Aaron Rodgers has yet to announce his plans for next season officially. But as with most things in this world, all you have to do is follow the money. In this case, the Vegas gambling odds have been pointing to a Rodgers return to Green Bay, and Vegas is rarely wrong.
The momentum in the media seems to indicate that Rogers will soon make official his plans to stay in Green Bay. However, the gambling odds of that happening have been trending in that direction for quite some time. Here are a few examples of that momentum starting to shift.
Directly following the Super Bowl, speculation was perhaps at its highest that Rodgers could be on his way out. The Miami Herald compiled projections of what team Rodgers might be suiting up for this fall, and Green Bay was tied with the Denver Broncos atop the list. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Miami Dolphins were not far behind. The playoff loss and looming cap issues were as fresh as ever, and there was a very real sense that Rodgers might head elsewhere.
Here’s a look at those odds:
- Green Bay Packers +200
- Denver Broncos +200
- Pittsburgh Steelers +550
- Miami Dolphins +750
- Las Vegas Raiders +1,700
- New Orleans Saints +1,800
- San Francisco 49ers +1,800
As February wore on and things started to calm down a bit, the Packers began to rise to the top of the list. At BetOnline.ag, a popular online betting platform, the odds of Rodgers heading to the Broncos if he were to leave Green Bay shifted from -150 to +130 in a three-week span starting just before the Super Bowl up until last week. That means that the odds have shifted to a plus-money situation for Denver, meaning that this particular gambling site is trying to entice more people to take this prop bet. Generally speaking, they don’t do that for things they know are actually going to happen.
The odds moved after Rodgers posted his heartfelt, gratitude-laden Instagram post that could be interpreted in several different ways. However, those who set the odds in the desert interpreted it in one way only: Rodgers is coming back. It caused some bigger gambling sites, such as Bovada, to completely take down the prop bet as to what Rodgers’ next team would be. They felt that any exposure on the Packers was a liability, so they took it off the board.
Some were perhaps a bit more adventurous, leaving the odds up, but they had shifted well into the Packers’ favor. Maybe they felt that there were still enough Denver, Pittsburgh, and/or New Orleans fans who were delusional about their situation to fork down money on the hopes that a breakup would still be coming with Green Bay. However, each of those teams is a bigger long shot than the next.
However, what’s interesting is that through all of it, the Packers’ odds to win the Super Bowl haven’t really changed much. If Rodgers were confirmed to be leaving Green Bay, those odds would plummet, but Vegas isn’t budging yet. They are consistently in the second tier of teams in the league in terms of Super Bowl favorites, behind the Kansas City Chiefs, Buffalo Bills, and Los Angeles Rams. They are in the same group as the San Francisco 49ers, the Cincinnati Bengals, and the Dallas Cowboys. Even Rodgers’ Instagram post didn’t do much to change the odds.
The gradual shift of the odds towards the Green Bay Packers and away from the rest of the league isn’t a mistake. Everything is very calculated in Vegas. Oddsmakers hope to have the odds in a spot to cover their bases when the favorite hits, yet keep the underdogs just tasty enough for cash to be plunked down.
There’s a reason that they never shut off the bright lights in Las Vegas: The casinos keep on winning. If it seems like the oddsmakers are leaning one way, and it certainly seems so with Rodgers, it would be surprising to hear that he’d decided differently.
