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In 2015, the NFL stopped Tony Romo’s effort to host a fantastic football convention at a non-gambling facility in Las Vegas. Three years after the Supreme Court opened its doors to nationally legalized sports betting, things have changed. Dramatic.
Gisele Bundchen, the wife of Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, has joined DraftKings as a special board member, by David Purdum of ESPN.com. DraftKings operates sports books across the country, having emerged in previous years as one of the leading daily fantasy providers.
It is unclear what Bundchen’s special advice will be for a sports gambling company. It’s clear that the NFL has quickly gone from treating gambling like a poisonous arachnid to letting a bucket of tarantula crawl all over the Shield.
Indeed, the news comes less than a week after the NFL entered an unprecedented “tri-exclusive” (namely, not exclusively) sportsbook partnership with DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesar’s. Now that DraftKings is an official NFL partner, it is possible that the NFL will approve Bundchen’s hiring as a special board member.
This does not mean that everyone does something they should not do. It’s just further proof of how the world has changed so significantly when it comes to firewalls that the NFL maintains between gambling on its product and the integrity of its product. Only six years away from the media and powerful NFL players who committed to attend the Romo event because, egads!, happens in a building owned by a casino, a gambling company has given a significant position to the husband of the greatest player in NFL history.
The firewall still remains in place; players, coaches and officials cannot be involved in gambling. However, it is getting thinner and thinner, and the fire on the other side of it will continue to burn out of control.