Super Bowl Props to Avoid in 2021

by Robert Ferringo - 1/28/2021

By The End of This Article You Will Have A Better Understanding About Which Super Bowl Prop Bets To Avoid Because They Are For Suckers:

Yes (-1200)

No (+800)

The Super Bowl stopped being about The Game a long time ago. Now this annual orgy of greed and violence is pure spectacle, with hundreds of millions of worshippers all clamoring for a piece of the action.

And, as always, the one sure fire way to ramp up the debauchery on Super Sunday is through the wonder of gambling.

There is big money in this freak show. According to the American Gaming Association, nearly $7 billion dollars was bet last year on the Super Bowl between Kansas City and San Francisco.

This year Kansas City will take on Tampa Bay at 6:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 7 in Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium in Florida. The Chiefs are currently a -3.0 favorite, and the total in this game is set at 56.5.

But no one cares about the spread and the total. The betting handle doesn’t threaten the size of the GDP of Kosovo merely because of interest in the actual game. No, the good stuff is in the props. That’s the real catnip for all the debased and depraved gamblers out there. Especially the closet bettors; The miscreants that only let that lust for action come out to play once a year under tightly controlled circumstances.

Proposition betting involves wagering on all the other stuff that doesn’t involve the actual outcome of the game. The coin toss. How many catches a player makes. The color of the Gatorade dumped on the winning coach. The sex of the first genitalia shown during the halftime show. You can bet on all of it via prop bets.

Around 30 percent of last year’s overall Super Bowl action – roughly $2 billion – was laid down on prop bets.

So, like heroin and extramarital affairs, I know you’re going to do it. I’m not here to judge you or haplessly try to dissuade you from Super Bowl prop betting. But if you’re going to do it, then you should at least know which Super Bowl prop bets to avoid.

Below I’ve listed a few of the most obvious sucker bets among the thousands of available Super Bowl prop bets. I know people don’t wager on these things with the intention of making money; they do it for the action, they do it because it is fun or funny, and they do it to feel connected to this enormous cultural event. I get it. But I’m also a professional handicapper, and it physically pains me to see people piss their money away on foolish wagers.

So here are a few Super Bowl prop bets to avoid:

1. Anything Involving The Coin Toss

Context is a key part of any social action. Dropping acid and jamming out with glow sticks is perfectly acceptable in the context of a rave or a concert. It’s less acceptable at your kid’s parent-teacher conference or at a funeral.

The same goes for the Super Bowl coin toss. Betting $100 or $500 on a random coin toss between friends would be seen as pathological, compulsive behavior. But when that coin is tossed at the Super Bowl, somehow that makes wagering on its outcome more socially acceptable. And the result is one of the most popular and most heavily bet Super Bowl props on the board.

I’ve covered betting the Super Bowl coin toss in more detail here. And, as a mystic of mathematics, I have to say that this is The King of Sucker Bets.

Dude, don’t bet the coin toss. That’s some true degenerate nonsense. And if you’re betting on the coin toss just so you can announce to everyone at your Super Bowl party that you have money on the coin toss, then you need to take a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror and tackle your insecurities and need for acceptance head on.

2. Anything Related To Non-Football Entertainment

This group includes any bets on the National Anthem, the halftime show, or how many times the announcer ogles the starting quarterback’s wife in the stands.

Entertainment props are one of the ways in which the sportsbooks have broadened the appeal to non-football bettors. Some people might not be able to name three players on either team playing in the actual game, but they know who Jennifer Lopez, Maroon 5 or Beyoncé are. This year’s halftime performer is The Weeknd and there is an assortment of props related to which song he’s going to sing first, or whether or not he will change his outfit.

Props on the National Anthem have also started to grow. Eric Church (never heard of him) and Jazmine Sullivan (no idea) will sing this year’s anthem. I’m sure they will be great. And the books offer props on things like the length of their rendition and which singer will get to sing more words. I can’t make this stuff up.

The juice on all of these types of wagers are ridiculous. And think about it: do you really want to throw down your hard-earned cheddar trying to predict what these eccentric artists are going to do?

Finally, the books always throw in television production-related bets like, “Will they show Gisele on the screen” or “Will the cameras catch someone scratching themselves”.

Remember: one of the NFL’s fundamental aims with the Super Bowl is not to offend anyone. It is impossible, of course. But rather than have some fun and let things loose on the world’s biggest stage, the television producers will try to stage as joyless and inoffensive of a production as possible. So while the range of entertainment props are endless, the outcomes are not.

3. Betting The Super Bowl MVP

I know that this wager seems pretty straightforward. But it’s not. Quarterbacks have been named the Super Bowl MVP 14 times over the last 25 years. So it seems safe to throw your money down on one of the signal callers, right?

No. Because, again, the odds are shaded heavily toward the quarterbacks. This year, Patrick Mahomes is -120 to win the MVP. You’re getting better odds on the coin toss – with fewer possible outcomes.

Also, the numbers suggest that the quarterback wins the award more than half the time over the last quarter-century. That’s technically true. But no one really thought that Eli Manning, Nick Foles (or even Joe Flacco) were serious threats to win the award that year.

Finally, I wouldn’t call them “sucker bets,” but I also think that betting on the passing props for the two quarterbacks is also a low-value play. The sportsbooks jack up the numbers on things like passing attempts, completions and passing yards. They know the bettors want to bet ‘over’ because people bet the way they want to see the game played rather than the way it actually will be played. I have never found much value in these numbers, and I think that they should be on your Do Not Bother List.

Carpe diem. Good luck.

Robert Ferringo has been the top football handicapper in the country the past 10 years, earning nearly +40,000 in total football profit (average profit: ++3,800). He has also posted 8 of 10 winning seasons (including four straight winning years) and produced an amazing 56 of 87 winning football months over the past 14 years. Robert has hit at nearly 60 percent winners over his last 1,000 totals picks and has posted 12 of 14 winning Super Bowls.

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Super Bowl Props to Avoid in 2021

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