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Beckett’s Super Bowl XLII Coverage

Super Sunday Profit Potential

Super Showdown: The Running Backs

Franchise vs. Franchise: Part I

Franchise vs. Franchise: Part II

Super Showdown: The Wide Receivers

Super Showdown: The Quarterbacks

Wes Welker: An Appreciation

A Postcard from Gillette

Monday Morning Collector: Conference Championships

When it comes to Sunday's monumental Super Bowl XLII tilt between the Patriots and Giants, anyone and everyone can give you an off-the-top-of-their-head prediction. In fact, it’s safe to assume by this point that they already have – whether you’ve wanted it or not.

But most of what you’ve heard up to this point is nothing more than conjecture; gut feeling combined with knee-jerk reaction in an effort to sound informed. Here at Beckett Media, we strive to give you more substance with our prognostications.

To that end, we’ve developed an exclusive “Strength of Season” formula that uses each team’s complete 2007 football card collection to project Sunday’s winner. By focusing only on the 2007 product season, we eliminate any inherent historical advantages and place all emphasis entirely where it should be: On the Super Bowl season in question.

Our method is actually quite revolutionary in its simplicity (and it had us wondering why in the world we didn’t think of it sooner).

In any event, here’s what we did:

We started by identifying each team’s total 2007 trading card count (2,590 cards for the Giants, 2,194 for the Patriots). We then broke that total down into four distinct categories: Certified Autograph Cards, Game-Worn Memorabilia Cards, Rookie Cards and Base/Insert/Parallel cards (any Rookie Card, base, parallel or insert card featuring an autograph or piece of memorabilia was removed from all other categories and placed into the appropriate Certified Autograph or Game-Worn Memorabilia category).

After identifying the average value for each team in each of the four categories, we combined the average values for the Rookie Card and Base/Insert/Parallel categories into one category, giving us three distinct average values.

From there we added them up, divided by three and . . . Presto! . . . we had a projected final score for each team.

In the end, even though the Giants appeared on more cards than the Patriots in 2007, the quality of that quantity simply didn’t measure up. Will the same hold true in Super Bowl XLII?

-- Database research compiled by Tim Trout.