Last week's massive news in the legal sports betting industry – that PENN Entertainment will be partnering with ESPN to launch ESPN BET this fall – was in fact massive enough to serve as “A block” news far beyond the borders of the gambling industry.
Every TV talking head, columnist, and podcaster had a take, it seemed, on the marriage between those four uppercase letters that have long been synonymous with sports content and those other four uppercase letters that most of the mainstream media knew nothing about prior to last Tuesday's news release.
James Andrew Miller, the man who literally wrote the book on ESPN, appeared on The Press Box podcast with Bryan Curtis Monday and said he didn't think it was “that great a deal” for ESPN. He was surprised it partnered with PENN rather than DraftKings or FanDuel, whose “pedigrees are a little bit stronger” than that of the casino company that had a prior deal with Barstool Sportsbook.
“Two billion dollars is a nice number to throw out there, but it's spread out over 10 years, and they're going to have to do some dividing of that,” Miller said. “I don't want to say it sounds like a fire sale going on, but this doesn't reek of an element that's part of a grander strategic plan. This seems like a one-off, almost done in haste, and with a partner that you would never have expected them to be in business with.”