Sport Fallacy That Will Never End

In the world of sports, there will always be fallacies that pertain directly to players or teams. A fallacy is a mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound arguments. Logistically speaking it’s a failure in reasoning which renders an argument invalid. I am here to shed light on one of the greatest fallacies to be known in the sports world that states that a player can’t be considered truly great until they’ve won a championship. This was one of the most popular arguments that both sports fanatics and teams made when the subject of a player being great was brought up. A prime example is ex NFL star Barry Sanders who never won a championship.

First of all, there is the issue that individual greatness can’t really be measured in terms of a team accomplishment. However, Barry Sanders proved otherwise, leaving behind remarkable stats during his football career. Although Barry Sanders never accomplished his goal of winning a championship. Barry Sanders had many career achievements in his short time in the NFL, Which has made him an overachiever all around. For example, in 1988, he won the Heisman Trophy Award for best player in the nation. This is a very hard award to get as you must be one of the top athletes in a selective pool of thousands of other players. A year after that in 1989, he led the NFC in rushing yards and was named Rookie of the Year. In 1992, he became the Lions' all-time leading rusher. Two years before leaving the NFL, in 1996, Barry Sanders became the first player in NFL history to rush for over 1,000 yards in his first eight seasons and this led him to win the NFL rushing title and be selected to the Pro Bowl for the eighth time.

Secondly, I find this fallacy to be very hypocritical. I've seen it happen many times where sports fans call out a certain player or team and not being great but when their time came and they won a championship, those fans' perspectives changed. My reasoning behind this is that many people will call out players saying they are not great but the only reason they say this is because their perspective is based more on a team setting as it should be. This reason should not taint the greatness of individual players who always look to become great. One person can’t make the whole team and this ties in to a renowned sport saying, “there's no I in team.” In addition, an important moral reasoning that seems to be thrown out during these arguments is teamwork. To win championships, it has to be a team effort, and just because one player who has incredible stats and has won many awards like Barry Sanders but yet lacks a ring does not mean he was not one of the greatest players as very few players can achieve what Barry Sanders did in such a short career.

To conclude, sports fallacies will only continue to grow and I believe there's no real way to stop them as different ideologies will always be brought forward. Sports fanatics and teams will always apply their own morals when arguments like these arise. As we move on with sports, we the sports community should normalize bringing up stats of certain players when fallacies like these are brought up as they will be the best thing to serve to fans and teams when making false arguments.