Hello, Vegas!
The gambling industry and football have been seeing each other secretly since the 1960s. But Monday’s 31- to- 1 vote by league owners to permit the Oakland Raiders to move to Las Vegas with ( for now) no stipulations about sports betting is a sign that the league’s and city’s status has changed from “it’s complicated” to “in a relationship.”
The reason? Las Vegas has been sanitized a bit, and the NFL isn’t as clean- cut as it once appeared.
The dominant destination for American casino gambling since the 1950s, Las Vegas became notable in sports gambling circles in the 1960s. Until the 1961 passage of the Wire Act, Minnesota’s Leo Hirschfeld was the nation’s best- known football oddsmaker and line setter. After that law made it illegal to transmit any information used to assist in gambling across state lines, Hirschfeld retired, paving the way for Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, Bob Martin, Roxy Roxborough and a host of other Vegas- based handicappers who made Sin City synonymous with sports betting.
Since at the time, the NFL was staunchly opposed to any legalization of betting on football, anything Las Vegas was a no- go.
Why was the league so strongly against sports betting, which ( as anyone who’s played fantasy football or noticed the crowds at bars on autumn Sundays knows) leads to more interest in the game? Commissioner Pete Rozelle— as responsible as anyone for creating the modern NFL— opposed gambling for, essentially, public relations reasons. Protecting the integrity of the game and the purity of fans’ love for it, in the end, was part of safeguarding the league’s image.
That anti- gambling stance extended to all of Las Vegas; in 2003, the league refused to air a tourism ad for the city during the Super Bowl. The ad, sponsored by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, showed no casino scenes. The league, however, insisted that “Las Vegas” meant “gambling,” and citing a clause in its television contracts prohibiting gambling- related ads, quashed the spot, although not without creating plenty of free advertising for the city. So what changed before Monday’s vote? Las Vegas is no longer a desert oasis dominated by gambling; it’s a major metropolitan area of over 2 million people, and even its gambling business is no longer all about gaming.
The second change is that the league— and America— have moved beyond what Rozelle feared in the 1970s.
The NFL has already been more than comfortable with daily fantasy sports, which many states agree is unequivocally gambling. The NFL remains officially opposed to straight- up sports betting, but not so militantly anymore.
Ten years ago Las Vegas couldn’t buy airtime during a Super Bowl. Within another 10 years it will have hosted one. That turnabout is your proverbial “when pigs fly” scenario. The pigs are flying in Las Vegas today, and the pigskins will be following soon enough.