Gambling and the Super Bowl

By Eric Nelson

In the spirit of the upcoming Super Bowl as well as man's second largest pastime, gambling, I have decided to embark on an intellectual journey exploring past Vegas Super Bowl spreads and results.

I will attempt to decipher what this year's betting spread is really trying to tell us.

Just for clarification purposes, a spread is the final point margin Vegas predicts a given team will win by. If an individual "covers the spread" it means that the winning team outscored their opponent by a greater number than predicted by Vegas.

The first thing that stands out to me is that Vegas favorites are 32-12 over the past 44 super bowls. The favorites have won the game outright seven times, but failed to cover the spread.

Three of these games ended in a push (tied the spread). For the past three Super Bowls, the favorites failed to beat the spread, highlighting a more recent trend in which the underdog doesn't seem to be at as much of a disadvantage.

In this year's spread, which so far has the Packers as the -3 underdogs, we really will be putting this recent trend to the test. Since 2002, the favorites have only gone 5-4, and of those five victories only beaten the spread three times. To put this in perspective, from 1971-1997 the favorites went a collective 22-5 and beat the spread 18 of those 22 times.

During the ‘71-97 era, however, we witnessed multiple back-to-back titles, as well as some of the teams considered to be the best of all time, including Sweetness and the 1985 Bears, as well as the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins.

The more recent Super Bowl scores would lead us to believe that the underdog is not necessarily the underdog anymore, but the Steelers and their nasty yellow towels would have us believe otherwise.

Super Bowl XLV is the Steelers' eighth appearance in franchise history. Their past appearances have accumulated an astounding 6-1 record.

So history tells us that the Steelers know how to win, even if it's only been with an average margin of 7.5.

Taking both historic and current trends into account, it would seem that Super Bowl XLV is an important crossroads for both teams.

Will the Steelers capture their third title in the past six years and emerge as the team of the modern age, or will the Packers realign themselves and finally emerge from Favre's shadow with Aaron Rodgers at the helm? As for now, I'm playing up the numbers game and putting the endowment betting against the spread.

If I win, I promise an astronaut training facility and program..so keep your fingers crossed.