SAN JOSE, Calif. – Among Super Bowl prop bets, it's the elephant sitting at the crossroads of reality and ridicule.

"Ted Ginn. Dropped passes."

You can gamble on a lot of things in the Super Bowl, but few are so taunting and opinionated as those wagering on the hands of the Carolina Panthers wideout, which were statistically among the worst in the NFL this season. When Bovada released it's oddball prop bets leading into Super Bowl 50, Ginn's was simple: Would he drop a pass? The odds offered made it clear the wagering site believed it was more probable than not. This is what happens when you drop nine passes against only 44 receptions – including a few wide-open touchdowns. The biggest stage of your career becomes a gambling sneer. Or your name gets plugged into a search engine and returns a minefield of clickable results like "Good Ted Ginn, bad Ted Ginn" and "Ted Ginn's a ball-dropper, but he makes plays, too."

This is the wave of Ted Ginn's NFL life. One wipeout after another has brought him to this Sunday – a fragile career opportunity to wipe away years of sour memories. As long as he can keep his hands wrapped around it.

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"Ted Ginn can play football," Ginn said this week, responding to a question about what the Panthers have discovered in him this season. "He can catch. He can run. He can do route-running. He can do everything that they say he can't. … I've been fighting since I stepped in this thing. Nine years in, I've been trying to make a team and stay on a team. That's just what it is. I never forget my talent or who I am. I just wait until I can showcase it. And this is the year I did it."

View photos Ted Ginn Jr. had 44 catches and 10 touchdowns this season. (Getty Images) More

It's been a frustrating road for Ginn, arriving to the NFL as the Miami Dolphins' first round pick in the 2007 draft (ninth overall) and then spending the majority his career as a middling journeyman. It included wince-inducing stops with the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals, as well as two seasons in Carolina (2013 and this year). Inside of that twisting path, Ginn realized nearly $26 million in career earnings, despite being characterized as a soft, drop-prone wideout whose Olympic-class speed earned him second and third chances.

None of that is news to Ginn, of course. He heard it all. Right up to the 2015 training camp, when Panthers No. 1 wideout Kelvin Benjamin went down with a knee injury and the sky began to fall in Charlotte. While Carolina's march to a 17-1 record might have obscured some of that summer panic, it failed to erase Ginn's ability to recall a general malaise that developed whenever someone began to talk about the Panthers wide receiver position.

"We understood that we were a whole bunch of misfits and different things like that," Ginn said. "The 'We don't have a receiving corps' [talk] – yeah, we heard it. But we knew what we had in the room. And collectively we came together as a group to make it work. That's all you can do."

It's on this point that Ginn likes to put his foot in the ground. He has long fashioned himself as a fighter of sorts when it comes to certain aspects of his life and football career. He talks openly about his early childhood, when he struggled to read and comprehend lessons in school – until his parents and teachers embraced an Individualized Education Program that would pave a scholastic path to college. He talks emotionally about his father's pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2012, which delivered a one-year survival rate of 20 percent while robbing Ted Ginn Sr. of portions of various vital organs.

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