Gonzo: Time to take a gamble

Contrary to what you might have heard, Page 2 is here to educate you. It's true(ish). Today's lesson: Anyone who tells you the Super Bowl is about naming the league's new kings and holding a spectacular coronation is slow or phony or both.

The actual game is merely a pretense, an excuse for most Americans to gather somewhere and stuff their faces until they lapse into a food coma and cheese dip shoots from their nostrils and chicken wings explode from their ears. It's good (if not healthy) fun. More than that, though, the Super Bowl is an excuse to gamble.

Even Billy Joel knows this.

A few years ago BJ sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Before he performed, he heard that various sports books had set an over/under on how long it would take him to complete America's song and joked that he could make some money off the line.

"He said he was going to sing the anthem really fast and bet the under," Richard Gardner said.

Gardner is the Bodog.com sportsbook manager, the guy charged with putting together all those silly, screwy, fun prop bets people bet on during the Super Bowl. (According to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, more than $81 million was legally wagered on the game in Las Vegas last year, which doesn't include the aforementioned prop bets or take into account the billions that exchange hands in offshore casinos or with your friendly neighborhood bookies.)

There are some prop bet mainstays each year (the coin flip, what color the Gatorade will be when it's dumped on the winning coach, etc.), but most of the oddball lines and over/unders are set according to the ever-developing story lines associated with the game. For Super Bowl XLIV, you can bet on how many times the TV shot will feature Peyton Manning's pop Archie (over/under 4), how often CBS will show Bourbon Street (over/under 2), and how much face time Reggie Bush's paramour, Kim Kardashian, will enjoy (over/under 2).

And lest you think this is all slapped together without much thought, a fair amount of research goes into setting the lines - however absurd. If you dig the downtime, you can bet on "which Super Bowl commercial will have a higher rating on USA Today's annual ad meter." Just understand it's not all luck. There's some precedence here.

"Oh, there's lots of historical data," Gardner told me. "Doritos won last year, and traditionally Anheuser-Busch/Budweiser has done very well. That's why we installed Bud as the 2-3 favorite."

Remarkably, he sounded pretty serious when he said all that.

For the classic-rock fans out there, you can point some paper on The Who. The legendary band will perform the halftime show, affording you to wager on how many times Pete Townshend will do his signature windmill move (over/under 5), whether a member of the group will smash a guitar (Yes +120/No -150) and, if so - and I'm not making this up - what the broken guitar piece will fly off and hit first.

If you're wondering, "the floor" is the favorite at 2-3 while "a fan" is the long shot at 100-1.

In all honesty, if you're betting on guitar shrapnel, you probably have deep and incurable gambling problems. Not me. I'm saving my (not-so) hard- earned cash for how many times the announcers will fully mention Hurricane Katrina (over/under 21/2).

The over is a lock.

The city of New Orleans has been through a lot, but someone needs to tell the politicians down there that hosting a parade win or lose - as the city announced it will to do this coming Tuesday - and disclosing those plans before the game is even played today is bad juju. The football gods are an angry, fickle lot and shouldn't be so brazenly provoked. . . . Some interesting info from DietDetective.com as you prepare today's Super Bowl smorgasbord: Eating half a DiGiorno stuffed-crust pizza with bacon, sausage and pepperoni would take 299 touchdown dances to work off. You'd have to do the wave 6,389 times to burn the calories in just six T.G.I. Friday's fully loaded potato skins. And just one pint of Ben & Jerry's delicious Chubby Hubby ice cream would require cleaning a football stadium for 322 minutes in order to break even with your body. . . . Last playoff game of the season. As regular readers/haters of this column are fully aware, I've been beyond dreadful picking against the spread during the postseason. Ah, but today is a new day. I'm confident (kinda) that I'll redeem myself. My head says to make the safe play and take the Colts. Of course, my head is huge but largely empty and has gotten me into all sorts of trouble in the past. I'm going with the black cavity that doubles as my heart and picking the Saints +5 over the Colts. Pretty sure that all but guarantees a win for Indy.