Baseball: The San Francisco Giants, in winning the 2012 World Series, participated in 16 playoff games — and they'd have had more, had they not swept Detroit 4-0 in the World Series itself.
Football: The San Francisco 49ers played 16 games in their entire regular season. Three more wins would make them Super Bowl champions.
This is not to make football sound inadequately grueling, but to make a purely statistical point: The sample size for football games is much, much smaller than the sample size for baseball games.
