The Case For and Against All Those Early Super Bowl Predictions

Two Relish editors on opposite ends of the debate take on those Super Bowl 2017 picks

Hanna Fogel’s Anti-Predictions Take:

I hate premature sports predictions. There, I said it. So many people (pundits, fans, and everyone in between) are making their Super Bowl picks now, before the NFL regular season has even officially started, and I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m jaded after what happened to my hometown Colts last year — picked as Super Bowl contenders, then Andrew Luck went down (and even before that wasn’t playing up to his usual standard) and the team ended up going 8–8.

Preseason games don’t really help anyone make educated guesses. Take the Colts again: they’re one of the winningest teams in the NFL over the past 10–15 years (they may only have one Super Bowl ring to show for it, but it’s become an expectation in Indy to at least make the playoffs, which is more than many other teams can say). Yet they are notorious for losing most of their preseason games in that same timespan, perhaps because rosters are so fluid up until the very last minute.

At this stage we’re starting with an almost-blank slate — there might be some carryover from last year, or if the team did a total rebuild you can perhaps speculate on how it will gel on the field, but those projections aren’t always accurate either. Back to my Colts: they went 2–14 in the 2011 season, only to turn around and go 11–5 and make the playoffs in Luck’s rookie year (and that of several other Colts), all while first-year head coach Chuck Pagano was fighting off leukemia.

Which brings up another point — there is no way to predict what’ll happen in a season healthwise. Whether it’s a coach falling ill or an athlete going down, we’ve all seen how these things can significantly affect a team. You could argue that Pagano’s illness rallied the team to fight for him, whereas when Luck got hurt last year, as decent as QB Matt Hasselbeck was when he stepped in, it still felt pretty demoralizing, particularly because Luck had looked like his old self that day against the Broncos before his kidney was lacerated.

Great athletes seem to figure out a way to shine no matter what situation they’re in, and their raw abilities tend to transfer over from practices and preseason games better than the team’s identity as a whole.

But even then, sometimes players that are expected to be great (or at least do well) don’t play the way they’re expected to, which can contribute to the doom of an entire season (see: Andre Johnson on the Colts last year, and Trent Richardson before that). Predicting a particular team’s game-by-game record is a bit more plausible, but even that seems like a stretch to me. Personally, I’ll be watching this season unfold as it happens and adjusting my expectations accordingly. Let’s talk in five months.

Rachel Shuster’s Pro-Prediction Take:

Sorry, Hanna, you have tossed away a golden chance at some fun like a Mark Sanchez fumble.

Speaking of Sanchez’s former, albeit briefly, team, the Broncos WILL NOT repeat as Super Bowl champions. You heard it here first. Not exactly going out on a limb with that prediction, given their murky QB situation, but not even their sterling defense will bail them out this time.

See how easy that was? So now I’ll step it up and predict the New England Patriots, driven on a mission to deflate the NFL front office by forcing the Commish to hand over that Vince Lombardi Trophy, will defeat the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl LI — and that’s no lie. Aaron Rodgers has his trusty WR Jordy Nelson back from injury, and Clay Matthews and Julius Peppers are on their own mission to cauterize wounds to their integrity from a bogus media report the NFL felt obligated to investigate. (Plus, Rodgers will show America that he’s the REAL bachelor with clout.)

OK, now that we have that out of the way, I’m going to explain why people make Super Bowl predictions without a shred of scientific evidence to back them up.

…It’s F-U-N!

Where else can you make outlandish predictions without the consequences mattering more than some good-natured egg on the face? The stock market? The weather? The presidential election? (Ok, there’s plenty of egg on the face there to feed the Electoral College.)

What is Fantasy Football or any Fantasy sport about than proving who’s the best at predicting? THAT has become the national pastime more than anything.

And why? Because in this age of information at the touch of a pinky on keyboard, we all believe we have the smarts to field and manage a team to rival the likes of the Theo Epsteins and Ted Thompsons—and certainly the Jerry Jones!

Now, no one can predict injuries, not even the great David Copperfield. But the magic in making predictions is that if your chosen team really, truly falls off the face of the NFL map by injury, you simply disappear — into the next sport season to predict.

(Did I hear someone chant, “Here we go Warriors, here we go”?)