It’s kinda funny what folks will put money on these days. I remember stumbling onto the whole betting scene around the Super Bowl national anthem length. Seriously, people bet on how long the singer will take to sing the Star-Spangled Banner.
So, one year, I decided to dive into this myself, just outta curiosity. Wasn’t planning on actually betting big bucks or anything, just wanted to understand how it worked. I hopped online and started poking around. Took a bit of digging to find the actual numbers people were looking at.
Finding the Numbers
What I found was this thing called the ‘over/under’. Basically, some folks somewhere predict a time, let’s say 2 minutes and 5 seconds, right down to the half-second sometimes. Then, you bet whether the actual performance will be longer (over) or shorter (under) than that predicted time. I saw numbers like 120.5 seconds thrown around for one performer.
It seemed wild to me. How do they even decide that exact time beforehand? And how do they time it officially on the day? Seems tricky.
Trying It Myself
Come Super Bowl Sunday that year, I figured I’d try timing it myself. Grabbed my phone, pulled up the stopwatch app. I was all set, waiting for the singer to start. It was surprisingly intense!
- Waiting for that first note… okay, START!
- Trying to focus on the timer and the song.
- Then the end… when do you stop the clock? The moment they stop singing? When the music fades? When they take a breath after the last note?
My time ended up being different from what the ‘official’ time was later reported as. Not by a lot, but enough to make me realize it’s not as simple as just hitting start and stop. Made the whole betting thing seem even more like a pure gamble.
Why I Even Looked Into This
You might be wondering why I even bothered spending time on this. Well, it actually started because of my friend group. We used to get together for the Super Bowl every year. Nothing fancy, just pizza, wings, and the game. We weren’t serious gamblers, but we liked making little prediction pools for fun – winner gets bragging rights, maybe doesn’t have to chip in for the pizza.
One year, someone brought up all the weird side bets, the ‘prop bets’. Stuff like:
- Coin toss result (Heads or Tails)
- Color of the Gatorade dumped on the coach
- And yeah, the length of the national anthem.
We thought it was hilarious. So, the next year, just to be that guy who knows obscure stuff, I decided to research the anthem odds beforehand. I wanted to see what the ‘experts’ were predicting. That’s how I found the over/under times and started looking into past results. It became this weird little ritual for me each year – checking the anthem time prediction. I don’t bet on it, but I still time it on my phone stopwatch every Super Bowl. Just a quirky little thing that adds to the fun of the day, you know?
