I was lucky enough to be at Sunday's playoff-clinching win by our beloved Ravens as they beat the Jacksonville Jaguars 27-7 to cap an unlikely turnaround from 5-11 last year - a performance that cost former head coach Brian Billick his job - to 11-5 this season. The Ravens advance to the Super Bowl elimination tournament against all preseason odds, expectations and forecasts. And this wasn't even close to being the biggest surprise of the National Football League in terms of unexpected success.
The Miami Dolphins won but a single game last year - coincidentally, against Baltimore - but rebounded to win the AFC East Division by beating the New York Jets on Sunday behind quarterback Chad Pennington, who, ironically, had been cut by the Jets to make room for Brett Favre. The Atlanta Falcons, a team in utter turmoil last season, torn apart by Michael Vick's imprisonment over a dog-fighting scandal, a coach who up and quit, and - like the Ravens - under a rookie head coach and with a rookie quarterback leading the way, also made it to the playoffs.
These were unanticipated successes, just as the failure of "America's Team," the Dallas Cowboys, to advance to the postseason was an unanticipated disappointment. The New England Patriots were just a few minutes into their first game of the season when quarterback Tom Brady, widely considered the best in the league, was severely injured while being sacked. The expert commentators wailed in unison how this doomed the Patriots' chances for a successful season. Yet behind untested quarterback Matt Cassel, the Pats still managed to win 11 games.
What this brief excursion into the hazards of predicting the performance of football teams leads me to is this: Prediction is a fool's game. Too many random things take place to enable anyone to tell us what's going to happen in the future, whether in sports or in anything else. These random things have been labeled "Black Swans" by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, because it was assumed (error of confirmation) that all swans were white until the discovery of Australia and its swans, which are black.
As humans, we are compelled to predict the future, but we are provably unable to do so when it comes to truly important, world-changing events. Mr. Taleb asked people to name three recently implemented technologies that most affected our world. Most would select the computer, the Internet and the laser. All of these things were, as he points out, "unplanned, unpredicted and unappreciated upon their discovery."
