An award-winning ESPN producer resigned after 24 years over the network’s embrace of sports betting: “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.”
The world has embraced decadence. Things that were once considered distasteful or brutish have become mainstream.
UFC is one example. Sports betting another.
this encourages rigging of sports game, if its not already rigged.
Between this and scams entire generations of wealth are being siphoned off.
We’re going to look at the normalization of gambling, especially online, as a huge mistake.
maybe it will finally get fewer eople to care about sports
Fastest growing addiction in America.
People losing everything they have.
I absolutely loath how ingrained it has become in sports. They have specific segments during half times about betting odds and there are banners everywhere for the various betting site.
To a lesser extent, I also hate what fantasy sports have done for various sports as well, mostly NFL. I don’t think it’s as bad as explicit gambling, but I just dgaf about anyone’s fantasy scores, teams, or whatever. That they take time out to cover that shit is annoying and is amongst the various reasons I no longer watch the NFL after 30 years of watching the Packers religiously. The product as a whole is just not enjoyable anymore.
I didn’t mind playing FF, but the heartbreak it provided each week wore me down over 20yrs. Won a couple of championships, but I also had rookie FF players win championships. Lots of luck involved. T’was a casual league, but one guy kept treating it like bloodsport so I decided to stop managing a couple years ago. With the inundation of gambling in the NFL I was so disgusted I gave it up altogether. I might tune in if someone else wants to but I’ve gained soooo much time back by not watching game after game. My fav team is even currently doing well, but I don’t really have any fucks to give either way. The owners have ruined the product through greed and avarice. Very apropo for this timeline.
I watched my first baseball game in a few years the other night. Had to turn it off. Between the draft kings, garbage political ads, AI slop pushing, viagra dick pills, and DEPARTMENT OF WAR commercials… Ugh it’s so sad. Our society is so fucked. If only we cared about education, healthcare, infrastructure, childhood development, etc the same. So much wasted resources, brain power, and ambition.
Makes me so sad. My kid is being raised in a hell hole. Doing what I can to protect her but good gravy I don’t even see a way out anymore. Sports are something I’ve all but given up on, and those commercial breaks during the guardians game reminded me why.
Pretty much nailed in. I’ve been away for probably 4 years now and honestly I have no interest in the game at all. I was at a bar with friends a few years ago when some of their friends were doing a fantasy draft and was wearing a pair of Packers shorts. A Bears fan came up and started giving me some gruff and I just told him I hadn’t been following the NFL anymore so I was current on events. He just kept trying to give me shit, so I went ahead and returned the favour as a Packers fan to a Bears fan. Afterwards I was telling my buddy that while I don’t watch or care anymore, I will always take the opportunity to dunk on the Bears.
I used to go to at least one game at Lambeau every year for about a decade. I do miss the excitement of being at a live game with 70k other people, but I just don’t have any desire to go to another. I would absolutely tag along for the tailgate though and hold down the fort as everyone else went in.
I could have written this comment. I’m sorry we went through this.
It’s not making sports better that’s for sure.
I’m not opposed to sports betting on its own, but I am absolutely appalled at how much it’s bastardized everything.
It’s one thing if it’s in small doses and you can sort of just ignore it. It’s another thing when EVERY FUCKING SITE AND PLATFORM has gambling odds, gambling ads, gambling sponsors. Etc. You can’t blink without these predators trying to siphon money from people.
If I were a recovering gambling addict and sports fan id be heartbroken right now.
We can thank Trump’s Supreme Court for this. They overturned a previous ruling with a case in 2018 and now here we are.
What’s extremely scary about online sportsbetting is how they game the user into falling further into the spiral with dark patterns. I can’t see that anyone with a slightly addictive personality could possibly not get completely railroaded into massive debt.
This shit has to be addressed, and soon.
It ain’t even just sport anymore. Election coverage on CNN includes Kalshi odds like it’s a fucking scientific study. Gambling is everywhere online too? Games, livestreams. Crypto casinos where they can get kids hooked.
Some of the initial friction between live streamers with the online left was when “gamba” became prevalent and they started calling it out.
It used to be illegal to have online poker like 25 years ago and now there are DraftKings banners in metro train stations and LeBron got $15mil annually to stump for Polymarket. What are we even doing?
The fucking prediction market odds during the news is insane, as if it has any bearing on reality.
It’s fucking back to the future 2…
Yeah I’m not some pearl-clutching puritan by any means, but all of this deeply embedded gambling (and “prediction market” bullshit) is not going to end well. The scandals, fixes, and chicanery will be off the charts and it’ll ruin sports.
I had a friend once who got a call from a sports bettor trying to sell their picks and asked him how much he bet on football a season. He said about $500. The guy laughed and hung up
I knew a guy when I was in big tech that’d lost $40K plus in draft kings per year.
Fucking insane what people pour into these.
Good for her. It’s incredibly difficult to walk away from a job like that and a job that she’s had for so long.
So it came as a shock to many people, including Nicole Noren, a longtime ESPN producer, when ESPN licensed its name to a gambling app in 2023. By then, ESPN, like so many sports outlets, was promoting betting at virtually every opportunity; now it would encourage fans to use ESPN Bet. The app, which stood to generate a billion and a half dollars for the network over ten years, proved to be an embarrassing flop. But it was promptly replaced by a partnership with DraftKings, the sports gambling giant. These days, DraftKings ads blanket ESPN coverage, and this past March the companies enabled customers to link their ESPN and DraftKings accounts. It’s a partnership, a press release explained, “that goes beyond a traditional marketing arrangement, redefining how fans engage with sports.”
For Noren, ESPN Bet was the last straw. “I was out,” she told me. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.” ESPN wasn’t an easy place to leave. Noren had worked there for twenty-four years, winning Emmy, Murrow, and Peabody awards, mainly for her work on Outside the Lines, the investigative newsmagazine. She was entrusted with some of the network’s most serious and sensitive reporting, involving topics such as gender-based violence, the mental health of college students, and concussions. With the NFL back in full swing—and ESPN preparing to carry its first-ever Super Bowl, in February—Noren spoke publicly for the first time about her own family’s experience with compulsive gambling. “Addiction dictated every part of our life,” she said. “It’s very, very personal to me.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It needs to be heavily regulated. No advertising, no enticements, no political donations, public awareness campaigns, levies to pay for social programs.
