Picking a Super Bowl winner before the season starts is not as unlikely as winning the lottery. It is also a lot more scientific.
Since I opened Qoxhi Picks in 1981, seven times we have picked the eventual Super Bowl winner in August. That doesn’t sound like much of a record to advertise, after all, one could have just picked Brady and the New England Patriots this century and picked up six winners.
Thing is, my Super Bowl picks are not solely based on who the best team is or what team the books are posting as the favorite. When I’m considering the wager on a Super Bowl winner, I like the sweet spot on odds between 10 and 18 to one. Only once in 45 years of picking Super Bowl winners have we taken a team with odds as low as 4 to 1, that was the San Francisco 49ers in 1984.
Our most recent Super Bowl winner was the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII, we got 12 to 1 odds on them before the season opened. A few years before that our pick was the New Orleans Saints, and they paid 21 to 1 for a preseason wager on them winning Super Bowl XLIV.
I never picked the Patriots to win a Super Bowl; the odds just never seemed like a good wager that takes months to complete. A lot can happen to a team over the course of an NFL season. The Chiefs were favored to win the Super Bowl in 2008 before Tom Brady was lost for the season with an injury suffered against the Kansas City Chiefs on opening day. The odds dropped on the Patriots winning the Super Bowl after the opening game season ending injury and those holding tickets before the injury had both short odds and a longshot chance.
Bad combination.