The Super Bowl is the undisputed heavyweight champion when it comes to title games in professional sports. It pits the winners of the National Football League’s two conferences, the National Football Conference and the American Football Conference, against each other in a television spectacular like no other on Earth. Unlike the other major sports, the Super Bowl is a one-time meeting. The World Series, the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Playoffs all rely on a 7-game series to determine the champion.
The Super Bowl used to be an NFC-dominated blowout, but the last several games have been absolute thrill-rides. Last year, the New Orleans Saints were victorious over the favored Indianapolis Colts. Some of their players got to hoist the revered Lombardi Trophy; the Saints quarterback, Drew Brees, famously chose to hold his infant son as flurries of confetti glittered in the stadium lights. It was just one of so many memorable Super Bowl moments.
The year before that, the Pittsburg Steelers beat the Arizona Cardinals with a touchdown pass in the closing seconds. And the year before that, the New England Patriots were denied a perfect season by the New York Giants with another last-second scoring toss, denying the Pats what would have been their fourth title in a seven-year span. In fact, there hasn’t been a “bad” Super Bowl since 2006, when Peyton Manning and the Colts vaporized the Chicago Bears.
What those three close contests had in common were that they all topped the $90 million mark when it came to sports-book wagers. The annual pot has actually more than doubled in the past 20 years. Super Bowl betting mirrors sports betting in general, as more and more people are taking their chances with the bookmakers, and with the explosion of online wagering. Perhaps it’s an indicator of a tough economy when people start chasing money this way; more likely it is a natural offshoot of pro football’s popularity across the world.
