Top stories around our network this week
On Monday morning’s show, the popular Barstool host Ben Mintz was blasting Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “1st of Tha Month” in honor of the first day of May. The song contains an n-bomb, and Mintz, who’s not Black, sang right along.
Mintz quickly apologized, to no avail. PENN Entertainment, which now fully owns Barstool Sportsbook, responded by firing him for the slur, much to the chagrin of Barstool founder Dave Portnoy. In a Twitter video, Portnoy said that while he understood PENN’s reasons for ridding themselves of Mintz, he “still f**king disagreed” with the decision.
In any normal week, the Portnoy-PENN kerfuffle wold be bold-type, above-the-fold news here at . But not this week – not when a college baseball coach loses his job for possibly influencing a wager placed in Ohio'on one of his team’s games.
Long story short, University of Alabama head coach Brad Bohannon scratched his best pitcher, Luke Holman, from a start shortly before the first pitch of a game against favored LSU. Around that time, U.S. Integrity reported that suspicious wagering activity had occurred at the BetMGM Sportsbook at Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark, home to Pete Rose’s former employer, Major League Baseball’s Reds.
Bohannon was fired and, unsurprisingly, it came to light that he may have been in contact with a bettor – possibly a former high school baseball coach'- at the sportsbook in question. In response to the controversy, several major mobile sportsbooks pulled the Crimson Tide out of their College World Series futures markets, showing how quickly America’s burgeoning legal market is capable of detecting and shutting down illicit activity.
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The Alabama story is likely far from over, and you can rest assured that will be closely following the developments, just as it’s done in virtually all corners of the sports betting universe, as evidenced by this week’s collection of stories from the site and its sisters in Michigan and Ohio. And for additional gambling-related information of vital and/or entertaining interest, be sure to check out the weekly Double Down column on and the podcast.
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