Superbowl Myths

SBNation is an amazing place.  Jon Bois, who writes for SBNation, is amazing at his job.

His job, usually, involves writing about baseball and making people laugh, though the order in which those two job descriptions should be places is debatable.  It hardly matters, however, since he's so good at both.

Today, he wrote a piece about football. Specifically, the Superbowl.  As a casual football fan-so casual it's arguable I barely qualify as a fan-I'm not quite sure how much weight to give to the football "conventional wisdom" that fills my car whenever I turn on sports talk radio. 

Does defense actually win championships?  That's an adage I've heard applied to every sport more times than I can quantify.  When Jon looks at all the Superbowls from this century and compares the regular season defensive prowess of both teams, there is no pattern whatsoever.  That's not to say that defense doesn't matter, or that it doesn't help.  This just pokes some holes in the belief that defense wins Superbowls as a general rule.

The reason I find the two weeks leading up to the Superbowl to be so agonizing is the relentless scrutiny that every aspect of the upcoming game is subjected to.  Nothing makes me turn the radio dial faster, however, than the unending stream of grueling speculation as to whether or not the week off will hurt or help the teams.

This season, teams coming off a bye-week were 16-16.  Since 2001, the winning percentage of the Brady/Belichick Patriots after two-week byes is scarily identical to their overall winning percentage.  The Manning/Coughlin-era Giants are in more or less the same situation.

This piece taught me a few things about how much I should buy into these Superbowl "myths."  I am very skeptical about this kind of speculative conventional wisdom as a general rule, and this knowledge will likely only make hearing the media buildup to Sunday's game all the more insufferable.