It is finally here! College football is back as we’re now in the lead-up to week zero. Locally, this is huge as both Illinois (at home versus Wyoming) and Northwestern (versus Nebraska in Dublin, Ireland) will open their season on Saturday.
But it all starts in earnest on Sept 3, with week one. The headliner game for that week sees #5 Notre Dame begin their campaign at the alma mater of their new head coach, Marcus Freeman.
Freeman, in his very first regular season game as ND head coach, takes on #2 Ohio State, the very program where he played his college ball, and starred as a linebacker. His Fighting Irish are massive underdogs, according to https://www.new-casino-online.com/ where they are priced at +15.5 and +475 on the money line. ESPN, who will carry the game on their ABC partners (7:30pm EST kickoff), are strongly backing the Buckeyes.
Their match-up predictor gives OSU an 83.5% chance of winning. Obviously, everyone seems to vividly remember the 2016 Fiesta Bowl, where OSU crushed ND.
“What a great opportunity for our football program,” Freeman said this preseason about the game.
“Really, it’s an opportunity to see how good you really are.”
According to one leading ticket broker, this is the most in demand Week 1 game of the upcoming season. It’s obvious to see why as this match-up will put the loser in a bind in regards to national title hopes. The winner, on the other hand, will have a resume win. Notre Dame at Ohio State on Sept. 3 is the #2 in demand game of the entire season, ticket scalping wise, according to that source.
Alabama Crimson Tide at Texas Longhorns on September 10 is the only game with higher demand for tickets. And now, more than ever, college football is big business. Really big business, as this will be the first full season of the brave new NIL era.
Beyond name, image and likeness, or ticket scalping for that matter, it’s going to be huge in 2022 for fantasy football and daily fantasy sports.
It took a lot of media campaigning, but sports gambling has truly gone from niche to mainstream. As much as it hurts to give FanDuel and DraftKings acclaim, due to their obnoxious ubiquity, they deserve some credit for what they did when unlicensed gambling was still illegal in almost every state.
They both claimed to be selling a service that was a game of skill, not luck. That’s how they got around the legal loophole, as they maintained that daily fantasy sports wasn’t gambling. It’s total b.s. of course, but their position held and here we are.
The two DFS giants, according to an article in Wired back in October of 2015, aired a national television advertisement every 90 seconds that football season. That’s how obnoxious it got, and even the CEO of FanDuel himself admitted they went a bit overboard.
The overexposure incited a backlash, although that didn’t stop people from signing up. Viewers, sports fans, consumers et al got to know the images of the actors and actresses in these ads really well, as they were the faces of the DFS industry, which at the time was really first starting to explode.
John Oliver, on his show Last Week Tonight, did a brilliant parody of these advertisements. Since launching mobile and online sports betting in Illinois on August 5, 2020, DraftKings has generated nearly $2 billion in handle in the state, more than any other operator.
And that rising tide has lifted a lot of boats.
Sports gaming is going to help make this college football season the biggest one yet, and it all gets going, in earnest on Sept. 3 with Notre Dame at Ohio State.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Bank (TheSportsBank.Net) and author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” as well as “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune, and he co-hosts the After Extra Time podcast, part of Edge of the Crowd Network. Follow him and the website on Twitter and Instagram.
Leave a Reply