The NFL is down to its final four teams: the Pittsburgh Steelers face the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game and MY Green Bay Packers will head down to Atlanta to take on the Falcons in the NFC Championship Game. Up until Sunday night, when the Packers and Steelers won games that went down to the wire, the playoffs had been less than thrilling; the favorites had been beating the life out of the underdogs.
The Sunday games – particularly the Packers nail-biter against the Cowboys – were quite exciting. Unfortunately for the Las Vegas sportsbooks, they were exciting in all the wrong ways. Even though the favorites had been winning up until that point, bettors loaded up on the underdog Packers and Steelers and won big.
According to David Purdum of ESPN.com, William Hill, which has 108 betting outlets throughout Nevada, was handed its single-worst day in the five years it has been in Nevada, losing a “seven-figure” amount to its customers. Prior to the two Sunday games, the favorites were 6-0 both against the spread and straight-up, but the majority of the money shifted to the Packers and Steelers for the last two games of the divisional round.
“Seemed like a blue-collar betting day with public parlaying, teasing and pounding money lines on Packers and Steelers,” Bill Sattler, director of specialty games for Caesars Entertainment, told ESPN. “We salvaged the under in [the] late game, but another solid week for the public.”
To read more into his comment, it seems like the “blue-collar” descriptor has something to do with what happened. The Packers and Steelers have two of the largest and most loyal fan bases in sports and both are located in what one would consider blue-collar cities. They are the two hottest teams in the football – both coming into their games riding two month-long winning streaks. Aaron Rodgers is the sickest player on the planet and the Steelers have arguably the best running back (Le’Veon Bell) and wide receiver (Antonio Brown) in the game, not to mention a great, experienced quarterback in Ben Roethlisberger.
Thus, it might not be that big of a surprise that bettors went nuts putting money on those two teams in every way, shape, and form.
Purdum reports that the kill shot for the sports books was in the Green Bay/Pittsburgh parlays, bets that required both teams to win. Those bets, naturally, pay out more than if someone bet on each team individually, since it was an all-or-nothing proposition.
And though Sunday was terrible for the bookmakers, the rest of the playoffs haven’t been good, either. Bettors sided with the favorites for the other six games, so the sports books lost money there. Even in a non-NFL game, the NCAA championship game between Clemson and Alabama, sports books got slaughtered. Alabama was a heavy favorite, but more money was put on Clemson, who ended up winning outright, resulting in William Hill’s worst college football loss of all time.
