Super Bowl Prediction: Wall Street Model Says Cardinals Win

It has supposedly correctly predicted the last four Super Bowl winners and this year the Wall Street Super Bowl prediction is for the Arizona Cardinals to win outright.  Nearly 85 percent of those betting the money line at  Bookmaker.com think the same.  The payout would be $215 for every $200 bet should Arizona win outright.

According to a Bloomberg piece, an analysis, detailed in a report this week by Los Angeles portfolio manager Steve Sapra, looks at the National Football League's 32 teams as if they were investments, calculating the "return" each delivered on bets that they would win each regular-season game. In the parlance of portfolio management, that's the team's "alpha."

Sapra's conclusion: The betting market pays too much attention to a team's regular-season performance during the postseason.

The Steelers are -6 1/2 favorites to win the 2009 Super Bowl Sunday at Bookmaker.com, online gambling's oldest established North American facing sportsbook.

"I don't think what we see in gambling markets is any different at all than what we see in financial markets," Sapra, who oversees research and trading for U.S. equity strategies at Analytic Investors LLC, said in a telephone interview. "People overemphasize what's happened recently, not considering the more distant past or that things can change."

Here is how the Sapra model works:

For sports teams, "returns" are a function of whether a team won each of its games and the chance it was given of winning, as defined by Las Vegas bookmakers' closing line on the game. The higher the alpha, the better a team performed relative to the odds.

This season's highest-alpha team, the Miami Dolphins, returned 63.2 percent to bettors who wagered they'd win each of their regular-season games. The lowest-alpha team, the Detroit Lions, became the first team in NFL history to go 0-16.

Cardinals' Alpha

The Steelers' regular-season alpha was 34.4 percent, while the Cardinals lost 7.5 percent.

Last year's champion, the New York Giants, returned 15.4 percent during the regular season, compared with 22.7 percent for the New England Patriots. The Giants were 12-point underdogs and it was the third-biggest upset in the game's 42-year history.

In the previous three years, the Indianapolis Colts, the Steelers and the Patriots defeated teams with higher regular- season alphas.

Betting on the lower-alpha team "has proved unusually successful" in the postseason so far, as those teams won nine of the 10 games, Sapra's report said.

Gambling911.com readers may be interested in how the typical NFL betting line is derived.  The Sagarin Model (found at USA Today) is used as a starting point and one might be fascinated how often the line falls exactly on that formula's number.

Here you can determine overlays or underlays based on what the oddsmakers post with some degree of accuracy though other tangibles such as injury and weather often come into play.

Assuming a neutral field, the Pittsburgh line is right on the money at -6 ½, though one would lean more towards the Steelers only winning by 6 points in this scenario - as such Arizona does cover.

There are those claiming that Tampa Bay is "home field advantage" for the Steelers, in which case another three points are added to the 6 ½ number bringing the real line to -9 ½. 

Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher