A team stays a contender until the local press believes it is one, at which point the season collapses.
The law is stated as though the press caused the fall. Regression to the mean produces the same pattern with no causal arrow at all: the media become convinced at the point of maximum unusual success, which is precisely the point from which the next stretch is most likely to be worse. Berg's version is memorable, and the mechanism it implies is the wrong one.
In practice
- A division promoted as the company's success story misses its next two quarters, and the promotion did not cause it.
- A fund profiled after its best year is profiled at the moment its returns are most likely to fall.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the one the law asserts, that coverage changes a team's behaviour. Another, which needs no causation, is regression to the mean: the press becomes convinced at the peak, and the peak is the point from which performance most often falls.
- In its favour
- The pattern is recognisable, and the timing it describes, acclaim arriving just before collapse, is real enough to have produced the same folklore in several sports.
- Against it
- It is a jinx claim with a mundane alternative available, and nobody has compared the fortunes of teams the press believed in against those it did not.
- Standing
- From Berg's numbered set, first codified on his blog in 2005. A jinx claim with a mundane explanation available: coverage peaks when performance peaks, and performance then regresses toward the mean, so the belief and the collapse are both effects of the same run rather than cause and effect.
- Subject
- Sport & Performance
- Essay
- The best-measured contests there are