The total number of people expected to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow is equal to all the people who ever existed
in human history. (Don't bother doing the math; that's the kind of statistic the media loves and it doesn't matter if it's completely illogical. Just repeat it and sit back and enjoy.)
Which means that at some point during the 32 hours the game will take, some 500 trillion people are going to hear one of the commentators say -- probably more than once --
this is where experience counts. This guy's been here before. That matters a lot.But does it?
One of the storylines this week, in fact, has been that the Packers are going to the Super Bowl for the first time in 14 years, while the Steelers are their for their third time, and the Packers have only three players on their roster with any Super Bowl experience -- and one of those is fullback John Kuhn, who got a Super Bowl ring while he was on the Pittsburgh practice squad the last time around.
(Which last part was surprising to me:
practice squad guys to the Super Bowl?)
That has led
even homer commentators whose job is to work as de facto PR guys for the Packers to claim that Green Bay is at a disadvantage, because, they say, players with no Super Bowl experience are likely to be overwhelmed by the moment, the thrill, Christina Aguilera singing the anthem, nerves, whatever.
But is that the case? Or is this just another easy storyline for the sportswriters, who love to focus on things that don't matter?
Because sometimes the easy storylines turn out to be true -- Wisconsin really was slower than TCU and that hurt them in the Rose Bowl -- I decided to apply my brilliant analytic abilities to the question
Does it matter if you've been to a Super Bowl before?Here's my working hypothesis:
no, it doesn't matter at all. Let's see if I'm right, first by looking at it logically, and then by actually checking the historical record to see if experience has actually counted in Super Bowls.
A logical test puts the hypothesis under scrutiny by looking at it in different ways -- asking where
experience counts above all other factors, or even
more than other factors.
Put another way:
does it matter if a team has ever done a thing before when we look at it in other contexts outside the Super Bowl? After all -- the Super Bowl cannot be unique in the sports world, can it? It can't be the
only area where having been there before adds that extra boost that guarantees, or almost guarantees, a win.
So does
experience matter elsewhere in the NFL? Does
having been there before make a difference in other games?
Generally,
no. Look at recent NFL history to prove that. This year, the Seahawks and Saints played a playoff game -- the first ever in the NFL between a 7-9 team and another NFL playoff team. The Saints coach
had been there before, having coached his team to the playoffs two recent times, including road trips. Pete Carroll was in his first year as a head coach at Seattle, but he won.
Still, you could quibble and say he'd been to the playoffs in his first go-round as a coach (although not since 1999), and that he had Matt Hasselsack, who had playoff experience, and some others from the Seahawks recent better past -- but what happened the next week, when Lovie Smith's Bears, with Jay Cutler making his first-ever start in the postseason, took apart the Seahawks? Did the rest of the Bears' experience overwhelm the fact that Cutler had never started a postseason game
at any level?And what about the week after that, when Colin Hanie came into the NFC Championship in the third quarter and soundly outplayed Green Bay's A-Rodg, even though A-Rodg had been there before -- not just to the playoffs (Rodgers was starting his fifth playoff game, but he'd
been there before when he watched Favre lead the team to overtime in the NFC Championship a few years earlier.)
And speaking of
a few years earlier, keep in mind that a year ago, Drew Brees in his first Super Bowl got there by outplaying Brett Favre in the NFC Championship, and Kurt Warner in the playoffs -- both of whom had more postseason experience than Brees will likely ever garner -- and then Brees' Saints beat the more-experience Colts in the Super Bowl.
And a few years before
that, Favre himself had been beaten by another first-timer, Eli Manning, playing in his first NFC Championship -- and Eli would go on to do it again 2 weeks later.
It's not just football -- all across sports, players who have
never been there before, anecdotally, at least, win big in big positions;
having been there before may, as often as not, be a liability rather than an asset. (It certainly is if
having been there before you decide to spend your week drinking and belting out showtunes rather than practicing).
First-timers won golf championships by the scads this year, beating more-experienced golfers easily, and look at the Olympics, where some athletes go multiple times to the world's biggest sporting stage.
The Olympics are possibly the only sporting event to rival the Super Bowl for attention -- since Americans don't watch the World Cup in large numbers -- and can be a good test of whether experience counts, since many Olympic events are individual efforts. So does having been to the Olympics
before help later on? Maybe not. I didn't do a scientific survey of it, but I did look into some high-profile recent Olympians, like Lindsay Vonn.
Vonn was in the 2002 Winter Olympics and got a silver medal. She went back to the Olympics in 2006 and wiped out, eventually finishing 8th and getting the "Spirit Award" - -making her the only Olympian I know of who shared an award with Eric Cartman. Then she went back
again in 2010, winning a gold and a bronze (but wiping out on two events and taking out her US team rival in the mix), and saying that she didn't ski as aggressively as she could have.
Meanwhile, Vonn's rival Julia Mancuso -- the one Vonn took out in 2010 by wiping out on the course -- won a gold in her first-ever Olympics, 2006-- but then only took silvers in 2010 at Vancouver. (
My thoughts on silver medals are here. They're not kind.)
I mentioned the World Cup, so let's point out that in 2010, Spain, appearing in its first-ever World Cup final, defeated Netherlands 1-0 in extra time. The Netherlands were making their third appearance in the World Cup finals -- and even with that "advantage" (plus
cheating) they couldn't win.
Logically -- or at least anecdotally, and anecdotal evidence was enough to support the Reagan Revolution, so let's go with it -- it would seem that
having been there before has little, if any, impact on a bigtime sporting event.
But to
really test it, I decided to actually look at past Super Bowls and see how many first-time teams won the game.
The Packers, of course, won Super Bowl 1 -- but people will scoff and say that they'd been in
championships before and so were experienced, so let's throw that out. Of the 44 Super Bowls since that one, teams with a prior Super Bowl appearance of any kind won six of the first 7, with the first
novice winner actually being the Steelers in Super Bowl IX, beating the Vikings, who'd been there the year before (and lost.)
Then, it's all "experienced" teams again until Super Bowl XVI - which paired
two first-timers, the 49ers and Bengals, so we have to throw that out. But a first-timer, the Redskins, won it the next year, so through the first 17, it's
Novices: 3 Experience: 12 Uncounted games: 2
Experience goes on a run of wins then, with two first-timers through Super Bowl XXV -- but those teams would go on to win again in short order, so through 25 it's
Novices: 5 Experience: 18 Uncounted games: 2
Looks bad for me and good for "analysts," right? The trend continues through 37:
Novices: 9 Experience: 26 Uncounted games: 2
The final seven finish up with only 2 wins for first-timers, so the overall tally is
Novices: 11 Experience: 31 Uncounted games: 2
Which seems bad for my hypothesis, but remember,
that tally counts
any prior Super Bowl appearance as "experience," which isn't really the case: when Brett Favre's Green Bay Packers went to back-to-back Super Bowls in the 1990s, did Bart Starr's Green Bay Packers' experience in I and II matter at all? Did the Indianapolis Colts' victory under Peyton Manning rely on the 1970s' Colts' two Super Bowl experiences?
Recounting, but counting
experience only for teams having been there in the previous five years (and including the two games thrown out previously) the
new tally is this:
Novices: 18 Experience: 26 Even if I throw out the only Super Bowl to pair two first-time teams -- 49ers-Bengals-- it's still novices 17, experience 26. That hardly seems to weigh
heavily in favor of experience, although it's something.
That analysis, I know, doesn't include
players who have been there before, and
coaches who have been there before. Frankly, I have no way of knowing how many players on the 49ers-Steve Young team that won were holdovers from the 80s' dynasty. But that bring up an interesting question: what about teams that were
just there. How do teams do in
back-to-back Super Bowls? Surely, that experience would help them the next year, having
just been there, and presumably having the same (or almost the same) team.
There have been 8 back-to-back Super Bowl wins -- by six teams. There have, in the same time, been only 3 back-to-back losses -- including the 4 in a row by Buffalo in the 1990s, a strong argument that just
having been there before isn't enough. (But sportscasters don't mean
having been there before and won, because they never say that.) And only twice has a team gone to the Super Bowl, lost, and then gone back to win it the next year. (Dallas in V and VI, Miami in VI and VII. The Colts lost Super Bowl III and won V, so that may count, too, but it's never happened in the free agency era, for whatever reason you want to ascribe to that.
So
just being there isn't enough;
being there recently and winning counts for something, but not all that much, while
having been there before historically seems to count for quite a lot -- oddly enough...
... or not oddly enough, since it's possible that
historic wins in the Super Bowl actually indicate a lot more about the
organization than the particular team playing. If individual experience in big events -- the Olympics-- doesn't matter, and collective experience in big events like the World Cup doesn't help, why does
historic success seem to matter so much in the Super Bowl (and the World Series, and the NBA?)
Maybe because the
team organization plays into how a team does at the next level. NFL teams (and all pro teams, outside of baseball) are largely the same in terms of talent: as the Seahawks-Saints and Bears-Packers games show, there's not that big a talent gap between "7-9" and "Defending Super Bowl champion," and not that big a gap between "Championship Belt Putting On Record Mogul" and "Who's That Guy?"
But at the playoff level -- and the Super Bowl is the biggest playoff, because teams that lose the Super Bowl are deemed to be
not second place finishers, but
awful teams (ask yourself what you think of Jim Kelly's Bills, who essentially won four straight silver medals) -- the talent levels are the same, so something else separates the winners from the losers, and that something may be the organization itself.
Ten of 32 NFL teams have multiple Super Bowl wins; 8 of those 10 are typically seen as having good management structures. (The 9th is the Redskins, who
used to been seen that way and haven't won anything lately; the 10th is the Raiders. God only knows how
they managed it, but they haven't been good lately, either.) Good management means good front-office executives, good talent scouts, good coaches, and good discipline at all levels of the team. It means that your players are less likely to get arrested and more likely to pay attention in meetings -- and a commitment to excellence such as that demonstrated by the Colts, who are regulars in the postseason and have two Super Bowl appearances in this decade.
The Colts were managed by Tony Dungy, and when they won the Super Bowl, the players were so fanatically devoted to winning -- and being organized -- that players stayed in a separate hotel from their wives during that year.
That can be the difference between winning and losing a Super Bowl -- maybe: teams that expect professionalism on the biggest stage of the game and
get it, while teams that are
just happy to be there or poorly run don't have as much hope. The Bengals are notorious for having poor management, and they lost the only two Super Bowls they lucked into, and haven't been back for decades. The Bills had good management, and went to four straight -- and their manager then jumped to Indy, who began winning regularly. The Cowboys had two legendary coaches and a commitment to discipline, and won Super Bowls as if it were easy. Then Jerry Jones took over and began meddling, and they have
one win since that era.
Judging by
that standard, what's the
experience that counts in XLV? The Steelers have been to the big game 7 times, the Packers four -- with the Steelers having much more recent experience. That argues for an
institutional edge -- a possibility that the Steelers' structure is such that its players can handle the rigors of this game because they were selected for just that by an organization that instills that kind of discipline in the players it selects. And notwithstanding
this and
this and
this, that's the appearance the Steelers' organization has to most people... not that the Packers lack that, but they haven't shown as much
institutional success as the Steelers have, which argues that as an organization, the Packers simply aren't set up to win as much as the Steelers are set up to win.
And that point holds up. Consider that the Patriots* were on a winning trend for many years under Belicheat, only to then have most of their postseason success fall away once it became widely known that not only had the Patriots* cheated, but that the organization was okay with that -- keeping Belicheat and most of the rest of the staff on. The Packers, after years of floundering, built up an organization that had a great deal of success in the 1990s, and then changed their structure and coaching, putting in first former GM/Head Coach Mike "Mike" Sherman and then Ted Thompson and Mike "Mike" McCarthy -- and getting caught up in personal politics with Brett Favre. While the Packers have been relatively scandal free -- consider how few people know who Johnny Jolly is compared to how many have heard about Ben Roethlisberger, who's never been charged -- the Packers have players like Nick Barnett and Jermichael Finley, complaining about not getting their day in the spotlight even though they're injured, and causing controversy that the coaches and team leaders then keep going, while the
worst scandal the Steelers have generated this year is PianoGate.
When the Bills lost all those Super Bowls, they had some personnel problems: they employed James Lofton, who'd had some problems in Green Bay, and Thurman Thomas was well-known for being a me-first kind of player. The 49ers, meanwhile, had a great organization during the 1980s and excelled -- but when ownership changed, they fell down, too.
It may not be the salary cap, or the coach, or the individual players
per se who determine how many Super Bowls you win. It might be
the organizational structure, the team's commitment not just to
winning but to finding, training, and keeping players who want not just to
win but to do it right -- to avoid distractions and focus on football and be professionals.
Which, if true, means that whichever team brings home the Lombardi Trophy tomorrow -- my prediction is Packers 29, Steelers 21 -- the
true credit
should go to the front office. So, Ted Thompson,
get ready to Do The Raji.
