LAS VEGAS — Call it a classic Las Vegas wedding, as the NFL and gambling tie the knot this weekend at Super Bowl LVIII.
Seven years ago, the NFL banned Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo from appearing at a fantasy football convention in Sin City.
On Sunday, Mr. Romo will be on the announcing team for CBS during the first-ever Super Bowl in the gambling mecca. The broadcast will feature gambling — and gambling marketing — to an unprecedented extent. The Kansas City Chiefs-San Francisco 49ers matchup is projected to be the Super Bowl with the most bets in history.
How did the NFL warm up to Las Vegas and the betting industry? As Ernest Hemingway once wrote of going bankrupt, “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Over the past two decades, the league had been dipping into gambling-adjacent products and seeing the revenue possibilities, but it remained firm. Other major professional leagues agreed that gambling was to be separated, state-and-church style, from the game itself for integrity.
Then, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited betting in most states, and that was that. The gold rush was on.
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The American Gaming Association estimates that $1.5 billion will be bet legally in the United States on this year’s Super Bowl, and dozens of companies are jockeying for a share of that pie.
Sports broadcasts have been flooded with ads since legalization, and this year’s Super Bowl represents the ultimate marriage between the two sides. FanDuel, DraftKings and others are throwing lavish parties and have the biggest displays on Radio Row, where game-week broadcasts originate.
Thanks to a quirk of law, most of those companies won’t be able to take bets at the game itself. Nevada law requires a physical casino to offer mobile betting.
One of those casino owners is Derek Stevens, who built the Circa Sportsbook, the latest and greatest in a city that is always chasing bigger and flashier.
Mr. Stevens was among the first to see the potential for Las Vegas as a sports town.
“I owned the Triple-A baseball team out here for six seasons, and I always thought Vegas was very well prepared to have a major league sports team here,” he said. “There was this little bit of black cloud on Vegas because of gambling, when all of a sudden the stars aligned, Bill Foley brought the [Golden Knights], and now every other league paid attention.”
The Super Bowl is the crowning achievement of that marriage of Las Vegas and sports. Even low-end hotels that generally charge $29 a night are offering rooms this weekend for more than $300, a party weekend even by Vegas standards.
The revenue possibilities gambling brings have arrived at a pivotal moment for sports teams facing an uncertain future in one of their most lucrative businesses: selling television rights.
Those stations have been more than happy to lean into the betting element. Most pregame shows offer promo codes and odds for the day’s game, even on team-owned broadcasts such as Monumental Sports Network’s coverage of the Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics.
At NFL Network, ads for betting services run in seemingly every break. It wasn’t that way when analyst Randy Moss, who has no relation to the receiver, started.
Before jumping to football, Mr. Moss made his name as a horse racing reporter.
“I started in 2008 with NFL Network, and I think there was some concern with them that maybe I would start betting on football,” he said. “I had to go to great lengths to make sure everybody knew there was no gambling on sports, no engaging at all.”
The NFL still bans many of its employees from betting on games to avoid the appearance of impropriety. In Virginia, state law prohibits placing bets on games involving state colleges to protect the integrity of the games. They may be in a losing fight as neighboring states legalize such services.
Joe Maloney, a senior vice president at the American Gaming Association, said his group has to work to avoid confusion with offshore betting companies, which are not licensed to conduct business in the United States.
This week, media coverage has included mentions of prop bets involving Taylor Swift, the pop star dating Travis Kelce of the Chiefs.
“Those types of bets are not going to be offered by legal U.S. operators,” Mr. Maloney said. “When you see news stories that talk about those prop bets, they’re quoting and oftentimes mentioning illegal offshore websites.”
Caesars Palace started the “prop” craze in 1986 by offering 20-1 odds on William “Refrigerator” Perry to score a touchdown in Super Bowl XX. When he scored, the payout became national news.
Even the slightest line movement is national news, as the point spread has become a widely known concept.
The game on Sunday has the 49ers favored by 2½ points. Stevens said the public mainly backs the Chiefs, with the “sharp money,” or professional gamblers, backing the 49ers.
The long-term societal impacts of the push to monetize gambling remain to be seen, but the eye-popping revenue numbers legalized gambling has produced suggest it’s not going anywhere soon.
Less than 10 years after being banned from appearing in Vegas, Romo is carrying the NFL’s flag at one of the world’s biggest sporting events.
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