According to Andrew Sullivan, a political commentator named Michael Graham wrote,
I am so confident of both a Patriots win today and a Romney win in Massachusetts on Tuesday that I made this pledge on the air Friday: ‘If the NY Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl, I will vote cast my Super Duper Tuesday primary vote for (shudder) John McCain.
But . . . the Patriots were favored by 14 points, and if you look up “football” in the index of Bayesian Data Analysis, you’ll see that football point spreads are accurate to within a standard deviation of 14 points, with the discrepancy being approximately normally distributed. So, a 14-point underdog has something like a 15% chance of winning. It’s funny how people don’t get this sort of thing.
On the other hand, his pledge is nonenforceable so it’s no big deal.
I always think it's funny how often something is claimed to be the "biggest upset in [football/baseball/tennis/soccer/basketball/boxing] history", and then you look and find that the betting odds or the implied odds were 5:1 against or something of that order. Admittedly, there aren't all that many sporting events where the odds are a lot bigger than 5:1, so these opportunities don't come up all that often. But when they DO come up, the underdog wins A SIXTH OF THE TIME! It's just not all that shocking!
In the case of the Patriots/Giants Super Bowl, I haven't heard the "biggest upset" claim, but I'm sure somebody out there is making it.
Several ESPN "analysts" were making "the biggest upset claim." Stupid.
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It's interesting that football spreads are that accurate. The spread-setter's goal is to get an equal number of people betting on each side. If too many people bet on one side of the spread, the spread moves away from that side. The result is a sort of wisdom of the masses.
It's as if the betting public is better informed on football issues than the home-buying public was on interest rates.
The odds of the giants winning that were implied by the price of "Giants win the superbowl" contracts at tradesports were just about 20%
It would be interesting to see using one of those sites what sporting event outcomes had the lowest implied probability of occurring.
Still, if the Giants had only a 15-20% chance of winning I would not have made the bet. Particularly as a wildcard. This could be "one of the biggest upsets."