Super Bowl 49: Is Seahawks Vs. Patriots The Strongest Matchup Ever?
Breaking news: the team that wins the Super Bowl isn’t always the best team in the league. Sometimes they are – last year’s Seattle Seahawks, to cite the most recent and obvious example. But then you’ve got other recent examples like the Baltimore Ravens and New York Giants – nobody would argue that either of those teams was the league’s best the year they won it all. A little luck and a great game against a New England Patriots team for the ages didn’t make Eli Manning the best.
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This year’s Super Bowl features the two best teams in the league. The Seahawks were the NFC’s top seed, while the Patriots wre number one in the AFC. Both teams finished the regular season with 12-4 records. Both teams were supposed to be great going into the season, and by now have clearly affirmed the praise with which they’re so often lavished.
Maybe this matchup doesn’t seem to beg the question “is this the best Super Bowl matchup ever?” But that’s what Nate Silver and company explored today at FiveThirtyEight. With eight regular season losses between them and a definite rough patch for Seattle, how could this be? And if it is so, why does Silver say “this could be the worst Super Bowl ever?”
Here’s an introduction to Elo, an extremely complicated (but not according to Silver!) statistical ranking system meant to comprehensively show how good a team is, in the context of all teams ever. Based on this methodology, the 2014 Seahawks are the fifth-best team ever to play in a Super Bowl since the merger. The Patriots aren’t at that level, but they’re quite close, really.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Seahawks/Patriots is the strongest Super Bowl matchup since the 1978 Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers. But there’s a caveat: the system penalizes the Patriots for their loss to the Buffalo Bills in week 17, when New England was in fact resting their stars since the top seed was locked up. Toss out that result and this game leapfrogs Super Bowl XIII. With only a minor tweak, this becomes the strongest Super Bowl matchup ever.
But the worst? You’d think having teams that are both excellent and evenly matched would be the best possible outcome. And while there’s certainly a great chance of that happening, history isn’t on our side. Silver has another metric, Excitement Index, which measures changes in win probability throughout a game. Turns out the games that have featured two evenly-matched superteams have been historically unexciting. Go figure.
Not that the past should always be seen as instructive of the future. Past Super Bowls provide precedent, but have just about zero predictive value. Two high-octane teams who’ve only been getting better as the season goes on? Sounds like a perfect recipe for success, despite what history might have to say.
This might be the strongest Super Bowl matchup ever. It might not. It might be the most fun, it might be the least fun. Remember a year ago, when the Seahawks and the Denver Broncos were supposedly as powerful and potent a matchup as possible? That game turned out to rank quite lowly by Excitement Index. Doesn’t mean there’s a single Seahawks fan out there who wouldn’t take that outcome again.