ESPN's Featured Comment of the Day is so frequently stupid, inane, or both, that Deadspin rightly set up a recurring feature to highlight some of those comments. That said:
"I think the Pats still only have a 50 percent chance of winning it all."
You may think that's a little low (I'd put them at 65%, as in a 90% chance of winning any given game from here on out -- your mileage may vary) but my goodness, the misplaced vitriol among Deadspin commenters made me think I'd stumbled onto AOL, or Foxsports.com, or even ESPN itself.
Nice work guys. Good luck ever being taken seriously by people who didn't already.
Posted by Matt Bruce at December 27, 2007 11:03 AMThere may be a slight error in your calculation, depending on what "winning it all" means. If that simply means winning the Super Bowl, then it should be .9^3 (73%) instead of .9^4.
FWIW, FO.com gives the Pats only a 29.1% chance (basically, (2/3)^3) of winning the Super Bowl. That seems awfully low to me, even given that, statisically, they have come "back to the pack" quite a bit.
Posted by: Kubi at December 27, 2007 01:28 PM2/3 is their chance of winning any given game? Yeah, that's pretty low.
They aren't a guarantee to win it all, but they are a prohibitive favorite. I'll give them 80% against Indy, 85% against the NFC representative, and 90% against whoever comes to Foxboro(ugh?) the for the Divisional game. Hmm, that only comes to a little over 60%. But in reality the probability of them winning it all is more likely 1 - P(Colts win in New England).
N/B: Sexual Thing was just playing...
Posted by: ZD at December 30, 2007 08:56 PM