MidwestHawker":2ecf1nvh said:
The SB hangover thing is kind of a misleading stat in terms of predictive value, because it doesn't account for the fact that the champion usually isn't the best team in football that year and thus certainly shouldn't be expected to repeat. I would say that it may be more useful just to look at how teams fare after winning the title as a #1 seed, but even that might be borderline worthless just because of sample size issues.
Agreed, there are a lot of factors behind that stat like you mention.
But in general all stats could have some misleading elements. Because stats can be highly correlative, sometimes it takes a lot of digging to find the causation.
Our sociology prof told us one story about how these citizens for morality types were trying to get X-rated movie houses out of their city. They did a study, and found that the more X-rated movie places in a city, the more crime.
The X-rated movie houses did their own study, and showed startlingly different results: the more churches in a city, the more crime
Of course, the underlying causation was: the more population in a city, the more [churches|x-rated movie houses|crime]. Everything in brackets was correlation.
Whose to say what the actual causation is behind stats we talk about, esp. the SB hangover stats.
The good thing about stats is showing correlation: the SB winner has a history of doing very poorly the next year and not make the playoffs, or not have a playoff victory, much less win the SB. So be on guard and be prepared and you can be an exception to the stat.
(Though really, you could say from a numbers perspective 20 teams out of 32 tend to not make the playoffs next year. 31 teams out of 32 tend not to win the SB the next year. Haha now I'm being snarky)
