The NFL got served

Christopher Sage used to place his bets in the shower.

Phone propped up, wagering on the next pitch, the next play, nearly 24 hours a day. He put a little over $2 million through DraftKings and FanDuel, lost about $175,000 of it, borrowed from loan sharks to cover, and watched his truck get repossessed.

This spring he sued the companies that built the apps, and the league whose games he was betting on.

Football season is back, the parlay ads are everywhere, and the legal theory that just cost Meta $18 billion is now aimed at DraftKings, FanDuel, and the NFL itself.

Sue the product, not the bet

The case is Sage & Thompson v. DraftKings, filed in Philadelphia in March. The claims: design defect, failure to warn, negligence.

You've seen this complaint before. It is the Meta case with the nouns swapped.

Look at who filed it. The Public Health Advocacy Institute was founded by Richard Daynard, the Northeastern law professor who spent two decades helping break Big Tobacco. Daynard does not file cases. He files templates, complaints built for a thousand other firms to copy until an industry has to settle.

The defective product is microbetting: live in-game wagers on the next pitch or the next play, resolved in seconds, now allegedly most of the volume on both apps. The complaint describes a slot machine wearing a sports skin. Except the app never pauses, and it knows exactly who is pulling the lever.

They named the league

Now read the defendant list. This is where the case stops being a rerun.

It runs past the sportsbooks to Genius Sports, the exclusive pipeline for the NFL's in-game data. And then to the NFL itself, which happens to be Genius' largest shareholder.

This is the same NFL that suspended Hall of Famers for a season over gambling and fought legal sports betting all the way to the Supreme Court. It lost in 2018, and then it did the math. Within a few years the league had official sportsbook partners, a franchise in Las Vegas, a Super Bowl in Las Vegas, and an equity stake in the company feeding its play-by-play data to the betting apps.

The complaint's logic is simple: the in-game bets run on league data, and the league gets paid on the way through. Sixty years ago the NFL banned its stars for wagering. Today it is a product liability defendant in a gambling addiction case.

Discovery, if the case gets there, will ask a simple question with an expensive answer: what did the league know about the product its data was feeding?

Meta looked bulletproof in 2022 too

Nobody thought the social media cases would survive either. Then design defect got past every motion to dismiss, Mark Lanier turned a jar of M&Ms into a $6 million bellwether verdict, and five months later Meta wired $18 billion to make the states go away. Thousands of individual cases are still in line behind that number, with the next bellwethers set for October.

The sportsbook cases are harder. These plaintiffs are adults, not kids, so assumption of risk has real teeth. And the early record is split: an Illinois federal judge let a case proceed by treating the app interface as a product, while a Pennsylvania judge tossed one, finding sportsbooks owe no duty of care to addiction-prone gamblers.

None of that scares the firms quietly building sports betting inventory. They are making a simple wager of their own: that the timeline repeats, and that four years from now somebody holds up a jar of something in front of a jury and talks about DraftKings in DraftKings money.

One more thing

I'm a lifelong Steelers fan. I endured a summer of World Cup flopping and counted the days until the pads started crashing into each other again.

I've never really gambled on sports. But my friends do. My neighbors do. So do the fathers at my daughter's kindergarten drop-off. Phones out, one more bet in before the morning bell.

Sports gambling is a tidal wave right now, and it's wall to wall.

The truth is I placed my one and only football bet years ago. That is my daughter getting ready for her first NFL game. The only ask I've ever made of her is that she cheers for the Steelers with her dad.

Four years later, she waves her Terrible Towel and sings along to the "Here we go Steelers" fight song with gusto.

So far, the bet is paying.

~ Adam

P.S. Want to be featured in The Tort Report? Reply with the story only you can tell, and it may get in front of 500 plaintiff firms.

Quote of the week

"A relentless, always-on addiction-amplifying machine."

— the complaint in Sage & Thompson v. DraftKings, describing what the sportsbooks built.