Granularity in game design

I think Granularity is a concept that you can apply to several aspects of a game or a design. I think in general Granularity is how fine or coarse an aspect is represented in a game.

Granularity comes to mind with wargames and army type games. A very finely grained game might have individual uints moving and attacking and getting hit, while a more coarsely grained game just looks at the pawns as entire brigades.

If you have a context you are trying to understand it, that might help in giving answers.

OK, I'll give it a shot. Of course, not being from the US, this wouldn't be my preferred selection of sports... :-) Also please note that I am overgeneralising deliberately.

-Soccer (games are often decided on a single goal, which doesn't necessarily reflect the actual play of the game.)
-Basketball (one type of score but a system that is well designed to keep the scores level so that the result can be down to luck.)
-Baseball (single points are usually scored at a time, but don't necessarily reflect the work that goes into scoring them)
-Football (two types of scoring. IIRC one is half of the other to try and indicate their relative difficulties - yes, I know there's a bonus point too, but that's irrelevant in this case. The very structured possession system makes it surprisingly like Basketball.)
-Tennis (each game consists of at least four points but you have to win by a clear two which means that you have to have demonstrated your superiority.)

The scoring systems should indicate which team/player did best, but there also needs to be room for good luck and quirks of circumstance. However, a system in which someone wins purely due to a quirk of circumstance is usually bad. This is why larger team tournaments are typically played in a group "all-play-all" model before knockout stages are reached. Tennis is an exception to this, but the individual sets within matches could be considered "group" games...
Thank you for inspiring such an interesting tangent. I shall probably find myself thinking about this all day and then come back and edit everything I have written ;-)