One of the questions I keep seeing popping up on X is whether Underdog would have pulled the plug on draft (read: fantasy) products in seven states if the company weren’t recently purchased for $1.3 billion by the IG Group.
I’ve seen many posts suggest — very loudly — that since Underdog founder Jeremy Levine “got his bag,” as the kids say, he only cares about the bottom line and is willing to slowly strangle to death the product that made the company in the first place, all in an effort to further Underdog’s prediction market product.
To answer the above, I’m going to reverse the old Mitch Hedberg joke: If a tennis ball company rolled up on the Pringles plant and said, “Yo, we’ll give you $1.3 billion to switch out the potato chips for tennis balls,” you think Mr. Pringles would be like, “Nah, we good”?
What I’m saying is anyone who is angry at Levine and Co. for taking away daily drafts and (this one hurts) best ball contests from players in Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey (that’s me over here!), Ohio, and Pennsylvania needs to look in the mirror. Like, you would say no to $1.3 billion?
Capitalists gonna capitalize, you dig?
And Levine is one of the great capitalists in the fantasy world. Started three companies, sold three companies.
Anyone surprised Levine sold Underdog — and clearly followed the legal team’s advice to ditch drafts — hasn’t done their homework. This is clearly what Levine does, and he’s clearly very, very, very good at it.
Truthfully, I’m a little embarrassed as a gambling journalist that I wasn’t asking questions earlier. Like when fantasy analysts Hayden Winks and Josh Norris left the company. Or when founding member of the company Nick Rudman left. Or when Nicholas Green, who led the legal team pre-buyout, left. Hindsight being what it is and all, but yeah: The writing was on the wall that changes were coming.
Of course, the change is now obvious: Underdog is a prediction market company first and foremost. I suppose it will keep its draft products (and sports cards rips, gah) around, but the company’s fortunes will live or die with how well it does in the prediction market space.
So good for you, Jeremy, and congrats to the investors — hope your prediction market product kicks ass.
Also: This sucks.
Boooooo!
The Underdog best ball community — and I really see it like that, as a community — is going to suffer as a result. For starters, it just lost 18% of the country’s population in dumping those seven states. As a result, I would expect the contests to get smaller. And there are plenty of people who are claiming that even though they’re not in a state where it was outlawed, they will move their action elsewhere.
Like over to DraftKings, which has grown its best ball product over the years to be real competition for Underdog. But it has never had a community around it like Underdog developed. (By the way, DraftKings made it clear over the weekend that despite the regulatory and legal reasons Underdog ditched fantasy, DraftKings isn’t doing anything similar.)
So what made the Underdog community a community? Who knows how anything like that happens, but having people like Peter Overzet — who is still under contract with Underdog — certainly didn’t hurt.
Overzet points to three main reasons the community took hold, with the first being the fact the company was not shy about hiring people like himself to spend hours most days streaming Underdog best ball content to followers from February to August.
“Underdog was very aggressive early on with the influencers, and they were just such an omnipresence within the space,” Overzet said.
But the company itself also acted in a way most companies — in fantasy sports or not — simply don’t.
“They were so public-facing and so responsive to community feedback,” he said. “They listened to the community. They would be taking constant feedback and be pretty responsive to the ideas.”
That, Overzet said, made players feel like they actually had a voice in the direction of the company.
That voice, clearly, is gone.
And then there was the Dawg Bowl, the live final Underdog built around its draft games. There were five of them over the last few years — three NFL, two NBA — and Overzet said they turned what was largely an online hobby into something much more.
“The hardcore players really, really wanted to be a part of it,” he said. “Not only because it was a validation of their success and the time they spent on the site, but they wanted to go and meet people and to make it feel like it was more than just drafting fantasy teams online in their basement.”
And now?
“The Dawg Bowl is done,” Overzet said. “It’s not happening anymore, and that’s a real unfortunate thing for all of the community momentum that Underdog had built up.”
Which really nutshells the whole situation for people who loved the product (present company included) and are now without it.
It’s not (just) about losing a place to draft best ball teams.
It’s about watching this fun little corner of the fantasy world get torn down because the economic incentives have changed.
Overzet, who calls Massachusetts home, understands the anger, even if his own feelings are more complicated. He was an Underdog investor and benefited from the sale. He also built much of his content career around games he can no longer play in his home state.
“I’ve experienced all of the types of emotions around this,” he said. “I was excited about the sale initially. I benefited from that, but I also have devoted all of my content building community around these draft games, and now I don’t have that.
“I’ve round-tripped every possible emotion,” he said.
Prediction markets rising
It’s a new world out there. Prediction markets — especially for companies without existing sportsbooks — are an all-or-nothing battle. Clearly, the Underdog brain trust has decided they are riding or dying with PMs. All the moaning and bellyaching in the world isn’t going to change that.
Underdog best ball and draft games aren’t dead — still available in 34 states — but I don’t think it would shock anyone to see them not get the push (financial or otherwise) they’ve gotten in the past six years.
Biggest lesson for me, personally? That I should 100% finagle my way into the first round of investors for whatever Levine does next time he’s got some time on his hands. The dude cooks.
