Sometimes your best isn't enough (sports voodoo edition)

My in-laws are from the Pittsburgh area and, therefore, Steelers fans.  The Steelers have been terrible this year, but found themselves at the beginning of this week 5-6 and facing the 5-6 Ravens in Baltimore.  If the Steelers could win this game, the rest of their schedule was relatively easy (compared to that of the Ravens and the 5-6 Titans) and they would have a good chance to go to the playoffs.

So, like any good son-in-law, I wrote to Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy), who does weekly football picks against the spread, and who is having a terrible year**, to pick against the Steelers.  The stars aligned, and he incorporated reader e-mails into his picks this week (scroll down to Ravens (-3) over Steelers), and it seemed like happiness would reign in Pittsburgh***.

So, of course what happened is that the Steelers covered the spread, but lost the game.  I am truly in awe of Billy Zima's stink this year.  

Well... for the sake of my in-laws, at least the Penguins lead their division in the NHL.


** As of this writing, Simmons is 75-97-6; just how bad is this?  Well, if you were to flip a coin to make your decision for all 172 games that weren't a push, you would expect to do better than 75-97 about 94.6% of the time.  That's not "statistically significantly worse than a coin flip at the 0.05 alpha level" bad, but close.

*** Well, until being bounced out of the first round of the playoffs, because they're really not very good.  The fact that the Steelers could even sniff the playoffs this late this year says more about the wacky state of the NFL than the quality of the Steelers.