Sports
Betting buzz: Browns, Panthers end big underdog losing streak
Everything that happens in sports has additional context when viewed from a betting perspective. From season-changing injuries to record-setting moments and so much more, the news cycle will constantly and significantly affect the sports betting industry.
Our betting buzz file, with contributions from David Purdum, Doug Greenberg and others, aims to provide fans a look at the sports betting stories that are driving the conversation.
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Sept. 21: Browns, Panthers end big underdog losing streak
Doug Greenberg and David Purdum: Through two weeks of the 2025 NFL season, underdogs of four points or greater were 0-12 straight-up, the first time no underdog that large had won a game outright through Week 2 of any season in the Super Bowl era (since 1966), according to ESPN Research.
That streak ended emphatically on Sunday. First, the Carolina Panthers (+4.5) easily took down the Atlanta Falcons with a final score of 30-0. Then, a short time later, the Cleveland Browns (+7.5) stunned the Green Bay Packers with a 13-10 comeback win, capped off by a game-winning field goal as time expired. Cleveland was as long as +3000 on the live moneyline during the contest, according to ESPN BET odds.
Through Sunday afternoon’s games, underdogs of four or more points are now 2-16 straight-up, but are interestingly a perfectly balanced 9-9 against the spread.
As a result of their large favorite status, the Packers were a popular pick for survivor pools in Week 3. In ESPN’s Eliminator Challenge, 15.65% of players (third-most) picked Green Bay, while 1,817 players — accounting for 10.7% of the remaining player population (fourth-most) — picked the Pack in the $1,000-entry Circa Survivor contest.
Big favorites tend to be popular plays with the betting public every week, especially in moneyline parlays. The Packers very much lived up to that reputation in Week 3, being the most-bet spread side by tickets on Sunday at BetMGM and Hard Rock Bet. Green Bay was also Hard Rock Bet’s most popular moneyline play by bets and handle, as well as the most lopsided moneyline and spread play, attracting 95.44% of combined handle in those markets.
ESPN BET had 87.8% of its spread handle backing the Pack, the most of any team on Sunday, and they joined the Falcons as popular moneyline single and parlay bets.
“The Browns comeback will be a tough one for many bettors, as Green Bay-Cleveland ended up as our most bet game of the early slate by total handle, and the Packers were the most popular moneyline selection of the day,” ESPN BET senior director Adrian Horton said over email. “The Falcons were the fifth-most popular moneyline pick, and both teams were easily among our most bet parlay legs.”
The two outright underdog wins must be a relief for sportsbooks, who had suffered through favorite wins for the NFL season’s first two weeks. According to analysis from financial services group Macquarie, NFL hold — or the percentage of money sportsbooks make off of all their bets — was at 8% through Week 2, down from the baseline average of 9.5%. Specifically, moneyline hold was calculated at -3% due to the amount of favorites coming through.
“What drew the biggest shock after years of being their biggest fans each week, we fully expected the Browns to miss the game-winning field goal,” Caesars Sportsbook head of football Joey Feazel said over email. “Instead, there were cheers on the trading floor, as we were stunned that this was not the Browns we were used to cheering for over the years.”
Sportsbooks will have two more chances to recoup early-season losses via big underdogs in Week 3: The New York Giants are 5.5-point underdogs against the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night, while the Detroit Lions are 4.5-point underdogs for Monday night’s showdown with the Baltimore Ravens.
Odds & Ends
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Sunday afternoon’s showdown between the Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles closed with the defending Super Bowl champions as 3.5-point favorites. The Eagles trailed 26-7 in the third quarter, at which point they were +2000 on the live moneyline, before launching a huge comeback that finished with them scoring a defensive TD on the final play of the game to win and cover by a final score of 33-26. It’s the first time a team holding the lead covered on a defensive touchdown in the last 10 seconds of a game since the Eagles did it in 2019 against Washington, according to ESPN Research.
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For the second week in a row, after Ravens RB Derrick Henry failed to find the end zone, two of the most popular and shortest odds Anytime Touchdown Scorers did not come through for bettors. Philadelphia Eagles RB Saquon Barkley (-160) and Falcons RB Bijan Robinson (-250) were both among the most-bet players to score on Sunday at the major sportsbooks, including second and third, respectively, at ESPN BET.
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With Sunday’s 41-20 loss to the Indianapolis Colts, the Tennessee Titans fall to 3-17 ATS under Brian Callahan, the worst ATS record for any head coach in the Super Bowl era (minimum of 10 games) and the worst 20-game start for any coach’s tenure, according to ESPN Research.
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Thirteen entries failed to submit their Week 3 pick for the Circa Survivor contest, resulting in an automatic elimination.
Sept. 19: Warren eyes history as OROY co-favorite
Doug Greenberg: Just like his team as a whole, Indianapolis Colts TE Tyler Warren has gotten off to an excellent start this season, racking up 11 catches and 155 yards across his first two NFL games. That production, along with meager starts for several of the preseason favorites, has propelled Warren to the top of the Offensive Rookie of the Year odds board.
Warren is tied with Tampa Bay Buccaneers WR Emeka Egbuka for the best odds to win the award at +425, per ESPN BET. Preseason favorites, Las Vegas Raiders RB Ashton Jeanty and Tennessee Titans QB Cam Ward, have fallen to a tie right behind them at +500.
Ward, Jeanty and Egbuka being in the favorite conversation makes a lot of sense given quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers are, historically, the ones that win the award: The longest drought among those three positions belongs to RBs, who haven’t seen one of their own win it since Saquon Barkley in 2018.
By contrast, a tight end winning Offensive Rookie of the Year is exceedingly rare: It has only happened once in NFL history and that was by Hall of Famer Mike Ditka back in 1961, before the Super Bowl era.
Further, Las Vegas Raiders TE Brock Bowers put up a historically great rookie season in 2024, leading the position in yards (1,194) and receptions (112), breaking Ditka’s rookie tight end receiving yards record, and even setting the record for receptions by a rookie, regardless of position. Not only was that not enough to win Offensive Rookie of the Year over Washington Commanders QB Jayden Daniels, it wasn’t even close according to oddsmakers, as ESPN BET made him only a +900 underdog at his shortest odds.
So for Warren to be sporting a favorite’s +425 for the award this early in the season likely says something about the competition he’s facing this season, as well as how oddsmakers are trying to get ahead of his potential liability later on. For now, he has only the 12th-most bets (2.9%) and 11th-most handle (2.8%) at ESPN BET, which also notes that he’s drawn the third-most tickets and money since the beginning of the season.
If Warren were to pull off the historic feat, he has a chance to make history in another way.
New York Giants LB Abdul Carter (+200) is still the favorite for Defensive Rookie of the Year after entering the season with the best odds. If both Penn State alumni were to win, it would be just the fourth time in NFL history that one school produced both Rookies of the Year in the same season, and the first time since 1997. Leaning into the storyline, ESPN BET posted a special market for Warren and Carter to both win the awards at +1500.
Sept. 15: Bengals’ odds plummet after Burrow injury
Joe Burrow‘s injured toe transformed the Cincinnati Bengals into Super Bowl long shots and underdogs to even make the playoffs.
Burrow, the Bengals’ star quarterback, will undergo surgery and miss a minimum of three months, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Monday Following the injury, the Bengals’ Super Bowl odds moved from 20-1 to 75-1 at ESPN BET. Cincinnati went from -155 favorites to make the playoffs on Sunday to +210 underdogs to reach the postseason at the sportsbook.
Burrow, at 11-1, was among the favorites to win regular-season MVP and attracted more than double the amount of bets of any other player at ESPN BET. On Monday, Burrow was taken off the board as a betting option on the MVP. While the Bengals’ futures odds took a big hit with Burrow’s injury, Cincinnati remained only a small underdog in its Week 3 road game at Minnesota. The Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas had the Vikings listed as 1.5-point favorites in their early line on the game that was available last week. The point spread had ticked up to Vikings -3.5 Monday before dropping back to Minnesota -2.5 Monday afternoon, after reports that Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy was battling an ankle injury and could miss Sunday’s game.
John Murray, vice president of the SuperBook, said the relatively small adjustment is mostly due to the quality of Cincinnati backup quarterback Jake Browning. “That speaks to the competency level of the backup,” Murray said of the line adjustment. “If Browning doesn’t play well today in relief of Burrow, you’re most likely looking at a bigger adjustment.” Browning threw for 242 yards with two touchdowns and three interceptions, after replacing Burrow in the first half of the Bengals’ 31-27 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars
They don’t come any tougher — especially mentally — than Dawn Staley. She didn’t, by accident, drive her way out of North Philadelphia to become an All-American, All-WNBA and Olympic gold medal-winning player, and then an iconic, hard-charging national championship-winning coach.
So here’s guessing she’ll be fine, or already is fine, no matter the strange and wild outburst she endured from Geno Auriemma on Friday after her South Carolina Gamecocks defeated his UConn Huskies 62-48 in the national semifinals.
“We move on,” Staley said on ESPN, still seeming bewildered by what exactly had happened.
Indeed, she and her team move on to bigger and more important things, namely Sunday’s national championship game against UCLA, where Staley could win her fourth title as a coach.
Staley shouldn’t spend a second looking backward.
It’s Auriemma who needs to figure out how to deal with this. Not just in trying to make amends — he issued an apology Saturday (in which he didn’t mention Staley by name) that he should have delivered immediately. More importantly, he needs to keep it from ever happening again, because he has too much to lose if he doesn’t.
To recap, Auriemma began barking at Staley during the postgame handshake, which should have been congratulatory but instead got contentious. There these two were, shouting in each other’s faces, having to be held back by assistant coaches.
It was like some cartoonish WWE bit (it’s not like Staley was going to back down, after all). And it was over, what exactly?
Auriemma kept trying to dodge the question postgame before finally saying he was troubled that Staley hadn’t shaken his hand before the game (she actually had) and that he had stood around for “three minutes” waiting for her to meet him at center court.
“I just said what I had to say,” Auriemma said.
Except it didn’t need to be said. Whatever perceived slight Geno felt should have been internalized. He would never accept a player being thrown off her game from such a minor incident.
Instead, in a fit, he came across as petty, personal and completely unbecoming of who he’s always been.
Some of that sanity sunk in by Saturday afternoon.
“There’s no excuse for how I handled the end of the game vs. South Carolina,” Auriemma said in a statement. “It’s unlike what I do and what our standard is here at Connecticut.
“I want to apologize to the staff and the team at South Carolina,” he continued. “It was uncalled for in how I reacted. The story should be how well South Carolina played, and I don’t want my actions to detract from that. I’ve had a great relationship with their staff, and I sincerely want to apologize to them.”
Auriemma is an absolute legend in women’s basketball; a Hall of Famer, a gold medal-winning coach, a 12-time NCAA champion. Maybe most remarkably, 41 years into his career, he’s as good as ever. UConn is, at least until Sunday, still the reigning national champion. The loss to South Carolina broke a 54-game winning streak.
It’s more than just all these victories — 1,288 of them, at a .886 clip. It’s how he won them.
An Italian immigrant who grew up in Philly himself, Auriemma did it with intensity, bravado, charisma and unapologetic competitiveness. He took no quarter. He never accepted that women’s basketball should take a back seat to anything.
He’s never been for everyone. His scraps through the years have extended from NCAA administrators to chief rival Pat Summitt to even UConn colleague Jim Calhoun, who built a dueling powerhouse on the men’s side in Storrs.
Auriemma, along with Summitt and others, helped redefine women’s sports by ignoring a society that saw women athletes as fragile and instead coaching them just as athletes, thus driving them to levels no one saw as possible.
In the process, he lifted the entire sport by redefining greatness, annually raising the bar and by doing it in the Northeast, backyard to the national media.
You can’t write the history of women’s basketball, or basketball at all, without Geno Auriemma. The entire operation owes him.
Which is what makes Friday so disappointing to even his greatest fans.
At age 72, he needs to be particularly mindful of his actions. He needs to be supportive, not petulant; gracious, not emotional. He’s the elder statesman, not the kick-down-the-door young guy. Lashing out is an act of ego and immaturity. He’s better than such antics.
He needs to lift others up, even after bitter defeats, not try to tear them down.
He’s done too much, accomplished too many things, positively impacted too many people to tarnish his legacy in the final chapters of what is otherwise one of the greatest stories ever told.
MANCHESTER, England — Dominik Szoboszlai said Liverpool lacked “fighting spirit” in their 4-0 defeat to Manchester City in the FA Cup and said it is “hard to find the words” to sum up his team’s poor performance.
Arne Slot’s side started well at the Etihad but conceded four goals in the space of 20 minutes either side of halftime. It is not the first time this season the Reds have wilted in the face of adversity, having won just two of the 19 games in which they have fallen behind.
It was the heaviest defeat of Arne Slot’s time in charge and Liverpool’s largest margin of defeat since October 2020.
“When you do something and there is no result for it, it makes no sense,” Szoboszlai told TNT Sports.
“We had chances and missed them; we conceded an easy penalty. We lose 4-0. We cannot concede as much as we concede. Nothing else to say.
“It’s hard to win here. After 1-0 down you still believe. At 2-0 down, it’s our own fault to come in at half-time conceding in the last minute another goal. At 2-0 the chances are lower and lower. You come out and want to show we are able to come back and you concede a third one, from then on there is no more chance to come back.
“The fighting spirit wasn’t there enough, the mentality wasn’t there enough. None of us were there to be honest as much as we could. It’s a hard time but we have to stick together. On Wednesday there is another chance but we have to get in our head this is not the season we would like to end.”
Asked why Liverpool were lacking the necessary fight to challenge City, Szoboszlai said: “That’s a good question. I don’t know. It’s hard to find words to be honest. We wanted this one so much. You lose 4-0 at City and it’s not the best.
“We have to forget as much as we can and as soon as we can and just keep on fighting all the time. I always say when we do it and we are winning, when we don’t do it we are losing. You have to fight, work hard, be there for each other and that’s what we are missing sometimes.”
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Szoboszlai’s comments were later put to Slot.
“I should ask him what he means and what period of time,” Slot said. “If he felt it was the whole game, I did not feel this until the moment they scored [to make it] 1-0.
“In that 10, 15 minutes of time [at the start of the second half],” he added, “I missed the fighting spirit … the willingness to win your duel, to be there first, to make it difficult for either a pass or a cross or a finish. That is something we definitely have to do better on Wednesday [against PSG].”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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The UConn Huskies men’s basketball team is one win away from reaching their third national championship in the last four years.
The Huskies got to the Final Four after a stunning Elite Eight win over the Duke Blue Devils when Braylon Mullins nailed a long 3-pointer to give them the lead right before the final buzzer. Duke reached the game with a victory over the St. John’s Red Storm.
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Andrea Hurley, wife of UConn Huskies head coach Dan Hurley, watches the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame exhibition game between the UConn Huskies and Boston College Eagles at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., on Oct. 13, 2025. (Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire)
Dan Hurley’s wife, Andrea, weighed in on St. John’s fans seemingly rooting against the Huskies as they took on the Michigan State Spartans in the other Sweet 16 matchup on that side of the bracket. It appeared the rivalry between the two schools is alive and well.
“OK, I’m gonna say it. St. John’s fans … When we went to the game, all those St. John’s fans were rooting against us,” Andrea Hurley said on “The Field of 68: After Dark.” “And that just broke my heart. … It’s really sad. … That’s crappy … That was crappy.”
2026 NCAA MEN’S TOURNAMENT: LAST TIME FINAL FOUR TEAMS MADE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
UConn head coach Dan Hurley talks with a referee during the first half of the Elite Eight NCAA tournament game against Duke in Washington on March 29, 2026. (Stephanie Scarbrough/AP)
Hurley said she was talking to Rick Pitino’s wife during the Big East Championship and asked her how she did it, seemingly forming a bond with the family over the rival school.She added that she may not have wanted to see the Red Storm in the tournament, but didn’t necessarily want to face the Blue Devils either.
Dan Hurley had praise for his wife earlier in the week after he said she was able to keep players from storming the court after Mullins’ shot went in against Duke. UConn may have received a technical foul for going on the court too early, which may have presented a different conversation from the media going into Final Four.
UConn head coach Dan Hurley speaks during a news conference ahead of the national semifinal NCAA college basketball tournament game against Illinois at the Final Four in Indianapolis on April 2, 2026. (Abbie Parr/AP)
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UConn will take on Illinois in their Final Four matchup. The winner will either play Arizona or Michigan.
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Geno Auriemma needs to be better than bizarre postgame actions against South Carolina
Dominik Szoboszlai: Liverpool lacked ‘fighting spirit’ in Man City rout
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