Several pro league commissioners, notably the NBA’s Adam Silver (above), were outspoken advocates for the broad legalization of sports betting before it became a reality in 2018. Now nearing the sixth anniversary of that momentous date on May 14, many of those same commissioners are acknowledging they are still struggling with the limits of their powers to manage the meteoric growth of the industry. 

Less than a month after former Raptors center Jontay Porter received a lifetime suspension for flagrant violations of league gambling rules, Silver said there are still limits to how effectively or broadly the league can govern the situation. 

“We only have so much control,” Silver said at the Associated Press Sports Editors Commissioners Conference this week in New York. “Certainly, prop bets, depending on how precise they are, lend themselves to more shenanigans than other kinds of bets. Now, some of that can be captured through various monitoring, but we also recognize that a large amount of the handle—I’m not sure of the precise percentage—but my hunch is there’s still far more illegal [betting] than legal.”

Even the legal, known level of sports betting is growing massively, reaching record levels in 2023 with a $119.8 billion handle and $10.9 billion in sportsbook revenue, according to the American Gaming Association.

“There are limits to our control, but we think there should be a regulated framework, where it’s the leagues working together with state oversight groups and the betting companies, whether or not we have partnerships with them,” Silver said. 

Baseball Issues

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently faced his own gambling-related crisis with the current gambling-related allegations surrounding Ippei Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter, that ultimately led to federal charges. Speaking at the same event as Silver, Manfred similarly said the league is “refocusing” its efforts in light of events occurring over the last several months. Among the areas of focus for MLB, as it is among many other leagues, is prop bets.

“We’ve been on prop bets from the very beginning,” Manfred said. “When we lobby in states, there’s always certain types of bets that we have lobbied against. I mean, the first pitch of the game, we really don’t want that available as a prop bet.”

Of course, a big component of the relative limitations of the leagues in this area is the lack of provisions such as subpoena power to compel sworn testimony. 

“Law enforcement officials have tools available at their disposal that are a lot more powerful than what we have,” Manfred said.

NASCAR is 12 races into its 2024 season, which is a unique one on the broadcast front. Next year, incumbent partners Fox Sports and NBC Sports will see their race counts drop when Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery come on board with NASCAR’s $7.7 billion media-rights deals beginning.

We already know the split of races—14 each for Fox and NBC, five each for Prime Video and TNT/Max—but exactly who gets which events is still being worked. Finding the right balance has become a “heavy area of focus internally,” NASCAR senior vice president of media and productions Brian Herbst tells Front Office Sports.

“The biggest piece for us on the schedule side is that each one of these partners is going to look for tentpole events, and they’re going to look for new markets,” Herbst says. Fox, of course, will still get the season-opening Daytona 500 (above) and NBC the Cup Series championship race. But what about other major events like the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte or the Chicago street race that wildly surpassed viewership expectations in its debut last summer? 

“Sometimes you’re able to deliver more to one partner versus another in one part of the year,” Herbst admits. “But you want to make sure that you do right by everybody over the course of the term of the partnership.” There’s still plenty of time to sort everything out, though. Last year, NASCAR released its 2024 schedule in October.

Netflix Bump?

Like several other leagues in the wake of continued success for Formula One’s Drive to Survive docuseries, NASCAR joined the Netflix party this year with the debut of its own show, Full Speed, that chronicled last season’s playoffs. Early data showed that 88% of people who watched Full Speed didn’t watch the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series championship race. Eventually, NASCAR will be able to find out which Netflix viewers ultimately watched Cup Series races this season.

Along with the seemingly new audience coming from the Netflix series, Herbst isn’t too worried about NASCAR’s current base making the switch to streaming for races on Amazon—more NASCAR fans currently subscribe to Prime Video than cable, he says.