Betting on Sports America: Panel says that NFL will come around to sports betting in time
Justin Martin, CDC Gaming Reports · <time class="entry-time" itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2019-04-27T11:30:25-04:00">April 27, 2019</time>
SECAUCUS, NJ – For all of the understandable excitement and possibility that has accompanied the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, and all of the marketing and media deals that have been struck in its wake, one potential major player has thus far refused to show any signs that it’s interested in joining the fray – the National Football League.
The National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association have all entered into partnerships with gaming companies – which has led to, among other things, the MGM Resorts International logo stenciled onto Fenway Park’s Green Monster.
The NFL has, so far, only signed a casino marketing deal with Caesars Entertainment.
That deal covers casino sponsorship only – no fantasy, no hotel promotions, and, most crucially, no sports betting.
A panel at last week’s Betting on Sports America conference left no ambiguity about the NFL’s importance to a healthy legal sports betting market, calling it the “key sport for sports bettors.”
To offer one example, this past year’s Super Bowl generated $150 million in wagers in Nevada alone.
Moderated by SportsHandle’s Brett Smiley, the panel, included Westgate Las Vegas Executive Vice President of Race and Sportsbook Operations Jay Kornegay, Kambi Group CEO Kristian Nylan, Redzone.bet co-founder Stephen Baumohl, Scientific Games Senior Vice President of Sportsbook and Platforms Keith O’Loughlin, and STATS VP of Product Management Blake Konrardy.
They unanimously confirmed the NFL as the “king of sports betting in the U.S.” while also indicating that college football and basketball are beginning to rival pro football in betting popularity.
In comparing college and the pros, Nylan said that the college bettor tends to be more loyal than bettors that favor the pro game, while Baumohl said that his firm’s data indicates that there is “no attrition rate” among NFL bettors, even considering the relative difficulty of profiting off of wagers on the professional games.
The power of in-play betting
O’Loughlin said that, outside the U.S. “60 to 70 percent” of wagering on American football is done in in-play fashion, and that the figure in the U.S. is already close to 50 percent.
“It’s growing very rapidly. I suspect that within two years’ time, 70 or 80 percent of all betting on NFL will be in-play,” he said.
He said the gap between pregame and in-play wagering isn’t a matter of a lack of education on the bettors’ parts, but more a need to wait for the market to evolve naturally.
“The operators that have gone live are either DFS (daily fantasy) providers who have built their own front ends, or traditional bricks-and-mortar operators who have a sportsbook live and are looking to see how to build an omnichannel proposition,” O’Loughlin said. “There’s only a handful of states live in terms of digital and online betting.”
“Everyone has to step up on modeling,” Nylan said. Kambi Group, he noted, doesn’t close its market when a penalty is called, instead updating prices in real time. “In-play needs to be live pretty much all the time.”
No European provider dominance
Baumohl said that he wasn’t concerned about European providers dominating America, adding the European market has shifted to concern itself more with sports that dominate locally, rather than those that appeal to American audiences.
There’s very little cannibalization between markets, O’Loughlin said. More options tend to bring in more customers, and “the only way to do that at scale is through automation.”
“It’s not about European or U.S.,” he said, “it’s about what the customer wants. It’s about making it easy for any consumer to bet.”
STATS’ Konrardy said bettors aren’t likely to be interested in wagering on the velocity of a particular pass in a football game, or something similarly granular. But that data exists, he said, and STATS feeds that information into its system in order to create player props and other automated markets that will appeal to players.
“What a lot of books need is an opportunity to take the data and break it into insights that can stimulate bets and encourage betting,” he said. “To really sweat it out and have an experience, instead of saying here’s a market, here’s a price.”
Advice to the league
Smiley referenced three areas in which he believed the NFL could make the games more appealing to bettors: officiating and bad calls, injury reporting, and a willingness to share betting information on the league’s broadcasts
Nylan said that bad calls aren’t a problem for bettors as long as the integrity of the game is fair. “The point of betting is to have good beats or bad beats now and then. You remember when you have a really lucky win or a really bad loss. It’s one of the things that makes sports betting fun.”
Baumohl, however, said that the NFL’s recent ruling that pass interference calls, which were implemented in the wake of the commotion over the ending of last season’s New Orleans Saints – Los Angeles Rams NFC Championship game, might create more controversy than it solves. Pass interference is subjective, he said. Whatever the call, there will still be big debates over whether it should have been overturned.
About injury reports, Kornegay said, “For us, transparency is the name of the game. Teams need to be more accountable for those types of reports.”
The NHL’s injury reports, he said, are a particular problem, given most teams’ propensity for describing injuries as upper- or lower-body injuries.
Nylan countered by saying that such a move would only serve to help the industry, not the players. He called it a bigger issue for fantasy than for sports betting.
“We’re always battling the sharps,” Kornegay said. “The general public could probably care less. The numbers that come out of Vegas are always geared toward the sharp player. That type of information is always between them and us. So the more transparency, the better for us.”
“The rules will evolve year on year,” O’Loughlin said. “As sports wagering has grown and matured, it’s become part of the commentary. Analysts now refer to where the prices are… Transparency is the word.
Kornegay mentioned that, 10 years ago, the NFL was reluctant to accept Super Bowl advertising from Las Vegas, even though that ad campaign had no focus on gambling.
“And now we have an NFL team in Las Vegas,” he said of the impending move of the Oakland Raiders in 2020.
Ultimately, the panel said, the issue is time.
“The American market is very immature,” Kornegay said. “But the operators understand the basics and the consumer. We applaud European knowledge and expertise, but it still needs to be Americanized.”
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s just going to take a little time.”
Justin Martin, CDC Gaming Reports · <time class="entry-time" itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2019-04-27T11:30:25-04:00">April 27, 2019</time>
SECAUCUS, NJ – For all of the understandable excitement and possibility that has accompanied the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, and all of the marketing and media deals that have been struck in its wake, one potential major player has thus far refused to show any signs that it’s interested in joining the fray – the National Football League.
The National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association have all entered into partnerships with gaming companies – which has led to, among other things, the MGM Resorts International logo stenciled onto Fenway Park’s Green Monster.
The NFL has, so far, only signed a casino marketing deal with Caesars Entertainment.
That deal covers casino sponsorship only – no fantasy, no hotel promotions, and, most crucially, no sports betting.
A panel at last week’s Betting on Sports America conference left no ambiguity about the NFL’s importance to a healthy legal sports betting market, calling it the “key sport for sports bettors.”
To offer one example, this past year’s Super Bowl generated $150 million in wagers in Nevada alone.
Moderated by SportsHandle’s Brett Smiley, the panel, included Westgate Las Vegas Executive Vice President of Race and Sportsbook Operations Jay Kornegay, Kambi Group CEO Kristian Nylan, Redzone.bet co-founder Stephen Baumohl, Scientific Games Senior Vice President of Sportsbook and Platforms Keith O’Loughlin, and STATS VP of Product Management Blake Konrardy.
They unanimously confirmed the NFL as the “king of sports betting in the U.S.” while also indicating that college football and basketball are beginning to rival pro football in betting popularity.
In comparing college and the pros, Nylan said that the college bettor tends to be more loyal than bettors that favor the pro game, while Baumohl said that his firm’s data indicates that there is “no attrition rate” among NFL bettors, even considering the relative difficulty of profiting off of wagers on the professional games.
The power of in-play betting
O’Loughlin said that, outside the U.S. “60 to 70 percent” of wagering on American football is done in in-play fashion, and that the figure in the U.S. is already close to 50 percent.
“It’s growing very rapidly. I suspect that within two years’ time, 70 or 80 percent of all betting on NFL will be in-play,” he said.
He said the gap between pregame and in-play wagering isn’t a matter of a lack of education on the bettors’ parts, but more a need to wait for the market to evolve naturally.
“The operators that have gone live are either DFS (daily fantasy) providers who have built their own front ends, or traditional bricks-and-mortar operators who have a sportsbook live and are looking to see how to build an omnichannel proposition,” O’Loughlin said. “There’s only a handful of states live in terms of digital and online betting.”
“Everyone has to step up on modeling,” Nylan said. Kambi Group, he noted, doesn’t close its market when a penalty is called, instead updating prices in real time. “In-play needs to be live pretty much all the time.”
No European provider dominance
Baumohl said that he wasn’t concerned about European providers dominating America, adding the European market has shifted to concern itself more with sports that dominate locally, rather than those that appeal to American audiences.
There’s very little cannibalization between markets, O’Loughlin said. More options tend to bring in more customers, and “the only way to do that at scale is through automation.”
“It’s not about European or U.S.,” he said, “it’s about what the customer wants. It’s about making it easy for any consumer to bet.”
STATS’ Konrardy said bettors aren’t likely to be interested in wagering on the velocity of a particular pass in a football game, or something similarly granular. But that data exists, he said, and STATS feeds that information into its system in order to create player props and other automated markets that will appeal to players.
“What a lot of books need is an opportunity to take the data and break it into insights that can stimulate bets and encourage betting,” he said. “To really sweat it out and have an experience, instead of saying here’s a market, here’s a price.”
Advice to the league
Smiley referenced three areas in which he believed the NFL could make the games more appealing to bettors: officiating and bad calls, injury reporting, and a willingness to share betting information on the league’s broadcasts
Nylan said that bad calls aren’t a problem for bettors as long as the integrity of the game is fair. “The point of betting is to have good beats or bad beats now and then. You remember when you have a really lucky win or a really bad loss. It’s one of the things that makes sports betting fun.”
Baumohl, however, said that the NFL’s recent ruling that pass interference calls, which were implemented in the wake of the commotion over the ending of last season’s New Orleans Saints – Los Angeles Rams NFC Championship game, might create more controversy than it solves. Pass interference is subjective, he said. Whatever the call, there will still be big debates over whether it should have been overturned.
About injury reports, Kornegay said, “For us, transparency is the name of the game. Teams need to be more accountable for those types of reports.”
The NHL’s injury reports, he said, are a particular problem, given most teams’ propensity for describing injuries as upper- or lower-body injuries.
Nylan countered by saying that such a move would only serve to help the industry, not the players. He called it a bigger issue for fantasy than for sports betting.
“We’re always battling the sharps,” Kornegay said. “The general public could probably care less. The numbers that come out of Vegas are always geared toward the sharp player. That type of information is always between them and us. So the more transparency, the better for us.”
“The rules will evolve year on year,” O’Loughlin said. “As sports wagering has grown and matured, it’s become part of the commentary. Analysts now refer to where the prices are… Transparency is the word.
Kornegay mentioned that, 10 years ago, the NFL was reluctant to accept Super Bowl advertising from Las Vegas, even though that ad campaign had no focus on gambling.
“And now we have an NFL team in Las Vegas,” he said of the impending move of the Oakland Raiders in 2020.
Ultimately, the panel said, the issue is time.
“The American market is very immature,” Kornegay said. “But the operators understand the basics and the consumer. We applaud European knowledge and expertise, but it still needs to be Americanized.”
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s just going to take a little time.”
