The Eagles are in the Super Bowl. Forgive me while I celebrate a little bit in order to make a point about probabilistic reasoning.
My hometown team (go Birds!) won 55-23 after dominating Washington. Saquon Barkley ran for 118 yards and three touchdowns; Jalen Hurts threw for 246 yards, threw one touchdown, and ran for three others.
And yet perhaps the biggest differentiator for the Eagles was turnovers. The Commanders gave the ball away four times, and the Eagles didn’t turn the ball over at all. If that had been reversed, the Eagles likely would have lost.
Turnovers — when one team gives the ball away to the other via a fumble or an interception — are a huge part of American football. Possession and field position are both extremely important. If Team A turns the ball over to Team B, it usually means that either (1) Team A had a high likelihood of scoring but now Team B has the ball with a moderate likelihood of scoring, or (2) Team A had a moderate likelihood of scoring but now Team B has the ball with a high likelihood of scoring.
In any given game, there’s a fair amount of luck with turnovers. A team might fumble the ball three times but get it back each time, or they might fumble three times and lose all three of them.
And yet, a counterfactual world where Washington doesn’t turn the ball over while Philadelphia turns it over four times is actually quite unlikely. Including both the postseason and the regular season, the Eagles have forced 36 turnovers while only committing 15. The Commanders forced 23 turnovers while committing 20. The odds that an average team does as well as the Eagles have on turnovers this year is about 1 in 400. The Eagles are not just lucky, they’re good.
If, in games between the two teams, the odds of any given turnover favoring the Eagles is 65%, the odds (in a four-turnover game) of a 4-0 Eagles advantage are more than ten times as likely as a 4-0 Commanders advantage (17.8% and 1.5% respectively).
A relatively “lucky” — but more likely — game for the Commanders might have featured two Eagles turnovers and one Commanders turnover — and that (small) disparity likely would not have shifted the outcome of the game.
In other words, the Eagles have juiced the odds with respect to turnovers.1 Using skill, training, and strategy, there’s around a 70% chance that any given turnover in a game will be in their favor. Of course, a 70-30 chance will go the other way pretty often.
There are lots of life parallels to turnovers in football. These are areas where you can substantially increase your odds but (because the probabilities don’t get to 100%) still involve quite a bit of luck. Think of the three point shot in basketball: a great shooter might make 45% of her threes while a mediocre shooter makes 30% — plenty of room for luck on any given shot, but the differences add up over time. Job or college applications can be similar: the content underlying the application (including the applicant) have a huge effect on the probability of success, but there can still be quite a bit of luck for any given application.
I write about this because there are two dangerous (and incorrect) conclusions one can draw from systems where one can change probabilities but that still involve luck:
Turnovers are completely random and there’s nothing you can do to affect them. The Eagles’ consistent ability to force more turnovers than they give up shows that this is not true.
If a team has a poor outcome with turnovers in one particular game, that there was necessarily something that they did wrong or differently. Most likely (though not always), this will simply be the result of bad luck in that game.
This has all kinds of parallels in one’s life. I do what I can to ensure that different aspects of each day go well, but there’s still a meaningful chance that some aspect of any given day goes poorly. The key is to look at (and think about) those aspects as probabilistic systems. If you’re applying for a job or a school, do everything you can to juice your odds, and then realize that any given application involves a high degree of luck. If I’m “by chance” not performing up my potential on 80% of days, I need to do something differently. If it’s only happening 10% of the time, I probably shouldn’t overreact to any given day.
The Chiefs are only average when it comes to turnovers. Hopefully the Eagles’ combination of skill and luck continues in the Super Bowl.
The Buffalo Bills did even better than the Eagles on turnovers this year — they forced 36 turnovers and only turned it over eight times. That was key to their success, but alas not quite enough to get them to the Super Bowl.