Legal Commentary

Super Bowl XLII - The 42nd - Who will Win?

By Andis Kaulins

On paper and in the oddsmakers eyes (the Patriots are currently 12-point favorites), the 42nd Super Bowl game is no contest, matching the 16-0 unbeaten AFC champion New England Patriots against the 10-6 wild card New York Giants, who did not even win their own NFC division but advanced to this final in the NFC playoffs by beating 13-3 Dallas and 13-3 Green Bay (in OT), the two best regular-season NFC teams by record.

Nevertheless, a regular season game between New England and New York advises us to caution. In that game on the Giants home field, the Giants led 28-16 in the 3rd quarter and blew the game in the last period to lose 38-35. What is unusual in that game is that the Patriots, the most offensive team in pro football by a wide margin this season, were actually the offensive underdogs in terms of a comparison of the net average yards per play advantage (NAYPPA), with the Giants leading that game 6.1 to 5.7.

As we have demonstrated for college football in our SPRS Top 250 as calculated by the SPRS football rating/ranking system, NAYPPA gives us a great tool for judging the actual relative dominance of two football teams. In spite of their six losses, the Giants are much closer to the level of the Patriots than the season records would indicate.

In the instant case, we think that the point spread here is too much in favor of the Patriots and find 12 points to be clearly unjustified by an examination of the stats. Since we do have someone in the family who went to the same high school (Waterloo, New York) as Tom Coughlin, the New York Giants head coach, and since we have someone else in the family who went to the same college (Syracuse) as he did, and since they will no doubt be rooting for the Giants, our prognostication view might also be subjective subconscious bias, so it too should be taken with a grain of salt, but here goes....

Although we would love to see the Giants pull off a Cinderalla victory, we really think that the Patriots have had such a tremendously remarkable season that they deserve this Super Bowl, and so we call it for the Patriots by a field goal, 42-39.

Full post as published by LawPundit on February 01, 2008 (boomark / email).