Chiefs fans, are you still basking in your Super Bowl victory? Eagles fans, perhaps you’re still feeling the sting of defeat. Or are you like a certain newsletter writer who is still wondering why she needed to eat quite so much guacamole in one sitting?

Regardless of how you’re feeling after Sunday’s big game—or if you care about sports at all—there are many takeaways from sports in general that you can apply to your work life. Today, we’ll look at a few.

Top talent, on its own, isn’t enough

Popular wisdom has it that both talent and the ability to work well together contribute to a team’s success. Still, the relative importance of each factor hasn’t been clear.

Brian Uzzi and Noshir Contractor, both professors of management and organizations at Kellogg, along with their coauthors, wanted to untangle the two forces. So they looked at individual and team statistics from the NBA and MLB, as well as from soccer’s English Premier League and cricket’s Indian Premier League. They also gathered data from an e-sport game called Defense of the Ancients 2.

Then they created a computer model that took into account individual performance, as well as a team’s history of success together, in order to predict who would win a match. They found that individual talent was a stronger predictor of victory—but that teamwork mattered too.

While the results suggest that individual talent matters more than teamwork, people shouldn’t interpret this result to mean that recruiting the best talent is enough to win.

“You have to have talent as a basis,” Uzzi says. “But talent doesn’t reach its full potential unless you get them to work as a team together.”

You can read the full Insight article on the research here.

High status comes in handy

In business, as in sports, there are often superstars who get put on pedestals. But how much do these superstars’ reputations become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

To investigate, Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations, and a colleague turned to baseball. They found that high-status pitchers get more favorable calls—in essence, a wider strike zone—than lower-status pitchers. And the benefit of the doubt accorded to high-status pitchers is highest when the pitch travels close to the edge of the strike zone, meaning there is more uncertainty surrounding the decision.

While there’s talk of automating the strike zone, the lessons for managers still hold.

“When you are high status, you tend to get more recognition for your accomplishments” across a range of contexts, explains King. “And that means that it’s much easier for people who are at the top of the hierarchy to … reproduce their success.” This form of reputational bias even extends to organizations, with more prestigious companies getting the benefit of the doubt in employment-discrimination suits.

The research offers managers an important takeaway about the tangible benefits of developing a reputation for excellence. But it is also a cautionary tale about the challenges of treating everyone fairly.

“People who are at the bottom of the hierarchy have to expend a lot more effort and a lot more of what meager resources they have,” says King.

You can read the full Insight article on the research here.

And don’t forget all those Super Bowl ads

Let’s not ignore that other big competition that happened Sunday: the marketers’ quest to produce the best ad of the Super Bowl.

This year’s Kellogg School Super Bowl Advertising Review concluded that Google Pixel was the big winner. The review, which is led each year by marketing professor Derek Rucker and clinical professor of marketing Tim Calkins, put M&M near the bottom of the list.