WELCOME  TO  MY  AUTHOR  PORTFOLIO

 

In case you haven’t heard, June 1 is National Flip a Coin Day  If you missed it, you’ll just have to wait till next year and plan better.  According to one website, “the origins of the holiday are inconsistent” whatever that means.

 

Maybe you think a coin flip is entirely random and the odds are exactly fifty-fifty that the result will be heads or tails. After all, the coin flip is the poster child for teaching probability and the idea of randomness. Toss a coin a thousand times and you should get very nearly 500 heads and 500 tails. Or if not, keep tossing till you get to ten thousand. The number of heads and tails should trend closer and closer to even the higher the number of tosses. 

 

A researcher at Harvard found, however, that if the coin you are about to toss begins its journey as a heads, it is ever so slightly more likely to be a heads when it is flipped. And same for tails. So, the odds are really more like fifty-one to forty-nine instead of fifty fifty. So there’s another thing you learned in school that isn’t totally true.

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The play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opens with a coin toss contest, Rosencrantz winning 92 times in a row betting on heads each time. Guildenstern suggests there may be un- sub- or super-natural forces at work. Or, perhaps, cheating?

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Which brings us to American football, which begins each game with a coin toss, a tradition that dates back to 1892. If a team wins the coin toss, are they more likely to win the game? Or more likely to lose the game?

 

We’ll focus on the Super Bowl. In the 2023 contest (Super Bowl LVII) the two teams that made it to the championship game are also the teams that had the highest number of coin toss wins during the regular season—the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles (tied at 14 apiece). In the Super Bowl, Kansas City won the toss and the game. Sounds like we’re on to something, doesn’t it?

 

In the previous 56 contests, though, things weren’t so clear. In those games, teams that won the coin toss went on to win the title 24 times but lost in 32. Before this year, teams that won the coin toss were on a nine year losing streak. The last time a team won both the coin toss and the game was the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII (two years later, they won the toss but lost—to the Patriots).

 

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