Super Bowl Prop Bet Breakdown: Don't Be Afraid To Go Under On Reba McEntire
Taylor Hill. Getty Images.I've looked at this from all angles and despite her age, Reba McEntire still got it. I'm not ashamed to announce I'll be going under on her 90.5 seconds to sing the national anthem line. I'm not even going to bother teasing it either. This is all despite the fact that 90.5 is the lowest total for the anthem since the bet started being offered in 2007. On top of that, there's even a statistical trend (r=.288) of singers taking longer as a function of year since 1990.
You can see this trend for yourself below thanks to this article I'm taking as 100% fact providing me the data needed to make this graph.
Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here. Performers are taking longer - generally speaking - to sing the anthem in recent years. And only three performers have hit under the 2024 line of 90.5.
But that's not the only thing going for the over. Only one out of seven performers hit the under when set at 107 seconds or less. The graph below is my attempt to visualize all results in terms of each performer's total line (the dot with the name next to it) vs their actual time taken (dot with "Time" next to it).
As you can see, the pairs of dots and connecting lines are colored green if the over hit, red if the under hit, and gray if Kelly Clarkson. Only Billy Joel went under the 2024 line at 90 seconds in the first year betting was available perhaps due to oddsmakers having absolutely no idea what they were doing. So yeah. It's true. There's a LOT of stats seemingly suggesting to take the over.
But I know a trap when I see one.
Let's look underneath the hood here. Don't be scared. As the linked article above details, Reba McEntire has publically sang the national anthem a couple of times already. Once for the 1997 World Series (79 seconds) and, more recently, in 2017 for a Celebrity of Hope softball game (83 seconds). This all according to the above linked source.
Advertisement
Both of these times are DRASTICALLY under the 90.5 2024 Super Bowl line. But let's dig a little deeper than this. In the name of science I put in the work to properly compare Reba vs the singer who took the longest ever - Alicia Keys. I wanted to see if the data had anything to say regarding how fast each singer sang their own songs vs the anthem. While my methodology hasn't yet been accepted by the International Review Board I'll let you determine what to make of this.
Basically, I took the top 5 or so songs each of each artist on Spotify (removing songs with other artists because I'm an upstanding, responsible statistician) and calculated how many words per second they sang per song. Not to name names of who this applied more to, but I also removed fluff words like "OHHH, oh oh OHHH oh OOOOOH, oh ahhh, OOOH OOOH OOH OOH OOOOOOOOOOOOOO".
As you might expect, Keys is definitely the slower singer with her own songs vs Reba. And both artists are slowest when singing the anthem relative to their own songs. But in order for Reba to hit the over on 90.5 seconds, she'll need to go UNDER .88 words per minute. That's a large dip from her most recent 1.01 WPM in 2017. Unless she's getting a root canal done earlier that day that's just way too much of a slow down from her baseline to expect.
So there you go. This is as spurious as you can get into the stats while at the same time kinda buying into it. And I'm fully in on this. Let the national anthem casuals only look at this being the lowest line ever and focus too much on recent performers taking their damn sweet time more and more. Reba is built different. Reba is old school. She's not there to make a spectacle of herself (FTR I'm TOTALLY OK with Alicia Keys doing so). Reba's the Iowa football of national anthem singers. No line is too low.
So bet the under (or don't if it ends up losing). Life is too short to wait any longer for football to start. Reba is going to get in and out of there as soon as possible once hearing confirmation of the vocal satisfaction from above. Just like you can do too if you go under on Reba.