Sportsbooks Go On The Record About Limiting Bettors | Sports Betting News
Last week’s meeting of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission featured legal sports betting operators explaining what behaviors by bettors get their attention for potential limiting and banning. Plus, how a Michigan man made $2 million in fake deposits into an app and early thoughts on how the NFL is handling sports betting advertising and integration in 2024.
Full transcript
Matt Brown (00:15):
Hello and welcome to episode number 250 of the LSR Podcast. My name is Matt Brown, joined each and every week by the brightest minds in all of the gaming industry. It is Adam Candee here with me. If you want to follow him over on the Twitter machine, it’s Adam Candee, two E’s, no Y. If you hate yourself, you can follow me @MattBrownM2. Everything we do, absolutely free, so go ahead, hit that subscribe button. Do appreciate the support on this.
(00:37):
Adam, 250 weeks of this podcast. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything other than live for 250 weeks in a row and doing these things like this, it is pretty cool. It’s pretty special. Thanks to everybody out there who continues to tune in and wants to get the rundown in everything happening in this crazy industry. When we skip a week, I get text messages and DMs and things, like, “Hey, what happened to the pod? Did I miss it? Did it not get posted? It’s not in the feed.” It’s like sometimes Adam’s got to live a life. He’s got to go in and smell the roses, if you will. We take a week off here and there, but 250 weeks of this thing’s pretty awesome.
Adam Candee (01:20):
Oh, only when Adam has to take a week off, huh?
Matt Brown (01:23):
Well, you’ve gone without me before, buddy.
Adam Candee (01:25):
Yeah, I have definitely continued this podcast in your stead. I also like to say that over the course of getting to know you over more than 250 episodes of this show and other shows that we’ve done, on the LSR+ podcast, I could mention some things that I think you’ve done 250 consecutive weeks, but I don’t know that it’s appropriate for the actual LSR podcast right here in front of the people in the very momentous episode number 250.
Matt Brown (01:55):
I appreciate your discretion, sir, and we will just move right on with all this.
Adam Candee (02:01):
Anytime.
Matt Brown (02:01):
No, but in all honesty, it’s pretty cool, guys. We do appreciate all of you out there, tons of cool feedback through all this. We’ll hopefully be talking 250 more episodes, hopefully we’re talking at episode number 500 through all of this. Adam, we’ll talk through some general topics after this, but I do want to get into the Massachusetts discussion that was had, because this is just more interesting. I don’t know if it’s as interesting for everybody else as it is for me and you, but it’s certainly interesting. You’ve never expressly heard as to why a sportsbook says that they will limit people. You and I both know just because we’ve worked with and around and/or whatever these sports bettors and sportsbooks and things like that and all that, but it’s never really just been laid out there on the table, which I again found pretty fascinating.
Operators explaining what behaviors by bettors get their attention
Adam Candee (02:51):
Yeah, Matt, I know you have both firsthand, secondhand experience in how this all goes down, and bettors, I think, would like to hear more about it. Now, it took a lot for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission to get their licensed sportsbooks to the table to have a discussion about limiting, but that did take place last week. Although I don’t know that we heard a lot of things that we haven’t thought about before, I think what’s interesting about it is putting a public marker on saying, “This is what we do. This is when we do it. This is to whom we do it,” as something to measure against in the future. I think when you say in general, “This is the way we do things,” that yeah, there are naturally going to be people who say, “Well, I don’t fit into any of those categories, why do you limit me?”
(03:43):
We’re not going to catch all when we go through the reasons that the sportsbook gave, but let me go into a little bit of this from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission meeting. I’ll start with BetMGM. Sarah Brennan, senior director of compliance, said that BetMGM looks at wagering patterns, irregular behavior, and bonus abuse, and went on, did BetMGM, to add capitalizing on errors, syndicate betting, wagering inconsistent amounts, betting on markets with lower liquidity and higher volatility. Caesars added, they look for suspicious activity related to geolocation, anti-money laundering, bots, and account sharing. This seems to be a list of things that I don’t think would surprise us in large measure. However, you will probably find a lot of bettors who are sharper bettors who would say, “That’s not me. I’m not someone who fits into any of those categories.” I think maybe where we would get into an interesting discussion is in the definitions of the things that we just talked about.
(04:54):
When we say capitalizing on errors, well what does that ultimately mean? Does that mean that every time you put a bad line up, that person happens to be sniping it. That suggests that you are dealing with someone with the advanced kind of software that it takes to be able to find these off-market lines immediately and to take advantage of them. Or is it the kind of story you and I have told on this podcast before where we happen to be going through, we see a prop that is wildly off-market, we bet a reasonable amount on it, and then maybe that gets shut down and then they try to come back later and say, “Hey, you know what, we don’t really want your action.” I think there are going to be stories that run the gamut when it comes to these sorts of things. A good start for sure in advancing this discussion, I don’t know that there are any solutions that everyone is going to be happy with or frankly that are going to make this something that doesn’t continue in the long haul.
(05:53):
Sportsbooks are going to continue to try to operate their business in a profitable manner that delivers return for their shareholders in a manner that those who are used to old school Vegas Nevada style sportsbooks are never going to be comfortable with. It is a different enterprise, it is a different business. However, on the other side of this, you’re also going to probably see bettors with large bankrolls, bettors who are doing this for a living. They’re going to continue to try to find ways around it. They’re going to try to find beards. They’re going to try to pick off bad lines. This is just the constant cat and mouse game of how the industry works. Now, will the Massachusetts Gaming Commission ultimately at some point step in and try to put some sort of hard rules on this? Well, that’s where the rubber would truly meet the road in this discussion.
Matt Brown (06:44):
Yeah, you and I have a decent idea why people get limited, and we’ve had a very candid discussion with each other off-air, and it doesn’t really matter if we put it on the record here. I do believe a lot of people out there, Adam, were getting limited or banned or whatever is almost like a badge of honor, which I’ve always thought was really strange and really weird. I think that there are people who almost test the limit as to what they can get away with on purpose to almost want to see. It’s this weird deal where there’s like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been limited at this book,” and you want to go and you want to brag about it. As opposed to on the couple of occasions where things have happened with me where I don’t say a word about it, I actually just go to the book and say, “Hey, is there anything we can do here? What’s going on? I don’t know what happened. What can we figure out?” Yada, yada, yada.
(07:40):
You got to try sometimes to get limited, right. The stuff that they’re saying with all of this, yeah, you go in and if you’re typically a hundred dollar bettor and then all of a sudden you put down a $10,000 bet, it’s going to raise some suspicion. It’s going to raise some eyes. It’s going to make people wonder what’s going on. You and I have talked about picking off bad lines and picking off stale lines and picking off things that are obviously an error within a betting app and things like that. That isn’t the business that they want, and they’re not obligated to serve you.
(08:15):
The couple of different times where I’ve seen just super egregious errors, specifically back in the early days of when we really moved to apps and were seeing these much more often than we see now, I’ve sent text messages to guys that ran books or I’ve gone to customer service and just said like, “Hey guys, you put the minus on the wrong side. You put the plus on the wrong side of this,” and whatever, because again, what good does that do? They’re just going to void the bet anyway. It makes a weird deal going on with all of that. I think some of these people don’t really understand that it is a for-profit business, Adam, and if you go in and try to take advantage of going on over there, well, what are they supposed to do? Just sit back and take it. No, there’s going to be repercussions to going and doing that stuff.
Adam Candee (09:05):
I also think you’re coming at it from the perspective of someone who wants to do this activity long term. You want to be able to say, I am going to get my action down at sportsbook X over the course of a year, two years, five years, 10 years, and because of that, if they have the Ravens -7.5 instead of the Ravens +7.5, I’m not going to try to snipe that for five dimes and then say, “Well, you put up a bad line,” because they’re very reasonably going to say, “We’ll take that bet and then you’ll never play here again.” I think there are some folks who are much newer to this who are going to come in and say, “Wait a minute, that seems wrong. You posted it, I’m playing it. What’s the problem here? Oh, now you don’t want my business anymore.”
(09:51):
There probably is a reasonable discussion to be had about where the middle ground falls in those types of situations because we are talking about so many new customers and so many people who might be new to the activity and not really know the nuance of what you are talking about right now. I think having this discussion in Massachusetts, and frankly kudos are to be given to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission for sticking with this because the first time they tried to do it, none of their licensed active operators showed up for the discussion. You ended up with just a handful of bettors and folks representing the other side. I’m going to say in some cases maybe taking the discussion a little bit too far with no counterpoint to it.
Matt Brown (10:35):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (10:35):
Now the Massachusetts Gaming Commission came back and said to its operators, “We,” air quotes, “strongly suggest,” and those are my air quotes, “you showing up for this discussion.” By putting pressure on their licensees, their licensees showed up and had what I think everyone would say was a reasonable, measured discussion about this. Is it something that’s going to lead to concrete action? Time will tell. It doesn’t really matter at this point, but it has to start with this kind of conversation in which regulators talk to, I hate to use the both sides term because that’s so loaded in the current environment, but you talk to the books, you talk to the bettors, and then the commissioners do what the job of the regulated market is supposed to do, which is to weigh the interests of the consumer against the interests of a free market and try to come up with a reasonable solution.
Matt Brown (11:28):
We look to, and I guess I’ve just always looked at it as like there’s got to be a little bit of give and take involved in this Adam, where it’s like you want bigger market and you want bigger menus and you want all these things to be available, which used to not be. I guess if you started betting in the new era of sports betting, you probably don’t even realize that most of the markets that you’re able to bet on are not available as recently as five years ago. You couldn’t get any of these things out there, and so we want more, we want more, and then you want to complain that they’ll only let you get down whatever, a thousand bucks on it or 500 bucks on it or whatever it may be, where this was not even an option. Literally a few years ago you couldn’t.
(12:13):
Could you imagine if I came on here, Adam was like, “Hey man, let’s bet some ping pong or some jai alai. I am reading this right now off of the DraftKings, cricket and e-sports, handball, all these things that you can go bet on right now if you wanted to, not available until very, very recently. You want the menus, you want whatever, and then you want to complain or get mad if you win a whole bunch or take advantage of something that gets mispriced, that you get limited. It’s like it’s a give and take. They’re going to give you the markets and just take what they’ll give you as opposed to trying to take advantage of every single little angle that’s out there. I think that that is basically what it comes down to.
(12:55):
Some of the stuff they listed, the syndicate betting the stuff, which is basically more like the steam chasers and things like that, the guys that are taking advantage of arbitrage type things. It’s just a deal where if you do anything in excess, Adam, if you do anything in excess, it will eventually come back around. A lot of the times when you hear about these guys that get banned, it’s just because they’re just doing it all the time. Literally, it’s like there’s no discretion. It’s just like every single opportunity that comes up, it’s bam, bam, bam, bam, bam hitting every single one of them and eventually it’s just going to tip the other way.
Adam Candee (13:31):
I don’t even think you have to go as far as talking about ping pong and jai alai and the Covid 2020 sports buffet. I think you can talk more about markets you didn’t have. Your basic prop you didn’t have in the regulated market a few years ago. Think about how long it took books in Vegas to even come around to listing the very simplest of football props in the NFL for yardage, for touchdowns, for attempts and receptions. Those things didn’t exist in 2018 in the Nevada market. They had to be pushed into it by what was happening elsewhere around the country.
(14:07):
Now you talk about people who get banned, and I’ll end my thoughts with this. We talked before about Bill Krackomberger, the professional bettor, who goes on with Gill Alexander a lot and was featured in the action documentary and so on and so on, and he very passionately on Gill’s show said, “You want to ban me? You want to try to find my other accounts? You want to find my beards? I’m just going to keep finding beards. I’m just going to keep going. I’m going to keep doing this. I’m going to keep finding a way to have my outs.” It’s going to go on, this game of cat and mouse between the sportsbook and the bettor is going to go on, but that is an edge case.
Matt Brown (14:50):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (14:50):
That is something that is not the common thing. What regulators need to be looking at and regulators need to be weighing and hopefully sportsbooks need to be looking at themselves prior to regulators handing it down, is how do we do this in a way that speaks to the issue of the $10, $20, $50 bettor? In the end, that’s what consumer protections are there for. I know that 90% of revenue comes from 10% of bettors when it comes to how a sportsbook operates. When we talk about those 10% of bettors, those 10% of bettors are the Bill Kracks, are the guys you see going the loudest on Twitter, or the guys you’ve never heard of who are running millions through offshore at the same time. Those guys are going to find outs, but that’s not the perception of how the sportsbook is formed, and that’s not the purpose of why the legal market was put into place in the first place. It is to protect the average consumer who’s coming into this blind and not really knowing much about what they’re doing. That’s the whole point of this.
Matt Brown (15:51):
Yeah, I like that you closed with that. That was where I was going to go as well. It was like the problem I have here is the $50 bettor or the hundred dollars bettor that I see every now and then, I’ll post a ticket and be like, “I tried to bet $50 on this and they would give me 13,” or whatever or something like that. It’s like, guys, what are we doing here? If you’re only going to take $13 on a bet, then don’t put the bet up. Just don’t put the market up. I mean, these are things where there has to be a meeting in the middle somewhere with all this. If you’re not willing to take a $50 bet, then the market shouldn’t exist. The market shouldn’t even be up.
(16:28):
These are all things that will evolve over time, but at least the discussion as you said is happening. It’s out there. It will only be more of these. Hopefully we can get something in place where it makes the books happy, it makes the bettors happy, and yeah, there’s going to be a little bit that is uncomfortable for both sides, but maybe we can at least all high five and move on and have a good time with everything.
How a Michigan man made $2 million in fake deposits into an app
(16:51):
One other story before we just kind of riff here for a little bit, but tell us about some fake deposits.
Adam Candee (16:58):
Not a story I expected to be talking about. The Michigan Gaming Control Board released this information and I want to go with this story by Pat Evans and make sure I read you some of the facts of the story correctly because they’re kind of wild and I can’t really can’t be off on these. Eight felony charges filed in Michigan after Caesars reported to the Michigan Gaming Control Board that a man named Jeffrey Saco, S-A-C-O, made more than $2 million in fictitious deposits in April 2023. Now, this is apparently him taking advantage in some sort of vulnerability as the regulator described it, in the system to make fictitious deposits. We don’t know a whole lot more than that about what the fictitious deposits, what the origin is or how it was done.
(17:53):
Here’s the wild part, Matt, over the next 16 days after the $2 million was deposited, this was in April of 2023, so we’re finding out about something that happened quite a long time ago at this point, this man wagered $88 million over the next 16 days. I’ll do the quick math for you. That is an average of $8,800 per bet. He’s now facing a number of charges, as I mentioned, eight felonies. He eventually, after wagering all of that money, transferred $521,000 out to his personal account and then stopped using the Caesar sports betting app. He’s now facing one count of larceny, three counts of gambling activity felony violation, and four counts of using a computer to commit a crime. To reiterate, Caesar’s was the one who reported this to the regulator, and everything has evolved from there since, but $88 million wagered over 16 days. I asked Pat to go back and double check it just because it’s such a wild stat to think about.
Matt Brown (19:08):
Yeah, you can’t even wrap your brain around it. I mean, it just doesn’t even seem possible.
Adam Candee (19:15):
No.
Matt Brown (19:16):
You had to have been betting the high line. You had to have been all of that stuff out there for sure.
Adam Candee (19:22):
I mean, you certainly weren’t betting Jontay Porter props because we know that those get flagged when you bet that kind of money on it. It’s unbelievable, man.
Matt Brown (19:31):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (19:33):
It’s crazy to think in the first place that someone cooked this scheme. I think the real question, not just for Caesars but for every operator out there, is what kind of system vulnerability allows for that amount of money to be put in without, I’m not going to say without verification because that would be above my pay grade in terms of understanding what happened here, but the fact is $2 million in fictitious deposits did end up in the account and led to the wagering.
How NFL is handling sports betting advertising, integration in 2024
Matt Brown (20:01):
Adam, we are entering into week number three of the NFL, week number four of college football. I actually paid hyper attention the first couple of weeks because I wanted to see, it was something that you and I were wondering as we headed in, and I don’t see any more or any less gambling ads than I did before. I don’t think it’s too much, but that’s me. Maybe I’m just desensitized to it or I just have a little bit of a soft spot for that type of advertising. I haven’t seen any commercials that make me cringe, which actually makes me feel really good too through the first couple of weeks of the season.
(20:34):
Other little observations that you and I actually texted about too, BetMGM seems to have gone away from the “King of Sportsbooks” tagline to the “Sportsbook Born in Vegas” tagline, which I thought was kind of interesting as well. I don’t know if that is to kind of separate themselves from the born online sportsbooks that are out there, but maybe it’s a creative marketing thing on their end or whatever. Through the first few weeks of the fall sports season here, have you had any sort of real observations that stuck out to you?
Adam Candee (21:05):
It’s interesting how quickly you and I both picked up on that tagline thing with BetMGM, and you’re right, in terms of trying to draw a distinction, they just want to be able to separate themselves in some way. We talked a couple of weeks ago about who’s going to be the real number three, someone has to step out and become that number three. That brand identity certainly seems to be an attempt to pop out and make MGM the best of the legacy sports betting brands that are out there. Other observations that I would have really not particularly strong convicted takes on anything, and I think that’s a good thing.
Matt Brown (21:45):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (21:45):
I don’t think there’s anything that has popped up that has made me say, “Oh man, I wish that hadn’t been done,” or, “I don’t know why this hasn’t been done,” or anything along those lines, Matt. In a way, it’s something that speaks well for an industry that is facing a federal bill targeted at ads, and that had just lived through the Shohei Ohtani and Jontay Porter scandal situations because ultimately those things happened in the NBA, they happened in MLB, and if you’re remember this time last year, we were talking about double-digit gambling suspensions in the NFL.
Matt Brown (22:26):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (22:26):
We were talking about Jameson Williams and Nicholas Petit-Frere and a number of other players who had received some level of sanction from the NFL. It seems like the NFL made a very clear statement with the penalties that they brought down, and we know that they decided this year to move their education from online to in person. Every NFL franchise received in-person gambling education prior to the season as well. Just to add a thought on that, I know a lot of people were wringing their hands over, “How could it have only been online,” et cetera, et cetera. Well, let’s not forget here that the Covid years existed.
Matt Brown (23:06):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (23:07):
The fact that 2020 and 2021 existed. Should have been done in ’18 and ’19 in person. Reasonable discussion to be had. I also don’t believe that saying in a modern era that because education was only delivered online as opposed to in person that it’s any less effective. As we look at this year in the beginning of the season, that’s probably the, there you go, I’ve worked my way around to the strongest take I have, which is that it’s a really good thing that we’re not seeing the same level of penalty activity against players that we did last year.
Matt Brown (23:37):
Early observations for me as well, we wondered about ESPN Bet, what they may or may not do, a high profile game between the Falcons and Eagles this past week of Monday Night Football. They had a full on shrunk the screen and then pulled up Erin Kate Dolan and had her do a big kind of commercial right there in game for ESPN Bet. We were wondering if they were going to lean a little bit heavier into all of that small sample size, it’s one game, but it was again, eyeballs on Monday Night Football, as we continue to see the ratings is incredibly massive. If that does anything or not, I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe it just kind of falls on deaf ears because it’s like you tune out whenever the commercials come on or something. That was also an observation I did have where the screen shrinks down, and then Erin Kate Dolan pops up and talks about ESPN Bet.
Adam Candee (24:26):
We can talk more about the ESPN thing throughout football season because one of the things that we noted, and we have a story coming on this at LegalSportsReport.com from Sam McQuillan, is that you mentioned the Monday Night Football game. You’re featuring the Falcons from a non-legal state and the Philadelphia Eagles from a legal and competitive state, and obviously trying to appeal to those fans in particular and then nationally as well. What’s the largest market in the country? It is New York, and ESPN Bet will not be live until the earliest week four of the NFL season because their license application isn’t going to be considered until September 23. You want to read more about how that came to be, go to legalsportsreport.com, and you will see our story there about the situation involved.
(25:15):
I have seen some positive chatter online about some of the integration that is now happening with the fantasy app and the sports betting app. Some of the things that were promised are coming, probably a little later, I think, than some would’ve liked considering we know how prime week one is for acquisition of customers, especially when you’re in the situation that Penn and ESPN Bet are playing from behind. I think there’s also a case to say better late than never when it comes to you can always do smart things to try to increase the reach you have and see if they’re smart enough that people take notice and even if it isn’t a week one thing, that you’re able to make some headway later on.
Matt Brown (25:54):
One of the things I was able to notice too, Adam, just because of my setup and stuff that I have at home, and the way that commercial breaks will fall and stuff like that, is I’m able to see pretty easily the national buys as compared to the regional buys and things. You’ll go to commercial break and even though they’re not at commercial at the exact same time, if it’s a game, games are happening on all in one network, I might see Caesars across my TV anytime in a given 45 seconds to a minute whenever all the TVs go to break. I know that’s a national buy, it’s whatever, same deal, DraftKings, FanDuel, MGM. If you’re watching a Cleveland game, if you’re watching the Browns, then it’ll be off, but you might see a bet365 ad, so you can tell it’s like it’s not a national buy, it’s more of a regional buy because those aren’t coming across all the televisions, it’s coming across probably in the local section of the ad schedule and whatnot, which I thought was interesting.
(26:49):
The other thing that I also thought was interesting, and maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think through two weeks I’ve seen a Fanatics commercial. I don’t know. I mean, maybe I just missed it, but I am trying to focus on seven TVs at once, but I don’t know if I’ve seen a Fanatics commercial through two weeks.
Adam Candee (27:08):
I’m going to double-check this while we’re on air, but I do not believe they are among the official partners of the league for those purposes. Yeah, DraftKings, FanDuel, and Caesars are the tri exclusives as it was put at the time, and then it was Fox Bet, BetMGM, PointsBet, and WynnBet. I don’t know if the PointsBet name has transferred over to Fanatics for being able to do that with the league or if they’ve chosen to do that type of advertising. I would be outside of my comfort zone to tell you that much.
(27:47):
To your point, and this is just something I’m going to add for people who might be unsure about how this all goes down. Last night, my wife and I were sitting down to watch some television, happens to be a West Coast Yankees game, so I’m watching at night at a time when we might otherwise be watching a show together. I said, “Oh, you know what? I’ll put the game on the iPad and just put that on the coffee table and we can watch the highbrow entertainment of Below Deck Mediterranean that we were about to put onto the main television.” When I did, I briefly had an overlap of the Yankee game being on the big TV on MLB.tv and then the Yankee game also being on the iPad on MLB.tv, and they were running exactly synced and it went to commercial and they were two completely different commercials.
Matt Brown (28:34):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (28:34):
Now, mind you, same house, same geolocation, streaming on both, so I’m not getting a broadcast feed either way, right? Completely different ads on both of them. Realize that just because you are seeing something on your television, doesn’t mean everyone is seeing it on their television. If you are in one of those hyper-competitive markets like a Pennsylvania, it’s the same as political advertising in a way, you’re not necessarily seeing the same thing everyone else is seeing.
Matt Brown (29:00):
Yeah, it’s been cool. I’m paying a lot of attention here early on to just see, I was specifically looking out for a Fanatics one because I was just trying to figure out what their hook might be in a commercial, but I’ve not seen that quite yet. I’ll be on the lookout this weekend for that as well.
(29:21):
Adam, before we get out of here though, I do think we need to, you and I both just massive, massive sports fans and then we get the final Woj bomb dropped today that Adrian Wojnarowski, I mean, the guy just defined breaking news on the internet, right? I mean, he invented basically understanding that people wanted to know all of this stuff as fast as humanly possible, and he took it to the web to do that and pave the way for guys like Schefter and all this Shams and all these guys that have come along who are really great at it as well, decides today that he’s going to retire from ESPN and go over to be the general manager over at St. Bonaventure actually, and just his alma mater.
(30:06):
I thought it was really cool in the statement that he put out Adam, that kind of resonated to me of we talk about athletes and fighters and whatever hanging on too long and not being able to give it up. He said, “I grew up the son of a factory worker two miles from ESPN’s campus and only ever dreamed of making a living as a sports writer. Thirty-seven years ago, the Hartford Courant gave me my first byline, and I never stopped chasing the thrill of it all. The craft transformed my life, but I’ve decided to retire from ESPN and the news industry. I understand the commitment required in my role, and it’s an investment that I’m no longer driven to make. Time isn’t an endless supply, and I want to spend mine in ways that are more personally meaningful.” He goes on to thank everyone that helped him in his career and et cetera and stuff like that, but the fact that this guy has one, the guts because he’s leaving who knows how much money on the table, I mean.
Adam Candee (31:02):
$7 million estimated per year.
Matt Brown (31:03):
Yeah, I mean, who knows how much money on the table with all this, but that he is able to sit there and look at himself in the mirror, Adam, and say, “I don’t have the fire inside of me to do this at the level that I want to do it at, and I’m not going to disrespect this job, this thing that I’ve created, all of this, what is expected of me, and I would rather leave it and go do something else than take it down a notch and be the guy that gets washed up and can’t do the stuff anymore.” I was blown away by that the statement that he actually just said, “I don’t have the drive to do this anymore.” I’m like extra, extra props to you to be able to understand that and be able to walk away.
Adam Candee (31:46):
You and I did not coordinate this part of the broadcast prior. This is not on our rundown, and I will tell you it’s the exact same line that caught my attention about I’m not willing to put in the work anymore. It just goes to show a couple of things. First of all, you have to understand what becoming Adrian Wojnarowski or Adam Schefter is. You essentially are giving up your life. You are saying, “I’m going to be on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You can text me at three in the morning and I will wake up and tweet about it. I am a conduit of information. I’m less a reporter. I am more an information merchant and information broker.”
(32:25):
To relate this back, Matt, to what we do here on the LSR podcast, we had a lot of discussion three or four years ago about will we see one of the Schefter, Wojnarowski class decide to go to a sportsbook and what ethical problems that could pose? We didn’t actually see that happen. We do have the Shams partnering with FanDuel, which caused its own heartburn around the draft, but we really didn’t see that masse. I think the easy play for anyone in Woj or Schefter’s position would be to say, “Yeah, OK, ESPN’s paying me,” and again, these are reported figures, “7 million a year for Woj, 9 million a year for Schefter.” You could walk over to any of the major sportsbooks. I mean, if you believe the reports of what Pat McAfee was getting paid by FanDuel prior to him going and doing the ESPN thing again, you would say he could have easily, Wojnarowski, walked into any of those sportsbooks and said, “Give me the McAfee deal,” and he didn’t.
Matt Brown (33:29):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (33:29):
He didn’t just cash out and take the money and say, “OK, well, this is how I’m going to bring it on home.” I will play my own devil’s advocate just a little bit and say when you’ve made the kind of money that Adrian Wojnarowski has in his career, it does give you a little bit of a fallback to be able to say, “OK, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t have the fire for it, and by the way, I’ve been paid multiple millions of dollars for the last however many years, and I can rest on that.” At the same time, just as people who have been tangentially related to the sports media industry for a long time, you understand what it takes to become someone who operates at that level and takes on the pressure and the willingness to say to your family, “This is who I am,” and they have to figure out a way to live with it, that there’s a true sacrifice involved in there that money doesn’t entirely make up for, and he’s choosing the other side of it now.
Matt Brown (34:27):
Yeah, I mean, hats off to him. I mean, like I said, just the pioneer of taking this game to the web. You and I work primarily on the web with the stuff that we do and all this. When he went over to Yahoo, it was a game-changing deal. He’s like, “I’m going to do everything here. It’s going to live here. It’s going to live on the web. We’re going to break the news here. We’re going to break the news on Twitter. This is how this is going to go.” You hear other people in the sport talk about him and all the people that know him, and all you hear is just unbelievably awesome things. I have not heard a bad word about Woj from anyone in the public. Good on him. Hope he enjoys the general manager thing.
(35:11):
By the way, did you ever think you’d live to a day when a college would need a general manager to deal with the NIL stuff and deal with all the others? That’s where we’re at now. Hell man, sign me up, man. I’ll be the GM at LSU or something like, come on, man, come give me the cash. I’ll do it for cheaper than Woj will, I promise you.
Adam Candee (35:27):
I just love that we’re having an out-and-out acknowledgement of what it takes to operate a major program these days. You do have to have someone who can just handle the business side of an individual program, because theoretically, that’s the athletic director for the entire department, but sometimes football and basketball are operating on a different level.
Matt Brown (35:46):
So great, the general manager. Oh man, what a gig. What a gig. Adam, you and company have other stories overall in LegalSportsReport.com. We’ll let you guys go over there, check those out. Please go in, take in all the words that Adam and team do over there. They listen, they read, they summarize, so that you don’t have to. For Adam. I am Matt. Talk to you guys next week.