The Pros And Cons Of Fantasy Sports

After watching ESPN’s 30 for 30, Broke, my mind starting pondering this question of why and how so many professional athletes are blowing through the millions they make while playing their specific sport? It is amazing that someone can spend that much money so quickly. What are they buying and who are they buying things for? Where are they spending it? Where do they go wrong? When did this trend start and will it continue in the future? What are the league officials doing in order to prevent this tragedy from happening? These are some of the questions I will try to answer throughout this paper.

Have you ever participated in a paid fantasy sports league? If so, you have participated in a form of gambling. The definition of gambling is “to play games for a chance of money”, which by playing in a paid fantasy sports league people are doing so. Today I will argue the topic of considering fantasy sports a form of gambling, and that teenagers should not partake in paid leagues if gambling remains illegal for anyone under 21. One out of every five sports fan has participated in a paid fantasy sports league in the last five years. So therefore one in five sports fans has participated in a form of gambling even though some deny it. Paid fantasy sports leagues are a form of gambling therefore they should diminish.

Things like Direct TV's Super Fan package will be beneficial to a fantasy football player who has three different games to watch, all being aired at the same time. Sportsline has a league that plays for money called "Gridiron Guru League." This particular league's players are made up of 14 celebrities from CBS announcers, Jim Nanta, Phil Simms, Boomer Esiason, Bonnie Bernstein, Dan Marino, Gus Johnson, Randy Cross, Brent Jones, Steve Tasker, Steve Cohen, Tommy Tighe, and Clark Judge (WWW.boston.com, 2006). This is now taking the form of celeberty fantasy football, the endless possablilities for the media to partake in this fantasy world. Sports Center is trying to lanch a new talk show specifically dealing with fantasy football updates, player stats, and so forth. Already ESPN Boston radio has a Wednesday night fantasy show with Mike Antonellis and Bob Halloran. "On the newstands, publications about fantasy outnumbered the traditional previews about the upcoming season" (Wendel, 2004, How Fantasy games, 11).

I would like to start off by explaining what fantasy football is and how it works. Fantasy football is all about constructing a virtual team made up of NFL players. At the start of any football season, everyone who want to be in the fantasy league gets together to have a draft. These team owners proceed to pick NFL players that they want for their team. Depending on what league someone is in determines what type of players an owner can put on their team. Typically a starting team will consist of one quarterback, a couple receivers and running backs, a kicker, a tight end, and a team defense. The owner with the first pick starts, this is usually the manager of the league. After he picks a player from the NFL, the next owner will pick a player and it goes down the line until all the owners have one player on their team. To make this process fair the owner with the last pick gets the first pick in the second round of the draft and then it will go up the line to the owner who had the first pick, and after the owner with

With how many sporting events that there are in this country, it is common to see fans that love multiple games. Professional sports are typically favored by most followers, but there is a clear deficiency that hurts the leagues. Professional sports are exhilarating if one is a fan of a playoff team or especially a team that wins championships on a regular basis. While this is great for traditional powerhouses and teams with endless amounts of money, the majority of teams in these leagues serve as punching bags for years or even multiple decades. There is a fine line between these teams and other organizations that struggle just to make financial ends meet. Teams in financial

DraftKings and FanDuel should not be allowed to operate because it is not a game of skill. The two companies both claim that their daily fantasy sport league games are of skill, while others such as the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, believes it is a game of chance. In a statement to The New York Times, FanDuel said

Today, it is FanDuel and DraftKings who take advantage of the slow moving government and the unregulated system of daily fantasy sports. In an interview with Matt King, CFO of FanDuel, Walt Bogdanich, investigative journalist, states, “So you don't view what you do here at FanDuel as gambling,” and instantaneously King disagreed by saying, “No … Every time that you talk to our users, what comes through loud and clear is the fact that we're an entertainment product (The Fantasy Sports Gamble).” Basically, Bogdanich asks if King thinks FanDuel is gambling and he spontaneously disagrees that their product was just for the purpose of entertainment. Bogdanich goes on to ask if King believes that their product should be regulated, but King avoids answering with yes or no by saying that their product is all about entertainment value. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t want to sound like someone who despises fantasy sports, but I just hate the fact that he’s only saying things that his lawyer allowed to him to

Have you ever dreamed of what it would be like to own your own professional fantasy squad? Fantasy sports are a way to live out that dream. To make things easier, all illusion games are fundamentally the same, real number athletes and their real-living performances are used to generate full head for fantasy teams in fantasy conferences. For example, in a traditional fantasy league there is a set number of team owners. There is a set of rules that determine everything from team roster size, to scoring method, to strength of schedule. You and your fellow team owners are all in full control of your team.

One reason we should not pay college athletes is they will have extra money for the temptation to gamble. Gambling by athletes is a growing social cost of big time college sports (Hearn). If we do not pay these athletes they will not have a lot of extra money to gamble. The result of a Michigan study revealed that more than 5 percent of players’ have either given information about their team, bet on games they have played, or shaved points for money (Hearn). Affecting

A farmer in Louisiana, not an insider trading scandal, will destroy the multibillion dollar daily fantasy sports (DFS) industry. DFS is a rapidly growing segment of the online sports gaming industry where popular sites have grown by approximately 300% over the last year and are currently valued at over $1 billion (Miller & Singer, 2015). Leung (2015) describes the basic DFS tournament as a weekly tournament where professional athletes are allocated a value based on past performance. She says that participants are allocated a ‘salary cap’ and create a roster based on the sum of those athletes’ values, until they reach their cap. Leung also shows how a participant’s score is determined by the performance of their selected athletes that

Since the inception of fantasy sports companies, very few industries have grown this significantly in such a short time span. Since the surge in popularity of daily fantasy betting FanDuel and DraftKings have launched aggressive efforts to expand in order to reach the 51 million current fantasy sports users in the US and Canada alone. Although approximately 38% of Americans admitted to betting on sports in 2008, fantasy sports companies are also experiencing increased scrutiny from state regulators. Criticism stems from the belief that daily fantasy sports betting is considered to be online gambling and therefore should be illegal or heavily regulated at the state level. Multiple

The bargaining power of suppliers in the Fantasy Sports Industry should be considered medium to low. It would be difficult for any one company to drive up the prices because the businesses are not competing on price, but are competing based upon sites ease of use and complementary of products, such as sports news and analysis. Sites are able to charge for additional services such as complementary products and may be able to compete somewhat on these price points.

“Is this addiction and love for fantasy football good or bad?” one might ask. An addiction where one does not harm himself, or the people around him, is what I see as a good addiction. Fantasy football is not just something one gets into to pass the time. It is the ultimate source of entertainment associated with sports. If sitting down in one’s sofa on a splendid Sunday afternoon to watch game after game of hard-hitting, competitive football with drama and a storyline, on par with those of the World Wrestling Entertainment is not enough to make one’s hair stick on its ends; imagine on top of that what it would feel like to have a whole week of bragging rights after beating your friend’s fantasy team with “your” player, Michael Vick, running in from 40 yards out for the touchdown, resulting in 10 points to your fantasy point total that ultimately yields a 100-99 win. This moment is as sweet as it gets in terms of the euphoria that one will feel.

It’s a typical Fall Sunday afternoon and millions of people are huddled around their televisions at home, or at sports bars watching their local team’s battle on the gridiron for football supremacy. Meanwhile, a growing number of the most diehard football fanatics are sitting around their computers. Why aren’t they watching the game you may wonder? It’s simple. A new phenomenon called Fantasy Football is sweeping the nation.

Fantasy sports have become very popular among sports consumers and fantasy football is the leading fantasy sport. This research aspired to gain an understanding of fantasy football and the motivations behind playing. This is important because there has not been a lot of research done on fantasy football and it is becoming very important in the sports world. I participated in one fantasy football league and observed another when the groups would get together to watch the games every week. I also conducted interviews from the members of the groups. It was found that the three main motivations were social bonding, bragging rights, and competition. There was another theme that arose from the research and that was about gambling, specifically if fantasy football were to become illegal how it