You Probably Needed to Be Odd to Take a Chance on Long Odds

All it took was a little courage or some prescience, and a lot more luck.

It might have helped if you were from Charlotte or Jacksonville.

All you needed was $100,000 in August, and a bookmaker with nerves of steel and an unlimited bank account and you could have been first in line at Peter O’Malley’s office with $200 million in hand to bid in the Dodger sweepstakes.

And you needed the Jacksonville Jaguars and Carolina Panthers to play each other in the Super Bowl.

The odds of Carolina winning the NFC title were 40-1 before the season began, according to Roxy Roxborough of Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which sets the lines for the city’s casinos. Jacksonville was 50-1 to win the AFC crown.

If you could have found anybody to make the bet--and, Roxborough said, you probably couldn’t have--that made a Jacksonville-Carolina Super Bowl 2,000-1.

Some casinos went further. Arizona Charlie’s made Carolina 80-1 and Jacksonville 100-1.

“Carolina looked like a better bet,” Roxborough said. “But they are in the NFC, with the big three: San Francisco, Dallas and Green Bay. Who would have figured them to even get a bye?

“And everybody said the Jaguars were only a 30-yard field goal [by Atlanta’s Morten Andersen] from missing the playoffs. And they wouldn’t beat Buffalo, and when they beat Buffalo, it was an old, worn-out Buffalo. And they wouldn’t beat Denver, but then they beat Denver.”

And have an expanded bandwagon.

The odds on Jacksonville playing Carolina in New Orleans are somewhat shorter now: 25-1.