UPDATE: Demi Lovato’s National Anthem came in a 1 minute, 50 seconds, well under the posted line.
Commercials, the coin toss, the Gatorade bath color. What can’t you bet on for the Super Bowl?
Even before the game kicks off, prop-betting mania will be underway as millions of watchers (maybe?) will have the stopwatch app opened on their smartphones to record the time of Demi Lovato’s rendition of the national anthem.
Betting on the anthem time is by no means a novel tradition at this point, but DraftKings Sportsbook has put a little twist on the popular prop this year, comparing Lovato’s time to gameplay that’s going to follow it.
Odds as of Sunday at 11 a.m. ET and via DraftKings, where Action Network users get a risk-free bet up to $500.
Super Bowl Prop Bet: Will Demi Lovato’s National Anthem Run Longer Than the Shortest Scoring Drive
- Yes: -625
- No: +400
Obviously, this prop raises two questions:
- How long will the national anthem last?
- How much time will the shortest scoring drive take?
Let’s start with the second one.
Over the course of the past 20 Super Bowls, there have been 153 total scoring drives, lasting a combined 529 minutes and 48 seconds (per Pro Football Reference), which comes out to around 3:27 per scoring drive and 7.65 scoring drives per game.
Obviously, not all games are the same when it comes to scoring — more on this shortly — but for the sake of the argument, let’s look only at the shortest 20 scoring drives, and assume that will give a rough idea of what the average shortest drive has been.
As it turns out, the 20th-shortest drive clocks in at 56 seconds, and the average of the 20 shortest drives comes to just 30.2 seconds.
Now onto today’s game specifically.
For starters, the high total (53.5) suggests a bump in scoring drives — probably to around the 9-10 range. And Lovato is definitely going to sing for longer than 30 seconds (most oddsmakers seem to be expecting her to go for a few seconds over two minutes).
Here’s what you really need to know: 36 of the 153 scoring drives have landed at two minutes or less, a 23.52% rate. So if there are nine scoring drives in the game, there’s a …
1 – (1 – 0.2352)9 = 0.911
… 91.1% chance that one will be inside that mark based on the 20-year history.
That probability implies that the true betting odds should be more like -1000.