“A man’s gotta make at least one bet a day, else he could be walking around lucky and never know it.”
– Jimmy Jones
My first foray into gambling was pretty timid, I converted about 40 bucks into nickels, and hit the nickel slots to just see what the whole risk/reward paradigm was about. Until I hit it “big” about five bucks in. My first jackpot dumped about a hundred dollars worth of nickels into my life, and suddenly, I was far less risk averse in my game plan, spending-wise. I was already playing with house money.
Richard H. Thaler and Eric J. Johnson of Cornell University first defined the “house money effect,” borrowing the term from casinos. The term references a gambler (like me, above) taking winnings from previous bets and using some or all of them in subsequent bets. There’s less risk in spending once you’ve already exceeded the amount you were willing to lose.
And wow, have the Denver Broncos been playing with house money for a while now.
Not that they haven’t earned every bit of the 15 wins they have racked up this season, not that they haven’t paid for them in blood, sweat, and ankle fractures, in spades and hearts and diamonds. They have given repeatedly and prodigiously to take themselves from a 1-2 team to a 15-3 team at the cusp of another Super Bowl appearance.
But when head coach Sean Payton said at seasons’ start that the goals were to 1) win their division, 2) grab the 1 seed for the playoffs, and 3) win themselves a championship, even the most ardent Broncos supporters came at that with an knowing smile, and guessing that it was a three-year plan if all the cards fell into the right place.
Well, the cards have fallen even more fatefully than any fan could have supposed, and Peyton now seems prescient. That division win is now theirs for the first time in a decade. That 1-seed is just the same. The three-year plan turned into a one-season plan in fairly short order.
And now, the team is decidedly playing with house money. They are so far ahead of everyone’s expectations but the bravado of their head coach, that this season is a huge win no matter where the team now caps out. Expectations be damned. Backup quarterbacks be damned. Oddsmakers and prognosticators be damned as well. Which adds the best possible wrinkle into this last game or two of the season for this upstart Denver football team.
They have no pressure left. They have been expected to lose this magical run every week since week 4, and have consistently turned those expectations on their ear. They believe it to a man, now, and they feel nothing but excitement and possibility in a moment that would turn most mere mortals to shaking, quaking flakes. Instead, this team is hardened. Battle-tested. And they believe. They believed when Pat Surtain II went down, the way they now believe that Jarrett Stidham will step up. They can lose either of these next two games, and will have never had a thing to lose, as they now know they are good enough. That their turn will not only come, but may already be here.
Why not the Broncos? Is anyone left any less banged up? Any less suspect in some area of their game? While the above-described oddsmakers slid the Broncos out of the favorite position when Bo Nix went down, they had the game as a bit of a push both before and after Nix’s injury.
There is every reason to believe the Broncos can win a couple more games after all the hardship and disbelief they faced all season long. They believe. And they are (and will be) playing that freely, because they have have been playing with house money for a few months now.
