For the second time in less than a year, the National Football League may force one of its online partners to pull gambling-related advertisements and promotions off the Internet.
Some ads on Sportsline.com, the league's official partner in developing and maintaining NFL.com, have raised the ire of NFL officials, reported the St. Petersburg Times on Friday.
The ad in question promotes an online pool game that costs $17 per person and offers the winner $1 million. The site also has other "pick'em" games in which players can mail in their picks at no cost.
The situation has been called to the attention of the league office and comes less than six months after the league forced banner ads for online casinos off of various pages on Yahoo.
The NFL was one of a host of leagues, including the NHL, MLB, and PGA who encouraged the portal site to remove banner ads on pages where the leagues had provided logos or content.
The flap with Sportsline comes just months after the company was awarded the contract to be the official partner to the NFL. While league officials and representatives with Sportsline did not return calls from IGN this week, the Times said the league wasn't happy about seeing the ads up.
"We are recently aware of it, and we are looking into it," Brian McCarthy, the league's director of corporate communications, told the Florida newspaper Thursday. "We only saw this after it was released."
Although the league was made aware of the situation a week ago, no action has been taken to either remove the contest altogether or put it on a different section of the site.
The development with Sportsline is somewhat surprising considering the amount of buzz that was created with the Yahoo ads. Many industry experts felt the flap between Yahoo and the NFL regarding online casinos was the company's downfall in trying to win the contract rights for this season.
The contest, Office Pool Challenge, is a new dilemma for the league, considering it has made every effort to distance itself from gambling-related sites and operations. This is the first time one of the league's partners has offered the service.
The site is able to bypass U.S. gambling law because while players have to buy into the contest to be eligible for the prize, the cost is associated with what the site labels as "access to statistics and expert analysis." There is a plethora of sites on the Internet that give away the same information for free.
The concept of the game falls along common "pool" games where participants pick weekly winners. Although many office pools just call for the correct winner to be picked, Sportsline's contest brings the spread, what it calls the "winning margin," into play.
For $17 ($1 a week) players are able to log on to the site and pick each week's winners.
While neither side could be reached for comment by IGN, a Sportsline spokesperson last week said the two sides were communicating with each other to remedy the situation. It is unclear if those talks are still going on or if the NFL agreed to let the contest remain.
Sportsline spokesperson Alex Riethmiller told the Times last week that his firm wanted to "do right by the NFL."
He went on to say that the company knows how valuable its relationship is with the league and that it isn't about to do anything that will put it in jeopardy.
"As a partner with the NFL, this is something we are sensitive to," he said. "We have worked with them in the past with this and will continue to work with them on it."
In addition to the Office Pool Challenge, the site also offers a King of the Hill contest. In that contest, also free by mail, participants pick a lock of the week. If their team wins its game, they move on to the next week; if their team loses, they are done for the year. At the end of the
season players can turn their initial $10 investment, which is required for statistical analysis, according to the site, into a $5,000 payoff.
It is hard to imagine that the NFL would allow any of the gambling-related games to continue through Sportsline after the strong comments McCarthy said last spring during the turmoil with Yahoo.
"We wouldn't want any situation where a fan could perceive any affiliation between us and gambling," he said.