It wasn’t long ago that the only place you could legally place a wager on sports events was in Nevada. But after the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in May 2018, all 50 states now offer legal sports betting, and most have more on the way.
The emergence of sports gambling has brought many changes to the game, including new league partnerships with betting platforms and TV shows that regularly feature odds on the ticker and make gambling picks. In fact, the line between sports media and gambling has all but disappeared, with personalities on some television shows cheekily referencing the over/under or point spread and some major sports books forging data deals with broadcasters.
Amid this changing landscape, the NFL has beefed up its security measures and created a network of integrity employees who track the flow of bets on games and identify patterns that suggest tampering. The NBA has taken a different approach, shutting off the flow of in-game data to operators without rights to its official feed. The Tennessee sports betting law includes a provision that requires bookmakers to use official league data for all in-game wagers.
The idea of a national standard for sports betting data first surfaced in a lobbying document circulated by the NBA and MLB in February 2018, just three months before PASPA was tossed. But the concept has been slow to take hold, and state laws have varied widely on how they define tiers of data and require sportsbooks to source their data from the leagues or approved third parties.