Remember the days when the NCAA was most concerned about peripheral elements for an athlete to be agents and gamblers offering money to shave points?
In this day and age of instant internet updates and fantasy leagues galore, the NCAA now has another headache in addition to its concerns of the popular mention of point spreads before, during and after televised games.
It’s not only about who has direct contact with the athletes now. It’s about what the athletes might do on their own on the Internet visiting daily sports fantasy sites such as FanDuel.com or DraftKings.com. Yahoo and CBS Sports have also recently cashed in on the daily fantasy sports craze.
The NCAA, university executives and conference commissioners are helpless against this wave of activity that is deemed to be illegal for student-athletes to use them.
According to NCAA vice president of regulatory affairs Oliver Luck, an athlete getting caught using either FanDuel or DraftKings for college sports will cost that athlete a year of eligibility. How the NCAA will catch the offender is another question. Athletes can have friends who play for them. The threat is mostly to make aware that the NCAA does not condone football players counting on other athletes to make money, which cripples the integrity of the sport, especially if that athlete is playing the other.
Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott has sent letters to both FanDuel and DraftKings requesting them to stop college daily fantasy leagues. It was first reported the Pac-12 has banned ads from both companies to be aired on its network, but Scott later clarified that the Pac-12 Networks will accept ads from them as long as the ads do not promote the college game.
Scott’s hedging shows how much this is a Catch-22 situation: Conference administrators do not like the perils of college football involved with such sites but they sure don’t mind the advertising dollars.
ESPN has ended DraftKings sponsored segments although the network continues to run ads for FanDuel and DraftKings. The move to end the sponsored segments came a day after the New York Times reported that a DraftKings employee admitted to inadvertently releasing data prior to the slate of Week 3 NFL games, prompting claims that the employee may have used insider information to win a $350,000 prize at FanDuel.
This kind of scandal is what the NCAA wants to bring daily fantasy sports under the microscope. Further deterioration and heighten awareness of potential improprieties will only strengthen the stand of college administrators with athletes against the danger of these daily fantasy sports Web sites.
Government officials are now becoming involved as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, called on the panel to examine “whether permitting a multibillion-dollar industry to police itself serves the best interests of the American people.” Sen. Robert Menendez and Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., both Democrats of New Jersey, asked the Federal Trade Commission to implement safeguards to ensure a fair playing field.
“The federal government has determined, for the moment, that it’s not gambling,” Scott told USA Today. “But the NCAA has taken a position that we can set the rules and we don’t support it. So that’s where we’ve drawn the line.”
The Nevada Gaming Control Board on Thursday dealt another blow to daily fantasy sports operators, ruling that activity on sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings constitutes gambling. The Gaming Control Board wrote that because daily fantasy sports involves “wagering on the collective performance of individuals participating in sporting events,” daily fantasy sites must obtain licensing from the Nevada Gaming Commission to continue operating.
FanDuel and DraftKings can obtain a license but doing so they would admit that daily fantasy sports are a form of gambling. Nevada will become the 11th state in which at least one of the major daily fantasy Web sites is banned.
The college players that are listed at FanDuel and DraftKings each have a salary amount posted by their name that is subtracted from a contestant’s available pool when a player is selected. Each position slot must be filled like a coach filling out a starting lineup.
Two problems here that eat at people like Larry Scott: College sports are about amateurism and fans are making money off of players who are not getting paid for what they do. College football players do not have salaries like those in the NFL, but these Web sites portray that differently – as a fantasy of course – and that takes away from what administrators say is the purity of the sport.
Sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings cannot be policed, as of now, because they are considered as fantasy sites, not gambling sites, although both fantasy and gambling entail winnings based on performance.
Nothing is bound to change until the federal government gets involved in more detail and sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings are deemed illegal. Don’t expect these companies to remove the chance to pick college players any time soon because that will be an admission of doing something wrong.
Money is the bottom line, like it or not, and nobody is losing sleep over this.
The NCAA and conference officials are better off now only voicing their displeasure but still pocketing advertising dollars while hoping the athletes use their computers only for their class assignments.
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