Super Bowl Prediction

Seahawks 31, Broncos 17

At the beginning of the year, I would not have expected to be picking against Denver. They were playing as well as any football team ever, and it didn't look like anyone would come close. But due to the nonlinear nature of my metric, their ranking was based on a value that could come down pretty fast. And it did. Not out of the top few teams in the league, mind you, but when there's a cubic term, there can be a big difference between first by a lot and first by a little. And half way through the season, the Seahawks pulled ahead. And never looked back. They snuck into the number one spot defensively only in the last week of the season. But what went unnoticed to the mainstream was their offense. They may not have piled up a lot of yards, which happens when you run the ball a lot. But still, only seven teams managed to score more points. In fact, a lot of fans would be shocked to learn that neither the Saints nor the Chargers were able to score as much as the offenseless Seahawks. And those teams didn't have to face the Cardinals and 49ers twice. The Seahawks have the skill to dominate on offense as much as any team sitting at home. When they open up the passing game, they're lethal. And they will. Darrell Bevell finally showed a willingness to make non-horrendous decisions during the conference championship game. Against a defense that has Terrance Knighton in the middle, he'd be hard pressed not to do it again. And exploiting this mismatch is going to be the big difference in the game. The Seahawks are actually the team with the practically unstoppable offense. Bevell was the only thing stopping them all season.

As we can see with my rankings, the Seahawks are the much better team. The gap between them and the Broncos was almost twice the gap between the league's third place team, the Patriots, and its last place team, the Texans (ok, that's more of a function of the luck (or lack thereof) for the Pats and Texans, but the Seahawks are clearly superior to Denver).

...

But something's being overlooked. Injuries. And the fact is, the Seahawks are a much healthier team. I want to talk about two players specifically. To do this, I'll take us back to a time when we could see both of them playing healthy for an extended period of time. Specifically, midway through the 2012 season. Let's go.

So it's the start of November now, and we're trying to decide on the ten best players in the league. The Broncos aren't very far into that 11 game winning streak, but Peyton still makes it. We realize he's back. Adrian Peterson has been good, but his first half just isn't at MVP level yet. But it turns out we're lying to ourselves, because the top two MVP candidates in the future aren't the two best players right now. In fact, they AREN'T THE BEST PLAYERS ON THEIR OWN TEAMS. That's right. Other than JJ Watt, the two best players in the world are their teammates: Von Miller and Percy Harvin. And on that note, we come back to the present, when one of these two players is about to be a world champion. But one of them isn't playing. That .1 difference between the Seahawks and Broncos? That was with a top 3 player in the NFL playing half the season. And more importantly, with another top 3 player not playing (pretty much) at all. But it's all switched now. And the Seahawks have a huge advantage.

I will acknowledge the variance in football, and I will acknowledge that my predicted score does not, by any means, represent an actual, calculated, median score, or even average score, for each team. But it's no fun to give a real prediction, like: the Seahawks' score will be (approximately) normally distributed with mean 26 and standard deviation 8, and the Broncos' score will be (even more approximately) normally distributed with mean 21 and standard deviation 12. Which leads to a probability .64 for the Seahawks winning. If you want to judge me based on a prediction, judge me based on this one. And don't give me credit for my first one. I did that to grab attention. And show the strength of my convictions about my model. And that's all any "expert" on espn is doing as well. The probability that the final score is 31-17 is pretty much identical to the probability that it's 26-21 (In fact, it's higher, because 26 isn't that common a football score.). And wouldn't it be wonderful if I were right?