It’s Super Bowl week, which means the sports news cycle is full of the same old stuff as every year. Empty interviews, flashbacks to the past of the Super Bowls, countless predictions about who will win Sunday… and one prediction in particular, pops up around each season like clockwork.
I get it, the Super Bowl is the biggest game of the season and the pros have two weeks to predict, so trying to figure out which one of the two teams will win is a ratings/number puller. easy pageviews. However, most of those calls are made by men and women doing some calculations in their heads; only one madness try to do it through simulation art.
As they have done since Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2003, EA Sports has run the teams and rosters for the big game through its system, playing a game and getting the results. That result was a 31-17 win for the Eagles over the Chiefs.
However, before you take that money to the bank, either because you are an Eagle fan or you have a strong belief in the sanctity of by Madden player ratings and match day authenticity, you should know that for all the attention EA Sports has given these simulations and for all the attention given to them—this year guess has its own trailer—the game’s achievement isn’t much better than a coin toss.
Since that first public attempt in 2003, madness successfully predicted the winner of the game 11 times, meaning it was wrong 8 times (you can see the full list of each score This). You could say, that 11-8 record is over 0.500, enough to at least make it to the knockout stages and certainly more accurate than most flesh-based pros. Especially when you look at the game’s Super Bowl XLIX predictions as very correctly, determining not only the winner but also the exact score (NE 28 – 24 SEA).
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But in recent years the wheels have fallen off! For the first decade of its simulations Madden nearly always got the winner right. For four of the last five years, though, and six of the last nine, its predictions have landed in the L column, meaning it simply cannot be trusted to be predicting the winner on Sunday with any more accuracy than tossing a coin, rolling some dice or asking an octopus to crawl towards a flag (actually, to be fair Paul did a great job).
All of which means, based on this 31-17 prediction, I’m looking forward to seeing the Captain win 24-10.
