For the past several months, my friends and I have dreaded Sundays, as so many of the men in our lives rid themselves of interest in everything around them to throw themselves into the chaos that is football. Not to say that there aren’t superfans who are women, because tons of my girlfriends love the game too, but there’s something to be said for the aggressive levels of testosterone that emanate from groups of University boys on a Sunday afternoon from September to January. Of course, that deserves a certain level of appreciation; cheering for the same team each year, bonding with your friends over game stats and beers and whatnot. But all season this year, I just couldn’t stop thinking, what is all the hype around football anyway? I’ve seen the Superbowl before! I have watched football games and as much as I would love to fall completely and totally in love with a team, and become a die-hard fan, I just feel like that’s not in the cards for me.
In past years I felt like a bit of a fraud watching the Superbowl, since I didn’t even care what happened. I just like the chicken wings and the half time show. But I thought, if my friends and I are willing to ball out on food for this event, we might as well try to care about what’s going on in the game. I wanted to watch the Superbowl and feel like I actually cared about whether the white team or the red team had more points.
There are many ways my friends and I could have gone about this ‘finding interest in the game’, but we took a page right out of the handbook of all of your male friends: we decided to dive into gambling.
I had heard of Bet365 and Bet99 and briefly seen the app over the shoulder of some of my friends, but I had no idea the depths to which this betting occurred. Weeks ago, my housemates and I decided we should download Bet365 and scope it out, in preparation for the big day. We made accounts right away and soon after discovered that it was actually SO CONFUSING. When the Superbowl finally came, we all decided that we were going to put a hefty sum of $50 into the app to try and fully engage in the hype of the event.
And boy did it ever work. It became abundantly clear how addictive betting can be because you simply cannot take your eyes off of the event. For the entirety of the game, we were dialed in screaming about how we wanted out bets to hit. Mind you, we literally couldn’t have cared less about the outcome of this game days, even hours before.
It was borderline scary how thrilling the addition of gambling made our evening, but I am happy to have gotten a taste of what all this fuss is about.
In the end we all lost pretty much of all our money, because we did indeed bet solely on the losing team. I think overall it was a positive outcome, because neither I nor any of my housemates are tempted to bet frivolously again any time soon. We will definitely be saving our next encounter with sports betting until Superbowl 2022.