An overwhelming majority of the bets for Thursday night’s game were on the Dallas Cowboys. Among all the money bet on the spread at BetMGM, 85% was on the Cowboys as of Thursday afternoon.
That means there were a lot of angry people going to bed late Thursday night.
The Cowboys didn’t play that well but the way the end of the game unfolded was seemingly perfect for all of those people who took the Cowboys. Dallas closed as a 5.5-point favorite, and they led 20-15 late in the game. Dallas bettors needed one more score to cover. The Giants failed on a fourth down, and the Cowboys’ drive couldn’t chew up the rest of the clock. They decided to send on Brandon Aubrey for a 51-yard field goal in the final minute. It looked like a fortunate break.
Aubrey has been practically automatic during his NFL career. He had never missed a field goal of 50 yards or longer before lining up for that field goal in the final minute. He hit a 60-yarder earlier in the game, and he has made 60-yard kicks look easy. A 51-yarder for Aubrey seemed like a chip shot, as Al Michaels made jokes on the Amazon Prime Video broadcast about how some people were quite happy to see Aubrey coming on for the kick.
Then those people watched in horror as Aubrey missed a long field goal for the first time in his career. The kick immediately went to the right and stayed there. The Cowboys got an interception in the final seconds and the final score was a 20-15 Cowboys win.
Hopefully Post Malone, who has been known to wager on the Cowboys and showed up at Thursday night’s game with an Aubrey jersey because the musical artist and kicker are friends, didn’t take his favorite team and lay the points. Everyone else seemed to.
For 85% of people, they were feeling confident about the Cowboys and were set up to win a bet on them with less than a minute to go. Of all the ways to lose, the NFL’s best kicker blowing a field goal wasn’t on their radar.
