Modified 9 February 2011
I am embarrassed to say that I finished 4-7 for the 2011 playoffs and have now lost the past 4 Super Bowls against the point spread. Combining both regular season and playoffs, I finished even-steven at 130-130-7 for the 2010-11 NFL season.
Sports fans like groundhogs have another 6 weeks to hibernate. Then, tune in for my March madness picks when I also match wits against Baracketer-in-Chief Obama.
To see why I picked Pittsburgh to win the Super Bowl, check out Freakonomics author Professor Steven Levitt's case for picking the Super Bowl underdog every year because Super Sunday bettors are less sophisticated than regular season punters and overvalue overdogs even more than regular season bettors.
www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05sbgamble_92_94_.html
Through 45 Super Bowls to date, underdogs are 21-22-2. Based on Professor Levitt's analysis, I would expect to see underdogs win on points in 54% of Super Bowls over a statistically significant sample of 1,000 Super Bowls or so. We will not live long enough to find out if Professor Levitt is correct. But, it is interesting to keep track of Super Bowl data as the years go by.
Part-time NFL analyst and full-time public policy pundit Gregg Easterbrook http://search.espn.go.com/gregg-easterbrook/ recommended taking all home teams in the quarter-final round of the NFL playoffs based on the 73% winning record straight-up of home teams in the quarter-final round over the full history of NFL playoffs in this format going back to 1990. ESPN blowhard John Kincade calls this advice lazy based on the last several years with home teams only winning 50%. 2-2 this year is too small a sample size to say who is correct on a consistent, long-term basis. We won't know for sure until 1,000 games have been played over the next 200+ years. But, this year Kincaid called it better than Easterbrook.
Condolences to long-suffering Jet fan and former Godiva toy boy Reginald who remains unlucky in all his love affairs -- with football and the ladies.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
