I announced it last week in Discord, but our final Underdog $100 credit winner was Discord user “WordyPoet.” Congrats to all the winners all year, and a huge thank you to Underdog for sponsoring this fun Stealing Lines giveaway this year.
If you haven’t checked out their lobby yet, there are an absurd amount of ways to play the Pick ‘Em games for the Super Bowl, including plenty of first quarter props where you could build an early ticket and then make some more live as the game rolls along.
Among the various ways to play these, I often enjoy picker “higher” on the lower totals for relatively rare events, which are a fun full-game sweat. Here are my favorite two of those to get you started on a build, where you can add your favorite core pick or mix and match these two with a few different options.
The first concept leverages the KC defensive matchup Dalton has hit in Discord to argue a healthier Deebo Samuel might get a bit more work around the line of scrimmage after two weeks since their last game.
The second is a value given Kadarius Toney’s inactive status and how the Chiefs can’t really trust Mecole Hardman. Richie James has caught at least one pass and gone over this number in seven of the Chiefs’ past nine games, but just not the past two. Still, he’s played at least 15 snaps in all three playoff games, and run 23 total routes. If you think about it in terms of Yards Per Route Run, and assume the issues with Toney and Hardman plus James’ locked-in special teams role give him a good chance to run 7 or 8 routes, you’d say he projects for about 7 or 8 receiving yards even at his super low 0.96 YPRR for the year.
I’m not saying throw both of these on all your entries, because both of these guys could legit put up goose eggs in these categories. But I always love having a couple picks like these that are mostly uncorrelated to script or other events, and help me build out other entries.
The other part of this writeup comes as I realized I never gave a full analysis of this game, despite getting my pick in right after the Conference Championship games. That +116 we got on Kansas City aged well, as the early money did shorten the moneyline number a bit and I never saw it reach that range again, despite bouncing around all week, mostly between +100 and +110.
But the conversation leading into the game has been fascinating, and I realized many of you maybe didn’t grab that first line, and are curious whether I’d still be on Kansas City today. And the short answer is I would. But there are so many interesting things to talk about, including ways to consider the narratives we hear from the betting market, that I still wanted to write something up this morning.
For much of the past week, the conversation has pretty clearly been that the public money is on the Chiefs, while the sharps are on the 49ers. That’s been loud, and if you pay attention to media sources, it’s very popular to back Patrick Mahomes and co. even with San Francisco slightly favored.
What’s fascinating about this is the relatively limited movement one way or another on the line. We got the early movement toward Kansas City, and for a bit it looked like the game might reach a Pick ‘Em, but then it did slowly creep back toward San Francisco, and it looked like it might settle at -2.5 at most books, before it mostly shifted back again to -2. And interestingly, the books aren’t in lock step — if you just tracked DraftKings and FanDuel, you’d have seen FD staying further toward SF all during the leadup (KC is current +110 on the moneyline there), while DK has seemed less welcoming to KC bets (currently +100 on the moneyline there).
These are always complicated discussions, and the betting world is full of ego and arrogance, where intellectual curiosity and knowledge-seeking is hammered as ignorance and exploitable naivete. In that environ, everyone’s an expert, parroting something they’ve heard somewhere else, except a ton of the firm stances you’ll see don’t actually hold much water when put under a critical lens. The ignorance is actually on the side that’s confident they have it all figured out; as David Foster Wallace said, blind certainty is “a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.”
As with any analysis of a mature market with tons of action, the forces that dictate it aren’t always clear, even to the people setting the lines. This is where the word “dynamic” fits into something like market dynamics — the rules shift over time, and are influenced by things like who is participating in the market, and how. Ultimately, the objectives of one book might differ from another, and while no two books are going to have massively different lines in a situation as big as the Super Bowl, we do know that books take positions themselves, and at times encourage betting on one side for one reason or another. I would argue this Super Bowl is an example of disagreement between books about where the biggest liability is.
See, this very loud narrative that the sharp money is on San Francisco isn’t something that exists in a vacuum. Maybe five years ago that would have had more meaning, but there are plenty of informed bettors that no longer fit into the “square” public group, and also maybe aren’t sharps. They are somewhere in between, and they amount to a large portion of the betting public here in 2024, now that betting in the U.S. has been legal for some time. Pretending like the conversation ends at “public on KC and sharps on SF” is being a step behind.
As always, everything is in the line; if “the sharps are on SF” was some hidden edge that only a few people knew, the books would be liable to the more informed public flipping a lot of money over to the side they are already most concerned about, because of how much more the sharps get down. Their liability could wind up large on SF even if more tickets came down on KC’s side overall, because of the difference in size of the average bet.
These are hypotheticals; I’m not an expert on betting market dynamics. I just know that I’ve seen it oversimplified by relatively smart analysts several times this week, and I know that there’s no way in hell it’s that simple here in 2024. If it was, I’m pretty sure we would have moved past the opening line and gotten to that all-important SF -3 at some point, or at least gotten back to the moneyline numbers where things opened two weeks ago, after the Conference Championship games.
The fact of the matter is that there is more money on the KC side, and that the books’ position does show respect to SF overall. But I’ve been fascinated by the (lack of) movement, and while I’m out here talking about blind certainty, the reality of my current stance is I’m not at all sure about this. It just doesn’t seem as simple as the convenient narrative, that the SF side is the “sharp” one. Adam Levitan hit on the opacity of all this a few days ago.
When you get to the point where someone like Clay Travis is taking SF — in my opinion pretty clearly because he’s aware of the perception that being on that side will make him look more informed — and I’m hearing about pretty square IRL buddies knowing that the “smart money” is on SF, you just need to start questioning again. Again, my position is there isn’t a convenient narrative here, and you can justify a position on either side.
Of course, the result is going to lead to its own narrative, as it always does. Especially if SF wins, where this “sharp money was on SF” thing will go down as the story. But despite how green I am at some of this stuff, the one thing I do feel confident in is an ability to analyze other analysis, as it were. And my bullshit meter has been on high alert in the lead-up to this Super Bowl, where there’s been a whole lot of simplification of the “dynamic” part of all this.
Let’s look at the actual game.