The Silver Bulletin Super Bowl LX preview
Are the Seahawks and Patriots overachievers, or actually good? Our XL-sized take on LX.
You can find ELWAY’s Super Bowl odds at the ELWAY landing page here. But today’s newsletter provides a lot more detail about the game. To be honest, today’s newsletter is a bit overstuffed — rather than hitting your inbox two or three times amid a busy political news cycle, I’m sending one comprehensive Super Bowl preview considering:
Where the Seahawks and Patriots would rank among the most unlikely Super Bowl champions;
ELWAY’s retrospective ratings for every past Super Bowl;
QBERT ratings for every past Super Bowl quarterback;
A deeper look at the Patriots’ schedule;
Is Sam Darnold too mediocre to win the Super Bowl? And is Drake Maye too young or too injured?
Why Super Bowls tend to be high-scoring — just in case you’re thinking about betting the over/under line;
And, the most likely exact final scores and the best Super Bowl squares based on 30,000 ELWAY simulations, including a downloadable EXCEL spreadsheet.
The Patriots and Seahawks previously faced off in Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona. That game ended spectacularly when Russell Wilson was picked off by the Patriots’ Malcolm Butler on 2nd-and-goal from the 1-yard line with 26 seconds left, clinching a 28-24 victory for the fifth of Tom Brady’s seven championships.
The game is sometimes regarded as the best Super Bowl of all-time. But watching from the opposite end zone (I was lucky enough to attend on the company dime back when FiveThirtyEight was held in high esteem by my bosses at ESPN1). I remember actually feeling a bit deflated by how quickly it ended.2 According to Sports-Reference.com, plays from the opponents’ 1 result in an interception less than 0.5 percent of the time3 (fumbles are the more common problem because teams usually run rather than pass4). Instead, game over. There were about 2.5 seconds between the snap and when Butler fell to the ground with the ball secure in his hands; even a walk-off home run provides more time for contemplation.
But that game 11 years ago had to live up to a lot of hype. It was a matchup of giants. The Tom Brady Patriots were the Tom Brady Patriots. And the Seahawks had decimated the Broncos to win Super Bowl XLVIII in New Jersey and entered the season as favorites to repeat.
On Sunday, Super Bowl LX — that’s #60 if you don’t speak Roman Numeral — will feature the same uniforms, but there are no players on either roster left over from the 2015 game. And instead of a battle of juggernauts, it’s one of overachievers. At least according to Vegas, whichever team prevails will be one of the least-likely champions ever, right up there with the Rams’ stunning turnaround into the Greatest Show on Turf in 2000 and Brady’s first title in 2002.5 The Seahawks began the season with +6000 odds (60:1) to win the Super Bowl. The Patriots were +8000.
I’d love to tell you that ELWAY gave the Seahawks and Patriots better odds. But I can’t say that because we didn’t get the model up and running until Week 7. I can tell you that it’s been bullish on each team ever since we began publishing our forecasts. Not that ELWAY got everything right (let’s not talk about the Lions, please). But those various ELWAY-inspired Seahawks futures bets I made earlier in the season might be enough to save my year.
Still, the truth is that, as much as it might be “fun” to gamble ELWAY’s reputation on a Super Bowl pick that defied the conventional wisdom, this is one of those games where the model is fairly well-aligned with Vegas. The system has been higher on both participants than the consensus. But since it likes both of them, that sort of cancels out. Still, there’s a lot to consider, including a couple of “X-factors” that aren’t accounted for explicitly by the model.
The history of the Super Bowl, according to ELWAY
Since ELWAY ratings never entirely reset but carry over partly from season to season, that means technically speaking, the very first game in our database from 1920 affects the system’s ratings for every subsequent game. So, we can see how ELWAY would have rated every Super Bowl matchup — and how the Seahawks and Patriots line up against past participants. What I’ll show you here is a simplified version of our retrospective ratings. They include a team’s baseline rating plus an adjustment for the starting QB in the game. There are various other adjustments that ELWAY makes: the most important of these is for injuries. That’s an important one this year, since both the Seahawks and the Patriots are notably healthy (unless Drake Maye’s shoulder problem proves to be something that can’t just be shrugged off). However, we only have injury data dating back for the past few years so I’m not including those adjustments in this table. The other adjustments that ELWAY makes don’t tend to matter much for the Super Bowl.6