Best sports bets of the 2010s
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On Saturday, Baltimore Ravens quarterback and likely MVP Lamar Jackson will begin his postseason run at the helm of the current Super Bowl favorites. Both notions seemed preposterous this summer - the Ravens opened as 40-1 long shots to win the Super Bowl, while Jackson's MVP odds were as high as 100-1.
After breaking down some of the worst bad beats of the past decade in late December, this weekend got us thinking: what about the improbable bets that rewarded bettors? Here are 10 of the best bets from the 2010s:
Auburn Tigers win BCS championship (January 10, 2011)
Ahead of the 2010 season, few believed Auburn had a chance to cash a 50-1 title ticket behind new quarterback Cam Newton, who'd transferred from a junior college that January. It didn't take long to believe in eventual Heisman winner Newton and the Tigers, who ripped off a perfect 14-0 season and bested Chip Kelly's Ducks in the title game.
Somehow, this wasn't even the best value play on Auburn this decade. In 2014, one bettor stood to win $50,000 on a 500-1 ticket if his favorite team could cap off a dream season with a win over Florida State in the title game. The Tigers lost in heartbreaking fashion when Kelvin Benjamin scored with 14 seconds left to give the Seminoles a three-point win.
St. Louis Cardinals win World Series (October 28, 2011)
It's not often a team in any sport gets 999-1 odds, but it speaks to how unlikely St. Louis' run was in 2011. The Cardinals were on the brink of being eliminated from the playoffs on Sept. 12, when one bettor placed $250 on them to win the National League (500-1) and another $250 on the club to win the World Series (999-1).
The Braves' late-season collapse helped St. Louis sneak into the playoffs, where it ripped through the Phillies and Brewers to win the NL pennant. In the World Series, the Cardinals came within one strike of defeat, but David Freese's heroics delivered a title to St. Louis and a cool $375,000 to that lucky bettor.
Connecticut Huskies win NCAA Tournament (April 7, 2014)
Everyone remembers the Huskies' improbable 2011 title run when Kemba Walker led the team to five wins in five days in the Big East tournament and another six victories in the big dance. But what about 2014? Connecticut opened at 65-1 and saw 100-1 odds as late as March when the Huskies were a mediocre No. 7 seed that needed overtime to beat Saint Joseph's in the first round.
UConn was still catching 100-1 odds at some shops after that win, but Shabazz Napier had his own Kemba moment and carried the Huskies to five more wins, capped off by a title-clinching victory over preseason favorite Kentucky. It's the only time this century that the college basketball champion wasn't a top-three seed.
Leicester City wins English Premier League (May 2, 2016)
This might be the greatest long-shot success story we see in our lifetimes. Entering the 2015-16 season, only five clubs had ever won an English Premier League title in its 23-year history. Leicester City were not among them. The Foxes had never sniffed a Premier League title and were on the brink of relegation from the league a year earlier.
Oddsmakers paid little respect to Leicester City, dealing 5,000-1 odds on the club to win it all. That proved to be a crippling mistake for English books, as Claudio Ranieri's squad got off to a hot start and held off a late-season surge from Tottenham to hoist the Premier League trophy. Needless to say, the days of teams getting 5,000-1 odds in a 20-team league are in the past.
Philadelphia Eagles win Super Bowl (February 4, 2018)
Before the 2017 season, the Eagles, led by second-year quarterback Carson Wentz and second-year coach Doug Pederson, were among the bottom half of teams on the Super Bowl oddsboard. Philly saw as high as 60-1 odds in the offseason and entered the year around 40-1 before Wentz improbably led the team to an 11-2 record and emerged as the odds-on MVP favorite.
Then Wentz went down, and the Eagles' title chances looked equally grim. In stepped Nick Foles, who engineered an all-time playoff run and bested Tom Brady in the Super Bowl as a 4-point underdog. Foles became a folk hero in Philadelphia and rewarded those who'd backed the Eagles before the season.
Patrick Mahomes wins NFL MVP (February 2, 2019)
It may be hard to remember given the hindsight of two surprising MVP results in recent years, but imagine how crazy you'd have sounded in 2018 betting on a player with one career start to win the award. That was the case with Patrick Mahomes, the second-year QB whose immense upside pushed 2017 MVP contender Alex Smith out the door ahead of the 2018 season.
Mahomes entered the offseason as a 100-1 long shot but saw his odds slashed after an impressive summer for the Chiefs. Bettors were onto something, as the 23-year-old flamethrower threw for 5,097 yards and 50 touchdowns to become the second-youngest MVP winner in league history. (Somehow, books made the same exact mistake with another second-year dynamo a few months later.)
Andy Ruiz defeats Anthony Joshua (June 1, 2019)
In most cases, bettors have to wait at least four months to cash in on long odds. But when Andy Ruiz filled in late as the opponent opposite Anthony Joshua in Madison Square Garden, oddsmakers didn't give the Mexican-American fighter much of a shot against the British favorite. Most of the public was on Ruiz, who closed around 10-1 at most books and as high as 20-1 to upset the unified world heavyweight champion.
It was hardly a contest. After taking a big shot early, Ruiz rallied and sent Joshua to the tarp four times in a knock-out victory. Things didn't go so well for Ruiz in the December rematch, but bettors who backed the 'dog the first time around enjoyed one of the biggest upsets in boxing history.
St. Louis Blues win Stanley Cup (June 12, 2019)
Unlike most of the winners on this list, the best time to bet the Blues wasn't in the preseason or right before the playoffs. It was halfway through the year, when St. Louis had the worst record in the NHL and faced an 11-point deficit for the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference with just over three months left in the season. One bettor took a $400 shot on the Blues at 250-1, while some books took small bets as high as 300-1.
You know how it went: St. Louis ripped off an 11-game winning streak to climb back into the playoff field, and it outlasted Boston in the final for the Blues' first Cup in their 52-year history. The 250-1 bettor - a lifelong Blues fan - cashed his $100,000 ticket to cap off a tumultuous NHL playoffs for bet shops.
Toronto Raptors win NBA title (June 13, 2019)
In a truly wild month for long-shot bettors, the Raptors became the second-biggest underdogs (+230) since the NBA-ABA merger to win the NBA Finals, beating the dynastic Warriors on their own floor. The bigger payout, though, was for those who bet Toronto to win it all at 60-1 odds in the summer.
That was before the Raptors traded for megastar Kawhi Leonard, whose arrival slashed those title odds to 20-1. It was still a massive value for Toronto, which benefitted from a few bounces against Philly and a few injuries against Golden State to cut down the nets.
Joe Burrow wins Heisman Trophy (December 14, 2019)
The latest entry in the decade's best bets was among the most thrilling, as Joe Burrow rewrote the collegiate record books en route to a stunning breakout campaign. What makes the LSU quarterback's story so shocking isn't that he came out of nowhere - it's that he completely transformed from what we'd known him to be.
In his first three years at Ohio State, Burrow sat behind J.T. Barrett and Cardale Jones and eventually lost his starting job to Dwayne Haskins after breaking his hand in a freak accident in practice. He transferred to LSU and was wholly uninspiring in 13 starts for the Tigers in 2018.
It comes as less of a surprise, then, that Burrow was a 200-1 Heisman afterthought at some places entering 2019. Yet he played like a quarterback reborn, throwing for 5,208 yards and 55 touchdowns with a 77.6% completion rate to secure LSU's first Heisman Trophy since 1959. Not bad for a Buckeye castoff.
C Jackson Cowart is a betting writer for theScore. He's an award-winning journalist with stops at The Charlotte Observer, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Times Herald-Record, and BetChicago. He's also a proud graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, and his love of sweet tea is rivaled only by that of a juicy prop bet. Find him on Twitter @CJacksonCowart.