Last year, I wrote a post on the plays that had the biggest impact on the eventual Super Bowl champion. These were the plays that affected the Super Bowl win probability by the biggest amount among teams that did not win the title. At the time, the Buffalo Bills were on the short end of the most influential play in the Super Bowl era. When Frank Reich put the ball down for Scott Norwood, I estimated that the Bills had a 45% chance on winning the Super Bowl. After the kick went wide right, the Bills’ win probability fell to zero. The 45 percentage point fall was the biggest change for a non-champion of any play in the Super Bowl era. Over 48 years, a bunch of plays fell in that range, but no team could point to a single play as having lowered its championship chances by so large an amount.

A couple weeks ago, that long-held record got broken kind of like Michael Johnson broke the 200-meter record in the Atlanta Olympics. Malcolm Butler’s pick obliterated the old mark. My estimate has the Butler interception as increasing the Patriots’ chances of winning by 0.87. There is no doubt that what some have called the Immaculate Interception is on an island by itself as the most influential play in NFL history.

To get that change in win probability from Butler’s play, I am going to assume that the Seahawks would have run on third and fourth down. I am going to give a run from the one a 60% chance of working. That might seem high, but the Patriots were the worst team in football in stuffing the run in important short-yardage situations either on third or fourth down, or down by the goal line. And their limited success mostly came against terrible running teams. It is not a huge sample, but against teams outside the worst quarter of rushing teams by DVOA, the Patriots had allowed opponents to convert 16 of 17 times with two yards or less to go for a first down or touchdown. If we add the playoffs, they actually had three more stops against good running teams (Baltimore and Seattle), albeit in games where the opponent had a good amount of success on the ground. With Seattle being the best rushing team in football by a mile and the Patriots being at best not great in run defense in that situation, it seems hard to think that Seattle had anything less than a 0.60 chance of scoring on a run.

Here are my other assumptions:

Give Seattle a 2% chance of throwing an interception on the slant.

Give Seattle a 0.5% chance of fumbling on a running play.

The slant had a 55% chance of scoring a touchdown.

The Patriots have a 5% chance of winning if the second down play scored the touchdown with a snap at 0:26, 3% if it was second down, and 1% if fourth down.

Under those assumptions, the Seahawks’ win probability at the snap―taking the slant call as given―was 0.87.

Prob (Score 2nd down)*Prob (Win if Score) + Prob (3rd down happens)*Prob (Score 3rd down)*Prob (Win if Score) + Prob (4th down happens)*Prob (Score 4th down)*Prob (Win if Score) =

0.55*0.95 + 0.43*0.60*0.97 + 0.17*0.60*0.99 = 0.874

One interesting thing to note is that Pete Carroll’s seemingly odd explanation about wasting a play is not quite that crazy. If the Seahawks had just thrown the ball away on second down to waste some time, but leave them the timeout to run twice, their win probability was 0.82. That fall is small in part because the Patriots’ chances of winning after a Seattle score get even lower if they score on a later down. It’s still not a great idea because Marshawn Lynch’s chances of scoring on third or fourth down are not 100%, but Carroll may have been thinking along these lines.

Two other plays from this postseason deserve special note. First, the Jermaine Kearse Manna-from-Heaven catch could have been a top five most-influential play in NFL history. Under my rules, it does not get on the list because a game can only have one play on the list and the team that it hurts has to not win the Super Bowl in the end. But if Marshawn Lynch ran it in and the Seahawks won, the Kearse catch would have been the play that hurt the Patriots more than any other. Brian Burke’s Win Probability Calculator assigns the Patriots a 62% chance of winning at the snap and a 25% chance of winning after the completion. So the calculator estimates that the Kearse catch lowered the Patriots’ chances by 37%, eerily similar to the 39% hit the Patriots took from the Helmet Catch.

While that play does not make the cut because the Immaculate Interception wiped it out, another play from this postseason almost did squeeze onto the expanded list. The onside kick recovery by Seattle in the NFC Championship game, according to my estimates, lowered the Packers’ chances of winning the Super Bowl by about 14 percentage points. Here are the ingredients for that calculation:

Give Green Bay a 0.8 chance of recovering the onside kick

Green Bay has a 0.95 chance of winning if they recover

Green Bay has a 0.55 chance of winning if they don’t recover

Green Bay would have had 0.45 chance of beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

So, before the onside kick, the Packers’ chances of winning the Super Bowl were:

[Prob(Recover onside kick)*Prob(Beat Seattle if recover) + Prob(Don’t Recover)*Prob(Beat Seattle if don’t)]*Prob(Beat New England) = (0.8*0.95 + 0.2*0.55) * 0.45 = 0.39

After the onside kick, the Packers’ chances of winning the Super Bowl were:

Prob(Beat Seattle after not recovering) * Prob (Beat New England) = 0.55*0.45 = 0.25

So the failure to recover the onside kick lowered the Packers’ chances of winning the Super Bowl by 14 percentage points, leaving the Brandon Bostick botched recovery just off the list.

Below is the updated and expanded-to-25-plays list of the most influential plays in NFL history. The full set of ground rules can be found in last year’s post. The SBD, or Super Bowl Delta, value refers to the change in the probability of winning the Super Bowl for the team on the short end of the play. Since Norwood’s miss lowered the Bills’ chances of winning the Super Bowl by 45 percentage points, I assign an SBD value of 45 to that play.

Rk NFL Year Game Play Time at snap Losing team Game WP Change SBD value 1 2014 Super Bowl Immaculate Interception 00:26 Seahawks 0.87 87 2 1990 Super Bowl Wide Right 00:08 Bills 0.45 45 3 2008 Super Bowl Holmes 40 yards to Arizona 6 01:02 Cardinals 0.42 42 4 2007 Super Bowl Helmet Catch 00:45 Patriots 0.39 39 5 1982 Super Bowl Here Comes the Diesel 10:28 Dolphins 0.36 36 6 2012 Super Bowl 4th down incomplete to Crabtree 01:50 49ers 0.35 35 7 1988 Super Bowl 27 yards to Rice 01:15 Bengals 0.34 34 8 1979 Super Bowl First pass to Stallworth 12:15 Rams 0.31 31 9 2013 NFC Championship Sherman tip-to-INT vs. Crabtree 00:30 49ers 0.5 28 10 1970 Super Bowl Mike Curtis INT of Morton 01:09 Cowboys 0.27 27 11 1967 NFL Championship Starr QB sneak 00:16 Cowboys 0.35 25 12 1993 Super Bowl James Washington fumble return 14:34 in 3rd Bills 0.24 24 13 1972 Divisional Round Immaculate Reception 00:22 Raiders 0.95 24 14 2011 Super Bowl Wes Welker drop 04:00 Patriots 0.23 23 15 2011 AFC Championship Lee Evans drop 00:28 Ravens 0.45 23 16 1990 NFC Championship Roger Craig fumble 2:40 49ers 0.45 23 17 1987 AFC Championship The Fumble 01:12 Browns 0.4 22 18 1999 Super Bowl Warner to Bruce for 73-yard TD 02:05 Titans 0.21 21 19 1981 NFC Championship Danny White fumble after The Catch 00:38 Cowboys 0.42 21 20 1975 Super Bowl Wagner INT of Staubach 08:41 Cowboys 0.21 21 21 1975 Divisional Round Hail Mary 00:32 Vikings 0.85 20 22 2001 Super Bowl Brady to Brown for 23 yards 00:29 Rams 0.2 20 23 1978 Super Bowl The Sickest Man in America 2:46 in 3rd Cowboys 0.17 17 24 2010 Super Bowl Matthews forces Mendenhall fumble 15:00 Steelers 0.17 17 25 2012 AFC Divisional Flacco-to-Jones over a sleeping Rahim Moore 02:13 Broncos 0.17 17

On this updated list, Butler’s pick looks like Tiger Woods’s -12 on top of the scoreboard at the 2000 U.S. Open. The Immaculate Interception stands alone, almost twice as influential as any other play in the Super Bowl era.