Pat McAfee’s Ill-Advised Bet Cost Him $30,000 Before the Super Bowl Even Started
If you have thousands of dollars to throw away, there’s no better time to do it than during the Super Bowl. The biggest game on planet earth offers so many avenues on which to gamble, many of which have nothing to do with the game itself. There are “prop bets” that range from which song The Weeknd would play first during the halftime show, to which color of Gatorade would be poured on the winning coach. Popular sports commentator Pat McAfee got burned on one of these on Sunday night.
Pat McAfee’s wild ride
Since his retirement from the NFL in 2016, Pat McAfee has bounced around sports media. His first stop was Barstool Sports, where he hosted a show on their SiriusXM channel until 2018. After a year of making random appearances on ESPN and Fox, the Pat McAfee Show resurfaced on Westwood One and DAZN, before moving — once again — to SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Radio in September 2020.
Since then, Pat McAfee has made himself a brand, and that brand has become entangled with sports betting. In 2019, McAfee announced a partnership with the daily fantasy sports company FanDuel, and today the FanDuel branding is plastered over every square inch of his show’s studio. The show has also expanded to air on TVG, the national horse racing and betting network.
Pat McAfee makes a bet to forget
One of the most popular prop bets for the Super Bowl is, of course, the coin flip. This makes sense, after all. It can only go two ways — heads or tails. As the designated road team, it was the responsibility of the Kansas City Chiefs to call the coin toss.
In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, McAfee made it clear that he would wager $30,000 on the coin flip, and that he was confident that it would land on tails. In his words, “tails never fails”. Unfortunately for McAfee, it did this year. The coin, as flipped by Tampa General Hospital ICU Nurse Manager Suzie Dorner, went heads.
Ironically, as he put it on ESPN’s Get Up, “The only thing the Chiefs won was the coin toss!” This continues a recent Super Bowl trend. With this game, the team that has won the coin flip has now lost the last seven Super Bowls.
One funny side effect of the coin toss
After the coin toss, the word “Tails” became the top trending topic on Twitter for a brief moment. It just so happens that “tails” is not just the opposite of “heads” on a coin flip. “Tails” is also the name of a video game character — specifically, the two-tailed fox sidekick from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
Football fans who clicked on the tag may have been surprised to find artwork and GIFs of the popular character. Conversely, fans of the video game franchise, awaiting news of the series’ next installment, were disappointed to find more Super Bowl chatter. Such is life.
