ESPN Announces New Gambling Show Despite Disney's Anti-Gambling History - RotoGrinders
ESPN announced on Friday a new gambling-centric program titled Daily Wager that’s heavy on news, dicussion and anaysis, with graphics showing betting lines, news and information, first reported by Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand on Friday. The ESPN betting analyst and Behind the Bets podcast host, Doug Kezirian, will lead the show, which is scheduled to air daily from 6:00-7:00pm ET on ESPN News starting March 11.
Other on-air talent will include college football gurus “Stanford” Steve Coughlin and Chris “The Bear” Fallica, ESPN Chalk reporter David Purdum, and radio personality and sideline reporter Anita Marks. The show won’t only be tailored to gamblers, said ESPN executive Norby Williamson.
“This is not a backroom, roll-up-your-sleeves, insider gambling show — our goal is to serve people that watch sports who may or may not gamble on games,” Williams explained.
This is ESPN’s first network show focused on sports betting, though Action Network’s I’ll Take That Bet, hosted by former ESPN employee, Chad Millman, currently airs on ESPN+.
Aside from ESPN+ and multiple podcasts, ESPN has been slower to embrace sports betting than rival sports network, Fox Sports. Fox Sports introduced ‘Lock it In,’ featuring a daily hour-long betting panel on FS1, at the beginning of last football season.
Meanwhile, ESPN’s parent company, The Walt Disney Company, joined the Seminole Tribe of Florida to promote an anti-gambling measure in Florida last fall.
Disney contributed $20 million dollars toward the passage of Amendment 3, which appeared on the Nov. 2018 ballot and passed with 71.5 percent of votes in favor. The amendment was to “Provide voters, through citizen-initiated ballot measures, with the exclusive right to decide whether to authorize casino gambling in Florida,” per Ballotpedia, as opposed to giving the state legislature authority to do so.
As the Miami Herald reports, the amendment is thought to make the process of expanding gambling in Florida more difficult, meaning it might be a long time before legalized sports betting sees the light of day in the Sunshine State. Home to the company’s flagship Walt Disney World, fewer dollars spent in Florida on gambling means more on entertainment for the resort, the thinking goes.
It will be interesting to see how ESPN juggles creating a show for both the bettor and the average sports fan, as Williams suggests.
More interesting, though, is where ESPN and Disney go from here if the show is a success. Will Daily Wager move to ESPN or ESPN2 and be more accessible to viewers, like Fox Sports’ ‘Lock it In’? And might we see popular ESPN personality Scott Van Pelt on the show? We put Yes at -300.