Does Winning the Super Bowl Make You the Best Team?

[Paul Bunyan's Axe]

Hey guys, Nexus or Against us here, making my first post in the sports section, it's a poll so get ready to vote!

My question does winning the super bowl make you the best team? My answer? Sometimes. In most cases the best team in the league won't win the super bowl. It's hard to say who the best team in the league of that year is when there's so many other factors that play in besides actual on the field play.

For instance, a few years ago the Seahawks were 7-9 and defeated the Saints in the Wild Card, were the saints the better team in that game? Hell yeah they were, no doubt. Who's to say if the Seahawks didn't win that game, the Saints don't go all the way to the super bowl and win?

In my opinion, there's just too much outside of playing the game that factors into Super Bowl wins to call every team to ever win the Super Bowl the best team of that year.

I guess you could argue that the best teams show up regardless of the situation they're in, but still, that's just not it to me.

Thoughts? Opinions? Death threats?

 

[Megatron]

Not usually. It's normally the hottest team at the time. Hell, we've had only 2 1 vs 1 Super Bowls in the past 12 years I believe. Some teams I do think were better than their record that had low seed due to some circumstance (injuries, another good team in division). For the most part the best teams are the ones that end up #1s, since that is a larger sample size and more indicative of how a team performs then a 3 or 4 game stretch. There's outliers once in a while, but winning the Super Bowl is more about catching hot at the right time, not being the best team for the entire 16 game season.

But that's what makes all playoffs great. Once you're in, you have a reasonable shot at going far.

 

[Harthan]

Football playoffs suffer from a similar problem to March Madness, although much more ingrained into the system - one game is subject to far too many variables to truly claim that the better team won any game. Given a series, those variables start to cancel out and the team with an all around better game wins the majority of the time. But, obviously, the "Any Given Sunday" principle holds true in football and it's a consequence of the incredibly physical nature of the game; there's just no way you can play football more than once a week. Because of this, upsets can and do happen and given the playoffs is a sequence of one off games, no, winning the Superbowl does not make you in any way the best football team. Clearly there is a certain degree of talent required to win the Superbowl, and no one could reasonably claim that a team that wins the Superbowl is anything less than very good, but the best team need not win because of the fact that when all you get to play is one game, anything can happen and small variables can dramatically affect the outcome.

 

[George Steele's Barber]

Winning the Super Bowl and being WWE Champion are similar in that neither makes you the best. I'm not going to repeat everything that Megatron and Harthan said. They nailed it. All I will say is that winning the Super Bowl makes the best team irrelevant. Winning the Super Bowl is and has always been far more important in the NFL than being considered the best. Winning the WWE Championship does not make the best guy irrelevant.

But in the immortal words of Jesse Ventura, "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, Gorilla."

 

[Larry]

I don't think winning the Super Bowl makes you the best team by a long shot. Hell, this year the Super Bowl winner wasn't even the best team technically in their division. They just got hot at the right time, and were gifted a playoff birth. The Green Bay Packers were arguably the best team through regular season, but it only took one game for them to no longer "be the best" against a team that was lucky to even make it in. The Patriots were amazing all through the season and look what happened to them, somehow conveniently they lose to the Giants, who once again were lucky to even make it into the playoffs. Does anyone actually think the Giants were the best team in the NFL? Not by a long shot. I think it's a little fishy and a little too convenient that the Giants, who limped all through the season, Forest Gump their way into the playoffs, then miraculously their this team of world beaters that can't be stopped. I personally have begun to believe that this shit is fixed somehow. So as far as I am concerned, winning the Super Bowl doesn't make you the best team at all, it makes you the pre-determined winner of a fixed bunch of bullshit.

 

[DirtyD79]

Hell yeah it does. It says you won when it was all on the line, In the end that's all that matters. It's all about who's holding the trophy when all is said and done.

 

[Natural Selection]

I think Ba-Bomb nailed this one. While I'm not a Patriots fan by an stretch of the imagination, I do find it odd that despite being the clearly better team twice they lost twice. Maybe it just comes down to New York has their number. Yet over the last several years football has looked more and more like wrestling to me. Lets recap a few reasons why 9-11 happens and the Patriots win the super bowl Oh YAY what a feel good story. Jerome Bettis announces he will retire at the end of the season and the Steelers win the Super Bowl(In a controversial game) YAY feeling even better. Lets not forget the perfect season that no body wanted to happen, bam giants get hot and suddenly the streak is over. Then Hurricane Katrina annihilates the gulf and oh my the Saints win the Super Bowl in their first ever Super Bowl appearance. Maybe its just the nature of the beast or maybe its all sports entertainment now. At least when I watch hockey it still seems real, but to answer the question no winning the super bowl doesn't make you the best overall team of the year it just makes you the winner.