WELCOME to QuantCoach.com, the only site on the world-wide web that provides meaningful professional football coaching statistics. QuantCoach.com's revolutionary coaching statistics are derived from a peer-reviewed and generally accepted theory of competition known as Growth Theory. Veteran coach Bill Parcells once said, "If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries." But Growth Theory teaches us that success "springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking." In professional football, those "recipes" are the plays that coaches design. Simply, QuantCoach.com's coaching statistics separate the contribution of plays to pro football success from the contribution of players.

THE CHALKBOARD

The Anatomy of a Super Bowl Upset

Joe Flacco may not have the style of Broadway Joe, but according to coaching statistics Flacco now has a Super Bowl upset almost as big as Namath's toppling of the Colts, 16-7, in Super Bowl 3.

Flacco and the Ravens 34-31 victory over the 49ers ranks as the sixth biggest upset in Super Bowl history when measured by the regular season play design edge that the loser/favorite held over the winner/underdog. In 2012, San Francisco was .0621 better (in other words, 6.21 percent better) designed than its opponents while Baltimore was only .0073 better (in other words less than 1 percent better) designed than its opponents. Thus, the 49ers held a 5.48 percent design edge (.0621 - .0073) edge on the Ravens.

In the Super Bowl, the team with the regular season design edge is 31-16 (.660 winning percentage). Thus, it's surprising when the team with this edge loses in the Super Bowl. Using QC's coaching statistics, here is a table showing the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history with the underdog's play design deficit, H A:

As you can see, Super Bowl teams with a big regular season play design edge tend to beat themselves with turnovers more than underdogs beat them with great game plans. Sure, there is more than one recipe for an upset. The Giants stunning victory over the unbeaten Patriots in Super Bowl 42 was unaided by a turnover edge and a wacky touchdown pass that was deflected twice to Colts tight end John Mackey propelled Baltimore to victory in Super Bowl 5.

And it is surprising to see that Bill Walsh and Joe Montana actually had a significant play design deficit to overcome against Dan Marino and Boomer Esiason in Super Bowls 19 and 23, respectively. But it is not surprising that--with two weeks to prepare--they figured out how to do so even without the help of a turnover edge. (Although, they did not do so well enough in Super Bowl 23 to cover the 7 points of faith the books placed in them to do so.)

But in 60 percent of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, including three of the four biggest, turnovers clearly were the cause of the upset.

Another interesting fact about Super Bowl upsets is that such upsets are randomly scattered throughout the game's history. Generally, an upset is no more likely to occur today than it was in the first decade of the game 's existence.

Last week, in the aftermath of the Ravens upset, Aaron Schatz speculated that perhaps today the regular season doesn't mean as much as it once did.

"Once upon a time, the NFL playoffs were fairly predictable," Schatz wrote. "[I]f you made a list of the top five teams in the league by conventional wisdom, usually one of those teams would end the season with the Lombardi trophy.

"For some reason, it seems like regular-season performance [recently] has become useless in predicting which team will win a championship. All you have to do is get into the tournament, and you can toss everything else out."

Not so fast. As pointed out above, the Super Bowl team with the better regular season play design has won 2 out of every 3 Super Bowls consistently throughout history. Further, if you look at the teams with the least regular season design edge who have reached the Super Bowl, it becomes even more clear that the idea that the regular season is not worth as much today as it used to be is an illusion. Here is a list of those teams:

What this table shows is that the illusionary "devaluation of the regular season" is mostly nothing more than the product of NFL realignment and playoff expansion. Prior to Super Bowl 13, only one wild-card team qualified for the playoffs. Unsurprisingly, the first mediocre team to reach the Super Bowl as measured by regular season play design differential did not show up until Super Bowl 14 when the Los Angeles Rams took advantage of an unusually weak NFC to make it.

Moreover, under the pre-Super Bowl 13 playoff format and divisional alignments, the SB42 Giants (10-6), SB43 Cardinals (9-7) and SB47 Ravens (10-6) would not even have qualified for the playoffs, assuming that the Ravens were in the same division with either New England or Houston this year as they may well have been under the old alignment format. Thus, the only mediocre or worse team to "fluke into" the Super Bowl with less than 11 wins remains the SB14 Los Angeles Rams (9-7), who only had to win two games to do it.

What about the SB46 New York Giants you ask? The QuantCoach is glad you did.

The SB46 Giants had a mediocre 9-7 regular season record, but their .0330 regular season play design edge was better than 27 other teams that reached the Super Bowl and better than 8 other teams that won the Super Bowl (SB9 Pittsburgh; SB15 Oakland; SB18 LA Raiders; SB23 San Francisco; SB35 Baltimore; SB36 New England; SB42 NY Giants; SB47 Baltimore).

Through the lens of coaching statistics, the SB46 Giants were not a mediocre regular season team nor was their 21-17 win over New England in the Super Bowl an upset as New York enjoyed a slightly larger play design edge over their regular season opponents (.0330) than the Patriots did (.0272).

What got all 10 teams in the table above to the Super Bowl and enabled four of the five who prevailed in the Super Bowl to win football's ultimate game was their ability to avoid turnovers. The table below summarizes each team's regular season, NFC or AFC playoffs, and Super Bowl turnover differentials:

As you can see, all of these teams except the SB13 LA Rams, SB42 NY Giants, and SB43 Cardinals were solidly turnover positive during the regular season and the Giants and Cardinals were excessively turnover positive in their NFC playoff runs that got them to the Super Bowl. Moreover, when turnover subsidies ran out in the Super Bowl for SB29 San Diego, SB31 New England, SB34 Tennessee and SB43 Arizona, they lost. Only the SB42 Giants were able to pull the upset without turnover subsidies.

The final element that explains Super Bowl upsets is the diffusion of play design knowledge since Walsh's retirement after the 49ers "upset" of the Bengals in Super Bowl 23, the fifth biggest upset in Super Bowl history from the perspective of coaching statistics.

As you can see, mediocre teams reached the Super Bowl only twice (SB14 LA Rams and SB15 Oakland) in the first 28 Super Bowls (3.57% of Super Bowl participants during that period), but have reached the Super Bowl eight times in the last 19 Super Bowls (21% of all Super Bowl participants during that period). NFL playoff expansion, playoff realignment, and turnovers undoubtedly explain the vast majority of this increase.

But the spread of football knowledge also has played a role.

Counterintuitively, as the table below shows, 70 percent of the Super Bowl teams with the largest regular season play design edges over regular season opponents participated in Super Bowl 7 or earlier, the "run first, pass second" NFL era of Vince Lombardi. These teams included both participants in Super Bowls 1 and 2 and both participants in Super Bowl 7, the year the NFL moved the hashmarks closer to the center of the field and Miami's Larry Cszonka and Washington's Larry Brown ran wild.

The only two teams to make the list from the Post-Bill Walsh era are the SB24 49ers and the SB26 Redskins, generally considered the two teams in the discussion for the greatest team of the Post-Walsh Era.

But this is not the end of the story. As the table below shows, coaching statistics again reverse field and demonstrate that the five biggest Super Bowl differences between regular season play design edges over regular season opponents have occurred in the "pass-first, run-second" Post-Walsh Era, including the SB34 & SB36 St. Louis "Greatest Show on Turf" and the SB42 unbeaten Patriots.

What this shows is that Walsh's design, to some extent, commoditized the NFL and made it easier for mediocre teams to prevail in 3 or 4 straight games if they just avoided turnovers and were solid in the kicking game. This hypothesis is further strengthened by the fact that the great increase in mediocre teams reaching the Super Bowl did not begin until Super Bowl 29, approximately six years after Walsh retired and his knowledge had fully diffused throughout the NFL.

As you can see, in their loss to the Ravens, the 49ers had the 11th largest regular season play design edge ever in the Super Bowl. But if you look closer you notice something very interesting.

San Francisco's Super Bowl design edge is the first edge that is primarily based on innovation in the running game since the great Bill Walsh took off his whistle for the final time at the end of Super Bowl 23.

This delicious fact presents the question that will dominate the 2013 off-season: What is the shelf-life of this design edge? Will the edge be there in San Francisco (or Washington or Carolina or Seattle or Philadelphia or somewhere else) next year?

Is the NFL at the threshhold of its first sea change in design since Walsh's 49ers won Super Bowl 16 and launched the current era of NFL design that is based on throwing the football?

Time, of course, will provide the definitive answers to these questions.

So the QuantCoach hopes to see you back here the Sunday after Labor Day when we start to get the answers.

(Archives Home)

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