🏈 How The NFL Will Handle Coming Days

Welcome to our new weekly cadence -- to your inbox Monday-Wednesday-Friday morning with news and updates in sports, gambling, and media. On Thursday, takes directly from our text threads.

Anyone with a basic sense of decency is hoping (praying, if that's your thing) for Damar Hamlin to make a full recovery after Monday night's terrifying medical emergency. Selfishly, many of us are probably rooting for that outcome so we can go back to being gleefully oblivious. With all we have, we ought to fight that urge going forward.

In the email today:

1) Hamlin's injury brings the National Football League's sole purpose (the generation of profit) into unsettling focus. 🏈

2) Dana White does the absolute last thing anyone should do. ⚖️

3) Two states (Oklahoma, Georgia) continue sometimes brisk and sometimes halting progress towards legalizing sports gambling. 📱

Four days in and we are already plenty concerned that 2023 isn't going to be much of an improvement over 2022.

1) DAMAR HAMLIN AND THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES 🏈

Unless you didn't consume any media Monday night or all of yesterday, you know that Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field in Cincinnati during the Bills' game with the Bengals on Monday night.

Fox Sports pundit Skip Bayless reacted to Hamlin's injury with concern about what postponing the game would do to the NFL's schedule going forward.

Bayless was widely excoriated for this tweet. Its timing was gross, and given Bayless' less than stellar reputation, it felt exploitative. Bayless apologized on his show on Tuesday, perhaps at least in part because his bosses may have told him that he needed to.

The worst part of Bayless' comment is that, if he thought about it for a minute before he tweeted it, he would have realized that not only was it insensitive, it was pretty dumb.

• Both the Bills and the Bengals have clinched playoff berths. This game, if it is ever played, is only about playoff seeding.

• The NFL has a two-week stretch between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl. That gives the league plenty of flexibility to push regular season and early round playoff games into January if they just use one of those weeks.

• Bayless approached this decision as though it was the league's to make. What everyone watching found out quickly (and really should have known) is that if the players refuse to play, there is no game.

There were interesting financial ramifications that emerged from the postponement of the game, some immediate and some still to be seen.

• The happiest development was the surge of donations to Hamlin's GoFundMe which buys toys for underprivileged children. The fund went from four figures to over $5 million in a day and a half.

• Several leading sportsbooks voided the vast majority of bets on the game.

• As of this writing, it is unclear whether the game will ever be played. That raises myriad questions around ticket refunds to fans, advertising fees potentially being repaid, broadcast rights fees being returned, etc.

OUR TAKE

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has an enormous amount of detractors. Anyone rooting against him in the aftermath of this tragic moment, though, are probably going to be sorely disappointed.

The league's worst case scenario is the game never being played, which really isn't even that bad an outcome insofar as the public relations angle on that choice would have to be positive.

If the game can be rescheduled, what is likely to follow is a Butterfly Effect on the NFL schedule which will compel the league to move games to weekdays (as they did during the worst of COVID-19).

Don't you believe the NFL would be heartbroken about taking on the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League during January weekdays. The ratings would likely be very serious, especially if any of the playoff games end up being played midweek.

2) UFC PRESIDENT DANA WHITE STILL DOESN'T SEEM TO HAVE A "GOOD SIDE" 😪

As scary as the Hamlin injury was, it is a wonder that that injury — cardiac arrest caused by blunt force trauma to the chest — doesn't happen in UFC on a regular basis.

UFC President Dana White already has a sorry reputation as far as care for his fighters is concerned. White's fighters regularly complain about being underpaid and underinsured given the risks that they take.

Given that as pretext, this is about the worst look White could have presented to the world this week.

The short version:

• Dana and Anne White were involved in a physical altercation in a video posted by TMZ

• Anne slapped Dana, and he slapped her back before they were separated

• The couple has been married for almost 30 years and has three children

• Both Dana and Anne stated that this was an isolated incident and that alcohol was a contributing factor

• The couple is more concerned about their children and their family's privacy at this time

• Dana emphasized that there is "never, ever an excuse for a guy to put his hands on a woman" and that he is embarrassed and deserves any criticism that comes his way

There have already been calls for White to step away from UFC in the immediate aftermath of this scandal. We would not advise you to hold your breath on that.

Day's end, though, UFC is a violent, more than occasionally gruesome blood sport that continues to edge its way into the American sporting mainstream.

White is believed to be worth in the neighborhood of $500 million. Drunk, disorderly and physically abusive is no path to mainstream acceptance in today's America.

3) OKLAHOMA AND GEORGIA MOVING AT DIFFERENT PACES TOWARD LEGALIZING SPORTS GAMBLING 💰

OKLAHOMA

Sooner State Governor Kevin Stitt wants sports gambling to be legal in Oklahoma.

• Governor Kevin Stitt supports sports betting in Oklahoma

• Stitt believes it should be fair, transparent, and maximize revenue for the state

• Oklahoma State Representative Ken Luttrell has introduced a bill to legalize sports betting in the state

• The 2023 legislative session begins in February

Stitt mimiced just about every state politician by noting that his primary motivation for making sports betting legal in Oklahoma is "to invest in top priorities, like education."

Always a safe thing to say when you hold public office.

GEORGIA

Politicians in Georgia are also lining up in an effort to make sports gambling legal there.

• The legislation would require to bills to be passed: one to allow sports gambling, horse racing and casinos through a constitutional amendment, and another to outline how the revenue will be spent.

• The legislation has the support of Lt. Gov.-elect Burt Jones and state Sen. Brandon Beach.

• A recent poll showed that 45.6% of likely voters surveyed favored making online betting on professional sports legal in the state.

• The same poll found 59.7% of respondents in favor of online casino gambling.

Another voice in the chorus is state Rep. Ron Stephens. This should sound sort of familiar: "We walk away from $100 million every year in sports gambling, and other states...get that money from people here in Georgia," Stephens said. "Let's regulate it, tax it, and put the money in...wait for it...education. For the children.

JOB LEAD OF THE DAY 💰

If you think we are beneath throwing Kyle some red meat in this space, you don't know us at all. Look at this job lead!

Director of Student-Athlete Development at Villanova University. Salary is believed to be in the range of $50,000-$65,000 per year. "Intercollegiate sports management experience is a plus." That doesn't say it's a requirement.

This job actually sounds like a lot of fun, especially if the men's basketball team can get its collective head out of its collective derriere.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON? 😎

• Who else but notorious degenerate gambler Pete Rose made the first legal bet in Ohio. Of course he bet the Reds to win the World Series. Good luck Hit King: The Reds are somewhere around +20000 to win it all.

• Cleveland Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff is worried that gamblers are going to pump him for injury information to tilt the odds in their favor.

• ESPN's ratings for the two National Championship semi-final football games were higher than expected.

• Penn Entertainment has agreed to remove the term "risk-free" from its sports gambling advertising materials.

WHAT TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR BEFORE THE NEXT SEND 👁️

• Fresh off France's World Cup final loss, Fox Sports has acquired U.S. broadcast rights to soccer's Coupe de France, a national tournament open to all French clubs.

• With any luck, if you share a name with a golfer who qualified for the 2023 Masters, an invite might be headed your way.

• Cristiano Ronaldo signed with Saudi Arabian football club Al-Nassr for 30 pieces of silver...we mean...$75 million a year. Sportswashing ain't cheap.

• Ohio really seems to like sports gambling in the early going, with 11.3 geolocations over the first weekend where betting was legal.