What's the point of ESPN Bet?

While certainly not rising to a controversy, the social media dialogue yesterday around ESPN betting analyst Erin Kate Dolan says a lot more about the challenges facing ESPN Bet than it does the specific picks that she gave out.

In a video posted to her X (formerly Twitter) page, Dolan gave out four prop bet picks that were her favorites the Ravens-Chiefs Thursday night opening game.

Normally, a betting expert giving out their picks for an NFL game wouldn’t be worth a second thought, except, as several sports betting experts observed, most of Dolan’s bets were not ones that were available on her own network’s platform – ESPN Bet.

Dolan then spoke out defending her video, saying they were her personal best bets and not necessarily tied to the ESPN Bet platform. She also said people are “crying too much” given the social media engagement that the video created. That likely spoke to the number of critics that showed up in replies and mentions looking for more insight and background into why she touted the picks she did. And it should be noted there certainly seemed to be a considerable amount of comments that were heavy on sexism and light on any real critiques.

Dolan can make whatever picks she wants for whatever reason she wants. But it also illustrates the continued awkwardness of the ESPN Bet rollout in regards to the promotion of the product and integration (or lack thereof) with existing ESPN products and personalities.

If ESPN knows how to do anything well, it’s corporate synergy. We’ve seen it time and time again over the years that when the Bristol machine wants to get behind something, they have the ability to go all in. That’s why it’s so puzzling why the network has seemingly failed to get its personalities on board with promoting ESPN Bet in a worthwhile way beyond a couple commercials here and there.

ESPN Bet is still struggling mightily to break the DraftKings-FanDuel duopoly in the sports betting space and thus far have failed to gain any momentum to close the gap. Consider its relationship to ESPN’s two biggest stars – Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith.

Smith has done some work to promote ESPN Bet, but he also has a deal with PrizePicks for his podcast and regularly tweets out social media videos promoting them to his millions of followers. McAfee has openly alluded to some of ESPN Bet’s shortcomings on his ESPN syndicated show .

Seeing an ESPN betting analyst not bothering to give lines that appear on ESPN Bet may not be worth reacting to in isolation. But it only adds to the perception that the $150 million a year Penn and ESPN partnership is not on the trajectory they hoped for when they signed the deal.

The post ESPN betting analyst defends not touting bets on ESPN Bet appeared first on Awful Announcing .