Lagartixa
Well-known member
There are 32 teams in the NFL. Sample sizes, especially in the playoffs, are tiny. "On any given Sunday" and all that, y'know? Just one game. So the chances of even a very strong team like this year's Bills or the 2013 Seahawks winning a Super Bowl aren't all that great.
Let's talk a little about unbalanced data. Let's take the simplest case of something with two outcomes. Let's say a given person having or not having some disease. And let's say the disease is rare. For simplicity, let's say that we expect there to be one person with the disease out of every 10,000 persons. Now let's say you want to predict, based on other available data (e.g., symptoms, demographics, geography, exposure to possible risk factors, etc.), whether a given person has the disease. How would you measure the quality of your predictor? Accuracy might come to mind - how often is your predictor right? Seems logical, right? Yeah, well in this example, the accuracy of the predictor is a terrible measure of how it's doing, especially if the disease has serious consequences if not treated. Why?
In this example, take a predictor that in every case, no matter what, just says "this person doesn't have the disease." That stupid predictor has 99.99% accuracy. It's only wrong in a single person out of every 10,000. But if the disease kills or severely harms without treatment, everyone who has the disease will die or be severely harmed. Statisticians recognized this a long time ago, and that's why there are other measures of predictor quality that are better for cases like this, usually involving combinations of the true-positive, true-negative, false-positive, and false-negative rates of the predictor.
Getting back to football and the Seahawks, there are a lot of ways a team can fail to win a Super Bowl in a given season. The team can be bad. The team can be reasonably good but not make the playoffs, or it can make the playoffs and just be beaten by better teams. The team can be great, but lose key players to injury. The team can be really good but just have a bad day in a playoff game due to one or more injuries, a bad matchup with the opponent that day, a lucky bounce or two, one or more bad calls or no-calls (coffcofframsvssaintsinplayoffsafter2018seasoncoffcoff), one or more players on the team just having a bad day, some player on the opposing team playing out of his mind and having a career day, or many other possible factors. So even a really good team doesn't have that much chance of winning a Super Bowl in a given season. No matter how good the team is, if you just predict "the team won't win a title this season," you're significantly more likely to be right than wrong.
The .NET Eeyores know this, and they use it to try to look smart. They cherry-pick data to make arguments that, for example (and it's a common example around here), Pete Carroll is a bad coach, and they conclude with something along the lines of "as long as Carroll is here, the Seahawks won't win another Super Bowl." Their chances of being right about the conclusion are really good, even if the arguments and reasoning used to justify the conclusion (not to reach the conclusion- they start with the conclusion and find arguments to support it) are specious or worse.
When most Seahawks fans are excited about growth and development on the team, or just about a good game, each of the Eeyores tries to look like the smartest person in the virtual room by citing a bunch of cherry-picked information and stating a negative conclusion like "the Seahawks won't make the playoffs this season" (in 2022) or, in just about any season, "the Seahawks won't make a deep playoff run as long as Pete Carroll is around." As I've stated, such predictions are more likely to be correct than incorrect even for a good team with a good coach, so then the Eeyores can come in and say "see? I told you!"
When something happens that surprises everyone, like just how much Wilson has been sucking in Denver and just how well Smith and the Seahawks offense have been doing in 2022, the Eeyores just move the goalposts, again, to be able to try to convince somebody (maybe us, maybe themselves
) "see? I was right!" Watching "Failed" (with an "I" and the big fat "L" the Seahawks laid on the Wilson Broncos) repeatedly change the subject and grasp for things to criticize this season has gotten pretty damn funny. For years he's been telling us that Carroll was holding Wilson back, and that the way to go was to dump Carroll, invest in Wilson, and watch the titles roll in. Then, before this season started, he told us the Seahawks were a terribly run organization, while the Broncos had been doing everything right. When Wilson without Carroll turned out to be a below-NFL-average QB and Geno Smith played as a top-five QB for the first third of the season, "Failed" leapt into action to credit all success to Waldron and blame the defense's poor performance on Carroll. That's his basic rule - everything good that happens for the Seahawks is due to somebody other than Carroll - for years, it was Wilson, but that explanation isn't available anymore - and the blame for anything bad belongs completely to Carroll. Then when the Seahawks defense played well against the Cardinals, while the offense fell back to still-way-better-than-Denver's-offense's-best-game levels, he blamed Carroll for that.
