HOUSTON – Dr. Rick Winer, of Atlanta, is a psychiatrist on weekdays and a Super Bowl statistician on weekends.
The 61-year-old provides information to announcers at NFL and college football games.
He has been to 23 of the past 50 NFL Super Bowl games and he has worked as a freelance statistician at 21 of those games.
It’s a side job he started at the age of 15, after asking the coach of his high school football team if he could keep track of the game stats.
This Sunday, he will be working with a St. Louis radio station to feed the announcer all types of facts about Super Bowl LI in Houston.
“This Super Bowl is very unusual because it’s only the second time in the last 20 years that the referee has not already worked a game involving either one of the two teams playing in the Super Bowl,” Winer told Channel 2 at the Menninger Clinic in Houston on Friday.
Winer is a Menninger-trained psychiatrist.
He spends hours researching team stats before any given game.
Since he’s from Atlanta and he’s a Falcons fan, he has to brush up a little more on his Patriot facts prior to the big game.
One interesting part of Winer’s method is that he keeps track of all his stats the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper.
“It’s different,” Winer admitted.
He said he doesn’t introduce himself as “Dr. Winer” when stepping into a press box, but eventually most members of the media learn about his full-time job as a psychiatrist.
“They might start asking me about how to help a family member, a friend or even themselves,” Winer said.
He said researching NFL stats is his passion and in a way, his self-therapy.
“My office looks a lot more like somebody who does football work rather than psychiatry work because I have a lot of memorabilia,” Winer said.
Here are some interesting Super Bowl facts he pointed out during our interview:
- The team that wins turnover ratio typically wins the game and the team that scores the most points off those turnovers is much more likely to win.
- For the past 50 games, the coin toss has come up heads 25 times and it has come up tails 25 times.
- Tom Brady has thrown 14 touchdown passes in Super Bowl history, but the longest one has only been 22 yards.
- The team that scores first in the Super Bowl has won 34 of the last 50 games.
- The Patriots have been to six Super Bowls, but not one of them has been decided by more than four points.
- The Texans are one of only four NFL teams that have never played in Super Bowl.
- No football team has ever played a Super Bowl game in its home stadium.
- Only twice in Super Bowl history has a team won a game after scoring the fewest points off the opponent’s turnovers.
- One of the two times happened two years ago when the Patriots defeated the Seahawks.