Lisa, angry at Homer for tricking her into helping him gamble on football, makes a bet that if she loves him the winner of the Super Bowl will be the Washington Redskins and if she doesn't the Buffalo Bills would come out on top (Washington won). When this episode premiered, those two teams were actually squaring off in Superbowl XXVI and Washington won 37-24. Over the next three years, Fox made it a tradition to air this episode just before the Super Bowl and change the dialog so that the teams would include whatever teams were playing that year. According to the DVD commentary, Lisa accurately picked the winning team every single year. Coincidentally, the Buffalo Bills lost three consecutive Super Bowls from 1992 to 1994. Thus, The Simpsons' accurate predictions always involved assuming Buffalo would lose. (The Bills also lost an earlier Super Bowl in 1991, but there was no Simpsons episode about that one.)
When Homer invites Barney to go bowling on Sunday, Barney says that his mom is coming in from Norway. In the ninth season episode Simpson Tide (1998), Barney's mother is shown to be a Commander in the Navy. She may be returning from deployment.
In one scene, Homer makes Lisa sit on the end of the sofa so that she will not interrupt the game. Yeardley Smith recalls that many people at the table-read thought Homer was "too harsh" in the scene, but it ended up being included in the episode anyway.
Jay Kogen commented that Lisa and Marge episodes "tend to be the better episodes", because they are more thought-out and have more emotional depth to them. However, they are harder to write than other episodes because they are "less jokey." The writers therefore made the decision to replace Marge's role with Homer, who tends to be funnier than Marge. Al Jean commented that because he has a daughter, Homer-Lisa episodes are easier for him to write and he "always want[s] to work on them." Rich Moore said they are his favorite episodes to direct, because "the two most opposite characters in the cast finding some kind of common ground [...] That was always interesting."
Ugolin and Cesar appear for the first time since The Crepes of Wrath (1990), only now, they are out of prison, living near Paris (we can see The Eiffel Tower by the window), and watching Jerry Lewis movies in an apartment.