The Patriots season schedule is on a 5 year trend predicting Super Bowl Teams

[PATRIOTSFANINPA]

O.K. We all know the Pats played and beat both Super Bowl teams in the Packers and Steelers but I don't think it was mentioned that the Pats have played BOTH Super Bowl participants in the past 5 years (of course NE was one of them in 2007).

Has playing the Pats in the regular season given the other teams (regardless of whether they won or lost against NE) confidence to go into the playoffs and win their conference?

Is it coincidence or is it something that has elevated a team once playing the Pats?

2006 - Colts and Bears played NE - NE lost to Indy and beat the Bears

2007 - Giants played NE in Super Bowl - NE beat the Giants twice that season - preseason and regular

2008 - Steelers and Cardinals played NE - NE beat the Cards and lost to Pitt

2009 - Saints and Colts played NE - NE lost to the Saints and lost to Indy

2010 - Packers and Steelers played NE - NE beat the Packers and Steelers


If this trend continues next season (with a CBA in place) then we can expect an AFC East team or an AFC West team to play an NFC East team in SB 46
according to the Pats 2011 schedule (Colts and Steelers would be the exception)

So NFC fans of the Eagles,Cowboys,Redskins and Giants can only hope this continues on.

 

[Calciumee]

So next years superbowl will be Buffalo - Redskins

 

[sbpatfan]

I see no trend what so ever, just boredom.

 

[Sicilian]

Technically it could be one of the AFC division leaders outside of the East and West too, since we'll be playing them.

 

[PATRIOTSFANINPA]

Technically it could be one of the AFC division leaders outside of the East and West too, since we'll be playing them.

We are playing

The AFC East
The AFC West
The NFC East
Pittsburgh and Indianapolis are the 'division outsiders'

Thats it

 

[SNHU0311]

i like having a tough schedule. its a good measuring stick.

 

[DocHoliday]

Or the Pats are a good team and end up playing other good teams, and this pool of good teams includes the Superbowl contenders.

 

[DonBlackmon55]

I see no trend what so ever, just boredom.

Whoa ! I dunno what you're looking at bro, but there is a clear trend I see - a team from AFC will play a team from NFC for the right to hold the Lombardi trophy for 1 yr. Now back to my statistics 101 class.

 

[Dufflebagz]

.......Ok?

 

[PATRIOTSFANINPA]

What some of you don't realize is that the chances of a team playing against the Super Bowl teams 5 years in a row is odds of 7,775-1

But apparently not many get it here of how much of a longshot it has been ....but knowing some in here its no surprise they don't get it

 

[Dufflebagz]

What some of you don't realize is that the chances of a team playing against the Super Bowl teams 5 years in a row is odds of 7,775-1

But apparently not many get it here of how much of a longshot it has been ....but knowing some in here its no surprise they don't get it

Steelers and Colts.....you know why we play them every year? Because we both finish at the top of our division and get to play each other. Sometimes it's just luck of what divisions we play, same thing for the NFC teams.

 

[Wolfpack]

First of all, we didn't play the AFC Champs in 2007 because we were the AFC Champs that year. Other than that, it's just all Indy and Pittsburgh, who we play just about every year since we all usually finish 1st in our respective divisions. And we're playing each of those teams again next year.

I think the fact that we've played the NFC Champs 5 years in a row is the more interesting part because that is random. Of course, all AFC East teams can make the same claim.

 

[jbb9s]

What some of you don't realize is that the chances of a team playing against the Super Bowl teams 5 years in a row is odds of 7,775-1

But apparently not many get it here of how much of a longshot it has been ....but knowing some in here its no surprise they don't get it

first, unfortunately, i am afraid that since the NFL pairs up teams against each other that finished in the same place of their respective division, the first place Patriots tend to play a lot of other first place teams. So I'm not sure about you 7775-1 odds there. The only way that would be accurate, assuming the other math is right, is that there is 0% relationship between a team's competitiveness year to year. There is a lot of parity in the NFL, but not that much.

Also, because of the randomness and noise in regression modeling, it has been proven that people who aggregate massive amounts of data and run thousands of models will eventually find strong R^2. A notable example is that a professor (obviously, who else does this research?), I believe at Berkeley or Stanford, proved that reported UFO sightings have a strong coefficient of determination of future weekly stock market trends over an 80 year period.

So I guess the question is if a few million people take a few minutes every day to study the box scores of football results over a 5 year period, would that be enough aggregated data to assume that a few noisy but otherwise irrelevant trends are noticed?