That is not true. The Buccaneers’ stretch of 26 in a row is a 1 in 67 million shot in flipping coins. There haven’t been 67 million football games played in every pro football league and college conference ever. Even the Lions’ current 19-gamer is a one in 524,288 shot, and there haven’t been anywhere near that many games played in the history of the NFL. To play that many games they would’ve had to be playing 32-team, 16-game seasons since about the time Julius Caesar was assassinated.
Indeed, even if you were to weight the coin - say, make the chances of a loss 3 in 4 - the odds of losing 19 in a row are less than half of one percent.
You have to be a really, really, really bad team to lose 19 in a row.
Except it is not a coin flip. The LIons are picked to lose and are generally 7 to 14 points underdog reflecting the relative crappiness of their teams.
Fifty /fifty is more that people think. If you flip 100 coins, and remove the heads every time until you are down to 2, you will see that some coins in a 50/50 will come up tails 5 or 6 in a row. If your sample is big enough, 50/50 is a Bell curve.
You forget though, that what you have to look at is not the statistics you quote. The issue is: how many possible combinations of 26 straight games have been played, and how many of those combinations have resulted in 26 straight same results. I’m not saying that the overall conclusion of the first poster is correct, just that the math you’ve suggested to debunk it isn’t appropriate.
So here’s a question: could the Lions (clearly the worst NFL team) be beat by the best high school football team in the US (whom I have no clue who that is)? How about the best college team?
No and no. Even the lowly Lions are essentially a collection of college all stars, who are much closer to their peak football ages, at every single position. I don’t know what the spread would be, but my off the cuff prediction would be something like Detroit 56, Florida 10.
Er… the math I suggested was one hundred percent correct to debunk what I was replying to. Allow me to requote the stated claim:
This is simply false. If you treat football games as a coin toss then the W/L expection of any game is treated as 50%. That means that the statement is false; given the number of games played in all of history, assuming coin flip results, you absolutely would NOT expect to see streaks longer than what we have actually seen (a 26-game losing streak has happened.) If you treat all NFL games as coin flips, a 26-game losing streak would not be expected to happen more than once every 250,000 years, assuming you keep playing with 32 teams playing 16 games each.
That such losing streaks have happened is because NFL games aren’t coin flips; it is in fact possible to assemble a team awful enough to lose many games in a row.
The Lions have most certainly not been a coin flip. They are getting 6 1/2 pts this week and are at home. That is more like being a 10 point dog. They are getting points every game. So the coin flip analogy does not work.
Hmm, the Lions a touchdown dog at home against a team that beat the rams by 2 points. Money is tight this season and I told myself I wouldn’t be throwing down sports bets, but… damn.
Assuming they remain unvictorious until then, the Lions will have to lose to the Vikings on November 15 to tie Tampa Bay’s record and then lose to the Browns the following week to set a new record.
At long last the Lions have gone from being embarassingly inept and godawful and return to their glory days of being merely pathetic.
Ummmmm…yay?
And to further rub salt in the wounds of the Washington Redskins, this didn’t look like a professional football game as as much as it did the Lions scrimmaging against themselves.
Woo. This fucking sucks. We get congratulated for winning a game. This kind of shit should be expected 8 times a year on average. Because it’s an average, then that means we’re going to have a decade of absolute domination over everything NFL-related.
Fuck. Couldn’t even watch the game.
The reason I picked the Lions this week is that Washington has looked pathetic, while the Lions showed some signs of life. It’s not like they’re actually good, but I think they aren’t the worst team in the league right now.
