There's no doubt that there is a significant point-spread factor in the growing conviction that New York is going to make a game of it Sunday against New England and quite possibly pull of a giant upset. During the first half of the season, the Pats were every bit as perfect against the spread as they were against the opposition. But over the second half of the regular season, it was a slightly different story. The Pats still won all the games, but they had to come from behind four separate times in the fourth quarter and the team covered the spread just twice. Moreover, it has failed to cover in either of the two playoff games. Despite that iffy performance for bettors of late, the Pats, a team that eked out a three-point victory over the Giants last month, have once again been established as a huge favorite--12 points in Super Bowl XLII.

It is the psychology of those recent point-spread shortfalls that has fed the notion that the Pats could be ripe for the picking. Never mind that the second-half spreads were seriously inflated by unsophisticated bettors leaping on the Patriots bandwagon. The betting result has pretty much obscured what the Pats accomplished in their two playoff games. They defeated two very good and very hot teams, Jacksonville and San Diego, in totally different fashion--one with a precision--indeed record-breaking--short passing game, the other with a smashmouth running attack. And though the Pats were challenged early in each game by strong performances by young quarterbacks, neither victory seemed in doubt by the fourth quarter and the Pats won both games by comfortable, two-score margins. Yet somehow the failure to cover made those victories seem disappointing rather than dominant or daunting.

The other nervous-making factor, especially for Patriots fans, is that they, of course, remember: the Pats were the last Super Bowl team to come in as a double-digit underdog, 14 points to St. Louis in 2002, before the Super Bowl XXXVI upset that launched the New England dynasty. And the previous time before that, in 1998, defending champion Green Bay was a 12-point favorite before losing to John Elway's Denver Broncos 31-24.

Rather remarkably, this will be the 14th time in 42 Super Bowls--fully one-third of them--that there has been a double-digit favorite. The first four games, back before the contests were yet "Super" and were simply called the AFL-NFL World Championship Games, all featured double-digit spreads in favor of the long-established National Football League champ. In the first two, the Packers walloped the AFL's Kansas City and Oakland, by huge margins. But in the final two years before the two leagues merged, bettors failed to grasp that the AFL had caught up and maybe even surpassed the stodgier NFL. First Joe Namath's New York Jets stunned the Baltimore Colts, regarded as a juggernaut, 16-7. A year later Len Dawson and the Kansas City Chiefs kicked the Minnesota Vikings 23-7.

Despite those notable upsets, more double-digit favorites have won and covered the spread to boot than bombed in the Super Bowl. In those 13 Super Bowls with a spread of at least 10 points, the favorite boasts a 9-4 record in the games and is 7-5-1 against the spread.