OT: MSU abruptly ending $9M partnership with Caesars Sportsbook
“Initially, it was a good thing, but I don’t think it’s in our best interest moving forward,” MSU athletic director Alan Haller said.
A university taking $1M a year to push crack cocaine online gambling onto over 50,000 students was a “good thing”? How many young addicts did this partnership help create over the last 16 months? It seems it is only ending because Congress and the American Gaming Association banned all sports betting advertising and marketing on campuses (under age 21 audience) as of July 1, 2023.
It’s in “their” best interest moving forward. No mention of the best interest of their students though.
Probably just a naming conflict with their Little Caesars job placement program.
Logged-in simply to upvote this.
^ Very undervalued comment!
Well played.
I bet that they will find a new sponsor that will pay them $95 million.
The Spartans thorough vetting is showing once again...
<clears throat> <straightens collar>
We’ve recently rented a glass house re: proper vetting.
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" referred to a literal death sentence. Jesus was advocating mercy, not complicity.
In all other contexts, fuck the glass houses. I ain't interested in unwritten rules where everyone stays silent because we're all guilty. If Michigan is dirty, call it out. If Michigan State is dirty, call it out. Call everything out.
They say sunlight disinfects, but you have to hit everywhere at once. Otherwise the vermin just scuttle.
I agree with your point that letting sunshine in is the best disinfectant. (This is why the world of the journalists - real journalists - is so vital. They are (or should be) in the business of shining light where it needs shining.) But, to be fair in this situation, the fact that we completely dorfed the Schemy hiring DOES cause our bully pulpit to have only 3 legs.
(Personally I think bleach works better than sunshine in real life, but I could never figure out how to work that into the analogy.)
a little apples and oranges but with the Schemy thing not too far in the rear view mirror we're sort of in a glass house at the moment.
to be fair, glass houses are pretty hard to see in a rear view mirror
And I'd smash the fucking thing down from the inside if that's what it takes.
What's with this moral cowardice shit? People make mistakes, but the solutions to that are reform and accountability, not "oh shit we'd better stop judging Michigan State because BOTH SIDES".
If both sides are bad, that only means we have more work to do.
Both sides are bad and we do have more work to do.
(Vetting has nothing has to do with this anyway, other than being successful troll bait).
I would argue that the Shemy thing is peanuts. He has some views that are unsavory, which, had he been a little more internet savvy, nobody would have ever known about. Nobody I have worked with (apart from close acquaintances) has known my politics for over a decade.
MSU got into bed with known misery merchants and sold access to their student body for a pittance. Might as well partner with Only Fans while they are at it.
Might as well partner with Only Fans while they are at it.
*MSU administrator scribbles down idea gleefully.*
LMFAO. Caesars Sportsbook, OnlyFans. Fair comparison.
How many young addicts did the partnership help create over the last 16 months? I'm going to go with zero. College students are are still going to see 10-20 sports gambling advertisements throughout the day and would know what Caesars is. I highly doubt the school having a partnership with one of them affected anybody's desire to gamble.
It was always a weird look for the AD and even more so given the Bama baseball and Iowa athletes issues.
Big corporations don't spend money on anything, including $9M on marketing, unless they believe there's a return on investment.
Take a look at how all sportsbooks have spent money the last ~3 years. And how DraftKings and Fanduel spent on DFS advertisements in the mid-2010s. They sort of do just spend money on anything.
It's an arms race between the different gambling providers to acquire users. They all hemorrhage money. There are probably some college students who used Caesars bc it was "MSU's" sportsbook. But students aren't starting to gamble on sports based on an AD's partnership.
Accountants and marketing execs run the world. No one is spending money just because someone else is.
This is marketing, i.e., an attempt to get your name out there and to promote the concept of your product. Marketing gambling has been hugely successful. We’ve gone from a world where gambling was seen in popular media as problematic at best, and rarely discussed, to one where we see gambling as a normal part of the sport and bookies are part of the broadcast team.
Valid. It raises a question I’ve pondered for some time: there is a LOT of money being dispersed to student athletes under NIL. People wealthy enough to make these large payments don’t typically spend money unless there’s a return in it for them. I’m wondering if there is some sort of tax benefit to them, because I just can’t see any return. Any thoughts?
There are two issues here. First, every corporation thinks that they're going to get some kind of return on their investment. The truth is, though, that corporations waste money on things all the time--particularly with advertising and marketing, which are notoriously hard to quantify (beyond click-through rates, anyway).
The second thing is that you're assuming there's a monetary benefit to paying athletes NIL money. Sure, sometimes there will be (i.e., if they're using it in [effective] advertising), but they're also getting a psychological benefit--it's an ego thing.
^^^Here^^^ is an example where Libertarians (not necessarily bad people) go off the rails.
Related, P.J. O'Rourke quote:
The capital L libertarian is the high school calculus teacher backing you into a corner over some warm white wine and explaining why the sidewalks should be privatized. Lovely guy, really nice person and for all I know he's right about the sidewalks. But it makes for a damn uninteresting hour-and-a-half.
My favorite quote about libertarians is
"Libertarians are like house cats: Absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
You are completely correct about libertarians many of whom would struggle to survive in a libertarian or frontier society. In a dog eat dog world they would be Alpo.
But its also true that many Statists also think big government is the cat’s pajamas while being befuddled that a Holocaust, Holodomor, and Hiroshima could occur. With the concentration of power comes the ever increasing ability to help and/or harm humans on huge levels.
I think most people ignore the inconvenient aspects of their preferred ideology because they don’t want to reckon with the reality that they do not, in fact, have the solution to what ails the human race.
He's wrong about the sidewalks, P.J. I love arguing with libertarians--they're often wrong but never in doubt. All it takes is a few easy historical references to prove them completely wrong.
To be fair, privatizing sidewalks would be pretty far down the list of priorities for most libertarians. And they are not the only ones that are inflexible with their politics.
But once they get past masking pot legal for them and those pesky age of consent laws out of the way, they're going right for the sidewalks.
In that respect, Libertarians are like any other fanatics. Huge numbers of people, for instance, don't believe that elections that their candidate lose could possibly be fair, despite all of the evidence.
Argue with them only for entertainment purposes. "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - W. Churchill
Those who I knew that enjoyed betting loved doing so long before they got to college so I tend to agree with you. Might not be zero but a very low percentage.
This reminds me of the hooplah when like 23 year old Kenny Pickett wasn't allowed to talk about bud light or whatever in his post game press conference. as if that's going to lead to college kids drinking beer....
They found out that part of the $9M was a bonus and Caesars kept it for themselves.
Doesn’t their little yelp “go green “, lend itself to being sponsored by a marijuana collective?
and given Le’Veon Bell‘s confession this last week that he was, as Chris Farley would say, blowing some Doobie before the games when he played for Pittsburgh it would seem to fit right in.
Blowing what? #SD4L
“Smoke green, snort white” as they say
Outstanding 😂
or our youngest's favorite version: can't read, can't write!
downvoted this just so i could upvote it again
downvoted this just so i could upvote it again
I’ve seen this before so I tried it on you. The downvote gives the known -1, but then the upvote gives you a +2 from your total before I downvoted — like the downvote didn’t happen.
Long story short: I don’t get your comment! (could someone explain please? ...would like to understand the snark)
I'm not sure what comment you don't get, but maybe the previous one? It's a play on MSU's 'Go Green, Go White' chant...
The “downvoted this just so i could upvote it again” comment. I see it frequently
It doesn't affect points. It's just the act of up voting twice can only happen if you down vote after the first up vote.
Thank you!
I upvoted you twice.
Few years ago, I remember my Marketing Director saying we have an opportunity to work with a local Cannabis dispensary and our place was a quite large addiction facility. Thought that is a good idea until I realized that they wanted us to do Marketing with them including stuff on our website. As a community organization helping with addiction, money/donations wasn't worth the damage it can do to our reputation and the message it sends to our patients. We had to say no to the donation.
Would that mellow them out so they could walk through a tunnel without 'roid rage manifesting itself?
Now that's an interesting question... NIL is still unregulated, meaning the marijuana collectives' limitation to operating in all-cash transactions seems like it would really be able to leverage past practices of cash deals in paper bags.