The NFL is back. Thursday Night Football is back. Making risky sports bets on your favorite NFL team to ultimately disappoint you ... yeah, that is back, too.
Putting together a Thursday Night Football parlay factoring in the Travis Kelce injury
Betting on Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs is more what you’d call a “guideline” than an actual rule.
Joe Rondone/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK
As we get ready for tonight’s Week 1 Thursday Night Football matchup with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Detroit Lions, we have our first opportunity to head over to DraftKings Sportsbook and place real money on real, regular season football.
Currently, DraftKings still has their “DK Special” bet up for the game. At -20000 (that’s minus twenty thousand), you can bet that Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes will complete more than one pass in the game. What does that mean? That means if you want to win $100.00 for this bet, you would have to risk $20,000.00 on the bet. On the flip side, if you were to “only” bet $100.00 on these -20000 odds, it would pay out a whopping 50 cents. Hard to justify the risk there.
Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports
Quarterback Joe Flacco looks like a new man in Cleveland, throwing for over 300 yards in back-to-back-to-back games for the first time in his career.
But if you take odds that may not be quite as ridiculous, even if they are favored, you can string those bets together in what is known as a “parlay” to potentially increase your payout. You can head over to DraftKings for a full definition of what a parlay is - and no, it is not just the rules of engagement in Pirates of the Caribbean - but we will cover the basics here. Essentially, a parlay is a string of multiple bets (each individual bet known as a “leg”), where for there to be any payout whatsoever, each leg of the parlay has to be correct. It is all-or-nothing. In a three-leg parlay, if one of the bets misses but the other two hit, there is no “partial payout.” It is simply a loss. But if all three bets hit, that is where there might be opportunity for money to be made.
So consider this four-leg parlay for tonight’s game:
- Lions OVER 13.5 points. Detroit’s offense should not be the problem in 2023. With playmakers all around the offense and a potential for a shootout, the Lions should cruise past 14 total points.
- Lions QB Jared Goff OVER 229.5 passing yards. This is a fairly modest passing total for Goff and the Lions considering the high scoring game everyone still expects this to be.
- Chiefs UNDER 38.5 points. With uncertainty surrounding Travis Kelce’s knee injury, it is more than reasonable to think the Chiefs are held to 38 or less points in the game.
- Chiefs WR Skyy Moore OVER 29.5 receiving yards. Speaking of Kelce, if he misses the game, the Kansas City passing attack has to go somewhere. Skyy Moore would certainly be a beneficiary of additional looks. Thirty receiving yards is certainly on the table.
The parlay odds for this bet would be +175, meaning a $100 bet would pay out $275 (the original $100 bet plus an extra $175). Again, this takes all four individual legs of the parlay have to come true for this bet to pay out. But look at the odds: Instead of a $100 parlay, if four $25.00 bets were placed on each of these legs individually and all four were to come true, the total payout would be $228.44 (the original $100 bet plus an extra $128.44). By stringing these four bets into a four-leg parlay, a winning bet pays out over 36% more than the four solo bets by themselves.
Does this mean the parlay is a safe bet to make? Of course not. Every bet also presents risk. But stringing together a series of less-risky bets into a parlay, while the risk is greater because it presents more opportunities for the overall bet to miss, the potential reward is greater. Once a basic parlay bet is understood and made, the feeling of it hitting is like no other, and soon, a novice sports better can eventually win a treasure that would make Jack Sparrow jealous. You can head over to DraftKings Sportsbook to try to make it happen.
If you like this material, make sure you’re subscribed to The SB Nation NFL Show podcast where we cover Thursday Night Football sports bets every week. You can catch us wherever you listen to your podcasts. As always, you can follow me on Twitter/X @ChrisDunnells. Odds/lines subject to change. T&Cs apply. See draftkings.com/sportsbook for details.
