Boxer Floyd Mayweather wins big in bet on Cowboys’ victory over Giants

Last week, reports came out that boxer Floyd Mayweather bet $3 million in a total of nine different sports books on the Alabama-Michigan game. Turned out that the reports were erroneous, but Mayweather confirmed that he did make a huge pile of scratch on the NFL's regular-season opener, a 24-17 win by the Dallas Cowboys over the New York Giants.

Mayweather laid $200,000 on the Cowboys in the second half, and came away a big winner when Dallas outscored the Giants, 17-14, in the final 30 minutes.

This time, Mayweather confirmed the win via his Twitter account:

Not a bad little payday.

This wouldn't be the first time Mayweather bet big on sports, but the rumors of his gambling aren't always true -- he denies once dropping $1.8 million on a regular-season L.A. Clippers game, but he did bet a cool $1 million against Tim Tebow's Denver Broncos in their divisional playoff loss to the New England Patriots last season. He also has reportedly pocketed $900,000 on the results of a New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets-New York Knicks game.

"A $50,000 bet, or a $100,000 bet, that's a normal bet," Mayweather told MLive.com in April. "I don't really get like, into, 'Oh, I won $100,000,' at all. Once you've been involved with it for so long, if you lose a couple hundred [thousand], you'll be like, 'OK, let me wait for the right pick -- the right, right pick -- and I'll get a hundred from that.' Then wait for another right pick. Win a couple hundred, then you're up. It's about having more ups than downs."

Mayweather has had his share of both recently -- he was guaranteed a $32 million purse for his eventual win over Miguel Cotto in May, and then started serving two months of a three-month prison sentence in July on a misdemeanor battery domestic violence conviction. Mayweather, 2011's highest-paid athlete according to Forbes, was released on Aug. 3.