Chris Fallica has been tracking line movement and placing bets for a long time. Well before ESPN viewers knew him as ‘The Bear,’ Chris was a kid on Long Island going over parlay cards with his dad and visiting Suffolk Downs. When he got to the University of Miami in the early 90s, he was visiting an on-campus bookmaker that managed to somehow never pay him.
For casual sports fans, Chris has become one of the best known faces amongst network sports betting talent. The guy that used to show up occasionally on College GameDay as a fact checker or statistician popping in with an obscure fact, grew into someone plenty of gamblers around the country refused to make a move without hearing from. That’s what made him valuable enough for FOX to lure him away from The World Wide Leader.
These days, the audience counts on him for advice on more than just college football. Sure, he has made the transition to FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff, but Fallica is also a key part of the network’s horse racing coverage. Last summer, bettors could also get his picks for matches in the Women’s World Cup.
We launch a new series today with our friends at Point to Point Marketing. Our goal with these series has always been to give you inside access, to let you see behind the curtain on how decision makers grow an audience, revenue, and their own careers. In the past, we have focused on market managers and podcasters. Today, we take the same approach with some of the best known and most influential names in the sports betting space and where better to start than with Fallica?
In our conversation, he reflects on the headaches talking about gambling on ESPN used to cause versus where the subject stands now. We also dive into the feedback he hears on social media, why player and coach gambling scandals are actually signs of progress and more. Enjoy!
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DR: Do you think there is still room for networks to expand the amount of gambling content they’re using day to day?
CF: Yeah, I think there is. Right now, it almost feels like some people are doing it just for the sake of doing it and really haven’t figured out how to do it best. I think there can be smarter ways within pre-game shows and even within the telecast.
I know we have, for a long time, had the Al Michaels “and he goes over the goal line for the touchdown,” and you knew what it meant. Or Brent [Musburger] with the “the interesting thing to note is…”. I’d be curious to see with how maybe some of the spring football leagues and some of these other startups incorporate it within the game. I think there’s room to grow just within the telecasting game or even on the opening graphics of a game, where you can throw up just what the point spread is. I think within some of the studio shows or shoulder programing at some of the networks, just kind of incorporating just a little bit more of fantasy as well as some prop bets.
There is still room to grow. I think the important thing is going to be not flooding the audience. It can’t be too much, but like I said, it also can’t be just like, “oh, we’re just going to do it for the sake of doing it.” You have to strike the balance.
With so many content creators out there and so many people out in the space right now, you almost have to go through and just kind of figure out who is worth following and who is just kind of like an accumulator.
I try and pick my spots on social media. My background is research. That’s how I got into it with College GameDay. For the longest time I was an information guy, I was a numbers guy, I was a researcher. So, I kind of try to incorporate some historical information that says, “Look, I’m not saying that this is a reason to bet on a game,” but like I put something out earlier last week about how you go back over the last few years, one-seeds have been terrible in the Sweet 16 [of the NCAA Men’s Tournament]. It’s not to make you say, “Okay, I’m betting against all the ones each year,” but at the same time, if you’re looking at a one seed, laying a short number like Carolina did and like Houston did, maybe it does give you a little bit of pause to be like, “Okay, maybe I want to be a little bit careful here with these one seeds, because it’s not necessarily as easy as it looks.”
Sometimes though, I’m just throwing out an interesting, historical type note that maybe has nothing to do with gambling. I think people can just kind of take it at face value. I struggle with that from time to time, and I gotta bite my lip with people who think every single thing that I put out there is gambling related, because I still like the historical part of all this.
DR: I want to jump into that because one of the things that I have wondered, especially as bigger states have come online and gambling has become this unavoidable part of sports content, it almost sounds like you are saying that making gambling information palatable to non-gamblers is irrelevant, because people are coming in with preconceived notions anyway.
CF: I think they are better, but I think the goal is to try and give you information that’s palpable and that people can digest and absorb. Maybe gambling Twitter can be an absolute sewer or a cesspool. And you’re not going to change everybody’s mind.
Maybe I’m different. I’m in the minority and maybe looking at it the wrong way, but I try and take as much information as I possibly can, even if it’s from a side of a game that I disagree with or a bit of information that I’m kind of like “I don’t know if that makes sense, but I got it. Alright well, why do they like this? Why are they saying this? How did they come up with this? Could I see a game going this way?”
I’m going to incorporate this more into horse racing as well because that’s a betting industry where the data and the information is not free. It’s a very expensive sport to handicap…it’s almost impossible to beat and it’s hard to get into. The first thing I do after losing a race, if there’s a horse that won that I didn’t think figured, I’ll try and go back and figure out, “Okay, what did I do wrong? What was I looking at here or wasn’t looking at but maybe should have?”
I think if more bettors did that, maybe in the sports realm, like, “Okay, what happened here? What did it I see? Was this just a situation where maybe I had right side, wrong result, or did I just read this game completely incorrectly?” That kind of learning from your mistakes and learning from your loss, I think can only make you better and a better follow in the long run.
DR: What was the reaction that you saw, before gambling started spreading across the country? What was the reaction to College GameDay giving out lines, or hell, your entire segment from the power conference commissioners in college football?
CF: It was great. When we first started and went like no holds barred, “we’ll be first, we’re doing this moving forward,” I think in the mainstream media, there were some critics who were like, “Alright, they’re going all in on this. Let’s see how this goes.” The general bettor and gambling universe were like, “This is great that finally they’re treating the topic like that.”
I think Chris Fowler, and Rece [Davis], but it was Chris hosting at the time, for not trying to be naive like, we thought people weren’t betting on games. We would throw some things out there like, going back to like 2013 or 14, “Hey, Mark Dantonio and Michigan State, when they’ve been a double-digit underdog it’s very dangerous.” We wouldn’t necessarily give specific “They’re 11-1 ATS with nine outright wins.” We wouldn’t go that far, but we would give veiled hints.
When we first started doing the board, that’s when I would get kind of no holds barred and just give information like, “This is one of the worst, if you look at expected points or defensive efficiencies” and like “why is this number only six?” or, “Mississippi State’s a massive favorite over UMass today. Last week they got the big win. Next week they’ve got Alabama. This is a total sandwich game. I don’t know if I’d want to be interested in laying 31 points today.” I think people really appreciated that and valued that.
Some of the fans and some of the bettors that especially appreciated it, I can speak from experience with feedback, is when I would put on the board on GameDay, MAC games with Eastern Michigan. I would put UMass, I would put UT-S[an] A[ntonio], and I would put the focus on a lot of these smaller conferences that only hardcore fans and maybe bettors knew about. I think that kind of gained some traction, maybe a little bit of respect within the community that I follow these games and knew these games and knew the teams in these spots. At the same time, there was an equal benefit for maybe the mainstream college football fan who maybe didn’t know about Eastern Michigan and [head coach] Chris Creighton or didn’t know about UTSA and they’re kind of learning a little something. “These teams might be pretty good. I’m not going to bet the game but let me check out the score at the end of the day” and you see an Eastern Michigan beat Illinois, or you see a UTSA hanging around and playing well and maybe win in a conference title.
So, I think even if you weren’t a bettor, I think you did get something out of a conversation and learning about some of these teams and the numbers. And I could give one of these conferences a little bit more of a spotlight.
DR: It’s strange to see the number of scandals popping up involving people inside the games, like Alabama baseball a few years ago with the head coach or NBA players placing bets on games. What is your reaction and what do you do in times like this? How much pushback do you hear from the average person?
CF: There really hasn’t been that much pushback. I mean, every now and then you’ll get the tweet about “Why are you doing it? This is the problem!”. But for the most part, the people that I interact with, are bettors or are sports fans who understand the big picture and I think they understand that one of the reasons these things are coming to light is because of the legalized nature of things now. Back in the day, there wasn’t as big of a of a spotlight on it and maybe you could get away with a bookie in the underworld and fans wouldn’t necessarily know what was going on, but now you have such a microscope on everything.
You brought up the Alabama bit. If you walk into a sports book at the Great American Ballpark, whoever it was in Cincinnati, and you try and get down the amount of money on a college baseball game, someone’s lights are going to go off. I mean, it set off alarms and they got caught.
Who knows what’s going to happen with the Ohtani thing or the Toronto Raptors player? The player prop market especially, like a public prop you’re betting 50 bucks, maybe 100 bucks and just kind of watching the game. If you’re looking to get down serious on a player prop, it’s clear you’ve got some pretty significant information to weigh, whether it’s an injury or something. That’s going to raise suspicions. The same thing with Temple, a line going from like 2 to 8 and a half in a matter of an hour and a half or so, that’s going to bring up suspicions.
That’s a good thing. It’s much better this than CCNY or the Arizona State stuff before people really caught on to what was going on. I mean, we don’t want anything to not be on the up and up. Everything should be on the square, but if something isn’t, we have a much better chance of nipping it in the bud right now than we did in years past.
DR: So, it’s not just networks putting out gambling content, but plenty of websites and all these books and mobile apps on people’s phones. They’re creating content on their own as well. Is there any way to better police problem gambling by the apps and the networks? Or do people sounding that alarm have to accept that this is one of those things where everybody that participates has to understand that it requires some serious self-policing?
CF: I think a majority of it is self-policing. And obviously, if you’re a problem gambler and you’re draining your bank account, you obviously have some issues that need to be taken care of. At the same time, I do think the sportsbooks and your financial institutions can step in and be like “Hey, you’ve dipped below, or you’ve withdrawn a certain amount from your bank account in the last three days. We’ve put a hold on your account” or one of the sportsbook apps has noticed you’ve lost $25,000 in two days and reaches out to say, “We just want to make sure everything’s okay. We’re going to put a 24-hour hold” or whatever.
I’m sure people would be upset by that. Maybe you don’t want it to be that extreme, but I know the sports books right now, I know my VIP hosts at DraftKings and FanDuel however often they need to, just do kind of a check in. “Are you aware of the assistance programs that we have or the controls where you have to go through a list of questions and check ins.” I mean, they are trying.
Now, I think there are people out there who are trying to say, “Why are they going to try? They’re businesses and they just want your money.” I mean, there are a lot of people out there that feel the books are the enemy regardless of what they do. “There’s certainly nothing that is going to be able to help you if you’re a loser. They see that as an addition to their bottom line.”
I think there are people within the sportsbook industry that can target people and then people are going bankrupt and losing marriages and whatever like that. That doesn’t paint the industry in a good light. So, it benefits everyone for everybody to kind of be aware and give it a helping hand if there are issues out there.
DR: As a content creator, are you comfortable with where, the relationships between the leagues and books are, or do you feel held back at all?
CF: No, I haven’t really experienced any issues with that. I can remember back when we were building graphics at ESPN and with the NFL you cannot use team names. You cannot use team logos, so you had to put like a color swatch with the Cleveland Browns or if you had the Giants you would have like a blue and red color patch. You certainly couldn’t put like “Giants” or “Browns.”
The fact that now you’ve got the league, who obviously has sponsorships and business relationships with some of these apps, and books and sportsbooks near and in stadiums, it’s clear that they see the benefit to their bottom line with fans being more interested in having a stake in the game.
I haven’t had any issues with kind of being limited now in terms of what I can say or what I can do. You see the NCAA wanting to limit player props and such but I mean, in terms of me tweeting out a note or giving a note on the air, maybe there were times in the past, actually it was right after mass legalization, where conferences would be like, “No, we don’t want odds talk or gambling talk on a college network,” whether it be like the SEC Network or the ACC Network and that’s fine.
“That’s their prerogative and you have to work around it, but the last few years I think has made it very, very widely known, with these leagues now, it would be a little bit hypocritical to say, “no, you can’t mention that North Carolina is a four-and-a-half-point favorite over Alabama or whatever it was.”
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