Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Jeff Haney on some reasonable NCAA tournament odds instead of the ludicrous ones, like the 5 sextillion to 1 for Oral Roberts, that were reported by USA Today

The odds of No. 16 seed Oral Roberts winning the NCAA men's basketball tournament are 5 sextillion to 1, according to USA Today.

An old saying among gamblers states that odds printed in a newspaper are worth something only if you can bet into them.

But this takes the adage to an extreme.

Sextillion is equivalent to 10 to the 21st power, or a 1 followed by 21 zeros.

Obviously no bookmaker could actually take such a bet - not only because the payout would be enough to retire several national debts and dwarf even more gross national products, but also because a gambling syndicate could start hedging like mad to lock in a profit even if ORU won just its first two games. (Approximate real-world odds of that happening: 50-1.)

In Las Vegas, anyone moved to place a wager on Oral Roberts to win the tournament could buy a ticket that would pay perhaps 5,000 to 1.

That's a 5 followed by only three zeros.

The true odds of ORU pulling off that feat lie somewhere in the middle.

Using estimated money-line prices - a money-line wager is a bet on a team to win the game outright, regardless of the point spread - we can approximate the odds of Oral Roberts' road to the Final Four ... and beyond.

In today's game against top-seeded Memphis, you could get about plus-740 on Oral Roberts, or $7.40 for each $1 wagered.

Let's say you won and rolled your winnings into another money-line wager on ORU against Arkansas (assuming the Razorbacks get past Bucknell). I'll estimate you could get plus-550 on ORU.

Moving on to the Sweet 16, I think plus-700 on ORU would be a fair price against Kansas, followed by a projected plus-725 against UCLA, plus-750 against Duke and plus-800 against Connecticut.

Crunch those numbers, and you can determine that the odds of ORU winning all of those games - it's essentially a six-leg money-line parlay - equate to about 275,000 to 1.

However, who among us would have the courage (although that's probably not the right word) to take their $30,000 bankroll and put it all on the 8-1 shot of an ORU upset in the championship game?

Of course, Oral Roberts and its fellow No. 16 seeds have no earthly chance of winning the entire tournament.

Some people think the outlandish prices provided to USA Today by oddsmaker Danny Sheridan - Albany was a 1 sextillion to 1 shot, Southern checked in at 5 trillion to 1, N.C.-Wilmington and Northern Iowa were relative chalk at 1 million to 1 - are a creative, funny, relatively harmless way of expressing that these teams have no shot.

I disagree.

I think putting out such numbers can mislead readers - especially when they appear in the same section that runs ads from scamdicappers promoting their "Big Dance Hoop Challenge - Go 16-0 Free," or their "3 Huge Winners," or the fact that they will "Go 4-0 Free."

Those fantasy-land odds combined with the ripoff advertisements can engender the kind of hocus-pocus mentality on gambling that infects much of the American public.

It's a mind-set that breeds a culture of mistrust of gambling, including sports betting, that ultimately gives rise to truly abominable ideas such as the recurring effort in Washington to outlaw betting on college sports in Nevada.

A lot of people rely on USA Today's otherwise fine sports section for information.

So it's no real surprise that many people who are otherwise savvy about sports - including out-of-towners whose interest in the Las Vegas scene perks up during big events such as March Madness - have huge gaps in their knowledge of even the rudiments of sports betting.

The guy in the USA Today advertisement is going 16-0 against the point spread. So a 60 percent mark against the spread must stink. (In reality, that's about as high as a professional gambler can hope to hit over time.)

Should Oral Roberts be 5 sextillion or 5 thousand to 1? That's a difference of 18 zeros, after all.

And boxing continues to fly comfortably under the sporting public's radar.

A Las Vegas radio spot promoting Saturday's world heavyweight championship fight between Hasim Rahman and James Toney this week referred repeatedly to Hasim "RAH-men," like the dried noodles. It has been pronounced "ROCK-men" throughout his career.

Toney is a 2-1 betting favorite in the bout, with a round proposition of over/under 11 1/2. The fight, in Atlantic City, will be shown by HBO (Cox cable channel 200).

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