I'm with you on it being difficult having faith in this team. I have a feeling they will think they have the game won because they already beat Cuse 2x this season. Hope Johnson is able to play to at least have a little threat of an outside shot.
We have a good chance to go 3-0 against Cuse according to this NFL blogger and his football analogy. So lets hope for the best since we have some NFL statistical backup to support our "hail mary" hopes!
Posted by Doug on January 8, 2008
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Does the Bye Week Increase Home Field Advantage?
Quick Pro Bowl note »
An email from a good buddy of mine (and occasional commenter here):
i am so sick and tired of hearing "its so hard to beat a team three times in a season". idiots. yes, going 3-0 vs a playoff team is hard. BUT NOT IF YOU SPOT TEAM A TWO GAMES YOU MORONS.
He's right, of course. This is essentially the same reason why black isn't necessarily a good bet on a roulette wheel that's come up red on the last ten spins. Yes, it's incredibly unlikely for a wheel to land on red on eleven straight spins, but
given that it's already landed on red for the last ten spins, it's not at all unlikely for it to land on red for the eleventh. Likewise, before the season, the Cowboys beating the Giants three times would have been something of a longshot. But now that they've already done two-thirds of the work, it's not.
Anyone making the hard-to-beat-a-team-three-times claim probably is suffering from a failure to understand conditional probability, but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong. Football games are not roulette wheels. In particular, they're not independent. Maybe teams learn more from losses than from wins, or something like that, and it really
is hard to beat a team three times, even if you've already beat them twice. That's an empirical question. Let's check it out.
Since the merger, there have been 17 instances of a team trying to beat another team thrice in a season. In 11 of those cases, the team succeeded.
