What can the Superdome tell us about the Super Bowl?

28Jan 2013

This year's Super Bowl is being played at the home of the New Orleans Saints, the Superdome. It will be the seventh Super Bowl played there, so what can the previous six - and some recent history - tell is about the way the game is likely to go? Richard O'Hagan investigates.

At one time, the Louisiana Superdome (or Mercedes-Benz Superdome, as we are apparently supposed to be calling it) was a regular host of the Super Bowl, lending itself to the NFL's main event four times in the years between 1978 and 1990. Since then the expansion of the league and the rush to build newer, bigger, stadia across it has meant that it has held only two games, the last of them 11 years ago.

For anyone looking to bet on the number of points scored in this game, the previous Super Bowls held here throw up a couple of curious statistical anomalies. For example, three of the six games had an identical number of points, 37. Two of the others were 56 point affairs, leaving San Francisco's 55-10 demolition of Denver in 1990 as the outlier in this field. Moreover, all of those 37 point games finished with the same scoreline, 20-17. That's an average of 43.33 points per Super Bowl.

However, there are a couple of important factors to consider before taking that figure as an indicator. The first is that, as we have said before on betting.betfair, the game itself has become much more of a passing game over the years since. When Chicago beat New England by the then-record score of 46-10 in Super Bowl XX there was but one passing touchdown in the whole game. In last year's game between the Giants and the Patriots there were three, and yet there were only 38 points scored in all.

The second and even more relevant statistic is that since that last Super Bowl in 2002 the Superdome has become an entirely artificial surface. In the last season of play on the grass surface each game saw an average of 46.38 points per game. This season, that average has risen to 56.5. That can be partly explained by home side the New Orleans Saints having the worst defence in NFL history in terms of points conceded, but not entirely as they won as many of their home games as they lost, including one game where they held their opponent scoreless. In fact, over the past two seasons fewer than a quarter of the games played at the Superdome (4 of 17) have ended with fewer points scored than the 43.33 that the stadium averages for Super Bowls. That makes the 2.16 currently on offer for a total score over 48.5 points look very good indeed.

The change of surface has made a change to the type of scoring play you can expect, too. In 2002 there were an average of 3 receiving and 2.25 rushing touchdowns per game (almost on a par with the stadium's Super Bowl average of 3 and 2.16). This season, however, those figures are 4.38 and 1.63 respectively, with the latter figure being distorted by Carolina's five rushing touchdowns in one game. With that in mind, back the first touchdown to be a receiving touchdown at 1.76.

As the game is in a dome, there will be no wind to factor into the equation when it comes to the passing game. This should favour Baltimore more than San Francisco. Whilst both sides have strong-armed quarterbacks - and indeed Colin Kaepernick's is arguably stronger than Joe Flacco's - it is the Raven's offense which is built more on long plays, utilising the speed of Torrey Smith and the strength of Anquan Boldin. Flacco also tends to throw the ball deep when in trouble, a situation where Kaepernick is more likely to use his exceptional speed and mobility to avoid problems. For these reasons the 4.2 price on the first score being a Ravens touchdown looks very attractive.