Being a sports fan for as long as I can remember, making games more interesting has always been top priority. This is usually referred to as gambling.
Without gambling, how else could someone sit through a Texans, Cubs, Trailblazers, Raiders, Royals or Raptors game?
Or any WNBA game for that matter?
However, the various forms of gambling have gotten stale.
There's boring win/loss form of betting. There's the 'a bit too easy' covering the spread form of betting. Then there's my favorite type of gambling, the over/under game.
Over/under is a wager in which a bookie will predict a number for a statistic in given game, like the combined score of two teams, with bettors putting money on whether or not the number will be higher or lower than the predicted number.
So, why not take this over/under game and make it more interesting?
Instead of wagering on statistics in games, I think we should wager on other facets of the professional sporting world.
Lets use our own Ball State University Cardinals football team coaching staff for the first bet.
First over/under wager: the week Brady Hoke realizes there are four quarters to a football game. Let's set it at week eight. Why week eight? I think Brady Hoke needs a few more 19-0 shutouts in the game's last quarter to come to this realization.
Side bet: What's Hoke thinking about during the fourth quarter that he doesn't notice a football game going on? Job security? A better offensive line? Hot dogs? We need to know these things.
Lets switch our sights to the NFL for our second wager. As many have heard, Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens was bit by the depression bug earlier this week and may or may not have tried to commit suicide.
How sad.
Let's set the second over/under wager, the number of talk shows Owens appears on from now until the end of the season to tell his sympathetic story, at 11. A sit-down, heartfelt one-on-one with Barbara Walters in obvious, but I think the cap could be set somewhere near Maury Povich. Come on, Owens has to have some illegitimate kids floating around San Francisco and Philadelphia, doesn't he?
For the third and final wager, lets switch over to the PGA. Although I'm not really a fan of golf - I expect that to happen when I'm 45 - it's inevitable, Tiger Woods really intrigues me. For instance, during the Ryder Cup, a golf exhibition between Europe and the United States, a Irish tabloid printed fake nude photos of Wood's wife, Elin.
This was the only time during Tiger's career he actually showed signs of anger when he lashed out at the tabloid during a press conference. So, for the third and final wager, let's take a number of how many fake nude photos of Elin it would take for Tiger to flip out and beat someone with a nine-iron. I'm setting it at 15.
This new type of betting could evolve gambling to the point that if you lose money on a bet, you won't care because the game provides that much entertainment.
OK, you'll be angrier than Bill Parcels after a missed Mike Vanderjagdt field goal, but it's still better than losing money on a point spread.
Ryan Smith is a senior journalism major and writes 'Don't Take This Too Seriously' for the Daily News. His views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper.
Write to Ryan at rjsmith@gmail.com.
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