Super Bowl XLV Hot Reads: A Look At Super Bowl History And Betting’s Future

As we get closer to Super Bowl 45, there will be a lot to read on the Packers, Steelers, and everything in between. To help you sift through the massive amounts of coverage, we’ll pick out each day’s best stories. It will be called “Hot Reads,” because: football! And reading!

1. Sports Illustrated unveiled a collection of every game story from the past 40+ Super Bowls, and it’s absolutely worth getting lost in the time capsule for a solid two hours today. From the ’72 Dolphins to the ‘86 Bears to the ’94 Cowboys and on and on. Very cool.

More links after the jump, including a pretty fascinating look inside the gambling industry.

2. A betting tablet--sort of like an iPad--is revolutionizing the gambling industry. Yahoo! Sports’ Les Carpenter examines the new wrinkles, and it’s absolutely worth your time:

Sports gambling in this country has always had this tawdry image; run by scruffy men with nicotine-drenched voices. For so long the Vegas sports book has been a dreary place, shoved to the corner of most casinos, away from the happy dings and jangles of slots and the showy excess of the high-stakes card tables. It’s the place where men in dirty sweatpants pick food off their shirts while locking eyes on any number of giant screens flashing horse races in front of empty stands.

[,..]

The tablet changes this. The tablet is private. The tablet is clean. With the tablet you are instantly presented with a menu of wages that have nothing to do with the final outcome but something so seemingly controllable and predictable as a team’s ability to move a football 10 yards in three plays. A couple taps of the screen, a quick confirmation and if a minute later the quarterback throws a 25-yard completion a new, richer account balance flickers on the top corner of the screen.

Considering how much money’s involved in gambling, the only surprise is that this sort of technology didn’t emerge sooner. Either way, it’s awesome, and I wish I was in Vegas again this year.

3. Who deserved the Defensive Player of the Year: Troy Polamalu (who won it) or Clay Matthews? At National Football Post, Matt Bowen takes a closer look at two of Super Sunday’s biggest stars.

4. From the New Yorker, a pretty hilarious riff on the annual “governor’s bet” that accompanies whichever states wind up in the Super Bowl:

...The Western governor, still heady with the idea of humiliating the Eastern governor, fired off a memo that amended his earlier demand: if the Western team won, he said, he would now demand two nights in the finest hotel in the Eastern governor’s state, and he would enjoy the company not of the Eastern governor’s wife but, rather, of his daughter. The Eastern governor was with television reporters when he received the memo, and he fired right back, saying that he would take a full week in a Western hotel with the Western governor’s mother, and that it would be a week she’d remember for the rest of her life.

And if that comedy’s a little too high brow, Kissing Suzy Kolber’s Mike Tunison does his best impression of Louis C.K. picking the Super Bowl, and it’s dead-on.

5. Finally, how important is the Super Bowl, anyway? A new poll says it’s the second most important day of the year for American males:

A further finding in the poll shows that the Super Bowl is the second most important day in an American male’s life during the year. The poll results show that men get excited for the Super Bowl more than any other day, with the exception of Christmas, and look forward to it more than their anniversary, birthday or Thanksgiving.

That seems... Misguided. The Super Bowl’s great, but come on. Nothing beats Thanksgiving.