Betting on the Super Bowl

Great question. Let me load the data and check how often the favorite actually wins the Super Bowl.

Looking at 58 Super Bowls with betting lines, favorites win about 58% of the time.

That's a decent edge for favorites, but 42% underdog wins means you can't just blindly bet the favorite. The Super Bowl has produced some legendary upsets.

This is where it gets interesting. Vegas is eerily accurate on the spread.

29 favorites covered, 28 underdogs covered, 2 pushes. That's a 50.9% to 49.1% split - essentially a coin flip. Vegas knows exactly what they're doing on the biggest game of the year.

Here are the underdogs who shocked the world, ranked by how big of an upset it was:

Joe Namath's Jets in Super Bowl III stand alone - 18-point underdogs who beat the Colts. That "I guarantee it" moment is still the gold standard for Super Bowl upsets. The 2001 Patriots over the "Greatest Show on Turf" Rams (+14) and the 2007 Giants ruining New England's perfect season (+12) round out the top three.

Almost identical accuracy to the spread:

29 overs, 28 unders, 1 push. Vegas has the Super Bowl total dialed in just as precisely as the spread. The house always knows.

Oh yes. Even with their overall accuracy, there have been some spectacular misses:

The 2018 Rams-Patriots game is the biggest outlier - the line was 55.5 and the final score was 13-3. That's nearly 40 points under the total. On the flip side, the 1979 Cowboys-Steelers shootout (66 points on a 37-point line) and several other high-scoring affairs went way over. But these are the exceptions - Vegas gets it right far more often than they miss.