CLEVELAND — Super Bowl Sunday is just a few days away with Ohio represented for the first time in over three decades. The Los Angeles Rams are about a 4 point favorite in Sunday’s game. A fact that doesn’t do the Ohio bettor all that much good right now. Yes timing is everything in sports and in sports betting and the timing for Ohio is off this year with the legislature having legalized sports betting but the Ohio Casino Control Commission is still 10 months or so from having it up and running.
The folks at PlayOhio.com estimate if it was, Ohio would likely be one of the nation’s top states for wagers on the game.
“A similar-sized state Illinois already has online sports betting going right now and we’re projecting that $75 million will be wagered on the Super Bowl in Illinois,” said Matt Schoch of Play Ohio. “So from that you can extrapolate that Ohio would be somewhere in that range.”
The American Gaming Association estimates that a record 31.4 million American adults plan to bet on the Super Bowl, a 35% increase from last year and they’re going to bet up to $7.6 billion. Legalized sports betting the reason.
“Just like Ohio coming online sometime this year, ten new states have come online since last year so that certainly brings that opportunity closer to home for a lot of people,” said Casey Clark, Senior Vice President with AGA.
While they don’t have figures for how much Ohio is losing out on this weekend not having sports betting they do have high expectations.
“Certainly Ohio is such a mature gaming market and we’ve talked about this before, that our expectations are that Ohio could, once it’s fully mature and operational, with our sports betting operation could generate as much as $9 billion or more in sports betting handle per year,” Clark said.
That’s why you see all players gearing up not just the casinos but the sports teams. The Cavaliers announced Tuesday a deal with Fubo Sportsbook with plans to open a 3,000 square foot sports lounge inside Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
“I think you’ve seen that all over the country where you’ve got 150 plus commercial partnerships between sports entities and gaming operators on things from marketing to offering an experience at a ballpark like you’ll see in Cleveland,” said Clark. “We have it here in Washington where we’ve got now a sportsbook at Nat’s Park and we’ve got one at Capital One Arena with the Caesars Sports Book where the Wizards and Capitols play.”
Bettors slightly favor the Rams, with 55% saying they expect to bet on them to win, compared to 45% on the Bengals. Few people saw this matchup coming: according to AGA research at the start of the season just one percent of expected bettors said they would wager on the Bengals to win the Super Bowl and just two percent would have picked the Rams five months ago.
