Super Bowl 
/ Jack Houghton / 03 February 2011 / Leave a Comment 
Steelers are the value
"Back in the day, a British betting market had a pure simplicity to it: you could bet on any of the participants or, in some sports, the draw. That was it. Times have changed though. Now it’s different."
Line betting is all the rage in the NFL but what's the point when two teams are so closely matched, asks Jack Houghton
Britain's gamblers have always been willing to accept that, from time-to-time, they'll be presented with an event that is decidedly lop-sided: Liverpool taking on a non-league team in the FA Cup; Arkle going for a third Gold Cup; Matt Cardle loosening the vocal chords on X Factor final night.
On occasions like this - where the scales of chance are heavily weighted on one side - the event is priced-up accordingly, and punters make their choice. Simple. It may well be that the weight of money required to make a wager on the favourite financially worthwhile, or the sheer improbability of an upset, mean that punters keep their money to themselves and wait for the next betting opportunity. But one thing is for certain: there's no meddling.
At least there never used to be. Back in the day, a British betting market had a pure simplicity to it: you could bet on any of the participants or, in some sports, the draw. That was it. Times have changed though. Now it's different. We're presented with a plethora of specials and handicap markets: gimmicks to breathe life into otherwise comatose events.
Why? You wouldn't find Radio Four spicing up the Shipping Forecast for the benefit of listeners (Producer: "Any chance we can say there's a hurricane heading for Humber?"); so why do we feel the need to make every sporting event of betting interest? What's wrong with watching a hundred-to-one-on-shot for the sheer numerical beauty of it?
I blame the Americans. Coca-colonisation doesn't stop with soft-drinks and fast-food you see: now we even bet like our transatlantic cousins.
In America, it's all about the "spread". Unsatisfied with sporting events where the winner seemed a foregone conclusion, Charles K McNeil came up with the idea that, in any two-outcome event, the underdog should be "given" a certain amount of points in order to turn them into an even-money shot. This point addition - usually expressed with half-point fractions to avoid the possibility of a draw - was known as the "spread".
This Super Bowl Sunday - not to be confused with "Superb Owl Sunday", an event my spell-checker is clearly more excited by - all the talk is about the spread. When the Green Bay Packers take on the Pittsburgh Steelers at Cowboys Stadium, they will do so with the paltry advantage of just one-and-a-half points in some Nevada casinos - the smallest spread of the last half-century.
If the teams are so closely matched then, what's the point of the spread? Well, it's become a tradition I suppose. And it gives the casino PR-men something to talk about. Take RJ Bell. He's been trotting out a statistic of late: the team installed as Super Bowl favourites by Las Vegas casinos have won 32 out of 44 renewals - a 73 per cent hit rate. And the point spread, according to Bell, can be seen as an "unmatched predictor" of NFL games.
Well, maybe. But that largely depends on the records those favourites took into Super Bowls. If they tended to be very short-priced favourites, that success rate would likely have been matched by any armchair football fan. And a German octopus would have done even better still.
And anyhow, analysis conducted by Andrew Iskoe suggests that Vegas oddsmakers aren't actually as good at constructing the point spread as Bell would have us believe - with it only proving decisive in less than one in six games.
On that basis then, I'm going to throw out Bell's Vegas-favourite statistic. The ratings suggest this game is a coin-toss and so, at [2.34], the Pittsburgh Steelers have to be the value call.
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