Delaware is the most NFL-obsessed state in the country, judging by Google searches.
It had 60,582 searches per 100,000 people, even though it isn’t home to an National Football League team. But it does have a long history of betting related to the NFL, going back to 1976.
That’s more than three times as high as the searches in Alabama, No. 50 on the new list. Like Delaware, Alabama does not have a resident National Football League team.
Google Keyword Planner was used to find the 50 most Googled terms relating to NFL in the US and then each state’s number of searches for each term. There are 616,974 searches for the top 50 NFL-related terms on average every month. Delaware, then, represents almost 10% of these searches.
Out of the 50 terms that were used, the most common nationwide were “NFL,” “NFL scores” and “NFL schedule. The most common in Delaware: “NFL score.”
“The true scale of the country’s love for NFL becomes even clearer when you consider that those 50 search terms don’t even include any team-specific searches,” said a representative for onlinecasinos.com, which announced the results.
Nevada, a state with an even longer history of gambling and the site of the 2024 Super Bowl, was No. 2, averaging 58,899 searches per 100,000 people.
Maryland took third place, at 56,892, and Pennsylvania fourth, at 54,403
Alabama registers the lowest level, at 19,348, with the website speculating because it’s “one of the country’s college football hotbeds, and home to the all-conquering Alabama Crimson Tide – winners of six national championships in the past 15 years.”
Four other states without NFL teams – Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky and Louisiana – rounded out the bottom five.
Delaware and the NFL
In August 1976, the Delaware State Lottery announced a plan to start a lottery game called Scoreboard based on National Football League games. The NFL sued, but the game started Sept. 12, 1976.
A court ruling a year later required Delaware to post that the game wasn’t authorized by the NFL and that one of Scoreboard’s three components didn’t comply with Delaware law.
So it was time for a huddle. A long huddle.
In 2009, Delaware passed the Sports Lottery Act, “which authorized sports betting and table gambling at existing casinos,” Courthouse News reported. Predictably, another suit ended that.
“In 2018, Delaware was the first state to allow sports betting after the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act,” Delaware Public Media reported.
“The Lottery had planned on opening up online sports betting by the start of football season as part of a new contract for the state’s internet gaming operations,” delawareonline.com reported in June, but officials paused those plans to give the Legislature time for input.
Delaware has “fallen behind” in the range of gambling it allows, delawareonline continued. “The First State has never allowed mobile sports betting, the most popular form of sports betting.”
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