The San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens are both favorites to win their conference championship matchups and potentially face off in the Super Bowl, so naturally a lot of bettors put money on this matchup to happen. But a meme from November has galvanized even more bettors than usual.
The notion that the NFL is "scripted" originally gained traction after an offhand remark by former running back Arian Foster on a podcast in 2022. Since then, disaffected and impressionable people across fandoms have bought into some variation of the notion that the outcomes of NFL games are preordained — some tongue-in-cheek, others tragically literal in their interpretations.
In last year's Super Bowl, all it took was one tweet that purported to show the already determined final score between the Eagles and Chiefs on a Sports Reference page (Eagles 37, Chiefs 34) in order for that exacta to be by far the most bet prop on the game.
Before that, old photoshopped Simpsons episodes served as conspiracy fodder that affected the betting markets.
This time around, it's no different. A meme from November about consistencies in the Super Bowl logo color scheme sent the exact sort of demographic you'd imagine it would've sent into crazy mode.
Anyone else notice this? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/edOCyKqEET
— NFL Memes (@NFL_Memes) November 8, 2023
There's more to this theory. So it goes, the team whose color is at the bottom of the Super Bowl logo is the "scripted" winner. So, yellow in Super Bowl LVI for the Rams and red for the Chiefs. Purple shades the bottom of the Super Bowl LVII logo, so tin foils think the Ravens will beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl.
They've been further affirmed by a Canadian TV channel that mistakenly displayed the 49ers and Ravens as Super Bowl finalists during a broadcast last week.
Last Thursday, the NFL Super Bowl script was quietly revealed to be 49ers-Ravens on the local broadcast of CTV 2 in Vancouver.
Watch the black box below the traffic four seconds in…
(H/T @ApexMarketing) pic.twitter.com/RsAyJh7sLE
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) January 22, 2024
At FanDuel, the Ravens to beat the 49ers became the single-largest Super Bowl liability at the sportsbook since the meme went viral in November, with plenty of bettors wagering at heavy plus-money odds on this exacta to pan out. FanDuel is the largest sportsbook by volume in the United States, with the majority of bettors wagering in $10 increments or less.
The trading team at DraftKings said it has also taken heavy volume on a 49ers vs. Ravens exacta Super Bowl. In fact, since the conspiracy theory was posted on Nov. 7, the sportsbook has experienced a 21x spike in handle and 9x spike in bets on exactas relating to 49ers vs. Ravens — the most out of any other teams or matchups.
DraftKings head of trading Johnny Avello pointed out, of course, that a large portion of that phenomenon is because the 49ers and Ravens are both No. 1 seeds who have been conference favorites for a month now. And he added that he isn't afraid of the money rolling in from internet trolls, either.
"[When the meme came out] is about the time when some of the money started to come in, but if we start handicapping colors, we're in a whole lot of trouble," Avello said.
