Daily Options Report

So who's going to win the Super Bowl this year?  How about the Packers, says the Times Fifth Down blog.

Why you ask? They rank best in the Defensive Hog Index, created by Cold, Hard Football Facts. Here's how it works.

The Defensive Hog Index is our effort to quantify which team has the best defensive front in football. It's proven a huge indicator of success since we introduced it during the 2007 season: teams that are better in the DHI are 20-2 in the playoffs over that time, and the No. 1 team in DHI has won the Super Bowl each year (2007 Giants and 2008 Steelers).     

This isn't rocket science, folks. The Defensive Hog Index simply looks at at each team in three major, easy-to-understand categories and ranks them by average in these categories.   The top defensive front is that which posts the highest average rating across the board. The Defensive Hog Index is based upon these criteria:    

YPA – Yards Per Attempt. So simple, even you can understand it. This rates a defense's ability to stuff an opposing ground game.    

NPP% – Negative Pass Plays, expressed as a percentage. This is how often an opponent's pass plays end in either a sack or interception. Defenses that get after the quarterback and overwhelm the opposing offensive line naturally force sacks and INTs. These negative pass plays are calculated as a percentage of attempts. So if a team foces two sacks and two INTs in 40 pass plays, their NPP% will be 10 percent (4/40).

 3down% - Opposition success rate on third down. The lower the percentage, the higher the defensive success.

Unlike, say, our business, he acknowledges it's very small sample size and likely a statistical fluke.

But it kind of makes sense that these are good traits to win a tightly fought playoff game. So how about some backtesting? Or better yet, how often does the team with the better Defensive Hog rating win a single game?

Until about 4 years ago, the best indicator of who would win in the 2nd round was the very complex "who had the bye" index. Bye teams are 7-9 over the 4 years, but were pure gold before that. Just going from memory here, but I believe from the start of the 6 team format (1990) to 2003, the 1995 Packers were the only non-bye team to advance to the NFC championship. So if that "mean" reverts, the Packers face a pretty steep task as a #5 seed in a pretty loaded NFC field.