The Eagles victory in the NFC Championship game was truly
wonderful. Foles went 26/33 for 352
yards with three TDs and no interceptions.
He averaged more than 10 yards per pass. The Eagles (mostly Foles, but
with some help), put up 38 points on what was supposedly the best defense in
football. Projecting Nick Foles’s
numbers into the Superbowl, he’s going to complete 54 of 62 passes for 502
yards and six touchdowns and the Eagles are going to beat the Patriots 84 – 3. Right?
Right??
In the late 1960’s, Daniel Kahneman, who would win a Nobel
Prize in 2002 for his work with Amos Twersky in creating the field of
behavioral economics, was working as a psychologist for the Israeli Air Force,
helping train fighter pilots. The
instructors had come to believe that criticism was more effective than praise
when teaching men to fly jets. They
pointed out (accurately), that pilots who performed well and received praise
almost uniformly performed worse their next time out, while pilots who were
criticized almost always performed better.
Kahneman observed the process for a while and then explained what was
really going on.
Both the good performers who were praised and the bad
performers who were chastised were simply regressing to the mean on their
subsequent flights. The “bad” ones would
have flown better and the “good” ones would have flown worse even if the
instructors had said nothing at all.
What Kahneman described was an illusion of the mind that all of us are
subject to---the belief that our words are most effective when they are
critical or give pain. Our criticism is “rewarded”
because it is often followed by a better performance. Kahneman later wrote, “Because we tend to
reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because
there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are
punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”
(This story comes from “The Undoing Project” by Michael
Lewis.)
In Kahneman’s terms, if we accept Foles’ performance against
the Vikings as the reality, we will be punished for it. If we bet on him now to repeat the day he had
against Minnesota, we will regret it because he will most likely regress to the
mean rather than produce a second consecutive hall-of-fame afternoon. You don’t get consecutive hall-of-fame
afternoons from Nick Foles. You get one
every three years or so, like the game against the Raiders in 2013 where he had
seven TD passes. We’ll get another game
like that from Foles, but it won’t be this Sunday; it will be in 2021.
Listen kids, I like Nick Foles. He is the best quarterback in his family,
unlike Eli Manning (or even Chelsea Manning).
When the Eagles traded him to St. Louis for Sam Bradford in March, 2015,
I viewed it as the first of many signs that Chip Kelly is not nearly as smart
as he thinks he is. And the day he had
against Minnesota was not a complete fluke.
He’s played some great games.
Foles is good enough to win a Superbowl someday, though it probably
won’t be this one.
In terms of our basic numbers, New England has a significant
edge. If the ability to make big pass
plays is what brings home the Lombardy Trophy (and that, of course, is the
theory we’re pursuing here), the Pats win because their Adjusted Yards/Pass is
a very respectable 6.8 yards (2nd best in the NFL) vs. 5.8 yards for
the Eagles (8th). The Eagles’
defensive AYP is better than New England’s, but all the Pats’ defensive stats
are somewhat deceptive because their defense played so badly the first four
games of the season. Over the last
twelve games of the regular season, New England gave up 171 points to its
opponents (14.25/game). The Eagles gave
up 203 points over that stretch (16.9/game).
So who really has the better defense?
My reasoning here is pretty straightforward. Assuming Brady has his normal day and Foles
has his normal day, Brady will prevail.
With the line at Patriots -4 ½, I would normally advise you to take the
Patriots and lay the points.
But look at the Superbowl scores in the Brady/Belichick era:
2002---NE 20 St. L.
17
2004---NE 32 Caro 29
2005---NE 24
Phl 21
2008---NY 17
NE 14
2012---NY 21 NE 17
2015---NE 28 Sea
24
2017---NE 34 Atl
28 (OT)
Notice anything? The
only game decided by more than four points in either direction was last year’s
overtime extravaganza, and that one was tied at the end of regulation. I’m not saying New England is incapable of
beating the Eagles by more than 4 ½ points this year, but they haven’t shown
that kind of domination in seven previous Superbowls, so I do not plan to put
good money on the proposition they will do it this time. I’m passing.
New England is better, and should win.
But the line is about right.
I do have one recommendation, however.
We have all seen the surprising stat that the Patriots, in
their seven previous Superbowls, have not scored a point in the first
quarter. Digging a bit deeper and
looking at the total scoring for both
teams in the first halves of those seven games, we find an average of 18 ½ points
scored in the first half. In only one game (the 2015 match against Seattle), did the first half
total exceed 24 points.
This year, the over/under total for the first half of the
Superbowl is 24 points. Take the under.
Copyright2018MichaelKubacki
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