Oklahoma's Sports Betting Future: Legislative Updates

Watch Oklahoma's Sports Betting Future: Legislative Updates - SportsGrid on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00As we head to the summer, Missouri will get online with their sports betting eventually,

00:04but then I don't know that any other state is going to come online with sports betting this

00:08year. Hawaii looks like a no. Pat, is there any update on Oklahoma? I know that was a state that

00:14we discussed last week as a possibility. Yeah, Oklahoma is such a strange state because of the

00:19tribal relations between the governor and the tribes. You know, entering the year, it looked

00:25like a long shot. We thought maybe Nebraska, maybe Minnesota, Hawaii came out of nowhere and almost

00:32got it done. Didn't, of course. You know, Nebraska was just kind of, or not Nebraska, Oklahoma was

00:38just kind of a toss away saying there's no way that there can be an agreement, so there's no way it can

00:42happen. Well, it turns out the lawmakers are looking to maybe go around the governor by, you know, who

00:51has pledged to veto any legislation that gives the tribes exclusivity. Well, sure, there's a bill

00:59that did just pass a Senate committee for the first time from the House that would do that, and

01:03certainly Governor Kevin Stitt would veto it. However, there's another bill that is in play

01:08that they used back in 2003, the Oklahoma legislator, to just send the issue to the ballot and say,

01:15hey, if you want this, go ahead and vote it. It happened back in 2003 with the lottery. They

01:20created a lottery by that, and it was basically lawmakers saying, we don't want to be the

01:24definitive say on this, and that might be what happens here in Oklahoma this year with sports

01:29betting. Even if Stitt vetoes the one bill, the other one would, he would only be able to set the

01:35referendum date, so, you know, maybe he might try to put it on a weird date that nobody will vote,

01:40and that's what he's trying to get around, but, you know, if Oklahomans truly do want it,

01:45you know, why wouldn't they go ahead and vote that way, and that's something that happened in

01:49Missouri last year. We might see something similar next year in Nebraska with sports betting companies

01:56maybe doing their own ballot initiative as they did in Missouri, and so Oklahoma, yeah, they could

02:04potentially have it on the ballot this year, sometime later this year, and they might get to say,

02:09yeah, we do want it, or no, we don't want it, and then, you know, who knows what happens then.