Will Trump roll the dice on legalized sports betting?
One of the take-aways of the past NFL season, other than the fact that Dan Quinn should appoint a clock management coach, was that the league can no longer assume the public will tune in to whatever game happens to be on in prime time.
Ratings swooned, especially early in the season, in a manner that was previously unthinkable for the NFL. Baseball and hockey are used to the fact that they lose viewers when small markets play marquee games — witness the fact the NHL can’t announce a slate of outdoor games without including the Chicago Blackhawks — but football was thought to be impregnable.
Whether it was a blip or the start of a trend, there is one surefire, slam-dunk, no-doubt way for that decline to be immediately reversed: legalized gambling. And with President Trump involved, could it become a reality in the near future?
“It’s a difficult thing to predict,” Jake Williams, head of legal for Sportradar US, said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. “But there’s a path for it to happen soon.”
That path exists for a few reasons. The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing a constitutional amendment passed by New Jersey that allowed sports betting in that state. If it’s upheld, other states could follow suit. But perhaps more important, the federal government could reverse its own ban on sports gambling. There are business and tax-revenue reasons to open up the legalized gambling market in the United States, and if there was ever going to be a president to allow it, you’d have to think that one who has personally owned and operated casinos is a likely candidate. As for the moral arguments that might have swayed previous administrations from legalizing gambling, it’s fair to assume Trump would not be particularly troubled by such squeamishness. Whatever you think of his politics, he doesn’t seem to sweat such details.
Joe Brennan, the chief executive of sports-betting startup SportAD, who was previously involved in the New Jersey legal manoeuvring, said on Saturday that the “most optimistic scenario” is a Trump administration that weighs in on gambling next year and sees it legalized by 2019. At this point, Trump has yet to appoint the solicitor general who would handle such a file.
Jeff Ma, an executive at Twitter who was part of an infamous team of MIT students that figured out how to beat casinos at blackjack, said he expects the business case for legal gambling to eventually win the day. Imagine how much more fan interest there would be in a Thursday night game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Cleveland Browns if gambling were widely available.
“I just think there’s so much money at stake,” Ma said, “I don’t know how it happens, but I think these (leagues) will get together … and figure it out.”
So, it could happen. It could happen soon, or soonish. Then the question becomes: are the leagues anywhere near ready for it?
Short answer: nope. Consider that the major sports leagues are entertainment products that seek to provide information to their fans for marketing purposes. Games are broadcast and information like sports and stats are disseminated through various channels: the news media, the Internet, the teams themselves. There’s a desire for that information to be distributed accurately and in a timely manner, but ultimately it’s all for fun.
But say it’s 2019 and sports betting is legal. Not only are people placing bets on a football game before kickoff, but they can make in-game wagers as the action unfolds. Gambling in Europe and Asia has already shown in-game betting can quickly outstrip pregame bets in terms of volume. So now every bit of data is crucial. Did Julio Jones make that catch, or was it a fumble? Did Sidney Crosby get a second assist on that goal? The speed with which that information is delivered is dramatically important: a gambler who can adjust faster than the betting houses would have a tremendous advantage. That sevensecond broadcast delay for the Super Bowl would be a disaster. And what about instant replay? A baseball umpire could be reviewing a game-winning three-run home run, which can easily take a full two minutes — plenty of time for people to bet on the outcome of an event that would turn an underdog into a big winner.
The increase in scrutiny on games would be significant, right off the jump. As Ma said, gamblers often follow these things much closer than the average fan.
“I’ve always said that the clock operator should be one person who bet the over and one person who bet the under,” he said. “That clock would never be wrong.”
This is one reason why leagues, despite the money at stake, might have trepidation about legal betting: it brings with it a host of concerns they would rather not consider. Another year of weak NFL ratings could be enough, though, to cause such a rethink. The NHL has already gone to Las Vegas, after all, and all leagues have partnered with daily fantasy sites. Horse, barn, et cetera.
But Ma also offered a caveat: “Any time I ask knowledgeable people when gambling will be legal in the U.S., the answer is always ‘five to 10 years.’ And that was five to 10 years ago.”