New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton can’t be bothered to pay attention to which of his players calls “heads” or “tails” for the coin toss before the opening kickoff of a game or overtime.
He’s sure of one thing, though: “I don’t know that I’d want to go to Las Vegas with them,”
Payton said.
Good thinking. No way would it make sense to gamble with this bunch. The Saints are 0-11 on coin flips this season, the sort of thing that might make a micromanaging NFL head coach, well, flip out.
“It’s kind of ridiculous at this point,”
New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees said.
And while the Saints are 7-3 and lead the NFC South despite coming up short every single time on what should be a 50-50 proposition, coin-toss statistics — yes, they do exist — show that the NFL team that won the pregame flip wound up winning 52.1 percent of the time through Week 10 this season, according to STATS LLC.
That’s about the same as the 52.6 percent that STATS shows for coin-toss “victories”
matching up with game victories since the start of the 2008 season, when the NFL changed the rules to allow the team that wins the toss to defer its choice until the second half.
Like the Saints, the Cleveland Browns can’t seem to make heads or tails of why they’re oh-fer on coin tosses this season, going 0-9, STATS said.
Actually, Browns coach Pat Shurmur and captains Phil Dawson, Joe Thomas and Scott Fujita weren’t aware of precisely how bad their luck has been until asked about it by a reporter from The Associated Press.
“Who keeps that stat? That’s what I want to know,”
said Thomas, a Pro Bowl tackle.
He and players on other teams interviewed for this story all said they don’t spend time figuring out which call to make — or even who will do it — until the time comes, with both teams’ captains standing at midfield.
“It’s kind of like, you line up and it’s, ‘OK, you got it.’
It’s never a big deal,”
Thomas said. “All we talk about is the strategy: Do we want the ball or do we want to defer?”
For the Saints and Browns, it must feel as though other teams are saying, “Heads, we win. Tails, you lose.”
The odds of a team losing 11 consecutive coin flips are about 2,000 to 1, STATS said.
“It’s very unlucky for them in particular, but over the course of time, that kind of event will happen,”
said Susan Holmes, a professor of statistics at Stanford University. “When you’re tossing a ton of coins, you could very easily have 11 heads in a row.”
The Super Bowl has been host to an even longer lopsided streak: The NFC team has won the toss at each of the last 14 championship games, the odds of which are roughly 16,000 to 1. With only a 45-game sample size, the Super Bowl hasn’t followed the regular-season trend of a slight edge to the team winning the toss; flip winners are only 22-23 in the big game.
In 2007, Holmes and other researchers published an academic study about flips that, she explained in a telephone interview, “proved that the coin has a tendency to come up the same way it starts. So if you start the coin on tails over your thumb, and then you flip the coin and catch it in your hand, it’ll have a 51 percent chance of coming up tails.”
