“Can you believe these junkies are betting on the coin toss?” is a comment you’ll often hear from media types before the Super Bowl. But in a country where millions of people buy lottery tickets every day, the Super Bowl coin toss is a great bet in comparison.

If you’re laying -110 on either heads or tails, you’re bucking a house edge of less than 5%, meaning the sports book offering the bet expects to win less than 5 cents on the dollar. Compare that to a lottery that immediately extracts 50 cents on every dollar and you’ll see what a far superior bet the Super Bowl coin toss is.

I agree that anyone who bets the coin toss is an action-craving idiot. But what does that make lottery players who play a game with a takeout that is ten times greater? Yet the same media outlets so critical of the coin toss bet promote the lottery incessantly via treating the results and winners as news items.