Please, for the love of god, I am asking colleges and sportsbooks to stop doing sponsorship deals
This isn't going to end well if you don't knock it off
I get lots of press releases, most of which I ignore. Occasionally, they make me angry. Yesterday I got one of those.
US sports betting operator Tipico announced it would become the “official sports betting partner” of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference men’s and women’s basketball championships in Atlantic City, NJ. That is a real sportsbook and that is a real conference, if you are unfamiliar with either. More from Legal Sports Report here.
This is a very stupid idea for several reasons, but one of those reasons stands out.
In recent months, the scrutiny of the sports betting industry has been higher than it’s ever been, with numerous legislative and regulatory efforts looking at promotion and advertising of sports betting. We even have two states looking specifically at reining in the exact type of sponsorship Tipico just did.
So, I am begging sportsbooks (and colleges), before the optics get any worse, please knock it off. (Tipico is not the first on this front; we have seen a handful of deals involving other colleges and sportsbooks.) Please do no new deals, and if you can draw down the deals you do have, please do that, too. Whatever upside you are getting from getting access to college athletic department email databases and the eyeballs at games is offset by the potential downside of regulation beyond this niche form of advertising.
If there was ever a time for self-regulation, this is it. Do deals to provide your data to sportsbooks or an intermediary data company to your heart’s content, just stop this nonsense.
Some will point out that there has been advertising of William Hill sportsbooks at UNLV for some time. To which I say, great, but the time that stuff like this is going to fly under the radar and seem like a good idea in the wider ecosystem is over. (And Nevada is just different.) If you are waiting for the NCAA to provide some sort of leadership on this issue, you’ll likely be dead before that happens.
And yes, gambling advertising spills over into a variety of realms where people under 21 will see it. But a college setting, where the vast majority of undergrads are under 21, seems like the wrong place if we’re going to pretend to be serious about responsible gambling and not promoting gambling to those who are underage. (It’s important to note that know-your-customer protocols, at least, will be stopping underage users from betting at sportsbooks.)
And this isn’t even the only problem with this deal. You can’t bet on the MAAC tournaments or New Jersey college teams under state regulations. What an amazing UX: Sign up for Tipico at these games that you can’t bet on! I suppose the narrative is that the people at this game will want to bet on other college games and March Madness, but c’mon.
Anyway, this made me angry, and I suspect Substack is a place where I’ll let out my anger about dumb stuff in the gambling industry.
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