Super Bowl 44 Betting – 20 Things You Didn’t Know About the Super Bowl

TWENTY THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT THE SUPER BOWL

Here we go:

• As the 1966 football season started, there was still no date or site in place to hold the first Super Bowl, which was to take place just months away, in January of 1967. Since no one had much of an idea about the importance of the Super Bowl, this was not considered to be a major crisis at the time. Finally, the Los Angeles Coliseum – with only 27,000 of its 93,000 seats situated between the goal lines – was selected.
• Super Bowl I was the only one in which two different networks has the rights to televise the game simultaneously. This was because CBS had the rights to NFL telecasts, while NBC held AFL rights. Pete Rozelle made the command decision on that one.
• CBS may have been the first source to use a certain familiar term in public when it took took out a full-page ad in newspapers the day before the first Super Bowl, proclaiming that "Tomorrow is Super Sunday on CBS." In the end, CBS won the ratings battle with NBC.
• Up until last season, the team that won the coin toss to start the game was not permitted to defer receiving the football until the second half. It was finally allowed, starting with Super Bowl XLIII between the Steelers and Cardinals. Arizona won the toss, and deferred until the second half.
• One might figure that a coin toss would be a 50-50 proposition when it comes to who would win it. Mathematically, it is, but an incredible oddity is that the NFC team has won the coin toss twelve straight times, and 29 out of 43 times overall.
• There has been a seven-footer in the Super Bowl. Richard Sligh, a defensive end for the Oakland Raiders, made an appearance in Super Bowl II against the Green Bay Packers.
• Ron Widby of the Dallas Cowboys was the first player to punt the ball nine times in a Super Bowl (#5 against Baltimore). He was also the lone Super Bowl competitor who also played in the American Basketball Association. Widby had been drafted by both the New Orleans Buccaneers of the ABA and the Chicago Bulls of the NBA., and played 20 games for New Orleans in the 1967-68 ABA season. To demonstrate his versatility as an athlete, he is now a teaching pro at a golf club.
• Joe Gibbs, the Hall of Fame coach, won three Super Bowls with three different Washington Redskins quarterbacks – Joe Theismann (XVII), Doug Williams (XXII) and Mark Rypien (XXVI), who incidentally was the first Canadian native to start at quarterback for an NFL team, and of course was the first Canadian to win a Super Bowl MVP.
• The first player to both throw and catch a pass in the same Super Bowl was Sam Havrilak, the versatile Baltimore Colt who caught two passes and completed a pass for 25 yards in Super Bowl V against the Dallas Cowboys.
• Only one player has been with a Super Bowl team five seasons in a row. He’s Gale Gilbert, a former quarterback from the University of California who was with the Buffalo Bills as they went to Super Bowls XXV through XVIII, and then moved over to the San Diego Chargers, who were in Super Bowl XXIX. As you can see, he was also on five straight Super Bowl losers. Gilbert never threw a pass in any Super Bowl. He actually played more in the Little League World Series, where he was a catcher for the U.S. West team that played Taiwan and, of course, lost. His son Garrett plays quarterback at Texas, and yes, that was him you saw stepping in for Colt McCoy in a losing effort against Alabama in the BCS title game.

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• Percy Howard didn’t play football at Prairie View A&M, but caught on with the Dallas Cowboys as a wide receiver in 1975. In Super Bowl X against Pittsburgh he caught a 34-yard touchdown pass from Roger Staubach, which made the final score 21-17. That turned out to be the only pass he ever caught in the NFL.
• David Tyree, famous for making the "Helmet Catch" in Super Bowl XLII, has not made a reception in the National Football League since.
• Timmy Smith, a rookie fifth-round draft choice from Texas Tech, ran for a record 204 yards in Super Bowl XXII as his Redskins beat Denver 42-10. The next season he had 470 yards, but played only one game in the NFL after that.
• Tickets for the first Super Bowl at the L.A. Coliseum could be had for as low as $6, and even that reflected "Broadway prices" according to one New York Times reporter. The tickets weren’t selling, and no wonder – some of them were more than a football field away from the field itself. This year, the average ticket price on StubHub is hovering around $2700. Face value of the lowest-priced tickets the league is holding is $500.
• According to an Associated Press story the day before the first Super Bowl, "Reports from legal bookmaking establishments in Las Vegas have revealed that the Super Bowl contest here (L.A.) tomorrow has not been an especially attractive Super Bowl betting proposition. Professional gamblers who bet heavily with the Las Vegas books apparently have too little information on the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The contest is described as an attractive one for head-to-head bets between friends for small sums. This does not interest bookmakers."
• For the first Super Bowl, NBC sold its advertising at a rate of $70,000 per minute, and needless to say, it has increased a great deal since then.
• Miami, which is the site for Super Bowl XLIV, is the only city to have hosted the Super Bowl in consecutive seasons, as it was the home for Super Bowl II between Oakland and Green Bay,m then Super Bowl III between the Jets and Colts.
• There are four venues that have hosted both a World Series and a Super Bowl – the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, Jack Murphy Stadium (also known as Qualcomm) in San Diego, the Metrodome in Minneapolis, and the stadium known as Joe Robbie, Pro Player, Dolphin, LandShark and now Sun Life in Miami Gardens, which is playing host to this year’s game.
• Three stadiums that have housed the Super Bowl no longer exist. Tulane Stadium in New Orleans has been demolished, as has the Orange Bowl in Miami and Tampa Stadium. The Super Bowl host stadium that has been around the longest is Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, CA, home to SB XIX, which was built back in 1921. Contrary to popular thought, the Pontiac Silverdome still exists, and in fact was recently sold, albeit for only $583,000.
• The closest anyone has gotten to being a "home team" in the Super Bowl was back in Super Bowl XIV. The Los Angeles Rams, who played their games at the L.A. Coliseum and moved to Anaheim Stadium the next year, played the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena. Also, Stanford Stadium, where the 49ers played the Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX, was less than 30 miles from Candlestick Park. With the next three Super Bowls scheduled for Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis and the Louisiana Superdome, we may not have to wait long for a team to play the game in its own ballpark.

Oh, let’s add a #21:

• Don’t assume that home field advantage would create intolerable crowd noise for an opponent in the Super Bowl. The way Super Bowl tickets are allocated, each team in the game gets 17.5% of the tickets, with about 5% for the host team, about 1.2% to the other teams in the league, and 25% retained by the league office.

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