Super Bowl TD Props & Odds: Best Bets To Score A Touchdown

February 1, 2021 - by Jason Lisk

One of the largest set of props for the Super Bowl involve touchdowns. Which players will run, pass, or throw for a TD in the game, and how many will they score?

To help answer these questions, we’ll lean on the Super Bowl team and player stat projections we created for the 2021 matchup between the Chiefs and Bucs. [most recent update to our projections and these odds–February 4th]

Our projections are based on the past performance of Kansas City and Tampa Bay this season (e.g. how each team distributed scoring opportunities), as well as on historical matchups with similar point spreads and expected points scored according to the betting markets.

In this article, we will look through the various touchdown props and compare them to our player projections in order to find potential values.

Note: “Projected TD’s Scored” Does NOT Equal “Chances of Scoring a Touchdown”

One thing we want to clear up before we get into this analysis is that just because we project a player for a certain number of touchdowns, doesn’t mean you should blindly use that number to represent the chance that they score.

Huh? Well, that’s just how the maths work. Let us explain.

Take Chiefs WR Tyreek Hill, for example. We project Hill with 0.97 combined rushing and receiving touchdowns in Super Bowl LV.

That 0.97 TD’s projection does not imply that Hill has a 97% chance to score exactly one touchdown, or at least one touchdown. Rather, it represents the average of a range of potential outcomes.

If Super Bowl LV were played a hundred times, in some games Hill wouldn’t score a touchdown. In other games, he would score multiple TD’s. A single TD projection for Super Bowl LV has to boil down all those possibilities into one number.

Example: Tyreek Hill TD Distribution in 2020

Here’s a real life illustration of what we mean. Hill scored 17 TD’s (15 receiving TD’s and 2 rushing TD’s) in 17 games played this year. His game-by-game touchdown scoring production looked like this:

• Zero touchdowns scored in five games
• One touchdown in eight games
• Two touchdowns in three games
• Three touchdowns in one game (coincidentally, against Tampa Bay)

Hill averaged exactly one TD per game, but he only scored a touchdown in 70.6% of games. He also scored multiple touchdowns in 23.5% of games.

So particularly for the top scoring players on each team (say, players whom we project with at least 0.3 expected TD’s in the Super Bowl), just recognize that our TD projection should not be compared directly to the odds that the player scores at least one touchdown.

The possibility of a multiple-TD game means that a top player projected for 0.75 TD’s actually has less than a 75% chance of scoring at least one TD.

Converting Touchdown Odds to Percentage Chances of Scoring a Touchdown

To properly assess Super Bowl prop bets involving touchdowns, you need to figure out their break-even percentages.

Negative Payout Odds

If a given prop bet has a minus (-) sign in front of it, that means you have to pay that amount of money to win $100 (e.g. -175 means bet $175 to win $100). To find the break-even percentage for the bet, the formula is:

odds / (odds – 100)

In the case of Tyreek Hill, at post time his odds at DraftKings for scoring a touchdown are -175. The break-even percentage for Hill, then, is 63.6% to score a touchdown, similar to the 70.6% of the time he has scored in a game so far this year.

Positive Payout Odds

If a given prop bet has a plus (+) sign in front of it, that means you win that amount of money if you risk $100 and get the bet right. To find the break-even percentage for the bet, the formula is:

100 / (odds + 100)

Returning to the Tyreek Hill example, DraftKings has the odds at +250 that Hill scores multiple touchdowns. The break-even percentage for Hill to score at least twice, then, is 28.6%, somewhat higher than the 23.5% of games he has scored at least twice this season.

Quarterback Passing Touchdown Props

Now, let’s get to our analysis of Super Bowl LV touchdown props.

First let’s look at some passing touchdown props for Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady. As of post time, here are their betting odds to go over vs. under two different TD lines available at DraftKings, along with the break even point for those odds, and our projected chance of each happening.

If our projection is higher than the break-even percentage for that specific prop bet, that indicates a positive expectation bet according to our projections.