The New York Giants were 300-to-1 win the Super Bowl late Thursday afternoon.
Those odds are courtesy of our friends at PointsBet Sportsbook. Clearly 300-to-1 is a very big number, but it’s justified at this point in time because the Giants stink. Heading into the Thursday night thriller with the Eagles, the Giants were 1-and-5 and Saquon Barkley is out for the season with a torn ACL. The odds are strongly against New York making the playoffs, let alone winning the Super Bowl.
Thing is, the Giants were only around 100-to-1 before the season. The only teams with higher odds were the Bengals (120-to-1), Jets (120-to-1), Panthers (120-to-1), Football Team (150-to-1) and Jaguars (200-to-1). You would think that teams expected to have little or no success would have much juicier odds to win the Super Bowl.
If it isn’t really in the realm of possibility, why aren’t teams 300-to-1 or more preflop?
“I go back to the Rams-Titans Super Bowl from back in the Kurt Warner days,” Caesars senior oddsmaker Alan Berg told NBC Sports. “Everybody in town had pretty thick odds on the Rams to win it all. [Some Nevada sportsbooks had Rams 300-to-1 in 1999]. That probably woke everybody up to not have too many teams in that 300 or 500-to-1 range before the season. If your number is too high these days, a sharp guy will probably come in and make a bet."[[ad:athena]]
Big prices aside, sportsbooks want to balance ledgers and limit liability. So a run of money on any team can make beads of sweat roll down a bookmaker’s neck should that team exceed expectations.
“It’s difficult to have $20 million worth of liability on a football team to win the Super Bowl,” Berg said with a laugh. “There’s always that sweat when the money builds up. There was an example like that with lots of baseball future bets on the Marlins. We had a very high preseason price on them. Then COVID happened, the season shortened, playoffs expanded and all of sudden, they’re in the playoffs. We were in a little bit of a sweat with that.”
If you think 300-to-1 on the Rams was a smooth cash with “The Greatest Show on Turf,” that’s nothing compared to what happened across the pond four years ago.
That’s when Leicester City won the English Premier League for the greatest underdog cash of all-time. European bookmaker Ladbrokes posted 5,000-to-1 odds before the season and they paid it for it dearly when the Foxes pulled off the unthinkable. Bloomberg reported that sportsbooks in the United Kingdom had to fork over around 11 million pounds.
“There’s nothing in American sports that can compare to Leicester City winning that championship,” Berg explained. “It would be like a AAA team like the Albuquerque Isotopes winning the World Series. It makes no sense. It was such a magical run. Every domino just fell into place for them. It was truly insane. Even the New York Jets (1,000-to-1 right now) coming back from the spot they’re in wouldn’t be as impressive as what Leicester City accomplished.”
Solid perspective from a gentleman that’s been doing this for a while.
So the next time you think about throwing some pizza money on a professional sports team to win a championship, just remember that they don’t make long shots the way they used to. Preseason odds will never be overly juicy because sportsbooks have learned their lesson. And they hate when history repeats itself.
You can thank the Rams and Leceister City for that.
