Twitter mistakes happen, including from us, but a particularly funny one came from numbers-focused site FiveThirtyEight (formerly affiliated with The New York Times and ESPN, now part of ABC News) Wednesday. The site has been running numbers-based NFL regular season and playoff predictions all year, updated after each game, and their actual predictions page looks fine. But they promoted it on Twitter with a graphic that showed the New Orleans Saints (controversially eliminated by the Minnesota Vikings Sunday) as having the fourth-best odds of winning the Super Bowl at 11 percent. The (since-deleted) tweet, which received over 66 replies, 14 retweets, and 65 likes while it was up, can be seen here:
Given that we’re unaware of any judicial attempts to overturn the on-field result (this time), the Saints’ chances of winning the Super Bowl would seem to be significantly less than 11 percent at this point in time. So that puts this up there with the Sudbury-Thunder Bay debacle in infamous FiveThirtyEight sports mistakes. And it led to some funny responses:
Hell yeah Saints, 11 percent chance you can do it.
— Editor-in-Chimp (@NewsFedora) January 8, 2020
Can’t believe you guys got the election wrong.
— jay fullington (@jayfullington1) January 8, 2020
#Saints pic.twitter.com/aNgmecAALT
— Josh Wick (@mr_joshhern) January 8, 2020
https://twitter.com/RedAtrocitus/status/1215035364378701825
@JayBordelon pic.twitter.com/ScKI2fizlM
— Zach (@HTownZM) January 8, 2020
We all make mistakes, and it’s quite possible this one came just from whoever was at the Twitter controls forgetting to update the graphic they used last week. And they did eventually pull this down. But that’s still a funny error.
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.