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When you've been watching football for most of your adult life, you start to use that sport as a reference point when thinking about and analyzing other sports.
A goalkeeper may stretch for a shot in the box, and you might look at it as you would when a receiver is laying out for a pass over the middle. Or a midfielder may be gifted with long, arcing passes, and similar physics and geometry may come to mind as when you watch a quarterback throw the deep ball.
FiveThirtyEight, a website that uses deep data metrics to analyze politics, economics, sports, and more, tried to do just that with last Tuesday's 7-1 win by Germany over Brazil. What would be the equivalent in football?
Well, it would have to be the postseason, since this was a semifinal match. It would also have to be a win of at least 50 points. And the losing team would have to have scored a meaningless consolation touchdown.
And where does that leave us?
Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight concluded that the closest comparison to Brazil's embarrassing display was Jacksonville's 62-7 playoff win over Miami in the 1999 playoffs:
"Put in soccer terms, the Jaguars’ margin would have been 6.8 more goals than expected. But that’s nothing compared to the the 1940 NFL championship game between the Chicago Bears and Washington Redskins, which ended with the Bears winning 73-0 (on the road, no less). By soccer standards, that would be like winning by 10 more goals than expected, a mark Germany would have needed to pour on about three more goals to match."
Check out Paine's piece on FiveThirtyEight to read more about the formula he used to make the comparison and see how he compares Germany's 7-1 win over Brazil to other sports.