You know the old catch-phrase: “care to make things interesting?” It’s what you say when you’re asking someone to bet against you on something. In recent years, we’ve seen a major shift in the interests of NFL consumers. More football watchers are becoming fans of their own fantasy teams and/or whatever team they’ve wagered on.
It keeps things engaged when the team they support is irrelevant. Super Bowl LIII, or Super Bowl 53, is poised to be the perfect game to test this theory. The New England Patriots are in the NFL championship game for the fourth time in five years and 10th of the last 17. The familiarity is breeding contempt as fans are tired of seeing the same side over and over and over and over again.
That’s the down side. The good news is that if you plan to bet on Super Bowl 53, you have more options than ever to place wagers both offline and online. Seven U.S. states now currently offer fully regulated sports wagering and that doesn’t include New Mexico, which provides another market via a tribal gaming pact.
According to PlayUSA Network, a news, analysis, and research organization dedicated related to the regulated online gaming market in the United States, as much as $325 million could be wagered on the NFL’s showcase game.
That figure includes all the legal jurisdictions in the states: Delaware, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.
Additionally, Super Bowl 53 will be the first one in which you can bet legally in New Jersey, and PlayNJ.com (a subsidiary of PlayUSA Network) experts project that over 1 million Americans will place a legal bet on the game. Their estimates also claim that by the time Super Bowl 53 kicks off, there will be more than 250 legal online and retail sports books where a gambler can “make things interesting.”
And revenues are only expected to keep increasing, validating just how far the industry has come in a very short time.
Nevada set an all-time high last year by collecting $158.6 million in wagers ahead of last year’s game, nearly 40 percent of the state’s total handle in February 2018, according to Nevada Gaming Control Board figures. It’s expected that this industry will only continue growing at a rapid pace this year, and beyond.
So if you have grown fatigued of Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the rest of the New England Patriots, no problem! There are plenty of prop bets out there, and like the rest of the space, they have have only been increasing in popularity.
These days, betting on the Super Bowl has gone far beyond football, and there are plenty of options to entice bettors; especially those who don’t care for either of the teams that are playing.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
He also contributes sociopolitical essays to Chicago Now. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. The content of his cat’s Instagram account is unquestionably superior to his.