Competition: The Less Than Super Part of the Super Bowl

A physicist at Boston University has some surprising news for the 90 million people who will spend much of tomorrow night waiting for commercial breaks in the Super Bowl to get up and  go to the bathroom: the game is not that exciting. At least, it’s not that exciting if excitement = likelihood of an upset. As this piece in BU Today reports, Sidney Redner and colleagues crunched
a century’s worth of numbers, more than 300,000 games from the National
Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League
Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the English Premier League
(soccer), to determine the relative competitiveness of each sport. The
researchers based the notion of competitiveness on the probability of
an upset victory by the team with a lesser record of wins and losses.
And when it comes to this measure of competitiveness, it turns out, the
NFL comes up a loser, with a 36.4 percent chance of an upset in any
given game. What the most competitive game? Soccer. In that sport, Redner found, the underdog
pulls off a victory 45.2 percent of the time.