I don’t bet on sports. It’s not that I have any prejudice against gambling. I just know I’d lose a lot of money if I bet frequently, so I don’t. I’d rather keep the money.
If you do bet on sports, you probably know that at Super Bowl time you can bet on much more than just the final score of the game. USA Today has a list of the latest Super Bowl “prop bets”, as they’re called. These are bets that are offered by many sports books in Las Vegas and Reno. There are more than 100 of them. Half have to do with game-related statistics. The rest qualify as silly. Here are some of the sillier ones:
The odds that a fan taunts New England quarterback Tom Brady by tossing a slightly-deflated football onto the field are 19 to 1. You’ve got better odds if you bet that a fan will toss a flare onto the field. That’s at 15 to 1. The odds someone will throw a sex toy onto the field are 45 to 1, and the odds that someone will toss a dead falcon are 300 to 1. The sex toy thing, by the way, actually did happen at a New England road game during the season.
Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn is bald. The odds that he wears a hairpiece during the game are 50 to 1.
The odds that announcer Joe Buck will be clean shaven are 10 to 1. Buck has a penchant for rocking a few days’ worth of stubble.
Here’s a good bet: You’ll have 8 to 1 odds that neither Joe Buck nor Troy Aikman nor any sideline reporter will say the word “Deflategate”. If they say it, you lose. The NFL would probably prefer that they didn’t, but it’s likely to be brought up by someone.
This one surprises me. The odds of a halftime show wardrobe malfunction are 2 to 1. That makes me believe the definition of wardrobe malfunction is fairly broad. For instance, if a dancer loses a shoe, that could be a wardrobe malfunction. More specifically, the odds that halftime performer Lady GaGa will accidentally show some intimate part of her body are 15 to 1. The odds that she wears an outfit Fox will have to blur for indecency are 3 to 2. That one surprises me, too. My guess is that all outfits have been pre-approved.
The odds that someone will catch fire during the halftime show are 25 to 1. Someone falling off the stage currently stands art 12 to 1.
There’s even an over-under bet on commercials that feature some sort of parody of the president. The over-under is 1.5, so if there’s one commercial, you lose. If there are two, you win.
And finally, the odds that Patriots head coach Bill Belichick will host Saturday Night Live in the weeks following the Super Bowl are 5,000 to 1. Sounds impossible, but it might be worth ten bucks to try to win 50,000.
You can see why I don’t bet.
