00:00And so the state of Ohio seems to be trying to put the genie back in the bottle, so to
00:04speak, Sam,
00:05where they would prefer if there was no sports betting at all. And I don't know that the two
00:09stories are correlated, but that was a major story from last year. Simply put, is this possible,
00:15Sam? Can you possibly just end sports betting based on a couple of incidents? It doesn't seem
00:21realistic to me, but they are just, at least from what I'm seeing, discussing ending online sports
00:27betting. Maybe there would still be retail shops. I guess there could be more local monitoring.
00:32If you could dive into this a little bit more and tell us what they're thinking.
00:36Yeah, I think we know pretty well that no matter what any lawmaker does ever, even if it was a
00:42bill
00:42that kills or makes sports betting illegal, sports betting is still going to happen. And it's been
00:47happening throughout the past, I don't know, however many hundreds of years of sporting events
00:54in this country, which is one of the reasons states legalized sports betting in the first
00:57place, a state like Ohio. So it's not really a thing that they're able to do is end the actual
01:04practice. But when you have these incidents, these headlines that you mentioned from the Cleveland
01:10Guardians pitchers in sports betting scandals, and people talk about legal sports betting as
01:16encouraging bad actors, which could be true, could not be true. It makes a lot of these things more
01:21politically palpable, at least for lawmakers in Ohio to actually propose ending all online sports
01:28betting, which we know is where the bulk of all the legal activity is. And also in the proposal,
01:34they're proposing ending player props and parlays. So other lawmakers in Ohio have come out and said
01:40exactly that, that this is kind of just would not accomplish the goal. If the goal is to prevent
01:46sports betting scandals, if the goal is to stop people from, you know, the bad parts of sports
01:51betting, making it illegal, most of it anyway, the online activity kind of just gets rid of what
01:57the state did a couple years ago. And the whole reason that legalized sports betting in the first
02:00place. Now, you know, obviously, Ohio is that state where those Cleveland Guardians pitchers
02:04were involved in that alleged case of, you know, rigging pitches. We saw Governor Mike DeWine
02:10come out after that very vocally and say legalizing sports betting is a thing he regrets most as the
02:16governor in the state. He was very instrumental in working with the MLB on placing those caps on
02:22micro bet markets that were allegedly involved in that case. So Ohio has been kind of a hotbed for
02:27some of this political reaction. Now, whether lawmakers are actually able to end online sports
02:31betting? I don't think so. I think, you know, the fellow lawmakers in the legislature will not see this
02:37as just kind of a non-starter, something they're not going to do. But what it could end up in,
02:41Craig, is a baked down proposal. The bill could get whittled down to perhaps remove player props,
02:47perhaps remove parlays, perhaps do something smaller as a result of this kind of bigger push.
02:52So it's definitely something we're going to keep watching that could pop up in other states as well.
02:56Any kind of restrictions that come out of all of these crazy cases we've had over the past couple
03:01of years. And, you know, you mentioned that might be the biggest one we've had. We're just saying a lot
03:06considering the fact that, you know, NBA head coach, I think the second day of the season was
03:10arrested by the FBI. And you have the Terry Rozier case. And every day, it just seems like there's
03:15more of these scandals, which in turn lead to these kind of proposals.
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