John Riordan: Super Bowl's big bets will be more lucrative than ever

As the waves of legalised gambling roll across the US, punters look to the Bengals, the Rams and the pop stars for inspiration

Quarterback Matthew Stafford is watched by head coach Sean McVay during practice at the Los Angeles Rams Training Facility in Thousand Oaks, California. The Rams will play against the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI on Sunday. Picture: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

The march to this weekend’s Super Bowl has been an especially confounding one for gamblers who couldn’t have possibly foreseen a pairing involving the against-all-odds Cincinnati Bengals and the slightly more fancied LA Rams.

And yet, the big game punts of all shapes and sizes will crash in over the next 48 hours in unprecedented fashion as the onset of legalised gambling spreads across the States.

In yet another tiny example of how long this past year has been, watching the 2021 decider, the 55th Super Bowl, meant a trip for me and my friends across the Hudson River to New Jersey where indoor dining was legal. The State of New York was being a lot more cautious than its stroppy kid brother when it came to the easing of restrictions.

A similar trend has applied to opening the floodgates to the voracious appetite of the betting industry.

For several years now, committed gamblers in New York have looked longingly across to the Garden State and wondered why they don’t have the right to conveniently lose money like Jersey boys and girls.

Last Super Bowl Sunday, as our cab emerged out of the Hudson Tunnel and with kick-off fast approaching, I kept refreshing the betting app. I had to wait until we were a little deeper into Jersey City to register properly and therefore legally wager a few light Super Bowl punts for the group. We didn’t win as big as Tom Brady’s Tampa Buccaneers that evening but we came out on top.

However, because I don’t visit New Jersey as often as I should, the paltry winnings rested in the account, lingering inaccessibly there because of my New York residency.

It can often be a harmful irony of the so-called ‘Land of the Free’ that freedom can mean multiple different things across its 50 individual states as well as the district where Washington resides and the several overseas territories deprived a little deeper.

The starkest, most divisive examples of the eagerness of states to cling on to their parochial priorites involve guns and tax rates and access to abortion.

These days, the rights of the woman to choose and of the gambler to lose are headed in dramatically opposite directions.

Recent changes in the law for Mississippians and Texans have sent shivers down the spines of the vulnerable women that live there and the various organisations who battle to protect them. The knock-on effect could lead to a direct challenge to federal law which, if successful, would mean more than 20 states would ban or severely limit abortion at all stages of pregnancy.

The right to choose is a significantly more important issue than the right to bet on sport or the right to smoke weed but given the fact that the latter rights can lead to much needed tax revenue for the responsibilities of states like repairing crumbling roads and bridges, the odds are unsurprisingly stacked against women.

In the immortal words of Selina Meyer, the iconic main character of Armando Iannucci’s masterful satire of the US political system, Veep, “if men got pregnant, you could get an abortion at an ATM”.

There are about 30 states where sports betting is now legal, including 18 that allow online sports wagering. This means over 100 million Americans have the right to place a wager where they live.

A month ago, New York State entered the fray, launching its hotly anticipated mobile sports betting program. For the weeks leading up to it, you couldn’t move for targeted ads on social media, TV commercials with big name stars and huge billboards everywhere you looked which accompanied the thirsty marketing push for your first legal punt.

The logic was simple: a free bet would entice a casual like me in and then my laziness would yield loyalty for all the next wasted bets I would make.

I know I’m the target because, anecdotally, my friends who are much more committed to the ebb and flow of weekend action, the ups and downs of varying sporting endeavours, are staying loyal to their ‘guy’. They won’t abandon the out-of-state bookie on whom they can rely to accept a deeply thought out wager and pay out when necessary to do so.

As the creeping inevitability of this onset of increased rights approached the borders of New York, investors have watched with anticipation. It has been fascinating to watch the big players jostle for position and it has been enlightening to see who succeeded in entering the New York market.

The four brands who have been hounding New Yorkers for their business may or may not be familiar to an Irish reader but it doesn’t take too much scratching beneath the surface to join the dots to more recognisable companies in the UK and Ireland.

Caesars Sportsbook has fairly obvious Las Vegas origins. The state of Nevada is of course world famous for its gambling of all types and sports betting is just one extremely lucrative arm of its activities. A relatively complex merger involving Caesars in 2018 gave William Hill a larger US footprint, ultimately subsumed and rebranded as Caesars Entertainment.

The origins of FanDuel and DraftKings are a lot fresher and both of these arch rivals emerged out of the popular fantasy sports sector. Their higher paced spin on sports consumption was their gateway to expanded gambling offerings and while DraftKings has resolutely raised investment while retaining control for its original founders, FanDuel merged in 2018 with the Paddy Power / Betfair stable to become a lucrative arm of Flutter Entertainment.

And then there’s RSI (Rush Street Interactive) which was a new one to me when the new dawn shone in four weeks ago. With origins in river gambling in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it’s probably no surprise that their marketing budget has been much tighter than their far glitzier New York mobile betting market rivals.

All told, Forbes is estimating this new addition to the gambling landscape will translate into a billion dollar market in New York with more companies vying for the favour of Albany legislators.

I am part of the problem here. I have reduced the unfathomable sacrifices made by the players and coaches representing the Bengals and the Rams to a sideshow while the main commercial considerations of betting, marketing and overall consumption take centre stage.

Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow deserves at least 1,400 words for his already remarkable career — both college and pro.

He led LSU to a national championship and won the college version of player of the year before being drafted to the NFL and destroying his knee in his rookie season. And now, in just his second season, he is giving Cincinnati fans a first Super Bowl in four decades.

Or what about Aaron Donald, the defensive tackle of the LA Rams whose major task on Sunday evening will be to prevent Burrow from making plays?

He’ll be the one wearing 99 at the SoFi Stadium and you’ll likely see him doing all sorts of body contortions to evade Burrow’s large bodyguards with the scary objective of causing harm to the young quarterback. If Donald succeeds and breaches and tackles or creates space for his fellow defenders to break through, the Rams will win as they are favoured to do by all of these oddsmakers.

But alas, no, the vast majority of casual punters like me (a description I am more than ok with!) want to know what the over / under is for the length of the rendition of the national anthem by country singer Mickey Guyton.

Will she stretch out her version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” of more or less than 95 seconds? We can bet on where we think she’ll end up. Will there be spies leaking information from Saturday’s rehearsals? You can bet your life.

Who will the man of the match / MVP thank first? Family or God or teammates or coaches? You can bet on that.

Will the winning coach have orange or blue Gatorade poured over him by his players at full time? Will there be correlation with the orange of the Bengals or the blue of the Rams? Eight out of the last 11 winning coaches have been doused in orange or blue. Is that relevant? Do you feel lucky?

Who will win the coin toss? If the Rams win 23-16, you can multiply your wager by 200 but you can also bet on which of the halftime performers will take the stage first. And whether it’s the Rams or the Bengals who lift the Vince Lombardi Trophy just before 9pm Pacific Time on Sunday, the biggest winners will be the bookies.

- @JohnWRiordan