We like to think that we have a good handle on football, if only to convince ourselves that we can smugly predict future sporting events with any kind of accuracy. There's a whole cottage industry of preview magazines, award watch lists, and preseason polls devoted to the idea that people and teams and sports in general are somehow eminently knowable, that we can use past performance to peer into the future because we're smart, dammit! We're just so smart.
Well, we're not. We are dumb.
Humans are notoriously bad at understanding patterns and numbers and worse, drawing really ridiculous conclusions from said patterns and numbers.