The Most Mocked Call in Super Bowl History Was a Good Bet
The interception chance was about 1 percent, and an incompletion would have stopped the clock and given Seattle an extra play.
Talks at Google · Thinking in Bets | Annie Duke | Talks at GoogleTwenty-six seconds remained in the 2015 Super Bowl. The Seattle Seahawks stood on New England's one-yard line, down by four, with second down and one timeout left. A touchdown would almost certainly win the championship.
Seattle head coach Pete Carroll had Marshawn Lynch in the backfield, a bruising short yardage runner whom everyone expected to carry the ball. Instead Carroll called a pass. Russell Wilson threw toward the end zone, Malcolm Butler stepped in front of it, and the game was over in an instant.
Annie Duke, a former professional poker player who studies decision making, uses the play to explain a mental habit she calls resulting. Broadcaster Chris Collinsworth hammered the call on the live broadcast. Duke recalled that the next day most major outlets described it as the Super Bowl's most disastrous play call ever, while USA Today went further and described it as the worst call in all of football history.
Duke tells the story for a different reason. She argues the reaction confuses the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. The result was terrible, but a terrible result does not prove a terrible decision, any more than calling heads on a coin flip is brilliant if it lands heads and stupid if it lands tails.
The numbers support her point. The chance of an interception in that spot, depending on how many seasons you count, was roughly one or two in a hundred, Duke said. Seattle essentially lost on a one percent chance.
There was also hidden logic in the choice. With only one timeout, Duke noted, two straight runs would have eaten so much clock that Seattle would likely get only two plays. An incomplete pass, which happens about 40 percent of the time, stops the clock. That would have given Seattle three chances, including the two runs everyone wanted in the first place.
In Duke's telling, the pass cost about a one percent chance of an interception, and in return bought an extra chance to run the ball afterward. She pointed readers to a detailed breakdown by Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight for more of the math.
Imagine the same ball caught for a touchdown, Duke said. The same decision suddenly feels brilliant.
Questions people ask
What exactly does Annie Duke mean by resulting?
Resulting means judging a decision by how it turned out, rather than by whether the reasoning was sound at the time. Because luck shapes outcomes, a good process can fail and a bad process can succeed, so Duke argues for evaluating what was known before the result arrived.
Why didn't Seattle just hand the ball to Marshawn Lynch?
Lynch was one of the league's best power runners, which is why the call seemed so baffling in the moment. Duke's point is that the pass did not replace Lynch, since an incompletion preserved time for two runs afterward, so Seattle could try both.
Where can I read more of the math behind the call?
Duke pointed to a detailed breakdown by Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight, which walks through the clock math and the interception odds. She said she highly recommended it for readers who want the fuller analysis.