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- A representative for Westgate Superbook called on the NFL to investigate a large suspicious bet made on the Bucs before Tom Brady announced his return on Sunday.
- According to Forbes, one bettor bet $8k to win $96k on the Bucs winning the NFC days before Brady’s unretirement.
- Be sure to check out more sports stories at BroBible here.
Several suspicious bets days before Tom Brady’s return are prompting one Vegas sportsbook to call on the NFL to investigate the matter.
Earlier this week, Jay Kornegay, vice president of the Westgate Superbook in Vegas, had called on the NFL to look into a bettor who placed a large bet on the Bucs before Tom Brady’s return.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that they knew he was coming back when they placed those wagers on Thursday,” “And these were not casual bettors. They would be categorized as educated bettors. It wasn’t a guy with a Tom Brady jersey at the counter. It was a player that we would describe as sharp. With that type of play and the announcement we heard [Sunday] that he was unretiring, there was information that was shared prior to his official announcement.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that information leaked sometime in the middle of last week. This is concerning. I don’t think I’ve ever said the NFL really needs to investigate something. But this is something they need to look into and how it got out, because there are many books that took some sizable wagers in the middle of last week.”
Forbes has uncovered the exact bet that caused the uproar from Westgate Superbook in a new report.
Via Forbes
On Thursday, March 10, a new customer came into the SuperBook at Westgate Las Vegas and asked to put down $8,000 on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to win the National Football Conference next year at 12-1 odds, which would net $96,000.
One of the risk management employees asked the sportsbook director John Murray if they would take the man’s bet and he said, “yes.”
Apparently, several big bets were made on the Bucs around the country before Brady’s return.
Earlier that day in New Jersey, a customer put $1,000 on 60-1 odds for the Bucs to win Super Bowl LVII and $1,000 with 30-1 odds for them to win the NFC. The sportsbook’s radar was up, so the oddsmakers adjusted the odds to 25-1 and 12-1, respectively. By Sunday night, not even two months after announcing his retirement, Tom Brady took to Twitter to say he was coming back to play a 23rd season.
On the same day over at the South Point in Vegas, another man placed a large bet for the Buccaneers to win the Super Bowl at 50-1 odds. Later on, the odds lowered to 30-1, then 25-1, and the bettor came back and placed bets for “decent amounts,” says sportsbook director Chris Andrews.
It raised my eyebrows,” says Andrews. “I’m not going crazy on this—right now, we lose more on Buffalo winning the Super Bowl than I do on Tampa Bay. I got 11 months to figure this out. But we feel like there’s something nefarious that went on.”
Andrews says they took the bet and that’s it; sometimes oddsmakers get beat. “The fact is that a Tom Brady team would never be 50-1 to win the Super Bowl, so he got a hell of a bet,” Andrews says. “But I don’t feel as bad as the guy who paid $518,000 for Brady’s last touchdown ball.”
The NFL issued a “no comment” when the Las Vegas Review-Journal asked about the suspicious bets.