Thursday’s NFL Draft is set up to be one of the most memorable events in football history – but it’ll be for fascinatingly odd reasons. Over the years, we have been accustomed to seeing large groups of men from each team’s brass huddled up and going over every little detail before welcoming a player to become part of their future.
Now, we’ll be seeing things take place in a different form. And we’ll certainly all be tuning in because let’s face it, what else is there to do? With all of that urge to watch sports again, comes the urge to bet on this event.
And that’s exactly what we’ll all be doing on Thursday night. This will end up being the most bet-on NFL Draft in our existence.
“We’ll do probably more than 10 (times) what we did last year (on the draft),” said John Sheeran, director of trading for FanDuel.
DraftKings even said that its New Jersey sportsbook has already topped last year’s betting handle on the draft with less than a week to go. PointsBet, another sportsbook competing in the New Jersey marketplace, said that the amount wagered on the draft so far has been comparable to that of a typical Monday Night Football game. Throughout the nation, there are tens of millions of dollars that are usually wagered on in a high-profile football game.
Different Ballgame
Because of the new settings that all teams will be dealing with, most experts have guessed that these mock drafts we love so much will be a lot more inaccurate than usual. After all, even the draft experts have been sequestered to working from their homes. There will certainly be a lot of assumptions going on until we actually see these names called on Thursday.
“It’s really, really tricky to decipher what is actually information that you can use to make your line more accurate,” said Sheeran. “It’s almost impossible to keep on top of all of it. In the instance where we miss key information leaking out, you will invariably find a stream, a waterfall effect of bets that are coming through at that moment of time.
“It won’t be difficult for bettors to find opportunities to get a good bet on that will end up having a lot of positive value,” added Sheeran.
This is still uncharted territory, having odds on the NFL Draft, for sportsbooks in the United States. Believe it or not, Nevada sportsbooks weren’t even allowed to take action on the NFL Draft until 2017 – a year before the U.S. Supreme Court made it legal for states to decide if they wanted to legalize sports betting or not.
“Generally speaking, you don’t take one square dollar (on draft props),” said Jeff Davis, director of trading for Caesars Sportsbook. “And you get absolutely throttled.”
There are tons of betting options for customers looking to place a wager on Thursday through Saturday. Joe Burrow and Chase Young are huge favorites to go 1-2 in the draft, so bettors would need to risk a huge amount of money to make a little. For instance, Burrow has -10000 odds to go first, so you’d need to risk $10,000 to win $100.
No worries, folks. There are realistic ways to make money.
Other offerings include picking the correct order of the first three selections, which position a team will select first, and even which exact player a team will select first.
This is as close to real American sports that we’ll get for a while. So, we might as well embrace it and help our sportsbooks out in the process. But we do expect that money if we win too!
