MAN IN THE ARENA Part 7: Risky Business

At one point during Super Bowl 51, the Pats had a .02 percent chance of winning the game.

But that game wasn’t the first time that Brady faced long odds. In fact, in a lot of his previous playoff games he’d had win probabilities in the low single digits: 7 percent, 4 percent. But Brady and the Pats kept winning, and in Super Bowl 51… they did it again.

So is Brady magic? Or do we just have the idea of probability all wrong?

This episode looks at how probability - and risk - influence how we make decisions, especially… when the odds are against us.

Because as Tom has shown us again and again and again, there is a difference between impossible and improbable...

GUESTS: Neil Paine from 538, Doug Kezerian from Daily Wager, Alessandro Bonatti, game theorist from MIT, plus two coaches from the "greatest high school football game ever played."

Thanks to ESPN and Eddy Clinton for the clips used in this episode.