Okay, so the other day, I got curious about the Super Bowl coin toss. Like, really curious. It’s such a small part of the game, right? Just a flip. But it kicks everything off. I started thinking, has it been heads more often, or tails?
So, I decided to actually check it out myself. It wasn’t super scientific or anything. I basically just started looking up the results from past Super Bowls. I went back quite a ways, trying to find out the result of the toss for each game. It took a bit of digging around, just looking through game summaries and stuff people had written about past Super Bowls.
I kept a simple list. Game 1: Heads. Game 2: Tails. Game 3: Tails. You get the idea. Just jotting it down as I found the info for each year.
After I got a decent number of games logged, I just counted them up. You know what I found? It was pretty darn close to 50/50. I think when I looked, tails had a very slight edge over the years, but really, nothing statistically significant, you know? It felt pretty random, like you’d expect.
But then I thought, okay, what else? Does the team that calls it correctly, or the conference (NFC vs AFC), tend to win the toss more often? So I went back through my list and added another column for the winning conference of the toss.
That was interesting too. I noticed there seemed to be streaks sometimes. Like, the NFC won the toss a whole bunch of times in a row during one stretch. Seemed weird, but again, with a coin flip, streaks happen. Overall, though, looking at the whole history I had, neither conference seemed to have a huge advantage in winning the toss itself.
Then came the big question for me: Does winning the toss actually help you win the game? I always wondered about that. Getting the ball first, or choosing to defer, does it matter?
So, one more time, I went through my list. This time I noted down who won the toss AND who won the actual Super Bowl game. I compared the two for each year.
And guess what? Winning the coin toss didn’t seem to have much connection to winning the game at all! It was almost split down the middle again. The number of teams that won the toss and then won the game was very close to the number of teams that won the toss but lost the game. So, winning the toss seems pretty meaningless for predicting the game winner.
It was kind of a fun little project, just digging into the numbers myself. Didn’t use any fancy tools, just looked up the history and kept track. It pretty much confirmed what you’d expect – a coin toss is just random. But it was cool to see the numbers and the little streaks that pop up over time. Makes you realize how we sometimes look for patterns even in randomness.
