Five books price the same 32 teams every day of the summer. They rarely agree, and in August they barely try.
Baltimore is a clean example. Take the Ravens to win the Super Bowl and you are paid +1000 at DraftKings, +1100 at bet365 and BetMGM, and +1200 at Caesars and FanDuel. Same team, same season, same outcome. A $100 position settles for $1,000 in one place and $1,200 in another.
That is 20% more money for identical risk, decided by which tab was open.
The board, book by book
Three teams, and the range each one trades in this morning:
| Team | Shortest | Longest | Extra payout at the best price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baltimore Ravens | +1000 | +1200 | 20% |
| New England Patriots | +1600 | +2000 | 25% |
| Miami Dolphins | +30000 | +100000 | 233% |
Miami is the number that stops people. A $100 position on the Dolphins returns $30,000 at the short price and $100,000 at the long one. The event being priced is identical. The difference comes down entirely to where the ticket was written.
Two hundred and thirty-three percent more money, for taking exactly the same view on exactly the same season.
Longshots run wide because almost nobody trades them. A book carrying no action on Miami has no reason to sharpen the number, so it sits wherever the trader left it in June. The teams people actually bet — Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia — get corrected faster, which is why their range is 20% and their longshots run to 200%.
Why the spread survives all summer
Futures markets stay loose because nothing forces them tight.
- No settlement pressure. A Week 3 spread resolves in seventy-two hours. A Super Bowl future sits on the book for six months, so a stale number costs the trader very little today.
- Thin two-way flow. Sharp money arrives on games. Futures attract opinion, and opinion arrives in one direction — on the team the bettor likes.
- Inventory drives the number. A book already carrying heavy Baltimore liability shortens Baltimore to stop writing more of it. A book carrying none leaves it long to attract some. Both numbers are correct for the venue that wrote them. Both describe inventory.
What to do with it
Check every book before entering. That sentence is the entire practical content of this note, and it is worth more than most opinions about which team is undervalued.
The Forecaster exists to make that check take seconds. It reads all five boards, marks the longest available price on each team, and names the venue holding it — or the venues, because on nearly half the board more than one book is tied at the best number.
Seattle is the current example worth looking at. The projection has the Seahawks near 10.7% to win the Super Bowl against a market read around 6.7% — the widest gap on the board this morning — and the best number sits at +1200.
A season simulation will not out-forecast a trading desk. Taking +1200 where somebody else took +1000 is available to anyone who looks, and it compounds across every position entered for the rest of the season.
The margin sitting inside all of these prices is the subject of Every board sums past one hundred.
Prices are the boards as of 17 August 2026 across bet365, BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings and FanDuel. On converting American odds to implied probability, see Odds.