Columnist Dean Juipe: Rams could make some bettors rich

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

Really now, how many bettors are actually holding the big ticket?

Five? Ten? Twenty?

Well, there can't be many. Only a very few zealots would have made a wager last summer that looked as if it had no chance whatsoever of paying off.

The St. Louis Rams at 200-1 to win the Super Bowl? It might as well have been 1,000,000-1.

Of course a few preseason bets were taken on the Rams' championship prospects, and without much doubt those bettors were inebriated or merely amusing their friends with their callous disregard of money. But, as we now know, the laugh is on the rest of us.

After Sunday's results in the National Football League's conference championships, the Rams are only a victory away from one of the most improbable seasons in sports history. Winners of only four games in 1998, they've advanced and are favored to win next Sunday's Super Bowl in Atlanta with the Tennessee Titans.

Some Las Vegas casinos shy away from offering futures on NFL teams and St. Louis has just proven why. The sports books like to take in money and not pay it out, and while they enjoy enticing bettors with numbers like the Rams at 200-1 they wince when there's a chance those bettors will return to collect.

Frankly, based on their performances in the conference title games, Tennessee may be the better team. But the Rams will have the sentimentalists on their side for what is traditionally America's premier sporting event.

The Rams have been down so long they can measure it in decades. Hence, the ridiculously inflated opening number on their prospects of winning the Super Bowl.

And while the Titans didn't exactly come from left field, bettors could have had them at a juicy 30-1 back in August.

St. Louis vs. Tennessee: The TV networks haven't been too thrilled with these upstarts knocking the big-market teams around during the regular season and out of the playoff picture, but seemingly every impartial fan believes it's a godsend to have some different, un-Denver-like teams in the finale.

The Rams are in despite not really flashing their vaunted speed during an 11-6 win over Tampa Bay.

The Titans are in because they were the only team that could defeat Jacksonville this season, doing it three times including a 33-14 win in the AFC title game. The Jaguars were 15-0 against the rest of the league and, yes, the sports books in this city would have been tickled a few months ago to have customized a futures bet for you on the likelihood of that happening.

Consider these pluses when weighing a fresh wager on the Titans: They were 5-0 vs. division champs Jacksonville, Indianapolis and, underline this, St. Louis; they forced an astronomical 40 turnovers and stockpiled 54 sacks during the regular season, then caused the Jaguars to turn the ball over six times Sunday; and they're relatively healthy.

Of course St. Louis has a diversified offense and only trailed four times the entire season, even if it has only two victories over teams with winning records.

A lot will be written this week about the Rams perhaps being a team of destiny, which is usually a lot of hodgepodge. But for the preseason bettors who took the bait, destiny may be driving a Brinks truck.

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