By David Roher
Twitter follower Blake Barfield asked us last night if there was any correlation between the conference winner of the Pro Bowl and that of the Super Bowl. I decided to tackle this question for the NFL and the other three major American sports. Here are the results for each league — the first number is the p-value (lower indicates a stronger relationship, .05 or lower is significant) and the second is the fraction of times that the winning conference was the same in the ASG and the final.
NFL: .759 (19/40)
MLB: .717 (37/73)
NHL: .713 (16/28)
NBA: .081 (37/59)
I wasn’t expecting to find any relationship, so the NFL, MLB, and NHL numbers are unsurprising. But the NBA figures, while not yet statistically significant, might eventually yield a relationship with a larger sample size. The conference that wins the NBA All-Star Game has gone on to win the NBA Finals 63% of the time.
