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NFL and Company Go After Delaware

What accounts for the phenomenal growth of the NFL in the last 20 years? Certainly television played a major role and in that regard one of the great decisions the league made was to divide the TV money up equally, going a long way towards ensuring parity, or something close to it. That competitiveness helped keep the league in front of sports fans.

The other major if unacknowledged factor was gambling. Football is perhaps the ideal sport on which to gamble. It is spaced out and does not have too many games, so a bettor can plan money management easily. It is a sport that lends itself fairly easily to points spreads and is so evenly matched, that parity thing again, that the favorites with the line, win only 50.1% of the time. Without gambling, professional football would never have become the dominant sport in America and would likely now fall somewhere the NBA and the NHL.

That is what makes the action taken by the NFL, and its other three pro league cohorts, in filing suit against Delaware so hypocritical. Delaware's lottery game based on NFL game results will be a fraction of the action in Las Vegas and a very small fraction of the action worldwide. How it is supposed to poison the supposed purity of the game I'll never know. This from a league which is actively seeking marketing opportunities with state lotteries around the country. As for the integrity of the game, ask David Stern about his referees.

Let's get past that this is the NFL's second attempt at halting Delaware's game. In the first suit, the Delaware Supreme Court unanimously found the game to be constitutional. Look, it's not Delaware's or any other governmental body's responsibility to ensure the honesty and integrity of a professional sporting event; that is the league's responsibility. It's not Delaware's obligation to police the athlete's; that belongs to the league and its teams. It's time the NFL got off its high horse, accept sports betting for the benefit to its popularity that it really is and join its fans in petitioning Congress to set up a federal regulatory scheme to license Internet sports betting in the same way that it has allowed Internet horse racing pari-mutuels.

It would be good for the leagues by increasing fan interest, and it would be great for the fans. Just look to Europe, where sports betting has been legal and common for decades, to see that it has no real effect on the outcome of games. In fact, the sports books are usually the ones who are first to spot betting anomalies that lead to uncovering point shaving or match fixing. In addition, by legalizing sports betting and then taxing the hell out of it, the government would be creating a new revenue source for states, which, as we have seen with the California budget crisis, are in great need of whatever source they can find. In short, it's a winning proposition all around (no pun intended), which is probably why it has little chance of passing Congress anytime soon.

Full post as published by Sports Biz on July 28, 2009 (boomark / email).