Super Bowl Hype Drive: Prediction Aggregation

Back in grade school, I used to poll my friends the week before the Super Bowl, asking who they thought would win. (Okay, fine: In order to get a better sample size, I asked the people who weren't my friends, too.) And they performed well considering the sample: off the top of my head, they correctly called the two of the three games I polled them on.

You may remember that, last March, I collected a few dozen brackets and graded them during the NCAA basketball tournament. Most of the brackets predicted that Kentucky would eventually win the championship, which they did. How accurate would a crowdsourced Super Bowl prediction be?

Super Bowl Hype Drive: New Orleans' Bad Mojo

This year marks the Super Bowl's return to New Orleans for the first time since 2002, when the Patriots upset the Rams on a last-second Adam Vinatieri field goal. But the Superdome has a reputation for hosting blowouts, even given the fact that many Super Bowls are one-sided affairs. Is this reputation deserved?

Super Bowl Hype Drive: Room for Squares

The run-up to the Super Bowl leads to a lot of great traditions -- parades! weird bloggers at media day! the disfiguration of millions of chickens! -- but high among these is the office squares pool. You've probably seen them; they look something like this:

You sign your name to a square, and once all the squares are filled, someone picks row and column values. Say you end up with the square (3, 1). That means that, at the end of any of the four quarters*, you win money if the score is X3-Y1 -- e.g., 21-13, 31-3, 41-33, etc.

* - Actually, the fourth quarter one usually includes overtime periods too, so if you had Ravens 8, Broncos 5 as a square in the AFC divisional playoff game, you would've won once Justin Tucker made that kick in the second overtime.

Obviously, the odds of every combination aren't equal, and you know intuitively that multiples of 7 or 3 are more likely to come up. Wouldn't it be nice to know what your odds of winning were compared to someone who drew, say, 7-7?

To determine the odds, I used Pro Football Reference's Score Index to find the score by quarters of all playoff games dating back to the 1994-5 season, when the NFL added the two-point conversion. This gives you a 20-year sample that (with this season included) encompasses 208 total games. Here are the total number of times each combination of numbers has occurred.

	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
0	62	16	6	66	65	6	25	112	7	7
1		5	3	13	20	6	7	27	10	3
2			0	3	4	1	4	9	3	1
3				19	35	3	11	64	6	8
4					20	8	9	43	9	11
5						1	1	7	3	1
6							1	14	2	3
7								41	9	6
8									2	3
9										1

Divide by the total number of quarters of football played (832), and you get percentages:

	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
0	7.5%	1.9%	0.7%	7.9%	7.8%	0.7%	3.0%	13.5%	0.8%	0.8%
1		0.6%	0.4%	1.6%	2.4%	0.7%	0.8%	3.2%	1.2%	0.4%
2			0%	0.4%	0.5%	0.1%	0.5%	1.1%	0.4%	0.1%
3				2.3%	4.2%	0.4%	1.3%	7.7%	0.7%	1.0%
4					2.4%	1.0%	1.1%	5.2%	1.1%	1.3%
5						0.1%	0.1%	0.8%	0.4%	0.1%
6							0.1%	1.7%	0.2%	0.4%
7								4.9%	1.1%	0.7%
8									0.2%	0.4%
9										0.1%

So, from the looks of things, (7, 0) is the best combination to get, right?

Not so fast. These numbers include ALL scores, both X0-Y7 and X7-Y0. In typical versions of this game, you only get one of the two squares. How can you determine which of those are more likely to occur? You can't really use home/away, since the playoffs include the neutral-site Super Bowl, and the home/away designation isn't meaningful for those games*. So let's just split it down the middle: if you have (7, 0) and someone else has (0, 7), 50% of the time you'll be on the right side of the pairing and 50% of the time you'll be on the wrong side.

* - Unless you really, REALLY like coin flips.

If you have (0, 0) -- or any of the other pairs along the diagonal -- you're in luck; there's no one else to split the odds with. That means that, overall, your best bet is that (0, 0) square, and THEN one of the (0, 7) or (7, 0) squares. The top five, by percentage:

Square	Pct
0,0	7.5%
0,7	6.7%
7,7	4.9%
0,3	4.0%
0,4	3.9%

The bottom five, of course, remains the same, with (2, 2) as the kiss of death with zero occurences.

Good luck, everyone. I for one will be rooting hard for a 42-12 final.

Super Bowl Hype Drive: Naming Wrongs

I'm only going to write this once: it's the Super Bowl, not the Superbowl. It is a bowl that is super. The name was ripped off from the Super Ball, a popular 60s children's toy (which seems ironic given how touchy the NFL is about Super Bowl-related copyright infringement). You'd expect this to be related to the rise of Twitter hashtags, but the pandemic predates the Fail Whale (which, incidentally, is never called the "Failwhale").

I don't get it. No one talks about the "Rosebowl" or the "Worldseries" or the "USOpen" or "Daytona500". Last year's game didn't feature the "Newengland Patriots" and "Newyork Giants". This year's game isn't in "Neworleans". The winner doesn't get the "Vincelombarditrophy".

So please, guys, it's two words, both capitalized. From now on, let's only use "Superbowl" if we're referring to Clark Kent's dishware (shipped with him from Krypton, of course, and able to serve heavy gravies in a single bound), or maybe a really excellent bird of prey.

...a superb owl? Anyone? No?

All right, fine.

Thinking Out Loud: Replacement Referees and Home-Field Advantage

Home-field advantage, like the Cubs' curse and the substandard jumping abilities of Caucasians, is one of those sports truisms that has been accepted for decades as a given. The 2011 book Scorecasting investigated this phenomenon and ventured to explain why home-field advantage still existed in the era of free agency, chartered jets, and five-star hotels. Consider this slideshow, taken from the presentation given by the authors at the 2011 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:

The Real Reasons Behind the Home Field Advantage from Sloan Sports Conference

Unsexy and I Know It

Bryan returns with his entry in the Grantland Fantasy Island competition. It didn't get picked, but it might just help you in your upcoming fantasy draft. Go nuts.

Nothing I write here will win your fantasy football league for you, because leagues aren’t won on draft day.

No, leagues are won with midseason pickups, by making sure you know the instant that rookie running back wins the starting job. And when his last-minute touchdown seals victory over your roommate, you sleep with one eye open and a frying pan in hand, just in case.

But at least you won.

Of Course It's About the Money

When announcing the decision to release longtime franchise quarterback Peyton Manning yesterday, Colts owner Jim Irsay insisted the decision was not motivated by money. "In the end, before we ever go into any specifics, it's never been about money. It's never been about those tpe of things," he said.

I didn't see the press conference, but it seems he said this with a straight face.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, Peyton Manning's contract stipulated that the Colts owed him and his laser rocket arm $28 million if he were on the roster on March 8th. We are led to believe, then, that through some epic, earth-shattering coincidence, Manning was released March 7th.

Why lie about it? From a business perspective, the decision is reasonable, and the reasons for it were referenced time and time again in Manning's farewell press conference. Manning has had countless* procedures on his neck in the last year, and may never throw another pass in the NFL. Even if he completes his rehab procedures and suits up once again, the man has been in the league since 1998. Years upon years of vicious hits** take their toll after awhile. At this stage in his career, the great Peyton Manning is morphing into that 1995 Subaru wagon you had in college: no matter how many things you fix, the next breakdown is right around the corner.

The Irsay family is of course infamous for unpopular business decisions compounded by abysmal public relations, but Manning deserves a more honest send-off. With such transparent financial motivations, why not tell the truth? Why not say, "As much as we appreciate everything Peyton Manning has done for the Colts and the city of Indianapolis, this football team is at heart a business with the goal of winning football games. And it makes no sense from that perspective to pay eight figures to a 36 year old*** with a debilitating neck injury who may never throw another pass.

"It's not personal; it's strictly business."
______

*-countless (n): a number I can't be bothered to look up
**-Not including those leveled by bounty hunters.
***-Ok, 35 and 11 months.