate change. And curling, for all intents and purposes, has undergone a LOT of change in the 21st Century. We’ve gone from you can hit guards to you can’t hit guards until the third rock to you can’t hit guards until the fourth rock to the fifth rock to you can’t even move a guard out of the way. The aforementioned sweeping. The time clocks. The list goes on and on. But how do you not change the extra end? It’s 100% broken, at least at the top level of the game.

Right now, at that top level, the team without hammer has somewhere between a 5-10% chance depending on ice conditions/gender/miscellaneous factors. That…well, that sucks. Imagine a world where hockey has 3-on-3 overtime, but the team who tied the game up with 5 seconds to go has to play the first 60 seconds of overtime with two guys in the penalty box. Imagine baseball’s extra innings, but the home team is the only one that gets to start a runner on second base. And they get to do it every inning. Here are some reasons I’ve heard to keep extra ends:

1. “You’ve already played 8 or 10 ends, if you end up without the hammer in the extra end, it’s your fault.” Uhh…what? If a football team loses in overtime, unless there was some glaring mistake, most of the time you don’t say, “well, you know, if you just hadn’t tied the damn team in the first place!” In theory, a perfectly played curling game results in 10 scores of 1 point and the team who started the game with the hammer gets it in the extra end. Plus, lots of things can happen in a game. The fact it ends up tied shouldn’t be either team’s “fault”.

2. “It’s just the way we’ve always done it, baby!” Baseball, a sport that once prided itself on being slow, almost as if that was the POINT of the game, is about to put pitchers on a clock. We don’t always have to look at other sports, but if you haven’t noticed, all of them have had MAJOR changes in the last 25 years. Hockey eliminated the two-line pass, touch icing, added the puck over the glass rule, added the skate in the crease rule (then removed it), etc. Baseball juiced and unjuiced the balls, forced pitchers into hand checks, banned the shift, added modified extra inning rules, added pitch clocks. Football became much stricter on roughing the passer, added head-contact penalties, and let Nickelodeon put slime in the end zone. Soccer, a game whose whole deal is that it’s simple and anyone can play it anywhere at any time, added video review. (thank god curling doesn’t need VAR). Doing something because it’s the way we’re used to doing it has never been an effective solution to anything.

3. “But all the solutions are gimmicks!” We’re about to get into the solutions in a minute, but in case you haven’t noticed: the whole world is a gimmick. Everything is made up, nothing matters. It’s time to lay back, take a sip of Pepsi, and let the gimmicks wash over you like a warm tide. Sports don’t mean anything. They’ve always been designed to entertain, it’s just that it was less blatant in a world where you had to wait for the morning paper to get your news and curlers could smoke on the ice. Now that we have all the information, it seems that some people want to trade in purity rather than in entertainment. There’s no such thing as purity. No form of a sport is more pure than any other one. The athletes of curling have taken your purity and showed you that it’s worth about two guards, massaged to the side boards. The only thing that makes a sport pure, in my view, is the test of wills it presents to us as human beings. We watch sports because a) we know we can’t do the things the people we are watching are doing and b) we want it to be as hard as possible for them to do it. Extra ends aren’t hard anymore. They just aren’t. We’ve defeated that challenge. It’s time to sweat.

So how do we go about finding that sweat? We’ve been presented with a few options:

1. Ban ticks, in the extra or otherwise. Well now. Look at this. A solution designed to keep those purists happy with just a little, oooh, a little modern spin. But much like the Pepsi Twist, this just isn’t enough. Your little fake lemon essence is no substitute for the real thing. Because yes, it is the ticks contributing to the paltry winning percentage for the team without hammer, but we’re still way too good at the game for this to make enough of a difference for me to care. You been seeing how good seconds are now? You’re all out here complaining that blank ends are too easy and we have too many of them. You know what is also easy? Instead of blanking, playing the end like it’s a blank, but then hitting or drawing for one at the end. Next.

2. Draw to the Button. Ok, look. When the WCF first put this idea forward last year, I was with those old purists. I lost my mind. YOU’RE PUTTING THE GAME ON THE LINE WITH A DRAW??? But then…Colton Flasch and Karsten Sturmay had to draw to the button and my blood pressure skyrocketed. As a former player who played in enough televised games (like 5), knowing that tension also got ratcheted up when I realized how nuts it would’ve been to make the two teams sit there for a COMMERCIAL BREAK before they threw was novel and amazing to witness. But in talking to some players, the ice is a problem here. One side of the ice can always be better than another side, and we saw teams exploit that to their advantage in a massive way this weekend. It may not always be that lopsided, but seeing literally 3 of the 4 skips who were forced to draw the button miss the house short…well that’s not entertainment either. If PointsBet keeps rolling this event and they wanna keep the draw to the B for it (because let’s face it, the “Sweep16” is also pretty gimmicky (but fun…can I do two brackets? Why not. It was fun and I liked it) to start with), then sure. But if this shows up at the Brier or Worlds, I’m throwing my birthday cake. Pass. Oh, and I’m taking a bonus pass (a Buy One Get One Free, if you will) on more draws to the button. Two players throw, everyone throws, blah blah. No. *waves hand dismissively*

3. Two Extra Ends. Let’s make every game 8 ends, and then play two extra ends, each team gets the hammer once. This is one of those ideas that immediately sounds good and then after about 5 seconds you go…wait. What if they’re tied again (which logic and analytics would dictate there’s a very good chance they would be). What do we do then? An 11th End? A draw to the button? We could’ve skipped this all anyway. Plus, the reason we’d switch to 8 ends is for television and to make the games shorter. Ensuring every tie goes to 10 ends is not a recipe for either. Nah.

4. The 0.5 Theory. I’m not sure who came up with this idea, but it follows as such: if you win the pre-game draw to the button, you’ve got two options: start with the hammer, or start with a half-point lead. “A HALF POINT??” you’ll say. Yeah. A half-point. It starts a game-long chase to be the leader immediately. No extra ends. Might even minimize the number of blanks as scoreboard management completely shifts because one team will always be leading. We’ve always talked about the skins game being one of the more exciting formats we have because it forces a team to steal or score 2 to win a skin. Just imagine a 10th end to win the Brier and a team needs to score 2 to win or THEY LOSE. No “oh, well even if we miss this shot we might get one and the tie”. Nope. It’s all out, balls out for 2. I love it. It gets me excited just typing it out. Now, the major argument against this is that it’s tough to explain. Sports don’t really have a half-point (though tennis does have that weird love system and we just all kinda got used to that) and curling is already hard enough to explain as it is. But you know what I say? Good things should be hard (yeah I said it) and if you don’t wanna take the time to learn the nuances of our great sport, you don’t deserve it. Half-point, have mercy. Who do I have to talk to?

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