Katie Nolan: ESPN having a sportsbook ‘blows my mind’

Katie Nolan doesn’t understand how ESPN gets away with it.

The former ESPN personality weighed in on the network’s sportsbook during a recent episode of Casuals with Katie Nolan, her SiriusXM podcast, addressing the awkward reality ESPN faced last month when it removed an ESPN Bet banner mid-segment while discussing FBI arrests in an NBA gambling scandal.

“ESPN having a sportsbook blows my mind,” Nolan said. “I get it. I’m out of touch with the industry and where it’s going and where it’s been. I understand that. You can yell that to me all you want to, it still is like you can’t be the reporting arm of sports and also the gambling [arm]… I don’t understand how they get away with it, but it is what it is.”

It’s a sentiment that’s been echoed by others in recent weeks, particularly after the Oct. 23 arrests of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier in separate FBI gambling probes.

During Get Up‘s coverage that morning, an ESPN Bet banner ran along the bottom of the screen while Mike Greenberg discussed the arrests. The banner eventually disappeared, but not before creating one of the more uncomfortable moments in recent ESPN history.

“I don’t know if you saw the clip of them talking about — I think it was on Get Up — and they tried to quietly remove the bug that said ESPN Bet from the corner of the screen,” Nolan explained to her listeners. “Which is like almost worse. It’s almost like deleting the tweet. You’re like, ‘Well, now we have screenshots of you doing the tweet, so it’s like a bigger deal…’ We know what’s behind that. We know what’s going on.”

Unreal scene from ESPN Get Up this AM.

They’re talking the FBI’s arrests for NBA Sports Gambling. Mike Greenberg explains how ESPN used to shun sports gambling…while an ESPN BET promo is on the screen.

The graphics team realizes the disconnect and takes the chyron down lol pic.twitter.com/ICCvyhJHPA

— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) October 23, 2025

Nolan acknowledged she might be out of step with where the industry has gone, but that doesn’t change her actual concern. Even if you accept that sports gambling is now fully integrated into sports media, she’s questioning whether one company can credibly do both — actively promote an ESPN-branded sportsbook and report on gambling scandals involving that same industry.

It’s not a new worry for her. She previously argued that ESPN’s gambling partnerships risk turning properties like NFL RedZone into betting content, warning that “sports shouldn’t be a pipeline to sports gambling.”

The Get Up banner disappearing mid-segment only proved her point about how messy this gets in practice. And while Nolan wasn’t at ESPN when the network went all-in on gambling, she watched those wheels being greased.

She spent four years at ESPN from 2017-21, hosting Always Late with Katie Nolan on ESPN+ and the podcast Sports? with Katie Nolan. Her run there ended after Always Late was canceled in 2020. She left in September 2021 and launched Casuals with Katie Nolan on SiriusXM this past January.

The stakes have only gotten higher since she left.

Penn Entertainment pays ESPN $1.5 billion over 10 years under the ESPN Bet licensing agreement, which launched in November 2023. And to handle any potential conflicts of interest, the Worldwide Leader established internal guidelines when ESPN Bet launched, prohibiting reporters and insiders from betting on sports they cover. The policy states no story should be “reported, delayed, influenced, or withheld with the intention of impacting betting lines.”

Since the incident, network executives have maintained they can separate the business from the journalism. EVP David Roberts told Front Office Sports the network is “not going to hold back in any way on doing what is journalistically responsible and aggressive in how we cover this story.”

And when you’re scrambling to hide your sportsbook logo while covering gambling arrests, you’ve already proven you can’t do both.