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Facing a team 3 times (1 Viewer)

mydixie

Footballguy
I hear, all the time, from the talking heads that "It is very hard to beat a team 3x in 1 season". Getting past the fact that facing a team 3x in 1 season is hard to do, and that if a team beat another twice during the regular season the loser probably didn't make the playoffs. Does anyone have any stats on the 3rd meeting? I am guessing that some talking head said this years ago and the rest of the sheep have been repeating it ever since.

 
Yep. I can pull the stats in a bit but if IIRC the team that won the first two times is something like 9-7 in the third time.

The notable memory for me is always the '99 Jags and Titans. Jags went 15-3 with all three losses coming to Tennessee. I'm not so sure Coughlin really wants to see the Titans in the Super Bowl :popcorn: .

 
Blog post from last year

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. Teams, like this year’s Cowboys, who have the better record and were therefore playing at home, are 9-3 when trying to beat a team three times in a season. Here’s the data:

Code:
+------+-------+-----------+-------+-----------+-----+-------+| year | team1 | t1_record | team2 | t2_record | loc | score |+------+-------+-----------+-------+-----------+-----+-------+| 2004 | GNB   | 10-6-0	| MIN   | 8-8-0	 | H   | 17-31 || 2004 | STL   | 8-8-0	 | SEA   | 9-7-0	 | R   | 27-20 || 2002 | PIT   | 10-5-1	| CLE   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 36-33 || 2000 | NYG   | 12-4-0	| PHI   | 11-5-0	| H   | 20-10 || 1999 | TEN   | 13-3-0	| JAX   | 14-2-0	| R   | 33-14 || 1998 | DAL   | 10-6-0	| ARI   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 7-20  || 1997 | NWE   | 10-6-0	| MIA   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 17-3  || 1997 | GNB   | 13-3-0	| TAM   | 10-6-0	| H   | 21-7  || 1994 | PIT   | 12-4-0	| CLE   | 11-5-0	| H   | 29-9  || 1994 | MIN   | 10-6-0	| CHI   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 18-35 || 1993 | RAI   | 10-6-0	| DEN   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 42-24 || 1992 | KAN   | 10-6-0	| SDG   | 11-5-0	| R   | 0-17  || 1991 | KAN   | 10-6-0	| RAI   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 10-6  || 1989 | HOU   | 9-7-0	 | PIT   | 9-7-0	 | H   | 23-26 || 1986 | NYG   | 14-2-0	| WAS   | 12-4-0	| H   | 17-0  || 1983 | SEA   | 9-7-0	 | RAI   | 12-4-0	| R   | 14-30 || 1982 | MIA   | 7-2-0	 | NYJ   | 6-3-0	 | H   | 14-0  |+------+-------+-----------+-------+-----------+-----+-------+
 
Yep. I can pull the stats in a bit but if IIRC the team that won the first two times is something like 9-7 in the third time.
In other words, it is NOT difficult to beat a team three times in a year.
Well, yes and no. It depends on how you define difficult, of course. But a team which has lost twice to another team, has a reason to change its game plan substantially. Whereas a team which has beaten another one twice, thinks it has found the formula, and can do it a third time.
 
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An interesting aside to this is that the only way two teams match up three times is they are both playoff teams and from the same division.

That means that both are 9-7 or better (as Doug pointed out, only one non-strike 8-8 team was in this mix, and several teams had 10+ wins as a wildcard). This means that the other team is 9-5 or better against the rest of the NFL and is a pretty darn good team - that's how they got into the postseason.

It's the familiarity and the matchups between divisional foes that matter. If a team "has the other's number", there's usually a matchup problem. That also is highly unlikely to go away in the third meeting.

 
In third meetings where the two teams split the first two games. there is nearly a 100% chance that the winner of the game will have won one of the earlier meetings, as well.

 
Yep. This is a falacy. The reason why it is so hard for a team to beat another team 3 times is it is relatively rare that a team faces a division opponent they've already beaten twice in the playoffs.

When it does happen, the team that was 2-0 usually wins the third meeting.

 
Ask Dallas of last year how their 3rd meeting vs the Giants went.
:D the difference this time around is that the Ravens' defense looks susceptible to big running plays..Chris Johnson was shredding that defense before he got hurt,as a result, FWP should have loads of success against the Raven's !Can't imagine Baltimore winning this game...so there goes the 'tough to beat the same opponent 3 times in one season' theory. :thumbup:
 
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Tanner9919 said:
Ask Dallas of last year how their 3rd meeting vs the Giants went.
:excited: the difference this time around is that the Ravens' defense looks susceptible to big running plays..Chris Johnson was shredding that defense before he got hurt,as a result, FWP should have loads of success against the Raven's !Can't imagine Baltimore winning this game...so there goes the 'tough to beat the same opponent 3 times in one season' theory. :goodposting:
I am a Steelers homer and I can certainly imagine Baltimore beating the Steelers. This is going to be a tough, physical game. Turnovers are going to be key. If the Steelers don't shoot themselves in the foot they have a great shot at winning the game but it ain't going to be easy.
 
Steelers did this to the then Browns, now Ravens the year before the Super Bowl loss I think. That team is about to get beaten 3 times again! :goodposting:

 

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