Gambling really is the all-American pastime now that Walt Disney Co. is buying a $250 million piece of for-money fantasy league DraftKings. The agreement commits Disney to buy $500 million in advertising time and imagery on a variety of ESPN platforms. At present, the ESPN airwaves are awash with ads for FanDuel, featuring socially challenged males boasting of their fantasy-league prowess. (Do their imaginary girlfriends know they’re doing this?) FanDuel will get pushed back into the queue for airtime now that Disney has allied with DraftKings.
I knew Steamboat Willie plied the rivers but I never thought of him as a high roller. As some of the major leagues rethink their stance on sports betting, Disney finds itself closer to casino gambling than ever before … and won’t that be a tectonic shift in American culture? At any rate, the difference between real and fantasy sports betting has always struck me as a matter of sophistry, so maybe some straight talk will come out of Disney’s radical move.
* Penn National Gaming unwittingly unleashed a monster when it gave John Noble free buffet admission for life at M Resort. How was it to know it had loosed a stalker on its female employees? It remains to be seen if Penn could have done more to discourage Noble but, for the moment, there are a number of emotionally scarred people who were eyewitnesses to Noble’s Easter Sunday suicide in the M buffet line and they have all our sympathies.
* Knowing they’re dealing with a $2.3 billion-a-year industry, Florida‘s state senators will ponder a bill to temporarily extend Seminole Tribe blackjack and other banked games for one more year, giving Gov. Rick Scott (R) and the Lege time to work out a long-term compact. As matters stand, Scott only has four weeks to get a compact signed and over to the state capital. Instead, “We’re interested in having a discussion with the tribe in an environment where we do something that makes long-term sense for taxpayers and the tribe,” said Regulated Industries Committee Chairman Rob Bradley (R). Over in the House, Rep. Dana Young (R) is convinced this new initiative won’t affect her omnibus. However, Young’s bill has a lot of moving parts — dog racing, racinos, poker rooms, megaresorts — so I wouldn’t rate its chance of passage highly this session.
* In a word, “Ouch!”
I watch ESPN a lot and they do have plenty of FanDuel ads. I have been in a NBA fantasy basketball league for over 20 years and I would never consider doing something like this but with the amount of ads they have been showing since the football season there must be a lot of interest.