I am the author of ““The Mental Performance Index: Ranking the Best Teams in Super Bowl History”” which, like the title implies, uses a systematic approach to determine which teams were best.
It was only after standardizing performance ratings in a football game with the Mental Performance Index statistic (MPI for short) that we were able to compare how teams had performed even when they were over 40 years apart. Using a play rating system that is fair and balanced, the MPI total score indicates how closely a given team came to perfection in a game in a similar manner that a baseball batting average shows how close a batter came to perfection on a scale of .000 to 1.000. In the case of football team performance, however, .500 is roughly average performance.
There were a total of 14 MPI statistics created and 14 more traditional statistics were analyzed in the book, so we looked at a total of 28 ways of determining how good a team was, and team rankings for all 28 statistics are presented in this book. Of course everyone wants to know which team was best overall, and that is shown in the MPI Total score (MPI-T) rankings in which the top 32 performing teams on Super Bowl Sunday are listed.
Read this book and let the debates begin over which team was best!
I hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse into the world of sports psychology.