The reward of a functioning society
When people started realizing the COVID-19 pandemic might be serious in March, sports shut down. The NBA halted its season, NCAA March Madness was cancelled outright, the NHL paused its season, so on and so forth. The NBA and NHL are back, playing their “bubbles,” and Major League Baseball has embarked upon a 60-game, coronavirus-plagued season, but one of the biggest sports questions surrounds football. There has not really been much said about what the NFL season – if any – will look like, but things have really come to a head this week in college football, as both the Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences announced on Tuesday that they have postponed their seasons. As a result, sportsbooks have pulled betting lines off their boards as they try to figure out what is going on.
It did not start with the Big Ten and Pac-12, though they certainly hold the most weight so far. Both conferences – made up of such preeminent football programs as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, UCLA, USC, and Oregon – have all but cancelled their fall sports. They hope to bring them back in the spring, but who knows if that will be possible.
Before those two, the Mountain West, Ivy League, and Mid-American Conference (MAC) called off football, as did a couple individual schools, Old Dominion and Connecticut.
The ACC and SEC are still moving forward with football and the other Power 5 conference, the Big 12, seems to fall somewhere in between being gung-ho and postponing.
Sportsbooks thrown for a loop
The way sportsbooks are handling things right now varies, but as Jeff Davis, director of trading for Caesars Sportsbook, told ESPN, “When weird stuff happens, like all of this, you can’t plan for it. ome of this is going to be handled on a case-by-case situation.”
Caesars, for example, will still keep any championship and Heisman Trophy futures live as long as there is a winner. Some are just playing a waiting game right now, not wanting to make any firm decisions until more dominoes, if any, fall.
“We would refund the teams that don’t play,” Jeff Stoneback, BetMGM’s director of trading in Nevada, told ESPN. “If you’ve got teams that are in there now and they play the season and a champion is declared, we’d pay off on that. If you’ve got LSU (an SEC team) and they’re declared the winner, you’d get paid. If you have USC, we’ll give you a refund.”
Significant money at risk
As football is the most popular sport on which to bet in the United States, the loss of games will be a big hit to sportsbooks. In Nevada, college and NFL football betting revenue is lumped together, but GCB senior research analyst Michael Lawton told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that it’s about 60/40 NFL to college. With $122.4 million in profit from football wagers statewide last year, that equates to almost $50 million in lost profits if college football is cancelled completely.
“As long as we got college football in the spring,” Westgate sportsbook director John Murray told the Review-Journal, “theoretically we’d get our handle back in the spring. That wouldn’t be disastrous.”