In two years, the Raiders will be playing football in the gambling capital of the world. To some degree, the Raiders will surely take steps to distance themselves from the industry, but not when it comes to their new play-by-play announcer, Brent Musburger.
Musburger, who lives in Las Vegas, is very much involved in the sports handicapping industry (he has already started his own venture out there), but does not believe he’ll have any kind of helpful inside information when it comes to betting the Raiders – and his reason actually makes some sense.
“Let’s say I’m gonna pick the Raiders game every week,” Musburger recently said on the ProFootballTalk podcast. “Oh, I’ll know for sure what’s going on… uh, not so fast my friends. I have found that the closer you get, the less apt you are to see the truth when it comes to picking football games. The best handicappers I have ever been around have nothing to do with the sport – no such thing as inside information. They look at numbers, they certainly watch the game, they know the personnel. But they’re not biased. If I did that, there would be a bias factor, mentally, that would kick in, and listen I might be right maybe 50 percent of the time about the Raiders season… The bookies would all be broke if such a thing as inside information could help you beat them. These are very sharp numbers.”
Musburger makes a good point that football games aren’t generally decided by one or two small details of information like an injury or game plan (which he would know about both), but if Derek Carr is, hypothetically speaking, dealing with a back injury that is affecting his throws, that’s information that would be great to know before one of us tries to slap down $50 on a game.
If it’s all the same, Brent, and these little tidbits really aren’t going to affect the outcome, do us all a solid and share everything you got before each game.
We’ll figure out what to do with the information from there.
twitter: @raidersbeat
