OT Coin Toss Rules

[*Nately120*]

(01-17-2016, 10:59 AM)reuben.ahmed Wrote: It was a funny flip, especially in ESPN's slow motion replays where you saw Rodgers eye the coin the whole time as it fell - and how the coin just jittered back and forth but didn't flip.

Hilariously, I tried flipping a quarter on my carpet. I was successfully able to get the coin to not flip in mid air, but there was no real control of what happened once it landed. Is this to say, in whatever turf/grass is on an NFL field, when the coin lands, it likely won't flip with the impact? Strange stuff. I'd love to get a hold of that cool looking coin they use to flip, it seems to be cased with another material. I wonder if it has the home team's logo on it.

According to Rodgers he did flip it to Tails on the next toss, and proved it does flip over to Heads (i.e. he lost the toss), but I wonder how many coin tosses have occurred where the coin didn't flip and it was not noticed by any side.

I imagined the rules would get weird if it says "Must flip at least once", or then "at least twice", etc. People would have to watch for it, and then people would think the ref purposefully flipped it only once.

Not to get all conspiracy on things, but it's possible to actually purposefully flip a coin so it lands a certain way.  It takes lots of practice, and really isn't a practically thing BUT that's why the rules of coin flips used to be "CALL IT WHILE IT IS IN THE AIR, right?  If the flipper knows what he wants the outcome to be before he flips it, he can influence what comes up with more than a 50% probability; ergo, it's only a 50-50 chance if he wants it to be.

Back in my "gaming days" before I was way cool like I am now I knew some "power gamers" who would practice rolling dice.  One guy had this system where he would always place the dice face up in his palm, one at a time, with a certain side facing up every time and then flip it in such a way that he had a much better chance of it landing as he wanted due to reducing the amount of shaking and variability that went on.  People who didn't want to cheat or bend the rules would grab the die, or dice, cup their hands around it, and shake and roll.

So this sounds absurd, but if you think back to old Yatzhee sets you had to roll the dice all at once, and they would come with a "rolling cup" which, when used correctly would obscure the dice while they were being jostled and make you roll them all at once.  The NFL coin flip's rules go against the nature of fair probability:


1.  the ramifications of the outcome are known BEFORE the toss is made
2.  the coin can be seen BEFORE it is tossed and is placed in a certain manner (heads up, correct?)
3.  only one variable (a single coin) is tossed, thus reducing the amount of variability

Anyways, I'm sure someone who knows more about math can explain this better, but for something with so much riding on it the NFL coin toss is oddly been altered to reduce the chance factor.