I had a drink a few months ago with a friend who was a stalwart in the club game back in the 1990’s. I asked him what he thought of the club game today compared to a few decades ago. First, he said no one plays defense any more. Ok fair enough. He’d fit right in with Shaq and Barkley on a TNT half time show.

Second, he said that games are too short today. Back in his early days, they played games to 19 and 21 and every point was played uphill and upwind. While those days are a distant memory, it got me thinking about how many games at Nationals even make it to 15 any more. I’ve played at Club Nationals or followed as a spectator back to 2009. It seems that more and more games end with a winning score of 14, 13, or an even lower score. So I decided to dig into the numbers.

Background

USA Ultimate made some major changes to the Club Nationals format starting in 2013. While a lot of attention, and rightfully so, was placed on the format of power pools versus a 16-team bracket, another big change was reducing round times to just 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Data

I looked at round times at Nationals by year back to 2004. To the best of my knowledge and research, here is what I found.

2004–2010: 2 hour rounds

2011–2012: 2h 20min rounds

2013–2016: 1h 45min rounds

Next, I looked at the breakdown of winning scores by year at Nationals. Data are from the USAU website and Score Reporter. Note that I did not include any consolation games. Only pool play games, power pool, lower pool, and championship bracket games were considered.