Las Vegas sportsbooks saw unexpected big bets on Tampa Bay Buccaneers to win Super Bowl ahead of Tom Brady announcement

On Thursday, while bookmakers and bettors were focused on college basketball tournaments, big wagers on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to win the Super Bowl showed up at multiple Las Vegas sportsbooks.

Tampa Bay was around a 50-1 long shot when bets upward of $10,000 came in Thursday at the SuperBook, South Point and Circa Sports. Bookmakers drastically adjusted their odds, while trying to determine what was behind the flurry of interest in the Buccaneers. They'd find out three days later, right in the middle of the madness.

At 7:13 p.m. ET, Sunday, just minutes after the bracket for the NCAA tournament was released, Tom Brady announced he was unretiring and would be returning to play for Tampa Bay. The Brady news hit during one of the busiest stretches of the year for oddsmakers: the hours after the tournament bracket is unveiled, when sportsbooks were racing to post point spreads on the 32 opening games of the tournament and update their odds to win the national championship.

«It was very hectic, intense,» Ed Salmons, a veteran Las Vegas bookmaker with the SuperBook, said.

Bookmakers for the SuperBook first thought something was up early Thursday morning, when a new customer in New Jersey who had never made a bet with the company, asked to make a pair of $10,000 bets on the Buccaneers to win the Super Bowl at 60-1 and to win the NFC at 30-1. The SuperBook allowed the customer to bet $1,000, an amount in line with their house limits on futures wagers, but still moved Tampa Bay's Super Bowl odds to 25-1 and their NFC odds to 12-1. Later in the day, a bettor in Nevada, who the SuperBook considers savvy, placed two big bets on the Buccaneers at the shortened odds.

«We thought Deshaun Watson was going [to Tampa Bay],» Randy Blum,