It’s easily the most ridiculous bet of the NFL season but it’s also beautifully symbolic as to why the Super Bowl is the Holy Grail in terms of betting options each year: You can wager on the coin toss.

Obviously, betting on the Super Bowl coin toss is going to be even odds on heads or tails no matter where you bet – BetED has it at -110, while Bodog opened its coin toss odds at -105 for each. And, scarily enough, the most overwhelming Super Bowl betting trend of the past 12 years has been the coin toss: the NFC has won it 12 years in a row and is 29-14 all-time in calling the right side of the coin. The odds of one conference winning 12 Super Bowl coin tosses in a row is more than 1 in 2,000 (if my math is right – you have to start at the second win because it’s 50-50 on a conference winning the first one).

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The Saints are the visiting team this year and thus will call it – of course they benefited from the Vikings calling wrongly to start overtime in the NFC title game. Last year we saw some history on the coin toss. The Cardinals won it (Pittsburgh incorrectly called tails) but deferred to the second half. Pittsburgh received the opening kickoff, marking the first time in Super Bowl history that the coin toss winner kicked off to start the game. The league just changed the rule last year allowing the coin toss winner to defer. For what it’s worth, only three teams during the regular season opted to defer when winning the coin toss against the Colts: Baltimore, Denver and New England. Indianapolis scored TDs on their first drives against the Ravens and Broncos but went three-and-out against the Pats – this is something to consider on those “first team to score” prop bets if the Saints win the toss (but there’s likely no way the Saints put their defense on the field first).

The loser of the coin toss has won 10 of the last 13 Super Bowls, so it obviously has little bearing on the actual result. The winners of the toss have won 20 of the 43 games overall. In the last 13 Super Bowls, heads has won eight times. The past four teams to make their Super Bowl debut – Cardinals, Seahawks, Panthers and Buccaneers – all won the coin toss. But only the Bucs won the game.

What you might need to do is determine which way the referee holds the coin on Super Sunday and have your hand ready on the “bet now” button. 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 heads is facing up when the coin is on a person’s thumb, then it’s more likely to come up as heads when flipped and vice versa. One would think researchers at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz would have better things to do than this, but it truly was a study.

After reading this NFL piece head over to our Bet Football Conference winners page. If you plan on betting NFL you'll also want to read our NFL Season Win Total Predictions page. Our NFL Preseason Betting Tips page is also a valuable tool for your NFL research. For more NFL articles and free picks visit our homepage and view the "Doc's Daily Medicine" section.

And this year’s coin will have traveled quite a distance to get to Miami. It was brought into space by the crew of space shuttle Atlantis in November. It is being presented to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, on Wednesday and then will be brought to South Florida.