The long drought between the NFL’s Super Bowl and the start of a new regular season can appear to drag on forever for die-hard sports bettors, but there is always some year round action on the board at most offshore sportsbooks operating online with NFL futures betting odds to win the next Super Bowl.
A futures is a bet on an event that takes place somewhere down the road. The betting odds are often released way before that event will take place and then adjusted based on the betting money coming in. In the case of NFL futures for its biggest event of the season, you can often find futures odds for next season’s Super Bowl just days after the current season’s championship game was actually played.
The main thing to keep in mind about futures odds is that they are based on public perception more so than reality. This is especially true when it comes to NFL Super Bowl futures. Only one of the league’s 32 teams can win and quite a bit can happen over the course of a year. One strategy is to make a small wager on your favorite team and sit back and hope your dream of them winning a title comes true. A more productive strategy is to study the opening futures odds and then track their movement through free agency in March, the college draft at the end of April, offseason mini-camps in spring right up until start of training camp in August.
The money coming in from the betting public will dictate if a team’s odds start trending up or spiraling down. The sportsbook’s goal is to try and even out the money as much as possible so they do not get stuck holding a ton of bets on one or two teams.
Most times when it comes to Super Bowl futures, the team that won the current season’s world title will open as the early favorite to win again next season. Going back over the list of Super Bowl winners, since the 1999 regular season the New England Patriots were the only team to win back-to- back titles in 2003 and 2004 which gives you a pretty good idea of just how tough it is the repeat as winners.
Teams losing the Super Bowl have it even worse and you would have to go all the way back to the 1993 season to find the last time the losing team made it back to the Super Bowl the following year. The Buffalo Bills own that dubious distinction after losing four-straight Super Bowls from 1990 to 1993. The Seattle Seahawks were on a bit of a run in recent years with a Super Bowl title in 2013 followed by a loss to New England in the title game the following season.
The trick to cashing-in on a Super Bowl futures bet is to find a team that could be poised to take that next step after achieving some level for success in the previous few seasons. It is a rare occasion where a team comes out of nowhere to win a NFL title. The New York Giants stunned quite a few bettors in 2007 when they beat the undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. The Giants went just 9-7 in the 2010 regular season when they went on another Super Bowl run by beating New England again just four years later.
The main reason why so many bettors do lunk down so much money on a very speculative bet is to add a bit more action to the regular season and the playoffs. The best way to go about betting NFL Super Bowl futures is to set a small budget from your overall betting bankroll and spread it around by making small bets on a handful of teams. This way you can hedge your chances to cash-in on a winner when the game is actually played in early February.
