Super Bowl Betting: Sportsbooks Safe from Long-Shot Wagers

If you wanted to turn a huge profit by betting on the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl, you should have done it after Week 4.

The Pats had just been hammered at Kansas City a week after barely defeating the Oakland Raiders and a week before they headed home as rare underdogs to the Cincinnati Bengals.

Oddsmakers bumped the slumping team down to 16-1 (according to the Odds Shark archive of Super Bowl futures bets), and fans and pundits wondered aloud if the Patriots were finished and if Tom Brady was washed up.

Of course, they won seven straight and 10 of 12 after that, losing only a Week 13 game at Green Bay and a meaningless Week 17 game against Buffalo along the way as they marched back to the Super Bowl.

Similarly, Seattle was 9-1 on the futures market heading into Week 9. Surprise losers of a couple of games and looking like anything but championship material in a close 30-24 home win over Oakland (as 13-point chalk), the Seahawks were not impressing oddsmakers.

But again, the cream began to rise, and the Seahawks lost just once after Oct. 19 to return to the Super Bowl.

The defending champion Seahawks facing the always-contending Patriots means the Super Bowl XLIX matchup won't cost oddsmakers a ton of money on the futures market regardless of who wins. Both began the season with short odds and among the top three teams on almost every Super Bowl betting board.

In early September, the Denver Broncos topped the betting on the Super Bowl XLIX board at roughly 5-1. As it turned out, that was a lousy wager. Denver peaked too early, Peyton Manning got hurt, the Broncos lost a home playoff game to Indianapolis, and the team fired its head coach.

Seattle was the second choice on that board at 6-1. Some might think 6-1 makes for a nice price, especially now that the Seahawks are where they are, but those looking for bigger payouts probably passed on Seattle back in September.

New England was the third pick on that board at 8-1 and tumbled to 16-1 within a month. The Patriots then earned the top seed in the AFC playoffs and took advantage of that position, outlasting Baltimore in the divisional round then clobbering the Colts in the AFC Championship Game.

The San Francisco 49ers, also at 8-1 on those early Super Bowl betting lines, were probably the biggest futures busts of the season as they missed the playoffs altogether. The New Orleans Saints, who came next on that board at 9-1, also missed the playoffs, failing to win even the weak NFC South.

The Green Bay Packers also went off at 9-1 on the Super Bowl XLIX odds this season and then blew the NFC Championship Game last weekend to the Seahawks.

The biggest long shot to make the playoffs this season was, somewhat surprisingly, the Dallas Cowboys, who began this season at 66-1 on the odds to win the Super Bowl and then came within a catch/non-catch of advancing to the NFC Championship Game.

The Carolina Panthers went off at 50-1 and made it to the divisional round. The Arizona Cardinals, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Cincinnati Bengals and the Baltimore Ravens all went off at 40-1 and made the playoffs—although only the Ravens got past the wild-card round.

The best performance from a team that didn't make the playoffs came from the Buffalo Bills, who started the season off at 100-1 on the Super Bowl board and then went 9-7, missing a wild-card berth by a game.

Stats and odds courtesy of Odds Shark.