After years of opposing sports betting, the NFL and other professional leagues have repositioned themselves as primary stakeholders in US legal sports wagering. They want to profit from legal betting, ideally by receiving a direct share of the total amount wagered on their games, but short of that they have sought official data mandates in state laws to allow them to monetize official game-tracker data. This quest for official data has supplanted integrity fees as the leagues’ preferred method of obtaining a piece of the betting gold rush.

ARI SHAPIRO: David Purdum covers the gambling industry for ESPN, and in full disclosure, sportsbooks do sponsor and advertise on the network. So we asked him what the ruling on PASPA has done to the relationship between sports and gambling.

The NCAA is concerned about the impact of sports betting, particularly on college campuses. The organization’s new e-learning module educates current and prospective student-athletes on the harms of problem gambling, as well as the risks sports betting poses to the integrity of NCAA competition. In a September 2023 survey of campus compliance directors, 27% of autonomy schools indicated that they had dealt with a sports betting-related issue.

A handful of states require sportsbooks to use official data in their oddssetting. Most do so only for Tier 2 bets, those that involve a final score or outcome of a game, but Illinois and Tennessee mandate the use of official data in their sports betting laws.