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Super Bowl 49: What The Experts Are Thinking

By Kenn Korb

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Jan 30, 2015; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll (left) and New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick (right) during a joint press conference for Super Bowl XLIX at Phoenix Convention Center. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

The Super Bowl 49 weekend is here, with Sunday bringing the big game to us finally.

As much as I would have loved to see the Green Bay Packers make it — and how much it hurt to have them get soooooooooo close, only to see them snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — as a fan of the sport, I cannot fathom not watching what looks to be an extremely close matchup.

How close? As of Friday, the Vegas betting line was sitting at New England (+2). For non-gamblers (or those who don’t listen to Bill Simmons/etc discuss gambling lines), that basically means that New England is favored to win by two points; pretty small margin.

Sites based in mathematical analytics such as NumbersFire put this game even closer; their nERD metric* and overall predictions both favor Seattle, but with less than one point of an advantage pointing their way in both cases.

Now, how about the ‘experts’? Well, things seem to split pretty evenly there as well.

I looked at multiple places, and not surprisingly there was no consensus pick.

Jan 30, 2015; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll (left) and New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick speak during a joint press conference for Super Bowl XLIX at Phoenix Convention Center. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

NFL.com cobbled 14 writers together, ending up with a 8-6 split in voting going for Seattle. They couldn’t even agree on a general score; they have everything from 21-point blowouts to OT-endings, with either side apparently just as liable to be on the winning end of things as they are to lose in either fashion.

ESPN asked all of their football writers and broadcasters and amazingly ended up with an almost-perfect split of 35-34 in New England’s favor.

If you’d like to include offshoot sites and other sources related to them, I looked into that as well.

Grantland gave me in-depth insights from two of my favorite writers, Bill Simmons and Bill Barnwell; for this game they were split (any reader of Simmons knows which way each went).

I also looked at SportsNation voting; they sided with New England. And of course, there was the overplayed trend of letting ‘oracle’ zoo animals make picks; this time it was orangutans, and they eventually picked New England as well.

Beyond those sites, there were a few other ‘notable’ places with predictions. Football Outsiders (one of my go-to places for advanced stats) seems to favor Seattle ever so slightly.

Pro Football Focus (another go-to advanced stats site) had a 4-4 split between their eight writers. Madden simulations appear to expect a 28-24 New England victory. Even Google has made its way into the prediction game (albeit in an entirely different fashion), figuring Seattle to come away victorious.

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I even stumbled across a site called NFL Pick Watch, which brought together the picks of 100+ people from a vast array of sites. Any guesses on the splits for the predictions?

Dead even. 50%.

You are probably wondering by now “But what does this all mean? Why does this matter?”. Well really, it doesn’t; the predictions mean nothing to what will happen on the field.

But it does lead into the thinking that this should be an excellent game. When people who have spent large portions of their lives studying and/or playing this sport cannot as a group even come close to leaning one way or another on who should win, that’s impressive.

No matter who your team is, this is the kind of matchup that you dream of seeing.

Bring on Sunday!

(Oh, and if anyone is interested in where I sit on this game…you’ll just have to wait until the staff predictions are posted.)

*nERD measures the number of points you’d expect a team to win by against a league-average opponent on a neutral field.

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