Welcome, welcome, welcome!!! to the one and only Cold, Hard Football Facts Super Bowl stat spectacular.
Step right up and fill your fertile little mind with a curious circus-freak sideshow of amazing & stupendous Super Bowl facts and figures you just won’t find anywhere else.
If the Giants shock the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, they’ll certainly have earned the right to be called champions. Not only would they have won three road playoff games and knocked off the only 18-0 team in history, they’ll have overcome the toughest postseason schedule of the Super Bowl Era.
New England’s Tom Brady lit up the scoreboard in 2007 like Fonzie whacking Al's pinball machine in Milwaukee circa 1958. But Brady's 117.2 passer rating is merely the 8th-best passing performance of the post-merger era when compared with the league-wide average.
This is awesome, folks. Ever wonder how passer ratings have evolved over time? We have the annual league-wide passer ratings from the 1940s (when passer ratings hovered in the 40s) to the 21st century (when league-wide passer ratings topped 80 for the first time).
If you believe in portents of pigskin, consider that teams which lost by seven points or less in the regular season are 6-1 in Super Bowl rematches. The Giants, of course, lost by three to the Patriots in Week 17.
If the Patriots beat the Giants in the Super Bowl, they’ll become just the fourth team in history to beat 10 Quality Opponents in a single season. The list of four? The 1979 Steelers, 2003 Patriots, 2004 Patriots and 2007 Patriots.
With a 15-3 postseason mark, New England’s Bill Belichick is the best big-game coach in football today. His .833 playoff winning percentage blows away his .611 regular-season winning percentage.
New York’s three road playoff wins this year constitute nearly 3 percent of all the road playoff victories since the AFL-NFL merger. Road teams are just 102-228 (.309) in the playoffs since 1970.
The 10-6 Giants outscored their opponents by just 1.4 PPG this year. If they knock off the Patriots, they’ll surpass the 1980 Raiders as the worst regular-season team to win a Super Bowl. We’re sure Giants fans would learn to live with the shame.
The 1999 Rams currently hold the honor of the most dominant Super Bowl champion. But a look at their respective schedules shows that the 2007 Patriots were a far superior team.
New England’s Randy Moss is one of just two players in history to average more than 0.8 TD catches per game.
Rarely does our all-important Quality Wins Quotient point to such a startling mismatch as the one we find in Super Bowl XLII. This page is complete with the records vs. Quality Opponents of every Super Bowl contender since the AFL-NFL merger.
The Giants are just the 12th team to play four postseason games – a full quarter of a season tacked on to the end of regulation. If they win the Super Bowl, they’ll become just the seventh team with four playoff victories in the same season. To put that into perspective, four playoff wins is double the number of playoff games the Cardinals have won in 88 years of NFL football.
