The Bengals Have a 32% Chance of Winning the Superbowl

[leonardfan40]

(02-11-2022, 05:39 PM)KillerGoose Wrote: I'm not sure if this is your intention, but these conversations always go down a road where it becomes condescending and it becomes rather frustrating. 

What says the Rams are better is their on-field performance - that's how you judge a team. Probably the top statistic used is EPA per play. You can derive a teams expected points scored by taking their field position and various other factors. It's an efficiency metric and is used to figure out which teams are using their limited resources (I.E. downs) better. You can use this to figure out who is better over the course of a season or within any given time frame. Various models may use various metrics, but EPA is the golden standard within the analytics community. All of the situations you mentioned can be accounted for in some way. There are programs that can watch game film and break down what coverage the defense is running and provide plays to counter it based on success rate, break down tendencies etc. 

I'm not sure what to say regarding this point. Again, that just isn't how it works. If you think it is easy and meaningless, I guess go work for an NFL team in their analytics department lol. In all seriousness, no NFL team is going to have a 99% chance of victory against another NFL team. Maybe if a team was favored by 20 points, I guess. Most WP models account for the Vegas spread, because it is fairly accurate. If a model is just consistently wrong, then the model is probably bad. However, if the model has a strong correlation to victories, then it is a good model (again, the Vegas spread is pretty good). 

And these conversations usually end up with something along the lines of "math nerd" or "data nerd" or some other variation of nerd thrown around. It isn't very creative. I'm not going to engage this part - you're pretty dug into your stance. So, one team will win this weekend and I hope it is Cincinnati. WHO-DEY! 

No I’m not trying to attack you. Just saying that these percentages don’t mean anything. They are all flawed. What you can do is put these out there then make excuses when they are wrong, rinse and repeat week after week and year after year.

You can’t account for all of the situations I posted and the millions of others that affect a person/teams performance all the way down to their mood that day or if they had a fight with their wife the night before. There is no calculation that will accurately predict how the relationship between Zac and McVay will affect the game. Nobody knows which of those coaches has a better grasp for the others tendencies or game plan. Nobody but those two know exactly how their relationship worked and how much they coordinated on play design and calls. Nobody can calculate that.

Even if you did “account” for those there is no perfect calculation for each one when you get down to the very personal stuff. you’d be relying on a human to try to decipher which ones will apply. There are no perfect models for NFL games.

You can say oh they just messed up on one game but when you see year after year one team going against the “odds” game after game after game that should tell you how flawed they really are. When the playoffs and super bowl are on the line they have missed on two specific teams badly over and over for the last two years.

This year the Bengals were underdogs in the divisional round with 34% chance to win, followed up with 19% chance the next week. Won both and have a chance to beat the “odds” again this week for the third time in a row. If the Bengals do it 3 times in a row are they really just beating odds three times in a row? Or were those odds wrong? Were they missing something that can’t be calculated? It’s easy to say no the odds are right and the team just got lucky. They didn’t get better, they weren’t better than we thought, they just hit on their slim chances time and again.

What about if the same thing happens to the eventual Super Bowl winner two years in a row? Last year the Bucs were given 30% chance to win the divisional game, then 37% to win the conference, then underdogs again in the Super Bowl. If these models are so good how are we this close to them being that wrong in the biggest games of the year in back to back seasons?
The Bucs were the best team last year and proved it, odds be damned.
The Bengals have a chance to go out there and PROVE they are the better team, odds be damned. If the bengals win the models can say all they want that the Rams were the better team. Bengals win head to head in the super bowl the bengals are the better team.

Odds said bengals wouldn’t beat the Chiefs the first time this year. We did. Then odds said we wouldn’t beat them again. We did. Are the chiefs the better team if we played again? Or were the models not just wrong but failed to learn for the mistake the first time around? The Bengals are better than the Chiefs even though odds would surely be for KC again if they met.

Two years in a row the team in conference finals with lowest shot of winning (of the 4 teams) could very well be the SB champs. Maybe these models are imperfect and don’t know what truly goes into making a champion.