Did I mention the fact that the STEELERS ARE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL?!
I really can’t think about anything else. All day long, whenever I tried to do something, I couldn’t get through a thought without the words ‘SUPERBOWL’ or ‘STEELERS’ popping into my head.
*** Update ***
I have seen some comments here and some comments at other places that makes me realize that most people have no idea how the line works in professional sports. The Steelers opening as 3.5-4.0 pt favorite in Vegas does not mean that some panel of experts somewhere have decided that the Steelers are a better team, or that the Steelers are going to win, etc.
Bookies make money on the vig (vigorish, the juice, etc.), not on having people bet the wrong way. They d0n’t make their money because 90000 people will bet on the Seahawks and lose- that is too risky for them to underwrite. They make their money on 45000 people betting on the Steelers, 45000 people betting on the Seahawks, and taking a little off the top.
In other words, they just want their bets balanced, in that half the people betting place money on the Steelers, the other half place money on the seahawks. What it means is that the oddsmakers have decided that more people are going to bet on the Steelers, so in order to sweeten the pot for people to vote for the Seahawks, the throw them some points.
Now, it isn’t completely meaningless, because as anyone who has followed sports gambling will tell you, the odds makers can be uncannily accurate. When the line moves over the next two weeks (and I can assure you, it will, and I am betting the Steelers will probably be close to 6-7.5 pt favorites or better by gametime), think of it as the same sort of distributed intelligence that happens with tradesports or the DIA wanted to do with their intelligence betting scheme from a few years back that everyone freaked out about. When the line moves, it isn’t because th bookies know something other than that they know how people are betting, and they need to balance out their bets.
That is pretty much the basics, so when either team tries to pretend to be the underdog because of the Vegas line, recognize it for what it is- something the team is using to motivate itself. The Steelers fed off that for the last few weeks, but in reality, they were more than just underdogs in Vegas, as the 6 seed never had made it to the SB before.
*** Update ***
BTW- that is about as short and concise a description of how sports betting works as I can do in 200 words or less. Additionally, I am not a sports gambler, so any more in depth and I am out of my league.