This league does NOT condone gambling

The numbers are in, and Nevada's legal sports betting operations struck gold with this year's Super Bowl. From yahoo.com:

.S. football fans bet a record $81.2 million in Nevada on the Feb. 1 Super Bowl, and casinos won a hefty $12.4 million, state gambling regulators reported on Wednesday.
Betting on the championship game between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers, won by the Patriots 32-to-29, jumped 13 percent from $71.7 million a year ago, the Nevada Gaming Control Board said.

Gamblers set the previous record of $77.3 million in 1998, but that year Nevada casinos eked out a collective profit of only $472,033, while this year the house won a hefty 15.3 percent of all wagered bets, one of the highest percentages in the last decade.

To quote Bruce Wayne (I remember this from the episode of the old TV show where one of the villains hooked him and Robin up to some kind of killer slot machine. What do you know, he got out in the next episode,) "I'm not a gambling man." But if I was, I had a feeling that while the Panthers might not win, they wouldn't lose by a touchdown. So I feel kind of vindicated. Still, it's funny that over $80 million was bet legally in Las Vegas, and no one questions the integrity of the game. But to advertise Las Vegas during the game, that would completely shatter the league's image.

I agree with Jim Rome that the halftime fiasco, planned or not, is hardly more offensive than flatulent horses, groin-biting dogs, or four hour erections. The NFL approved commercials with all of these gems. Rome might not have much room to talk about commercial content. After all, his show did once have spots for "Bang" and the current commercial promising that buyers can "get, and keep an erection, for 45 minutes, even a hour," runs one or twenty times an hour. But he's got a point that they haven't set the bar too high, and are in no position to take the moral high road on anyone.

So get a load of this, from the LVRJ:

Upset by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's covert placement of advertisements touting local tourism within Sunday's telecast of its annual championship game, the National Football League on Tuesday said it's taking steps to permanently ban similar ads from airing during future game telecasts.

"Those ads are a violation of our policies," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said by telephone from the league's headquarters on New York's Park Avenue.

"It shouldn't have happened in the first place, and we certainly don't want it to happen again."

For the past two years, Las Vegas-based advertising agency R&R Partners, which handles the convention authority's account, tried to buy in-game national advertising time directly from the Super Bowl's host network.

Both times, the NFL stepped in and killed those efforts, citing its long-standing policy of rejecting gaming-related ad content.

This year, however, R&R circumvented the league's objections by purchasing ad spots directly from CBS affiliates in five of the top seven U.S. media markets. As a result, viewers in or around Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco were shown Las Vegas ads during Sunday's game just as they were exposed to national ads that included Anheuser-Busch's flatulent horse and Frito-Lay's wrestling grandparents.

R&R estimates about 20 percent of the Super Bowl's estimated 89.6 million viewers watched Sunday's pro-Vegas spots, which cost $1.5 million. And most of those viewers reside within areas that already supply a large number of local tourists.

FULL STORY

Unbelievable. The league's problems aren't its own standards, but advertisements that don't mention gambling encouraging people to visit Las Vegas. It's amazing that a league that has been so pioneering in American sports entertainment can also be so reactionary.

If they asked me, I'd suggest that R & R buy time during "Playmakers," just to get over on the league a little.
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Radio update: If you live in the Las Vegas area and want to hear me talking about something, check out KNPR 89.7 this Friday. They'll be airing a commentary I did on the Castaways closure sometime during the day. You can also find it at www.knpr.org.
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posted by Dave at 3:05 PM

This league does NOT condone gambling

No Fun League