As Sunday wound down at the sportsbook at the Mirage in Las Vegas, MGM director of race and sports Jeff Stoneback looked ahead to the Monday night game and was a little concerned.
Roughly 12 times as much money had been bet on the favored Baltimore Ravens as had been bet on the Los Angeles Rams.
"I can safely say, unless a lot of Rams money comes in tomorrow, that it will be our biggest decision of the year," Stoneback said.
The story was same at sportsbooks around Las Vegas -- the books need the underdog Rams in the Monday night game in a big way.
"Baltimore, next to New England, is one of the more popular teams [with the betting public]," Ed Salmons, vice president and head football oddsmaker at the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas, said. "We definitely have some exposure on Baltimore right now."
As we look ahead to a consequential Monday night game for both sides of the betting counter, here are this week's Notable Bets, our wrap-up of sports betting storylines from around the nation.
NFL
'The line just wasn't right'
• The line of the Seahawks-Eagles game moved sharply Sunday morning, with Philadelphia going from a 1-point favorite to a 2.5-point underdog to Seattle. The Seahawks won 17-9.
• "The line just wasn't right at the beginning, and everyone bet it that way," CG Technology oddsmaker Dave Sharapan said of the Seahawks-Eagles point spread.
• Thirty minutes before kickoff, the MGM's Stoneback said his book was extremely lopsided on the Seahawks, before late money from respected bettors came in on Philadelphia, including an $80,000 money-line bet on the Eagles. "Money was coming in all week on the Seahawks," Stoneback said. "It was going to be our biggest game of the morning."
• The SuperBook reported taking multiple "decent-sized" wagers on the Seahawks from public bettors, something that Salmons wasn't surprised by. "The public has kind of seen enough of the Eagles," Salmons said. "They like Seattle and they love Russell Wilson, so I wasn't surprised."
Odds and ends
• Cowboys-Patriots: "The one result we really needed was Dallas to cover," Salmons said. "When we put it up last week, we had a guy come in and bet $50,000 [on the Patriots] at minus-6.5. The sharps were on the 'dog on that game ... the line was going down ... and the public was on New England."
The Patriots closed as consensus 5.5-point favorites. They won but failed to cover in a 13-9 win over the Cowboys.
• The New York Jets' 34-3 rout of the favored Oakland Raiders produced one of Caesars Sportsbook's biggest wins of the season on an early kickoff.
• A bettor hit a $200,000 seven-point, three-leg teaser at MGM that paid a net $220,000. The bettor had the Tampa Bay Buccaneers +11, over 44.5 in the Tampa Bay-Atlanta game and the Cleveland Browns -3.5.
The Bucs upset the Falcons 35-22, and the Browns blasted the Dolphins 41-24.
• Caesars Sportsbook had locked in a winning day prior to the Sunday night game between the San Francisco 49ers and the underdog Green Bay Packers. The 49ers added significantly to the book's windfall. "We'll still have a winning day," Caesars senior oddsmaker Alan Berg said. "But if the 49ers cover three, it will be a monster Sunday for us."
The 49ers won 37-8.
• Sunday produced mostly positive results for sportsbooks, although to different degrees. The SuperBook, CG Technology and MGM reported small winning days, while PointsBet, which operates primarily out of New Jersey, characterized the day as a "wash." The Jets' upset of the Raiders, along with Washington's upset of the Lions, were good for the books.
• "Overall, we made some money for the weekend, and it was a huge improvement over the disaster that was a week ago," the SuperBook's Murray said in an email to ESPN. "We are going to need the Rams pretty big Monday night."
• The Ravens are consensus 3.5-point favorites entering Monday's game against the Rams. As of late Sunday, at sportsbook PointsBet, 85% of the bets and 65% of the money was on Baltimore.
Early Week 13 lines
From Caesars Sportsbook, at completion of Sunday night game.
Thursday
Chicago Bears (-1, 39) at Detroit Lions
Buffalo Bills at Dallas Cowboys (-7, 44.5)
New Orleans Saints (-7, 49) at Atlanta Falcons
Sunday
Cleveland Browns (-1, 40.5) at Pittsburgh Steelers
Green Bay Packers at New York Giants (Off)
New York Jets (-3.5, 40) at Cincinnati Bengals
Philadelphia Eagles (-7.5, 45.5) at Miami Dolphins
San Francisco 49ers at Baltimore Ravens (Off)
Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Jacksonville Jaguars (-1.5, 49)
Tennessee Titans at Indianapolis Colts (-3, 42.5)
Washington Redskins at Carolina Panthers (-10, 41)
Los Angeles Rams (-3.5, 47.5) at Arizona Cardinals
Los Angeles Chargers (-2, 39) at Denver Broncos
Oakland Raiders at Kansas City Chiefs (-9.5, 54.5)
New England Patriots (-3.5, 44) at Houston Texans
Monday
Minnesota Vikings at Seattle Seahawks (-3, 48.5)
College football
Notable rivalry week opening lines, via Circa Sports:
Georgia -29 at Georgia Tech
Ohio State -9 at Michigan
Clemson -26 at South Carolina
Texas A&M at LSU -15
Alabama -3 at Auburn
Oklahoma -14.5 at Oklahoma State
Circa's first season posting opening line
• For years, the first weekly college football lines originated at offshore sportsbooks and at the Wynn in Las Vegas. This year, Circa Sports, the new kid on the block, took the lead.
Each Sunday during the season, at precisely 11 a.m. PT, Circa hung the first lines on the market and allowed limits bets of $2,000 over the counter and $1,000 on the mobile app.
After the early NFL games kicked off Sunday morning, Circa sportsbook director Matt Metcalf and oddsmaker Matt Lindeman would scour through box scores in a mad dash to get their numbers out. Metcalf wanted them posted exactly at 11 a.m., even going as far as pulling the world clock to confirm.
"The response was overwhelmingly positive," Metcalf told ESPN. "I can't think of anyone who was negative about it, besides telling us that we made a bad line or messed up a line, which, I think, is to be expected to some degree."
One such mess-up happened last week on the Minnesota-Northwestern line. Metcalf anticipated Minnesota starting quarterback Tanner Morgan would miss the game and opened the Golden Gophers as 7-point favorites. Morgan played, and Minnesota closed as a 15-point favorite. The Gophers won 38-22.
Overall, though, Metcalf was extremely pleased with how the season -- Circa's first -- played out.
"We had a great college football season," Metcalf said. "I think we got really lucky. We opened some numbers where we'd be six, seven points off the closing number. I just felt all those numbers that we opened off, all seemed to go our way."
Circa launched this summer and operates out of the Golden Gate and The D, two venerable downtown casinos owned by Derek Stevens, a big sports bettor himself.
Season in review
• "This is the sensation I get," Salmons of the Westgate SuperBook said of this college football season, that "the good teams are too good. The spreads are just comically high."
• LSU closed as a consensus 41.5-point favorite over Arkansas on Saturday. It was the largest point spread in an SEC game since 1996, when Florida was a 43-point favorite over Vanderbilt.
• Penn State opened as a 40-point favorite over Rutgers this week.
• "Those games are literally unbetable," Salmons said. "That's just not a good game for business."
• "It's been a really good college season for us," the MGM's Stoneback said. "I don't think we've had more than two losing weeks, off the top of my head. Both the NFL and college football has been one of the strongest in years."
Odds and ends
• Florida International upset Miami as a 21-point underdog on Saturday. It was the Hurricanes' third loss of the season when favored by 14 or more points, something no other team has accomplished in a single season in the past 40 years, according to ESPN's Chris Fallica.
• "Miami is power-rated as the second-best team in the ACC," Salmons said.
• Bookmaker William Hill released odds on the exact matchup and winner of the national championship game. LSU beating Ohio State opened as the favorite at 11-2.
Other examples:
Ohio State beats LSU 5-1
Clemson beats Georgia 22-1
Georgia beats Oregon 200-1
Oregon beats Alabama 500-1
• Akron covered the spread for the first time this season in a 20-17 loss at Miami (Ohio) on Wednesday. The Zips entered the game 0-10 ATS and are the only team in the past 15 seasons to fail to cover the spread in their first 10 games.
Elsewhere in betting
• Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Doncic opened at 50-1 to win the NBA regular-season MVP at the SuperBook. Doncic is now 5-2, behind only Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo (2-1).
• Bookmaker William Hill announced plans to purchase Las Vegas sportsbook operator CG Technology this week. At its peak, CG operated roughly a dozen sportsbooks in Las Vegas, most notably at The Venetian, The Cosmopolitan and M Resort.
• Boxing: The SuperBook posted odds on a potential boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and UFC champion Khabib Nurmagomedov. Mayweather opened as a -2000 favorite, with Nurmagomedov a +1000 underdog.
• Boxing: Station Casinos posted odds on a potential heavyweight title fight between champion Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury, making both fighters -110.
• Bettors continue to place the majority of their football bets on game days. New Jersey sportsbook 888 says 62.2% of bets on college football are placed Saturday, while 54.4% of NFL bets are placed on Sunday.