Delaware Legislature Bets on Sports Gambling
Would be only state East of the Mississippi to allow sports betting
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Sports books may make Wilmington a hot new destination for tourism.
Delaware's bid to become the only state on the Eastern Seaboard with legal sports gambling needs only a signature from Governor Jack Markell to become reality. Markell has promised to sign the bill that the state Senate approved with a 17-2 vote on Tuesday.
Delaware is looking to gambling as a way to help fill a $755 million budget shortfall, and they anticipate that it could generate $50 million annually for the state's coffers. The state briefly had a football lottery, essentially a parlay bet on all football games played on a given day, in 1976 but abandoned it after it didn't prove financially successful.
There are still questions about what form the gambling will take, Delaware's constitution outlaws gambling except in lotteries, and those answers will come in court. That's where the NFL comes in. The league has filed a brief in Delaware's Supereme Court asking that the law be invalidated because "the integrity" of the games will be threatened.
It's funny how the NFL always gets upset about gambling on their games while simultaneously bending over backwards to make their game as appealing as possible to gamblers. You needn't look any further than the injury report that teams release every week for evidence of their complicity with gambling. The league mandates that those reports are accurate representations of the players' health, information which needs to be public for no reason other than giving bettors as much information as possible.
If the law goes through, the league has indicated a willingness to sue Delaware to make them stop. They tried the same thing in 1976, and it didn't go too well. From Judge Walter K. Stapleton's ruling:
I do find, however, that the existence of gambling on NFL games, unaccompanied by any confusion with respect to sponsorship, has not injured the NFL and there is no reason to believe it will do so in the future. The record shows that extensive gambling on NFL games has existed for many years and that this fact of common public knowledge has not injured plaintiffs or their reputation.
If anything, gambling on NFL games has burnished the league's reputation, or at least it's prime position on the nation's sports landscape. The only actual problem the NFL could have with this law is that they won't see any of the revenue generated by wagering on their games.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.
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Posted Thursday, Jul 16, 2009 - 7:36 PM EST
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