I woke up this morning and reached for my phone like a man reaching for a life raft, and before my eyes had fully adjusted to the concept of being alive, I had already placed three bets. I know this because my betting app sent me confirmation emails at 6:02, 6:08, and 6:11 AM, which means I was gambling before I was fully conscious. Two of them are on things I don't understand. One of them appears to be a bet on whether Bad Bunny will be wearing sunglasses during the first song of the halftime show. I don't know what the odds were. I don't know which side I took. I just know that at some point between my third alarm and my first cup of coffee, my half-asleep brain decided that Bad Bunny's eyewear choices were worth my hard-earned money.
The Prop Bet Menu Is a War Crime Against Responsible Gambling
Listen, I consider myself a disciplined bettor. I have spreadsheets. I have models. I have a system I developed over two years that has netted me a lifetime record of roughly negative four hundred dollars. I am an expert. But nothing in my system prepared me for the Super Bowl prop bet menu, which is 847 lines long and includes things like "Will a player propose on the field after the game? Yes +3500 / No -5000." WHO IS BETTING ON THIS? Who looked at that line and thought "you know what, I've got a feeling about this one"? Apparently me, because I found it in my bet history from 4:47 AM this morning. I took "Yes." I am unwell.
There's a prop bet on how many times the broadcast will show Taylor Swift. There's a prop bet on the color of the Gatorade bath. There's a prop bet on whether any player will be flagged for an excessive celebration penalty in the first half. There is, and I am not making this up, a prop bet on the COMBINED RUSHING YARDS OF BOTH PUNTERS. Both punters. The two men on the field whose entire job is to NOT run with the football. Someone set an over/under on their rushing yards and someone else, presumably after suffering a head injury, bet on it. That someone was me. I took the over at 0.5 yards. I feel great about it. I feel absolutely nothing about it. I am in a fugue state.
The Group Chat Has Become a Warzone
My group chat has been going off since midnight. There are currently 347 unread messages and at least four people who have declared their locks of the game, all of which are different teams. My buddy Marcus has been sending paragraphs since 2 AM about how Drake Maye is "built different" and how the Patriots' defensive scheme is "basically what Belichick would've run if Belichick understood the modern NFL." Marcus has lost fourteen straight bets. Fourteen. In a row. He has not won a bet since the College Football Playoff in December. He is the most confident man I have ever met. He is also the brokest man I have ever met. These two facts are deeply connected.
My other friend Jessica sent a screenshot of her bet slip at 1:30 AM. She has a 9-leg same-game parlay that requires Sam Darnold to throw for exactly 287 yards, Rhamondre Stevenson to score the first touchdown, the game to go to overtime, AND Bad Bunny to play "Titi Me Pregunto" as his third song. This parlay pays $84,000. She bet $5. She has been telling everyone she's about to be rich all morning. She will not be rich. She will be five dollars poorer. But for the next eight hours, she is the most optimistic person on Earth, and honestly, I envy that energy.
I Have Tried to Watch Pregame Coverage and It Is Making Me Worse
I turned on the pregame show at 7 AM because I'm a masochist. The broadcast started twelve hours before kickoff. TWELVE HOURS. They have TWELVE HOURS of content to fill about a football game that hasn't happened yet. You know what happens during twelve hours of pregame? Nothing. Absolutely nothing happens. Former players say things like "I think the team that executes better is going to win this football game" and three other former players nod sagely as if this isn't the most obvious statement in the history of human speech. Then they cut to a reporter standing outside the stadium at 7 AM in a parking lot where literally nobody is yet, and the reporter says "I can FEEL the energy building here" and brother, you are standing alone in an empty parking lot. The only energy building is from the generator powering your camera.
But I keep watching, because every segment gives me a new idea for a bet. "Sources say Maye's arm looked especially strong in warmups." GREAT. Now I'm slamming Maye over 1.5 touchdown passes even though I already have him under 250 passing yards in a separate bet. These two bets cannot coexist. They are mathematically at war with each other. I have essentially bet against myself. This is what twelve hours of pregame coverage does to a person.
The Super Bowl Party Preparations Are Already a Disaster
I'm going to my friend Dave's house for the Super Bowl party. Dave sent a text this morning that said "bringing anything is optional but judgment is mandatory." He also sent a menu. The menu includes something called "Fumble Dip" which I'm told is just regular spinach artichoke dip that he renamed because he thinks he's clever. There are also "Interception Wings" (buffalo wings), "False Start Fries" (regular fries served late on purpose as a bit), and something called "The Sack" which is a 5-pound block of cheese that he's going to eat by himself because nobody else wants to participate in whatever that is.
Dave's TV is 85 inches. His living room is 11 feet wide. Watching the Super Bowl at Dave's house is like sitting in the second row of an IMAX theater except the audio is worse and the seats smell like Dave's golden retriever. But the man has six screens set up: the main TV for the game, a laptop for live odds, an iPad for the prop bet tracker, a second laptop for the group chat, his phone for his betting app, and an old Kindle that he's using "for vibes" even though it's just displaying the screensaver. Dave is ready. Dave has been preparing for this day since September. Dave has not prepared for the emotional devastation that will occur when his 8-leg parlay dies on the second play of the game. None of us are prepared. That's the beauty.
A Love Letter to Being a Complete Degenerate on the Greatest Day of the Year
Here's the thing about Super Bowl Sunday. It's the one day a year where being a degenerate gambler is not just acceptable, it's basically mandatory. Your grandma is betting squares. Your uncle who "doesn't watch sports" has $50 on the coin toss. Your coworker who lectures you about your "gambling problem" during the regular season is going to text you at halftime asking what "the live spread" means. Everyone is a degenerate today. The whole country is balls deep, and for once, nobody is pretending otherwise.
So yes, I've made eleven bets before 8 AM. Yes, three of them are complete mysteries to me. Yes, I will make at least six more before kickoff. Yes, I will lose most of them. Yes, I will wake up tomorrow and check my account and feel a very specific kind of sadness that only comes from betting on the punter rushing yards over. But right now, in this moment, on this morning, with my coffee getting cold and my phone buzzing with Marcus's latest "lock of the century" and Jessica's deranged parlay screenshot and Dave's text asking if anyone can bring "a backup cheese" just in case, I am the happiest person alive. This is the day. This is what we've been waiting for all year. Patriots. Seahawks. Maye. Darnold. The most unlikely Super Bowl matchup in recent history, and every single one of us is about to lose money watching it. Happy Super Bowl Sunday, you beautiful, broken degenerates. We ride at kickoff. Balls deep. Always balls deep.