It’s common for people to see information on social media and rush to sports betting sites to place a wager. A tweet about an injured player not practicing, for example.
This is good practice in some cases. If a quarterback isn’t playing on Sunday, that could swing a point spread, and locking in a bet as soon as possible once that information gets out could be the difference between a winning wager and a losing one.
But some bettors may need to give their heads a shake. Specifically, the people who rushed to “correct score” betting markets for the Super Bowl after the game’s outcome was supposedly “leaked” on social media.
There was a lot of carping about NFL games being rigged following the Cincinnati Bengals-Kansas City Chiefs matchup in the AFC Championship. The game did have some… interesting… officiating, so that was enough to get the masses on social media speculating.
Dropped into the middle of this was a viral screenshot of a boxscore, which showed the Philadelphia Eagles beating the Chiefs by a score of 37-34. This was the purported leak of the Super Bowl "script."
There is almost certainly no script for Sunday’s Super Bowl game (or not for an exact score, at the very least). Snopes, which describes itself as "the internet’s definitive fact-checking resource," rated the claim of a leaked score as false.
“From what we could gather, the person who created the score seen in the tweet had simply used as a template a page of [a] previous game that had been published by pro-football-reference.com,” the site said. “For example, there was one game that ended 37-34 earlier in 2023. A few simple changes in the code of the page were all that were needed in order to produce the image.”
According to the so-called "script" for Super Bowl LVII, the Philadelphia Eagles will supposedly defeat the Kansas City Chiefs by a score of 37-34. https://t.co/Y0qYyrfQgg
— snopes.com (@snopes) February 7, 2023
Enter FanDuel. On Monday, the online sportsbook reported that the correct score of Eagles 37 - Chiefs 34 “has seen the most stakes of any prop in the last 24 hours, only trailing stakes of each teams' moneyline and spread selections.”
And, of course, the reason for the prop’s popularity was the screenshot.
“Anyone on Twitter or TikTok may have caught the ‘leaked’ box score circulating, the primary driver behind this,” FanDuel said.
The odds for Eagles 37 - Chiefs 34 were +20,000 at FanDuel in Ontario on Tuesday morning. The two adjacent scores, Eagles 37 - Chiefs 31 and Eagles 38 - Chiefs 10, had odds of +25,000 and +40,000, respectively.
Please think about it
So, yes, people are betting on the final score of the Super Bowl because of a fake leak of a fake script. Furthermore, this is not the first time people wagered real money based on something like this.
The Simpsons is a long-running TV show that has been weirdly prescient at times, such as with an episode that mentioned Donald Trump as a past president years before that was true. Another tweet, this time of the Simpsons purportedly predicting the Cincinnati Bengals would beat the Los Angeles Rams in last year's Super Bowl by a score of 34-31, prompted another round of poorly thought-out wagering.
But that Simpsons score was not the final score, and people lost money. And, based on the odds, there is a good chance people will lose money again if they are betting on the final score of this year’s Super Bowl because they think there is a script for the outcome.
Yes, the final score could be 37-34 for the Eagles. It probably won't be, though.
“Prices are always fluctuating slightly for a variety of reasons,” a FanDuel spokesperson told Covers. “This latest TikTok correct score example has gained attention, much like the Simpsons one from last year!”
