The betting line for Super Bowl XLV has held steady all week, with oddsmakers consistently listing the Green Bay Packers at 2.5-3-point favorites over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Check out SB Nation's NFL Odds page in conjunction with Odds Shark for more details.
Everybody loves trying to predict the winner. I will be back later on today with my Super Bowl prediction. For now, let's take a quick peek at a variety of computer simulations and how they think the game will turn out.
- Madden 2011, the hugely popular NFL video game from EA Sports, is calling for a Steelers victory. Yahoo! Sports says that EA Sports has used Madden simulations to correctly predict the winner of six of the last seven Super Bowl (the New York Giants upset of New England being the exception).
- PredictionMachine.com has run 50,000 simulations of Sunday's game, and finds the Packers winning 60.5 percent of the time.
- At WhatIfSports, the simulation engine spit out a much different result. In 2,501 simulations, WhatIfSports showed the Steelers winning 52.5 percent of the time.
In reality, none of this really means anything. It's just sort of fun to look at and talk about. I find it funny how two computerized simulators can come up with different results -- meaning, of course, they were programmed with different parameters.