Indiana and Iowa Want Sports Betting Ready For Football
Indiana isn’t fooling around when it comes to giving sports bettors a lot of choices. The state’s gaming commission has released the list of games that will be available for wagering, and there is hardly anything that is being left out. Aside from the so-called major sports such as pro and college football, pro and college basketball and Major League Baseball, there will be all forms of auto racing, such as NASCAR, Formula One and IndyCar (naturally), plus extensive coverage of pro golf, including all PGA and LPGA Tour events, as well as the European tour.
Will Indiana and Iowa Get Sports Betting Ready For The NFL Football Season?
Multiple soccer leagues will be listed, and this includes the major European leagues, the English Premier League and the U.S.-based Major League Soccer. They’ll have tennis events, on both the men’s and women’s side, not to mention boxing and the UFC. And there’s more.
There are currently thirteen locations that have been cleared to have a sports betting facility on their premises. This includes ten licensed casinos and three off-track betting sites – the Winner’s Circle locations in Indianapolis, Clarksville and New Haven. These were all licensed within the last couple of weeks. The Rising Star Casino in Rising Sun and the Majestic Star Casino in Gary have not yet applied for sports betting licenses.
There is a tight schedule for all of this, as ideally, the locations can all be up and running by September 1, in time for the NFL season and much of the college season to begin. They have the events laid out, and the locations and all they have to come up with are the rules, which they hope will be adopted on August 28.
Yes, that’s a very tight schedule indeed.
In Iowa, which is another part of “Big Ten Country,” casinos are also making plans in a hurry, as they are making deals with third-party vendors who have the expertise in the area. And while a specific target date for opening up the new sportsbooks has not been established, they hope to be operational by August 31, which is when the state’s two Division I (FBS) football teams begin action, with the University of Iowa playing against Miami of Ohio and Iowa State taking on Northern Iowa.
The NFL begins just five days after that with the Chicago Bears hosting the Green Bay Packers, and as luck would have it, those are the two teams that probably have the largest fan bases in the Hawkeye State.
Wes Ehrecke, the CEO of the Iowa Gaming Association, believes that most of the casinos should be just about ready to offer the sports betting product at around that time.
Again, as it is with Indiana, a number of rules must be established to govern sports betting, and those will hopefully be decided upon by the end of July. Many states have rushed into legalizing the sportsbooks in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, and as one can imagine, this has created a mad scramble, as legislators have hastened the process of legalization so as not to lose business to neighboring states.
