On Tuesday, the network made a major announcement.
Soon enough, entire shows dedicated to gambling and fantasy popped up all over sports networks, including ESPN. In recent years, sports leagues and networks gave in and started to embrace gambling, particularly with the exploding popularity of daily fantasy and gambling sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. At the same time, the dirty little secret was sports leagues and networks knew a chunk of their popularity was because people had money on games. We’ve always known that gambling has been a significant reason behind the popularity of sports, but aside from the occasional mentioning of gambling odds (or a wink-wink acknowledgement of the point spread late in games), networks kept gambling at an arm’s length. Once upon a time, sports leagues and most sports networks were wary of getting too cozy with the gambling aspect of sports.
