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The Super Bowl has always been the pinnacle of the National Football League season. It pits the best team from each conference against each other in the title game that crowns the league champion each year.
The game is more than just a football game, though. It is an event that’s enjoyed by millions of people across the world. The Super Bowl is regularly the most-watched sporting event of the year, and is among the most-watched TV program of any genre.
The Super Bowl has always attracted big betting action as well. This year, though, sports betting reached new levels on the Super Bowl. Many states set some impressive wagering records and exponential growth from last year to this year.
New Jersey Rakes in Record Handle
Since it legalized sports wagering back in 2018, New Jersey has quickly risen to one of the leading states for sports betting. Their aggressive and progressive approach has led them to attract tons of customers and actually even overcome Nevada when it comes to total handle.
On this year’s Super Bowl alone, New Jersey sportsbooks took in $117.4 million in bets. That number is not only a record-setting performance, it was also more than twice the amount wagered on the game last year.
The state’s Governor Phil Murphy tweeted not long after the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement released the results:
That total handle happened at all retail and online sportsbooks in New Jersey — including retail sportsbooks, mobile sportsbooks and those at racetracks and at casinos in Atlantic City.
According to the Gaming Enforcement data, payouts for the Super Bowl in New Jersey totaled $106.1 million. That means that sportsbooks also made a nice profit of $11.3 million.
That profit reversed a downward trend in the first two Super Bowls after sports wagering was legalized in New Jersey. In last year’s Super Bowl, sportsbooks in New Jersey lost almost $4.3 million. The year before, New Jersey sportsbooks lost about $4.6 million on the Super Bowl.
Other States Broke Records, Too
New Jersey wasn’t the only state that had a great night on Sunday. Other states set sports betting records for the Super Bowl, too.
The star of the night was Nevada — long the leader in sports wagering, and always a huge draw for big events like the Super Bowl. The state didn’t set a record for total wager handled in Nevada, but they still did bring in $154.7 million in total bets. That resulted in $18.8 million in taxable revenue.
Sportsbooks in Illinois handled $45.6 million in total bets on Super Bowl LV. Much of that came from online sports betting, with $42.7 million being bet on computers and mobile devices. That total generated roughly $1.15 million in tax revenue for the state, according to the Illinois Gaming Board.
In Oregon, not only did the total number of wagers on the Super Bowl increase from last year, but so too did the average bet size. This year, there were a total of 150,000 wagers placed through the Oregon Lottery Scoreboard betting app, with an average of $23 per bet. Last year, there were just shy of 100,000 total bets at an average of $21 per wager.
Other results included:
- Iowa handled $6.5 million in bets.
- Pennsylvania handled $30.7 million, with $24 million of that coming online.
- Delaware brought in $2.1 million.
- Mississippi handled $6.7 million.
- West Virginia handled $3.9 million.
- New Hampshire brought in roughly $2.3 million. That’s impressive considering they just launched sports betting and have only one operator at this time — DraftKings Sportsbook.
This is all positive news for sports betting in the United States. It’s likely to push these states to expand their offerings in the future. And it also may convince other states to move on approving sports betting in time for next year’s Super Bowl.