If a groundhog is supposed to predict the end of winter, can vacant office space signal who’s going home with a Super Bowl victory Sunday?
Just maybe, says commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, whose executive chairman happens to be Roger Staubach, who has two Super Bowl rings of his own.
The Chicago-based firm looked at vacant office space in team’ cities since 2000 and found that in seven of the cases, the team whose city had higher office vacancy rates brought home the Lombardi Trophy.
For instance, in 2006, the most recent year that the hypothesis held true, Pittsburgh’s office vacancy rate was 15.9 percent, compared to 10.5 percent in Seattle; the Steelers outscored the Seahawks 21-10 that year.
So what about this year? Just over 12 percent of office space is vacant in Pittsburgh compared with almost 19 percent in Green Bay.
“You can mark my word, the Packers will prevail,” Staubach said.
mepodmolik@tribune.con
Ok, so, putting aside the obvious silliness of this connection … I do not see how vacancy stats coinciding with 7 out of 11 games is hardly much of an indicator. I mean thats only 63.6%. Now thats just silly.
It’s silly, but it is a better predictive rate than random chance. That said, let’s all repeat: “Coincidence is not causation. Coincidence is not causation …”
Since all the SB predictive methods are more or less ridiculous, why not have fun? At least this has the virtue of originality.