Super Bowl LX between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots will likely begin on a kickoff and then a running play, as each team handed it off more than half the time when faced with 1st and 10.
But which team ultimately starts with the ball is important, as before a ball is touched, each team’s captain will meet in the center of the field for the ceremonial coin toss to determine which team will have the right to choose either to kick or to receive.
DraftKings is offering odds on the result of the coin toss, with heads and tails both carrying -103 odds.
For the game, the Seahawks are 4.5-point favorites, with the point total set to 45.5.
Below, I’ll break down this novelty special’s odds and offer a verdict as to what the coin toss’s result will be.
Will the Seahawks vs. Patriots coin toss be heads or tails?
On the surface, there should be exactly a 50-50 chance of either outcome, but so far, that hasn’t quite been the case, with 31 tails and 28 heads in the first 59 iterations of the Super Bowl. Of course, that’s well within the margin of random chance, with 9.6% of 59-flip outcomes resulting in exactly 31 tails. Plus, each coin flip is an independent event, so even though it’s been tails slightly more times than it’s been heads, that doesn’t mean that heads is due.
The coin used during Sunday’s game won’t be just any old quarter; instead, it will likely have the official Super Bowl logo on one side and the teams’ logos on the other, but it’s not announced prior to the game which side will be designated to be heads and which will be designated to be tails. Given that the logo has just two letters and the Lombardi Trophy, there’s an off-chance that it would require slightly less weight than prior logos and therefore be more likely to land face-up, but in reality, any difference would be so minuscule that it wouldn’t affect the odds at all.
In order to determine which to choose, I flipped a coin 10 times. Tails came up six times.
Verdict: Tails.
