Chiefs-Saints wacky final minute leads worst betting beats of the week in sports

While baseball steadied fans locally with a rare Phillies no-hitter and a Little League World Series berth, preseason football dominated the weekend sports action with 14 of the week’s 16 games taking place between Friday and Sunday.

The results of preseason football hardly matter unless you’re the Baltimore Ravens, who have now won 24 straight exhibition games after narrowly defeating the Eagles on Saturday night. Betting on preseason action with a large portion of the players unlikely to make the team seems unwise, but that won’t stop bettors from the dreaded cautionary tale of bad beats.

Across all of sports, the usual ninth inning blown leads in baseball have become the norm, but a wacky finish in one of Sunday’s preseason games leads this week’s bad beats.

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Let’s get this out of the way first: Saints quarterback Derek Carr and Chiefs star Patrick Mahomes each played one drive in this game, so the final result did not rest on their shoulders.

In typical exhibition fashion, the Saints-Chiefs game from Caesars Superdome featured blown leads on both sides. The Saints, entering the game as 1.5-point favorites, jumped out to a 17-0 lead early in the second quarter; the Chiefs scored 24 unanswered and led by seven with under 2 minutes remaining.

After a Jake Haener touchdown pass and a missed two-point conversion, the Saints trailed 24-23, with two timeouts remaining and 70 seconds left in the game. After two straight runs that burned through the Saints’ timeouts, the Chiefs, in their own territory, decided to throw a screen on third and 8 that turned into a defensive linemen interception. That gave New Orleans the ball just outside of the red zone.

Four plays later, the Saints won on a walk-off field goal, leaving Chiefs money line and +1.5 bettors devastated by Kansas City’s late misfortune.

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The Oakland Athletics and New York Yankees had one thing in common entering their matchups on Sunday: both are in the cellar of their respective divisions. Somehow, though, both teams blew multi-run leads in the ninth inning on the same day.

After building a 7-3 lead through eight innings, the Yankees entered the ninth against the Miami Marlins with a 99% chance of covering and -122 on the money line. New York never recorded another out, as Miami had four hits, scoring five runs, including Jake Burger’s game-ending RBI single to sink the Yankees, 8-7.

Meanwhile, the Athletics (+120) held a 7-2 lead on the Washington Nationals in the ninth inning. Oakland also had a 99% chance to cover before things went awry. The Nationals scored six runs in the bottom of the inning, two of the runs coming at the hands of the Athletics pitching and fielding, to give Washington the series sweep over Oakland, 8-7, after a walk-off RBI single by Jeter Downs.

Brutal beats for Yankees and Nationals money line bettors.

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The WNBA regular season has about a month remaining until the playoffs, and the race is heating up with the fourth-eighth seeds separated by just four games.

One of those teams in the thick of the playoff race is the Atlanta Dream, one game back of the fourth-seeded Dallas Wings, but one game ahead of the sixth-seeded Minnesota Lynx and seventh-seeded Washington Mystics.

Sunday night, the Dream, as 17-point underdogs, played the top-seeded Las Vegas Aces. Through three and a half quarters, Atlanta hung tough, trailing 75-62 with 5:30 left in the fourth.

The Dream didn’t score another point until 90 seconds remained in the game, when AD Durr hit a free throw to trim the Aces’ lead to 84-63. After that, the Dream scored just two more points, failing to cover the 17-point spread in their 86-65 loss after scoring five points in the last six minutes of the game.