The games were exciting enough. I watched every inning of the Brewers’ four game series with the San Diego Padres and it was maybe the best string of baseball games I’ve ever witnessed.
But during the late night broadcasts from the West Coast, one of the ads caught my attention. At first I thought maybe the FCC had established some new more liberal rules around broadcasts that take place after traditional children’s bedtimes. There goes Trump again, I thought.
Sydney Sweeney was selling something. When I first saw the ad I didn’t know who Sweeney was and I couldn’t quite make out what she was pitching. I thought maybe it was sports gear — she was wearing a lot of it but failed to put on the uniforms beneath it.
Eventually, I Googled it. Turns out she’s the pitch model for Novig, a sports betting app. The point of the ad (she keeps saying “just sports”) is that on the site you can’t bet on anything distasteful, like when the next war will start or who will be killed or die next or anything related to politics. No, just sports.
Predictably, Sweeney is getting the controversy she so carefully planned for. The NPR Left rose to the bait as sure as the Dodgers dispatched the Braves. They tsked and tutted about how this somehow degraded women’s sports, never mind that Sweeney never purports to be an athlete. It used to be evangelicals who were the prudes, now it’s the hard-left.
In fact, Sweeney takes her place alongside the late great Dolly Parton and the force of nature that is Taylor Swift in laughing all the way to the bank. She didn’t take a fee for her work. Instead, she demanded a piece of the action. She has taken an undisclosed stake in the company. And thanks to the viralness of her 30 seconds on camera, Novig’s valuation went from $500 million to two billion overnight. If her share is only one percent of that, she’s now worth $20 million more than she was a few weeks ago.
So, good for her. But all the misplaced angst about what she’s not wearing is covering up the real problem, which is the product she’s selling. Sports betting — and, in fact, betting on just about everything — has gotten out of hand. The leagues and broadcasters used to strictly forbid the mixing of their games and the betting world. Of course, it still took place but it was limited to Vegas and to guys in the neighborhood bar betting ten bucks on Sunday’s game. The leagues tried hard to build a wall between the gamblers and the players. See Rose, Pete.
Then the professional leagues realized that they were leaving money on the table. And all of a sudden the concerns that betting would taint their game with Black Sox-like scandals evaporated into the night. Because the leagues don’t want to advertise it, the numbers aren’t readily available to the public, but it’s estimated that, all in, the NFL pulls down about $2.3 billion from sports betting annually while MLB gets about $1.1 billion.
And if you don’t think that the NCAA is going to soon get in on the estimated $3 billion in betting action that takes place around March Madness, well, you may want to put some money down on the football Badgers winning the national championship this season.
I wasn’t appalled by Sweeney’s ad, but you know what really bothers me? The constant, seamless but yet unseemly linking of the action on the field with the real time betting that was going on during the Brewers – Padres games. Odds kept popping up for all kinds of things, including whether a given batter would get a hit on the next pitch. And every few innings the commentators would present a graphic for the odds that the real time sports books were giving for who would win the game.
This will inevitably result in major scandals. Some minor ones have already popped up, but someday Pete Rose will look like the Pope. Players are going to get paid tens of thousands to do subtle things, like strike out in a little noticed game. But then they’ll be offered millions to throw a playoff game. It’s gonna happen. No question. One hundred and ten percent.
And then there’s the havoc that this must be reaping on family budgets. How many guys are sitting with a few beers, alone in the family room, and finding Sydney Sweeney convincing? They discover a gambling addiction they didn’t know they had. Their wives and partners find out later. For whatever reason, there has been little attention paid to this, while people obsess over what Sweeney isn’t wearing.
In the end, I don’t have any trouble at all with Sydney Sweeney using sex to build her fortune. It’s happened before. But I do have a big problem with what she’s really selling.
