KC Joyner is wrong; strong conferences do not produce more Super Bowl wins.

I grabbed KC Joyner's book, "Blindsided; Why the left tackle is overrated and other contrarian football thoughts" from the library the other week, and I could immediately tell that something was wrong with his analysis. Now, I haven't gone through the whole book, but in one section, he poses the question, "Does the creampuff diet work for NFL teams?"

His conclusion, obviously, is that strong conferences produce Super Bowl winners.

I decided I should take a closer look at his data. Instead of trying to analyze how well each conference was in the playoffs and separating them into different eras (based on the changes of playoff formats), I merely grabbed the winning percentage of each conference for every year between 1970 and 2007 (his data) in which the Super Bowl winner came from.

It turns out, coming from the historically strongest and weakest conferences throughout the years, does not produce the most amount of Super Bowl wins. In fact, it looks a lot like a standard statistical bell curve, don't you think?

If you read his book, KC Joyner draws distinctions between periods of where the top-winning percentage conference produced the Super Bowl winner consistently, and other times when the opposite was true.  To me, there is a lack of consistency for his conclusion that strong conferences produce winners.  By recasting his data by looking directly at how conferences performed throughout the years, we can see that the real key to predicting which conference will produce a Super Bowl winner in any given season, is to look for the conference to win between 51~56%, with the mean at 53%.  Keep that in mind when evaluating the odds of any given Super Bowl, huh?