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Even Nate Silver's Statistics Are Good Liars

The FiveThirtyEight section of ESPN.com's home page has had a hilarious piece of self-parody clickbait on display for about a week now. I didn't read anything but the headline, which was enough.

"The 2007 Patriots Were the Greatest Team in NFL History."

I can only imagine how many advanced metric trees were cited to disprove the idea that the forest of Super Bowl XLII had any historical significance. Silver's a big success and his own writing usually has a grip on logic, but in this mass marketing age, it seems even mathematics need a slatepitch to grab eyeballs.

Like any good clickbait, I assume this nonsense contained a list. In it, I suppose the runners-up for greatest team in pro football history were the 1968 Colts and 2001 Rams.

posted by Michael Gee @ 6:14 AM