Less optimistic? This won't be as difficult as a lot of people are saying. Vegas has the Pats with a 39ish percent chance to win the SB. Falcons at 32 and bringing up the rear is Pitt with 12.
I think they know something. Landry Jones IN Pitt against NE had the same passer rating as Bens road rating this year. The people who are saying last possession/three point game are fairly wrong. 10-14 point win.
Sure, I agree that that's a likely outcome, I'd even agree that it's the most likely outcome by a fairly significant margin. But it's not really a direct counter to the point I was making. I think the Pats are the better team, and I think if you play the game 10 times they win by multiple-score margin 4-5 times. But if they're hypothetically losing 2 by a similar margin, and the remaining 3 are one score games that are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50/50, that puts you right at the same win expectancy that my gut's suggesting.
I *think* we'll win by multiple scores. We're clearly the better team. But the Steelers are a good football team, to the point that we probably can't win while playing bad football like we did last week. They aren't the Texans, and that simple fact by itself rules out objectively claiming anywhere in the neighborhood of 90% confidence in victory.
For some context:
Win Probability Calculator | Pro-Football-Reference.com is an interesting source for translating how much better you think a team is vs. another to actual win percentage. If you're an 8 point Vegas favorite (which is a significant favorite, indicates that you're substantially better than your opponent), and you receive the opening kick for a touchback, at that moment you have approximately a 72% chance of victory. And again, this is a team that Vegas is suggesting is likely to win by multiple scores. If you change the line to -6 (the actual line that the Pats are favored by), win expectancy drops to 67%, which is just about dead on with the number I threw out there, and still represents being considered a heavy favorite, since it suggests you're twice as likely to win as they are as of the opening kick.
So when I, or 538, or anyone else, suggests that we have 'only' a 70ish percent chance of winning, that could be accurately and fairly restated as "I think we're the better team by a significant margin and that we should win, but the standard any given Sunday mantra always applies".
