Here’s an excellent article by my favorite football blogger and college differential equations professor, Doug Drinen. It sums up a concept that’s been popping up in sports a lot recently: people often make too much out of nothing. We see a hitting hot streak and assume the batter has made an improvement. We think winning a best-of-seven World Series proves one team is better. We think an awesome vacation will make us immeasurably happy.
Doug’s begins his article by answering the basic question, “what is the probability of randomly drafting 14th out of 14 teams over three straight seasons. The easy answer is (1/14)^3 and it’s technically correct. But as is often the case, the problem lies in the question, not the answer to it.
Would you be as amazed if the person picked 10th out of 10 three straight years? Picked first three straight years? Picked at the same position three straight years? Probably not quite as intriguing, but including all those unlikely scenarios together makes the likelihood of any of them occurring much more probable. And what if you noticed this question was posted on a message board? Are you as amazed that it happened to one person out of the thousands that read the message board? Or maybe the person who it happened to doesn’t read message boards, but a friend in the league does and posted it in his stead?
The point is that an uncountable number of things happen to everybody each day. Unlikely things are bound to happen. Keep some perspective and don’t assume it necessarily means anything or is as unlikely as you might think. Read Doug’s article. He states it better than me (although you can feel free to skip over his advanced math.)
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.