Super Bowl Prop-A-Palooza, Part 1

It's Super Bowl time and that means three things: an inexorably boring and useless Pro Bowl, tons of horrific media coverage focusing on inane storylines, and enough prop bets to drown you in a frothy sea of mathematic delight! Through the next two weeks, we'll be selecting a few prop bets at a time, running the numbers and giving you the best recommendations. We'll try to stick to more interesting ones - sorry, coin flip fans - but if you have a specific prop you'd like for us to look at, feel free to email me at nik@numberfire.com and we'll see what we can do.

Which Ravens player will score the first touchdown for his team?

At first glance, this seems like a shoo-in to be Ray Rice, as he led the team in touchdowns with 10. Looking at the players to score first, Torrey Smith and Ray Rice led all Ravens at four this year; before last week against the Patriots, Ray Rice had not been the first Raven to find the end zone since Week 9 against the Browns. In addition, both Vonta Leach and Anthony Allen vultured touchdowns from Rice early in games. Of course, a single season of comparables is not significant enough to make any recommendations, so we dug into our list of game predictors to determine the likely culprit.