NCAA executive Oliver Luck has reminded people in Dallas that any athlete found to be gambling on college sports (including daily fantasy games such as Draft Kings) will automatically lose a year of eligibility, according to Mississippi State athletic director Scott Stricklin. Fantasy sports have exploded since then, with FanDuel and DraftKings, the leading daily fantasy sites, awarding more than $3 billion in prizes in 2015. The two Android apps approved by Google are fantasy sports market leaders DraftKings and FanDuel, now online as of the past several days.
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On the eve of the National Football League season, Google has turned an abrupt about face on its fantasy sports policy.
1, Fantasy sports is sports betting.
In last week’s podcast I highlighted Julian Edelman, Rob Gronkowski, and Tom Brady as viable starts for the Patriots, with Robert Woods as the sneaky pick for the Bills. However, there is “carve out” language that exempts fantasy sports, online state lotteries and horse racing.
In this Wednesday, September 9, 2015, photo, Devlin D’Zmura, a tending news manager at DraftKings, a daily fantasy sports company, works on his laptop at the company’s offices in Boston.
The aforementioned sites are literally everywhere; in the same magazines where collegiate superstars grace the covers; in sports event programs; streaming across televisions or devices during broadcasts; and on nearly every sports site we visit, there is no avoiding them.
The courts may have to decide the legality of its sports-for-money website, a gaming expert says.
“Because it’s a new area, there’s no real law that fantasy sports is or isn’t legal, it’s just that the way the Louisiana statutes are written, it’s fairly negative against contests in general”, Midland said.
But what bothers me more is that daily fantasy sports have crept into college athletics.
This is an apparent direct turnaround from Google’s position of the last two years: in August 2013, Google Play restricted all gambling apps including any falling under the category of so-called “games of skill” if they offered “prizes of cash or other value”.
Obviously, gambling is a big no-no for athletes on any level.
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The booming DFS sub-industry has caused more than a dozen states to take a look at the activity and its legality, with the latest being Massachusetts, where DraftKings is based. Sports wagering is legal in four states, although Nevada is the only state with full-scale race- and sportsbooks. Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball, which owns a small equity stake in DraftKings, has said he believes that daily fantasy is not a form of sports gambling.
