The 10 most gambled-on games of 2024

Hello and welcome to the first-ever Thanksgiving FOIAball! We sincerely hope you aren’t reading this when you should be hanging out with your family. 

Put the phone down. Go enjoy these rare moments you get with the ones you love. Even if they drive you crazy.

We’ll still be here when you get back to the couch this evening. 

This week, we’re diving into confidential presentations from gambling monitoring firm IC360 that show some fascinating numbers. We’ve got the top ten most gambled-on games of 2024, the most popular conferences for degenerate bettors, and the rake sportsbooks took in thanks to the expanded playoff.

We also have a small follow-up to our dive into Mike Lombardi’s trip to Saudi Arabia. 

And we end with an explanation of why you should never make another Thanksgiving sandwich. 

Just last month, FOIAball revealed how schools partner with gambling watchdogs to track student-athletes' betting and suspicious activity on games.

In that story, we mentioned that industry experts question just how scrupulous these firms might be, given their success is tied to the unfettered growth of sports betting. 

The more widespread gambling is, the more they’re suddenly necessary. 

And while IC360’s website highlights its compliance and monitoring systems, it is also, behind the scenes, a leading industry research firm.

Two PowerPoint presentations given to the University of California-Berkeley athletics department show how it tracks both broad and granular details about college football gambling, highlighting its almost exponential growth. 

The documents obtained by FOIAball are “Mid-Season” and “Winter” insights for the 2024 football season. The latter also includes additional data about the men’s and women’s basketball seasons. 

The presentations begin with a truly ironic warning. 

In disclaimers for both, IC360 states that using its proprietary information about the state of the gambling industry to make future predictions about the gambling industry would be… a gamble.

“It is important to note that the sports gaming and betting environment is highly variable and unpredictable, with significant risks associated with decisions involving sports gaming, betting markets, and related industries.”

“The analyses, recommendations, and data provided do not guarantee future outcomes and do not serve as a basis for predicting specific results in any market or investment context.”

Though we at FOIAball are not bound by that dictum, we will not use these insights to open our own sportsbook. But, boy, would that be lucrative. 

The end-of-season presentation found that, through the 2024 National Championship game, over $16 billion was wagered on the sport.

That was a 29% increase from the season before. 

Maybe we should open one. FOIAbet. Our books are the most open in town. 

Because the amount wagered on every single college game makes the subscription newsletter business look meager.

(No offense meant to all our paid subscribers. We love you and your stickers are coming soon. If you haven’t filled out the address form, here’s a link.) 

According to IC360, the average college game had $14 million in bets placed. Think Missouri State vs. FIU. Arkansas State vs. South Alabama. Army vs. Lehigh. All eight-figure handles. 

Remove the Group of Five, and that number grows. The average game between two Power Four programs had $19.5 million in bets.

And while there are big-time matchups across the season that rake in dough, those don’t skew the mean as much as you might think. 

The Mid-Season insights ranked the ten most gambled games through the first half of the 2024 season. 

Because Cal made the list as the sixth-biggest of the year, the total handle for that game was included in the data. 

An estimated $60 million was bet on its Week Five tilt against Miami. If you remove games like that, random November contests are still averaging $10 million each. 

Those numbers shoot up when you get to the postseason. 

One of the big knocks on the 12-team playoff was that it would devalue bowls.

Not in the eyes of bettors. Those three dozen games averaged $31.3 million in bets. Last season's conference championships, the first where automatic playoff bids were on the line, had $55 million gambled per game. 

The betting ramped up during the first week of the playoffs, where Tennessee played Ohio State, Clemson took on Texas, Indiana traveled to Notre Dame, and SMU faced Penn State. 

The average handle for those? $116 million. 

Bets in Round 2 dropped by almost $20 million, to $98 million per game. IC360 speculated that the first round's higher handles were due to “heightened excitement of the new format and closer spreads on average.”

No one, it seemed, wanted to believe in Cam Skattebo’s ability to cover. 

If you were worried about Vegas’ briefly dipping rake, totals jumped to almost $300 million on each of the two semifinal games: Penn State vs. Notre Dame and Ohio State vs. Texas. 

The National Championship game was, as you might expect, the most gambled-on event of the season, with $389 million.

Because this presentation was specifically made for Cal, the data in the two PowerPoints goes into even greater detail about both the Golden Bears and the ACC. 

In 2024, just a hair under $3 billion was bet on Atlantic Coast Conference games. 

Although the conference often finds itself mired in red-headed stepchild status, action on its games was on par with the Big Two. 

Through the first seven weeks of the season, the Big Ten was college football’s most bet-on conference, with 17.9% of bets placed. The SEC finished just behind it, seeing 16.6%. 

The ACC wasn’t far back, with 15.3%. The Big 12 came in fourth at 14.8%. 

The Group of Five, which has half of all teams in Division 1 football, had 30.1% of all bets. 

Data for specific teams in the ACC outside of Cal was anonymized, but the ACC’s most gambled-on team had $428 million placed on its games over the full season. The second most bet program came in at $402 million. 

Across the entire sport, the average Power 4 team had $336 million in bets placed. 

Cal finished as the eighth-most bet-on program in the ACC. Its $233 million figure made it the 50th biggest program in the sport for bettors. 

Earlier in the season, Cal ranked higher, at 20th overall.

That’s due to Week Five against Miami, which cracked the top ten of all games through the first seven weeks. There are some discrepancies in the figures, though. The Mid-Season data said that $80 million was bet on the game. The end-of-year numbers have it pegged slightly lower, at $60 million.

That data also shows the fluctuation by game for Cal. For the school’s Week One opener against UC Davis, just $1 million in bets were placed.

When the school played Auburn the following week, that number jumped to $23 million. Bets fell the following two weeks during games against San Diego State and Florida State, before shooting up against Miami. 

The last week of the data, against Pitt, $25.3 million was gambled. 

The data doesn’t break down when bets were placed, but it’s possible that the Miami game ranked so high because of in-game action, with the Hurricanes rallying from 25 points down to beat Cal 39-38. 

Plus, its 10:30 p.m. kickoff on the East Coast made it the only action for bettors. 

That tracks with a granular breakdown of kickoff times provided by IC360, which showed that games played in isolation garner the biggest handles.

Friday night games have much higher action, as does Saturday evening. 

Of the ten most bet-on games of the 2024 season, three were played on Friday, when there wasn’t competition for dollars. 

IC360 noted that Cal’s totals were boosted in comparision to other ACC teams because of its West Coast status, playing in more “chase games.” 

“Late-night contests generate a significantly higher hand due to less competition and being a ‘chase game’ for bettors,” IC360 wrote. 

Two other games in the top ten were also the only ones in their time slots: Florida State and Georgia Tech in the Aer Lingus Week Zero Classic, and LSU vs. USC on Sunday night in Week One. 

The top ten most bet games of the 2024 season, through Week Seven, were: 

10. Georgia vs Alabama 
9. Texas vs. Michigan
8. LSU vs USC
7. Illinois vs Nebraska
6. Miami vs California
5. Kansas vs. Colorado
4. Clemson vs. Georgia
3. Syracuse vs. UNLV
2. Kansas State vs. Arizona
1. Florida State vs. Georgia Tech

Really, the only bad data for the industry is that those 3:30 SEC on CBS games don’t get the same big numbers.

“3:00 – 5:59 p.m. EST contests typically receive less handle due to overlap from other two windows,” the presentation noted.

While 12 p.m. and 7 p.m. kickoffs averaged $18 million per game, mid-day games got four million less. 

Games kicking off after 9 p.m. on Saturday? Those saw $35 million. 

What does this all mean? You degenerates should probably just go to bed. 

Speaking of Cal football, we have to admit, we underestimated them. 

After news broke of Mike Lombardi’s trip to Saudi Arabia, FOIAball… FOIAed UNC for travel release forms and approvals from its export control office. 

When those returned records, we decided to hit up other schools. 

Our theory was that these things don’t typically happen in a vacuum. Where there’s one, there’s others. 

Especially given that we exclusively reported how Saudi money was hovering around other parts of the sport. 

We filed requests with a lot of schools. Fifty-eight, to be exact. And we’ve been buried in rejections. Oklahoma State, Oregon, Boise State, Clemson, Texas A&M, Texas, Missouri. 

None of those teams’ GMs or right-hand men flew to the Middle East. 

But we had hope that one man might make a Lombardi-esque mistake. You see, we are from the D.C. area, and we have been subjected to decades of ignominious idiots helming the Washington Commanders.  

The alleged reason the still-unnamed Saudi donor reached out to UNC was because of an appreciation for Bill Belichick’s NFL pedigree. 

What other school has a former NFL coach helming its program? Who might also be unaware his behavior is a public record?

Cal GM Ron Rivera. 

So, as other schools returned nothing, FOIAball held out hope. But the university recently told us it had no records for any Rivera to Riyadh trip. 

Which means Mike Lombardi is, truly, a man alone. 

To be a great journalist, you need two things: Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

You need to be dubious of the world at large, always questioning if widespread assumptions are wrong and bad. 

And you need to know in your heart that you are the only intelligent one out there, the lone person capable of telling everyone what’s really going on.

Which is why I’m here to talk about an obsession that’s infuriated me for years: the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich. 

I’m sure it existed before 1998, but I’m also certain all of you learned of it from watching Friends. 

And because the hordes have no discernment, merely wanting to do what everyone else is doing—and what everyone is doing is a bit from Friends—I’m now subjected to dozens of Instagram stories on Black Friday of “the best part of Thanksgiving.”

First off, no. The best part of Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving. Being around family. Overindulging in a lovingly labored-over meal. Running around with kids in the backyard. Maybe a nap on your host’s couch.

It is most assuredly not betraying your host's ample generosity in gifting you six different Tupperwares so you can scurry back to your apartment to do performative day-after digital misanthropy in search of seven tossed-off likes from quasi-friends mindlessly hitting the heart. 

It’s a bad sandwich. 

Let’s start with its temperature. It can’t be served completely cold, because no one wants to bite into a jiggly mound of coagulated gravy. 

But hot gravy atop piles of cold casserole doesn’t work. You have to warm it all.

If you build it and pop it in the microwave, the bread is ruined. If you heat everything separately, you now have a plate of perfect, piping hot Thanksgiving leftovers. Why would you sandwichify that? 

Especially because no bread is right for it. Maybe you have dinner rolls. Those are too small for the sandwich’s height. Biscuits don’t have near enough structural integrity. 

Sourdough, you say. Cut it thin and your filling falls through. Thicker and, given the stuffing, you’re eating a pound of bread wrapped around a potato.

The turkey? You already know. When have you gone to a deli counter and asked them to cut your order into four slices? Or asked it to be ripped into shards of various, uneven sizes. 

It’s blobs. On slabs. That you still wind up eating with a fork. Which you could just do with a plate of leftovers. 

There are only two proper things to do with your Thanksgiving leftovers. Heat up stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy. A perfect meal on its own.

Then take whatever turkey you have left and make Turkey Tetrazzini. 

“Oh no,” you exclaim, “You just ranted about the heaviness of my sandwich and now you want me to make a brick of a casserole?” 

Yes, I do. This is a casserole that is nourishing yet light. The only additional carb is pasta, which is like Italian diet food. 

And it has tons of cheese, something your Thanksgiving sandwich is lacking. 

You can load it up with green things, too, like the kale salad no one touched. 

Now, I don’t actually know what Tetrazzini is or means, but I think mushrooms are part of it. If you have them, great. If not, whatever. 

Sauté those with butter (or just melt butter), sprinkle in flour, and load up with stock (hopefully from a carcass). 

When that’s ready, put in things. Lots of things. Turkey. Big hunks work great here. Glazed carrots. Roasted turnips.

Then add a whole block of cream cheese and a whole block of something white and shredded, like fontina or mozzarella. 

Partially cook some spaghetti, so it’s bendy but not wiggly, and toss it in, too. You want the mixture to be thick but still soupy, as the pasta will absorb some liquid.

Put that in a casserole dish. Spread over panko bread crumbs. Shower with parm. 

Here’s a recipe I’ve used, but from which you can deviate all you want. 

Bake until bubbly and golden. And never think of making a Thanksgiving sandwich ever again. 

If you are all the way down here, I want to say thanks for reading, thank you for being a paid subscriber to FOIAball, and happy Thanksgiving.

Ron Rivera via YouTube; Miami vs. Cal via YouTube