Discussing sports betting on his show Tuesday, WFAN’s Mike Francesa came up with a brilliant idea.
“If the states are smart, they’ll take people who really understand this and let them create games that would attract people,” he said. “If I created a game that plays into your football or basketball or baseball expertise, and you could, for $20 or $50 in total, and you have a chance to win big money depending on how you play it, that will be an exciting play for you.”
He continued: “I think you can create something where the payoffs are not a-dollar-and-a-dream like the lottery, where the odds are you’ve got a better chance of getting hit by lightning. But that if you have a skill — I could create 10 games in 15 minutes if you gave me 15 minutes to do it. And those games, if created properly, will be very enticing to the public.”
And then: “Let’s say I create a game where you get to pick five players tonight in the major leagues. And if your five players, based on numeric totals than any other five players, you win $50,000. And the fee is $10 to get in. People will buy that. They’ll play it like crazy.”
Francesa is right that the system he describes would be wildly popular. We know that because the system he describes is wildly popular. Mike has essentially recreated the concept of daily fantasy sports, which already exists as a multi-billion-dollar industry.
https://twitter.com/BackAftaThis/status/1006699469281349632
Yeah, it seems as though Francesa is not a big daily-fantasy player… and also didn’t watch much television back in 2015 when when seemingly every commercial during sporting events pitched DraftKings or FanDuel.
Francesa’s spiel Tuesday caught the eye of one entity that knows a thing or two about daily fantasy sports: DraftKings itself, which quote-tweeted the clip with the comment “Sounds familiar. 🤔”
Sounds familiar. 🤔 https://t.co/0r6EetRrCv
— DraftKings (@DraftKings) June 13, 2018
Often times, when we share Francesa clips, it’s because he has said something amusingly wrong. In this case, however, he was actually completely right. Just about four years too late.
