Twice weekly, we’ll comb through as many articles, tweets and podcasts as we can find related to the world of sports betting and daily fantasy sports, and publish the good stuff here.
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The Oakland Raiders will be moving to Las Vegas.
The Raiders are leaving Oakland again, this time for the neon lights of Las Vegas.
In a decision that would have been hard to fathom not so long ago, NFL owners voted Monday at the Annual League Meeting to approve the Raiders’ proposal to relocate to Las Vegas.
The decision comes after years of fruitless efforts by Raiders owner Mark Davis to build a viable stadium in Oakland. The failure to do so, which goes back to Davis’ late father Al Davis’ stewardship of the team, led to exploring stadium options in Los Angeles and eventually Las Vegas, where Nevada lawmakers approved $750 million in public funding for a new stadium. The Autumn Wind will no longer blow through Raiders games as the team is expected to move into a planned $1.7 billion domed stadium in Las Vegas.
ESPN Chalk took a look at the NFL’s evolving stance on sports betting.
Things have changed markedly in five years for Goodell. With Monday’s vote, we now have the Las Vegas Raiders, a stunning relocation of a storied franchise that will test the league’s longstanding avoid-at-all-costs approach to Nevada, home to the nation’s largest legal sports-betting market.
To examine the NFL’s decades-long adversarial public relationship with sports betting, ESPN Chalk curated a collection of public comments, deposition testimony and stated policy from current and past commissioners and NFL executives, beginning with then-commissioner Pete Rozelle in the 1960s.
The NFL will also lift their ban preventing referees and on-field officials from being in Las Vegas.
To guard against even the appearance of a conflict, the league has for decades prohibited its officials from visiting Las Vegas at any point during the season — with the exception of personal emergencies or mandatory meetings for their non-NFL jobs. They are allowed to visit in the offseason, provided they inform the NFL office. But even then, they are barred from sportsbooks.
Obviously, the in-season ban will be lifted if the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas is approved, multiple people familiar with the situation said Sunday. But as the league opened its 2017 owners meetings, the current policy was a reminder that Vegas-style gambling remains an important sub-plot despite the NFL’s clear evolution on the issue.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal published an article that showed how one of the first sports betting mutual funds in the United States is doing.
With less than two weeks to the new year, Connelly lost 10 of his next 13 bets, wiping away all the gains and more. He finished the year down 23 percent compared with a 13 percent gain for the Dow Jones.
“It has been brutal to say the least, and I am disappointed I could not achieve the results I hoped for,’’ Connelly said by phone. “Vacation will be slim this year.’’
His fund, which was registered a year ago, is down 4 percent in 2017 as of Thursday.
A Mississippi man was fined $5,000 for his role in an illegal sports betting operation.
The investigation revealed a secret operation with password-protected access to several sports books and several ways of moving money, court documents show. It also revealed a network of agents and others to oversee groups of gamblers.
Schmitt’s role in the conspiracy began in September 2009 and continued through May 2014, when he cashed a $2,370 check related to the conspiracy.