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The New England Patriots celebrated their victory with their fans back home in Boston yesterday.
Atlanta apparently has hired a new offensive coordinator as coach Dan Quinn appears close to demoting the defensive coordinator who helped orchestrate his team’s late collapse.
The draft, mini-camps and a long summer is in front of football fans until their next taste of real action next September.
But upon closer look, there was so much to savor from Super Bowl LI that the staying power of the game should resonate as one of the greatest in NFL history. And it was played less than 72 hours ago.
The Patriots’ wild overtime victory smashed probability models as they came from the largest Super Bowl deficit in history and tied the record for an NFL playoff game.
An interesting article by J.J. Zachariason on the website numbersense.com shows how the game made a mockery of the win probability tables that usually are right as a game plays out.
The website reports that a win probability model’s goal is to provide odds of a team winning or losing a game at any point during that game. To figure that out, an algorithm is created to calculate the win probability added (or lost) after each play.
Wild plays like Hail Mary passes or pick-six touchdowns can dramatically swing those models around.
Midway though the third quarter when Atlanta was ahead 28-3 the charts gave the Falcons a 97.62% chance to win the game.
Zachariason reports that over the last 20 years, only two NFL teams rebounded to win a game where it trailed by 25 or more points at any time in the third quarter. The first one was Indianapolis, coming back against Kansas City in the 2014 wild-card game. The other one was Sunday night.
Putting the numbers in a more definite context, 422 NFL games during the past 20 years had a team down by at least 25 in the third quarter. Two teams came back, for a 0.46% chance.
It got even weirder late in the game.
After New England reeled off 17 unanswered the ball, the Falcons still had the ball with an eight- point lead. And when Julio Jones made his circus catch on the sidelines place Atlanta on the New England 22 with 4:40 left in the game. The win probability at that time was a solid 96.55%.
Numbersense has another wild statistic that will cause Dan Quinn to wake up in the middle of the night screaming the next few weeks. Since 1997, only three teams have lost a game after being up by at least eight points within an opponents’ 25-yard line with five minutes to go. And it hasn’t happened since 1997.
But New England’s comeback, in terms of history, might rank as the most dramatic in NFL history.
Bill Belichick’s team kept beating odds repeatedly throughout the second half.
Until at the end of the game, they were the ones who were clutching the Lombardi Trophy as the winners of their fifth NFL championship.
Tgriffin@express-news.net
Twitter: @TimGriffinBig12
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