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It is said that when you are a journalist you never want to be in the news yourself. For Zach Maskavich, media reporter for WESH Channel 2, this continues to be a struggle he certainly couldn’t have foreseen.
Super Bowl LV takes place in Tampa on Sunday, and reporters across the country are looking for unique angles in their coverage of the big game. Given that he works in nearby Orlando, Maskavich found his niche outside the Raymond James Stadium on Friday, recording some of the sounds coming from inside. So he ended up posting a video of Jazmine Sullivan and Eric Church’s national anthem practice on his Twitter feed, with a time of two minutes and sixteen seconds.
Very good players. Here is the stopwatch on the practice of the national anthem. 2:16 #Super Bowl #GoBucs #ChiefsKingdom pic.twitter.com/CpJC4gHUPp
– Zach Maskavich (@ZachMaskavich) February 5, 2021
Since the length of the anthem is a well-known bet for Super Bowl players every year, this is very valuable information. And as for this year’s anthem, the over / under was sitting around two minutes away, according to punters, by the time Maskavich posted his video.
However, as soon as the video started circling, those numbers started to change, according to ESPN. With this practical information now available, punters rushed to place top bets with bookmakers like Australian PointsBet, which had to stop betting due to overwhelming demand. Meanwhile, Curacao’s Pinnacle Sports initially had the top / bottom set at 1:58, with odds of -110 to bet on either side. Hours after the video was posted, the price shot up to -1,500 before eventually having to stop betting. This appears to be the case for many other international bettors as such bets are not legal in the United States.
Maskavich, as you can imagine, started hearing about it from gamers on Twitter.
“I just thought it was pretty funny,” Maskavich told ESPN. “Some of the responses have been hilarious; some people are really crazy.
“I had a feeling it was going to gain traction, leading up to the Super Bowl, and people liked prop betting. But I didn’t think it was going to explode like this. People contact me, wondering if Vegas paid me to do it, and all this other crazy shenanigans.
Ariel is one of my best friends, she knows a lot more about the gaming industry than I do. But also, if for some reason my tweet CHANGES THE BETTING LANDSCAPE… I’m all for https://t.co/GhCwEyfje5
– Zach Maskavich (@ZachMaskavich) February 6, 2021
Of course, a practice race is a practice race, so that doesn’t mean the actual anthem will be going on that time on Sunday. But if you are making friendly bets (for fun, of course) and someone unaware of the video tries to point you with a plus / minus of about two minutes (Demi Lovato pointed to a minute and 49 seconds last year), you might just have the edge you were looking for.
Meanwhile, as we mentioned, national (or international) attention isn’t something entirely new to Maskavich. You might remember him from an unfortunate moment during a 2018 high school football game that landed him (along with his crotch) in SportsCenter’s Not Top 10.
I never would have thought that in my life @KeithOlbermann would tell me about getting hit in the crotch on national television. But here we are # NotTop10 pic.twitter.com/zXyDK7c6AC
– Zach Maskavich (@ZachMaskavich) October 26 2018
We can’t wait to see Zach go viral again around 2024/2025. We will be keeping an eye on.
[ESPN]
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