Da Bears

I'm going back to the well (despite having fallen in the last two times). After using eBay market data to successfully predict the winner of last season's American Idol and the 2006 NBA Finals, I've stumbled recently, misfiring on the winners of the 2006 World Series and College Football National Championship. But I remain unbowed, and am determined to get back on track with this Sunday's Super Bowl winner between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears - which will also help me avoid the inevitable teasing Ryan gives me when I get one wrong.

This time, after firing up my trusty eBay Marketplace Research yesterday, I decided to tweak my strategy a little. Instead of using just one piece of information as in the past, I would compare several key areas to see which sold more items in the past two weeks. And as we often find, real life was reflected on eBay - the Colts dominated on offense, and the Bears were far superior on defense. Offensively, the Colts' All-World QB Peyton Manning throttled the Bears' shaky Rex Grossman - almost 20,000 Peyton items sold in that span compared to 2,200+ for Rex. But the Bears roared back (pun intended) on D. Brian Urlacher, one of the league's most feared linebackers, sold over 6,000 items, while Dwight Freeney, Indy's premier pass rusher, managed only 300. So we had a dead heat.

That brought us to the simplest comparison of all. It's more fun (and as I've found, potentially more accurate) to use individual players instead of the teams to predict success, so I had planned to avoid the straightforward Chicago Bears vs. Indianapolis Colts comparison if I could. But the aforementioned tie forced my hand.....and it wasn't even close.

13,000+ Indianapolis Colts items were sold in the last two weeks, which isn't too bad. But compare that to 32,000+ Chicago Bears items, and it was clear who was on top. I even looked up how many just "Colts" items sold in the Sports Memorabilia categories (which would include non-Indy-related Colts stuff), and even that fell way short.

So who will emerge as champs, defying conventional wisdom (as well as the Vegas oddsmakers)? As Saturday Night Live once put it: Da Bears.