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Want your team to win the Super Bowl? Pray they lose the coin toss.

A vigorously hand-flipped coin leads to the archetypal odds statement: 1 in 2. Half and half—but, at the Super Bowl, it's rarely so simple. Here, to melt your cortex, is a rundown of the historical Super Bowl coin toss odds. (Note: these odds are in no way predictive—i.e. the teams that have won the coin toss and/or the Super Bowl in the past have no impact on who will win in the future.) So here we go:

Every year, the Highland Mint (near Palm Bay, FL) mints a single, unique coin to be tossed at the opening of the Super Bowl. Out of fairness, of course, the team that gets to call the toss alternates between the National and American Football Conferences: one year, the AFC calls it; the next, the NFC.

The calls alone. Historically, heads has been called slightly more often than tails—heads has been called 22 times, tails 21. So the odds a team will call heads are 1 in 1.95(51%), while the odds a team will call tails are 1 in 2.05 (49%).

The coin toss itself. Of the 43 coin tosses in Super Bowl history, 22 coins have come up heads, 21 tails. The odds, then, that the coin will come up heads are 1 in 1.95, while the odds the coin will come up tails are 1 in 2.05. Conclusion: it is highly unlikely that the toss is rigged.

Winning the toss alone. (Definition: “winning the toss” means—regardless of who called it—being granted the choice of kicking or receiving.) The odds of winning the toss—of having it flip in your favor—are the odds of winning any coin toss: 1 in 2.

Winning the toss, and then winning the Super Bowl. Here’s where it gets a little counterintuitive. Of the 43 unique teams that have won the toss, only 20 have gone on to win the Bowl: the odds a team that wins the coin toss will go on to win the Super Bowl are 1 in 2.15 (47%). However, 47% is very close to 50%, which would be as random as, well, the coin toss. But…

Calling the toss correctly, and then winning the Super Bowl. You think that was counterintuitive? Of the 25 teams that have called and won the toss, only 13 have gone on to win the Bowl. Even though nearly everyone wants to see their favorite team call the toss, win the toss, and then win the Super Bowl, it’s only been done 13 times, making the odds 1 in 3.31 (30%). That’s right: not only do you not want your team to win the toss, you definitely don’t want your team to call and win the toss.

Well, maybe not really… Let’s come back to reality for a moment. While only 13 of 43 Super Bowl winners called and won the toss first, another 12, or 28%, won the Bowl after calling and losing the toss. This means that teams that merely called the toss—no matter if they won or lost it—ended up winning the Bowl in 1 in 1.79 cases, or 56% of the time.

So to review:

The odds a team that wins the coin toss will win the Super Bowl are 1 in 2.15 (47%).

The odds a team that loses the coin toss will win the Super Bowl are 1 in 1.87 (53%).

The odds a team that calls the coin toss will win the Super Bowl are 1 in 1.79 (56%).

Ultimate conclusions. Okay, so the second sentence of this article was a fib—but a fib to prove a few points.

1) Merely losing the coin toss (odds of going on to win the SB: 53%) is different than calling and losing the coin toss (odds of going on to win the SB: 26%). Beware unclear verbiage.

2) Furthermore, losing the coin toss, in and of itself, is hardly an improvement on winning the toss: the chances of a team that wins the toss goes on to win the championship are a full 47%.

3) If anything tilts the historical odds in favor of a win, it’s the act of calling the toss. It doesn’t even matter how the coin comes down. Just by calling it, a team’s historical odds are 56% in favor of winning the game.

But even that is a correlation, not a cause. The ultimate, ironclad rule is this—winning the Super Bowl depends on any number of things: strength, skill, stamina, speed, strategy, teamwork, completions, the wind, the weather, the coin toss, and who knows how many other factors, most unquantifiable.

Ultimately, it’s a toss-up.

Time to decompress, with some other Fun Facts:

The odds the team that wins the coin toss will choose to receive the kickoff are 1 in 1.02 (98%).

Due to a rule change in 2009, only one coin-toss-winning team has ever chosen to kick, rather than to receive—the Arizona Cardinals—hence, the odds the team that wins the coin toss will choose to kick off are currently 1 in 43 (The Cardinals went on to lose that game).

The longest streaks of heads or tails: Heads came up 9 times in a row (Super Bowl VI-XIV, while tails has twice come up 4 times in a row.

The longest coin-toss-winning streaks (regardless of who calls it): The AFC has won the toss 4 years in a row (1972-1975). The NFC, on the other hand, has won the last 12 tosses (1998-2009); though, in fairness, NFC teams only went on to win 3 of those championships. The odds a conference will win 12 coin tosses in a row are 1 in 4,096, or roughly the odds that a person 5 or older in Oklahoma speaks Hebrew in the home.

Broken down by conference, the NFC calls tails much more often, and the AFC heads. The odds an NFC team will call tails are 1 in 1.5 (or 67%), while the odds an AFC team will call heads are 1 in 1.47 (or 68%). But just as the toss result doesn’t seem to matter, neither does conference: the NFC has 22 Super Bowl wins, the AFC 21.

Finally: It’s theorized that a coin toss in overtime, which has yet to happen in a Super Bowl, might not lead to unpredictable results…