Superbowl-NASCAR Comparisons and Predictions For The Daytona 500

February 5, 2008

By Brian Watkins

Brian Watkins

It’s hard to believe the off-season is over and oh-so soon we’ll be forking over cash for tickets, food and gas to get there. We’ll be complaining about commercials, commentators and bad calls. We’ll be cheering “our” drivers and curse the drivers we can’t stand for one reason or another. We’ll wait patiently for the new die casts and driver attire to hit the shelves, and we wait with baited breath to see if 2008 will truly be the last season of big changes as NASCAR suggested during the media tour.

To some, NASCAR events are like social drinking. It’s something they do here and there but it’s not anything they need or can’t live with out a few weeks at a time. For others, NASCAR is like crack. They truly feel that if they miss a lap they miss a lot. Me? I’m somewhere in the middle. I don’t have to be at every race and I don’t have to have every item available with my drivers name on it, but I watch as much and read as much as I can about the sport.

While I was sitting and watching the Superbowl the other night (this year the game was far better than the commercials) and though I was interested in the on-field action, I couldn’t help but be distracted. No, I wasn’t distracted by the cheerleaders or any other sideline action- I was distracted by the numbers on the jerseys.

The same thing happened when they handed out our kids little league jerseys last year. Each of our kids had a number that corresponded with a driver. One son was #24, one was #3 and one was #15. While I recognized them as our kids out there on the field, I also couldn’t help but have the names Gordon, Earnhardt and Menard pop into my wee brain during the games. That was the issue I had with the Superbowl. 55, 88, 17, 2, 9, 29, 99 and many others were out there on the turf playing a very exciting 4th quarter of football and at the same time I was thinking NASCAR.

After the game I decided to do a little comparison between the numbers on the winner’s jerseys and the numbers on the back of the Patriot’s players. Of all the players on the Giant’s, only 21 of them had numbers unique from the Patriot’s members (2, 9, 13, 25, 29, 35, 43, 51, 57, 59, 60, 76, 79, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 98 and 99 respectively). Being that the Giants won, I thought I’d go one further and pull out the numbers from the above list that matched NASCAR drivers. Of the 21 numbers, only 5 synced up with driver numbers; 2, 9, 29, 43 and 99.

I suppose if I was a decent analyst I could break down the player’s performance during the game and factor that into my list of numbers. Since I’m not even a mediocre analyst however, I decide to take the NASCAR numbers and use those to predict that Kurt Busch, Kasey Kahne, Kevin Harvick, Bobby Labonte, and Carl Edwards will have a better than expected showing in the “Superbowl of Motorsports”, the Daytona 500.

On the other side of the coin, the New England Patriots had 8 unique jersey numbers that matched drivers for the 2008 season: #7 Robby Gordon (and I suppose Clint Bowyer as well), #15 Paul Menard, #16 Greg Biffle, #38 Dave Gilliland, #41 Reed Sorenson, #70 Scott Riggs, #77 Sam Hornish, Jr., and #84 A.J. Allmendinger were the drivers “represented” on the field by the team that was supposed to win it all but fell short. For those drivers, I’m predicting a worse than expected finish in the big race.

Folks, this is about as unscientific a method for figuring out who’s going to do well and who isn’t as you can get. I’m also pretty sure it will prove to be as unreliable as exit polls and Superbowl predictions. Either way it will be interesting to see how closely the numbers line up to Daytona performances.

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.

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