New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady suffered a season-ending injury during yesterday’s game with the Kansas City Chiefs. After he left the game and before the extent of the injury was known, the TradeSport’s contract on whether the Pats would win the Super Bowl fell about 5 points (from 21 to 16). Then at about 6:30pm ET Yahoo Sports posted a story that he was done for the year and the price collapsed. It has now stabilized at about 8, so the injury experiment suggests that a healthy Brady was worth about 13 points in this market.[*] I hope his agent is paying attention.

[*] Possibly understates Brady’s value since there were already concerns about his health prior to the injury.

link: Tradesports NE Pats market

It seems like we have consideration, prize and chance here – involving sports no less. What about fantasy sports? Could YooNew be considered a type of fantasy sports league and thus exempted under UIGEA? Here is the relevant exemption from the law:

(ix) participation in any fantasy or simulation sports game or educational game or contest in which (if the game or contest involves a team or teams) no fantasy or simulation sports team is based on the current membership of an actual team that is a member of an amateur or professional sports organization (as those terms are defined in section 3701 of title 28) and that meets the following conditions:

(I) All prizes and awards offered to winning participants are established and made known to the participants in advance of the game or contest and their value is not determined by the number of
participants or the amount of any fees paid by those participants.
(II) All winning outcomes reflect the relative knowledge and skill of the participants and are determined predominantly by accumulated statistical
results of the performance of individuals (athletes in the case of sports events) in multiple real-world
sporting or other events.
(III) No winning outcome is based–

(aa) on the score, point-spread, or any performance or performances of any single real-world team or any combination of such teams; or
(bb) solely on any single performance of an individual athlete in any single real-world sporting or other event.

It seems that YooNew is not a sports fantasy game so defined, because the winning outcomes are based on the fortunes of real-world teams.

On a more positive note, the above language is pretty broad, especially the part about accumulated results. This is reasonable because when results are accumulated chance is less of a factor, both for the performing individual and the predictors.

Wouldn’t someone’s political nomination be determined by their “accumulated statistical results” in primaries (“other events”)? If you argue that the nomination is a single event that takes place one night, what if you closed the market the day before? How about inauguration futures instead of election futures? That is, even if an election is considered a single event, to get to the inauguration an individual must have accumulated results in multiple events.

As you can see, the fantasy sports and “educational game” exemption invites a lot of hair-splitting. How would “team” be defined for non-sports questions? If the “prize” for a given bet is 1000 $10 contracts, was that value determined by the number of participants? Would it make a difference if the prize was given by a central party or by many counterparties on an exchange?

I don’t expect these ideas to make any difference, as they are only ideas, and given how aggressive the DOJ has been in the past, people should be well-warned about being cavalier with “legal hacks”.

Over the last 22 Super Bowls, 18 — 86% of them — were won by the team that came into the game after allowing fewer regular-season points. (In the 2004-05 regular season, the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles each allowed 260 points.) Not since the Denver Broncos won 1999′s Super Bowl XXXIII has the team with the weaker defense emerged victorious.

And that’s why the underdog Chicago Bears should defeat the Indianapolis Colts in Miami on Sunday. Lovie Smith’s NFC Champion Bears allowed only 255 points during the regular season. That’s third-best in the NFL — and is a whopping 105 points fewer than the AFC Champion Colts allowed.

More bad news for Colts fans. In the regular season, the Colts defense allowed 360 points — more than any team that has won the Super Bowl. Since the advent of the 16-game schedule in 1978, only three winning teams allowed 300 or more points in a season — the 1983-84 Raiders (338), the 1998-99 Broncos (309) and the 1980-81 Raiders (306).

And while much has been made of the Colts’ powerful offense, the Bears scored the same number of points — 427 — in the regular season. Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning has been the focus of attention, but his Chicago counterpart Rex Grossman has been about as efficient in his passing this post-season — with 6.66 yards per attempt vs. Mr. Manning’s 6.84 yards per attempt.

That brings into view another trend pointing to a Bears win. A good gauge of a team’s strength is its ratio of points scored to points allowed — and the measurement we use to express that ratio is Pythagorean Wins. Since Super Bowl XIX, the team with more P-wins has gone 18-4 (81.8%) making it a more reliable indicator than a team’s actual record, which predicted the outcome just 76.5% of the time. This season, the 13-3 Bears outscored their opponents by 172 points (better than five of the last six Super Bowl champs) and led the NFC with 12.36 P-wins. The 12-4 Colts, on the other hand, outscored their rivals by just 67 points, which projects to only 9.59 P-Wins. No team in history has won the Super Bowl with a P-win total that low.

Instead of listening to the pundits who say their team has little chance against the Colts, maybe Chicago fans should focus on this: Only three teams since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger — the Raiders in Super Bowls XI, XV and XVIII — have entered the big game with fewer P-wins and a more porous regular-season defense than their opponents and still managed to win.

Savvy fans may dismiss many of these numbers, arguing that the AFC was the far better conference this year. That may be true for the conferences, but it doesn’t necessarily hold for this matchup. The Bears and Colts played five common opponents this season — the New York Jets, New York Giants, Patriots, Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins. Indianapolis went 5-0 against these teams, while the Bears were 3-2. However, in those games, the Bears scored 114 points and surrendered only 75, outscoring their opponents by 39 points. The Colts? Despite their perfect record, they scored 128 but gave up 107, for a 21-point differential, just over half that of the Bears.

I got long a little NFL.COLTS after they beat the Patriots. More recently, my boss asked me to get long a ton of NFL.BEARS, which is paying 2:1. Either way, I am happy.

Cross-posted from CaveatBettor.

Cross-posted from CaveatBettor. Last of 3 posts, the prior post available here.

I have included last week’s probabilities as well. Note that this past weekend’s winners’ chances all increased, along with the Ravens. The other bye week teams’ chances all decreased.

As of 1230pm Thu Dec 4 2007, here’s what p (A | B) looked like:

The original post can be found here.

As of 1230pm Thu Dec 4 2007, here’s what p (A | B) looked like:

Note the high AFC prospects relative to the NFC teams. The JETS are a bit surprising at the bottom of the list; I think they could beat any of these NFC playoff teams in the Super Bowl (and I’m from New England).

Cross-posted from CaveatBettor.