I’m not here to give free advertising to anyone, but I have proof that the popularity of betting the Super Bowl coin toss has taken on a life of its own. And because of that, this year’s coin toss before next Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis between New England and the New York Giants is the most important ever.

FREE PIZZA!

Papa John’s will give away a free large one-topping pizza and a two-liter Pepsi MAX if the majority of voters on the Papa John’s website can predict the correct coin toss before Super Bowl XLVI. Of course there’s a catch: You have to be enrolled in the Papa Rewards program, whatever that is. But you can vote at the Papa John’s website through Feb. 1, and the majority winner will be unveiled on Feb. 2. Pretty clever advertising I must say.

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Anyway, back to the important stuff: Betting on the Super Bowl coin toss. There simply has been no easier money for the past 14 years on the big game than wagering on this. As always, the odds for heads and tails are the same: -105 or -110 depending on where you look (you can also bet on which team wins the toss and whether the coin toss winner wins the game). The Green Bay Packers won the coin toss last year, meaning that the NFC has won it an astounding 14 years in a row. That means the coin has come up heads 24 times, tails 21 overall. The NFC has won the toss a total of 31 times, the AFC 14.

The Giants are the visitors this year and, thus, will get the call. Heads has come up three times in a row and has been a winner for the past two Super Bowls (Saints, Packers). But that team that has won the coin toss has won the coin toss is only 22-23 all-time. In fact, the team that has won the coin toss has lost 10 of the past 15 Super Bowls. Three seasons ago, the Arizona Cardinals won the coin toss and became the first team to defer (it became an allowable rule that season), but they went on to lose to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Green Bay deferred last year and forced a Pittsburgh three-and-out.

The last time the coin came up tails was four years ago when the Patriots and Giants faced off – we all know what happened then. The Patriots were the last AFC team to win the coin toss, but that didn’t do them much good. In Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans, the Pats won with heads but ended up losing 35-21 to the Packers. That, of course, was pre-Tom Brady and Bill Belichick (Drew Bledsoe/Bill Parcells) for New England and was Brett Favre’s lone title with Green Bay.

Some “studies” believe that a coin toss isn’t exactly a 50/50 proposition. A 2007 study titled "Dynamical Bias In The Coin Flip" and published in the “Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review” concluded that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started -- at least 51 percent likelihood but up to as much as 55. So if tails is facing up when the coin is on a person’s thumb, then it’s more likely to come up as tails when flipped and vice versa. I really hope our taxes didn’t pay for this study.

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