Even after all these years, Tom Brady has still got it at age 43.
Good looks, a championship pedigree, the right offensive weapons around him and the ability to attract lots of bets in NFL future books around Las Vegas.
Not that 40-year-old football players haven’t been valuable in the past.
“I remember George Blanda was still valuable in his mid-40s,” South Point sportsbook director Chris Andrews confessed to NBC Sports. “At that point, he was not a starting quarterback, but he was still coming in and pulling off miracles as a sub or a kicker.
“Brady is just different, man. He’s still the guy. He’s moving markets and he deserves to move markets. By all accounts, he looks great in practice. He lost a little zip last year, but not a whole lot. And this new supporting cast will help.”
It’s amazing to me that bettors still have that much faith. And they showed their appreciation in droves. They bet the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 60-to-1 all the way down to 10-to-1 to win Super Bowl LV at the South Point.[[ad:athena]]
Tampa Bay is 5-to-1 to win the NFC. That doesn’t even sound right to say out loud.
“No,” Andrews replied after a five-second pause. “It doesn’t.”
We also discussed how bettors view the Baltimore Ravens and my hometown Chicago Bears.
It was no secret that the public was going to show support for Lamar Jackson and the Ravens, so their future price was never that high. Andrews said they lowered Baltimore’s championship odds a little bit down to +450. He reported really good two-way action on their win total at 11.5.
Chicago is a polarizing team for bettors this year. Their season win total is either 7.5 or 8 and they’re sort of flying under the radar in the future books at upwards of 50-to-1. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about with the Bears.
NBC Sports colleague JJ Stankevitz recently wrote that he thinks Mitchell Trubisky is going to start under center Week 1 at Detroit.
So my question to Andrews was simple – Trubisky or Nick Foles?
“It doesn’t matter to the point spread,” Andrews explained. “When you say somebody’s inconsistent, right away you label him as bad. I view inconsistent as more up-and-down. Both [Trubisky and Foles] are perfect examples. Foles has been really good at times and not so good others. Two years ago, Trubisky was really, really good. He was one of the hot players coming into the season last year as an MVP candidate. We wrote a lot of money on him. Last year, he was awful. They’ve both shown signs of being really good. But there’s too much inconsistency.”
Last but not least, the South Point is going to get their doors blown off if the Indianapolis Colts are victorious in the last game of the season.
“We’re getting stung pretty good on the Colts,” Andrews added. “They bet us from 50-to-1 all the way down to 15-to-1. I think they’re a really good team, but I’m not a big Philip Rivers fan. We get beat up pretty good on the Raiders, but that’s not really a surprise. Those are the two teams that would really hurt us. We would lose well into six figures on either one.”
