{"id":5035,"date":"2019-01-21T23:13:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T23:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/?p=5035"},"modified":"2019-01-23T06:29:23","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T06:29:23","slug":"early-super-bowl-line-movement-shows-public-backing-new-england-patriots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/nfl\/early-super-bowl-line-movement-shows-public-backing-new-england-patriots\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Super Bowl Line Movement Shows Public Backing New England Patriots"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Super Bowl matchup is set following a pair of wild conference final games on Sunday that saw the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams emerge victorious. It was the first time in history that both NFL Conference Championship games went to overtime. In the AFC Championship, the New England Patriots quickly dispatched the Kansas City Chiefs by a final score of 37-31<\/a> as Rex Burkhead scored on a two yard run with 10:08 remaining in overtime. The outcome renewed some of the usual rancor over the NFL\u2019s overtime format which gives the team winning the coin toss more than a 60% chance of getting the victory.<\/p>\n

In the NFC Championship game, the Los Angeles Rams kept rolling as they took a 26-23 overtime victory over the New Orleans Saints<\/a>. The Rams will now be looking for their first Super Bowl championship in the city of Los Angeles. The St. Louis Rams went to the Super Bowl in 2000 and won it in 2004 and while the previous incarnation of the Los Angeles Rams went to the Super Bowl in 1980 they were defeated by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Interesting sidebar\u2014this was the closest a team has ever come to playing a Super Bowl \u2018home game\u2019. The contest was held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California which is a half hour drive up the 110 on a good traffic day.<\/p>\n

The Rams\u2019 victory has been marred by the \u2018sore loser\u2019 antics of New Orleans Saints\u2019 coach Sean Payton who won\u2019t stop crying about a missed pass interference call<\/a> that might have cost his team the game. Instead of accepting the fact that blown calls are part of sports, the NFL and their media supplicants like ESPN are just fanning the flames. Part of this is a lack of anything else to talk about in the two week break between the Conference Championships and Super Bowl but the strident pleas for redress from the NFL and the media make it clear who they wanted to win the game. ESPN is the worst offender\u2014they post what is essentially an editorial as straight news claiming that there\u2019s an outcry for rule changes. It\u2019s precisely what writer Chuck Klosterman was referring to over a decade ago<\/a> when he decried the \u2018phony debate\u2019 model that was taking over sports media. The gravity that ESPN gives to the issue borders on comical<\/a>\u2014they even refer to the missed call in Sunday\u2019s game as \u2018infamous\u2019<\/a> hoping that viewers will reflexively take the bait and get equally as upset.<\/p>\n

The wishes of Sean Payton, the NFL and ESPN notwithstanding the Rams are in the Super Bowl and will face the Patriots on February 3 at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The early Super Bowl line movement has shown money come for the New England Patriots. That\u2019s not surprising given their status as a \u2018public\u2019 team and even less so given the narrative that the NFL and their media partners have contrived around this game\u2014that Los Angeles is an undeserving entrant and that another Brady\/Belichick \u2018march to victory\u2019 is an inevitability<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The earliest numbers posted had the Los Angeles Rams installed as a -1 point Super Bowl betting<\/a> favorite but they quickly were engulfed in a surge of Patriots action. After a little initial resistance at Patriots -1.5 the price shot all the way up to -3 at some sportsbooks though over the past 24 hours it has settled in somewhat with New England a -2 or -2.5 favorite just about everywhere. A few outliers have New England as low as -1.5 or as high as -3 though the movement between these two numbers is fairly insignificant from a betting standpoint. Obviously, should there be a widespread move to the key number of -3 it would be a big deal and should it move off -3 to -3.5 an even bigger deal. In the latter eventuality it would almost certainly not stay there for long as \u2018sharp\u2019 money would quickly buy it back down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Super Bowl matchup is set following a pair of wild conference final games on Sunday that saw the New…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":5044,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nfl"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5035"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5047,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035\/revisions\/5047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}