What’s interesting to me is that the Patriots have the demonstrably better QB here, and are still winding up the definitive underdogs.

I know Drake has been a little weak lately, but it’s not controversial to call him better than Sam Darnold (as Sam’s biggest supporter, if it’s not controversial to me, I have confidence saying it’s not controversial). This got me to thinking. In the era since the league changed the rules to make the QB position much more important in 2004, how many times has the team with a clear QB advantage been such an underdog in either a Conference Championship game or in the Super Bowl?

It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence. It happened in 2006, where the Chicago Bears (with Rex Grossman) walked into the NFC Championship game as 2.5 point favourites over the New Orleans Saints (with Drew Brees), but even this indicates a clear QB bias in the betting market, as the gap is talent between the 2006 Bears and the 2006 Saints is not as much gulf as it is chasm. To walk in as only 2.5 point home favourites demonstrates just how little the public believed in Rex. The Bears won this game by 25 points by the way, as even with the third best QB in the world, the Saints could not score.

It happened again in 2008, twice, both times due to the inadequacy of the 2008 Arizona Cardinals, in spite of Kurt Warner’s presence. Kurt Warner was quite a bit better than Donovan McNabb, and 2008 Warner vs 2008 Roethlisberger is one of the biggest QB gaps in Super Bowl history. Nevertheless, those Cardinals were not a good team, Warner or not, so they walked in as underdogs against both Philly and Pittsburgh.

In 2011, we see this again, also due to a really subpar championship game roster, as despite Alex Smith being a great deal worse than Eli Manning in 2011, the Giants travel on the road to SF as underdogs, albeit only by two points, which is evidence of the QB gap.

Would you call Matt Ryan demonstrably better than Colin Kaepernick in 2012? Debatable, which I suppose violates the definition of ‘demonstrable,’ so no.

In 2014, we see a Packers team with a much better QB (Aaron Rodgers) walk into the NFC Championship as nine point underdogs in Seattle, for some reason. On a side note, this is perhaps the easiest spread to bet in playoff history. I would’ve picked the Packers to win this game outright, but the vibes of the time skewed heavily in favour of the Seahawks, and I suppose the public got the last laugh on me.

The phenomenon returns once more in 2015, as the Carolina Panthers have the inferior QB (despite a totally undeserved league MVP award for Cam Newton), but comes with an asterisk, as the league’s EPA/Play leader (Carson Palmer) had broken his finger, and largely stunk, since week 15. In all likelihood, this is the most similar game in the last 21 years to the game we’re going into on Sunday. Sam Darnold did not win MVP, but he deserved it this season about as much as 2015 Cam Newton did.

Here, the real malaise sets in. The worse QB is not favoured in one of the final three games of the year until Jalen Hurts is favoured by one point over Patrick Mahomes in the 2022 Super Bowl. This is another one of the easiest bets ever, as the Chiefs were a relatively easy easy pick (at least in my mind) to win outright that day, and this is where I curse myself for having a bad memory, because last year, it happened in both conference championship games.

2024 Jalen Hurts was favoured over the demonstrably better 2024 Jayden Daniels. Patrick Mahomes (tenth in EPA/Play) was favoured over Josh Allen (league leader).

In all, there have been 65 renditions of either the Super Bowl or a conference championship game since 2004, and of these 65 tries, the worse QB has been favoured just nine times. It looks like we’re about to go ten for 66, which will still only be 15 percent of the time.

What strikes me is just how often the best QBs end up on the worse rosters in the NFC Championship game. Of our nine times the worse QB has been favoured, five of them have happened in the NFC Championship game. Even in the wacky conference, it’s still only five times in 22 tries.

I don’t think I’m going anywhere with this. I’m just saying that these betting markets in these late season games (where it’s a vibe check, more than anything, with a lot of public money in there) have a lot of bias towards the bigger QB name.