The NFL may be America’s game, but when it comes to the Super Bowl, that’s a worldwide event. Estimates are that around the planet, some 160 million people tune in to watch the championship match of the NFL season. Naturally, the majority of those viewers are in the United States. Projections are that 99.9 million Americans were in front of their tellys watching the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers 31-20 in the 2020 Super Bowl game, giving the Chiefs their first title in 50 years.
The numbers in the United Kingdom weren’t on par with that level of audience and yet, they were quite impressive nonetheless. At its peak, the British audience on the BBC for Super Bowl 54 climbed to 1.3 million. That’s a quality total when you consider that the kickoff for the game was at 11:30 p.m. local time. The numbers were also more than 100,000 above the UK Super Bowl viewing audience in 2019. As well, online viewing figures for the BBC increased by 31 percent as compared to the previous year’s game.
Super Bowl betting is also a massive event, and the beauty of Super Bowl wagering is often in its simplicity. It isn’t necessary to be an expert on American football in order to place plenty of wagers on outcomes during the game. A fun, exciting and easy method to wager on the game without actually knowing a lick about the sport is via Super Bowl prop bets. As it turns out, some of the most popular Super Bowl prop bets have nothing to do directly with the playing of the game.
Let’s take a look at a few of these unique wagers to display exactly how little knowledge of American football is required to place a bet on the outcome.
Coin Toss Result
To start off, here’s a wager which is literally a 50-50 proposition. The pregame coin flip to determine first possession of the football offers just two outcomes. It’s going to be heads, or it’s going to be tails.
Tails owns a 29-25 lead over the course of the 54 Super Bowl games. Tails is also on a roll. The coin has landed on that side in each of the last two games and over six of the past seven Super Bowls.
Do the laws of probability suggest that heads is long overdue for a run of good fortune? It could be. But hey, that’s your call. It literally is a flip of a coin.
You can even play a second coin toss prop on which team will win the toss, as well as a third prop on whether the team winning the toss will also win the game. Again, each is a 50-50 call.
It’s Raining Gatorade
This is a tradition that began in the mid-1980s with the Super Bowl champion New York Giants, who would dump the Gatorade tub over the head of coach Bill Parcells when the game was won, dousing him in a shower of colourful sugary liquid.
“If you’ve never had a Gatorade bath, you haven’t done anything very exceptional,” Mike Ditka, coach of the Super Bowl XX champion Chicago Bears, once famously noted.
This prop is a tougher call. Over the past 11 Super Bowls, orange was the colour of choice five times, including last season when the Gatorade was dumped over the head of Chiefs coach Andy Reid. Blue was drenched over a coach twice, while purple and yellow scored once each.
Interestingly, no shower was the winning play twice in the past eight Super Bowls.
National Anthem Props
How long will it go? That’s the prop you must play on the length of the Star Spangled Banner. This year’s performers are country singer Eric Church and R&B artist Jazmine Sullivan.
Since Super Bowl 40, the average anthem length works out to 1:57. Six times it’s gone over that total, while sliding under nine times.
Just a hunch, but a duet that normally doesn’t perform together, that sounds like it could be a long one.
In the UK, for example, the BBC showed the game live and the audience peaked at 1.3 million in the opening five minutes (broadcast at almost 11.30pm, of course), a figure which was
