“My team is 2-0… should I order my Super Bowl tix?”

Image:Wilsonnflfootball.jpg, modified to have ...

Image via Wikipedia

Sports Stats ‘on Tapp’ is a biweekly blog published every Wednesday and Friday with a bonus “SIX STATS…” posting every Friday.

Two games does not an NFL season make, and it may not be enough to prompt some fans to go out and purchase Super Bowl tickets or give up on their team’s chances for the 2011 campaign, but what does two games into the season tell us? More importantly, can past history predict if the Super Bowl champs this year will come from the teams that are now 2-0, those at 1-1, or those still looking for their first win of 2011?

In looking at the past 45 Super Bowl champions, we discover that 30 of them (66.7%) were 2-0 in the first two games of their championship season. Ten of the teams had one win and one loss, three teams were 0-2, and two teams had one win and a tie after their first two games.

WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG FOR A TRIVIA QUESTION: Can you name the last team to start the season 0-2 and win the Super Bowl that year? Answer at the end of the blog.

This year after two weeks of the season we are already down to only seven undefeated teams at 2-0 (Buffalo, Detroit, Green Bay, Houston, New England, New York Jets and Washington). Time will tell if all, any, or some of the seven make the playoffs, but over the past five seasons we’ve seen that close to half of the playoff teams have been 2-0 after Week Two. Of the 60 playoff teams from the five seasons spanning 2006-2010, 29 teams were 2-0, 26 were 1-1, and only five teams that started 0-2 made the playoffs in the last five seasons. Note: In the last two NFL seasons (2009 and 2010) no 0-2 team made the playoffs in those years.

Including this season and going back another five seasons, two teams have started 2-0 in four of those six years, most in the NFL: the New England Patriots, and the Green Bay Packers. Four teams, Cleveland, Oakland, Philadelphia and St. Louis have no 2-0 starts in the last six NFL seasons.

TRIVIA ANSWER: The 2007 New York Giants started the season 0-2 and won the Super Bowl that year.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: