I’ve been having a good conversation with Aaron Schatz, the leader of the Football Ousiders crew, about the similarities between the Indianapolis Colts and the St. Louis Cardinals. We generally don’t post football stuff on Unfiltered but, hey, it’s Super Bowl Weekend, it’s Aaron, and as you’ll see, there’s a substantial baseball tie-in here. More importantly, Aaron’s analysis makes me feel a little better about the Bears’ chances. Here’s what he has to say:
I’ve been going through tons of numbers, analyzing and breaking down the matchups for my preview of Super Bowl XLI between Chicago and Indianapolis. A lot of the trends seem to forecast an Indianapolis victory, but that victory would be a huge historical anomaly.
BP readers are familiar with the whole concept of Pythagorean wins. That concept, projecting wins simply from points/runs scored and allowed, applies across all sports. 15 of the last 17 Super Bowls have been won by a team that ranked either first or second in Pythagorean wins during the regular season.
Based on Pythagorean wins, the Colts were not a championship level team. They had a lot of close wins, particularly early in the season, and ended up with a .600 Pythagorean winning percentage (9.6 wins).
This would be the lowest of any team to ever win the Super Bowl. The Bears, on the other hand, were second this year, with 12.4 Pythagorean wins.
I’m writing and writing, and my mind keeps coming back to this, that there’s a reason teams like the Colts historically don’t win championships. And then I realized: Baseball Prospectus already went through this four months ago. The 2006 Indianapolis Colts are quite similar to the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals.
The Cardinals won the World Series with just 82 Pythagorean wins. They had the second-lowest Pythagorean winning percentage of any World Series champion in baseball history. Like the Colts, they were coming off two great seasons where they failed to go all the way. Like the Colts, they are led by a superstar who is probably one of the greatest players in his sport’s history. Like the Colts, their defense
(pitching) fell apart during the regular season, and they looked weak entering the playoffs. Like the Colts, their defense (pitching) dramatically improved during the postseason, once again making them formidable team they had been in 2004 and 2005.
The 2004 and 2005 Cardinals would have made sense as World Series champions. When the 2006 Cardinals won, it seemed strange — yet most of the important players on the roster are the same. The same goes for the Indianapolis Colts.
The 16-game NFL season, combined with a one-and-done postseason, opens the door to more random chance than a 162-game baseball season followed by three postseason series of multiple games. In the NFL, there’s a greater chance that the objectively “best” team will not end the season as the champion. And yet, even in baseball, a team that was essentially .500 over six long months ended up with the trophy. In the NFL, we talk about Any Given Sunday, but Any Given October is really no different.
The official BP Playoff Prospectus articles chose the Padres, the Mets, and the Tigers to all beat the Cardinals. Three weeks ago, I picked the Ravens to beat the Colts. Does this mean that statistical analysis in sports doesn’t work? No, just that we work in probabilities, not definites, and that’s as true during a 19-game postseason as it is during a four-game postseason. If that element of chance wasn’t there, sports wouldn’t be any fun.
Think about it if you’re a baseball fan looking for an angle on the Super Bowl — especially if you’re a St. Louis Cardinals fan looking for a rooting interest.
You can find Aaron’s full Super Bowl preview over here.
You’re probably wondering about my prediction for the Super Bowl. Actually, you could probably care less. But I’ll give you one anyway: Colts 24, Bears 19. I see a fairly sloppily played game with a lot of turnovers and field goals.
By the way, while it’s always fun to be a city whose team is in the midst of a championship drive, football can’t quite compare to baseball in this regard, simply because in the baseball playoffs, you have a game played nearly every day. People are very, very, very, very excited about the Bears here in Chicago; you see Bears stuff everywhere you turn. But there’s not quite the same mindset that there was for the White Sox‘ run to the championship in 2005, or the Cubs‘ aborted one in 2003, because having a game played every Sunday doesn’t require people to alter their plans in the same way. It’s still great, but it’s very different. The Super Bowl’s like the anticipation you felt leading up to Christmas when you were a kid. The World Series is like the first week of summer break.
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