Super Bowl Factoids

Thought with Super Bowl Sunday coming up this weekend might start a thread on interesting little Super Bowl factoids. Will start us off with one from today's paper, feel free to add you own.

The record for the team winning the coin flip at the beginning of the game is 22-23!

There has never been an overtime game

Patriots have won during their dynasty when the game was played in New Orleans, Houston and Jacksonville, lost when it was played in Phoenix. because this game will be in Indianapolis, another city where nobody wants to live, Patriots will win this game.

marc, I think that's a fact, not a factoid.

Nah. My dictionary defines a factoid as:
"A trivial or useless fact or statistic."

So it may indeed be a fact but qualifies as a factoid.

Ah, you have a different dictionary than I. "-oid" as in "humanoid" is something that appears to be something. Appearance in many cases also implies "but is not". So a factoid should be something that looks like a fact but is not. But, so goes the English language. I stand corrected. A word that used to mean "is not a fact" now means "is a fact". That's awful (which, I think, used to mean to be filled with "awe").

Here's one dictionary's entry (from wikipedia): Compact Oxford English Dictionary as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact".

Language expert William Safire in his On Language column advocated the use of the word factlet to express a "little bit of arcana".

I like the idea of "factlet". (Didn't mean to derail thread.... back to our regularly scheduled discussion).

My favorite factlet (I won't let things go!) is one of the most famous. The winner of the SuperBowl (NFC or AFC) predicts the stock market. If the NFC team wins, the market does much better than AFC team. I haven't seen the number in a few years, but the difference was not only "statistically significant" it was large, like 20% return difference.

It's a great example that if you look at enough random events with a 10% or 5% chance of being wrong, you'll find a lot of wrong statements.

What was also missed in the above is that the data set is small. NFC teams (Packers in 67 and 68) won in the 60's when the market was strong. Then AFC teams (Dolphins, Steelers, Raiders) came on in the 70's and the market did horrible in the 70's. When things got great in the go-go 80's and continued to the tech-bubble in the 90's, the 49ers and other NFC teams (Redskins, Giants, Bears and some nameless team in Texas) were dominating.

According to a wikipedia page, it has been right 33 out of 41 times. 80% accurate predictor.

The other interesting thing about this factlet is that you've got room to fudge data. Teams started in one conference and then switched.

The Super Bowl Indicator is a good example of "spurious"