sports betting politics

Nevada’s new legalized online poker site, launched two weeks ago, has already dealt a million hands. Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports’ national columnist, wrote in a recent column that it has the potential to open the floodgates to other types of legalized gaming across the country.

Might that include sports betting?

If professional sports leagues, and the NBA in particular, want to oppose and argue against legalized sports betting in the US, then the least they could do is stick to facts rather than hypothetical surveys and conjecture.

That, essentially, is the argument made by a pair of Saint Louis University students in a recent paper titled, “The legalization of sports gambling: An irreparable harm or the beginning of unprecedented growth?”

In a Friday brief, the U.S. Dept. of Justice argued that the federal ban on sports betting is a “constitutional exercise of congressional authority and should be upheld.”

The state of New Jersey, which is trying to make sports betting legal in its state, disagrees.

The NFL and the other major sports leagues still want us all to believe that fantasy sports are just a funny little game played for “pretend” and “made up” money.

It’s insulting.

And poker pro Erick Lindgren’s powerful story of gambling addiction—to, among other things, fantasy football—provides even more evidence that the pro sports leagues are naïve at best, and deceitful, pretentious and hypocritical at worst.

We’ve heard before that the majority of New Jersey residents are in favor of sports betting, but that’s a more gambling-centric culture that doesn’t reflect the collective view of the American people, right?

Wrong. A new poll found that, for the first time ever, Americans are in favor of widespread legalization of online sports gambling.

Well, it’s official. Enough with the posturing and the lobbying and the debating and the court cases. The people have spoken—814 of them, to be exact—and the majority, albeit a very, very small majority, want sports betting to be legalized.

Not just in the state of Nevada, where it’s currently legal, and not just in the state of New Jersey, which is trying to make it legal. No, these people want sports betting everywhere. Isn’t it about time we give the people what they want?

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell railed against sports betting legalization again this past Friday, stating in a deposition that gambling’s threat to the integrity of the league is his “No. 1 concern.” Then, three days later, ESPN’s No. 1 broadcaster referenced the point spread numerous times late in a blowout game. Gee, why is that? And why does it continue to occur?

In depositions released over the weekend, NBA commissioner David Stern took a few shots at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the state’s plans to legalize sports betting in the Garden State.

A court battle between the leagues and New Jersey won’t begin anytime soon. For now, it’s merely a war of words.

We can’t legalize sports betting, Blue Jays president Paul Beeston says, because the Black Sox were caught in a game-fixing scandal in the 1919 World Series.

Yes, we’re now using a random corrupt team from nearly 100 years ago that was getting paid pennies compared to today’s players as evidence in a decision about today’s sagging economy.

ESPN The Magazine recently asked professional athletes the following question:

“Do you think sports betting should be legalized?”

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