On Sunday, "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver used a series of metaphors to make clear the ironies behind DraftKings and FanDuel’s fight for legality. Oliver compared the daily fantasy sports sites to the NFL, a pack of wolves, heroin and a suspicious scoop of TCBY frozen yogurt to make the following point: If it looks like gambling, advertises like gambling and takes away your money like gambling, then you know what? It should probably be considered gambling.
“DraftKings even claims on its website that it’s ‘100% legal,’ which is immediately suspicious,” Oliver said. “If the guy at TCBY said this frozen yogurt was 100 percent legal, you would know that somehow it was a product of the illegal sex trade.”
Like most -- read: all -- of us, Oliver found humor in the fact that FanDuel’s own employees made up nearly half the crowd at last Friday’s daily fantasy protest: “If you’re trying to make the argument that you’re not a shady, gambling-related company, maybe don’t openly stack the deck in your favor.”
Oliver closed the segment with a plea to those that have a say in the debate: If we’re going to let daily fantasy continue, then we need to regulate it. Otherwise, we’re leaving our money and our time in the hands of two sites that “have the support of the NFL” -- and, as the show asked, “when have they ever been associated with anything shady?”
Exactly.
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