Regardless, Brady’s seven rings are remarkable. There is no way to find a precise number. In other words, the estimated probability of another Tom Brady coming along between now and 2075 is roughly 0.01% – the odds are around 1 in 10,000. One yielded a probability of 15 in 100,000 the other a probability of 5 in 100,000. But Wyner suggested two methods to get an estimate. The question he finds most interesting: If we played another 55 NFL seasons, how likely is it that at least one more player will win seven Super Bowls?Ĭalculating that probability is near-impossible. That’s one of the reasons Wyner, the Penn professor, suggests a different approach. So if a player wins one Super Bowl in a given season, his odds of winning a second next year aren’t 1/32 – they’re higher.īut it would be extremely difficult to approximate how much higher, and inject that variability into a mathematical model. It’s necessary to enable the calculations. The more important caveat is that the assumption mentioned above – that the player’s Super Bowl odds in a given season are 1/32 – isn’t a realistic one. So, four times more likely – but still ridiculously improbable. The probability that one of them would win seven or more Super Bowls? Rather than use the 2000 draft class as our sample for career-length data, we used all QBs drafted from 1985-2004. "If it's not a quarterback, it's not gonna happen,” says Abraham Wyner, a stats professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. They’re more likely to yield several Super Bowls. QB careers last longer than the average player’s.
The first caveat to those minuscule probabilities is that they wouldn’t be quite as small once we know that the random player is a quarterback. In other words, an average NFL player who spent 21 seasons in the league would have a 0.00023% chance of doing what Tom Brady has done. The answer, he says, is roughly 36 million.Īnd three experts – including Severini and Mark Glickman, a statistics professor at Harvard – independently came up with another mind-blowing number: Even if you were to guarantee that the randomly selected player would have a 21-year NFL career, the theoretical probability of that player winning seven-plus Super Bowls is 1 in 435,119 – or 2.3 in a million. Thomas Severini, a statistics professor at Northwestern University, suggested framing the results with a different question: How many players would need to be drafted for there to be a 50% chance of one winning at least seven Super Bowls? But multiple statistics professors confirmed its validity to Yahoo Sports. The actual math is ridiculously complex – think equations with 80-plus characters. The model showed that the theoretical probability of winning at least one Super Bowl was 15.38%. And we asked stats whiz Vince Jansen to build a model that would tell us the likelihood of a random player winning at least seven rings. We made the (overly simplistic) assumption that an average player’s Super Bowl odds in a given season are 1/32.
#VII SUPER PLAYER PRO#
To answer, we pulled data on career length from Pro Football Reference. If you were to randomly select one of those players, without knowing anything about how his life would transpire, what is the probability that player would win seven-plus Super Bowls? Exactly 254 players are about to be picked in the NFL draft. How’d we calculate that? We started by narrowing the question: Put yourself back in April 2000. Cox/Getty Images) The math behind Tom Brady’s improbability Tom Brady hoists the Vince Lombardi trophy after winning Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium on Februin Tampa, Florida.
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