It’s Super Bowl week, which means the mainstream media makes a huge deal about all the different prop bets that are available.
Of course, if you’ve bet on football online before, you know that sportsbooks offer tons of prop bets on every regular season game as well. But even if you don’t usually bet on props, there’s just something about the Super Bowl that makes you want to get in on the action.
Problem is, a lot of these props can be a total guessing game. Betting on the coin toss is the obvious degenerate move, but I don’t see how you can actually handicap whether Gronk will get more receiving yards than the total of penalty yards assessed to both teams (an actual prop I heard on the radio today).
Guessing game or not, who are we kidding? We’re going to bet on Super Bowl props, so let’s at least try to highlight a couple that we feel we can actually predict. Here’s one that I absolutely think is worth an investment.
New England Patriots Over 6.5 Points In First Quarter (-138)
I know the Pats have yet to score a first-quarter touchdown in the Super Bowl during the Brady/Belichick era. But guess where the betting public’s going to be putting their money once they hear that stat a million times during Super Bowl week?
The bookies are aware of this stat as well, yet they’ve made the Over 6.5 points a pretty healthy favourite here. The only way to get Over 6.5 points in one quarter is with a touchdown (unless the Pats score three field goals, or two field goals and a safety), so you can get a sense of what the books are thinking. I agree with them.
The Pats of recent years have been the favourites in Super Bowls, which may have made them a bit too complacent at the start. This year’s team is different, though, embracing the underdog role (it’s actually getting annoying how much they’re embracing it, but I digress.) Look for the Pats to try to make an early statement here against a Rams team that may be a bit jittery in the opening frame.