Last Super Bowl For North Carolinians Without Legal Online Betting
Sunday marks the final Super Bowl to take place without legal online sports betting in North Carolina.
The eight North Carolina betting apps expected to go live on March 11 won’t be permitted to take wagers on this year’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, but that likely won’t stop North Carolinians from betting on the game.
A pair of tribal casinos in the state offer legal, in-person sports betting. Other residents may cross state borders, perhaps to Virginia, to wager on legal betting apps. geoComply found that 116 bettors attempted to log into legal sportsbooks in North Carolina before then traveling to Virginia to place a bet on Super Bowl weekend last year.
Other bettors are likely to use the offshore market to wager on the Super Bowl, something North Carolina legislators are excited to prevent in future NFL seasons with legal platforms available to bettors.
Why launch after the Super Bowl?
When North Carolina legislators passed online sports betting legislation in June of 2023, there was some initial optimism that mobile wagering would be live prior to the 2024 Super Bowl. January 8 was listed as the earliest possible start date for digital sports betting in the Tar Heel State, which was over a month before Super Bowl Sunday.
Ultimately, however, the regulatory work facing the state’s lottery proved too much to have a legal mobile betting launch date prior to the Super Bowl.
Immediately following legalization, the lottery needed to hire additional staff with sports betting regulatory experience. Once that process was completed, the lottery needed to draft and approve sports betting regulations – a time-consuming and tedious process. The group is still in the process of officially awarding sports betting licenses and reviewing each operator’s internal controls. The regulatory body is expected to meet later this month, at which time licenses could be officially awarded.
When March 11 arrives, it will have been about nine months from when North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper signed the sports betting bill into law to when the first legal online bet was placed in the state.
While bettors might be frustrated by the nine-month legalization-to-launch timeline, it often takes regulators six months or longer to prepare for a mobile sports betting launch. Virginia, for example, took about eight months to go from legalization to an online launch, while Tennessee took over a year to do the same.
