It’s time once again for Bad Chart Thursday! This week, I was thinking a lot about the old joke that the Super Bowl winner determines whether the stock market will be bullish or bearish (is “bearish” a thing? OK) or that it predicts presidential elections. With that in mind, this week I took things to the next logical step by determining whether or not the Super Bowl winner correlated with the percentage of growth of North Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP). Gaze upon my startling discovery:
As you can clearly see, when the AFC team wins the Super Bowl it tends to predict positive growth for the North Korean economy. With the exception of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ unjust win over the Oakland Raiders in 2003, an NFC win predicts negative growth.
What is the AFC hiding, exactly? Who makes all their “Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts? Where are they sending the millions of dollars they probably get (??) for winning the Big Game? I’m just asking questions.
Data comes from this list of Super Bowl winners, which Wikipedia insists on calling “Champions” as though they fought an actual bear or something, and this PDF report on the North Korean economy. Data from 2006 to present was available but inconvenient and so was left out.