Tailing Aaron Rodgers

First, the New England Patriots pre-season win totals…

“If you forced me to make a play I’m circling the under at 9.5 (wins) at -120. I think there is a longer tail to the under here; if they stick with Cam Newton a little too long, if Mac Jones is a little farther away than people realize, if there are injuries in this relatively aging defense, if the offensive line isn’t quite as good, if the offensive weapons don’t really make a contribution. There are a lot of ifs that are potentially negatives for the Patriots and I am perfectly fine playing the win total under.” – Drew Dinsick, Deep Dive Podcast, July 2021

During the 20/21 NFL season we ‘Tracked Tom‘ to see if Tom Brady would hit the over on his passing yards for the year. The theory at the time was the same that Drew describes: more can go wrong than go right. The question wasn’t about how well Brady played, per se, but rather what big events might happen and which way would they break? For Tom, everything was terrific and he hit the over.

It’s Plus EV Analytics who thinks this way, in part from reading Nassim Taleb. And from him we’ve got another for the 21/22 NFL season!

There’s a chance Aaron Rodgers says chuck-it, and goes on to host a game show and he throws 0 touchdowns, a 100% decrease from the line of 38.5. There is no chance he Proves them All Wrong™️ and has a 100% increase to 77 touchdowns (the league record is fifty-five, only three players have thrown more than fifty).

Visually the idea looks like this:

Take the under on Rodgers.

But not all systems are like this. Sports can be under on the idea of injury alone. Financials can be under too. Cryptocurrencies, for instance, can be hacked, regulated, or fall out of fashion. If someone put the over/under line of Bitcoin at $38,500 at the end of the NFL season, a similar set of arguments and conclusions flow.

To a point.

Unlike Rodgers, Bitcoin could double. It’s a different system. Businesses are more like Bitcoin than NFL lines. Most of the Amazon services started out as bets: will this thing work? Amazon’s wager was the outlay in resources but Amazon’s winnings, unlike Aaron’s TDs, could easily double, triple or more. Here’s how Jeff Bezos put it.

“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.” – Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander

Fat bottom tails make the complex world go ’round and a basic understanding of distributions, curves, and areas helps.

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