You can place plenty of bets on the Super Bowl, from typical wagers on the game itself to weird and bizarre props. Somewhere, someone is offering a bet on or including on a watch party’s prop sheet almost anything even vaguely related to the Super Bowl. By that standard, betting on the result of the coin toss is relatively tame and normal, and it involves nothing more than luck.
The Super Bowl coin toss is probably the most-watched flip of a coin in American sports. So, of course, people bet on it. Should they? Well, that’s another story.
On BetMGM, there are -102 odds for both heads and tails. You can also bet on which team will win the coin toss. In that case, the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs both have -102 odds.
That’s the smallest hold you’ll see on a two-way bet from a legal sportsbook. For comparison, betting on the spread or point total will typically draw -110 odds on each side. That’s because they know there’s no insider knowledge or risk to impact them. It’s a true 50-50 proposition, and you’re getting less than even money. It’s a negative expected value bet but not as bad as, say, betting on red at a roulette table.
The Chiefs, the so-called road team in the Super Bowl, will be the team to call heads or tails.
When it comes to writing content about a coin flip, it’s not all that straightforward. People care about everything when it comes to the Super Bowl, so we continue to create a story about the coin toss every year. We’ve had to get creative. Last year, Nando Di Fino dove into the archives to find some oddities about Super Bowl coin flips.
Ronald Reagan’s presidential library has an 11-minute video of him practicing before he went live for Super Bowl XIX in 1985.
There’s also a fun note about trying to get NASA involved with astronauts aboard Discovery.
“Unfortunately, plans were scrapped when NASA pointed out that a coin wouldn’t actually flip in the weightlessness of space. The astronauts instead did a demonstration during the pregame show — where Canadian astronaut Roberta Bondar held a coin as her crew members spun her backwards — and Chuck Knoll officially flipped the coin back on Earth. It came up heads (both times).”
The coins themselves have a fascinating history. George Halas flipped the coin for Super Bowl XIII when he owned the Chicago Bears and went fancy and nostalgic in his approach:
“He bought a $317 1920 gold coin (to commemorate “the year we started the league“). It landed with Lady Liberty facing up, which Halas had designated as heads. He claimed the loser of the flip (the Steelers) would get the coin — and you can see in this video he actually called over Jack Lambert and gave it to him. It’s worth about $3,000 today.”
Super Bowl coins are more official now. The Highland Mint offers commemorative versions of the official coin for sale. Three years ago, we acquired a few ahead of the Super Bowl and flipped them hundreds of times until we lost our minds in the name of science (or something).
Our total tally was 882 tails and 869 heads. It was a silly experiment that proved absolutely nothing. Tails came in 50.4 percent of the time, but even if that were the true probability, betting on the coin flip with -102 odds would still be a negative expected value bet. A -102 bet has implied odds of 50.5 percent.
In conclusion, please don’t bet on the coin flip. Know some of the history for a potential trivia night, have fun picking it in your party prop sheets and roll your eyes at us for posting a version of this every year, but don’t bet on it.
(Photo credit: Rob Carr / Getty Images)