February 3, 2013
MarkBernstein.org
 

Super?

Years ago, I was quite interested in whether or not the better football team consistently won games that matter.

In baseball, an inferior major league team will often beat a superior team. Even the very best team would be expected to lost about a third of its games to the very worst. That’s why you need to have 162 games in the season, and a 7-game series, to have any reasonable hope of establishing who deserves to win.

Football isn’t like that; in football, I think most people believe that a very good team will almost always defeat a bad one. But the playoffs are giving us reason to doubt.

This is a long-term threat to football; if the games are mostly going to be decided by lucky breaks and the referees, it’s harder to care. (I think everyone would agree that the refs could have given the game to SF if they were so inclined.) This year’s Super Bowl was filled with defensive ads (“We’re doing research to make the sport safe for your kids!” “We’re not sexist anymore!”), but none of this will matter if the games don’t.