The New York Giants may have won the 2012 Super Bowl, but they let the NFC down when they failed to win the coin toss. Prior to that loss, the NFC had a 14-year winning streak in Super Bowl coin tosses, a streak the San Francisco 49ers will attempt to re-start this season.
Super Bowl 2013 coin toss prop bet: Can the NFC recover after last year’s loss?
The NFC had its coin toss streak snapped last season, will the 49ers be able to get the NFC back on the winning side?
Mike Ehrmann
For more Super Bowl coverage, check out Niners Nation and Baltimore Beatdown
Prior to last season, the NFC had not lost a coin toss in the Super Bowl since the Green Bay Packers did so in 1997. The good news for the NFC, however, is the 49ers were not only a good coin toss team this season, but are currently riding a hot streak. San Francisco won 11 of 18 coin tosses this season, including three of its last four. The Ravens on the other hand won just nine of 19 coin tosses and are 1-2 in the playoffs.
As is the case with nearly everything involving the Super Bowl, there are multiple prop bets associated with the coin toss. You can keep it simple and bet heads or tails with both going off with -105 odds. You can also pick which team will win the coin toss and both are also -105. Taking it even a step further, you can bet on whether the team that wins the coin toss will also win the game, yes and no are both set at -115.
So what will happen? A closer look at history shows that it really is a 50-50 proposition as to whether the coin will come up heads or tails. In the previous 46 Super Bowls, the coin toss is split evenly with 23 heads and 23 tails. That said, heads has been the best choice recently as the last four coin tosses have come up heads. The Super Bowl coin toss results have gone on streaks. Five of the last six tosses have been heads, but eight of the nine before that were tails.
A coin toss is 50-50 and the results from this season do not help skew the odds in either direction. As the visiting team in the Super Bowl, Baltimore will call heads or tails. Including the playoffs, the Ravens have played 10 road games this season and are 5-5 in coin tosses. Baltimore lost the coin toss in its first Super Bowl appearance while San Francisco won the toss in four of its first five appearances.
While it’s unlikely that winning the coin toss would have much, if any, effect on the outcome of the game, the Ravens did win more games this season when they won the coin toss. Baltimore was 7-2 when winning the toss and 6-4 when they lost. San Francisco, however, went 8-3 when they won the toss but were even better when they lost. The 49ers won five of the seven games they lost the toss with one of the two others being a tie. Over the last 10 Super Bowls, the team which won the coin toss went on to win the game four times.
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