Super Bowl Coin Flip a Sucker's Bet

Super Bowl Coin Flip a Sucker's Bet
T.O. Whenham of Doc's Super Bowl Picks

Betting on the Super Bowl is serious stuff that takes a lot of time and study. Wagering on the outcome of the Super Bowl coin flip is a sure sign that you are a degenerate. Thousands of you are going to do it, though. The lure of betting on heads or tails, and kick or receive will be too much to resist. The gratification is instant, and it can give you extra money to bet at halftime. Not to mention the bragging rights when you can say that you nailed it to all your drunken buddies. The coin flip is, of course, completely random. That shouldn’t stop us from doing some analysis of what has happened in the past to look for an edge, though, should it? After all, we have two weeks to kill, so there’s time to analyze everything.

Betting Options and Prices
Before we look at what has happened in the past, let’s look at options and prices. There are three ways to bet the coin flip at Bodog. You can bet on whether it will be heads or tails, which team will win, and which team will, as a result of the flip, receive the opening kickoff. All six possible options are offered at prices of -105. That’s not bad, but books could get rich over the long run offering a 50/50 proposition at a payout of less than even money. This is for fun. But it will be more fun to win.

About the coin
The coin itself will be coming from Florida. A company call Highland Mint, which is based in Melbourne, Florida has been charged with making the coin. After the coin flip takes place the coin will head to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Because the coin will be minted in Florida, and Florida is considerably more humid than Arizona, you will have to factor in the different air densities and the coordinating differences in friction into your coin flip decision-making process. And no, I ‘m not serious.

Who will toss
We haven’t yet heard who will actually toss the coin, though there is a decent chance that it will be a quarterback. Four times in the last six years a quarterback has made the toss - Roger Staubach, Y.A. Tittle, Tom Brady and Dan Marino. Brady obviously won’t be tossing it this year, but his presence is a very good sign for the NFC representative. The Seahawks won the toss when Brady was the flipper, and the Patriots have lost the toss every time Brady has been in the Super Bowl. On that basis alone you might want to take an extra look at the Giants. The Giants are riding a hot streak - they won the toss last time they made the big game.

Kicking It
The one thing that is virtually certain is that the winning team will choose to receive the kick. That’s what has happened each of the last 41 years. There is a good reason for this - teams cannot defer until the second half in the Super Bowl, so choosing to kick would be monumentally stupid unless you had a ridiculously good defense and no offense whatsoever. In other words, Baltimore probably would have kicked if they had won when they played the Giants in Super Bowl XXXV.

NFC vs. AFC Coin toss
Want more reason to choose the Giants? The NFC can’t be beat. They have won the last 10 straight coin flips. There’s a bit of a twist, though - the last AFC team to win the toss was the Patriots back in XXXI against the Packers. That didn’t turn out well for the Pats, and winning the coin toss hasn’t turned out particularly well for a lot of teams recently. Tampa Bay was the last team to win the toss and the game, and that was five years ago. The winner of the toss has only hoisted the Lombardi Trophy twice in the last decade. So much for the theory that a team wants the ball first to set the tone and build momentum. It hasn’t always been so bleak for the toss winners, though - overall they are 19-22, but they were 17-13 in the first 30 games before the recent 2-9 skid. It’s up to you to decide if the losing ways will continue, or if the winner is due this time.

Final warnings, er, thoughts
Overall, the Giants are 1-2 in the Super Bowl coin toss, while the Pats are an ugly 1-4. The Giants are designated as the road team this year (the NFC is the visitor in even numbered games), and as such they will call the toss. The team has never called the toss before, so we can’t predict what they might do. The Pats have called it twice, and they went with heads both times. We can’t predict, but at least we can be confident that we are playing on a level playing field - in the first 40 Super Bowls it went heads 20 times and tails 20 times.

The last thing you need to know before making your crucial decisions - the public loves heads, so follow or fade at your own peril.

Click here to read about more funny Super Bowl things you can bet on!

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