After watching the final games of the Champions League group stage on Wednesday, I remarked to a friend that I was excited for the knockout stage draw on Monday (3 PM on Fox Sports 1, WATCH IT).

Then, I realized how excited I was to watch the group stage draw just a couple of months ago online. I also thought of the hysteria surrounding last Friday's World Cup draw on ESPN2, my girlfriend's glee at watching the BCS Selection Show on Sunday (even though the matchups were already set in stone), and the yearly excitement over the NCAA Tournament field being revealed. People even obsessively watch the NBA Draft lottery, which is nothing but dramatically revealing the predetermined order of the top 14 picks. What's the obsession sports fans have with selection shows?

In most professional sports, the matchups are based on record, and you can figure out who is playing who and what the bracket looks like just by looking at the standings. But in college sports and soccer, it's different. We can project what the BCS standings will look like (well, we can't anymore since the BCS is dead in a month), but there's always the chance of a bowl going rogue, bucking the trend, and picking a different higher ranked team for an at-large spot than another potentially more worthy team. The NCAA Tournament is a crap shoot. We know which teams will be involved (to an extent), but we're clueless as to what the bracket will look like until it's slowly revealed, line by line.

In soccer, things are much different. After the teams are divided into pots based on ranking or association, the draw is almost completely random. As teams continue to get drawn and the groups get filled out, the tension grows if your team isn't on the board. The reaction of utter anguish from ESPN's crew seeing the USA drawn into Group G was echoed on social media, and it was refreshing to see commentators act like diehard fans – all because of a random draw that no one had any control over.

And the American sports fan continues to love the selection. The World Cup draw, which took place at 11:30 AM on a Friday morning in December, drew 489,000 viewers – that's nearly as many viewers as the MLS Cup, which aired at 4 PM on a Saturday afternoon (albeit against the SEC Championship game). The draw was the most-watched draw *ever* on ESPN, topping the previous high in 1993 by 34%.

This is a trend that isn't going away any time soon. In January, NFL Network is airing a three-hour live broadcast of the Pro Bowl draft. And even though the Pro Bowl is a joke, that telecast is probably going to draw at least one million viewers. And it's tough to shoehorn these types of programs into sports where they're not already built in. Barring a massive change to the All-Star Game (which would probably cause fan revolts), there's really no way that MLB can match the tension of a random draw. Not enough Americans care about the NHL to make their Draft lottery an event in the States.

The uniqueness of soccer and the NCAA (as it exists in its current form, at least) gives both entities a built-in advantage over the majority of American pro sports. If the NCAA expanded college football's playoff past four teams, the tension involved with the seeding and selection of the teams could be on par with the NCAA basketball tournament each year. But that's probably not going to happen for awhile, and the tension of the random draw will really be limited to whether or not a bowl breaks with conventional thought. So for now, the best options are still soccer and the NCAA Tournament – it could be worse, I guess.

About Joe Lucia

I hate your favorite team. I also sort of hate most of my favorite teams.