Prince’s pants rip? Paydirt!

Inveterate gamblers, rejoice.

If the Super Bowl wasn’t occasionally deadly dull, you probably wouldn’t be able to bet this week on which will be greater Sunday, the number of passes caught by Marvin Harrison against the Chicago Bears in Miami or the number of free throws made by LeBron James against the Detroit Pistons in Cleveland.

Or whether Bears Coach Lovie Smith or the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy will slam his headset, what color the sports drinks consumed by the players will be or whether Prince will split his pants open during the halftime show.

Side bets, known in casino parlance as “propositions” and encompassing just about anything under the sun, have grown so wildly popular that they rival more traditional wagers made on the Super Bowl, Las Vegas sports book operators say.

About $100 million is expected to be bet in Nevada on the Super Bowl this week, according to Las Vegas Sports Consultants.

Jay Kornegay, executive director of the race and sports book at the Las Vegas Hilton and the so-called king of propositions, estimated that 55% of the money wagered at the Hilton would be put down on “props.” Fifteen years ago, he said, that figure probably was closer to 15%.

“They’re a huge piece of the Super Bowl pie,” said Robert Walker, sports director at the MGM and nine other properties on the Las Vegas Strip, who guessed that props would account for about 30% of the bets placed at most sports books.

Brian Girard of Las Vegas will put money down on a few props this week, he said, including two he has bet every year since 1999: that the game will go into overtime and that a safety will be scored. (The Super Bowl has never gone into overtime, and none of the last 15 has produced a safety.)

“My millennium mutual fund, as I call it,” said Girard, who increases his wager on the two bets every year in the belief that they’ll pay off in his lifetime. “I started out with a little bit of money on them and I’m kind of doing the ultimate chase.”

The odds this week on an overtime game or a safety being scored are each about 7 to 1. That means, for example, if Girard bet $20 on each and both happened his profit would be about $280.

Girard said he had bet props for more than 20 years, recalling that he was a winner, at odds of 10 to 1, when lineman William “The Refrigerator” Perry scored a late touchdown for the Bears against the New England Patriots in 1986.

“That was probably the best one I did,” Girard said, but he has also bet on the Bud Bowl, a mock game matching animated bottles of Budweiser against Bud Light during Super Bowl commercials, and four years ago got 2,000-1 odds when he wagered that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would score only four points against the Oakland Raiders.

The Buccaneers won, 48-21.

“I remember Tampa Bay had a terrible offense,” said Girard, still holding what would have been a $20,000 winning ticket, “but I was way off on that one.”

NO matter the score, props keep bettors engaged from the national anthem -- wagers are being taken on how many seconds it will take Billy Joel to get through it Sunday -- to the awards ceremony, when the correct most-valuable-player choice could send a gambler home a winner.

Which is why props have been so heartily embraced, of course.

The number of props offered has mushroomed, bookmakers said, because a string of lopsided Super Bowl results left bettors searching for something new.

“These games were so boring, always blowouts,” said Kornegay, who moved to the Hilton three years ago after spending 15 years at the Imperial Palace. “If you were to look through the sports book, maybe halfway or three-quarters of the way through the game, people had left because they were bored with the game.

“One way we decided to try to keep them in their seats was to make up different propositions that affected the third and fourth quarters, or wouldn’t be decided until the third and fourth quarters, so we expanded our prop menu in the early ‘90s, and it really took off the year the 49ers played the Chargers,” in 1995.

The 49ers were favored by nearly three touchdowns.

“There was no doubt who was going to win that game,” Kornegay said, “so while most books had probably around 30 to 40 props, we put up about 100 to 120 for that game. That was the year we realized we really had something.”

This year, Las Vegas sports books are offering as many as 300 props, many of which are shunned by professional gamblers and dismissed as “sucker bets,” and offshore betting sites are offering more than 1,000 over the Internet.

Kornegay said that he and his staff hunkered down for 26 hours over two days last week dreaming up props and calculating what odds to assign them.

“A lot of it is number crunching, but the other half of it is just booking experience and what we’ve experienced in past years in terms of how the general public normally bets certain props,” Kornegay said. The props range from the traditional -- Which team will win the coin toss? Will the game go into overtime? Will the first player to score be wearing an odd- or even-numbered jersey? -- to the more exotic.

An example of the latter: Which will be greater Sunday, the number of passing yards racked up by Colts quarterback Peyton Manning or the number of combined points scored by the four Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference college basketball teams -- Canisius, St. Peter’s, Niagara and Siena -- playing that day? Or, which team will lead by the widest margin Sunday: the Colts, Bears, Clippers or Toronto Raptors? The Clippers play the Raptors in an NBA game Sunday morning at Toronto.

“We get a fair amount of people

who are interested in more than the over/under” -- the total number of points scored by both teams -- “and the point spread,” said Reed Richards, a spokesman for the gambling website, www.betus.com. “They’re interested in a variety of different things, from who will be the first team to score to how many times Peyton Manning will be sacked.”

PROPS are not limited to the game. The halftime show also is in play. Through www.betus.com, bettors can wager whether Prince will suffer a wardrobe malfunction, make an obscene gesture or announce plans to run for president.

Just about anything and everything, it seems, is fair game.

Two years ago, for instance, a gambler would have been a winner, at 80-1 odds, if Sam Rayburn of the Philadelphia Eagles had recorded the first sack against the New England Patriots and “Ray” had won the Academy Award for best picture.

“The over/under and the spread are for the real hard-core gamblers, the real stats junkies,” Richards said. “But I think the people who really appreciate the game, really appreciate the drama and the characters, they become less interested in the score than in the people and the strategies that affect the outcome.”

Or, they just want to see if Prince will split open his pants.

“I bet more on the fun ones than on the actual, ‘Who’s going to win the game?’ ” said Brad Randolph, a 26-year-old graphic design artist from Austin, Texas, who correctly wagered last year that the Rolling Stones would open their halftime performance with “Start Me Up” and this year is betting on a Prince wardrobe malfunction.

“It just makes the game more interesting -- all aspects of it. If it’s 28-0 at halftime, normally I wouldn’t watch the rest of the game, but if I’m wagering on touchdown celebrations, I’ve got to stay tuned,” he said.

So-called crossover props tend to draw the most media attention but are not the most appealing to bettors. One example: Which will be greater, the number of points scored by the Bears in the first quarter or the number of birdies carded by Tiger Woods in the fourth round of the Dubai Desert Classic?

“The most popular prop is the first player to score,” Walker said. “It might be the most boring prop, but the first player to score is always paramount. I think everybody puts $5 to $10 down on that one.”

BECAUSE of the popularity of such props, Walker added, “the first eight to 10 minutes of the game in a sports book is like the Kentucky Derby because it’s so loud in here, the roar of the crowd. After the first pass completion, the first rushing first down, etcetera, it quiets down and people settle into the game.”

Not that it’s ever quiet.

“Props make the game a lot more enjoyable,” Walker said.

But the popularity of some props, Walker said, defies logic.

“Every year people bet that the final score will be 4-2,” he said. “Sure, you can great odds on that, but I marvel at that because, is that a game you’d really want to see? Is that a game you would even want to watch?”

Odds are, probably not -- unless you factor in the props.

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jerome.crowe@latimes.com