The Super Bowl game, we made it!
In review - Both probabilities correctly predicted last weeks conference championship games. The original super bowl prediction was rather close missing the correct prediction of having Denver in the final by one game (pesky bengals!)
We have an interesting super bowl ahead of us with the best defense playing the best offense. Historically in four super bowls where the top defense played the top offense the defensive team wins 3 out of 4 times (75%). This supports the old Mantra....Defense Wins Championships. This was questioned by a recent analysis by the
Advanced NFL Stats team that found that elite offenses in most cases will out pace elite defenses. This analysis took into account total performance and is not specific to playoffs. Either way should be a game for the history books.
For my analysis the total 2013-2014 network of games including playoffs was taken into account. The strength of this analysis is not only does it take into account the scores and the margins but also who it was against (and how those teams performed against other teams). All currently reported rankings of offense and defense are based on crude performance of yards and thus may over/under estimate true rankings. This analysis did not have weighting on any single game (NOTE: when this was done for playoff games the conclusion was the same).
Both teams did not play each other this season so all estimates are based on indirect comparisons from the network. See Network explanation
here. So this week I will put the 95% probability range along with the estimate probability. Without any further adieu the results:
Super Bowl Championship Probability
DEN VS SEA ------------------------------------> SEA Win 78% chance (95% CrI = 57%-91%)
CrI - Credible Interval. This interpretation of the 95% is that this is the certainity of our estimate. As you can see it all falls above the 50% giving us a higher certainty of a SEA win.
