Justin Verlander’s Super Bowl XLVI pick was perfect: Giants 21, Patriots 17

Good skepticism Mark! There is hope on Yahoo.

Love that book. It just turns out the picker was the AL Cy Young award winner. Crazy!

The thing is, the birthday paradox problem and predicting football scores are
pretty different.

The birthday paradox implies a uniform distribution over all 365 days of the year and says that we only need 23 people in the room to be 50% sure they have the same birthday.
To be 50% sure that you and another person in the room (not random two people) share a same birthday, you need far more people-
253. But one in 253 is still doable.

The football scores, even if we assume that neither team scores more than 70 points, aren't uniform to predict. There are 70*70=4900 different combinations, of which we can cut 140, that arent possible (i.e. all those like 36 - 1 and 1 - 20, because you cant score 1 point in football)

That still leaves 4500+ combinations, in which the most obscure ones will rarely be mentioned.

For example, the Giants won over the Falcons, 24-2, I believe.

The odds will lead one to believe that 1 in 5000 people got that right, but the distribution isnt uniform,
and given the fact that such a score triggers two unlikely events (one- a safety by a particular team+ no scores besides the safety)
the real probability that someone got the score right is closer to something like one in 250,000 or even worse.

A score of something like 12-4 or 10-62 is even less possible for people to guess correctly, since it implies even more improbable events that
deviate a ton from 'normal', statistically 'usual' scores.

everyone?

There's nothing remotely unusual about 21-17. 21 is a very common score.. 17 is a very common score. 3 touchdowns and 3 extra points gets you to 21. Two touchdowns, 2 extra points, and a field goal get you to 17. Yes, they way the Giants reached 21 was a bit odd, but 21 in and of itself is not remotely odd.

Sport, I get the feeling StatMan was being extremely sarcastic because it's not a very difficult prediction to make. That being said, Statman, if you were to actually predict the score for every NFL game in a season, you'd be lucky to get one right. Just because you pick an obvious score doesn't mean it will actually happen. I'm always impressed when somebody predicts a score correct because you rarely ever see somebody do it.

Pittsburgh defeated Dallas 21-17 at the end of the 1975 season. The Steelers also scored their 21 winning points in odd fashion.

I never post on these things, but I was looking for someone else who saw a blatant grammatical error in the first sentence. Kudos, colleague.

Good point. Not the most common way to 21.