During the next week and a half, statisticians, analysts and even astrologists will pick through the Super Bowl with a fine-tooth comb, trying to divine a winner based on everything from quarterback passer rating to phases of the moon.
With that in mind, Carlton Chin, a financial analyst and MIT graduate, and Jay Granat, a psychotherapist, constructed a model for The Wall Street Journal consisting of 10 football data points to figure out whether the New Orleans Saints or Indianapolis Colts will win the title Feb. 7.
Messrs. Chin and Granat crunched numbers from the previous 43 Super Bowls and found that teams with more takeaways than giveaways in the game have a 61% chance to win (good for the Saints, who have a better turnover ratio than the Colts this season), while teams that allow fewer offensive yards have a 60% chance to win (plus-one for the Colts, based on what they have done this season).
In this study, a few metrics wound up with surprisingly negative connotations. A high passer rating actually has a negative correlation with winning the Super Bowl, as the team with the lower overall passer rating has won 53% of the games. That could be bad for the Saints, as quarterback Drew Brees had a league-best 109.6 rating this season, besting Peyton Manning’s 99.9.
So what’s the verdict? Six of the 10 factors say the Saints will win, but big-game experience, which looks at whether a team played in the Super Bowl in the previous three seasons (the Colts were in the 2007 game) had the strongest correlation. Teams that did this beat teams that didn’t—the Saints have never been to the Super Bowl—64% of the time.
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