The NFL season and the Super Bowl

Thirty-two teams play a seventeen-game regular season split across two conferences of four divisions each. Division winners qualify automatically and are seeded one through four; three wild card teams per conference fill the field at seeds five through seven. Only the top seed in each conference receives a first-round bye - a change made in 2020 that turned the number one seed into by far the most valuable position in the sport.

The playoffs are single elimination. A conference champion has to win three games, or two with a bye, and then the Super Bowl. Every game is played at the higher seed's stadium except the final, which is at a neutral venue announced years in advance.

Seeding is decided by record, with an elaborate tie-breaking sequence: head-to-head result, then division record, then record in common games, then conference record, and onward through several more steps before it reaches a coin toss. Those tie-breakers regularly decide who hosts a playoff game, which is worth real probability.

Single elimination is a probability grinder. Suppose a team is a 70 percent favourite in every playoff game it plays - an enormous edge in this sport. Winning three such games in a row gives it a 34 percent chance of the title; four gives it 24 percent. That arithmetic, not pessimism about the roster, is why championship prices for even the best teams sit where they do.

It also explains the value of the bye. Skipping a round removes an entire multiplication from that chain, which is worth several percentage points of title probability on its own, before accounting for the rest and the home field. When a market moves sharply in late December, the seeding race is usually the reason.

The flip side is that the field is wide. Because any single game can go either way, the probability mass spreads across a dozen teams rather than concentrating on two or three the way it does in basketball. A championship market with eight teams above five percent is normal here and would be unusual in the NBA.

The league publishes the full schedule in May for a season starting in September, and the structure of that schedule is formulaic rather than discretionary: each team plays its three division rivals twice, one full division from its own conference, one full division from the other conference, and a small number of games determined by where teams finished the previous year.

That formula is useful for pricing because it means strength of schedule is knowable in advance. A team that finished first in its division draws other first-place finishers; a team that finished last draws last-place finishers. The difference is measurable before a single game is played.

For resolution, the official record is the league's own. Standings, tie-breaker application and playoff qualification are published by the league, and a market that names any other source is inviting an argument that does not need to exist.