Bet Early on Super Bowl for Best-Value Odds

[clevfan]

Bet Early on Super Bowl for Best-Value Odds

Commentary by Joe Saumarez-Smith

Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Usually the team that wins the Super Bowl is favored at short odds to repeat the feat the following season. The New York Giants, who beat the New England Patriots 17-14 in February, are a massive 28-1 to record back-to-back championships.

By contrast, the Patriots are rated 7-2 favorites (bet $20 to make a $70 profit), even though they lost all four of their pre-season games, including a 19-14 loss to the Giants last week. How does this make sense?

In part, it is a reflection of supply and demand. Far more bettors want to wager on the Patriots, who have made it to three Super Bowls in the last five years and won two of them. The Indianapolis Colts, Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints were the other most popular teams with the general public in the last eight weeks of the 2007 regular season, while the San Francisco 49ers, Houston Texans and Atlanta Falcons were the least loved, based on betting trends.

Other factors are at work. Linesmakers look carefully at the competition facing each team. The Patriots have the easiest schedule of all 32 teams, followed by the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders. By contrast, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Colts and the Jacksonville Jaguars have the toughest schedules, based on the win percentages of the teams' rivals last season.

Bookies tend also to ignore pre-season performances. The Detroit Lions are the only team to have gone 4-0 in pre-season games but they are still 125-1 shots to win the Super Bowl.

Two to Five Weeks

For those looking for a Super Bowl wager in September, it is worth remembering bookmakers see relatively little action on Super Bowl markets until the finalists are determined. That's because most bettors don't want to tie up their money for slightly more than five months waiting for a result and prefer to bet their favorite team on a week-by-week basis.

This tends to mean that bookies spend less time researching Super Bowl odds than they should and bettors can usually find some good value, especially if they hunt around for the best odds.

The greatest value in Super Bowl betting tends to come between two and five weeks into the season, when you have some basis to assess the teams. Because the bookies know they will take very little action on the Super Bowl winner, they tend to be slow to update their odds.

If you look at the teams that made up the final four that contested their conference championships last season, three of them hit far bigger odds in the first five weeks of the season than they had been before the season started (New York Giants were 200-1 after week 2, Green Bay Packers were 55-1 after week 1 and the San Diego Chargers were 25-1 after week 4), while the Patriots' odds had shortened to 2-1 from 5-2.

Avoiding Favorites

So who should you bet on this year? There have been no big moves for any team this year -- normally there is at least one team that is heavily hyped prior to the regular season and its Super Bowl odds tumble.

When Brett Favre was traded to the Jets, their odds were cut from 66-1 to 25-1 by some bookies. But the Jets are now out to 66-1 after the bookies took stock and realized the team was unlikely to become champion after the arrival of the ex-Packers quarterback.

I personally tend to avoid the favorites and look to have a portfolio of three or four teams that could possibly deliver at big odds. I support the Philadelphia Eagles, who are 33-1 for the Super Bowl, but betting should always be ruled by the head, not the heart, and I don't feel they are great value at those odds.

Titans, Redskins, Cardinals, Bucs

At the end of last season I marked out the Tennessee Titans, Washington Redskins and St. Louis Cardinals as the three teams to potentially follow against the spread in the early part of the 2008 regular season, on the basis that they had finished their season in reasonable form and were unloved by the betting public. At 60-1, 66-1 and 70-1 respectively I am also going to have small speculative wagers on them going all the way.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers at 45-1 also interest me, not least because the NFC South looks relatively weak and they could possibly win the division by repeating last year's 9-7 record. They went 3-1 and had the second-best net points statistics in pre-season, and are available at a tasty 45-1 with some bookies.

With those four teams all at big odds, I am going to have to have to get pretty lucky. But in a season with probably the most open NFL betting for five years, there's every reason to be optimistic.

Best available Super Bowl odds, based on a survey of more than 60 bookies worldwide:



New England Patriots 7-2
San Diego Chargers 8-1
Dallas Cowboys 9-1
Indianapolis Colts 10-1
Jacksonville Jaguars 16-1
New Orleans Saints 25-1
Minnesota Vikings 25-1
New York Giants 25-1
Pittsburgh Steelers 30-1
Philadelphia Eagles 33-1
Seattle Seahawks 33-1
Green Bay Packers 33-1
Cleveland Browns 40-1
Tampa Bay Buccaneers 45-1
Denver Broncos 50-1
Carolina Panthers 50-1
Tennessee Titans 60-1
New York Jets 66-1
Washington Redskins 66-1
Cincinnati Bengals 70-1
Chicago Bears 80-1
Arizona Cardinals 90-1
Houston Texans 100-1
Buffalo Bills 100-1
Baltimore Ravens 125-1
Detroit Lions 125-1
San Francisco 49ers 125-1
Saint Louis Rams 125-1
Oakland Raiders 125-1
Kansas City Chiefs 200-1
Miami Dolphins 200-1
Atlanta Falcons 225-1

[Eddylove]

Good thing I didn't take this advice last year:

Giants Pre-Season 30-1
Giants when playoffs started 50-1

Hmmmmm